Faith is a Choice, Not A Feeling

When I was a fairly new and somewhat neurotic young mother, I wrote the following poem:

Keep the Faith

©1999 by Susan Noyes Anderson, Awaken Your Spiritual Power

Sometimes I'd like to be

the type

who lives my life

without a backward glance––

and I would dance

through days

unburdened, fancy-free.

Instead, I'm me.

You know, the one

who counts the cracks

on every wall

and then recounts them

backwards

lest it fall

(knowing full well the chances are

it will).

Still, I have moments

when I just

let go––

then I stop counting cracks

and count on

faith.

You ask if the wall falls?

Surprise.

It's safe.

Twice every year, in the spring and in the fall, my church has a meeting called General Conference. At this time, the leaders speak on a variety of subjects, prayerfully chosen by themselves. The first two sessions of this conference were yesterday; the last two are today and can be viewed or listened to here.

Anyway, one of the speakers (Elder Neil L. Andersen) made the following statement: "Faith is not only a feeling, it is a decision." He pointed out that we all have days when the journey seems too hard and the road too long, days when we feel like we don't have what it takes to go on. He then reminded us that, while we don't know everything, we do "know enough."

And that was the basic and recurring theme of his talk. "You know enough," he kept saying. Wherever you are in your journey of faith (and I'm paraphrasing now), you know enough to take one more step, and another step, and the next step. Elder Andersen's admonition is that we need to choose faith. "Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief," said the father of an ailing child (Mark 9:24), and the Lord responded accordingly. As we choose faith, our doubt will be replaced by more faith. 

In my early 20's, when I wrote the sort of whimsical poem at the top of this post, I was just beginning to comprehend this great truth about faith. My experiences since that time have taught me that faith is indeed a choice, not a feeling that descends upon us capriciously or by genetic design, but a very deliberately made choice. True, we are all at different points in our walk of faith, but what's important (and I liked being reminded of this by Elder Andersen) is that every one of us "knows enough" to want to know more. No matter how meager our reservoir of faith might feel, faith is more than a feeling. It is a decision, and we can decide to believe and decide to believe and decide to believe again. The Lord will do the rest.

And that's what "Keeping the Faith" is all about.