Faith With Feet, Not Cicada Feet

I was in the fifth grade when the swarm of 17-year cicadas came and almost literally took over the east side of Asheville, North Carolina where we lived. In case you haven't heard of them, this type of locust lays their eggs deep underground and those eggs hatch seventeen years later. The resulting insects fly in massive, buzzy clusters, so that it's like World War III, but the enemy isn't approaching in overhead planes but rather in horrid winged, red bulgy-eyed, nasty-looking flying armies. And those winged critters have absolutely no qualms about landing on people and hooking their little bent-up legs into people's shirts or hair. Sometimes two at a time, like: "Hey, you take the right, I'll get the left, and when she goes crazy, we'll call in Bob over there, and he'll finish her off in a frontal attack."

Maybe you've guessed how I feel about locusts. 

Anyway, I felt the same way about them when I was eleven years old. We lived on the west side of Asheville, where -- for some reason -- they weren't as prevalent; however, east Asheville was where I went to school and church, or where I visited my mom at her workplace, so I had plenty of experience entering the war zone.

At school, recess became torture. I made up excuses to stay in the classroom if I could while the rest went outside. The trouble with that plan was that -- since the teacher had to leave someone inside with me -- this became noticeable very soon. So I started asking the teacher if I could run to the bathroom before recess... and then I'd stay in there the whole time until the class came back in. 

It didn't take too many episodes of this before the teacher sent the rest of the class outside with the class next door and stayed in to talk to me. "What's wrong, Tamara?" she asked. She prodded me about my friendships, tried to draw me out about bullying or other social issues. I was way too embarrassed to explain that the entirety of the issue lay in my nightmarish terror of two-inch-long winged critters who dive-bombed your shirt and looked like the next Stephen King lead role for villain. 

So I just shrugged and mumbled excuses, which left my poor teacher very unsatisfied and in the dark.

One day in May, the girls of my age organized a Mother's Day luncheon at the church, which -- as I mentioned -- was also located in the war zone made up of winged abominations. Not being able to come up with an excuse that my mother would believe why we couldn't attend, I grudgingly agreed to go, taking some slight hope in the fact that the cicadas had begun to die off. 

It seemed impossible that the little villains could metamorphose into anything worse... but they did. Their bodies just... dried up into horrible dull-yellow shells, which they left hooked onto the undersides of leaves or branches, and when you walked beneath them, guess what landed in your hair?

I'm not traumatized, I'm not traumatized, I'm not traumatized, I'm not...

Anyway, those shells were everywhere. I had to avoid trees (which was difficult to do in the wooded area where our church was) as my mom and I walked into the building for the Mother's Day get-together. 

Once inside, I breathed a sigh of relief, and went to help get the luncheon together in the kitchen while my mom went to sit in the eating area with the other moms. The girls were putting all the food together, supervised by one of the ladies in our church, and we planned to serve hors d'oeuvres, followed by light sandwiches, fruit salad, etc. 

I was excited until one girl had a brilliant idea for a practical joke. You've probably figured out what it was.

"Hey, let's go fill up their hors d'oeuvres bowls with locust shells! We'll cover them with napkins and see what they do!"

Noooo, I groaned. YEAH! the other girls said. 

So I stayed inside while they went out and gathered a ridiculous amount of shells. They brought them back in and dug their hands down into the bucket to fill up the bowls. Carefully hiding the piles of shells under napkins, they laid the bowls out on the table, and we each picked one up to carry in to our moms.

I would have ruined the joke -- and made ten other girls mad at me for doing so -- if I had refused and made my mom be the only one not to get a bowl. So I gingerly held my container, horrified to think of the tiny amount of space separating my fingers from the crunchy dead things inside it. We carefully carried the bowls into the eating area, and told the moms that it was a surprise -- they had to remove their napkins on the count of three.

The shrieks and squeals when this happened made the whole joke worth it (I even enjoyed it a little from my safe vantage point in the corner of the room). But then came the awful task of carrying the bowl back to the kitchen.

