When Your Faith Goes Postal

Have you ever met an earth angel–a regular person in an everyday place who says something deeply profound at just the moment you need to hear it most? Yesterday, my local post office clerk was that angel.

“Keep your fingers crossed for me, Roy,” I said, handing him my book in an envelope addressed to a screenplay reviewer in L.A. “I hope someone will turn The Road to Shine into a movie so many more people get its message about living your life to the fullest.”

“What do you mean, you hope?” Roy asked. “You either have fear or you have faith; you can’t have both.”

He was absolutely right. I was in fear, waking up crying every day that I’d never fulfill the vision I saw on my vision quest of helping millions to stop settling for less and to shine . . . also worried about my financial survival, and anxious I’ll never experience true love. Although I managed to shift to optimism for short bursts of time, underneath it all, I was terrified. My deepest fear? My life has no meaning. There’s no place for me on this planet, and there’s no point in me being here.

Perhaps you know the feeling. You’ve lost your job, a loved one, your clarity, and your path. Your life feels uncertain and empty, with no sign of getting better. You’re just “floating” out there every day, wondering why you’re here. You’re bored, impatient, angry, or depressed. You sob or scream at your God or Higher Power for letting you down and putting you through this, or you beg for mercy for your life to change. You’re lonely and disconnected, or you’re clinging to others to define who you are or give you a sense of place. You somehow manage to get through each day, but you’re a listless robot shadow of yourself, going through the motions, wondering what’s the point. These are all common symptoms of losing faith.

Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist who survived the Nazi concentration camps. While in the camps, he noticed that the prisoners who believed their lives had a purpose­–whatever that purpose was–survived. Those who didn’t died. He wrote a powerful book afterward declaring that the key force driving humans is our search for meaning.

So where does that leave us when we lose hope, fearing that our lives mean nothing?

Some spiritual teachings say if we muddy our desires with fear, we’re sending out “mixed signals” to the Universe, and we won’t be able to attract and manifest what we want in our lives. Other pragmatists claim that everything that happens in our life is random, or simply due to luck.

I don’t know the answer to why things happen to us or when or how… none of us ever will. All we can control is how we choose to live our lives. During times of darkness and struggle, will we choose to stay mired in negativity and despair or choose to see the lessons and move forward in hope? Will we choose to believe that we deserve and can have a love-filled, meaningful life and that a better life is on its way–in fact, is already here, if we can let go of our egos and pain to see it more clearly?

How our lives play out may indeed be totally random or all based on luck. It just seems like no coincidence that when I’m in my darkest moments, someone like Roy always pops out of the blue, reminding me to have faith.

© 2015 by Laurie Gardner