My friend Jojo Wagner once posted "What can FAITH do"? I found it so relevant that I requested borrowing her question to encourage further inquiry, and to her delight she said yes. My response follows! FAITH - the most misunderstood subject. Here goes! Faith cannot do anything. However, if you have it YOU can do wonders confidently. Here is why... firstly, faith is not wishful thinking or hope in hope itself, or a baseless nice feeling just because there is a lot of doctrinal agreement around a certain matter that you feel ought to happen. Faith is the substance... and the evidence of things not seen [by you as yet -but there is material fact of its existence or outcome](not wishful evidence, but real evidence). Faith is confident assurance. You could not have confident assurance unless there were evidence to base that confidence on. Example: A few years ago I had faith (confident assurance) that I would be at the Potala Palace in Tibet. I had never been to Asia - in fact I didn't even know for sure (prior to my research) that Asia existed - let alone Tibet! I found plenty of traceable evidence that EVERYBODY can verify that Asia exist and that thousands of planes fly there daily - and there is a large airport near Lhasa Tibet. I had faith that the plane could stay in the air for 13 hours and that Tibet exists - as there are plenty of pictures, videos, news, eye witnesses, evidence, proof that's traceable by anyone! I bought my plane ticket and had that "confident assurance" as I boarded the plane to Beijing, China. I did go and visited the Buddhist monastery in Tibet. Remember, faith divorced from evidence and substance is not living, useful faith - but a mere belief whose "evidence" is untraceable! There is a difference between "living, useful faith" and "mere belief". Living, useful faith is accompanied by traceable evidence and proof - this kind of faith works. Mere belief, however, does not work and you can't trust it, for it lacks traceable evidence - therefore, you cannot be certain about anything. Real faith is certainty - it is not a belief in certainty, it is the certainty itself! A word of caution: Just because something comes from a pulpit in a thunderous preaching voice and labels something "faith" does not make it so. Hocus pocus, woo woo stuff is not faith - if it were, it would be traceable and duplicable by anyone! Lastly, religion does not have a monopoly on living faith! We all exercise faith when we jump in our cars, believing that the road is still there. What can faith do? Well, the evidence that it provides takes the guessing out of life! Cheers!
