The Faithful Ones

Rob Merivale 04/02/26

There is a woman sitting in her car in a hospital car park at 6:47am.

She has just finished a twelve-hour shift. She hasn’t eaten properly since yesterday. In a few hours she will be back for another one. Right now she is sitting in silence, not because she is resting but because she doesn’t yet have the energy to turn the key.

She has never once described herself as faithful.

She is one of the most faithful people alive.

You have probably spent your whole life believing you weren’t faithful enough.

Not certain enough. Not trusting enough. Not spiritual enough. You heard sermons about faith and felt

the gap between what was described and what you actually experienced. You tried to believe harder. You prayed for feelings you couldn’t manufacture. You carried quiet guilt for doubts you couldn’t silence.

And you concluded, somewhere along the way, that something was wrong with you.

There was nothing wrong with you.

There was something wrong with the definition.

The lie we inherited

For centuries, faith has been presented as belief—the right thoughts, the right creed, the right emotional state. Certainty on demand. No wobble. No questions.

Because belief is a feeling, and feelings are not fully under human control. You cannot simply decide to feel more certain than you do. You cannot manufacture conviction by trying harder.

But we tried anyway. We measured ourselves against an impossible standard. We watched the confident believers and wondered what was wrong with us. We assumed the problem was effort, or sincerity, or spiritual depth.

It wasn’t.

The problem was that faith was never about belief in the first place.

What faith actually is

Faith is not an emotion. Faith is a structure.

Faith is getting up when you don’t want to. Holding things together when everything is falling apart. Taking responsibility when others step back. Showing up for people. Enduring what doesn’t make sense. Refusing to collapse when collapse would be easier. Staying aligned when pressure peaks.

Faith is what a body does under load.

Not what a mind believes in comfort—what a body does when life gets heavy.

The faithful ones were never the priests, the theologians, the professional believers. The faithful ones were the parents, the nurses, the carers, the cleaners, the teachers, the workers—the ones whose hands were too full to raise them in worship. They didn’t have time to talk about faith. They were too busy living it.

Two expressions, one structure

Some people do faith through motion—pushing forward, initiating, taking the next step when no one else will.

Some people do faith through holding—containing chaos, carrying others, keeping the centre steady when everything else is spinning.

Different expressions. Same structure. Alignment under pressure.

That’s all faith ever was.

The ones history missed

We praised the wrong people.

We canonised the articulate and overlooked the exhausted. We celebrated the ones who could stand still long enough to talk about faith and ignored the ones who were too busy doing it. We built institutions around belief and walked past the people whose faith was expressed in labour, care, endurance, and survival.

History made the faithful ones invisible—then blamed them for not being faithful enough.

What Jesus actually noticed

Every time Jesus comments on faith in the gospels, it follows the same pattern.

A bleeding woman who refuses to disappear. A foreign mother fighting for her daughter. A widow giving her last two coins. A woman breaking a jar of perfume because she understands the emotional weight in the room better than anyone else.

None of them recite doctrine. None of them claim certainty. None of them pass a theology exam.

And yet these are the ones he stops for. These are the ones he names.

Their faith is not what they believe. Their faith is what they do under pressure.

What this means for you

If you have worked a job you hated to keep others afloat—

If you have cared for someone who couldn’t repay you—

If you stayed kind when it cost you—

If you carried emotional weight no one saw—

If you endured pain without applause—

If you kept going when quitting would have been easier—

If you rebuilt yourself after collapse—

If you held a family, a team, a household together—

If you showed up because no one else would—

You have done faith.

Not believed in it. Not talked about it. Done it.

You passed a test you didn’t know you were taking.

The release

Faith was never about believing more. It was about surviving more. Staying aligned when life sits heavy on your shoulders.

So if you’ve spent years measuring yourself against a definition that made you feel like a failure—stop.

You are not a failure.

You are one of the faithful ones.

You always have been.

Somewhere, right now, a woman is sitting in her car in a hospital car park.

She doesn’t know it yet.

But she is one of them too.