It’s Not About the Timeline

One of the important parts of having faith is the reinvigoration of dreams or goals. Without faith, it’s very possible, almost likely, to lose ambition or live a listless life. It’s pretty hard to get excited about the long-term if we don’t have hope for the future.

Even glimmers of faith can inspire even the most cynical to return to fantasizing about a better future, and with practice, faith can loosen our stranglehold on outcomes or best laid plans. Chance becomes about opportunity, rather than potential crisis. 

For those that really keep practicing and get the hang of it, it seems like faith can also allow us to embrace a higher calling, purpose, or mission. That has certainly been true for me. I have been passionate about certain things for a long-time, but also pursued them with a fair amount of confusion and even lackluster ambivalence. 

There was a lot of: 

Why bother?

What good can I possibly do?

What if it’s too hard? 

What’s the point? 

Who cares? 

Who will judge me for trying? 

Aren’t there plenty of people already working on that?

How can little old me possibly make a difference? 

The list of self-defeating, hopeless, faithless thoughts was pretty endless. Now that I have faith and I genuinely believe that when I focus on Good (or God) and pray to make contact, my prayers do get answered, I feel much more hopeful and optimistic about my possible sphere of influence, which has allowed me to embrace causes important to me. This willingness to believe I can make a difference has given me Purpose (capital P) and a Mission (capital M). 

When I was younger, I couldn’t have told you what the BLEEP a purpose or mission really even are. Both felt abstract, elitist, out of reach, entitled, or just plain grandiose. Now, it’s kind of all that matters to me and it’s also relatively simple. I’m pretty happy to report that relationship problems or day-to-day stresses pale in comparison to my sense of purpose in life. 

The phrase, It’s about the journey, not the destination doesn’t mean BLEEP to someone slogging through hopeless, faithless hell. Believe me, I’ve been knee-deep in there. But living with a mission means we get to be driven by a purpose beyond our day-to-day hardships and heartbreaks. And I don’t think anyone can really get to a place of allowing themselves a sense of purpose without also having faith that their work will actually do some good. 

This can be good at any level, whether it is simply earning a living wage with a sense of purpose to provide for our families. It can be about helping others or contributing time, money, or energy to a specific cause. It doesn’t have to be about being a savior. The important part is we ascribe meaning to the productivity in our lives and we have faith we are making a difference. 

The other important layer to this is that timelines change when we have faith, purpose, and a mission. If the work we do has meaning to us, and we have faith it will have an impact, then all the living we do is part of our purpose. All the hardships and all the heartbreaks lessen a little bit in the name of the overarching goal. 

Many of us “over-identify” with our problems or the problems of others. There’s a lot of talk about empaths these days, and while it is good to connect with others, we also need to externalize and temporize our problems in order to be productive. Living with a sense of mission and faith does a world of good in that department. While we don’t want to avoid or suppress the difficulties in our experience, we also don’t want them to occupy all our time or become permanent parts of our identities. 

Experimenting with a relationship with Good (or God), faith, and the willingness to embrace a calling in life becomes an opportunity to live a life bigger than our day-to-day aches and pains, either mental, physical, financial, or familial. 

One thing that is abundantly clear when it comes to experimenting with faith is that nothing (nothing, nothing, nothing) ever arrives on our own timeline. That’s the point of having faith. We have to believe in Good (or God) and that what we need will arrive in time. I might even argue that the timeline is a distraction from actually achieving our dreams or goals. 

Faith is not about our timeline, but it can be about our mission.