Sunday, March 15, 2009

Faith & Imagination

If you believe you can, you probably can. If you believe you won't, you most assuredly won't. Belief is the ignition switch that gets you off the launching pad.”
-Denis Waitley

Yes, it is true that man can move mountains with his faith! Many a times our dreams, our desires, our aspirations remain unfulfilled because of the lack of faith within us. Apart from following the roadmap to our goals, we also need to believe in what we are and what we are doing. Do you think man would have ever been able to sail across the Atlantic or fly in the air in the so-called airplanes or conquer the moon without faith? Or take for example the on-going research to find any trace of life on the earth-like planet Mars. All this would not have been possible if any of these achievers or to-be achievers would not have had faith in themselves. With faith and imagination in hand, man has always moved to conquer the untrodden territories.

So how are faith and imagination related? William Blake’s famous quote goes as “To see the world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wildflower... hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour... is the power of imagination”. It is your imagination that can lead you to miracles and it is your faith that can help you achieve those. Only when imagination is intertwined with faith and unceasing belief will you be able to make your dreams come true.

To give you a better picture of the relationship between imagination and faith, consider this story. Most of us are aware of the famous Isaac Newton, the man who discovered that there exists something called as earth’s gravitational force. The story goes that Newton was sitting under a tree when an apple from the tree fell on his head. This made him wonder why the apple had to fall downwards only. And this trivial thought lead to the imagination and thereafter the discovering of gravity. It was just imagination and faith that guided him to prove the authenticity of his belief that “whatever goes up, must come down”. Isn’t this analogous to failures which make us feel that success is far from our reach, but if we have faith and the perseverance to achieve it, success will definitely come back to us.

It is said ‘do your best and leave the rest to God’. If God brings you to it, He will bring you through it.

The Bible, Matthew 17:20, says:I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, "Move from here to there" and it will move.
It depends on us and only us to firmly hold the vision and the faith at every stage of life however challenging the process is.

[PS: this is one of the articles that i wrote during freelancing... This is for Rohan.. well, u actually wanted me to write abt fear and faith... but my first post on this blog is about fear... and this one is about faith... hope u get ur answers :) ]