“And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.” (Mark 9:24). I think we sometimes use unbelief and disbelief interchangeably. They are not. The prefix un- more or less means not, but it is the kind of not that is lacking or missing something - unmet expectations, unrealized potential, undiscovered opportunities. Un- is full of possibilities. Dis-, on the other hand, implies a more willful and deliberate kind of not. Someone who is dishonest is choosing to lie. Someone who is disapproving is forming a deliverate, negative opinion. A good illustration between the differences of un- and dis- might be the difference between an unassembled model airplane kit - all of the pieces are ready to be formed into a completed model - and a disassembled model airplane kit - there used to be a fully assembled model airplane but someone has deliberately taked it apart. In the same interaction with the man who pled with the Savior to help his unbelief, the Savior compares faith to a grain of mustard seed. If faith is a seed, then unbelief would be a field of soil that has the potential to be filed with seeds of faith, whereas disbelief would be a field that has been paved over with concrete to disallow the possibility of any seeds of faith taking root. When Jesus’s disciples could not help the father and his son, Jesus explained that it was because of their unbelief, and then He went on to say that this kind goeth out not but by prayer and fasting. Jesus did not say they were unable because of their disbelief, but because of their unbelief. If they had prayed more and fasted more, if they had transformed their unbelief into belief by planting more seeds of faith, then they would have been able to cast out that devil. When the father cried out, “help thou mine unbelief”, he wasn’t asking Jesus to magically stop him from doubting. The father had lots of untapped and unrealized potential to believe in all of his open fields of unbelief and he was asking for the Savior’s help to plant enough seeds of faith for him to make it through this challenge he was facing. If we want to believe, we need to first acknowledge that we have and absolutely need unbelief. Unbelief is not a flaw or a weakness. The more unbelief we have the more potential acreage we have to plant our seeds of faith. When we say “Lord, help thou mine unbelief,” we are telling our Savior that our faith is not big enough and we need His help to make it bigger. Christ doesn’t want us to have only one solitary mustard plant of faith, and He doesn’t want us to have only a six by six garden plot, or a half acre field. I hope that we can all learn to embrace the exciting possibilities of unbelief and always be searching for that next patch of soil so the Lord can give us another handful of seeds to plant.
