Tell Us Your Story: Enter the #MyFaithHeroine Contest!

My mom hasn’t dedicated her life to missionary work like Amy Carmichael.

She’s never wrestled her way through social or gender barriers like Catherine Booth or Antoinette Brown Blackwell.

She’s not a mystic or a visionary like Teresa of Avila, nor a political leader like Fannie Lou Hamer.

She didn’t found a college like Mary Lyon or Mary McLeod Bethune.

She didn’t save thousands of lives as a nurse like Florence Nightingale or a doctor like Ida Scudder.

She never moved to India or Africa or Argentina; in fact, she’s lived all her life within the same ten-mile radius.

My mom’s name won’t go down in history. She won’t be remembered for any one “great thing.” Hers was, and is, a quiet faith, lived out in small, humble, almost unnoticeable acts of love and service.

And yet, my mom is my faith heroine – and the person to whom I dedicated 50 Women Every Christian Should Know. Because her faith and those hundreds of small, humble acts of love and service she’s performed day after day, decade after decade? They haven’t gone unnoticed by me.

I wrote in my memoir,  Spiritual Misfit,that my mom has always had a childlike faith, what’s sometimes called a “blind faith” — a pure, unwavering belief in the existence of God.

I sometimes joke that I must have been painting my toenails the day the Holy Spirit dished out faith, because I seemed to have missed the boat on that fruit of the Spirit.

But not my mom. She has been generously blessed with the fruit of faith, among her many other gifts.

Even though I can’t always relate to that kind of steadfast faith, I have admired my mom’s quiet commitment to God for a long, long time. Though I didn’t share it, and at times questioned the possibility of its existence (at least for myself), my mom’s deep, unwavering faith somehow steadied me along my own spiritually fraught journey.

My mom’s belief in God and in his ever-present goodness offered me both stability and hope — hope that I might someday believe in God too.

I’m willing to bet that you have a faith heroine in your life – someone who has influenced your faith journey, offered you spiritual wisdom or guidance, helped you to grow closer to God or inspired your faith in some way.

We want to hear your story! Tell us about your personal faith heroine. She can be a person from the past or present; a famous figure or someone with whom you have a personal relationship (like the story I wrote about my mom, above); a person still living or someone long-deceased. Tell us how she influenced you; how she helped shape your faith life; the kind of role model she was or is.