Wednesday, October 28, 2026
Good morning from Colorado!
Last night I mentioned a bit about my grandmother and her faith. She was a woman of God, and her faith was far greater than mine when I was young and at the start of my own spiritual journey. She once said that I had no faith at all. Now, looking back, I don’t think it was necessary to debate the matter with her. She had been walking with God longer than I had, and she had gone through experiences I hadn’t yet had. At that time, I was not only young in years but also in my faith journey. God was neither young nor new to the journey.
That difference matters to me today. We sometimes look at the situation we find ourselves in and decide it is not enough simply because we are comparing it with what someone else has. That person might have more faith, more experience, more money, more education, a larger business, a stronger relationship, or a life that seems to be progressing further than ours. But God has never required us to start with someone else’s life; He has only asked us to start with what He has given us.
A mustard seed is small, yet it remains a seed. Jesus used this very small seed to help us understand an aspect of faith that I believe we sometimes overlook. God is not requiring us to start with a great deal of faith; rather, He is showing us what happens when even a small measure of faith is placed in Him. Although the seed is small, the God whom we trust is not.
I think that God has bestowed upon me a kind of gift when it comes to dreams. I have the ability to look at something that has not yet developed much and still see what it might one day become. I can detect potential in things at an early stage. If I consider an idea, a situation, a person, or even a dream which is just getting off the ground, I can imagine what might grow out of it.
I also know that I shall never manage to see even a small part of all those things which I can imagine get beyond the seeding stage; some ideas will stay just ideas, some plans will never come true, and some dreams may be sown but won’t grow into the trees that I envisioned. And since my faith has grown, I have come to realize that I should not be disappointed by this.
It is sufficient merely to know that the seed came into being.
It might seem odd to some people, since we live in a world that values results. We want to see the completed house, the successful business, the degree, the promotion, the finished book, the repaired relationship, and the answered prayer. It is natural to want to know what kind of outcome our efforts will have.
Faith does not always result in a completed outcome. Sometimes it gives us the courage to plant. This has changed how I approach the start of things. Rather than continually questioning if something is large enough, successful enough, or certain to work, I now ask a different question: What can God do with what I have?
What can He achieve with the small amount of faith you have? What can He achieve with the idea which you have been too afraid to follow? What can He do with the experience you thought was wasted? What can He do with the gift you still haven’t figured out how to use? What can He do with the dream which is still no more than a seed?
We aren’t always given the chance to see the outcome, and that can be hard since we want to be certain that what we plant will eventually produce something visible and tangible. Maybe that is another area where faith plays a role: we plant without knowing precisely what will grow, then place our trust in God for what happens afterward.
This may have been my grandmother’s understanding of faith, which I was still getting used to. She knew the God I had only just begun to discover; her faith had deep roots because she had walked with God throughout her life, whereas mine was still developing. Yet we both looked toward the same God.
That might well be one of the lovely aspects of generational faith. One generation sows the seed, another looks after it, and a third eventually sees the tree grow. We won’t know which generation will witness the full outcome of what has been sown, but Scripture tells us that God brings about the increase.
When I consider all this, I come to the conclusion that it’s very easy to ignore something just because it hasn’t developed much. I have had dreams that never went beyond the starting stage, and ideas I was certain would never turn out to be everything I imagined. Yet that doesn’t mean they were without value; a beginning has worth even if we don’t know where it will end up. The fact that someone else is making progress doesn’t reduce the importance of my own beginning, and the extent of my faith doesn’t affect how much God can do with it.
Maybe the real issue isn’t whether the situation is good enough. Instead, the more important question is what we are prepared to do with what God has already put into our hands. We can plant the seed, look after it, pray over it, and then trust God with what is beyond our control. Some things will grow and become something we can see, while others might end up forming part of what we leave behind for someone else to discover. In either case, God is still in charge of what grows.
Perhaps that is all that faith has taught me. I need not see the finished tree to appreciate the seed; at times I can just be thankful that God gave me the dream, the opportunity, or the faith to plant it in the first place.
See you tomorrow for another 15 minutes with God.
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