Stepping Into The Void: Faith & Trust

I want to tell you about something that took me most of my life to learn.

For years, I thought I understood what it meant to trust, to trust myself, to trust God. I read books about living with real faith. I could talk about surrendering to the universe over coffee and sound like I knew what I was saying. But there is a big difference between thinking you understand something and actually living it, and life kept showing me the difference until I was finally ready to see it.

What I learned is simple to say and very hard to do. At some point, you have to jump into the void and trust that it will catch you. It takes courage to take the leap, and you feel like you're risking everything.

Maybe you know the feeling I'm describing. You're standing at the edge of some big decision. You can see everything behind you clearly, the life you already know how to live. Ahead of you there's nothing you can make out. No guarantees, no map, no proof that it works out. And so you wait. You gather more information. You tell yourself the timing isn't right yet.

I did that for a long time. I called it being careful, or preparing. Looking back, I think I was really just asking the unknown to make me a promise before I gave it anything. That promise never comes. The unknown stays unknown right up until you enter it. That's why the jump takes courage.

For me, the edge was my job. It was steady, it was respectable, and it paid me on time every week. I spent years telling myself I would start my company once I had saved enough, once I had learned enough, once I felt ready.

Then one day I opened an old journal to a random page that was nearly blank, the only thing written at the top was "Matt's Ideas". But the rest of the page was blank. In that moment I realized that I had spent my whole life working towards other people's ideas, I had never taken the time to decide the mark I wanted to leave on the world. In the following hours I drafted my resignation letter, and sent it the same evening, taking the leap.

I want to be honest with you about what happened next, because this is where a lot of people get sold a softer story than the true one.

"When you jump into the void, it will catch you."

This is a quote I remembered about stepping into the unknown, I thought about it a lot that day, because I was testing the idea in real time...

The void caught me. But it did not catch me gently.

I went more than a year without any income. Not a smaller paycheck. No paycheck. Every dollar the business brought in, I put straight back into it, because I could see the company I wanted to build, and I knew that starving it to feed myself would kill it before it ever got the chance to grow. From the outside, that might sound bold. From the inside, it felt like holding my breath for a year straight. Nights where I couldn't sleep because the doubt was so loud. Mornings where I woke up and wondered if I had traded a good life for a feeling.

Holding faith through that is heavy work. Trusting deeply, when the evidence hasn't shown up yet, will stretch you in places you didn't know you had.

So please don't take this lightly. Surrender is not a mood or a nice idea. It asks something real from you, and it doesn't tell you in advance how much. You need to be prepared to give everything you have, and then more. We gain nothing without sacrifice, and sacrifice comes in many forms.

Here is what carried me through those nights, and it's something I want you to hold onto if you ever find yourself in the middle of your own jump.

The pain is temporary. Everything is. Think back to the hardest feeling you had five years ago, the one that swallowed whole weeks of your life. You probably have to work just to remember it now. Feelings move through us like weather. Even the heavy ones. Especially the heavy ones.

And the pain isn't happening to you. It's happening for you.

I believe now that this is part of how consciousness develops. You become a fully embodied human being not by protecting yourself from the unknown, but by passing through it and letting it change you. Nobody can do this part for you, and no amount of reading about it counts. I know, because I did the reading for years while my real life waited.

I'm not going to tell you when your moment is. Only you can feel that. I'll just tell you what I know from the other side. The fear was real. The pain was real. And the catch was real too.

The void has been waiting for you longer than you've been afraid of it. It knows how to hold you.

"Courage is not the absence of fear, courage is being more afraid than you've ever been, but choosing to push forward anyway".