April 9

If You Want to, You Can Do It

When you want to cultivate something, you have to look for a little culture. The same is true if you want to cultivate faith. Think of all the sayings, all the great teachings and apply them in your life. Before farmers cultivate, what do they do? They first prepare the soil by taking out all the stones and twigs, leveling the ground, loosening the soil, putting in some manure, aerating it and then planting some good seed.

In our own lives, we have to go through a similar preparation. The seeds are the good thoughts from the scriptures and the great sages and saints. Put them in and nurture them. Let them grow in your life.

Cultivation is not that easy. It takes effort; but certainly if you want to, you can do it. To achieve the small things in life, you have to work very hard; but to achieve the spiritual goals, everything is done once you have that faith.

When a person is trying to cultivate faith, there will be hundreds of things to come and disturb it. There will be tests. Immediately things will come to create doubt in your life. Somebody will say, “God, enlightenment—why worry about all that? Enjoy life. You are missing so many nice things by concentrating on the spiritual life.”

It is not just in this age. For millions of years the same thing has happened. There are so many temptations to forget about spirituality. “Free me from temptation,” is one of the important prayers. “Take me to the real pasture where I can graze. Do not take me into areas where I will be distracted.” Have sincere, heartfelt prayer. It is not easy to build faith. Keep praying, “God, please help me. Let me see the Truth always.”