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.…