Day in and day out we encounter life. Sometimes life brings joy and sometimes life brings pain and disappointment. Depending on what you have experienced over time, you might find yourself in a place where you feel stronger because of those experiences, or depleted and trying to understand when brighter times will come. Whether times are up or down right now, this is a reminder to hold on to your faith.

Let me go a step further: hold on to and protect your faith.

Everything runs on hope and faith

Faith simply means to have complete trust and confidence in something or someone. Having hope means to have an expectation for something to happen. Honestly, sometimes hope is easier to maintain than faith, but we need both.

This is where it gets a little tricky: I can already hear you asking “how do we maintain faith when the outcome is not what we expected or desired?” Well, I am not going to sit here and pretend like I have the perfect answer to that question.

What I can say is this: recognizing when your faith is fading is the first step; cultivating and speaking hope again is the second; then, repeating that until your faith is stronger again will help to bring peace and a boost of energy until you can get to a better mental and spiritual space. The good news: Sometimes all you need is faith the size of a mustard seed to keep the faith engine running.

Finding a source of hope and faith

• What and who do you place your faith in?

• What source(s)–outside of yourself–do you have to help you continually renew your hope and faith?

I personally turn to my belief in and relationship with God, and the truths, values, and beautiful things–and sometimes people–in the world around me. You may have something different. The important thing is to have an additional source outside of yourself to help restore your hope and faith jar.

Why? For me, I arrived at this conclusion by recognizing one simple fact of the universe: we replenish ourselves every day by consuming something outside of ourselves (food, water, etc.). Our bodies are designed to process and maximize those resources and produce energy, but our bodies cannot produce its own source of energy. Therefore, we are designed to have an integrated and connected existence with the world. All we have to do is make sure we are consuming the good stuff (literally and figuratively)!

If we don’t consume food and water and instead say “No, I can produce energy from within myself,” we will eventually die from dehydration and starvation. So, while I acknowledge my own beauty, capacity, and strength, I also understand that I am designed to thrive in partnership with something outside of me. My faith in myself and life is only as good as it is intricately intertwined with my hope and faith in something greater.

Replenish your source

Life can feel really numb, lifeless, and bleak without hope and faith. Whether things are going well or not, we can have hope and faith that they will get better. They can also lead us to finding peace and acceptance in the outcome when things don’t go how we expected.

So, let’s remember to always nurture and fill our hope and faith cup. Let’s work to make it a practice so that we have something to draw from in those moments when we need it the most. And, just as we strive to protect ourselves from negative people and thinking, let’s try to also protect ourselves from people and things that intentionally try to make us question and throw away our faith.