“ Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” A piece of canvas, some tubes of paint and some paint brushes are not a painting, but they are the substances from which an artist creates a painting. Flour, sugar, butter, and eggs are not a cake, but they are the substances from which a cake is made. When we talk about faith being the substance of things hoped for, it might be helpful to think of the relationship between faith and hope as being similar to the relationship between paints and the final painting, or between the ingredients of a cake and the final cake. Faith can turn the raw potentiality of our hopes and dreams into something with substance, something real and solid and tangible. And just as the very first doodlings of an artist are probably not going to be hung up in a museum, or the very first batches of cakes of a first-time baker aren’t going to be bought or even eaten by almost anybody, our first efforts of exercising our faith to bring our hopes into reality are probably going to come up short of our expectations. But Da Vinci and Van Gogh and Rembrandt used the same kinds of colors in their paintings that kindergarteners use when they’re finger painting. A pastry chef in a five star restaurant uses the same kind of eggs and sugar in their cakes that some kid watching a YouTube video uses when making their cake. We’re all using the same basic substances to try and make our hopes into realities. A lot of us let the sacks of flour and the baskets of eggs and the tubs of butter of our hopes and dreams pile up and never try to actually make any cakes out of them because we’re too afraid that the cakes won’t turn out just right. We let the substances of things hoped for collect dust and go bad because we don’t have the faith to make all of the poor, imperfect efforts to bring our hopes into reality, all of the failures and mistakes and bad batches and botched jobs. But to have real faith is to scrape out the burned cake and clean out the mixing bowls and try again. The only way for us to give our hopes substance and make them real things that we can hold in our hands is to have the faith to try and fail and learn and try and fail and learn and make a terrible copy of our dream, and then a bad copy, and then a mediocre copy, and then a halfway decent copy. I know that as we put in the work and exercise real faith then our hopes will not only be in our heads and in our hearts but they will really exist in the real world.
