"If you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there, and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you." -- Jesus (Matthew 17: 21)
I once stood at the rim of an open-pit copper mine in southern Arizona, and looked down at the dump trucks that carried the ore up from the bottom of the pit. These are trucks so big that they'd barely fit in two lanes of a highway. They were so far down in the pit that they looked like matchbox toys. That alone was an impressive sight, but more impressive was being told that at one time, this vast, deep pit had been a mountain. The spot where I was standing would have been at the base of that mountain, and I'd have been looking up, instead of down.
Orders were given by the mining company's executives, and orders were followed by the miners. The ore was dug, the mountain was flattened, and they kept digging and inverted it into a hole, and the remains of the mountain and the hole were piled up into a long, flat-topped mountain of tailings about a mile away. Somebody said to the mountain: 'Move from here to there," and it moved.
People had faith that they could make small machines that could make larger machines that could make even larger factories to make even larger machines. And they had faith that these really large machines could dig and haul away an entire mountain and move it someplace else. People started with faith on the order of mustard seeds and ended up with faith on the order of mountains.
But why stop with mountains? Why not start with the faith we have now, however weak, and take up challenges grander than copper mining? Impressive as those trucks appeared from the top of the open-pit mine, it is even more impressive when human beings have enough faith to follow Jesus in the supreme adventure of loving even our enemies, forgiving those who hurt us most. Awesome as was that hole in the ground, and the mountain of tailings near it, it is even more awesome, and difficult, to extend appropriate compassion and protection to the most vulnerable people in our midst. It is a marvel to move a mountain by faith, and even more of a marvel when we faithfully and bravely dig into the depths of our our souls to face the demons we find there, and take on the hard work of inner healing.
Faith goes beyond belief in religious doctrine. It's not so much about belief at all, as it is the active application of a hopeful attitude. We can take what little faith we have today and put it to work growing more faith within ourselves and our society, so that we can move more than mere mountains.