Faith That Trusts God Beyond Logic and Reason
Some steps of faith will never make sense on paper. That does not mean they are wrong.
Joel Adeyemi was the kind of man who needed things to add up.
He was an accountant by training and a pragmatist by temperament. He trusted numbers. He trusted data. He trusted decisions that could be traced back through a clean chain of evidence to a logical conclusion. He was not a cold person; he was warm and funny and deeply loved by the people in his life. But when it came to making moves, Joel needed the math to work before his feet would follow.
Which made what God asked him to do at forty-one years old almost comically inconvenient.
He and his wife Ngozi had built a comfortable life in Toronto. Good jobs, a home they had renovated themselves over five years, two kids settled in schools they loved, a church community they were rooted in. Joel had recently been shortlisted for a senior partner position at his firm. Everything was, by any reasonable measurement, going well.
And then, over the course of about six weeks, through a series of conversations and prayer times and a missions conference he had only attended because Ngozi wanted to go, something began to shift in him. A pull toward East Africa. Toward a development finance initiative that needed someone with exactly his skill set. Toward a life that looked nothing like the one he had so carefully built.
He did the math. Repeatedly. From every angle he could think of.
It did not add up. Not even close.
The salary was a fraction of what he earned. The position offered no partnership track, no pension contributions, no career progression in any conventional sense. The kids would need new schools. The house would need to be sold or rented. Ngozi's own career would require a significant pause. Every spreadsheet he built came back with the same answer: this is not the smart move.
And yet.
Abraham packed up everything he owned and left for a place he had never been, following a voice and a promise and absolutely nothing else.
Genesis 12 does not record Abraham asking for a detailed itinerary. It does not show him requesting a five-year projection or a risk assessment. God said go, and Abraham went. He was seventy-five years old. He took his wife, his nephew, and everything he had accumulated, and he walked away from the familiar toward the unknown because God said so.
No GPS. No guarantee of what the destination would look like. No logical framework that could have justified the decision to anyone watching from the outside.
Just trust. Enormous, unreasonable, illogical, world-changing trust.
The writer of Hebrews, looking back on that moment centuries later, described it this way: Abraham obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. That phrase deserves to sit for a moment. He did not know where he was going. And he went anyway. That is not recklessness. That is faith operating at full capacity, in a register that logic simply cannot reach.
Caroline Marsh had been a pediatric occupational therapist for sixteen years when she felt called to leave her practice and start a nonprofit serving children with disabilities in rural communities that had no access to therapeutic services.
The idea had been growing in her for almost three years. She had pushed it aside, talked herself out of it, replaced it with smaller, more manageable versions of the same impulse. She would volunteer more. She would consult pro bono on weekends. She would donate to organizations already doing the work.
But the pull did not ease. It grew. And it grew most loudly during her prayer time, which was inconvenient because that was supposed to be the quiet part of her day.
Her financial advisor, a kind and careful man, sat across from her at his desk and walked her through the numbers with genuine concern. She had a mortgage. She had student loans from graduate school that were almost, but not entirely, paid off. She had a daughter in her second year of college. Starting a nonprofit from scratch with no guaranteed funding was, in his professional opinion, a significant risk.
"I know," Caroline said. "I know all of that."
"And you're still considering it?"
She looked at him for a moment. "I'm not really considering it anymore," she said. "I think I've already decided. I just came here to see if the numbers would talk me out of it."
He leaned back in his chair. He had known Caroline for years. "Did they?" he asked.
"No," she said quietly. "They didn't."
She launched the nonprofit fourteen months later, after a careful transition period and a lot of prayer and more than a few sleepless nights. The funding came in ways she could not have predicted or planned for. A grant she applied to on a friend's encouragement. A donor who heard her speak at a community event and wrote a check that covered her first year of operations. A partnership with a university program that provided student therapists in exchange for field placement supervision.
None of it had been on her spreadsheet. All of it was real.
Seven years later, her organization serves children across four rural counties. She will tell anyone who asks that she cannot explain how it works on paper. She has stopped trying. She just keeps showing up and watching God fill in the gaps she cannot fill herself.
This is not an argument against wisdom or planning or careful thinking. God gave human beings minds for a reason, and using them well is part of good stewardship. The problem is not logic. The problem is when logic becomes the ceiling of what a person will allow God to do in their life.
Because God's math is different from ours.
He feeds thousands with five loaves and two fish. He brings water from a rock. He makes the walls of Jericho fall through seven days of walking and a shout. He takes a shepherd boy with a sling and a handful of stones and brings down a giant that an entire army was afraid to face. None of these things would have survived a risk assessment. All of them happened.
The pattern is consistent enough to be worth paying attention to. When God is in something, the resources required have a way of appearing. Not always in advance. Not always on the schedule that would have made planning easier. But they appear. And the person who moved in faith finds, on the other side, a testimony they could not have written from a position of comfortable certainty.
Back to Joel.
He and Ngozi talked for months. They prayed together, sometimes with tears and sometimes with laughter at the absurdity of what they were considering. They sought counsel from people they respected. They looked at the numbers from every direction.
And then, on a Tuesday evening in November, sitting at the kitchen table with the kids asleep and the house quiet, Ngozi looked at her husband and said: "I think we both already know. I think we're just scared."
Joel looked at his spreadsheet one more time. Then he closed the laptop.
"Yeah," he said. "I think you're right."
They moved to Nairobi eleven months later. The house sold quickly. The kids, who had been the source of most of Joel's worry, adapted with a resilience that humbled him. Ngozi found consulting work that turned out to be more fulfilling than her previous role. And Joel stepped into a position that used every skill he had built over twenty years in ways that felt, for the first time in his career, like the reason he had developed those skills in the first place.
He still does the math. He is still an accountant; that did not change. But he holds his spreadsheets differently now. He knows they can only show him part of the picture. The rest belongs to a God whose calculations include variables that no human formula can account for.
He would not trade the leap for anything. Not even the comfortable life he left behind.
Some decisions will never make sense on paper. Some callings will not survive a cost-benefit analysis. Some steps will look, from the outside, like they belong to a person who has lost their mind, and the people who love you most may quietly wonder if you need to sit down and think this through one more time.
But there is a knowing that lives deeper than logic. A peace that, as Paul described it, surpasses understanding. Not a peace that ignores the facts, but a peace that holds steady in spite of them. A peace that says: I have checked the numbers and they do not add up, and I am going anyway, because the One who called me to go has never once run short of what was needed.
That is not foolishness. That is faith at full stretch.
And the view from the other side of that kind of obedience is one that no spreadsheet could have ever shown you.
"Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see." Hebrews 11:1
RLF Faith Space is a devotional blog for everyday believers walking out their faith in real life.
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