By Faith, Noah

At Whit's End, Jack Davis and Lucy Cunningham-Schultz come to John Avery Whittaker with a question that has been bothering them both: what does faith actually mean? Whit answers with a story instead of a definition. A house is burning, and a boy named Billy is trapped at his upstairs window while his father stands below in the dark, arms open, calling up to him to jump.

Jack does not get it, and Lucy would rather be told than guess. So Whit explains. Faith, he says, is trust. Billy may have said all his life that he trusted his father, but a real and active faith cannot begin until his feet have left the windowsill. Lucy wonders whether that is what people mean by a leap of faith. Jack, meanwhile, announces that he would never have jumped, on the grounds that his own father has skinny arms and would drop him like a hot potato. That gives Whit his second point: faith has to be placed in someone who will do what he says he will do. When the conversation turns to God, both kids admit the hard part. Lucy has been teased at school for believing in someone she cannot see, and Jack points out that at least Billy could see his dad down there. Funny they should mention it, Whit says, and leads them up to the Bible Room, where a very large boat is waiting.

Reading from Hebrews chapter eleven, Whit introduces a man named Noah, who lived in a time when people had grown so wicked that God was grieved in his heart over having made them. Noah found grace in God's sight and walked with him, and God chose him for a strange and enormous assignment. Whit imagines Noah coming home to break the news to his wife, who is far more interested in why God wants a boat than in whether dinner is ready, and who wonders aloud whether she should cancel her hair appointment. Two of every living thing, food for all of them, and a career change at four hundred and eighty years old.

The building takes about a hundred and twenty years - a hundred and twenty years of work for someone Noah has never seen, to escape a disaster that has not happened. That, Whit tells the kids, is faith. Noah preaches to his neighbors the whole time and is laughed at for it, and Whit imagines the pile of other troubles that might have landed at his back gate: a health inspector demanding a boat permit, a union boss annoyed that the crew is all family, a lawyer threatening to sue, and an animal protection officer objecting to the guests in the yard. Lucy is not sure it really happened that way. Whit admits the Bible does not say, and that they are using their imaginations.

Then the true part resumes. The family and the animals go aboard, God shuts the door, and after seven days the rain begins and falls for forty days and forty nights. The waters lift the ark above the highest hills, and only those on board remain alive. Months later, Noah sends out a raven, which finds nowhere to land. He sends a dove, and she comes back too. Seven days later he tries the dove again, and she returns in the evening with a freshly plucked olive leaf. Seven days after that, she does not come back at all. The ground is dry, and God calls them out to fill the earth again. Noah builds an altar, and God sets a rainbow in the clouds as the sign of his promise never to destroy the earth by water again - a reminder for God, Whit says, and a reminder for everyone else too.

This, Whit tells Jack and Lucy, is exactly how faith in Jesus works: trusting that he has done and will do everything he said, loving him without having seen him. Lucy decides she will remember that the next time she is picked on at school, and then asks what became of Noah. He lived another three hundred and fifty years, Whit says, and died at nine hundred and fifty. Jack wants to know whether faith like Noah's would get him to nine hundred and fifty too. Faith like Noah's, Whit tells him, and you will live forever.