Turning a Leap of Faith into a Walk of Faith

No outcome following a leap of faith is more predictable than the dive a Hallmark Channel movie heroine takes. If she leaves the big city to save her small hometown from sure ruin, leaving her career and fiancé behind, it will happen. She’ll use her skills to formulate a plan. If she hopes that charming single guy she’s fallen in love with over the last ten days will have her, don’t worry–he will. They’re perfect for each other.

If only she knew she was in a Hallmark Channel movie, that leap of faith might not be so scary.

Most leaps of faith in front of us are scary because we don’t have a sure outcome. We pray for courage, close our eyes, hope for the best, and jump. As believers, we also place our hope in God, believing he will rescue us if we land in a bad place. That hope is essential; it’s biblical. But what if instead of leaping in faith we simply walked in faith, right into the gnarly unknown? What would that take?

Leaps Happen

Many of my leaps of faith have been what you might call traditional, although certainly consequential: I married and had children. Some have been less consequential: I once permed my hair in the ’80s. You be the judge of that one.

Other leaps of faith were unique to me. Some were jumps in and some were jumps out—or both:

• I transferred to a different college after my freshman year, starting over socially and kind of disappointing my parents. They were college #1 grads.
• My first full-time job was in a sometimes-dicey social work environment, also requiring four hundred miles of driving each week—even with ice on the roads.
• I quit my job when my first child of three came along, halving our already kind of slim household income (because most men in ministry do not make big bucks); I went back to work ten years later, in a new field for which I had little training at the time (and also not for big bucks).
• I entered grad school when I was twenty years older than most of the students; I left grad school when I realized the rest of my life needed more of me, feeling like both a winner and a failure, depending on whether I felt education envy, or it was parent-teacher conference night.

For some of these leaps, I clung to the hope that if I splattered on the rocky ground below, God would be there to pick me up, brush me off, and send me on to the next thing. He was, and he did. He also let me know some of my leaps had more to do with what I wanted than what he wanted.

As a flawed human being, I’m sure my leaping days aren’t over, but I’ve come to believe walking in faith is preferable to leaping in faith. That’s because, by George, I think I’ve got it!

Shifting to a Walk in Faith

Lots of people in the Bible took what I’ve always thought of as leaps of faith, but now I think many of them were instead walking in faith. Queen Esther went to see her all-powerful king husband without prior permission, against protocol, to try to save her people. Sounds like a risky leap, but she’d been walking in faith all along, and I think this was another step in her walk of faith. For all she knew, that could have been the end of her queenship as well as her people, but reading between the lines of her book, she trusted God. Good move!

Daniel prayed to the one true God despite threats from the powers that be—and the danger of hungry lions. That was a leap of faith, a risk, but I think he, too, had been walking in faith all along. This was another step in that walk.

They and others arrived at a sure understanding that God could be trusted, even if their obedience put them in jeopardy. They walked in that assurance rather than leaping with only, as the saying goes, a hope and a prayer.

Deciding to leave my longtime position in a publishing house more than seven years ago to shift to full-time freelance editorial work seemed like a leap of faith. God was pointing me in that direction, but I didn’t know if my business would ever grow enough to meet our income needs, let alone how long it would take even if it did.

And then I jumped. Or did I?

The business has been a complete blessing, but the greater blessing has been to realize that after a lifetime of leaps of faith, making this change, including moving to another state, was the result of walking in faith. I wasn’t just hoping in the Lord; I was trusting him, without any assurance of the outcome I wanted. That trust was born of experiencing him as faithful for a lifetime.

Scripture has a lot to say about walking with the Lord, but perhaps the most to-the-point verse is 2 Corinthians 5:7 (ESV): “We walk by faith, not by sight.” Sometimes we take leaps of faith, and that’s okay. I’m sure my leaping days aren’t over, because I’m human, susceptible to fear and forgetfulness. But I believe when we walk in faith, when our hope blossoms into trust day after day and step by step, we experience the abundant life Jesus promised.

Do you hope the Lord will be there for you with every leap? He will. But consider how faithful he’s been to you, and how trust born of faithfulness can turn a leap of faith into a sure walk in faith, with God ever at your side.

Jean Kavich Bloom is a champion coffee drinker and a freelance editor and writer for Christian publishers and ministries. She doesn’t garden, bake, or knit, but insists playing Scrabble is exactly the same thing. Jean and her husband, Cal, live in central Indiana. They have three children (plus two who married in) and five grandchildren. She blogs at bloominwordstoo.blogspot.com.

Photograph © Jordan Donaldson, used with permission