Faith—The Bridge Between Fear and Love

As always, my intention is to help individuals and their families experience more peace, joy, warmth, happiness, and love. It seems that our lives are full of events and circumstances that get in the way of this objective. From the way we are being treated at work, to concerns about how our children are doing in school…sometimes there seems to be no end to the ways our peace of mind is disturbed. Today, I would like to introduce the idea of a spiritual solution to these everyday issues.

One of the key steps to a spiritual solution is moving through forgiveness to gratitude. However, with some circumstances, we can get stuck, and this is when faith becomes so important. 

Let me illustrate with an example:

The movie Miracles from Heaven is a true story about a little girl named Anna who has a disorder that leaves her unable to digest food. Not only is Anna unable to eat, but she also experiences extreme stomach pain. Understandably her mother and father become completely invested in finding help for their daughter. After they take Anna to several doctors in their home state of Texas and receive several different diagnoses, they are finally referred to a digestive specialist, Dr. Nurko. Unfortunately, Dr. Nurko confirms their worst fear. There is no cure for Anna’s condition and the best he can do is to treat her symptoms to try to make her as comfortable as possible. Anna’s parents, heartbroken, take their little girl home because there seems to be nothing else they can do. 

This is the point in Anna’s story where the Miracle happens. After some encouraging from one of her sisters, Anna climbs an old hollowed out tree that the two of them had climbed many times before she was sick. As the two sisters are enjoying the view from high in the tree, the branch they are sitting on begins to break. Anna scrambles to make her way off the branch, but she falls into the hollowed out tree. She hits her head and ends up lying unconscious several feet down inside the tree’s trunk. After several hours, rescue personnel were finally able to pull her from the tree. Still unconscious, Anna is loaded into a lifeline helicopter and taken to the hospital. Amazingly, she not only survives this fall but her stomach pain seems to be getting better. A return visit to Dr. Nurko in Boston reveals that the disorder, pseudo-obstruction motility, is gone. Anna is symptom free.

The aspect of this story I would like to focus on is the struggle Anna and her parents went through prior to her Miracle. A terminal illness in your child is a tremendous burden and unfortunately in many cases there is not a miraculous recovery like the one Anna experienced. A sick child is the kind of circumstance where we become completely invested. This is the kind of circumstance that can leave us feeling frustrated, angry, disappointed, or afraid. 

The primary objective of a spiritual solution is the return to a loving perspective. Here is why this is so important. Anytime you are experiencing frustration, anger, disappointment, or hopelessness, you are seeing the world from a fearful perspective. The downside to this perspective is that fear has no healing attributes. In fact, when we act out of fear, the only possible outcome is further damage. Conversely, love has only healing attributes. So if we can find our way back to a loving perspective, the only possible outcome is healing. This is the nature of the spiritual solution.

The fundamental process in a spiritual solution is to let go of our negative judgments and look for “good” or “value” in the circumstance. Moving though forgiveness to gratitude. As we make this shift, our perspective naturally becomes love centered. But how can we do this when we are confronted with one of these highly charged events, like a child being terminally ill? 

This is where faith comes in.

When the unforgivable has happened, when we cannot see anything to be grateful for, when we do not understand how any good can come from this, faith becomes the bridge between our hopelessness and our return to peace. Between fear and love. Faith asks us to trust that good is there…even though in our current condition, we cannot see it. Through this faith, we will start to experience gratitude even when we are not sure what we are grateful for. A sense of peace, joy, and love will return. Now we are in a position to act out of love and access love’s healing attributes.

It should be noted that healing from a spiritual perspective does not always bring physical miracles like Anna’s…

But spiritual solutions always heal our heart.

Spiritual solutions always bring us back to a place of peace, joy, and love, regardless of the circumstances of our lives. 

Peace be with you and your family,

Jim White