“Increase our faith.” This was the request of the apostles in our Sunday Gospel. It’s such a seemingly ordinary thing to ask for but in truth is most essential. As a priest, there are many times I have heard people say their faith is weak or their faith is being tested or they have lost their faith.

Oftentimes it’s when difficulties come one’s way that he says his faith is weak or is being tested. And with those trials and difficulties comes the question “Why?” “Why did God let this happen to me or to those closest to me?” “Is God not powerful that he cannot control this misfortune from happening? Maybe he just doesn’t love me enough to spare me this sadness.” Doubts set in. Believing and trusting in a loving and caring God seems not that easy anymore. And if the difficulty and suffering grows longer, the question “why?” becomes “how long?” Just listen to the first reading this Sunday from the prophet Habakkuk. The problem of pain and its accompanying questions can make our once certain faith start to question and doubt leading it to become weak. I remember a woman ask those very same questions when her husband died. But added to her burden of losing a loved one was finding out, as she went through her dead husband’s things, love letters from another woman. Confronting the other woman, she finds out her husband had a child with her!
To others the weakening of faith can come in the form of doubting whether there really is a God. “Is what I am being asked to believe really true and necessary? Is the Church really the community of believers Jesus established?” How many times have I heard college students and young adults grapple with such questions especially when confronted by other people who say they don’t believe in God or it’s just a creation of someone else’s imagination to stop us from thinking for ourselves. “If God is god and he is powerful, loving and good, why did he allow for this to happen? Maybe there is no god.” If there is one thing certain in such questions and doubts, it’s not the absence of faith but the search for certainty in one’s faith. Sadly, negligence in relation to one’s faith which begins with neglecting prayer, good works and church attendance leads to deliberately forgetting about God and ultimately to lapsing into a sinful way of life resulting into lost faith.

Our problem sometimes is we can get stuck with the certainty of our childhood faith. But as we grow and mature we experience and realize the complexities of life. Our faith needs to mature as well. Being a disciple of Jesus means making well-discerned and right choices. But knowing the right ones and choosing them do not always follow from the other. We think the faith we had as a child should be the same in our adult life. That is where we are wrong. Faith is not static. It’s dynamic. It must grow and mature through time. Just like in any relationship, the one we have with God must also change, grow and deepen. At times, we feel God so close to us, at other times so distant. In truth, our sense of God’s nearness or distance is our own making for God is always close to us more than we are to ourselves.