What's Faith Have to Do With Success?

Sticking it out is hard. We live in a world of microwaves and fast food and immediacy. 

Who works 5 decades for a dream anymore? It's impossible to find many who would wait 5 years. Seems difficult for many to wait even 5 months.

I'm willing to bet this issue of immediate gratification isn't new to you. It's hard for most to imagine themselves doing one thing for very long and near impossible to picture success if it can't happen tomorrow.

The thing is, most dreams require long term commitment. I know we've all heard the cliche, "The hardest things in life are the things most worth doing."

I think we all understand on some deep level that things aren't worth much unless you have to work for them. 

How many times do we go throughout our work week wishing we could just not go to work but stay home forever? Yet by the end of a week long vacation we're itching to get back to work, maybe not because we love our job but because there's something in us that needs to work. So maybe some could do an even longer vacation than that before getting antsy, but still, eventually, it'll get old.

Especially for creatives and leaders, if we aren't working on something, we go crazy. I know personally, if I don't have something I'm actively working toward, I about lose my mind.

Yet when it comes to the day in and day out, we drag our feet. So we're stuck between not wanting to work (so we do a poor job at what we're doing) and not wanting (and not being able) to not work. 

How do we bridge this gap? Faithfulness.

This concept isn't easy and even if you understand it, it can be difficult to walk out.

Faithfulness means keeping our eyes off the abstract successes of "someday," and looking to the work of today. It means being in it for the long haul, for the every day. It means taking what we have right in front of us and making use of that.

We've talked before about how success requires habit and consistency, taking care of the daily mundane tasks over and over. This comes in a similar vein.

Faithfulness requires awareness. You can't be aware if you're dragging your feet. What if you picked your head up and saw all the opportunities around you to improve your skills, improve your person, improve your community, and improve your chances for future success.

I'm not saying you can't look to the possibilities of the future at all. Dreaming is important and we've talked a lot about vision here at Trailblazer. But does your vision include where you're at now? Or does it skip over the liminal space you're in to some intangible spot in the future?

This is where faithfulness comes in. Often when we dream, the action steps don't even match today. We often know what we want to do later but we're missing a few steps between then and now. In our mind's image, we see the picture of what we want but there's just a lot of fog between that and where we are.

Faithfulness requires us to live in the now, and can thus help us bridge that gap. It takes the ideal of the future and brings it under the reality of the now in order to show us what is necessary and possible today. 

Are you being faithful to today? Are you aware of the opportunity of today? Or do you have your eyes set so far ahead that you can't see where to put your feet in front of you?

Think about these questions this week. Ask yourself if you're being faithful, and if you're not, begin to look around at where you're at and see not only how you can serve the time you're in, but how you can make the time you're in serve you.