During my senior year of college, I took a creative writing class. One of our assignments was to write a sonnet—a poem with a very rigid meter and rhyme scheme. Though I love poetry, I had never written a sonnet, and I was finding the assignment very challenging. I had pushed it off and pushed it off until it was the night before the sonnet was due—and still I had nothing. My brain felt stuck, and I didn’t know what to do.

Faith means believing what God says, no matter how unlikely or crazy it seems.

It means believing in the virgin birth. In people raised back to life. In dry bones turning into armies and stones gushing water. A donkey speaking. A river standing up into two writhing walls of water while a nation walks through. Water molecules transforming into the best wine anyone at the party had tasted. Bind eyes regaining sight and tax money materializing in the mouth of a fish.

The Bible is full of fantastical stories. Stories too good to be true—but that are true anyway. Many of us have grown up on these fantastical stories, and we accept them as truth. Distant, shouting down the hallways of the past, truth. A God-can-do-anything kind of truth. But not today. Not in this ordinary life. Not for me.