Life is a Journey

I am a Star Wars fanatic and I am a follower of Christ. The similarities between the Christian Faith and the Jedi Order have caused books to be written and I find it to be a great way to present my personal journey of faith as Jedi/Christian.

I know I am no longer a Padawan but somewhere in the midst of my knighthood my path got blurred, my faith had weakened, and I had almost lost hold of the purpose of the Jedi. Now equipped with the love of a family, a renewed hope with a purpose I am trying to find the my way back to the Order. My goal and desire is to be a Knight worthy of the honor, blessing and title of the Order. I Knight walking by deeds, words and power as I strive and grow into what the Masters have called me to be.

My Journey has not been easy and I have stumbled, struggled,
faltered, fell, even at times given up. However the Force and many of the Orders Knights and Masters haven't given up on me. So this is were you can join me in the very midst of my journey. That is the purpose of this blog. To be a place where others can join me in the journey that lies in the places somewhere between Padawan And Master. I hope to share the insight and words that touch my soul and catch hold of my intellect and my heart. To expose the things I fear and those things that spur me forward. It is my journey and I welcome you along.

Kenton J Mattos

Saturday, October 1, 2011

The Stuff of Dreams, Hopes and Faith

I have recently been working through some thoughts regarding dreams, hope and faith. How does one walk through the process of dreaming and hoping while keeping ones faith and hope in the right place? In my recent processing I came to a realization. It is hard for me to dream and hope.

As I was reading back through some journal entries from before I met Mandy I saw a lot of things I wrote about that I had dreamed about and hoped for. Things I believed God was showing me and had given to me to pray about. None of these things came to fruition. I ask why and didn’t initially come up with a reason. Having no reason adds fuel to the fire of disappoint from dreams and hope.

How does one walk in faith when you have a mounting pile of unfulfilled dreams and abandoned hope pilling up before you? Often times for me you don’t. You just stop putting faith in hopes and dreams. Then as you stop putting faith in them you stop believing in them. As you stop believing in them you don’t want to have them and a dream goes from giving one something to hope for into something to hold at a distance and regret.

It was in this process of thinking I have found myself dappling in for some time. Faithless, hopeless and wishing I was dreamless. But I am not. I have a dream. Not a small one or something I am even close to being able to do right now. This is why this dream requires an element of hope to support it life as a dream. Hope that somehow some way it can happen.
It will die there or at least will stay dormant there as it has for years until somehow something else is added to the mix. It is like having a seed planted in soil. It will always stay a seed and may even decay and rot so it becomes a part of the soil unless something is added to the mix. For the soil and seed picture you need water, for the dream and hope picture you need faith.

If you don’t water the seed correctly the very thing the seed and the soil need can actually be a part of the destruction. Faith can also do the same to the hope and the dream as I have experienced. It is not the act of having faith that is the down fall as I thought. I had bought into the thought that I have put faith into these other things and I believed in them and for them to occur and look what happened, nothing. Faith produces nothing. That is what my track record shows me.

I recently began to have a revelation about this faith, hope and dreaming thing. I discovered a tendency in my life. I have a tendency to put my faith in the hope or the dream. It is like expecting the seed and the soil to produce the water needed. When I look at my life and all the things I have but my faith in. I see one thing lacking, a correct placement of faith.

Where should one place their faith? How does one place their faith correctly? Is this something we should inherently know or are we supposed to learn as we go? What about being trained in the ways of placing our faith?

All these questions have been working through me as I have worked through my thoughts and as I began to write this blog. Have I come up with any answers? Yes. Do I have it all figured out so I can start walking in the right faith? No.

At some point in life the inherent ability of a child to have faith, to hope and to dream was lost or at least polluted. Now I have to work at faith and to retrain myself in living out faith. I need others to show me and teach me what it looks like and how it works. It is like a muscle that hasn’t been used because of an injury. It needs to be used and exercised so it can become strong and work correctly again.

Back to the question of where do we put our faith. I have seen and heard a very clear message lately. A message I have been reading about in my devotion time. A message I have heard and seen in the lives of people around me. God is the one I need to put my faith in.

2 comments:

  1. There is one truth I have found in faith. Faith is an action word just as hope and dream are action words. If you only dream with no action, your dream is likely to die. Same goes for hope. What is faith like a child? What do children do with that faith. They continue with life and work with and within that faith. I have been to too many churches that have faith that God will do something and yet they do nothing but wait for it to come to fruition. Sometimes it happens but most of the time they are still waiting. I heard a sermon one time about how waiting upon the Lord is an action. The same is true about faith. Okay now I see that I am going to start repeating myself. It has been a long day and an even longer week and tomorrow promises to be much of the same so off to bed I go.

    Justin

    ReplyDelete
  2. Direction, not desire, determines one's destination.

    ReplyDelete