Family Virtues – Faith and Hope

Faith is believing you can, even when it seems
you shouldn't even try. My niece is doing a great job of
doing all she can.

On one summer vacation, we were driving through central Utah near Arches National Park with a couple other families. We stopped to stretch our legs and walk around the towering rock formations. I followed a few of the others to a high arch (probably 30 or 40 feet high) and saw that they were starting to climb on it. As you might expect, I wanted to follow their lead and started to climb myself. It was easy and comfortable for me to climb higher than the others. Whether that was because they were smart enough to stop sooner or because I wasn’t too concerned about getting down, I’m not sure. But as the rock started to curve and the holes became smaller, it occurred to me that getting down was going to be a problem.

It was around that time that the others noticed I was in trouble and someone called for my dad. When he saw the situation, he quickly ran to me and started to climb after me. I couldn’t look down, and he wasn’t in a position to pick me up. So he talked to me and coached me down the rock formation. I was scared, but I had learned that I could trust my dad and he would help me get down safely. I walked away that day, a little wiser and grateful to be on flat ground.

Faith is a belief in something not seen but hoped for. I also define faith as belief in action. When we allow a belief to cause us to act, we are exercising faith. This is important for children to learn because it teaches them to act for themselves. It teaches them to move forward to accomplish something they want or need to do. Faith is a common part of life, and it was my faith in my father and his guidance that gave me confidence to get down from the rock.

Speaking of rocks, the most important faith we can teach our children is faith in the Rock of our salvation. When we teach our children to act according to their beliefs, they gain confidence in the power of God. We see it in the women that believed if she could just touch Jesus’ robe, she would be healed (Mark 5:34). We see it in the blind man that went to Jesus and asked to have his sight restored (Mark 10:52). We see it in the Canaanite woman who called after Jesus and asked him to heal her daughter (Matt. 15:28). In all those cases, Jesus responded to the actively seeking him with some form of the following: Your faith hath made the whole. Obviously it was the power of God that healed them or their loved ones, but he was acknowledging their effort to seek him out as a necessary ingredient in the miracle.

How can we teach our children to seek out the Savior? We can tell them to pray and ask for God to help them. We should also make sure we are leading by example. Are we seeking the Lord? Are we getting up from our prayers ready to move and follow the guidance we are given? I am amazed at what my kids pick up on. They are watching to see how we react and will follow our actions more than our words.

Like my niece, there are times when we just have to
hope someone will help us get out. This hope helps
us smile when we are down in the dirt.

Hope is closely related to faith and is necessary in our lives. Like faith, hope is a belief that something good will happen even though we can’t see it. The difference I see is that hope comes when something is out of your control. Let me explain.

When I was serving a two year mission for my church in South Korea, I got a letter from my parents. Luckily, I was sitting down when I started to read it because I was shocked at the news. My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and she would be going through chemotherapy immediately. I was thousands of miles from home, without a way to get home and even if I did go home, I couldn’t do anything once I got there. So I prayed for her and I got up and went to work. I had faith that God would answer my prayer, but I had a hope that she would be OK and would recover. My actions wouldn’t have a direct impact, though I think serving God as a missionary provides some blessings, my feeling was hope.

In the more eternal perspective, we hope for eternal life. A goal we could not achieve on our own. No amount of action could gain that reward. It is only through Christ that we can get that we can be saved from our sins (Titus 3:7). This hope is what gets us through the hard times when we lose a loved one before we are ready. We need faith to keep going, and hope can fuel the flame.

Again, kids need to see our example of hope more than hear our words. Are we hopeful when times are hard? Do we speak of hope when we have just cause to lament our fate? Are we full of hope in the words of Christ?

These are interesting days, but I believe God is aware of us and our needs. He is there guiding our footsteps as we scale life’s treacherous path. He comes to us always. It is up to us to act on this belief and see God’s hand in our lives. It is up to us to look forward with hope, not in man but in the power of God (Proverbs 10:28). Then we will see God do more than we ever could on our own.

Next week: Learning through parables