What’s the deal with faith? Why are we surrounded by the seen, the felt, the testable and the touchable, and yet are required to believe in things that are not seen in order to make our dreams realized? In the Abrahamic religious traditions, we’re told that we must have faith. Jesus spoke again and again, after he healed a paraplegic or a blind man, that it was the faith of the afflicted ones which had healed them. We’re encouraged to believe what’s unseen, rather than relying on our senses and investing faith in what’s physically detectable. Why all this insistence on faith?
Because our minds are constantly taking the unseen, the unrealized potential of the universe, and making it substantial. Our minds are little more than dream machines. We take nothing but ideas and turn them into something real. We do this with blueprints for houses, screenplays for movies, designs for building cars or even the next macromolecule that will heal that until-today incurable disease. Everything worthwhile starts out as an idea. When we work from that idea to make it reality, we’re really just acting on faith.
Take this reasoning one step further. What if our ideas also created what we see around us? What if faith manifested itself in all sorts of things to which we thought it was unrelated? What if we made mountains out of mind, and crafted our bodies out of dreams? Then the need for faith becomes even more pressing, since everything we end up sniffing with our noses or seeing through our eyes comes straight out of our faith in its reality. Then the only way we can change what we see is by thinking different thoughts, by imagining different dreams. We need to visualize anything before it becomes real. Maybe what Jesus meant was not that God creates what we see, not that God cures diseases through miracles, but that the creative, manifesting power over our own thought was what was indeed miraculous. And that’s how faith cures. And that’s why faith is so essential.
It’s as if our minds were muscles which need to be worked out just like our abs need to be if we want to build muscle. In order to remain strong, resilient and productive, our minds need to work out through exercises of faith. By developing this capacity for belief, instead of the negativity of unbelief, we create a positive world. We need to entertain faith, which is simply the belief in the possibility of the positive, in order to create a positive world. We need to envision. And that’s the reason behind the injunction to have faith. It’s not the change God’s mind, but to change our own minds.
It’s so we can use the powers of our minds to heal the sick-seeming world, which we create with a kind of faith in the negative. It’s to have faith in health rather than to invest in the reality of illness. It’s to believe in love rather than the power of fear. Only we can entertain these positive thoughts of faith. God can’t do it for us anymore than God can create a dream that seems to made of poverty and pain, of limitation and injustice.
We’re called to have faith in faith even more than we’re enjoined to have faith in God Itself. For it’s the power of our minds that creates all we see. When we sign on to this belief, we join our wills with God’s purpose for us. God created us powerful and filled with good when He created our minds. But God can’t use our minds for us. If God did that, our minds would never be as effective or as powerful as they’re meant to be. So, when God calls on us to have faith, God is calling on us to use the creative powers with which we’re most intimately and ultimately endowed.
© 2022 by Michael C. Just
Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.
You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23
Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002
Four of his short stories have recently been published online:
Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)
The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW
I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October
Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within