is faith foolish?

Shaylee Edwards
3 min readMar 9, 2023

Faith is natural.

A morning on the Mississippi River, New Orleans 2023

Faith is awareness of god’s love, life’s infinite intelligence. It isn’t cheesy. It isn’t a cop-out. It’s actually, as far as I can tell, the only future-oriented mentality that makes consistent sense.

When I use the word ‘god,’ I mean the universe, all that is, the quantum field, love, source. Life. When I say ‘god’s love,’ I mean a recognition that god loves god, life loves life.

In my work, particularly this series, I want to share how sacred concepts can make you feel and do better. Here’s what’s can I say about faith — it puts you in alignment with what seems like a so-obvious-it’s-hidden feature of life — Life is self-righting.

‘‘That sucky thing happened for a reason. Look what I got from it.’

I lived by ‘happened for a reason’ like it was my job for a long, long time not wholly seeing or owning my role in life’s twists an turns. …until I noticed that learning through painful experiences was sorta wearing me down. Plus, if god was so great, if this path was divine, what’s the deal dude? Why not send a letter with the message rather than a swift kick?

I explored ideas of choice, timing, grace, destiny, trying to synthesize opposing ideas into something useful. To be honest, and maybe it’s obvious to you when it wasn’t obvious to me, those inquiries came from a place of fear. I wanted to understand life so I could control it. I didn’t trust it.

…AND YET, and yet, since we live in this deliciously paradoxical realm, I also pursued this information because it’s beautiful. I’m including that little ‘AND YET’ note because, baby, whatever whacky thing you’re doin or have done, it’s likely beautiful and brilliant in its own way.

I speak to a lot of peeps who are so very hard on themselves. Sugar, don’t forget to let things be right, too. Since, let’s be real, it’s only your thinking that makes something good or bad.

Back to the topic — faith — what I found was that at the beginning of most of my adult journeys that included a more painful that ‘must have happened for a reason,’ tag was a choice. A choice I made. A choice that, I’m humbled to say, I usually had a feeling about.

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a bold, blinking “Don’t go this way!” sign (..every time, lolz). It was more of a subtle, ‘buddy… ehh.. this is weird.’ Still really owning the availability of that info was important in my healing.

I bet, if you sorta relaxed a little and sat with it, you’d find the same is true for your must-have-happened-for-a-reason’s, too.

Of course, there are instances that fall a bit outside of this simplification. Really sh!tty things. If you’ve got one of those in mind, my deepest respect and love for you. It seems there’s a way to include even those under an umbrella of oneness, but we won’t in this post.

Ok so far I said faith is aligning with the self-righting principal of life. I also noted hat we have choice and that there’s generally an awareness of what’s ‘right.’ How does all of that come together?

  1. You don’t have to wait for god to hit yah with his hammer. If you’re real about it, you mostly just hit yourself.
  2. Even if you did, things can still go somewhere good.

Which is basically saying, you don’t have to fear life. You can have faith in it. Faith AND a smidge more ownership. If you’re regularly making choices that diverge from what you feel is right, maybe sit down with that for a while.

My point here is this — life is always making the best of what happens and you can, too. Faith is being in that awareness. Faith is recognizing that fantasizing about what you don’t want to happen is madness. Faith is relaxing enough to ask how might something go well and what can you do to support that? Faith is letting life love you back. Or rather, letting you see that it always does.

thank you for reading ‘n being ❤ delighted to produce original content for the do-it-yourself types who want to be and do their best. visit me at habitbook.com to book sessions.

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