We must start at the beginning of our own individual human development itself, to really understand what having faith in or believing in someone or something else is about. Human beings have a bent toward, a proclivity for wanting and being able to place their trust in something, in anything, by virtue of our humanity.
This need to trust grows out of our tribal or communal nature. We find and create our own personal and individual identity as we connect ourselves to and with another person or with whole groups of people. As human beings, it is our very essence to live in multiple levels of social interaction, from intimate partnership with one other person to existing within many overlapping networks of relationship, all of which give us our total identity.
In fact, we are such social beings that we feel incomplete without relational interaction. Even hermits are interacting with the people they have left behind, pushing themselves into isolation as a result of their negative emotional bonds to the people they have chosen to break ties with, leaving physically yet never forgetting the hurts or hatred between themselves and those others. The pet or plant lover who has reduced or eliminated their relationship with other humans out of mistrust, epitomized by the proverbial “cat lady,” is compelled to relate to their animals by personifying them into their own safe family unit!
This shows us that trusting and believing in something is actually a very deep desire on our part. It is a hunger that has to be fulfilled or people feel abandoned and isolated, even destitute. We are driven to find someone or something to put our trust in by our very nature as human beings.
Partial or total loss of this deeply ingrained trust or faith in people or something else, because of ongoing failures of other people and institutions to adequately live up to our trust, brings us to extremely difficult questions, which may haunt both the hermit and the “cat lady.”
Partial or total loss of this deeply ingrained trust or faith in people or something else, because of ongoing failures of other people and institutions to adequately live up to our trust, brings us to extremely difficult questions, which may haunt both the hermit and the “cat lady.”
If we learn not to trust anyone or anything at all in the process of being wounded by many others around us, do we then become so isolated that we only trust ourselves?
If this is where we end up, how long and in what ways will we be able to survive until we come to realize that trusting and believing only in ourselves may also be misplaced as well.
What then?
Coming to look squarely and clearly at these questions seem to be the defining prerequisite for finding true and full faith in Jesus Christ. The prospect of going through this very difficult reality sounds terrible and so many will never choose to even consider it. Each of us has multiple junctures in our lives where trust has been lost, but most of us would rather continue to find things around us to believe in anyway, whether people, systems, family, institutions, friends, even ourselves, instead of accepting the fact that trusting too completely in anything of human origin will eventually never really satisfy our deepest needs or hunger.
We don’t let go of these beliefs easily, but when we finally do let go of those things that have let us down, we usually go right away into a mode of choosing to shift our trust to some other earthly thing. It takes a long time for some of us to stop shopping around for the next thing we can lock into, right here in our own human environment, instead of looking upward and believing in a Resource that is greater than this world.
This process seems to start out early on for most of us, at those initial stages in the unfolding course of our lives. For some of us, we move forward by trial and error as we grow up in and grope our way through childhood, within unstable families, shifting structures, and unclear norms. Others of us find ourselves forced into and then constantly reinforced to keep carefully within the prescribed pathways created for us by strict families or communities.
Somehow we do begin discerning over time, more or less clearly, what we are able to do on our own. We make these the very ways we become naturally inclined to think of, feel like, and do regularly, day in and day out. Over years of time, these become the template of natural or normal ways for us, as the product of our ever changing and growing life experience, our intelligence, our willpower, our ability to influence others, our social standing, our capacity to communicate effectively, and our self-strength, among other aspects of life.
As we then go on wandering into the challenges and the vast territories of life beyond our own abilities, skills, talents, and capacities to achieve, we begin to realize that we must learn to depend upon and trust in something or someone greater than ourselves. These other resources we have relied upon may have been our families or friends or business connections, political allies, our gang, our team members, neighbors, or various benefactors or organizations, even our governments.
Ultimately we find that we can only trust any of these entities so far or so much. All human relationships and institutions have limitations or regulations that are either ineffective or becoming more and more burdensome for us to remain in, neither with integrity nor without desperation.
