The Need to Believe

Hope is ever present but we don’t always feel hopeful. What we expect doesn’t always come about. Or we feel inexplicably empty. Somehow disappointment and frustration, among the myriad of negative disparate emotions, plagues certain days.

But because hope is ever present, yet sometimes out of vision or reach, we can still reconcile it. Times like these we should search high and low for this missing hope. But many times we don’t have the energy.

We need to become reminded, by some means, of this hope that should indwell us. We do this by going forward of our acknowledged hopelessness any way we can, by way of faith.

The Practical Way Of Faith

Faith is never more important than during times of mental, emotional or spiritual debt. Such a truth that proffers hope is the miracle of the resilient life anyone can have. But much of the time having the faith that would reconcile our hope requires more strength than we have.

Faith is more of a conscious competency than we would otherwise imagine. If we can be aware of our lack, just the same as we’re aware of our need of hope, faith might simply be the extension of a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other sense of decisiveness. It’s not hard to do what needs to be done if we break it down into its components.

The practical way of faith is not rocket science, but it does require the reverence to obey. And it’s hard to obey, for faith, when our hope has been throttled. But faith surely knows, we’ve travelled these tumultuous steps before.

Honouring Our Previous Steps Of Faith

Most of us that struggle for faith to sponsor our hope perhaps never reflect on the many steps of faith that have brought us this far in life. Added to these steps is the faithfulness of God; the grace by which even the breath we breathe we ought to be thankful for.

By going forward in faith we honour the times we were steadfast enough for endure to each moment up until now. Again, we don’t often credit ourselves for such faith. But there it is in plain view. We have cooperated with God, to some extent, to get where we’ve got.

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Hope is ever present but we don’t always feel hopeful. To redeem hope, faith is something we need to be consciously mindful of; to act in faith. One foot in front of the other in obedience—God, then, is giving us reason to believe in ourselves.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.