New Earth tools #7 – Faith
Previous articles in this series have looked at a variety of tools that are available to you, 24/7 and entirely free, to help you get to the New Earth. The next tool is faith.
Jesus tells us just how powerful faith is in Matthew 17:20. “If you had faith no larger than a mustard seed, you could tell this mountain to move from here to there.”
Here I want to talk about faith specifically as a tool to move us out of darkness and doubt.
The process of conscious emotional evolution is very much like a stock market graph with lots of falls and rises, with the long-term trend taking you ever higher.
When you’re on the rising part of this stock market graph you don’t need tools. You can feel yourself coming together. Burdens fall away. You feel closer to God.
You have the strange feeling of somehow being glued together a little better than before, like some wound you didn’t even know existed (because it was part of your ‘normal’) has just healed—which it has.
Crash
Where the tools come in is when you’re in the dips, falls and outright crashes of the stock market graph. They can be sudden, sharp and deep.
When you hit such a fall you get a severe emotional jolt. Your emotional toolbox goes flying across the room and all those shiny tools I’ve talked about in previous articles—like intent, neutrality and discernment—tumble out and land just out of reach.
You pace your room like a caged tiger. You’re outside somewhere, alone, bellowing with rage at the heavens. You’re lying on the bathroom floor crying. (I once spent a whole night there.) Even breathing seems almost too much. Your chest feels crushed, like the air can hardly enter and escape.
You don’t have the togetherness to apply any of the principles I’ve discussed. This whole New Earth Tools series is just so many useless words. It’s time for faith.
Jesus demonstrates the power of faith in adversity in one of my favourite stories, Luke 8:22-25. “One day, Jesus and his disciples got into a boat, and he said, ‘Let’s cross the lake.’ They started out, and while they were sailing across, he went to sleep.
Suddenly a windstorm struck the lake, and the boat started sinking. They were in danger. So they went to Jesus and woke him up, ‘Master, Master! We are about to drown!’ Jesus got up and ordered the wind and waves to stop. They obeyed, and everything was calm. Then Jesus asked the disciples, ‘Don’t you have any faith?’”
Four kinds of faith
Tools are never vague. They’re always specific. They work like this, and they produce this outcome. Emotional tools—including faith—are no different.
The faith that gets you out of emotional crashes has four aspects:
- In God
- In yourself
- That you’re in a sentient, benevolent process
- That our instruction manual, the Bible, is an accurate compass
Very often we’re OK with (1). We might be OK with (4), though of course that depends on reading the compass correctly. It’s aspects (2) and (3) that we struggle with. Those are the exact aspects that shift us out of murky waters and back on solid ground.
Faith calls on you to trust God, trust yourself, and trust the plan. No matter how much it looks like your life has just disintegrated, you are actually on track for wherever your unique journey is taking you.
There’s a basic principle here: the old must make way for the new. In that confused space between, that’s when you need faith.
There’s a basic principle here: the old must make way for the new. In that confused space when the old has painfully disintegrated and the new hasn’t yet materialised, that’s when you need faith.
The New Earth journey leads from separation to unity. Every separatist belief in your psyche will ultimately be squeezed out of you. You must see yourself as a whole, integral part of the entire physical and non-physical cosmos.
Spirals
So when nothing else works, have faith. Evolution travels in spirals and your path will spiral too. It will spin you around, make no sense one moment and deliver profound illumination the next.
Faith gives you something to cling to during the most challenging times. No matter how precarious your position seems, have faith. “Faith makes us sure of what we hope for and gives us proof of what we cannot see.” (Hebrews 11:1)
Remember, if you’ve hit a low point on the evolutionary stock market graph it’s because you’ve broken through some kind of barrier. So congratulate yourself and have faith. You will rise again.
Photo by Timothy Eberly on Unsplash