Faith
Faith has two ingredients:
1) Action
2) Time / Persistence
A lot of people take action, but give up when they don’t see immediate results. They don’t persist for a long enough period of time. Imagine a straight line running for 100 meters down a flat canvas. Imagine that straight line is the current course of your life and you would like to change the results you’re getting in your life. So you make a change, you take action.
You roll a ball one single degree off the center of that line. After rolling for 5 meters, the ball is only slightly off course, and if you stopped the ball there, there would be hardly any change. But give it time, and persist, and by the end of the 100 meters you have a big gap between the ball and that line. The longer the ball is allowed to roll, the bigger the difference. Imagine the line running from Johannesburg to Cape Town. One degree will make an enormous difference.
Time is the magic ingredient of faith. If you truly expect a result in your life, action will naturally follow in the same way that when a gunman sticks a gun in your face, your expectation to have your head blown off will motivate you to put your hands up and surrender.
But time and persistence is what separates the mice from the men. Look at all great men of history and you will notice that they are the same as you and me, except for one thing, they’ve realised the importance of and developed the quality of persistence. Combining their directed actions with time and persistence, they achieve great things. They may or may not have been of a specific religious persuasion, but spiritual laws work whether you’re an atheist or a theist – that’s why evil people can also prosper.
When you take action and persist, you’re demonstrating faith and all things are possible to him who believes.