“By faith, Abraham heard the call to leave his home for the place he would receive as his inheritance, even though he didn’t know where he was going” (Hebrews 11:18).

To me, the most obviously difficult aspects of faith are its unknowingness and seeming invisibility. The story of Abraham is cautionary and emblematic. Every piece of the tale challenges our materialist idolatries: God said (a voice – we don’t know what kind – from the One whom no eye has seen, or can see), “Leave your family and your home (OK, those are tangible things) and go to a place to which I will give you directions as you go (turn-by-turn divine GPS, but no screen) and there I will make of you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name great and you will be a blessing (and you’re going to do that with a 75 year-old how?).

The call to Abram to leave Haran is pretty much our introduction to his life. We know that he was born in Ur (Iraq) and that his father, Terah, took the family on a journey to Canaan that they never completed, settling on the way in what is now Turkey. We know that Abram certainly lived in a time and place where false gods proliferated, and he may well have been an idolater himself (as Joshua 24:2 more than implies). We don’t know if he also worshipped the Lord, or if he had some experience of the true God in his life. All we see is that, with neither warning nor apparent preparation, the Lord appears and turns Abram’s life, and the history of the whole world, on their heads.

The reason for recounting the sketchy details of Abrahams pre-discipleship life is that it underscores two things that we have already said about faith: First, it comes to us as a gift and, in its first appearance, reaches out to us entirely at the Lord’s initiative. Second, faith is a communication of God himself – his word and his presence invading our lives from the outside. I remember my first encounters with faith as a young boy sitting in church as the Gospels were being read, or an instance later in life when I heard a street preacher speaking about Jesus. With those words, anointed by the Spirit, came faith and a vision of God that I could not have conjured up by myself.

Such revelations of God are a beginning, but only that – necessary, but not sufficient, like the initial love that we felt toward our husband or wife; something that arises in our hearts and that we nurture and attend to through a long relationship of unconditionally giving ourselves to each other. With the Lord, of course, all is radically uneven. Everything on his side is perfected in our imperfection: his strength in our weakness, his mercy in our sin, his grace in our helplessness, his glory in our lowliness, his faithfulness in our inconstancy.

For us, growth is sometimes spectacular, especially in the early days of our new life. We throw off, blindly at times and without question, ungodly thinking, patterns of unrighteousness, attachments to idols. Faith seems to spring up and grow fruit in spite of ourselves. Like newborns, we transform so quickly that an observer might miss the key moments of our emerging character. More often God’s image increases in us through slower, more painful transformative processes. Along the way, we come face to face with our impatience and our unbelief, and with our need for a dynamic, enduring faith that conquers both.

Finding that faith – faith for today – is a necessity that requires joining two different activities. The first is connecting the past sovereign work of God to the present, remembering and recounting the grace and love that has sustained us until now. The second is, like the Israelites in the wilderness, gathering the daily manna that the Lord is sowing into our lives. Each one of these receives the Spirit’s provision, and each complements and makes the other fruitful. If we live only on past sustenance, we can find ourselves stuck, stale, looking to events with spiritual expiration dates rather than to the Lord himself. On the other hand, losing sight of God’s history of goodness can leave us without a secure foundation when our lives are fraught with peril and insecurity. Put together the certainty of the Father’s prior blessings with seeking him for who he is and what he’s doing now and we find more than enough to prosper even in the driest desert of our souls.

I can think back on the places where I became most certain of the Lord’s goodness and sovereign care. Quite often they were in the midst of circumstances that told against faith and armed with promises that told against circumstances. Compounding the difficulty of such situations was my own frailty, my own sin, the weaknesses and sin of others, and the implacable hatred of the devil toward us. It is clear that the Father ordained such times for me precisely to draw me to himself through real world, authentic trust in him. I needed an antidote to the grumbling and complaining, or wishful thinking and fantasy that sought to replace God’s gift of faith.

Like many of us, I am prone to putting the Lord on trial. For the grumbling times, we become demanding and ungrateful, balking at the jarring truth that we are not worthy of even the smallest blessings that encompass us.  In our “visions of unicorn” times, we relate to the Lord as a kind of lottery play, with faith as a kind of magic that will vault us past the deep waters of his perfectly ordered grace. We pulled the faith lever, why is there no jackpot? I thought I wan’t supposed to have to do anything.

Whether we are murmuring or living in la-la land, the Spirit’s call is the same: Come collect the harvest of manna that he is setting out for us. Come and taste the Lord’s abiding presence, his ultimate care and concern, and his ability to bring good out of the evil meant for our lives. It is impossible for me to forget my first experience of this intersection of the Father’s mercy and kindness with people (especially myself) and events that disrupted my hopes for a trouble-free life. At the time, I was far from home, expecting to make significant contributions to Christian mission, and ready to see my ministry stock soar. Instead, pretty much everything fell apart, with the downward trend culminating in spending a Christmas break nearly sightless (a housemate had accidentally swallowed my contact lenses) and pretty much useless. Maybe not as bad as John Milton’s state in “On His Blindness,” but maybe worse: He served as he stood and waited; I couldn’t even vacuum the floor, and my waiting was not the stuff out of which famous poems are composed.

What was the Father’s answer to my funk? Every night as I lay down to sleep, I would experience the most powerful, almost overwhelming love from him that washed clean the accumulated refuse of the day, transformed my perspective, and, over time, prepared me for fruitful service. I had never had such a stark reminder of the infinite separation that lay between us, an otherwise bridgeless separation that he alone could, and did, overcome by grace and faith. Grace and faith for today, for right now, for the real me, from the True God. Daily bread that sustains and satisfies, and that adds to the divine story that strengthens me as I remember and recount it.

Faith for today. Next week, faith for tomorrow.