Years ago, early in my career as a speaker, I had what I thought was a great idea for an evening of spirituality and musical entertainment. It actually was a great idea, but I had another idea that wasn’t so great: that instead of telling people how great the evening was going to be, I’d surprise them with it once they got there! Marketing genius, I know. . .
So, of course, not that many people came. After all, I’d promoted it as if you had to just trust me that it would be worth your while!
I had rented a huge, beautiful theater; we had fabulous musicians; the evening was really first class and wonderful. Among those who were there, a common comment was, “Wow, if I’d known how great this evening was going to be, I would have brought ten friends!” If only.
Faith is not just a theological principle; it is a mental and emotional muscle.
My parents had flown from Houston to Los Angeles for the occasion, and at the end of the show they came backstage to congratulate me. As my father put his arms around me, I burst into tears.
“Oh, Daddy,” I sobbed. “It was such a bomb!”
“What are you talking about?” he exclaimed. “It was wonderful!”
“Yeah, but not enough people were here,” I complained. “Daddy, I lost ten thousand dollars!”
“Aw hell, Little Sister,” he said to me. “First of all, I’m proud of you that you’ve made ten thousand you could lose, and I’m proud of you that you risked it on something so great. If anybody gives you trouble about this, you just tell them you can absorb the loss.”
The next day, and for several days thereafter, a girlfriend of mine who was one of the singers in the show kept fretting about my financial loss. But instead of joining in with her dismal, albeit compassionate, outlook, I took my father’s advice and kept saying, “Toni, I can absorb the loss.” I said it so often I began to convince myself, and in time I think I convinced her, too. I didn’t have control at that point over what had happened in the past, but I had control over how I dealt with it now. I had made a mistake, yes, but the universe wouldn’t hold me to it. The path toward, or away from, financial recovery lay in how I chose to think about what had happened: as proof of utter failure and doom, or as an opportunity to forgive myself and attract a miracle.
What I needed more than anything right then was faith—faith that I could go forward and ultimately recoup my losses.
FAITH IS NOT just a theological principle; it is a mental and emotional muscle. It is an aspect of consciousness, a function of the mind. With every attitude we demonstrate faith—either faith in what can go wrong or faith in what can go right. Our problem is that we tend to have tremendous faith in the power of our disasters and far too little faith in the power of miracles.
Our faith itself is a potent force: we increase a thing’s power by increasing our belief in its power.
Like any muscle, faith grows strong when used and weak when unused. When faith in love and its miraculous authority becomes a thought form that guides our thinking, it turns into an extraordinary power that transforms our lives.
It is not enough that spiritual power exists; we must have faith that it exists in order to use it on our behalf. Faith affects our psychological and emotional state, which greatly influences how we experience what is happening.
When you’re sitting in front of a pile of bills you don’t know how you’ll pay, or are being hounded by creditors, or are afraid you’ll lose your home; when you’re confronted by images of economic gloom and doom, recession, and hardship every day, it’s easy to fear that your financial state will only get worse. It seems easier to have faith in the power of economic loss than to have faith in the possibility of economic recovery.
But faith isn’t blind; it’s visionary. Having faith in a positive outcome doesn’t mean you’re denying a problem or ignoring obstacles; it simply means you’re affirming a solution.
If you believe that economic disaster is the bedrock reality of your existence because your physical senses and mortal circumstances practically scream that it’s so, then that belief is a powerful force. Your belief is literally being used against you.
But if you see your current economic hardship as what it really is—a temporary deviation from love’s perfection, happening within the mortal realm but in ultimate reality not happening at all because only love is real—then your vision works a miracle. It frees your energy, thoughts, and emotions, opening your mind to new possibilities.
For that is what a miracle is: a shift in thinking which then shifts your experience. This shift in perception—your willingness to look beyond appearances—enables you to invoke a different set of probabilities going forward. It enables you to see beyond what’s happening to what could be happening, thus creating the space for something new.
Faith is power. It changes your life by changing you. It places you on a different ground of being within yourself. It gives you a confidence based on something that’s in you but not of you, that can do for you what you can’t do for yourself. It keeps you from sinking into victim consciousness—a stance that attracts more victimization—and lifts you to positivity, which attracts more positive outcomes. Where we put our faith literally and directly influences what happens next.
The Bible’s adage “Blessed are those who have faith and cannot see” means “Empowered are those who remember who they are even when circumstances would tempt them to believe otherwise.”
