A Force to Move Us Forward Day by Day: Faith

Until faith becomes personal, it’s a word that’s easy to use. Faith involves action, but it’s damned hard to take even simple actions when we don’t know what’s ahead.
Have you ever walked through woods at night? I’m not talking about being scared, but when you are trying to make your way back through the dark in an unfamiliar place, it takes faith to stay true on a particular heading. We just want to see where we are going, every step of the way. It’s natural.
In the Bible, 2 Corinthians 5:7 reads, “We walk by faith, not by sight.” That concept of walking when we can’t see works well, particularly because it implies we have to move, walk. It’s easy to find a thousand references to faith in the Bible, but I’m only using one more to make my point. James 2:17: “…faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action is dead.” If you’re on that dark path in the woods, it doesn’t do ANY good to sit down and believe in your mind that you will reach your destination. Guess what? When you open your eyes, you will still be sitting in the dark, no closer to your goal. Faith requires action.
Faith also drives action, and therein lies great value. Faith focuses on the end game. And for those who know Self and walk in the fellowship of the Heart, that end game is knowing and living life Purpose as expressed in our vision and mission. Action, execution, doing the work to get to the goal, a goal to which we do not know every step of the way, is powered by faith. A vision, no matter how well visualized, will not occur without action driven by faith.
Faith, though, needs an object, and that object is focus on life Purpose, an expression of Self. Too easy or too hard, we can waver. Faith refuses to acknowledge either extreme because if it did, we would have no way to move forward when challenges arise.
In regards to those, let me make something clear. Those who speak lightly of faith don’t know the grittiness of it, the need for it in the daily grind of moving forward. Faith is not an inert spiritual quality, some ethereal notion or philosophy. When challenges do arise, faith allows us to recognize the true source and enables us to press on.
However, if we are allowing Ego to be our operating system, we may attribute challenges to faith or even what we perceive as failures to be the fault of others. Or we may conclude that fate or God or some power is against us and telling us to go another route. That route will never be discovered by allowing ego to act as our default operating system.
By the way, challenges to faith do not originate from some outside agency, be it God, Satan, other humans or any event or circumstances. The source of the challenge is always our perceptions of Self if we have come to self-awareness and walk in the fellowship of the heart. Anything that I perceive as causing me delay or interference or I consider as an alternative path to living my Purpose is a challenge to faith. That’s when it gets real and I need to get going.
Sometimes, going is not a turbo-charged, frenzied effort of productivity, but a simple matter of moving ahead at least an inch. A popular encouragement from my youth was to tell someone to keep on keeping on (KOKO). Sometimes, keeping on is barely getting by, but progress, always progress. Therefore, when I face challenges, I know I have created them as consequences of the drive to live Discovery. When I create a challenge because something needs to change in my life in order to work my mission, faith tells me to move my ass.
How about you? Keep on keeping on!