How My 3-Year-Old Showed Me What Faith Is
I had a really cool experience the other day. My wife and I were at the park across the street with our two little ones, swinging and sliding and just having a good time. I guess I’m still a kid at heart too, because I was trying out my new x-zylo, this weird plastic, ring-looking thing that you can trow like a football for hundreds of feet if you have a good arm. If you’ve never seen one of these things, you should google it. Pretty cool.
So within 2 minutes of practicing to throw the x-zylo, I get it stuck almost 20 feet up in a tree. Thankfully, I still have all my tree climbing skills from childhood, so up I go to retrieve my toy. Then Bella, my three-year-old daughter, comes over to see what’s going on. I guess she didn’t see me climb up the tree because she was looking around for me. So I start calling her name out from up in the tree, and killing myself laughing because she’s spinning in circles trying to find me, but just wouldn’t look up.
So after about a minute of doing this, she still hasn’t figured out that I’m up in the tree. So I yell to her, “Bella, come here!” and to my absolute shock, she shouts back “Okay daddy, here I come!” and starts walking to the trunk of the tree.
Now you have to understand, Bella has autism, and her vocabulary is still a big work in progress. To even say a sentence like that is extremely rare and very exciting!
But what was even cooler is the profound example of faith she demonstrated. Even though she couldn’t see her dad, she knew that he was calling her and she simply chose to follow his voice, trusting that somehow it would make sense eventually. I have been thinking since then, isn’t that exactly what the Christian life is like? We can’t see our heavenly Father, but we hear him calling out to us, and we choose to step out in faith and follow his voice, even if it doesn’t all make sense at the time.
That kind of faith doesn’t just happen. The trust gets built over time as a child experiences the love of their father, knowing that he is there and will protect them no matter what. Bella knows that I love her like crazy, and that she can trust me, so she was willing to listen to my call even though she wasn’t really sure what was going on.
I wish I had that kind of faith with my heavenly Father. God, grant me the faith of a three-year-old, the kind that jumps at the sound of your voice, in faith, knowing that eventually it will all make sense.
Canadian Bible Guy 
Thanks for posting this Jeremy. Brought me to tears envisioning the whole scene and thinking of its spiritual counterpart. So proud of Bella!!! And encouraged in faith by you. What a great end to my day 🙂