Corazon Aquino, the first woman President of the Philippines; in fact, in all of Asia, has been quoted: “Faith is not simply a patience that passively suffers until the storm is past. Rather, it is a spirit that bears things – with resignation, yes, but above all, with blazing, serene hope.”
It is that “blazing, serene hope” that most attracts me.
Faith is a big part of living an everyday kind of spirituality. Faith, at its most mundane level, is that confidence within that somehow things will work out right if we just keep doing what we believe is the right thing. Most of us are familiar with the definition in Hebrews 11:1 that faith is the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (KJV). Perhaps fewer of us are familiar with the concept just a couple of verses later that “by faith we understand that … what is seen was not made out of what was visible.”
When you take that last thought, from Verse 3, a step further, you can extrapolate that whatever is not currently in existence but that you deeply desire can, through faith, be generated just as well out of what is not now visible on this plane, to our human eyes. That thought is all I need to evoke blazing, serene hope!
