Believing in the Unseen = Faith

I'm inspired by Clarence, thanks for the blog post:
http://aconvowithgod.blogspot.com/2010/04/universal-law-of-faith.html


Most of us never put ourselves “out there”. What that means is we don’t go after particular goals because we don’t believe we can obtain them. Before we can go after something, we must first believe it’s possible and have faith. I realize that most people’s so called “lack of work or effort” is really a direct reflection of their lack of faith. When we do not believe it is impossible for us to act. We later blame our unproductive lives on a lack of opportunities but opportunities are everywhere, in plentitude.
 
I received a call from a friend to enter a modeling contest online. Now what I didn’t know is he told about 25 of his girl friends on Facebook. 2 of us decided to enter. The other contestant entered and said that she had been a finalist in their previous contest years ago. I could definitely see why she had just cause to enter the contest again. Now on paper I’m only 5’4, and far from thin (I like to think I’m wonderfully curvy) so becoming an industry model wasn’t exactly something I was planning to become. But it just so happened that this particular contest was about hair and facial attributes which means height was a non-factor and so was weight to a certain extent. It made me realize that there is always a particular way to do almost anything even goals that seem very restricted or incredibly limiting.

In my friend's blog, he talks about one woman's faith. More specifically, he talks about a biblical story in which a woman in need of healing approaches Jesus. When she finally sees Jesus in the crowd, she makes a decision she is going to touch him, and she also "knows" that she is going to be healed. But that makes me wonder several things. What made her know that she was going to be healed? Did she make that decision beforehand, that if she ever saw Jesus, she would touch him regardless of who was there and she would become healed? There is a Universal Law…it’s proven in religion and physics that “what goes towards comes towards”.

It’s the scientific law of cause and effect. The issue is most people don’t realize that the cause is our thoughts or more specifically, our original decision to go after a particular goal. In my situation, the cause was making a definite decision to enter the contest. The effects are all the actions that happened after that decision. The woman in the story decided she was going to be healed, and so it happened.

Most of us like to think that things “just happen” to us. We think we are born lucky or born fated to disaster. Wrong.

Once I decided to enter, I then ACTED upon that initial decision, immediately. I sent out an email to all my folks and then I sent out a link on facebook to get people to vote for me. This was the scariest part. I had no idea what was going to happen next. But it was too late. I had already acted upon my decision. This is where I encourage people who are going after a particular goal to do something that makes them commit to their decision. The best way to do this is to tell other people about it. If I had waited to send out the email another day, my inner hater would have destroyed me (fear is no joke). I started thinking limited thoughts right after I sent out the email. “What if no one votes for me?” “What if folks don’t think I should be a model?” "It's just an online contest, is it worth any effort?"

But it was too late…I had already sent it. And the next two days something crazy happened, I was part of the Top 8 immediately. I was totally surprised. And then my co-worker told me something that I’ve told myself over these past 3 months. He said, “If you’re going to go after something, you might as well decide you’re going to win at it and be successful.” And, throughout this whole competition, not one person has ever said, “I don’t think you should have entered”. Imagine that! But most of us…oh no we totally sabotage our best intentions. We don’t say that we’re winners. Instead we say things like “I’m just going to enter the contest and see what happens. I don’t really care anyways.” "I'm not going to go after (fill in the blank) because I don't think I can do it. And if I try it, and I fail, people will think I'm stupid."

From the beginning, I decided my plan of action would be to send out 2 emails per week to my friends/fam and to send a daily reminder on facebook, in order to remain in the TOP 20. It started out WONDERFUL (beginner’s luck huh), I was part of the Top 8, then the Top 10, later the Top 20…but then I fell off completely after 3 weeks. My dad called me and said you need to do more. But I was already executing my plan. Maybe I needed to give more in my emails, so I started incorporating stories. More phone calls came in to let me know I wasn’t part of the “Top” group anymore. YIKES! I started to panic, but I realized that I was doing everything in my capacity to act upon my goal. Then came the inner hater, "Relax, it's just a contest!" You can quit now and know one will really care that you started it". Or I could just believe that I was going to be in the Top 20, after all, I had put forth effort.

A week later, I walked into work, and someone yelled out to me, “Hey Shak, you’re number 6! What did you do over the weekend?” I was FLOORED. I couldn’t believe it. Did more people start voting for me? Was their a glitch in the matrix? Or….

The next month, the same thing happened. I was holding on to #19 for dear life and then I was bumped off completely. Now there were over 1000 women in the contest, and my friends let me know that there were billboards up everywhere. Folks at my job told me they heard about the contest over the radio. I wanted to panic again…but I was dealt with this just a month ago. I was sticking to my initial plan of action. I didn’t want to inundate my friends with any more emails and I didn’t want to fall into a competitive mind set. I decided I was going to just wait and relax. (BTW, I never sent messages on facebook like “PLEASE VOTE FOR ME NOW, I NEED YOUR VOTES BECAUSE I’M ABOUT TO LOSE MY SPOT”). I always sent messages thanking people for all of their help. I decided in the beginning that I would only send out positive messages of thanks and no messages of panic.

Last week, I bumped up to number 8 from 23/24. Now, I have no reasonable explanation for why this happened as I’m not that skilled and savvy to have a reporting system that captures all of the votes. But I was nonetheless really pumped by the results. And what was to come next?

More obstacles…most recently, I’ve had a few folks close to me, hate on this endeavor, underhandedly of course. In the past, I would act secretly towards a goal without telling anyone because of fear of these types of obstacles. But with this goal it is impossible to not “put oneself out there”. My friend asked, “What are you going to win again?” in a condescending tone. “When is it over? Wow, that’s a long time for just a contest.” I was actually offended and hurt. But one thing I’m learning through the process is to remain detached personally from others, thanks Bright. We only give off to others what we feel inside. And so we should not take what others say about us personally, although it is hard to do when we care about people.

I’m convinced by simply DECIDING to go after our initial goals we become changed, we become more, and some of us become believers. We gain the ability to really have faith in the unseen. There are now 1240 women in the contest, I’m number 14 which in mathematical terms, I’m part of the 1% group. How awesome is that?

With only 2 days left, I’m going over my initial reason for entering the contest. Initially, I thought whoooo hooooo, with $5,000 I can do this and that like take a lil trip and film some material. I also thought, I could use the contest itself to promote the plays I’m in…but something else happened. I ended up writing stories, and sharing them with people. And now I look forward to writing stories, it’s not about the contest or the play, how about that? God is so clever. I received so many responses over the past 3 months, I feel like I’ve already won a major prize. We never know how we find our paths you know. We just have to submit to the process and stay open. We often say I won’t do this or that but we can be blocking the very thing that brings us joy. We have to fight fear DAILY or else we end up doing much of the same which is often not doing much of anything.

P.S. http://www.thegreatmodelsearch.com/profile.asp?CustomerID=23

Shak
100.