What Is Faith?

The past couple weeks our family has been battling a bad head cold. I started it, then Anna got it.  Then Katie got it.  Last of all, Daddy got it.  Katie had it the worst.  She is still sick.  But this last weekend was the worst.

Friday night we put her down for bed.  She kept crying and saying she was going to throw up, so I'd sit with her in the bathroom, waiting for the episode. It never came, so she'd want to go back to bed.  We kept doing this same dance over and over again, and she was getting increasingly worked up.  We don't know if she was coughing so hard it was making her nauseous or if she had some sort of acid reflux going on that night.

Finally Scott gave her a blessing to try to calm her down.  She DID calm down.  In the blessing, she was blessed that she'd sleep through the night according to her faith and the faith of her parents.  Of course, we assumed that meant she'd calm down and go to sleep eventually.  We went up and got ready for bed.  She cried again with the same feelings as before.  I went down and was sitting with her in the rocking chair.

As I cuddled her, I was praying for the blessing to be honored.  I remembered the story in the New Testament where the father asked the Savior to heal his child and said he had faith but asked Christ to help his unbelief.  I felt the same way.  I told the Lord that I did have faith but asked him to help me make up the difference where my faith was lacking.

After I said this prayer, it occurred to me that faith was an ACTION.  Katie sleeping through the night didn't mean it would be in her bed.  After I calmed her down, I put her back in bed in hopes she'd sleep through the night there.  As expected, though, soon she was crying again, feeling like she was going to throw up.  So I went and got her and took her to the armchair in the living room.

We spent the night in that chair.  Katie did, in fact, sleep through the night.  She woke up once, but calmed down quickly because I was already there.  Mommy didn't get much sleep, but the blessing was honored for Katie.  She DID sleep through the night and was back to just a normal head cold the next day.

Sometimes faith means doing things that are hard.  Faith is an action.  To passively believe in something is not to believe in that thing.  To truly believe, we have to act.

Just a thought.