 But third, even if you had those two things, you need courage to face what might be possible for you. As I have worked with people over the years, it has become very evident to me that if one is flagging in courage, you will go to denial because it is too overwhelming. A lot of folks have a tremendous difficulty in having courage, and I thought and thought and thought about this a long time trying to figure out why don't people have courage? And then it began to be more and more clear to me that there is another element. You have to have energy or you will not have courage. And so if you don't have energy and therefore you don't have courage, you won't be able to face either what's possible for you and you certainly won't be able to face what's wrong. Now how does one have energy? Here I agree with the great Paul Tillich. I think you get energy through faith. Now faith, I use this the way that Tillich used it, you sort of either have it or you don't. It doesn't mean you believe something. It doesn't mean you feel a certain way. It doesn't even mean you will a certain thing. Faith means that in fact, discernibly, you're hooked up to something that pulls you together, that has juice. You're hooked up to something, we can say this, that mediates juice, I like to say. So there's a kind of a phenomenological thing about faith. That is to say, if everyone has some faith, or they would be dead, all of their systems would be fragmented and quiescent. Faith is that phenomenon of yourself being pulled together. There is something pulling you together, pulling you together against the forces that would try to destroy you. And so it pulls you together and enables you to stand into your life. So it's not a question of do you have faith by the virtue of the fact that you're sitting here, you have faith. The issue is how powerful is this? If I really look carefully at myself, is what I'm hooked up to, am I getting enough juice through this pulling me into integration that I can resist the fragmenting forces that are coming at me from without and within? So all of us at any particular time are somewhere on a kind of a continuum. You will notice that some days you actually have more faith than others. And it's simply, you just simply can look at it, am I being pulled together so that I can step into my life with courage and face my possibilities and face those things which are trying to kill me. Does that make sense? Okay. And one of the things to do, when I always do, when I'm teaching people about spiritual direction or spiritual leadership, as I say, what you do with anyone is you simply try to look and see what the state of faith in this person is. And then you look at what their faith is in. In other words, you can put it this way. What is mediating their faith? Because they may think their religion is religion A, and they may have very heart, very passionate commitment to this dogma of this religion. But if you look close at them, they may be hooked up and be connected to the juice through a person. It may be coming in through a person. It may be coming in through an image of themselves, but you folks that are really wonderful. You know, your faith can actually be in an image of yourself. And the interesting thing is that if you're getting the juice that's pulling you together and enabling you to stand against the destructive forces in your life, it is working somewhat. And I started out by saying there's a way in which all faiths are idolatrous to some degree. So even idolatrous faiths are faiths because they mediate power. And they mediate juice that pulls a person together to some degree or the other. So as you're looking at yourself on the spiritual issue, you can ask yourself, well, how is my faith? Am I accessing energy that's pulling me together so I can step into my life, resist the forces of destruction that are trying to destroy me? What is mediating it to me? Where am I connecting with it? Maybe a woman, maybe a career fantasy, follow me? But if you look closely, there is some place where you're hooked in, where you're plugged in. It's very important to look at that because a faith can be in something that is really going to disappoint you later. But the fifth thing is faith, the element of faith. Because if you have no faith, even idolatrous faith, you can say like this, idolatrous faith is better than no faith at all. Because without faith, then you're in real danger of having your despair kill you. One of the things we all struggle with is despair.