On Faith
Dr. Irving David Shapiro
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Trust Me, I Was Told
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Issue
Eight: Power
Issue Nine: Humor
One of the more powerful albeit elusive ideas known to humankind is something called faith. It's also one of the
lesser understood.
“Faith” is one of those things that either ya got or ya don't.
The Bible says (Hebrews 11:1) that “faith” is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” But I don't think you can tell from that whether you have faith or not.
However, there is a better way. In moments of trouble kind of stand aside and watch yourself carefully — what you do and what you say.
Here's a little story to illustrate the point.
Once upon a time, a man was driving recklessly down a dangerous, narrow, twisting and turning mountain road. All of a sudden, the car spun out of control and went over the edge. The driver temporarily saved himself by reaching out and grabbing hold of a shrub part way down the precipice as the car hurtled towards the bottom of the canyon some 2,000 feet below. Hanging in space with no apparent way of saving himself, the man begins to plead with God.
Please help me, O Lord! Please, please help me.
YOU WANT MY HELP?
Yes. I'll do anything. Anything.
ALL RIGHT. I'LL HELP YOU. BUT ONLY ON ONE CONDITION.
Anything. Anything. Name it.
THE CONDITION IS THAT YOU TRUST ME.
I trust you. I trust you. Now please help me.
OK, LET GO.
A moment passes. Another. And another. Then, desperately clutching the shrub, the man begins to shout, “Is there anybody out there who can help me? Anybody? Please?”
Think about it.
The point of this essay on trust is this: It's easy to say that you trust Him, but it's extremely difficult to actually do it. I should know.
You see, my full name is Irving David Shapiro. Everyone who knew me for the first 50 or so years of my life knew me as Irving. Almost no one does now. Now it's David. And for good reason.
To tell the truth, Irving was a bright, unfeeling, selfish, dreadfully insecure, combative, determined, persistent SOB. Trusting God was not in him. I don't think he even knew that there is a God.
Then the world caved in on Irving -- his wife (whom he had met when she was 12 and married when she was 17) died; his architectural practice went down the tubes, and his wealth (comprising a significant amount of real estate and cash) completely disappeared.
As you might expect, Irving fell apart. There was pain, lots of it. Tears, lots of them. Anguish, tons of it. But two good things came out of that emotional Hell -- (1) Irving became David (who was determined to be everything that Irving was not) and (2) God "magically" appeared. As John Flavel once put it: Man's extremity is God's opportunity.
It wasn't long before David, once he got to know God, started to trust Him. Not 100% to begin with, because there was still a great deal of stupidity, ego, call it what you will, left in him. But enough to let God work through him to let him do something Irving had never done -- help others (let me shift over to "I" now), which I did, and continue to do, by helping to free people from what Stuart Chase called the "tyranny of words." I do that by teaching people what language is, how it works, and its relationship to thinking and communication.
In that regard I've written a couple of books on the subject, a number of booklets, and I did commentary on radio more or less about language and life.
If any of this interests you, I invite you to check it out.
http://www.menssana.org/something_to_think_about_volume_1.htm will take you to the first volume of the essays. There you'll find essays on fear, on the brain, on political correctness, etc.
http://www.menssana.org/Personal_Freedom_Treasure_Chest.htm will take you to a catalog of those booklets, as well as to the essays, all in downloadable for free PDF format.
http://www.menssana.org/book_infomercial.htm will take you to an infomercial about my first book on language.
If you find any thing that I've written helpful, I'll be very pleased.
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