An interesting thought occurred to me recently (well actually tonight) – how do you keep faith when you have lost faith in yourself. Recently, I have gone through some things in my life that have caused my confidence to wane. No, nothing major or truly serious – your garden variety male ego stuff (humility in the face of a financial crush). So that left me with the question, is faith simple and if so, how can you have simple faith in something outside of yourself, when your faith in yourself is being questioned by yourself.
Read: Is faith in God contingent upon our ego (in the ego, super-ego, id sense)?
Now let me back up a little bit and unpack things a bit. As a human, and as a man in particular, having a fragile ego is par for the course. There are many things about our lives that we can like, some that we can loath, and many that we can just plain ignore (I do lots of that one) – the point is we all experience things that humble us in a way were we can loose confidence in who we thought we are.
That begs a question, when you are in despair and can’t seem to find faith in yourself – how much harder is it to maintain a good faith in God? I wish I had a simple answer for this, but I don’t. For those that know me, the verse I am going to quote is almost cliche with me (but it is appropriate):
“Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life. Let us not lose heart in doing good, for in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary. So then, while we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, and especially to those who are of the household of the faith.” – Galatians 6:7-10
Simple faith is not something that comes easy all the time, but rather something that takes perserverance – and with perserverance great rewards can happen. So when we find ourselves without faith in ourselves, it is no simple thing to keep our faith, but rather we should hold fast and keep our faith simple.
