What Active Faith Really Means

Dear Kids,

Brent is giving a presentation on 'Faith' at a leadership forum next week. In preparation for it he shared a story with me about the Von Trapp family - you know the one from 'Sound of Music'. He read the story to me from Stephen Palmer's Blog. Just to paraphrase this post, because he covers it so well, he talks about a decision they made as a family to stay in Vermont, but couldn't find a place to live. So they took it to God. Maria said this about it:

“We set up a small chapel in the broom closet of the inn where we were staying. We prayed around the clock for three days. Each of us — there were eight children, from ages three to twenty-five — prayed for one hour, in rotation. Can you believe it?

“When the morning to leave came, father had gone to get ready for our departure. When he returned, he told us that a local farmer had decided to sell his land and that we were going right up there to look at it. When we got out of the car, we all knew that this was our future home. We bought the property that day.”

This story hit me like a ton of bricks - MAINLY because there are some answers we have been looking for from the Lord... But it has never occurred to us to do something like this.

After Brent read this to me he said, "How many families do we know would do something like this?". Then I automatically looked at him and said, "WE have never done something like this."

So it is time to bump our faith and prayers up to another level. We started this morning, setting an alarm clock and at the top of every hour when the alarm goes off, both of us hit our knees and say a prayer for what we are seeking. Tomorrow we are fasting about it. And then the next day we will continue our 'top of the hour' devotion to God. We have no plans to stop until we receive the answers we are seeking.

We are told to 'weary the Lord' with our prayers, several times in the scriptures. I think the whole point of that is so we ACTIVELY and CONSCIOUSLY turn our face toward God. It is so easy to try and create all the answers from within ourselves... But the Lord is the source for those answers.

Active faith. Remember the power of TRUE active faith. I know there are various ways to show active faith besides prayer, but this has been a great starting point for us to take our faith up to another level. I hope you all know and have ACTIVE FAITH that the Lord can and will move mountains for us and for you.

I love you,

Your Mom