14 What good is it, dear brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but don’t show it by your actions? Can that kind of faith save anyone?... 17 So you see, faith by itself isn’t enough. Unless it produces good deeds, it is dead and useless…. 19 You say you have faith, for you believe that there is one God. Good for you! Even the demons believe this, and they tremble in terror. 20 How foolish! Can’t you see that faith without good deeds is useless?
James 2:14, 17, 19-20
I remember the Navy fighter jet. Vividly. It sat in a Wall Township park, stripped of everything that allowed it to fly.
Children would climb into the cockpit. They would pretend to be flying over foreign battlefields. I did it myself, imagining what it might be like actually to move this machine through the sky.
It was a fall day. The sky was grey and overcast. My dad and I were spending precious time together. As I recall, we were the only people in the park. We went to the old Navy fighter jet. I climbed up, enjoying the view.
A five-year-old remembers moments like this because they have only had a few moments like it.
Standing over the cockpit, I looked up at the tail of the retired jet. I wondered, “Can I climb the fin up to the horizontal tail?” Of course, I didn’t know what a “horizontal tail” was. In my mind, they were the “mini wings” extending from the fin.
My dad said, “You can do it.”
So I climbed. I shimmied up the fin. Halfway up, I nearly quit. But Dad said, “You can do it!”
And I did.
I remember walking out on the tail. It felt like I was twenty feet in the sky. Realistically, I was eight to ten feet above the ground.
I looked down at my dad. “Can you catch me?” I asked.
“Yes,” he promised.
This was a defining moment in my life.
Looking down, I believed my father would save me. He would protect me from my leap, keeping me from hitting the ground.
So I jumped.
And he caught me.
We use the word “faith” a lot. But I’m not sure we know what that word means. We tend to reduce it to believing a set of ideas. But faith, according to James, is much more than that.
Faith cannot be separated from the action it creates. Faith is a trust so deep that something must rise to the surface. Faith is always accompanied by action. Anything less is just theory.
I believe that we all want something real. We long to connect. If my experience is any measure, then the thought of settling for an artificial experience turns our stomach.
This is what faith does. It connects us with something real.
More precisely, it connects us with the One who is real. We can only make this connection when we trust Him. It only happens when we act. When we’re willing to leap into His arms. When we push ourselves outside of the realm of control. When we move beyond the bounds of self-determination.
If we are willing to take that leap, then we can encounter Reality. We can find ourselves, enveloped in a Divine Embrace.
This is faith.