When Self-Belief Joins God-Belief

“Believe it is possible to solve your problems. Tremendous things happen to the believer. So believe the answer will come. It will.”

~Norman Vincent Peale

There is power in the power of suggestion. People see great things occur in their lives when their belief, unstinting, compels them ever forward beyond vision of despair. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It works for us, never against.

Much of the time, keeping faith with our dreams is keeping faith with what God has instilled within us to do. Sometimes these dreams are entirely realistic, and sometimes they appear unrealistic. Yet only we can believe.

And then they are the problems. Problems beset us with fear and loathing. We may begin to resent the fact that we even have this problem—“why me?”—and we begin to fixate on the problem rather than on the solution.

But the solution is also part of our problem. We fixate on that, too.

Rearranging Our Focus

The idea of faith is that we don’t submit to fear to the point of being immobilised.

Instead of being too problem-focused or too solution-focused, we have an opportunity to deploy our focus at a level that is ambient with our hope. In other words, faith gently allows the hope to reside within. The hope of a resolution to our problem sits, more or less, dormantly. In this way we are not panicking. There is an undercurrent of belief that our problem can, and will, be solved. It’s that we are willing whenever we become able. We are ready to do what we need to do.

Faith in God is like this. It is power to believe that our problems are winnable. It is the power of belief that, through God, we can get knowledge of, own, and enact, our solutions.

So our focus needs to shift from dwelling anxiously upon the problem or the solution to the point of distraction, and onto a broad underpinning belief that the answer will come, and when it does we can and will affect it.

Believing The Answer Will Come, Eventually

In all reality our solutions have always come. Either the problem changed and catered for our unfolding circumstances, or we came to be aware of how to fix it and did.

A tremendous amount of peace and, therefore, power is achieved when we have the faith to simply allow our fears to be. Believing the answer will come means we don’t have to fix the problem this very moment. That takes a lot of pressure off.

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Having a hope that tomorrow will be okay is the key indicator that our faith is working. This shows us that God-belief is emergent upon self-belief. It shows that our belief in God is working at a personal level when confidence is drawn.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.