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It’s only been a couple of days since I’ve just completely submitted to God’s (or Good’s) direction for me. I’m not actually sure what pushed me over the edge to really give in and completely relinquish my destiny to my faith. Maybe it was just a combination of failures, answered prayers, readings, and progress as I’ve dabbled in faith. I realized actual faith is about surrender, just as all the sages warn us. It’s about trust, genuine love, and commitment. I can’t keep asking for things and disliking them. I just want to love what I am given and trust in the path completely. 

One might argue this is an exercise of the weak-minded, and that can’t possibly be true - do you know how hard it is to keep choosing faith? One might argue I am giving up or resigning to my fate, but I’m not sure that’s true either. I think there are phases of building faith and this is one of them. I also do think that there must be some truth to the law of attraction, whether it is a reality that the universe gives us that which we are or if it is true that when we change our perceptions, the things around us change. Does it really matter, so long as life feels better? 

I don’t really have much to lose. I’ve had so many prayers answered, only to have the most extraordinarily disappointing outcomes. This made me realize I either don’t know what I want or I don’t know how to receive it/make the most of it, so why not just pray for whatever is my actual purpose and destiny according to God (or Good) and see what happens? 

Again, this is a live-action experiment, so y’all can just sit comfortably and watch me take what may seem like a pretty big gamble in my life from the safety of your own homes. Turning my will and my life over to the care of a God of my understanding feels like a risk when I have been planning (and second-guessing) the BLEEP out opportunities and failures for a lifetime, but it seems like the natural next step as I have built faith through prayer, meditation, action, and results evaluation. 

The wild thing is that things have already started happening. It’s interesting that along with this next level commitment to faith, I’ve also decided to just exercise love at people when I’m feeling selfish or needy or extra, based on a poem I read that struck a chord with me:

Wellness Check by Andrea Gibson

In any moment, 

on any given day, 

I can measure 

my wellness

by this question:

Is my attention on loving, 

or is my attention on 

who isn’t loving me?

I have been praying love at people I would normally either be unimpressed with, have expectations for, be seeking attention from, or otherwise confused by, and it is working wonders. Rather than feeling exhausting, it feels restorative. Rather than feeling invalidating, it feels affirming. And things have been happening. Two people showed up in my life in a surprising way immediately. My perception of family is changing just through these exercises in mindful loving prayer at them. 

I’ve also recently had lots of blatant signs that I need to return and recommit to an old hobby that fell by the wayside in the slow motion chaos that is heartbreak. Several people from that world and circumstances I fell into beckoned my return, so I am dutifully following those signs to that endeavor knowing that is Good’s (or God’s) plan for me. 

These three things alone feel summoned into my life through my changing relationship with faith. I can’t describe it any other way. I decided I would believe in and pay attention to signs, and they are arriving in my life. The same is true for people. I’m not sure what to make of it, other than to say it’s exciting in a new way, and I plan to keep the faith.