Faith as Holy Dissatisfaction

Hebrews 11:1 tells us that faith is "the substance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." For too long, we have domesticated this verse into a statement about personal belief. But what if faith is less about certainty and more about holy dissatisfaction with the world as it is?

Rachel Held Evans once wrote about faith not as a fortress but as a river — always moving, always carving new channels through stone. That image haunts me. The heroes of Hebrews 11 were not people who had everything figured out. They were restless ones, misfits who looked at empire and exploitation and said, "This is not the Beloved Community that God dreams for us."

Consider the young seminarian who walks away from a church that tells her she cannot preach, not because she has lost faith but because she has found it. She has glimpsed something unseen — a table wide enough for every body, a pulpit open to every voice — and now she cannot unsee it. That is the conviction of things not seen. That is substance.

Faith in the Progressive tradition is not passive waiting. It is the stubborn insistence that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, and that God is calling us to grab hold and pull. When we march for the vulnerable, when we welcome the stranger, when we protect the earth that the Creator entrusted to our care, we are living out Hebrews 11:1 with our feet.

The substance of things hoped for always has dirt under its fingernails.