What IS Faith?!?!

We all  go through challenging things in life.  And as People of Faith we are charged with finding some way to navigate those things with our Faith.  I was taught two ways to think about "faith."

The first is that "faith" is something you hang on to until things get better. You grit your teeth and do not let go of the hope that things will get better.   The other is that "faith" is a force that makes things happen.  Despite the apparent facts, if you have enough faith, you can make things  work out the way you want them to.  Both of these have served me in some way over the years, but neither of them have ever really set well with me.
 
Over the past five years or so I have begun to embrace a different way of understanding faith.  Faith is more like a lens through which we see the Truth about the world and this life--"we walk by faith not by sight."  In other words, there is a TRUTH about everything that we go through, both the apparent good and the apparent bad; and it is through faith that we are able to see that TRUTH. 

For example, when God sent Moses to deliver the Hebrews from 400 years of slavery in Egypt, the things He did at first appeared to make things worse.   But the TRUTH was that in the end, those things led to their deliverance from slavery.  For us, the things we have gone through may appear to be bad, but after few months the TRUTH seems to be that they may have been ultimately good!  I haven't sorted it all out yet, but I think I am on to something.
 
Walking by Faith,

Robert  Caldwell