By April Yamasaki

When I first started my website, AprilYamasaki.com, I used the tagline “Spiritual Practice, Faith, and Life.” I really didn’t know what to call my new blogging venture, but I figured I had to start with something, and I could always change my title later.

As it turned out, “later” came sooner than I expected, for the following year, I changed my tagline to “On Faith and Writing,” then sometime after that to “Practical Spirituality,” and finally to my current tagline: “Writing and Other Acts of Faith.” While the emphasis has changed somewhat as my blog has changed and grown over the years, the one constant has been “faith.”

Whether I’m writing an article about spiritual practices for Lent or a more general article on how to pray, reflecting on Scripture or relating a personal experience, reviewing a book or discussing mental health and the church, interviewing a writer or sharing an excerpt from one of my books — whatever the subject, I write from a faith perspective, grounded in faith and shaped by faith.

American essayist and author E.B. White wrote, “Writing is an act of faith, not of grammar.” That’s how writing seems to me too. It takes faith to set pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and write from the heart. It takes faith to rework and refine those words and set them free in the world, not knowing how they will be received, yet praying they will find readers and speak life and hope to them.

As I point out on my website, “acts of faith are part of being human, even if you don’t think of yourself as religious, even if faith seems like a foreign country to you. We all take leaps that we can’t explain, we all sense the unseen beyond what we can see.”

In this way, I understand faith to be relevant in all areas of my life. Without faith, I wouldn’t be able to write and speak and serve the church as I do today. Without faith, I couldn’t have taken my husband to his radiation treatments day after day after day for a whole month. Without faith, I would have lost heart in this pandemic with all of its illness, isolation, stress, and death.

Yes, I know that many question the relevancy of faith because the church has failed again and again, and church leaders have failed again and again. I confess and lament over those failures. I grieve the injustice and pain that churches and church leaders have inflicted. I grieve my own complicity and inability to “act justly…love mercy…walk humbly” with God as fully as the prophet urges (Micah 6:8).

But instead of derailing my faith, these failures remind me not to place my faith in human beings or in human institutions or even in myself. Instead, I need to place my faith in God who is faithful and who never fails. Like the psalmist may I declare in faith: “My salvation and my honor depend on God; he is my mighty rock, my refuge” (Psalm 62:7). That’s when faith becomes truly relevant, when it rests in the One who is faithful.

April Yamasaki is an ordained minister with twenty-five years of pastoral ministry experience, and the author of Four Gifts: Seeking Self-care for Heart, Soul, Mind, and Strength; Sacred Pauses: Spiritual Practices for Personal Renewal; and other books on Christian living. She currently serves as resident author with Valley CrossWay Church in Abbotsford, British Columbia, and often speaks in churches and other settings. For more information, see AprilYamasaki.com and WhenYouWorkfortheChurch.com.