A righteous man is cautious in friendship, but the way of the wicked leads them astray. -- Proverbs 12: 26 (NLT)
If you are finding your faith wavering in an area of your life today, check the village you find yourself in. Secondly from this story we see the next truth is that restoring our faith is sometimes a process.
Then, spitting on the man's eyes, he laid his hands on him and asked, "Can you see anything now?" The man looked around. "Yes," he said, "I see people, but I can't see them very clearly. They look like trees walking around." Then Jesus placed his hands on the man's eyes again, and his eyes were opened. His sight was completely restored, and he could see everything clearly. -- Mark 8: 23b-25 (NLT)
At first blush one might be tempted to say that the first attempt by Jesus here failed. Not so. He could have kept the man in his village and simply said -- "be healed!" and the man's sight could have been restored. Instead we see this process playing out where the man's sight is restored in two steps. After the initial laying of hands the man was starting to see but things were still blurry. Isn't that just how we can be sometimes too in our walk? We struggle in an area with our faith and maybe we can successfully leave the village we are in long enough to hear the wisdom we need to follow. We start to see things clearer than when we were blind, but we haven't fully recovered our sight quite yet. Things are still a little blurry in our vision. We still hold onto the old habits. We still cling to the old doubts. Then the enemy comes against us and reinforces the old way of thinking and suddenly we are blind again. Our faith fails again.
We live in a microwave society where we want our solutions quick and now. Sometimes the restoration of our faith needs time. Sometimes it needs stages. Sometimes we can recover some sight but things might still be a bit blurry for us. Maybe we trust God with all the little things but our faith might falter on the larger issues of life. Going back to the story of the father with the demon possessed son we see that he first took the child to the disciples but they were unable to cast it out of the boy. Here was the initial reaction for Jesus:
Jesus said to them, "You faithless people! How long must I be with you? How long must I put up with you? Bring the boy to me." -- Mark 9: 19 (NLT)
Who is Jesus talking to? He is talking to His disciples! We know this because in the recounting of this healing in the Gospel of Matthew the disciples ask Jesus why they were unable to cast the demon out and this was the answer from the Lord:
"You don't have enough faith," Jesus told them. "I tell you the truth, if you had faith even as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, "Move from here to there,' and it would move. Nothing would be impossible." -- Matthew 17: 20 (NLT)
