the challenging shield of faith

I remember feeling rather let down when I took my first "spiritual gift inventory" test and the number one analysis of my responses was, "You have the spiritual gift of faith." Well, duh! I'm a Christian, of course I have faith! Can't this test tell me something more relevant, like what I'm supposed to do with that faith? My friends had the gifts of discipleship, pastoring, healing, compassion, teaching... "action" gifts that seemed a lot more important to me than simply "faith." I wanted more direction than that! (Don't we all.) If faith was the gift I'd been given, well, quite frankly I wanted the gift receipt to go with it.

How do you even begin to describe the gift of faith? Is it some perpetual optimism that refuses to see the dark and depressing sides of life and is always singing chipper, zippety-do-dah songs and blissfully smiling as the raindrops are falling on my head? Hardly. It's more like the grueling boxing match in which blood and sweat are flying everywhere as blow after blow pounds me into the mat, blinding my battered eyes, making my head spin as the referee starts to count... and yet somehow I always find myself back on my feet before the count reaches ten.

In Ephesians 6 Paul describes the armor of God, and faith as our shield, our primary defense against all the evil plots and schemes of the enemy. I think of the large, full-body shields of the ancient Roman army, and the way legions were trained to use them individually and as a team. The shields were extremely heavy, they were large enough to cover more than one person if necessary, and they could be locked together to form an impenetrable barrier that protected the entire column while still enabling them to advance on the enemy's line. They were also spiked, making them something of an attack weapon, too.

Faith is a difficult spiritual gift to live with. Sure, it's hard to keep getting up, to keep crawling out of my corner round after round... but the hardest part of living with the gift of faith is realizing that not everyone has it -- that some of my fellow soldiers have lost their shields in the midst of their battles, and that my shield of faith has to be large enough and sturdy enough to guard more than just me. I still don't know everything that it means to have faith as a spiritual gift, but in realizing my calling to continue fighting for the faithless, for the despondent and discouraged who are ready to give up on the victory God has promised them, I'm learning that faith is an action gift after all.