Hiya, folks,
I’ve made up a tentative plan for how I’m going to build my faith in God. I don’t want it to just be blind faith. I want it to be fully grounded in my own personal experience. I can’t think of any other faith right now that could be sustainable for me personally. Or any other kind of faith that I’d even really want.
Here’s my tentative plan that I’ll be working on in fits and spurts for… well, until I’ve accomplished my goal of attaining to perfect faith.
- One of the things that I believe about God is that he is all knowing, all wise, all powerful, and all loving. In the past, I’ve called these the four pillars of God’s nature and character. These four things are the essential ingredients to a God who can actually be trusted completely. If any one of them is missing, he can’t be trusted completely–period. So… I’m going to go through my life and experiences and list out all the places where I feel God has shown those character traits in my life with how he has dealt with me. Thus I will have a bank of personal experiences to fall back on when I’m tempted to fear.
- I’m going to write out a concise but complete statement of my beliefs based on my personal experiences that I can repeat to myself to help me gain perspective in the moments when fears come creeping, trampling, or barging in, thus helping to nudge them out of my heart and into the wind.
- I’m going to make a list of as many situations, actions, and experiences that I can purposefully put myself into that will force me to face my fears. The goal there being that by placing myself in those situations purposefully, not only will I have the opportunity to face the fears, I’ll also be fully prepared to face the fear by applying my statement of faith/belief/trust.
Basically, I’ll have started the fire while holding the fire extinguisher, if that makes sense.
Over time, by purposefully pairing the two together, fear followed immediately by my statement of faith/belief/trust, the hope is that I will train my brain and literally form new neural pathways that will eventually automatically apply my statement of faith/belief/trust each time I feel fear, whether through purposeful practice or through spontaneous, unexpected attacks.
So… there you go. This is my tentative plan. I’m sure I’ll add more to it in the future, but this is the start I’m going with.
Onward.
Lift the World 