Play It Safe?
Don’t get your hopes up.
Don’t dream, don’t believe, don’t imagine…because then you can’t be disappointed.
Just kidding.
I’ve been hearing from a number of you recently who’ve been struggling with the Divine Timing portion of our program. 8-) Faith demands patience; and that’s where it seems most of us get our knickers in a twist. But the truth is, impatience is not the biggest problem.
Maybe you’ve been praying for your soul mate…the perfect job…the perfect publisher to buy your novel…the perfect radio station to say “Hells yeah!” to your perfect talk show proposal. You’re doing the prayers, the visualizations, keeping the faith, and all your efforts are amounting to NOTHING.
Those of you who’ve been hanging out with me over the years have heard me talk time and again about Stage Two of manifestation—the point in the process of working spiritually toward a goal when everything seems to stall, or even fall apart around you.
But far worse than the external manifestations of Stage Two, for me, are the internal voices that inevitably rise up in the middle of it, saying, “Ok. So what if you spend all this time believing and hoping and praying, and it never shows up? What then?”
“Our sight may bring discouraging reports about prayer’s effectiveness. Pay no attention to it. God is still in control. Even the delay to the answer of our prayers is part of His good plan.” —Sarah M. Hupp
Far more than stagnation or chaos or falling apart, the human psyche rails against the looming possibility of disappointment. Because at the heart of disappointment lies the ultimate fear: that either God doesn’t exist, or worse, He does, but you don’t deserve His favor.
Risk believing, or play it safe? No matter how frustrated or impatient or scared or tired I might become, or how seductive the idea of “safety” might seem in a given moment, I can’t imagine living without the magic and the hope that trusting in God engenders.
Besides, the only true safety comes from faith. Without God, I am defined by my disappointments. With God, I am re-directed to a higher path.
For more information on the stages of manifestation, listen to the episodes on 5/10/10 and 5/17/10 of Living on a Prayer