They Told Me To Take A Leap Of Faith

There is a sentence that gets said to people in difficult jobs, almost always warmly, almost always by somebody who has never once been in that situation.

Sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith.

Picture the woman it is said to. She is at a church lunch. She has said, in passing and lightly, that work is hard at the moment. And a woman she likes, who means every word kindly, says the sentence.

And she smiles and says yes, probably.

And what she does not say, because it would be rude and because it would sound bitter, is this. Your husband earns twice what I do. Your mother lives with you and looks after the children. Your house is paid for. If you leapt tomorrow there would be about four separate things underneath you.

If I leap, there is a child, a mortgage, and my mother's rent, and nothing else at all.

So the advice is not wrong exactly. It is unusable. It has been handed to her by somebody standing on a floor, describing a leap to somebody standing on a ledge.

And here is what it does, which is the reason this matters. It is not neutral. It leaves a residue. She goes home slightly worse than she arrived, because now, on top of a difficult job, there is a question about whether her caution is a spiritual failure.

The advice cost the giver nothing. It cost the receiver about three days.

James names the exact move

There is a passage in James that is one of the bluntest things in the New Testament, and it is about precisely this kind of advice.

If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, And one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit? (James 2:15 to 16, King James Version)

Be ye warmed and filled.

That is a genuinely warm sentence. It is not sarcasm and it is not cruelty. It is a person wishing somebody well, sincerely, in words, while providing nothing that would change the situation.

And James calls it useless. He asks what it profits, which is a commercial word. He is measuring the transaction, and the answer is nothing.

You are not being unspiritual by finding that advice unusable, and James 2 names sincere well wishing without provision and asks plainly what it profits (James 2:16), and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person set aside a kind sentence without becoming bitter about the person who said it.

And notice what James is actually attacking. Not the words. The gap between the words and the situation. He is arguing that faith which does not touch the actual circumstances of an actual person is not doing what faith does.

You have been handed words rather than help, and James 2:15 sets the naked and hungry person right beside the sentence to show the distance (James 2:15), and the Spirit of God is the one who is not content to leave a person with only a sentence.

Songs to a heavy heart

There is a proverb about the timing and fit of encouragement that is one of the strangest images in the book.

As he that taketh away a garment in cold weather, and as vinegar upon nitre, so is he that singeth songs to an heavy heart. (Proverbs 25:20)

Singing songs to a heavy heart. That is a description of cheerfulness delivered to somebody carrying something, and the two comparisons are savage. Taking somebody's coat off in the cold. Vinegar on soda, which fizzes and does nothing.

The proverb is not saying the songs are bad. It is saying they are wrongly placed, and that wrongly placed encouragement actively removes something rather than adding.

You are not imagining that the encouragement took something from you, and Proverbs 25 compares badly timed cheerfulness to taking a coat off somebody in the cold (Proverbs 25:20), and it is the Holy Spirit who gives a person the words that actually fit rather than the words that sound right.

And notice what this frees a reader from. If the encouragement did not help, that is not a diagnosis of the receiver.

You have not failed to receive something good, and Proverbs 25:20 puts the misfit on the singer rather than on the heavy heart (Proverbs 25:20), and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a person from concluding that they are the problem.

What this is not

Let me be careful, because this could easily curdle.

This is not saying the woman at the lunch was a hypocrite. She was not. She was kind and she meant well, and she has no idea what is underneath anybody else.

It is also not saying that leaps of faith do not exist. They do. There are people whose story is exactly that, and God does ask some people to move without a floor. That is real.

What it is saying is that nobody can identify somebody else's leap from the outside, and that a sentence delivered without knowledge of a situation is not counsel.

And plainly: if the pressure has gone past what can be carried, if you cannot get out of bed, or if some part of you has begun wanting it all to stop, that is bigger than a job. Call or text the 988 crisis line, and say the true version out loud to a doctor or a counselor or a pastor you trust. Getting help is not a lack of faith.

You are not being told to reject encouragement, and James 2 objects to the gap between words and provision rather than to warmth itself (James 2:16), and the Holy Spirit is the one who supplies what a sentence could not.