Dualism: Trust and Faith
“All the world is made up of faith, and trust … and pixie dust.”
- J. M. Barrie (Creator of Peter Pan)
I was watching a movie the other night about the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Sinai to Canaan. If you were to walk it today. It would take you ELEVEN DAYS!
Why did it take them 40-years? The people who followed Moses had a lack of Trust and Faith.
They did not trust their leaders – who led them out of the slavery of the Pharaoh.
And they lacked faith in their God. The One who opened the Red Sea allowing them to escape the army of Egypt. The One who, when they were thirsty, brought water from a rock. The One who, when they were hungry, provided manna from the heavens.
Because of a lack of Trust and Faith it took the Israelites 40-years to go a distance that should have taken them 11-days, to get to their promised land.
This Trust and Faith thing is a constant battle in our lives, just like it was to Moses.
Trust is something that you control.
Faith is an inner belief.
Trust
Trust is the biggest reason some people are wildly successful. A lack of Trust is also the reason people consistently fail in their ventures.
The important thing to remember is that YOU control your trust! My dad always told me, “If you don’t trust yourself, who is?”
Trust becomes stronger when you put yourself to the test more often. When we succeed our trust grows. If we don’t succeed, we also become stronger because we learn more about ourselves. When we stop trusting and trying, we stop learning. When we stop learning about our limits and our possibilities we stop growing.
Here is an example. We go to the weight room, and we begin lifting weights on a machine. On day one we try lifting a light weight. And we can do it. Our trust level has increased. The next day we went back. We increase the weight and we still can lift it. Again, our trust has grown. On the third day we return to the weight room and try to lift more weight. But on this day, we can’t lift the weight as many times as the day before.
We have two choices: We could quit and go home or we can understand or learn why we came up short. We may learn that we are lacking strength in other muscles. If we begin to train the other muscles that help to do the lift we are working on, we will soon see our ability to lift the weight, which will eventually get easier.
Even in failure we gain trust in ourselves.
Faith
Faith is a belief in ourselves. Unfortunately, we allow people to determine our beliefs through accepting their negative messaging. When we allow people to determine our value, ability or worth we then become subservient to those people.
When we believe that we have great value and are unstoppable we begin to live in that mindset. Again, we may not always accomplish what we set out to do, but when we learn from the struggles our belief is untarnished. It actually becomes stronger.
If we have faith in our dreams and our goals, we can start our journey to our optimal life. We may run into dead ends and walls, but when we have our faith intact we can find a way around these obstacles without losing faith in our end results.
I use myself as an example. My dream was to win a Super Bowl. As I went through college, I came to the conclusion the final victory was not going to be as a player. As a football coach I didn’t have skills needed to obtain the final victory calling the plays. But as a strength coach I had all the tools and ability that I needed.
I kept the faith. I knew I would end up on the top, eventually. I just needed to find the right vehicle to get me there.
If I lost faith I would have stopped along the way. I wouldn’t have taken the calculated risks that resulted in my every ascending path. Too many get slowed down in the pursuit of their dreams and stop. They get stuck. They stagnate. And professionally, they die.
Instead of losing faith if they kept pushing and learning, they might have exceeded their dreams. But we will never know, because they stopped.
Trust and Faith
When we tie these two together, we are unstoppable. When we begin to get bogged down our Trust in ourselves will push us forward. When we have to reset our goals, our Faith straightens the path before us.
Both Trust and Faith are your responsibility.
Always Trust in your ability to find a way and always have Faith in your plans.
When you do this, you will find that there is nothing out there that can stop you from becoming who you are meant to be.
Have an amazing day!
