Faith Without Definition

The beautiful and spiritual coach Jennifer Wells-McCullough asked me to share a story about faith as she is launching TODAY a most enchanting ebook about the F- word. I have so many stories I could share but this was a turning point. While I don't share how I got to the place of knowing my abundance, the year of work and chaos that led me to understand it intimately, I hope the story will resonate within you and allow you to remember when Faith has showed up for you, or perhaps it was there all along.

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Faith showed up on the day we had $18 in the bank. There were no credit cards, we had let go of them as they had given us a false sense of living and safety and we were drowning in debt. There had been weeks of filling up my gas tank with only $5 at a time because that is all I had. Like being a college student, yet with 3 kids and debt, debt, debt.

When we gave up credit cards everything shifted. It is one of the decisions that saved my marriage. Truth heals us. We had to face all the decisions we had ever made around money and some of those decisions were powerfully raw. To pay off the $15,000 in hospital bills for my first miscarriage, we had put it on a credit card. That was the beginning. Looking at the old story meant going back and seeing all the places where together, Patrick and I had started to disconnect. Our marriage became stronger but not before a whole lot of freaking hard work and super-shitty times!

Money is a mirror of where you are and how you are choosing your moments. Money is energy and credit is most often a negative energy, it pulls from you and rarely makes a return. How we feel about money, treat it, look at it, use it, accept it --this is our mirror.

We had been living by making a payment to the credit cards each month and then using the credit cards for things like gas and groceries and lots of things we surely didn’t need. Each month the cycle would repeat. When the credit cards were gone, so was the safety net. We were leaping with no idea if we would make it to the other side or free fall. We owned a house that was bought before the market collapsed. Savings did not exist. My business was just starting the energy exchange of money being made.

$18.00 in the bank. I remember tears on that day that fell from fear, faith and freedom. I was scared about feeding my family, but the fear had changed. I knew that the fear was my old story. The one of lack and disconnect and not understanding how to truly live in abundance. All the work I had been doing for the past year had been about transforming the fear into abundance, loving the life I had, now. And a gift showed up to test that work. $18.00 in the bank. The beautiful work of learning to feel so grateful for now was about to be tested, again.

I looked around and saw all there was. I felt abundant in what already was in my home, of what was just waiting to be transformed into nourishment for us. The most divine feeling of gratitude washed over me for that $18.00 knowing how much abundance each penny truly held.

Magic. Faith. Something much larger than myself wrapped around me and I knew that this $18.00 was going to be transformed into my new understanding of abundance. The phone rang. My aunt offered to send my kids to camp. The mail came. A check from my grandfather with a note, “I remember how expensive raising three kids can be.” An email, my first paid writing gig. All of this moments after this message of faith and truth came to me.
I still get shivers when I think about it. We happen to be so abundant now the oil company keeps sending us a reminder that we have a credit with them. Oh we still have debt. We still have family who offer us breathing space with extra support. We are still ‘under’ when it comes to our house. But we have no lack. Faith didn’t remove the fear, it allowed us to learn from it, to access its message. That fear, oh it had so much to say and so many lessons for us to learn. We let go of so much, and still are. Yes, surrendering to faith without definition or proof.

Now we make decisions that come from abundance, not lack. Faith brought us there. Faith that believing in the powers of the Universe, God, Magic --whatever you call it-- could turn our entire world around. Faith that when you can feel abundant with so little, you realize you have love and joy and peace, as my children would say, ‘times infinity!’