Gift of Faith

From Mike Slaughter's book, The Renegade Gospel:

People believed it was impossible for the human body to break the threshold of four minutes in running one mile - that is, until Roger Bannister did it in 1054 with a time of 3:59.4.  The barrier that had stood for centuries is now broken regularly.  What was considered undoable is now doable!  For the impossible to become possible, you must believe it is possible; you must believe it before you can achieve it.  To be raised to a new way of living, you have to die to an old way of thinking.

My husband rides bikes.  He rides what I consider (what anyone would consider) to be long distances on a bicycle. For example, last Saturday he rode 106 miles to raise funds for a Children's hospital in town.  I have to think twice to DRIVE 100 miles, because it's a long way, but he doesn't.  He just does it.  What used to be undoable is now doable because he has changed his way of thinking.  (Not to mention trained and trained and trained, but still - you have to believe you can do it).

So it is with faith.  Faith is a gift given to us by grace, but we still have to open our minds and our hearts to the gift.  Today is the either anniversary of the day I started as the Associate Director of the Foundation where I work.  Am I sitting at my desk at work because God has called me here?  Me, a trained biologist, who knew more about splicing DNA than planning estate gifts (I mean, I knew NOTHING about planned giving, so it might be an unfair comparison), am now starting my eighth year of doing this.  Has God called me to this ministry?  I say that God has.  I might have believed it was undoable, but faith (and training, training, training) has made it doable.  The gift of faith given to me, and the faith of those who said, "Come be Associate Director," have opened the gift of this ministry to me.

I thank God for this faith, which is certainly a gift of grace.