One of the things which Jesus seems to look for before performing a miracle in someone’s life is faith. The father of the boy encountered in Mark chapter 9 was a case in question. Ever since he was a small child, the boy had been subject to violent convulsions. The problem was so dangerous that the boy often ended up falling into fire and getting burnt or water and nearly drowning. The father had no doubt tried everything he knew to get the boy fixed, but the problem remained.
The father’s pessimistic outlook must have only been reinforced by the failure of Jesus’s disciples to fix the problem. The father must have developed over the years an ingrained mindset which said that the problem was unfixable. So he was faced with a difficult dilemma when Jesus told him that anything is possible for a person who believes. He really wanted his boy to be healed, but everything which he had experienced in life so far was causing him to doubt. So he gave a somewhat unconvincing response: “I do believe. Please help me not to doubt.”
The response hardly sounds like an unbending statement of unshakeable belief. It contains an element of believing that Jesus really could do what he said he could, but it also contains a lot of fear that it might not be true, and fear that this would be another failure, and fear that this experiment would leave things worse than they were already. Perhaps there was also an element of good old fashioned scepticism about anything claiming to be miraculous. Notwithstanding the relatively low level of actual faith that the man showed, it was enough for Jesus, and he proceeded to heal the boy. The man’s level of faith was actually much more typical than that of people who seem to have not a doubt in the world. In fact, it could be argued that the only people in the New Testament who showed no doubt in their beliefs were the Pharisees and religious lawyers, and they were the ones who were so wrong in what they believed that they ended up crucifying Jesus.