There are three words that keep running through my mind… The first is “faith”, the second is “trust” and the last is “no guarantees… Okay that was two words! All religions teach us to have faith… faith in God, Jesus, Allah, Buddha and so on. We even make the effort to have faith in one another although usually and quite often faith in others is quickly understood as the “wild card”.
I have struggled with these three words continually in my life and always have found myself coming to a place where I have felt that they have failed me at a time when I thought for sure that they would pull me through. I am not saying that faith or trust have never carried me through some tough times in my life because that would be so far from the truth. I am expressing the times in my life when I absolutely thought that I was holding onto these ideas and thought I was “safe” and then found myself completely devastated.
What I have to come to understand, at least up to this point in my journey is that there are “no guarantees”… Wouldn’t it be terrific when something does not work out in our life for us we could take it back to God and say this is not working I would like my money back or an exchange please”. But, unfortunately that is not how life works.
One can be the master champion of faith and trust but this does not relieve anyone from having to endure trouble, heartache, pain and loss. In fact, when you study those who had great faith they endured more suffering than I would care to sign up for.
So what is the answer to this dilemma of having faith and trust but with no guarantees? What is the purpose of faith or trust if they do not at least have some reliability in this life that will help us when enduring trouble? Is it just the crutch that we use to get through a rough spot until it passes? Is just having a belief in a power (God) that is greater than us who sees everything and we believe that he is in control? What benefits do we derive from having such Nobel qualities?
I have known many mothers who had great faith in God that have lost children to sickness and accidents. Did their faith and trust not protect them from such terrible devastating circumstances? In the end we have to conclude that faith and trust do not guarantee us that we are going to escape the “bad” in this life.
I have faith and trust in God, the Universe and the Power of Creation… I have to come to realize that I must make choices that can affect my destiny in different ways bringing different results. My part in this drama of life is to seek conscious contact with a power greater than myself and to realize that I have been given gifts and talents that are to be used to create synergistic energy in this world that will facilitate the change that it was destined to bring about. My faith must be utilized and transformed into the idea that it is there not to just believe in a Person, or an Energy, but it is there to perform an action for the greater good . Faith without works is dead… Trust without commitment is useless…. The axiom is to come to the understanding and the process of taking those past experiences that made us question faith and trust and look at them through the microscope of self introspection.
No guarantee! Would you believe in God or a Power, Energy greater than yourself if you could not gain anything at all? Why do we say we “love” God? Have we really asked ourselves the “raw” faith and trust questions that need to be asked? Most of us believe in God because we don’t want to go to hell (fear)… to love someone because you are afraid of punishment… sounds like an abusive marriage. Some believe in a sacrifice of love that paid for their sins but, although this is a Nobel sacrifice the bottom line is that the sacrifice was made in order that we do not go to hell. Why do you believe in eternity? Why do you believe that there is a spiritual realm? Does believing in these ideas bring a valued benefit to your life?
We must come to the place where we build the bridge between the idea of faith and trust over the waters of understanding to the other side where we actually gain the benefits of why we have faith and trust and the purpose they are suppose to carry out in our lives. They are not to be worn as medals of accomplishment on our sashes of spirituality.
Can we take everything that we believe in and lay it out on the table and examine it thoroughly? After examination is it possible that if there was something (anything) that you realize could be questionable that you would put it aside and come to the conclusion that this must be re-evaluated. Re-evaluating my understanding of what I thought was true does not change the value of what is Truth. All it means is that I must start on journey, a spiritual quest of discovery to gain a new understanding without walls or limitations. I think it is extremely hard for us to really “Let go and let God”… in that phrase, I mean that we have been trained and indoctrinated to the point of a fearful existence. We actually believe that God, the Universe, or GOMU ( God Of My Understanding) would be slighted and actually get bent out of shape or worse yet, we would drift away from Him or It ( whichever the case maybe be) and we would be lost in the black hole of spiritual darkness only to plummet into the abyss of hell. I pose this question….

Seriously?????? Really???
How primitive we are in our faith and trust of an all knowing, all powerful and Infinite Love that we actually believe that is what would or could happen to us for seeking the truth. Fear! This is the enemy that paralyzes us from moving out and expanding our spiritual connection to Truth. FEAR! Is the stumbling “mountain” not a small stumbling block that tells us we had better not change our ideas and beliefs because then we will be heretics? If I burned the Bible would that kill Jesus or Jehovah? The Bible is a book… not a religion. It is a guide… the “Word” that was in the beginning (Genesis 1:1) is not the word on a piece of paper that will disintegrate in time. There are so many of these false systems of belief that we hold onto for dear life that have kept us from moving forward.
I think it can summed up in these words, “ The joy is in the journey and if we are not on a journey of discovery then we are stagnate in a land of frustration and boredom” Having faith can be equated to being an inventor or a scientist of spirituality… there are always new discoveries that are not really “ new” just new to us because we were willing to look for them that can bring greater clarity and knowledge to our questions and understanding of what we now ask “Why?” which happens to be the most common question.
The first question is… “Are you willing to let go?”