It’s easy enough to have faith in God’s infinite abundance when you have millions of dollars sitting in your bank account, but what’s important to remember is that everything seen begins in a place that was first unseen.
When a pilot cannot see the horizon because of low visibility, he or she doesn’t assume that the horizon has disappeared. At a time of low visibility, the pilot flies on instruments that can actually gauge a situation more clearly than he can. Faith is like flying on instruments: it’s acting on the assumption that just because you can’t see a possibility at the moment doesn’t mean that it’s not there.
And faith is not just knowing that love is always there: faith is also knowing that that which is not love is not really there! Yes, of course it is there within our three-dimensional mortal reality—the bills, the foreclosure, the pink slip, the recession—but that reality is not ultimate reality. Your power to invoke ultimate truth lies in your clarity about what is truth and what is illusion. With every thought we think, we display either faith in love or faith in fear.
Faith in love: “I lack a job as the world defines it, but my divine function is established by God. I am here to love and be loved, and that is what establishes my worth. No worldly rejection establishes my value in the universe, and no material lack diminishes my fullness in God. I atone for my errors and forgive others for theirs. I place this situation of apparent lack in His hands and rest in absolute faith that it is miraculously changing even as I speak this word.”
Faith in fear: “I am a complete failure. I’m too old to get another job; they’re only hiring younger people. The economy won’t be picking up for years. All the jobs are taken. The system is rigged. I totally screwed up. I was screwed by so-and-so. I’ll never get these bills paid. I’ll probably lose my house. I give up. It’s no use. It’s too late. I blew it. Damn the Democrats. Damn the Republicans. Damn the corporations. Damn the unions. Damn the rich. Damn the poor.”
Thoughts placed in the service of fear deactivate the Law of Divine Compensation. Why? Because they are unloving. They are attack thoughts, and miracles flow only through the auspices of loving thought. It is love and love alone that gives us the power to transcend the lower thought forms and appearances of the mortal world. Only love of our self and others gives us the divine authority to reset the trajectories by which our life unfolds.
Love’s miracles are being created in every given moment, unobstructed by anything carried over from the past. That is the way the universe operates. Your faith in love doesn’t determine love’s power, but it does determine whether or not you will experience that power. You can’t turn off the light, but you can put your hands in front of your eyes and then complain that the room is dark. The universe is infinitely and eternally lit with the light of love and new possibility. You can have faith in that and experience miracles. Or you can have faith in the illusions of the mortal world, experiencing lack and scarcity without end.
I DID RECOUP the ten thousand dollars that I lost so many years ago in Los Angeles, and while I certainly can’t say I never made another financial error, I never forgot the lesson my father taught me that night: that I could absorb the loss. Whether through cases where I’ve made mistakes, or where someone else made mistakes that affected me, I’ve learned that the products of fear do not permanently stand. Each of us chooses how we will think about what happens in our lives, and to look on a situation with faith in miracles is to look through the eyes and with the power of God.
If you remember that you are a spiritual being, that God alone is the source of your power, and that the universe is inherently designed to provide for your needs, then you are thinking in a miracle-minded way. You are exercising dominion over the mortal plane by remembering that you are not of it. You will “just happen” to be seated next to someone who is looking to hire a person with your skill set. You will “just happen” to think up some fabulous new project and effortlessly attain funding. You will “just happen” to receive a check in the mail from someone who has owed you money for years and never repaid you until now.
Why? Because there is a realm of infinite creativity that exists beyond the mortal mind, yet within the Mind of God. This is not fantasy, but rather the spiritual reality of the universe. If you choose not to believe this, that is your choice; if you choose to believe it, that is your miracle.
The universe is programmed to manifest, through you, the highest possibilities for your creativity and joy. And that never, ever changes. In God’s Mind you are never too old; in God’s Mind you are never inadequate; in God’s Mind you are not your résumé or your failures. In God’s Mind, there is no mistake that you are not given the opportunity to correct, nor anything anyone did to you that cannot be compensated for when you forgive and move on.
Nothing about your material circumstances has the power to stop the engine of cosmic intention that you be blessed. And you are blessed “eternally,” which means moment after moment after moment. In any instant, regardless of what has happened in the past, the universe has arranged and is continuing to arrange infinite possibilities for you to prosper. If you cannot see this now—if despair and anxiety hang like a veil before your eyes, preventing you from mustering any faith in God at all—then in this moment lean on mine. One mind joined with another, regardless of their position in time or space, can remove whatever chains would bind us and deliver us to that sweet, sweet realm where things come full circle and there is always a chance to begin again.