Small Steps -- FPC sermon excerpt

We’ve got the power. In fact, each of us is a little power plant.

Did you know that every time we take a step, we generate six to eight watts of energy? But then — poof! — it dissipates into the air.

If only we could capture it.

An architectural firm in London is now looking at ways to capture that energy on a large scale and turn it into electricity. At Victoria Station, for example, there are 34,000 people traveling through in one hour, rushing toward their trains. That’s a lot of steps. “If you harness that energy,” says the firm’s director, “you can actually generate a very useful power source.”

According to Fast Company magazine (September 2006), this architectural firm is working to develop vibration-harvesting sensors. These sensors would be implanted in the structure of train stations to capture the rumblings of commuters, turn the motion into electricity, and then store it in a battery.

There is power in small steps.

In today’s passage from Luke, the apostles say to Jesus, “Increase our faith!” They feel as though their faith is too miniscule to make a difference, so they plead for Jesus to enlarge it. But Jesus understands the significance of small steps, so he says to them, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea, and it would obey you’” (Luke 17:5-6).

Have you ever seen a mustard seed? Not many have. It is hard to see — each one is about one-twentieth of an inch in size. Very, very small. The point Jesus is trying to make is that faith doesn’t have to be huge to have an impact. It doesn’t have to make the news to make a difference.

There is power in mustard-seed faith.