We Don’t Have to Have It All Figured Out In Order to Move Forward

Faith can be a really scary thing, but so can life. I surprise myself a lot these days by wondering what everyone is so GD worried about. No, I do not have a prescription for a high-grade sedative, I just like my life a lot, even though it is full of hardship. And I do mean full. 

I won’t get into the details of the hardship, but I will say my life was much easier ten and twenty years ago (ahhh, the glories of youth) and I sure “suffered” a lot more. I’m putting the word “suffered” in quotes because it was all internal and self-inflicted. I was making myself miserable and couldn’t quite figure out how to stop. 

Lord knows I tried. There was medication involved, therapy, exercise, prayer, whining, shopping, partying, succeeding, failing, everything, and nothing made it any better or different. I do think some people manage to mellow out, become more forgiving of themselves and others, and learn more with age, but I also credit my relatively newfound sanity with a very open, ill-defined exploration in faith.

There was a sense of BLEEP IT, I’ve tried everything else, why not this? Don’t get me wrong, I’ve tried faith intermittently before. I consulted books, gurus, churches, even the wind. Religions of all kinds felt like a gate rather than a gateway. 

Because I felt like I had tried everything everyone else’s way, I felt more at liberty to try it on my own, for myself. Why not make my home my church, and preferably my own head? I started praying and meditating whenever I wanted. Stopping in the hallway to sit on the stairs and pray. Praying while making coffee or cleaning up a mess. For a while, I was praying in a certain room of my house, but then I realized, I don’t want to have to go somewhere special to get in touch with God (or Good). I want to carry God around with me in my head, heart, chest, soul. 

That felt better, that felt more connected, that felt like I had a better chance of realigning with the Universe whenever I had fallen off the proverbial horse. It’s easier to get back on from wherever I am standing, rather than having to bring the damn thing back to the barn. 

I heard a lovely quote from a famous figure that applies here. I’m a sucker from a good quote from an admirable person, and this one takes the cake if you ask me. According to internet lore, Martin Luther King Junior was speaking at the Park-Sheraton Hotel in New York City on September 12, 1962 to celebrate the centennial of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. In that speech, he is quoted as saying, “Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step.”

Apparently, that may be a misquote, and other sources suggest he actually said, “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” Unfortunately, after a lot of searching, I couldn’t find a quote even remotely like it in many of the transcripts of his speeches. I like the quote regardless. 

Faith, in my experience, really is about blundering forward with optimism, ideally without much concern for the details or how it’s all going to work out. We all know people like this and they are kind of BLEEPING annoying. I have probably become one of them. This doesn’t mean no plan is involved at all, but I sure as BLEEP do a lot less worrying about the all-important HOWs and WHENs. 

WHY is another story all together. My faith has made me feel safer, more self-compassionate, more loving, and allowed me to aspire to more. I feel like my dreams are within my reach if I keep the faith and keep working, which is not a hope I allowed myself when it was all up to me all the time. 

What I did learn when reading through Dr. King’s speeches was how frequently he spoke of faith. He never promised any of his listeners all the answers. In fact, he regularly acknowledged that there would be pain, and suffering, and no specific timeline upon which day his dreams for mankind might be achieved. But he asked all of us to keep moving forward with faith in a brighter future, and sometimes it seems that we’ve lost that collective aspiration for better. Modern media has convinced us that everything is awful and we are constantly at war with each other or within. 

My exploration in faith has promised me a different, better, brighter future, one I wish more people could embrace on a basic, cellular level. It’s not really about religion, so much as it is about a faith in Good (or God) that can bring each of us peace, and through that path, perhaps all of us.