Dedication is Key
There is an immediacy to our culture that makes many people impatient, restless, and move almost at the speed of light. Simultaneously, life is actually extraordinarily slow. Whether we live to fifty years old or one hundred, the unfolding of our lives leaves lots of room for trials and tribulations.
Gaining enough experience to act with certainty, whether it is in work, love, or faith actually takes a lot of time. And I do mean a lot. If I had known how long it would take for me to feel even remotely comfortable with certain hobbies, I might have felt overwhelmed and not bothered at all. We forget about how important the experience of learning, trying, and failing is and how very low the stakes actually are (except for in military training, perhaps).
There is something about the immediacy of consumerism that drives us to want perfection and want it yesterday. We can order a perfectly nice, machine-made sweater and have it to our house in days, why the BLEEP would be spend a couple years and several botched or failed attempts learning how to knit one ourselves?
We forget that mastery and self-efficacy are two very important underpinnings of doing well and feeling good. We forget that resilience is an experience unto itself that proves our value and mettle to ourselves first, before we even bother to prove it to anyone else.
Faith is part of persistence. It’s part of the flow state, that other place we go when we are totally engaged in the subject or experience at hand. Faith is what keeps us afloat and still paddling when we can’t see land on the horizon. It’s the motivation behind the sentiment I don’t know where this is taking me, but I want to find out.
So much of our culture offers ready-made answers or products or experiences. It’s not surprising that we have gotten uncomfortable with trial and error, with the unknown, with not knowing what comes next. There are instruction manuals for everything.
Five steps to a better relationship.
10 steps to a better body.
Insert part A into part B and turn until you hear a click.
Our own ingenuity has taken hardship and mastery away from the collective masses through machinery. And with that, it’s removed opportunities to develop faith in ourselves through experience, trial, error, and persistence.
I get impatient with my own faith all the time, because I still get scared. Fortunately, prayer is available for me to address the issue on the spot and remind me I don’t have all the BLEEPING answers. It’s actually becoming kind of fun to turn my life over to God (or Good) and see what solutions arise instead of my own cockamamie ideas. The answers are always better and far less work.
The crux of the issue becomes time. Patience. Will. Persistence. Faith. Just like woodworking or knitting or meditation or project management, I am not going to be a master craftsmen in faith overnight and neither are you. We have to exert enough will and faith over ourselves to just sit still and do nothing, and wait for Good (or God) to present solutions or act in other people’s lives on our behalf.
It’s not easy, but it is a very, very, very useful skillset. Try it some time, and then keep trying. The journey itself will be worth it.