The Faith to Move Mountains

When we imagine moving mountains with our faith, I think a lot of us picture ourselves thrusting out our hand dramatically like some Jedi and levitating a mountain out of the way. Something so unlikely and impossible and so undeniably awesome and impressive surely requires a lot of faith. But do you know what requires even more faith? Doing something that is highly likely and possible and practically invisible to anyone else and sometimes even invisible to ourselves. It is a scientific fact that mountains actually do move. It’s hard to tell. They only move a handful of millimeters or centimeters per year, but they do move. Continent-sized tectonic plates are floating towards and away from each other every day, but they are so big and they move so slowly that almost no one ever notices. It may take faith to showily move a whole mountain a hundred miles in less than a second, but it takes more faith to move a mountain a hundredth of a hundredth of a hundredth of a millimeter, and then come back the next day and the next day and the next day and move it again. Nobody, not even ourselves, can measure the progress we are making, and yet, we are moving mountains with our faith. We may not be happy with the glacial pace we are making when we are trying to move a mountain of trauma or addiction or to forgive betrayal or conquer fears. But instead of focusing on how slowly we are moving, if we pause to reflect on the sheer enormity of the mountain we are trying to move, then moving the mountain even a single nanometer with our faith is still an impressive feat. We should not so easily discount our faith because it is not dramatically obvious when we have accomplished something. If it takes us ten years to move the mountain a foot, we have still shown that we have the faith to move mountains.