“Truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move.” // Matthew 17:20
There are moments in the spiritual life when we come before God feeling utterly emptied. Our prayers thin, our hope fragile, our trust barely a whisper. We kneel in the silence and wonder: Is this enough? Am I enough? And into that silence, the Lord speaks something that should stop us in our tracks.
We are a people conditioned to measure. We measure our productivity, our worthiness, our progress. And so almost without realizing it, we begin to measure our faith by comparing it to others: to the saints, to the woman in the pew beside us, to who we used to be before grief or doubt crept in. We look at what little we are holding and conclude it is not enough to matter.
But God does not reckon the way we reckon.
When the widow placed her two small coins in the temple treasury, she did not make headlines among men. But her sacrifice was noted by God for eternity. Jesus called his disciples over to see because something in her offering arrested His gaze. It wasn’t the amount. It was the totality of her trust. She gave from her poverty, and in doing so, she gave everything.
This is the arithmetic of heaven: the smallest gift, offered from the depths of genuine surrender, outweighs the grandest gesture rooted in self-sufficiency.
He Is Moved by What We Think Is Too Small
There is a tenderness in the Sacred Heart of Jesus that our minds can scarcely hold. He is not a God who sits distant and unmoved, tallying our acts of faith and finding them insufficient. He is a God who runs toward the returning son while he is still far off. He is a God who stops a funeral procession because He cannot bear a mother’s grief. He is a God who pauses on His way to raise a synagogue leader’s daughter because a trembling woman who had spent everything, suffered everything, and dared to touch the hem of His garment because she held hope in her heart.
She didn’t even ask out loud. She reached. And He turned.
Christ felt her call. He felt the particular quality of her faith reaching out to Him in the crowd. Her faith, tentative and desperate and small in her own eyes, moved the heart of God.
He wants you to understand this about yourself: your reach moves Him too.
Faith in the Desert
Perhaps you are in a season where faith does not feel like a mountain-moving force. It feels more like trying to start a fire in the rain where you strike the match, and it goes out. You pray, and the words seem to fall short. You return to Mass and go through the motions and wonder, secretly, if you are simply pretending.
The mystics have a name for this: aridity. And they do not consider it the absence of faith. They consider it one of its purest expressions.
The desert does not mean God has withdrawn. It often means He is drawing us deeper, past the consolations, past the felt experiences, into something more durable and more true: trust that does not require evidence to keep going. This is the faith that moves His heart most profoundly.
A Word for the Weary
If you have carried a long prayer and hope that has not yet come. Like a miracle healing that hasn’t occurred, a relationship that remains broken, a prodigal who has not yet returned. Do not mistake the waiting for abandonment. The God who parted the Red Sea is not stumped by your situation. He is at work in ways that are simply not yet visible to you.
Your faithfulness in the waiting is not nothing. It is everything. It is the mustard seed pressing into dark soil. It is the widow’s coin placed with open hands. It is the trembling reach toward the hem of His garment.
Closing Prayer
Lord Jesus, I come before You not with great faith, but with the faith I have. I offer You my uncertainty, my smallness, my quiet persistence in returning to You. Let it be enough — because You have promised that it is. Move in me what I cannot move in myself. And teach me, day by day, that it has never been about the size of my faith, but the greatness of the God in whom I place it. Amen.
🙏🙏🙏
“Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom.”
– Luke 12:32