Just a few moments ago I had an epiphany. I have been in the process of applying for a passport. And as ‘fate’ would have it, my documents were shoddy, and my signatures were shoddy too! The agent who was helping me gave up hope and was just waiting to tell me the bad news that my passport application would not be accepted, which would result in another few weeks of reapplication toil. I prayed and prayed for the passport application to get approved… and somehow in my heart I felt the foreboding sense that I would get a call (I had to wait two minutes to hear the bad news) that my application was rejected.
Then, my epiphany. I questioned what was faith and I realised that faith is being sure that God COULD approve the passport. Faith, in fact, has been wrongly understood that God WILL do something, but rather Faith is actually in the sincere belief that God COULD do something.
My immediate memory when to Jarius (and his dead daughter), or the Syrophenecian woman begging for healing of her non-Jewish son, or even the Centurian who said that Jesus could just say that word and his slave/servant could be healed. At all these times, Jesus was amazed by the faith of these (gentile) people… but actually the moment was a moment of crisis. It was a time where the beseachers did not know that Jesus WOULD indeed answer their prayer, but they had no doubt that Jesus COULD do what they asked.
And that’s exactly what I realised. God could take my shoddy application and make it acceptable. The beuraucratic officers could look beyond the shoddy presentation and see that in fact my papers are in order. I knew for a fact that God could do it, and I also knew that if it happened, only God would have done it.
And then the call came… and I knew that even if the passport application was rejected… it would be for whatever reason God wanted to say to me. However, I had no doubt that even if it was rejected, God could have done it.
So the call came… and my passport application is accepted. The happy result was just a funny even ironic ending to my desperate prayer and realisation.
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