I woke up this morning and thought “I feel depressed” or whatever the word is for the funk I occasionally fall into. Maybe it was more of a “I feel meh” because I don’t really get depressed because it’s super unproductive. But when that wordless feeling came to me, Wisdom said, “No. I believe…” (in the opposite of the “meh”).

Basically, instead of “I feel”, it’s “I faith”. I believe.

I learned to fear. Not great big fear, but little everyday fears. Fear is rational. In a way, it’s wise. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, so fear can’t be all bad. But it’s really bad when you have more faith in what you fear than faith in the God who controls it all. Fear helps us survive, but left to run wild, carries us off to hidden places where we are no longer living, but living in fear.

I remember learning about the end of the world when I was younger. It’s not actually “the end of the world”, more like “the end of the age”. Because there’s more stuff to some. New Heaven, New Earth stuff. But when this big ball appeared to start really rolling a few years ago, the only thing I could think to do was to freeze. I think we all froze. Because when you experience something you’ve never experienced, you don’t have a “framework” for interpretation. No rehearsals, no examples of how to successfully handle this specific chaos.

And when you freeze, sometimes it takes a while to thaw out, fer real. That actually types out “fear real” before I corrected it- talk about a Freudian slip…because fear feels really real. And again, we’re back to feeling. We can’t always obey the commands of how we feel because then we’d take too many sick days in order to do fun things.

Feelings can be a good tool, but they’re not a very good guide to get through life. Feeling is more like butter. You use it for how it makes a dish better, but it’s not usually the whole dish (unless it’s a butter dish, lol). I mean, some people do keto or carnivore and eat sticks of butter, but typically it’s not the whole meal. So feelings aren’t the whole deal either.

But Faith is. Because Faith is what gives us a future. It doesn’t leave us stuck in the now, in a funk. It gives us a vision. And if it doesn’t, we need to make it so.

I admit I am one to greatly lack vision- both literally and figuratively. I am blind in a lot of ways- especially when it comes to Faith. I’ve lived my life in a quiet maze of my unknown, unspoken fears to the point where it’s difficult to see above the walls of my personal maze. And it’s easy to feel stuck in that maze. So instead of feeling that stuckness, I choose to feel something different. I choose to believe in what’s possible. I choose to believe that God is who He says He is, and that I am who He says I am. And that He is for me. And that all things are possible to the person who believes. And that’s just the start of it all.

It’s funny to me that I have lacked faith so much in my life. It’s quite possible I didn’t really know what faith was. I have looked too much at my surroundings and not at the possibilities ahead of me if I just asked, took action and had faith.

So that’s why I am writing this today. As a reminder to myself that whenever I get into my feels, I need to get into my Faith.

“And without faith, it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.” – Hebrews 11:6