We can choose to stay within these natural boundaries, remaining locked into what seemed to be reciprocal relationships, which are actually not helpful at all or that ask for more from us than they are willing or able to give back. To do this, we may fall into deeper and deeper levels of denial, or move toward anesthetizing ourselves with pleasures or addictions.
Regardless of how we deal with our lack of sustained resourcing, it is inevitable that we will also be forced to reckon with or to run away from the inevitable onrushing awareness that we are actually more limited than we had earlier understood. We end up hitting our heads against the brick walls or glass ceilings of our own inabilities and deficits, as well as the shortcomings of the people we are connected to and the various systems we are imbedded within.
The accumulation of these eventual dead ends leads us either to continuous denial or constant despair or into conscious discovery!
In other words, we begin to choose to get off the misery-go-round of trusting the untrustworthy!
Although we are given the opportunity at any of our life junctures to choose to stop putting our full faith or trust into anything or anyone in this earthly realm, it is especially at these low points of stark clarity that we begin to look heavenward for an answer that is greater than all humanity can provide.We don’t let go of these beliefs easily, but when we finally do let go of those things that have let us down, we usually go right away into a mode of choosing to shift our trust to some other earthly thing. It takes a long time for some of us to stop shopping around for the next thing we can lock into, right here in our own human environment, instead of looking upward and believing in a Resource that is greater than this world.
This process seems to start out early on for most of us, at those initial stages in the unfolding course of our lives. For some of us, we move forward by trial and error as we grow up in and grope our way through childhood, within unstable families, shifting structures, and unclear norms. Others of us find ourselves forced into and then constantly reinforced to keep carefully within the prescribed pathways created for us by strict families or communities.
Somehow we do begin discerning over time, more or less clearly, what we are able to do on our own. We make these the very ways we become naturally inclined to think of, feel like, and do regularly, day in and day out. Over years of time, these become the template of natural or normal ways for us, as the product of our ever changing and growing life experience, our intelligence, our willpower, our ability to influence others, our social standing, our capacity to communicate effectively, and our self-strength, among other aspects of life.
As we then go on wandering into the challenges and the vast territories of life beyond our own abilities, skills, talents, and capacities to achieve, we begin to realize that we must learn to depend upon and trust in something or someone greater than ourselves. These other resources we have relied upon may have been our families or friends or business connections, political allies, our gang, our team members, neighbors, or various benefactors or organizations, even our governments.
Ultimately we find that we can only trust any of these entities so far or so much. All human relationships and institutions have limitations or regulations that are either ineffective or becoming more and more burdensome for us to remain in, neither with integrity nor without desperation.
We can choose to stay within these natural boundaries, remaining locked into what seemed to be reciprocal relationships, which are actually not helpful at all or that ask for more from us than they are willing or able to give back. To do this, we may fall into deeper and deeper levels of denial, or move toward anesthetizing ourselves with pleasures or addictions.
Regardless of how we deal with our lack of sustained resourcing, it is inevitable that we will also be forced to reckon with or to run away from the inevitable onrushing awareness that we are actually more limited than we had earlier understood. We end up hitting our heads against the brick walls or glass ceilings of our own inabilities and deficits, as well as the shortcomings of the people we are connected to and the various systems we are imbedded within.
The accumulation of these eventual dead ends leads us either to continuous denial or constant despair or into conscious discovery!
In other words, we begin to choose to get off the misery-go-round of trusting the untrustworthy!
If we choose to look up to see where our ultimate help really comes from, we will spiritually come face-to-face with our Savior, Lord, and King, Jesus, the One Who is fully human and understands each of us more intimately than any one else, and yet Who is fully divine and so is able to experience all of time and eternity with each us, as though we alone are His greatest and only concern.
Jesus is the One Who has always, does always, and will always love us, Who lived the perfect life we can never live, always doing exactly the right thing and always loving everyone He encountered, whether telling the truth they didn’t want to hear or healing them in ways they couldn’t imagine, living life for us as the perfect Lamb of God, Who faced every temptation common to us all, yet Who never knew sin!
