Faith Turns Dung Into Diamonds

“Faith is the willingness to enter into the experience of the unknown with the full acceptance that whatever becomes known will be perfect for you and your journey of life.”

Howard Falco, I AM

I find that many people define faith as believing in a God who will do for them exactly what they want and demand. We pray that a job interview will go really well and that we’ll get the job. We have faith that God will see to it that all goes exactly the way we want. Then it doesn’t. Suddenly our faith dissolves into disappointment and anger, and we may find ourselves turning our backs on prayer and God for letting us down.

If this experience sounds familiar to you in any way about anything you’ve ever prayed for and failed to receive, then you need a new definition of faith. Faith is not about getting what I want. Faith is about believing that God will always do what’s best or perfect for me and my life’s journey. Howard Falco’s definition of faith hits the nail on the head.

We are called to have faith in situations that present us with experiences of the unknown. These are experiences that we are totally powerless over in terms of controlling the final outcome, like waiting on the results of a biopsy if we’ve found a lump in our breast or testicles; or sitting in a hospital waiting room while a loved one is undergoing open-heart surgery; or counting the days down before job cuts are posted at work; or wondering if we are ever going to meet someone that we can share our deepest selves with for the rest of our lives.

In most of these types of important life-changing situations, we enter into them with serious expectations and demands. We want what we want and we want it now—no ifs, ands or buts. It HAS to work out the way we want. And when it doesn’t, reality hits us like a cow pie in the face. This wouldn’t happen to us if we would change our ways of thinking. First off, we cannot make demands on life and expect that we will always get our way. To do so is to believe that we have all of the right answers ourselves. We don’t. We do not have all of the right answers for our own lives, much less someone else’s. And to do so is to leave God out of the equation.

If we believe in a God or Higher Power, then we need to relinquish the position of Supreme Being to that God or Higher Power by getting off of His/Her throne. Only our Higher Power can know what is best or perfect for us or someone we love. When we truly have faith in that Higher Power, we follow the flow of life, living it to the fullest, being the best we can be, doing our best and then accepting life on life’s terms as it unfolds before us under the plan of our Higher Power—a plan that is perfectly created for us.

In other words, when we enter that experience of unknowing in the form of waiting to find out whether or not we have been selected for a new job or promotion, we are willing to fully accept the outcome as being perfect for us and our life’s journey. If we get the new job, it’s because it is a necessary step we need to take along our life’s path. If we don’t get the new job, then it wasn’t right for us and we then can have faith that the right or perfect position for us is around the bend.

Faith is believing that everything we experience in life happens for us and not to us. We aren’t the victims of life. We are the sojourners in an ever-changing world that offers us cow pies one day and diamonds the next. Instead of being victims of those cow pies we can dig around and find the diamonds. We just need to have the faith that everything happens for our benefit. So start searching for those diamonds!