Have you ever seen those youtube videos of baby giraffes just minutes after they are born? They are both cute and insanely hilarious. The legs and joints of the baby giraffe struggling to support the weight of their relatively small bodies is one of the funniest things on the internet. Knees are shaking, legs wobbling, and try after try they lift off the ground and immediately face plant into African Savanna turf. Eventually, however, they start to get the hang of it. Their muscles begin to build, and they begin to run, play, and learn from their mother what it means to be a giraffe. Tall, strong, and majestic. Quick enough to dodge attacks by predators, and strong enough to fight off the ones who catch them. But they had a beginning, a beginning where they were small, weak, and funny. They were, quite literally, sitting prey.
The journey of faith is very similar to that of a baby giraffe. The Gospel of Mark paints a great picture of the wobbling knees, shaky legs, and multiple face plants of followers of Christ. In chapter 4, Jesus is teaching his followers about faith and accepting faith and allowing that faith to grow without the hindrance of worry, doubt, and fear. After he was done, they asked him what he meant, and he responds with one of the greatest comebacks of all time. He says to his disciples, "Don't you understand this parable? How then will you understand ANY parable?" He is essentially saying to his wobbly-kneed disciples, "This is basic stuff here...and you STILL don't understand."
Luckily, the Disciples didn't stay wobbly for too long. The more time they spent with Christ, the more they understood, the more they grew strong. Eventually, after years of learning and growing, they were strong enough to run, and it was at this moment that Christ was sent to the cross to die and after His resurrection, Christ tells his now strengthened disciples to go out and to allow their strong faith to produce more wobbly-kneed disciples.
Regardless of where we are in our faith, we all have moments of wobbly knees, we struggle to lift our weight, but like Christ's disciples, we grow strong and are able to go into the world and make more wobbly-kneed disciples.