Bed, Bugs and Faith by Catherine Weiskopf

James 2:17 In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

My daughter is afraid of bugs. She is tough, goes after a soccer ball with no fear but a millimeter bug will reduce her to screaming mess. One night as I said her prayers she saw a bug on her bed and panicked. I picked it up and asked her to get some toilet paper to squish it with. In the process of passing it from me to her, it dropped back on her bed. She did not pass go but went immediately to a melt down. We searched the whole bed for the bug and couldn’t find it. While I was sure it had flown or trotted on its way she was not.

She wanted to sleep with her parents downstairs in order to avoid the bug. As we talked about the dreaded insect she was visible stressed, holding her stomach in pain and getting mad at her mom for fumbling the important pass off.  She was sure she couldn’t sleep with the possibility of the creature crawling on her during the night. Facts about how many bugs already lived on her body didn’t help.

Because we weren’t keen on having her sleep with us and wanted her to face her fear a bit, I gave her some options.

“Holly do you think that God can take care of this bug for you?” I asked.

Technically she knew He could, but she was hesitant.

“Here are your options:

1. You can ask God to keep the bug far away from you tonight and have faith that he can and sleep in your bed peacefully;

2. You can lay in your bed thinking about the bug that may crawl on you and get a stomach ache and not sleep and

3. Finally you can sleep in the spare bedroom.

It’s your choice.”

I hoped she would choose option number one, but even if she didn’t I wanted her to be aware that it was one of the choices. She went for sleeping in another bedroom. 

This whole incident made me very aware of the fact that while I had time and time again told my son to pray about issues and he had seen answers to his prayers, I hadn’t done the same for my daughter. It also made me aware that for faith to stay alive and vital it requires action. Faith is like a muscle. If you don’t use it you’ll lose it. We must daily pray and step out in faith.

Recently God gave Holly another try when she had both a soccer game and an academic competition scheduled for the same Saturday morning. She hated to miss the soccer game because she’s the goalie. I did my motherly duty this time and reminded her to pray God would take care of it.

She prayed: Dear God, Help it to rain so my game will be cancelled and I won’t miss it.

Saturday came and Holly head off to her academic competition under gray skies. At five minutes before the game was to start, as her teammates warmed up on the field, lighting flashed and thunder crashed and the skies opened up and it poured. Holly did receive an answer to her prayer because that day she dared to ask, step out, and exercise her faith muscle.