"Mountains are moved with faith, Immaculee, but if faith were easy, all the mountains would be gone."

I just finished "Left to Tell", a book about one women's story through the Rwandan Holocaust. As she sat cramped in a small bathroom with 7 other ladies, she began to hear her killers searching the bedroom on the other side of the door. A single wardrobe was all that stood in front of the door. Any movement or breathing might alert the search party to where she was hiding. "I have killed 399 cockroaches, Immaculee will make 400. It's a good number to kill." What do you do when your enemies are surrounding you on all sides? You are trapped with your back against the wall and paralyzed from fear. You hardly want to pray in fear that they may hear your thoughts and know where you are.

As Immaculee began to pray, she envisioned Jesus standing in front of her; and that is what he had to say. "Mountains are moved with faith, Immaculee, but if faith were easy, all the mountains would be gone." Is that the response we would expect? Wouldn't we want Jesus to just look at us and say everything will be ok? Instead he tells her that this will be hard, but it had to be that way.

I haven't been able to get that line out of my head after putting that book down. What does that mean in my life? The odds that I will have to face any situation even closely related to what Immaculee experienced is extremely slim, and I thank God for that. Yet it is so inspiring and incredible to hear of stories when people literally entrusted their entire life over to Jesus, and simply waited for Him to carry them to whatever lay ahead. Whether that meant death or life.

"I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you."

I think we so often read that verse and expect that if we say we are Christians, we must be able to move mountains. And when that doesn't happen for us (which as far as I know has yet to happen) we get upset because we feel that God is backing off on his end of the deal. But where does it say that faith is easy. It doesn't say that being a Christian and having faith are the same thing. Saying you believe in Jesus doesn't mean that you fully trust in Jesus. And if we only need faith as small as a mustard seed, then we must really be confused on what this whole faith thing is all about.

I know that I sometimes get caught in the trap of thinking, "well I'm not faced with difficult situations like the millions of people in Rwanda, so how am I supposed to develop a faith like Immaculee." Although God says that our faith will be purified by fire, He never says that all fires are the same.

"Left to Tell" also showed me what true forgiveness is. After Immaculee returned home, she received the news that both of her parents and two of her three brothers were killed in the genocide. The only brother left was studying in Senegal at the time and avoided the war. When Immaculee finally comes face to face with the man responsible for the killings of her family, he is unable to lift his head and meet her eyes, ashamed of what he had done. He was being held in a prison and Immaculee had all control in her hands, able to say whatever she needed to to the man. And how does she respond, "I forgive you." I read about how we are taught to forgive both our friends and enemies in the bible. And although I would like to believe that I would be able to do that, I read Immaculee's story and can't stop thinking of how I might have reacted.

"…if faith were easy…"

And then I got thinking; well faith is easy when you can hear God talking to you and you can see Him guiding you ahead. Too much of the time I expect that when I ask God for an answer, he will respond to me. But that would make faith easy. That's not how God intended things to be. This is meant to be a struggle. Our relationship with Him is meant to be marvelous and beautiful, simplistic and pure, yet hard and trusting as well. God will always be there to pull us out of the pits we fall in, but what if we get stuck in a rut of expecting Him to always act this way. What if we are meant to lean on Jesus? What if we had to place our trust in Him, rather than wait for Him to save us from our falls? But how do we trust?

After Jesus spoke to Immaculee in the bathroom, He continued on to say this:

"Trust in me, and know that I will never leave you. Trust in me, and have no more fear. Trust in me, and I will save you. Trust in me, and you shall live."

How do we do that? It seems so easy; everything will be fine as long as we trust in You. But I think I'm learning quickly that trust is much more than I ever imagined. This semester has brought with it plenty of bumps in the road. And as each one comes, I have to constantly remember that I will not be able to scale even the smallest hill. For me that used to be scary, because I used to associate trusting in God to giving Him all control. And although I believe that God is still in control of everything happening around me, I am now recognizing that I still have to act on what God is putting around me.

It gets you thinking. Or at least it got me thinking. I would really recommend you find a copy of the book and read it. Reading has never been my biggest thing, yet I finished this book in one sitting. Every now and then God seems to make some things more clear than others, and that's how I felt with this book. I'm beginning to see that God wants to use me. I can feel Him tugging on me, opening my eyes to the world around me. There's many things in this world that I have no idea are taking place, yet God sees each and every one of them. That's why our experiences are so important, those are the moments when God takes us and shares a new realm of His kingdom to us. God is entrusting us to take this new knowledge, this new sight, and share it to those around us. When God provides us with a new set of eyes, we need to take advantage of that opportunity. This is God's kingdom, His beloved creation. We are an integral part of everything around us and God wants us to experience as much as we can.