Finn: “How do you do it?”
Russell: “Do what?”
Finn: “Never lose faith.”
Russell: “Some things I hide better than you do.”
These were the last lines of Wednesday’s episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation between Finn (Elizabeth Shue) and D.B. Russell (Ted Danson). In the episode, a little boy was kidnapped and a power outage strikes Las Vegas right after they start investigating the case. Finn is convinced of the veracity of the “three hour rule” in which you have three hours to find the kidnapping victim before they’re dead and Russell keeps telling her that they’ll find the kid alive.
In my life, I’ve had people ask me how I’ve had tremendous faith or how I managed to believe when my back has been in a corner. My answer: I don’t have tremendous faith. I simply hide the fact that I honestly don’t know what is going to happen next. I couldn’t have told you anything about what I was going to do after college until about 3 months before that day. I then could not have predicted that I would not finish my MTS and instead be a vicar’s wife who ended up gaining some minor Internet notoriety over a couple things I wrote for the now-defunct blog portal blogs4God. I couldn’t have even imagined that I’d find a job in Montana I loved so much that I went back to work a week earlier than I should have been allowed to after my c-section with Daniel or that I’d love it so much that I’d go back to work 4 weeks after he came home. (There was also the financial reason but my love for my work was the primary one.) I simply trust that I will react to whatever happens next and that somehow I will probably survive it. There have only been two times when survival was called into question and that was Daniel’s birth (both of us almost died) and a year ago when I had to sign the permission to put Daniel on ECMO. I was probably going to survive the latter if it failed and Daniel died but it was going to be pretty darn hard.
Hebrews 11 is full of examples of people who showed amazing faith even though things got dicey. Abraham left his homeland to journey to a place which had been promised for him and became a father at an advanced age. Moses led the people out of Egypt even though he did not feel suited to the job. Others were executed by inhumane means, were tortured and exiled and did so showing incredible faith even though they may have been quaking in their sandals at the time.
I think it’s more about standing strong on God’s promises even if inside, you have no idea if you’ll make it. There’s no harm in admitting fear — courage is just recognizing that there is something greater than the fear: God.
