How High Can a Flea Jump?

The problem of unbelief.

If you found someone living in a remote village that was living in the stone age and whisked them away to our modern culture, what would be their reaction? Would they embrace it easily? Would they wonder how they could have ever lived without it?

Would they believe you, if you told them about a light switch and that by simply flicking the switch, the room would light up? What if you had a power failure just before they made their first attempt at turning on the light? Would it be more difficult to get them to try the second time?

How often have you and I been seduced into believing something didn’t work because of circumstances not directly associated with what we are being asked to put our trust in. Or is it simply a new idea that you aren't familiar with?

A young, pregnant Eskimo woman was anxiously awaiting the arrival of her new baby. Her mother had taught her everything there was to be known. One of the most difficult things her mother had to teach her was that if there was something wrong with the baby the best thing to do would be to simply put the baby out on the ice. Life was almost impossible for healthy babies let alone ones with physical challenges.

Just before the birth, the woman's mother died and she was all alone. She remembered everything her mother had told her and delivered a beautiful baby girl. But too her horror, her baby had no teeth. One cannot survive without teeth in the harshness of the barren north. This must be one of the terrible deformities that her mother had warned her about. After all, if babies were born with no teeth, her mother would have told her. So the faithful daughter put her precious baby out on the ice.

She so desired to honor her mother's memory but she couldn't give up this precious life. She ran out on the ice and took the risk (had faith) of raising a deformed baby.

Here are some examples of how we don't have to be trapped in past failures or wrong lessons. All men aren’t abusive just because 1 man was abusive. Once you have gas in your car, it will run. Just because friends have let us down, doesn’t mean all friends will let us down. The list is endless as to what causes our faith to diminish. And what we sometimes fail to remember is that it wasn’t always the process that failed but a wrong lesson or application that caused the failure.

Learning to discern what caused failure is vital in developing our faith life and overcoming unbelief. Staying open to new ideas is what makes life like a box of chocolates.

If you put some fleas in a small jar and put the lid on it, you could watch them jump and hit the lid for awhile. It won’t take them long to discover jumping too high hurts their heads. Once they have learned the lesson, you can remove the lid and they won’t jump out of the jar. They learned the lesson that jumping too high hurts their head. You could even starve them and although they have the ability to jump out of the open jar, they will simply die believing that jumping too high hurts their head.

What lessons have you learned that has caused you to have unbelief? Did you learn the right lesson?

I write this from the context of having a plan that could literally bring economic equality to the entire world. The challenge is that people have to get 2 people to trust them. This is literally the only thing that has to happen in order to feed the poor, care for orphans and widows, achieve financial freedom and bring equality to all.

What lessons have you learned that stop you from believing this?