Jesus is the One Who has always, does always, and will always love us, Who lived the perfect life we can never live, always doing exactly the right thing and always loving everyone He encountered, whether telling the truth they didn’t want to hear or healing them in ways they couldn’t imagine, living life for us as the perfect Lamb of God, Who faced every temptation common to us all, yet Who never knew sin!
Jesus also chose to die an excruciating death that perfectly satisfies any penalties for falling short of every righteous obligation, not for Himself at all, since He had fulfilled all righteousness, but for any of us who believe in His finished work and receive it fully. Jesus’ death on the cross mercifully covers all of our sins and brings amazingly gracious healing to us from the all the sorrows caused within each of us, by anyone who has harmed us and sinned against us.
Jesus rose from His grave to offer His eternal life for us, and He is now coming to each one of us as His lost sheep stuck out in the middle of the nowhere of our own making, or as a result of being wounded by other people or situations.
Jesus knows us better than we know ourselves, and cares for us more deeply than any human being ever has or ever can or ever will. He wants His very best for us, unimaginably better than any other possible life we could ever know or choose.
Jesus has the power to begin moving us into this new life by giving us a new birth, if we choose to have Him enter into our hearts by believing that what He says about Himself is Truth, and what His true disciples have been saying about Him for 2000 years is real, and that all of His love is really for each of us, even those of us who have hit many brick walls and fallen into many deep pits, knowing we cannot trust anyone or anything.
As we begin to grasp these amazing truths about Jesus and Who He really is and what He has done, is doing, and will do for each of us, we are opening our hearts and minds to truly living by faith, not only to rise up and go forward in this life through all the difficulties and minefields yet to come, but this faith life is also the gateway into eternity, with each of us growing in love and being loved greatly by Jesus, beyond our wildest dreams and expectations.
Believing in Jesus opens our minds and hearts to greater dreams and expectations which will outlast the bounds of this world and its false hopes, its lies, and its destruction.
Living in daily connection with Jesus fills our entire beings with His light each time we look His way, and His mercy covers all the times we don’t, won’t, or can’t, as He continuously draws us back again and again, each time becoming released in greater measure from more of the ties and binds that have held us down and kept us back, in order to live out the fulfillment of our eternal destiny for the rest of our time on this earth and into forever.
Loving and being loved by Jesus is the beginning and the endpoint of living by faith!
Jesus rose from His grave to offer His eternal life for us, and He is now coming to each one of us as His lost sheep stuck out in the middle of the nowhere of our own making, or as a result of being wounded by other people or situations.
Jesus knows us better than we know ourselves, and cares for us more deeply than any human being ever has or ever can or ever will. He wants His very best for us, unimaginably better than any other possible life we could ever know or choose.
Jesus has the power to begin moving us into this new life by giving us a new birth, if we choose to have Him enter into our hearts by believing that what He says about Himself is Truth, and what His true disciples have been saying about Him for 2000 years is real, and that all of His love is really for each of us, even those of us who have hit many brick walls and fallen into many deep pits, knowing we cannot trust anyone or anything.
As we begin to grasp these amazing truths about Jesus and Who He really is and what He has done, is doing, and will do for each of us, we are opening our hearts and minds to truly living by faith, not only to rise up and go forward in this life through all the difficulties and minefields yet to come, but this faith life is also the gateway into eternity, with each of us growing in love and being loved greatly by Jesus, beyond our wildest dreams and expectations.
Believing in Jesus opens our minds and hearts to greater dreams and expectations which will outlast the bounds of this world and its false hopes, its lies, and its destruction.
Living in daily connection with Jesus fills our entire beings with His light each time we look His way, and His mercy covers all the times we don’t, won’t, or can’t, as He continuously draws us back again and again, each time becoming released in greater measure from more of the ties and binds that have held us down and kept us back, in order to live out the fulfillment of our eternal destiny for the rest of our time on this earth and into forever.
Loving and being loved by Jesus is the beginning and the endpoint of living by faith!
~Neil Uniacke, MC
Executive Director
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