Faith as the Courage to Build What You Cannot Yet See

Hebrews 11:1 tells us that faith is "the substance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." For too long, we have domesticated this verse into a statement about intellectual belief — assenting to doctrines we cannot prove. But the writer of Hebrews had something far more dangerous in mind.

Rachel Held Evans once wrote about faith not as certainty but as trust — the kind of trust that compels you to act before the outcome is guaranteed. Consider the community in downtown Portland that converted their church parking lot into a garden. No business plan. No five-year strategy. Just a conviction that if God's Beloved Community meant anything, it meant feeding their unhoused neighbors with dignity. They broke concrete on a Tuesday morning, not knowing whether tomatoes would grow in that soil, not knowing whether the city would shut them down by Friday.

That is the substance of things hoped for — dirt under your fingernails, seeds pressed into uncertain ground, a table set for people the world has decided do not matter.

Faith in the Progressive tradition is not about defending answers. It is about living into questions with enough courage to let those questions reshape you. It is showing up at the margins, where the Reign of God has always been breaking through, and doing the next faithful thing — even when you cannot see the harvest.