Faith – noun – complete trust or confidence in someone or something.
In our work-ethic-centric, do-it-yourself, self-sufficient American culture, we tend to place a lot of value on working hard at things and seeing results. If you’re down on your luck, then pull yourself up by your bootstraps, try hard, and you’ll succeed. We live in the land of opportunity after all.
And really, there is much to be said about hard work and strategic planning. The reason I do KRAs is because I want to be intentional about life – to approach it with a strong work ethic.
But all of this must be taken with a grain of salt. Because the reality is that no matter how hard we try at things, and no matter how much we plan, there are always going to be things that are out of our hands – things that we simply have no control over no matter what we do.
And so I am thankful that there is this notion of faith – having “complete trust or confidence” in God – remembering that no matter how many situations we come up against that are out of our hands, they are not out of God’s hands, and we can have complete trust and confidence in Him to work the situations out to His desired outcomes. He’s got a stronger work ethic than we ever will, and he’s got a nice dose of omnipotence too, so he’s more than capable to deal with the things that we cannot.
My prayer is that I could live my life always handing over the wheel to He who is more than able – planning and strategizing, but always under the umbrella of God’s ultimate control, and always freely trusting Him to intervene whenever He wants – trusting Him even more than I trust myself.
I was just reflecting and journaling on the notion of faith this afternoon, and right after I had the revelation of what faith was and how it applied to me in my life right now, I got a phone call about a situation that had been completely out of my control – getting permission to use a song in a movie I’m making. I had been waiting for weeks on getting the permission, and eventually just had to turn to faith and prayer that the permission would come through, because there was nothing more I could do in my own power to make it happen. And it is so fitting that God came through and brought the permission right as I was coming to this realization. And I’m not even exaggerating. The phone literally rang within seconds of me writing out my revelation about faith.
In any case, faith has been a big theme of these past couple weeks, because there have been a number of situations that are completely out of my hands. I am a strategic planner, but with some of these situations, it has just come to a point where there is absolutely nothing I can do in my own power to make things happen. And so I just need to have faith. It’s not always easy, and I may well get impatient, but I must never loose heart.
I can have complete trust in God, because God is completely trustworthy.
