Restoring Faith

So, now that we know our cynicism will not get us to our desired outcome, will restoring our faith be our guide to the promised land?

Being me all over - How can I do an about-face on this journey to stop the cynicism and have faith again? Lately I have felt that I have been on a inner journey not on my future prospects, but back to my past. On that journey, I am realizing there was a point where I did trust in something, even if that trust was only an invisible hope for a better life.

In all of our lives, there was a point where we had some form of trust, before we realized that ours was a broken and mangled world. We believed in a future full of promise and hope. We acted different, thought different, and that difference governed the steps we took and the words that we spoke to others. We didn't have to prove we had all wisdom and all knowledge back then. We were just learners, and the greats were somewhere out there. We hadn't become them yet; we were striving for that path where we would become one of the greats.

No one acted sassy or prideful because we had not gotten all we wanted. Yes, we knew those who pretended to have it all, but underneath that facade, we all knew they did not have it all together either. Despair did not exist because we were still hopeful that the promise was still out there.

In returning to that point in my past where hope still existed, I am beginning to believe, it is my impetus to move me back to trust. Whether finding that former place of trust is difficult or not, maybe I can still hope that such a place exists. It was that past hope that let me on my journey towards being a Christian. I remember thinking before I took that first step of faith, "The problem of world hunger is not that there is no food, only that it is poorly distributed. Just like the hunger hole in stomach of an Ethiopian babe could easily be fed from a wheat field from Kansas, my soul hunger for peace must also have an answer out there."

How though do we start a search for our past life when it is past? I decided to start my journey by exploring what my theory of "being me all over again" meant. First, "What is an impetus?" Looking the word up in the dictionary, I saw it meant "a driving force, stimulation or encouragement resulting in increased activity."(1) In other words, it is a good word for me to use for a starting point in my journey because we need a driving force that will result in an increase in our activity of trust.

Issac Newton added to this definition of impetus when writing Principia, published in 1687 (2). He said impetus was "the quality of an object moving independent of an observed force." The contemporary thought before Principia was that "an object only moved while a force was continuously applied."(3) The concept of momentum that Newton developed said that an object could continue movement without the aid of a seen force.

So to take this physics term back to the literary, we only need to keep up the momentum after starting to continue our journey of finding our faith again. Maybe Dory is wise in telling Marlin to "just keep swimming" in "Finding Nemo." Maybe that is where we continue our journey of finding and keeping our faith. To go forth with our impetus and then "Just keep swimming."

Another encouragement on my journey came from the wisest man ever. He said that if we would come to God as a child, then we could enter into the gates of heaven (Mark 10:13-15). To start on our journey back to faith, we must be brave to go back to that childish trust. When we can do that, we start to act differently and we cease to fill the world with our doubt and despair, and start to fill it with hope and faith. To regain our trust again, we should - we must - return to the life and faith of a child.

Resources:
1) http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/impetus
2) http://www.newton.ac.uk/newtlife.html
3) http://2000clicks.com/MathHelp/PhysicsMomentum.aspx