You've Got This!

9Choose Faith Over FearA greater force has your back

‘Live life as if everything is rigged in your favour,’ wrote the Sufi mystic Rumi over eight hundred years ago. Yet let’s get real here — living your life as though the universe has your back takes some major audacity. The audacity to place your trust in some higher force that cannot be seen; to believe in a power that cannot be proved.

I’m mindful that the very word ‘faith’, and even more so the term ‘spirituality’, can trigger defensiveness for some. Having grown up in Australia’s secular culture, I am aware of how quickly people can roll their eyes at the first whiff of anything remotely religious. So before I go on let me just clarify that this chapter is not about religion. While religion can provide a pathway to spirituality, it can also, as Sister Joan Chittister wrote, ‘leave people in danger of being a keeper of the law rather than a seeker of truth.’

So this chapter is for ‘seekers of truth’. It’s about strengthening your connection to a deeper dimension of your own humanity; to a source of power that cannot be seen with the senses or measured with science. But then again, to paraphrase one of history’s greatest scientists, Albert Einstein, not everything that can be measured matters, and not everything that matters can be measured. In fact Einstein once observed that,

When you examine the lives of the most influential people who have ever walked among us, you discover one thread that winds through them all. They ...