And this time, the napkin wasn't there, since one of the girls had gone around the table and collected all the napkins for recycling. I lifted that bowl of shells -- dead, empty, departed creatures with absolutely no impetus left in them -- took two steps toward the kitchen...

And dropped the bowl. The things went everywhere, blanketing the carpet and my sandaled feet, left bare to their scratchy, clingy legs.

Ew, ew, ew. 

I jumped back with my own shriek. It took a few seconds, but the situation became clear in that space of time: Tamara would not clean up the cicadas. Tamara would crouch in the corner of the room, shaking like a leaf. 

And so, bless her, one of the other girls came forward and scraped the bodies into the fallen bowl and carried it into the kitchen. 

Now, I just told you a whole story about these things (because it's a good story), but there's only one tiny little aspect of this story that spoke to me today while I was reading James 2:14-26. He's talking about faith and the deeds that accompany that faith. 

"What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him?" 

James' audience is "the twelve tribes scattered among the nations." Hebrews. Israelites. The people who originated from Abraham as a result of God's covenant with their forefather. And all of these people would know the Hebrew Shema, that is, a repetition of Deuteronomy 6:4: "Hear, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one."

So when James gets to 2:19, he drops a loaded point on his readers: "You believe that there is one God." You pray the Shema. You've heard of our one God since you were babies. You know this like the back of your hand.

But knowing without doing will not save you. James' way of putting this is intense: "You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that -- and shudder."

This. Is. Not. Faith. Demons do not have faith because they know God exists. They know God exists, and they do everything they can to war against Him, because they know, too, that their time is short and that their doom is sealed. From the day the tomb emptied, they knew. 

James' whole point is wrapped up in 2:26: "As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead." 

Those cicadas couldn't dive bomb me anymore by the time they became the hors d'oeuvres course at the Mother's Day luncheon. They had no impetus anymore; they were simply shells of what they had once been. No spark of life moved their wing tips anymore. They were ineffectual (except in terrifying one of the serving girls) and immobile. 

As my mom used to say, they "made a hole in the water." In other words, there was nothing they could do that would restore their life and movement, because they were dead.

Hebrews chapter 11 gives us the Faith Hall of Fame -- a list of many of the heroes of Biblical history who put feet to their faith, who believed and acted, who held firm and died for it. 

Which begs the question I'm going to ask right now: At the end of your life when you look back and take stock of all that you said and all that you did, will the dids match the saids? Will you and I be able to truly see the beautiful feet that bring the good news, brought by faith, because we believed enough to act?

You know what makes me pause and think? These people listed in Hebrews 11 were human. They each had human flaws, because they were "by nature objects of wrath" (Ephesians 2:3). But despite their shortcomings, they were known for the feet they put with their faith. Abraham set out for a destination with no ETA or map, Enoch walked so closely with God that he didn't even die -- the Lord just took him when it was time to go, Noah built an enormous boat when it had likely never rained upon the earth prior to the deluge, the people of Israel stepped down between two towering walls of water to walk across to the other side, and you've got to know they were eyeing those walls and trying not to think about how flimsy they looked. Joshua knocked down a city by walking around it a bunch of times. 

Hebrews doesn't talk about New Testament faith because the people living it out was the contemporary of the writer of Hebrews, but I just love my boy Peter, who blew aside all the laws of physics, and stepped right off the edge of that boat to walk on water toward Jesus. Peter was a fisherman. If anyone understood that water's surface tension doesn't allow for a leisurely stroll, he did.

But he put feet to his faith anyway.

And look what Jesus says to him: "Oh you of little faith, why did you doubt?"

We are flawed creatures of little faith, but that does not mean that Jesus doesn't still call us out of the boat. 

Faith without feet is dead, cicadas (yuck) without their innards are still and lifeless, and will never fly again, caricatures and shells of their former selves.

We've got to fill up our faith with fire, movement. 

I was tending a fire yesterday in my parents' backyard firepit. The flames danced higher as they got more oxygen; the flames turned to smoke and went out if they got smothered with too much ash. Movement, air adds fuel to the flame. 

Don't just stand still in the boat. Move. Get those feet walking, and step out.