Episode 130 Believe. Believe. Believe: A Few Words on Living with Faith

Believe. Believe. Believe. – A few words on living with Faith   Do we ever know our way forward, completely? I seldom do. I’m always walking one step further into the darkness hoping it’s the right direction. When we are trying new things and taking risks – living into possibility, this is the landscape. Martha Beck said, “Every leap into light starts as a leap in the dark.” That has been my experience. Stay tuned for a few words on living with faith – in yourself, in the force that guides you, in your possibility and mission. It changes the story completely. Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Power serves you best when you know how to use it Remember Hansel and Gretel? They didn’t know where they were headed, but they knew if they left a trail of bread crumbs they could solve their own problem. Yes, I realize that’s an interesting example since the birds end up eating their best-laid plans, but in the end, isn’t that usually how it goes? Life makes you move forward instead of letting you follow the trail back. And quite often it is in an unexpected way– walking into a dark forest, throwing out our best solutions as we move forward, like bread crumbs, and then things shift, the story gets more intense and doesn’t look like we expected. Here’s to the faith that in the end we’ll all push our personal witches into the oven and return home a hero, but let me point out a couple things – Hansel and Gretel had to walk into the woods to have their experience, even though it was traumatic, and of course they first had their desperate search for the trail that had vanished – we can relate to that when things change in our lives. In the end, they had to grasp hands and adapt or die, to put it bluntly. They had to move forward or stay stuck. They had to believe enough to drop the bread crumbs and move into the dark. Let’s kick off this fun discussion with the most basic understanding that fear and faith are opposites. If you believe the universe or God has your back and if you believe in yourself, the fear decreases. The more faith you have, the less fear dominates your thoughts and actions. This is important to understand because when you notice a high fear factor regarding something you’re trying to do you can stop for a moment and take stock of your faith around the given situation. You can decide where you stand and what needs to be adjusted. I’ve noticed something about myself lately. I’ve noticed that whenever I take on something that I have not done before, that I constantly shove that thing to the bottom of my list of things to do. I’ll share some specific examples. Recently my podcast editor took a full-time position elsewhere which required me to find a new podcast editor. One of the things my old podcast editor did for me was to design the cover photos for each episode. Well, that’s not usually something podcast editors do apparently, and my new editor did not include that in his services, so I needed to figure out how to use photoshop so I could design my own cover photos. Something new I don’t know how to do. Because I wasn’t sure which was the best program (could I use a cheaper program) and then I didn’t know how to use the program, I kept pushing it down the list of things to do because it was a step into the dark that I didn’t know how to take. I see this pattern repeated often for me. Example #2 – While I have 3 published books, all 3 have been published by publishers. They ask me to write the book. I write the book. Their editors edit, they design the layout, they...