Lenten Reflections

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By Jacob Akey ’24

Saving Faith

When I fly from BWI to the Manchester Regional Airport each semester, the one hundred twenty-six other souls on the plane and I place our lives in the hands of two pilots. They have licenses, I assume (I have never bothered to ask), and have probably flown that route successfully hundreds of times. However, for the seventy-five minutes of that flight, we passengers are entirely at the mercy of two men we have never met. Our future is subordinated to their will. There is an unbreachable door between us, and when we do hear their voices, an imperfect PA system muffles them. Just as on my flight, many thousands worldwide freely put their lives in the hands of surgeons, skydiving instructors, and Uber drivers. We trust experts, even when we have never met them. I do not mean this observation as a provocation or criticism of human nature; our trust in our fellow man is a necessary component of modern life. My point is rather the unremarkableness of it.

The Bible is chocked full of examples of those who trusted God as much as we trust our pilots and surgeons. Abraham, who took his son up the mountain at God's word, or Noah, who built an ark. Then there is Daniel. He is best known for emerging from a pit of lions unscathed, but his faith went much deeper than that. In today's reading, we see him pray and lay the men of Judah at God's feet. He confesses without equivocation and, in doing so, places his and his people's fate in the Lord's hands. Unlike those of us on the flight to Manchester, this faith is indeed remarkable. It goes beyond a mere intellectual acknowledgment of God and towards a true or saving faith. Daniel's faith was not belief alone, but belief and obedience, for the former without the latter has no value. Saving faith, like that of Daniel, is a terrifying, beautiful, superhuman thing. So is flight.