I have lived and learned.
I have had to shed possessions and money in the same way that the economy is now shedding jobs.
I have argued with the repo man(he won, I lost), avoided creditor phone calls (they found other ways to reach me), had the gas, electricity and cable shut off all at the same time.
I stood in line at the food bank and I've been rejected for Food Stamps.
And through it all, my Faith increased.
I came to know that I had lived a life of excess and needed to learn some things before I could live the life I truly deserved to live.
I will focus on 4 things you need to keep in mind.
In the future, I will cover some tools that you can use to strengthen your belief system and keep the faith, even though you may be losing everything.
Figure out not WHO God is, or WHAT God is, but WHERE God is.
When I was a child growing up in Brooklyn and attending the Church of the Evangel on Hawthorne & Bedford, I asked our pastor, Reverend Bill Nye , where God was.
Reverend Nye was one of those cool pseudo-hippie pastors with a singing voice that brought many a parishioner to tears on more than one occasion; I tell you this to say that he was a preacher you could touch, he had a huge station wagon that he used to take us kids to the park, to his Dad's parish in Greenwich, CT, to his parents beach house in Maine - anyway darned good guy, totally available to every child and adult in his parish, and probably the main reason I have not found a church home since High School.
Well, back in the '70s, Reverend Nye told me that God is inside of me, that I didn't have to find God, because God was always with me.
I did not totally understand it back then.
"There is no place where we begin and God leaves off.
We can find God only within ourselves.
" In Living the Science of Mind author Ernest Holmes explains it further by saying that God breathes life into you leaving an imprint - kind of like your Mom's eyebrows and your Dad's nose.
So keeping the faith requires recognition of the fact that you are one with a spirit designed for creation and not destruction.
Call it God, call it the Universe, call it Infinite Intelligence, call it what you will, just recognize the connection to it that already exists within you.
"Go thy way and as thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee," or as Henry Ford paraphrased, "if you think you can or you think you can't you're probably right".
Infinite Intelligence wants only the best for you.
God is all about good and creation, as opposed to destruction, and health and wealth, as opposed to sickness and lack.
But here's the thing though, because you have the power to create through your thoughts, you can actually create a nightmare life for yourself as well.
I'll give you an example, in the months before I was let go from one of my jobs, I sat around thinking all the time, "What am I going to do when they let me go?", so of course they let me go! My fear created that situation, and I pretty much focused on the fear of losing my job so much, that it couldn't help but happen.
That's the enormity of the power that you have to change your circumstances, but this power acts based on your thoughts and it doesn't know which are bad and which are good, so it just acts on what you are focused on.
Therefore; you need to decide what you really want and think about that! Your fear short circuits your good, and when you get out of your own way, you flip the switch that allows good to flow and complete it's circuit.
To have and keep faith you must retain the imagination and belief of a child I have a 6 year old grandson, and the first question he asks when he sees us bringing grocery or shopping bags into the house is, "Grandpa, what did you get me?".
He asks this knowing that Grandpa has placed a treat or a toy in one of those bags for him, probably something he mentioned in passing within the week just past.
I cannot begin to tell you the changes that have manifested in my life, (and that can be manifested in yours), through that same simple belief in my own ability to create the life I want simply by believing that if I ask, it shall eventually be given to me.
To wrap it all up, the 4 things you must know are :
- You are one with the Spirit and the Power which created all.
- To access and use this power of creation you simply have to recognize it in yourself
- Fear or a weak belief system is the opposite of faith and is what sends you in the wrong direction, creating lack instead of wealth and sickness instead of health
- To have and keep faith you must retain the imagination and belief of a child.
To access the creative power ask for what you want/need believing that you will receive it.