Faith and Fragment

If I could measure faith with a meter, it would drop to its lowest point when reflecting on God’s promises. Most divine promises are far reaching and limited by the curvature of time limits. Because I cannot see beyond the handwidth of my life God’s promises often challenges my faith.

I wonder if Abraham had any doubts or questions when God told him He would bless him and make his descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sands on the seashore? If I had been Abraham I would have had a few doubts with the few grains of sand I would have been allowed to hold. In my opinion it was a distant landscape of faith requiring an imagination for belief.

Like Abraham, we are promised much—but not one of us is granted more than a few grains to hold. Only by faith can we imagine the surf that we are promised will one day lap upon our shore.

It’s the complex thinker in me that excogitates the fragments of which a life is made of. Do fragments of my story and yours, in some mysterious way reflect the plan and the material of the whole? Are there fragments of necessity? Are parts of life thrown away, while other fragments from it transcend time because their fulfillment, though small, are important pieces in the divine work?

From our brief time on earth, it’s impossible for us to know which parts of our lives are fragments to be thrown away and which parts are fragments of necessity, reflecting a divine work that may be centuries in the making. It was just as difficult, I’m sure, for Abraham to know.