Ye of Little Faith

There is a phone call I put off for three days. It was to reschedule an appointment. I knew exactly what I needed to say, and I wrote it down anyway. Then I rewrote it and practiced it out loud in an empty room. Every morning I decided I would call after lunch. Every afternoon I decided the office was probably busy. I thought about that call in the shower, at dinner, and at two in the morning.

The call took four minutes. The woman on the other end was kind. I doubt she remembered it by the end of the day.

I live with severe anxiety, and on bad days it comes close to social phobia: a fear of other people out of all proportion to anything they have done. A lot of my life has gone into worrying about things like that phone call. I still see my therapist every week and I still take my medication, as I wrote in An Open Book Test. None of that is changing.

But I have been reading Matthew, and I keep running into the same four words. Here is the claim, and it is narrow. Worrying about trivial things is a quiet verdict on God’s provision. It says he might not come through this time. When I spend three days on a four-minute phone call, I am not only hurting myself. I am being disrespectful to God.

Four Times

The four words are “O ye of little faith.” In the King James, Jesus says them four times in Matthew. In Greek it is one word, oligopistos: little-faithed. Not faithless. He says it to people who are already following him.

The first time is the Sermon on the Mount. He has just pointed at the birds and the lilies, who do not work for their food or their clothes. Then:

Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? (Matthew 6:30)

The second time is on the Sea of Galilee. A storm comes up, the boat is covered with waves, and Jesus is asleep. The disciples wake him: “Lord, save us: we perish.” He answers with a question before he does anything about the weather. “Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?” (8:25–26). Then he rebukes the wind.

The third time, Peter walks on the water toward him, until “he saw the wind boisterous” and began to sink (14:30). I will come back to that one. It is the only time the King James makes it singular: “O thou of little faith.”

The fourth time is about bread. The disciples cross the lake and realize they forgot to bring any, and they start arguing about it among themselves. They have just watched Jesus feed five thousand people, and then four thousand, with baskets left over both times.

O ye of little faith, why reason ye among yourselves, because ye have brought no bread? Do ye not yet understand, neither remember the five loaves of the five thousand, and how many baskets ye took up? (Matthew 16:8–9)

Every time, they are worried about something he has already handled. Clothes. The boat. The water under Peter’s feet. Lunch. We are still on that shore, arguing about bread. The world grows enough food for everyone; as I wrote in An Open Book Test, we have a distribution problem, not a quantity problem.

That is why I have come to see my worry as disrespect. Suppose a friend has picked you up from the airport every time you have flown for ten years, and you call him three times the night before to make sure he remembers. He would be right to wonder what more he has to do. “Do ye not yet understand?”

Two Coats

Here is the other half of it. We worry about almost everything except what we ought to be concerned with.

There is a wrestling subscription box I wanted badly: a monthly box of shirts, collectibles, and other merchandise, shipped to the door. I had the page open. I had picked the plan. Then I sat with it and realized I did not need it. Not that I could not afford it. I did not need it. It was excess.

John the Baptist was asked about excess directly. The crowds who came out to the Jordan asked him, “What shall we do then?”

He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise. (Luke 3:11)

Until every neighbor has food, a roof, and warmth, why on earth would I want the box? Jesus is plain about where that kind of treasure goes: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal” (Matthew 6:19). And: “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (16:26). What we owe the hungry and the stranger is spelled out in Matthew 25, which I wrote about in A Bigger Table.

I want to be honest. The urge did not go away when I closed the page. I still want things like that box, and I suspect I always will. The want is not the failure. The work is to resist it in favor of the neighbor, and to do it again next month.

There is something sad and ironic in this. The merch business manufactures scarcity on purpose: limited runs, exclusives, “while supplies last,” a countdown clock on the product page. We have built an industry to make people feel a shortage of things nobody needs. Meanwhile the shortage that leaves people hungry is man-made too. We made that one by neglect.

We have not finished the main quest, and we are already off on side quests, the optional missions in a video game that do not move the story forward. Our time here is short. “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom” (Psalm 90:12).

Sometimes humanity looks to me like a bug flying into a porch light. People long assumed insects are drawn to lamps. In 2024, a team led by Samuel Fabian at Imperial College London filmed insects around lights in three dimensions and found that they are not steering toward the light at all. Flying insects keep their backs turned toward the brightest thing around, because for as long as insects have flown, that was the sky, and the sky told them which way was up. Put a bulb in the dark and they tilt toward it, lose track of up, and circle it, or flip over and dive into the ground.

We mistake the box for the sky.

Careful and Troubled

Worry also wastes what God has put right in front of us.

When Jesus visits the home of Martha and her sister Mary, Mary sits at his feet and listens. Martha is “cumbered about much serving,” and finally asks Jesus to tell Mary to help. He answers:

Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her. (Luke 10:41–42)

In 1611, “careful” meant full of care. Martha was not doing anything wrong. Serving guests is good work. But Jesus was sitting in her house, and she spent the visit in the kitchen worrying about the visit.

That is what the three days cost me. Not the phone call. The three days. There were conversations I half heard, meals I did not taste, and work I liked, and I spent all of it rehearsing a script.

Asleep in the Boat

Go back to the storm. The disciples are bailing water, and the one person on board who is not worried is the one who can stop it. When it is over, they ask, “What manner of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him!” (Matthew 8:27).

I can assure you that God is far better at handling whatever you are worried about than you are. My worry has never once calmed a sea. It has never made a phone call go better. What I can do is hand it over. Paul uses Martha’s word:

Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:6–7)

Peter puts it shorter: “Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you” (1 Peter 5:7).

Look Up

The way is up. On the mountain, Jesus told the crowd to “behold the fowls of the air” (Matthew 6:26). Look to the sky, and pray.

Peter did that once. He climbed out of the boat in a storm and walked on the water toward Jesus, and as long as he was looking at Jesus, the water held. Then “he saw the wind boisterous” and began to sink. He cried out, “Lord, save me,” and “immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him” (14:30–31). The wind was still blowing when the hand reached him.

A few lines after telling the Philippians to be careful for nothing, Paul says he has learned to be content with little and with plenty (4:11–12). Then he writes the line people put on gym shirts, and it is about exactly that: going without the box, and getting out of the boat anyway.