There's a version of this season that sounds simple: my hip failed, so I'm having it fixed somewhere else. But anyone who's actually lived inside a medical fight like this knows it's never just one problem. It's the infection that finally cleared after months on IV antibiotics, and then finding out clearing it wasn't the finish line — it was just permission to start over. It's chasing surgeons far from home because the one back home couldn't get me to reconstruction. It's realizing that rebuilding a hip actually starts with rebuilding a stack of paperwork: mismatched records and a Real ID that had already fallen apart once.
Just getting there has been its own series of roadblocks and hurdles. For most people that's a figure of speech. For me, on crutches and a walker, it's been literal — wet tile floors, stretches of sand, anything that isn't flat, solid ground has become one more thing to get across.
So when I needed a marriage certificate just to move a passport forward, John and I did the only thing left to do — we got in the car and drove through the night to Tennessee to get it in person.
I wasn't praying for a sign on that drive. I was praying to survive the logistics.
We stopped at a motorcycle shop in Tennessee along the way. Nothing planned about it. But somewhere in that stop, a conversation with a man turned into something else. Not small talk. Prayer. And before we left, he handed me a small glass vial with a single mustard seed inside it.
I didn't ask for that. I wasn't looking for it. In the middle of chasing government records and surgeons and money, a stranger put Matthew 17:20 into my hand — not as a verse I'd read again, but as something I could actually hold onto while everything else was still unsteady.
Scripture
"He said to them, 'Because of your little faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, "Move from here to there," and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.'" — Matthew 17:20 (ESV)
Scripture Summary
Small isn't the same as weak. Jesus doesn't ask for a mountain-sized faith to move a mountain — just a seed's worth.
Faith doesn't need to see the mountain move to be real. The seed came before the surgery, before the funding, before any of it was solved.
It often arrives through someone else's hands. He didn't know what I was carrying that night. He just obeyed something in the moment — and that obedience became my sign.
Why This Matters for Us
It's tempting to think faith has to show up as certainty — a clear plan, a fully funded surgery, a straight path from a broken hip to a healed one. Mine hasn't looked like that. Mine has looked like overnight drives, denied claims, and a stranger's kindness at a motorcycle shop. But the mustard seed was never a promise that the road would be easy. It was a reminder that I don't need the whole mountain to move today — I just need enough faith to take the next step while it's still moving.
Reflection Questions
Has faith ever come to you through someone who had no idea what you were carrying?
Where in your life are you waiting for a "big" sign, when a small one may have already been placed in your hand?
What is one next step you can take today, even without seeing the whole mountain move?
Prayer
Heavenly Father,
Thank You for meeting me in the middle of exhaustion, on a road I never wanted to be driving, for a piece of paper I never wanted to need. Thank You for placing faith in my hand through someone who didn't even know what this season has cost me. I don't have certainty about how this all resolves. But I have a seed. Let that be enough for today. Grow in me the kind of faith that doesn't wait for the mountain to move before it starts walking.
In Jesus' name,
Amen
