And he believed in the Lord, and He accounted it to him for righteousness. (Gen 15,6)

Mostly, we take our understanding of the concept of faith from our current life or from those around us. Most of the time we understand it as a denial of some negative reality, an effort to see it differently (or not to see it at all, a kind of trying to live on a blue cloud). If we are to talk about trust in God, most of us will understand it as hoping that some bad situation will turn out well or at least not so bad.

However, this is to some extent confusing faith with hope. Hope has to do with future expectations, and we can fill in what we would like to happen and ask God for it. Nevertheless, faith, specifically the Abrahamic faith, is something else - it is tied to a specific promise of God. For Abram, the whole journey to the coveted offspring was a struggle to believe God's promise, even when everything looked exactly the opposite, and in fact, increasingly worse. Yes, he certainly wanted the good ending - he had hope - but there was even something more. For in the beginning he had received a clear promise, but then - for twenty five long years - he experienced an inner struggle to know if his God was trustworthy, if he could deliver what he had promised. In that struggle, Abram sometimes won, but often lost.

People who easily believe anything are considered fools by those around them, and rightly so. But Abrahamic faith is not naiveté or foolishness. During his conversation with God, Abram experienced a great struggle before he dared to believe, but at one point he finally did. God responded immediately. While we would all like to escape to that dreamy blue cloud of hope at times, Abram provides evidence to us that biblical faith is a rather unnatural thing for humans (and vice versa, unbelief is much natural for us (!)). Life experience teaches us something other than to believe, and as an old merchant, Abram knew this well. In life, after all, you get what you snatch, and no one gives you anything for free. Better not trust anyone too much, rely on yourself, it is just a naive notion that someone could mean it too well for you.

To trust God, therefore, we must lift ourselves up (and often rather "be lifted up" - how great is God's grace!) because, as Abram testifies, the faith to which God responds is in fact a struggle for the image of God in the heart of man.