Crazy Faith summary

We know we have to walk before we can run, but when it comes to faith, we must also crawl before we can walk. The author calls this crawling phase baby faith, and it refers to starting small and making steady progress.

When you start lifting weights at the gym, you don’t begin with the heaviest dumbbells. Similarly, when the author met his wife, he didn’t declare his everlasting love for her right away. Instead, he took the time to get to know her, woo her, and make her laugh.

As a pastor, the author is used to answering questions about faith from his congregation. Over the years, the same questions have cropped up again and again. People ask, How can I be sure that God really exists? And How can I be certain that I have a secure future to look forward to? The answers the author gives might surprise you. Instead of trying to reassure people about their doubts, he replies that, actually, we can’t really be sure that God exists, or that our futures will look like we hope they will.

The key message is this: God and faith can often feel like one big maybe.

Sometimes even our best friends are too lazy to show up for us. On the night of the Last Supper, Jesus needed love and support; He knew one of His disciples was about to betray him. After dinner He asked His three closest friends, Peter, James, and John, to accompany Him to the Garden of Gethsemane. But when He began walking in the garden, He turned back and saw that His friends had all fallen asleep. This is a perfect example of what the author calls lazy faith.

When Jesus’s disciples fell asleep, it wasn’t because they didn’t care. It was just that, in that moment, they gave in to the weakness of their flesh.

All you might need to invite a miracle into your life is a pencil and paper. When the author was in middle school, his family was extremely poor, and he couldn’t afford the cool Nike sneakers he desperately wanted. But what he could do, he realized, was draw them. With the help of a ruler and some nifty draftsmanship, he made precise drawings of the exact sneakers he wished to own. Somehow, within a few weeks, they had made it off the page and onto his feet.

Here’s the key message: Help your prayers come true by committing them to paper.

Take a moment to consider the wonder and beauty of the world around you. Let your mind linger on the majesty of the mountains, the depths of the oceans, and the birds singing in the morning. How did God bring all of this into creation? He simply used His words.

The Bible story of the world’s creation highlights the power of the spoken word. When God wanted to banish the darkness, He said, Let there be light. Throughout the creation of the earth, He said what He wanted to see manifest. This is the perfect example of what the author calls stating faith.

It’s a sad truth that we don’t live in a fair world. We lose the people we love, our hard work can end in failure, and sometimes, we lose hope completely. Loss, in all its forms, is an inevitable part of life. In the midst of a time of crisis, our crazy faith can turn into fading faith. When our faith fades, we start to doubt whether God is really on our side.

All of us experience fading faith at some point in our lives. For instance, when the author witnesses his autistic son struggling to thrive and communicate, he finds himself wondering whether God is really going to manifest the bright future for his son that he constantly prays for.