faith

It was a little tough believing in spring this year.  It’s been way below normal for a month and an half and it snowed on 17^th April, long past the usual end of snow season here.

It can be even tougher to keep the faith when it comes to our personal lives.  Things go awry in ways or areas we’ve never had to deal with before and we don’t have a sense of natural progression to help us expect better days.

In reality, we’re always keeping the faith.

If we continually expect the worst, our faith is in that end of the spectrum.  If we always hope for the best, that’s where our faith is placed.  Most of us move around on the spectrum, depending on the issues and our experience in that area.

Can we choose where we place our faith?

Yes, although it sometimes takes some work.   That’s where understanding the basis for our faith helps.

Start with recognizing whether you’re an externalizer or an internalizer.  Is your faith in something outside yourself or do you have faith in your own abilities?

Externalizers believe in “the system” or in a higher power or in other people (yay, for family and friends).  Some externalizers believe that money will solve everything.

Internalizers look to their own abilities and strengths as the stuff they most rely on.

Again, most of us are a combination.

Once you understand where you’re placing your faith, you can ask yourself whether you’re limiting your toolbox (yes, Virginia, you need more than a hammer).   That’s related to doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.

And, if you are, you can then decide where you can expand your faith options.  Are there people who would love to come through for you?  Are you leaving a part of yourself out of the solutions to life issues?  Have you been deluding yourself about what money or the system can do for you?

Once you understand what’s going on with your faith, you can make choices to keep the broader positive faith.

Are you an optimist or a pessimist?  Is the glass half empty or half full?

Half full focuses on what’s there to work with.  Half empty focuses on the depletion of resources.  Maybe there’s even worry about whether what’s left will be enough.

Maybe that’s a total lack of faith.  More likely, it’s faith in not having enough.  When the glass looks half empty, the belief is that not enough is the dominant force.

But what is faith anyway?  It’s trust, isn’t it?  And if we’ve got trust problems, we’ve got faith problems.  Sometime, somewhere, we lived a story where the guys in the white hats didn’t win the shoot out.

So what now?

You know the story about the boy and his grandfather and the wolves?  The one where Grandfather tells his grandson that we all have two wolves inside us: one that wants to devour us and one that wants to help us live.   Can you hear Grandson’s breathless question, “but which one will win?”  And Grandfather’s calm answer, “the one you feed.”

We all have the capacity for faith in lack and faith in abundance, faith in success and faith in failure.  You may have to search a bit for the wolf you haven’t been feeding.  S/he’s still around:  you may have starved it into a corner, but you can’t kill it off.

So next time you’re feeding the worry wolf, the no-can-do wolf, remind yourself that your trust is misplaced.  Throw a few crumbs to the wolf who supports your hopes and dreams.

What could you accomplish if you only fed your faith in the positive?