There's a phrase that I've been sitting with for a while. More recently, I've been feeling invited to look a little closer. It's the phrase: the eye of faith. Alma in the Book of Mormon uses it. Moroni uses it. And the more I study about it, the more convinced I am that most of us, myself included, tend to treat it like a figure of speech, when it may be one of the most practical, helpful instructions God has ever given us.

Moroni, writing about the faithful who came before Christ, says there were many whose faith was so strong that they "could not be kept from within the veil, but truly saw with their eyes the things which they had beheld with an eye of faith, and they were glad" (Ether 12:19).

Read that again. First they beheld it with an eye of faith. Then they saw it with their eyes. The seeing came second, the vision came first.

I don't think that's an accident of language. It's the same pattern God describes about Himself: "I, the Lord God, created all things... spiritually, before they were naturally upon the face of the earth" (Moses 3:5).

Everything God creates, He creates twice: first in spirit, then in element. And if we're truly His children, learning to become like Him, then maybe it shouldn't surprise us that faith works the same way in us. What we're willing to see first, with an eye of faith, has a way of eventually showing up where we can see it with our eyes.

That sounds beautiful when life is going well. It can be considerably harder when the evidence in front of us seems to contradict the things we have been hoping for.

I’ve been teaching principles of Rare Faith for more than twenty-five years now, and you might think that after all this time I might have graduated from needing to practice them myself. I assure you, I have not. In fact, I think some of the greatest tests of these principles have come because I knew them. After all, it is one thing to teach that we don't have to know how everything is going to work out, and quite another to find yourself in situations where you genuinely cannot see how it possibly could.

There have been plenty of those situations in my life. There have been times when I couldn't see how a financial problem would resolve, times when something I desperately wanted for my family seemed nowhere in sight, times when unexpected health concerns made the future feel suddenly less predictable, and times when the combined weight of family responsibilities, relationships, business decisions, and plain old exhaustion made it much easier to focus on what was happening, than on what might yet be possible.

Here's what I've come to believe. Most of us aren't faithless. We're just looking in the wrong direction. We stare at the bank balance, the diagnosis, the empty chair at the table, the door that closed, and we call it being realistic. And then we wonder why the future keeps looking exactly like the present.

Of course it does. We keep rehearsing it.

Alma didn't treat the eye of faith as optional. He said that if we will not nourish the word, "looking forward with an eye of faith to the fruit thereof, ye can never pluck of the fruit of the tree of life" (Alma 32:40). Never. That's a strong word from a gentle prophet. The fruit doesn't come to people who wait to see it before they believe in it. It comes to people who look forward, who picture the tree grown before it has a single leaf, and who keep nourishing it with that picture in mind.

So why is it critical? Because the eye of faith isn't a garnish on life; it's part of how the life we long for is made. We're always looking forward at something. If we aren't deliberately looking forward with an eye of faith, we're looking forward with an eye of fear or an eye of habit, and we'll keep building more of what we already have. The question isn't whether you're picturing your future - you are. It's what you're picturing, and whether you're willing to see something other than the default future before it feels safe to.

And I think that's where we tend to be lazy, because looking forward with an eye of faith takes effort. It takes deliberate, daily attention to what could be, when everything around us is shouting about what is, and making decisions from what you faithfully expect, instead of from the limited resources presently available. Honestly, it's so much easier to let our circumstances do our thinking for us. But...

Memories tell you where you've been. Circumstances tell you where you are. An eye of faith tells you where you're going.

Moroni also gives us the hard part, maybe as a warning to take this seriously: "dispute not because ye see not, for ye receive no witness until after the trial of your faith" (Ether 12:6, emphasis added). There's usually a stretch in between, a season when you've seen it with an eye of faith but can't yet see it with your eyes. That in-between is not evidence that it isn't working. It's the trial Moroni promised, and it's exactly where most people give up, sometimes just before the fruit appears.

The eye of faith is not wishful thinking, it's the first step of creation - the same step God Himself always takes before revealing something new.

There's so much more to this than I can fit in a blog post. There's a specific way to use your eye of faith that I've watched open doors for my family and for students all over the world, and there are a few common mistakes that can also quietly cancel it out. That's some of what I'll be sharing at this year's Rare Faith Virtual Conference, "Looking Forward with an Eye of Faith," October 13–17.

Trevan and I will be joined by more than 20 other presenters, each sharing how they've seen these principles work in marriages, families, finances, health, and callings, often when they couldn't see any way forward at all. Sometimes hearing someone else's story is exactly what helps your own faith grow.

Registration is FREE, and I would genuinely love to have you there!

Whatever is in front of you right now, it's only the part of the story you can see with your eyes. The rest is waiting to be seen with an eye of faith first.

Save your free seat at the Rare Faith Virtual Conference