Choosing Faith Over Knowledge

I remember reading a book on D-Day and one of the important elements of that battle plan was that most of the soldiers who were to make that landing were still untested green soldiers. And the point the book makes is that it would never have worked with veterans. I don't remember the exact numbers but the expected casualty rate for the first waves was something like nine out of ten and the sergeant saying to the soldiers look to your right and look to your left, one or more of you will die, and almost all the soldiers thinking of their neighbors, you poor man, and never once imagining that it would be themselves. The soldiers who had never seen battle imagined themselves to be invincible and so they did not allow the rock hard certainty that they were most likely going to die stop them from charging forth with the belief that they were going to survive. Veterans, however, would have known better. The point of this anecdote is that we imagine that it would be easier to exercise faith if only our knowledge was more perfect. But the greater our knowledge, the less room we have in our head and in our heart for faith. That's because most acts of faith are beyond our present capacities, and so if we come from a place of knowledge rather than belief, then we simply won't even try because we know it will be beyond us. But if we don't know but just believe and go forth with faith, then we will be filled with power greater than our own and accomplish what we set out to do. Imagine your at the edge of a chasm but it's the middle of the night and you can't see the other side but you can hear a friend calling out to you. Now imagine that the farthest you've ever jumped horizontally is four feet and the distance to the far side is actually six feet. If you could see, if you had a perfect knowledge, then you would not try to jump because you knew it was beyond your abilities. But because you're in the dark, your imagination is telling you it's ten feet, or fifty, so when you make that starting run and then when you spring up and out, you're not trying to jump six feet but sixty feet and so you jump a lot farther than you would have thought possible, and are able to land safely on the other side. Waiting for more knowledge decreases our faith and thus decreases our power. It's no fun at first to feel the fear and go forth with faith anyway, but it's even less fun to allow our certainties to doom us to live only inside our known limitations and to never reach our full potential.