Developing Faith In Jesus Christ

Hello again! I recently finished serving an 18 month mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Salt Lake City. As such, this will be the first blog post of mine in 18 months, and I wanted to write about the amazing lessons I have learned on my mission. Because I have many topics I want to talk about, I will break it up into several different posts over the next couple of weeks. I have never learned so much in such a small portion of time.

We have all been given talents, gifts that we are supposed to use to help raise the Kingdom of God. One talent of mine is writing, although I didn’t get to use that talent very often on my mission. But now that I am home and school doesn’t start until January and I have all the time in the world, I want to put my talents to good use and hopefully my words can be a channel for the spirit to touch others.

And so this first blog post I dedicate to the topic of faith, because this was one of the things I learned most about on my mission. You see, in Preach My Gospel, one of the few books a missionary can read, there is a beautiful chapter all about the Attributes of Christ. For some reason I can’t really explain, this chapter has fascinated me more than any other chapter in, well, any book. If you could see my Preach My Gospel, you would see a chapter completely filled with notes upon notes upon notes, written in every space I could squeeze it in. And every time I had a new companion, I noticed a theme going on where I seemed to struggle with one particular Christlike attribute, that I suddenly started hearing in every talk, and started finding in every chapter of the Book of Mormon, until by the end of that transfer or the next, I had a completely new understanding of it.

And there was one Christlike attribute that I noticed seemed to be the theme of mine for two different times in my mission, and really truly the whole time. That was faith.

You hear a lot about faith on a mission. And if you don’t really understand what faith is, it can really bring you down to hear comments from your leaders like “if this [insert miracle here] isn’t happening, you don’t have enough faith.” And “If you want baptisms, you need to have more faith.” And “If you had more faith you wouldn’t fear anyone.” And “If you want to see miracles, you have to have faith.”

Now these are true, but you have to understand what faith is first. I did not at the beginning of my mission. I kept hearing those comments and looking at my area and the lack of baptisms, and thought “is it because I don’t have enough faith?”

And I would try to show what I thought was faith by praying at night that the next day we would get one lesson with a member present. Just one. Not a big number at all. One. And then we would call people and make appointments and work and work and work to get a member with us to just one lesson at the very least. And I would pray the whole time that it would happen, and I would say “I have faith that we are going to have a member present.”

Well guess what? I’d say like 9 times out of 10 it didn’t happen. Last minute the member would cancel or just plain not show up or last minute the lesson would cancel or we’d get to the door and no one would answer and then after that NO ONE would answer their doors for the rest of the night.

And I became very confused. In my head, I was showing my faith, and I was working to get the end result I wanted. So why wasn’t it happening? Did I just not have enough faith? I began to seriously doubt myself, and became very depressed any time the topic of faith was brought up during a meeting. I told myself that I didn’t have faith anymore. I didn’t have faith that we were going to get members to lessons with us, I didn’t have faith in the ward, and I didn’t have faith in myself.

And then while I was reading once again in Preach My Gospel, Chapter 6, something stood out to me that I had never noticed before. The title of the section on faith is “Faith in Jesus Christ.” And that was when I realized that I was putting my faith in the wrong thing.

We are supposed to have faith in Christ, not necessarily other people. If others mess up, if things aren’t going right, we should look towards Christ and just think about how our faith in him is. Faith is not about other people or things. It is faith that Christ is our Savior, He can help us, we are doing His work, and He will bless us for our efforts, if not always in the way we want to be blessed. It is okay if we do not have faith in ourselves. God didn’t ask us to have faith in ourselves. It’s okay if we don’t have faith in other people. God really didn’t ask us to do that. He asked us to have faith in Christ.

And I had faith in Christ. And once I realized that, once I calmed down and decided that maybe I didn’t have faith that we were going to get a member to a lesson with us, maybe I didn’t have faith that this person was going to open the door, or maybe I didn’t have faith that this person was going to come to church, but I had faith in Jesus Christ, that He is my Savior, and that He loves me. Once I realized all of that, I started seeing the miracles. The work picked up almost immediately and we saw miracles. Because we started putting our faith in Christ, and not anything else. THAT is faith.

And the funny thing was, this whole time that I told myself I didn’t have faith, we were doing online proselyting, I was bearing my testimony proving that I had faith when people would get on pretending they were investigators and then almost literally shove their anti-mormon literature in my face and I had to respond to what could have been a very convincing argument if I had not already received a witness of the truth of this church. I was able to respond and say time and again “I know that God lives and that He is my Father and that He loves me. I know this Church is true and that Christ is the head of this church.” I had faith. I just didn’t know that that was what faith was.

And then later in my mission, again the theme of faith came up and I learned an important lesson: God is never done teaching us. I wasn’t done learning about faith, and I will probably never be done. This time I learned that it does not matter if you only have a little bit of faith. You do not need huge quantities of faith to see miracles and move mountains. In the Bible, Jesus says “faith the size of a mustard seed.” You see, for the longest time I misinterpreted this scripture thinking that if we just had that little bit of faith, we could do miracles, but if the miracles aren’t happening, that must mean that you clearly don’t even have that much faith, your faith is like the size of speck. Wrong. That is not what that scripture means, I came to find out. Christ was trying to prove a point that was the exact opposite of what I believed. He was trying to prove that the amount of faith we have is not what produces miracles. It is the integrity we show towards that faith. It doesn’t matter if we start off with a little twig of faith, if we are true to what we know and act accordingly, God will let that twig grow into a tree. It is okay to only have a little twig of faith. Move forward, clutching on to that little twig, and you will see miracles.

I know now that I do have faith and it has grown immensely on my mission. I do know that God lives, Christ is his son, the Book of Mormon is the word of God, and that this is His true church upon the earth. I know that this is the way to happiness. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.