Last week, during Office Hours, one of our sweet friends shared that because she does not have much faith of her own right now, it helps her to borrow faith from me. And as soon as she said it, the conversation opened up. People began talking about the faith they have borrowed from friends, teachers, authors, family members, and people they may never meet.

And of course, I immediately talked about my beloved Joey Tribbiani from the TV show Friends. He was my guiding light. He was the one I turned to when everything felt hopeless. He was the one who somehow never worried. Never over-analyzed. It never even occurred to him to protect himself from anything because, to him, there was nothing but safety. Nothing but abundance. Nothing but love. In the most extreme situations, Joey just ate a sandwich or ordered a pizza. He was the epitome of No Big Deal. I loved him. So, I borrowed his light. I borrowed his faith when I had none of my own.

But Joey was only one of many people I borrowed from during the darkest period of my life. Back when I was lost inside my mind’s story that my life and my health were hopeless—back when I was convinced that I would never be happy again—something interesting began to happen. People started showing up in my life through books, television shows, podcasts, courses, and ordinary conversations. Some of them were real. Some were fictional. Some lived hundreds of years ago. But they all seemed to have something I could not find in myself.

They had lived through illness, tragedy, trauma, grief, or heartbreak, and somehow they still seemed light. They could still laugh. They could feel joy. They could be present in their lives in all the ways I couldn’t. They were not pretending that hard things had not happened, and they were not tying their stories up with a pretty bow. They simply did not appear to be terrorized by life in the way I felt terrorized by life.

I did not understand it at all. But a tiny part of me became curious.

I started reading and listening more and more. I was not trying to make sense of their stories, and I was not taking notes so I could follow their steps and get the same result. I think I just wanted to soak in the way they talked about their lives. There was this common theme running through all of their stories that I wanted to learn how to have for myself. I wanted to know how Grief and Light could exist in the same person—AT the same time! How really intense challenge and joy could be part of the same life.

One of those people was Katie Wrege. Life somehow just dropped her onto my front porch in 2018, when my primary lived experience was terror. Katie had lived with chronic hives for more than forty years, and somehow this woman was happy. I remember thinking, “Wait. What? She’s so carefree and light and joyful—AND she still gets big ol’ red, itchy welts and swollen lips and eye lids. HOW can those things co-exist.” But, there she was, standing on my front porch with a goody bag filled with all kinds of treats…AND a box of Zyrtec for my itchy hives. She beamed as she joked about her own hives and how she learned early the BEST wire brushes to use when the itching was a level 10. I listened to all of her stories and advice, but it made no sense how she was so lighthearted and joyful about it all.

During one of my worst outbreaks, Katie encouraged me to go to our country club. She knew what it was like to be covered in hives and still show up for things. She was not asking me to stop being scared, and she was not promising me that I would feel wonderful once I got there. She simply wanted to hold my hand and help me see that two things could be true at the same time. I could be covered in hives, have a big fat swollen lip, AND and I could go to the country club. I could feel afraid, and I could still participate in my life.

Katie was not telling me that I could live again after the hives were gone. She was showing me that the hives could come with me. And that she would not leave my side. We sat outside on the patio of the Red Fox, our country club’s casual restaurant. My heart RACED. There were so many people there. My top lip was SO big and distorted.

But, sure enough, as we sat and talked, something inside me began to settle. It wasn’t bliss or anything—but it was enough to plant the tiny seed that I was deeply OK.

Katie opened the door for me to actually experience the possibility of two opposite things being true at the same time. I could have my worst nightmare come true—a hives outbreak and swollen lips AND also have a sense of being deeply safe and held. When I had no faith of my own, Katie’s was strong enough for the both of us.

There was another person whose faith I leaned on when I had no one of my own. He was one of my dad’s good friends, General Norm Gaddis. I had the privilege of not only hearing his story from my parents, but I also had the honor of hearing it directly from him over dinner one evening. Norm had been a fighter pilot in Vietnam. In May of 1967, while flying his seventy-third combat mission, he was shot down over North Vietnam and forced to eject. He was captured, and he remained a prisoner of war for 2,123 days.

That’s nearly six years.

I remember sitting there listening to this man talk about experiences I could barely allow my mind to imagine. He spoke about being physically depleted and mentally depleted. He described circumstances that, from where I sat, sounded completely and utterly unbearable. And then he talked about faith. He talked about peace. Hope. Love. Kindness.

I remember having the same reaction I had experienced with Katie, only on an entirely different scale. How could those things possibly go together? How could someone live inside circumstances that horrific and still have access to peace?

My entire understanding of peace at that point was essentially that peace was what I would experience AFTER my health improved. AFTER my gun-to-the-head terror and panic subsided.

And here was Norm telling me about discovering peace in a place where almost none of the circumstances could be made okay. He wasn’t trying to convince me of anything, and that mattered. He wasn’t telling me that I should have his kind of faith. He was simply sharing what had been true for him, and somewhere inside me, something loosened.

Just 2%.

But that 2% planted a seed that helped me see that this kind of peace and contentment was POSSIBLE even if I had no experience of it at the time.

I couldn’t understand how people who had experienced enormous grief could laugh again without somehow betraying what they had lost, but there they were. Little by little, I began to wonder whether my inability to access something was really proof that it wasn’t there.

What if I could simply immerse myself—surround myself—with people, both real and fictional, who had this inexplicable faith? What if simply being OPEN to witnessing it could plant more seeds?

To be clear, I did not suddenly become hopeful. I did not wake up one morning filled with faith, and I certainly did not stop being afraid. But each person loosened something inside me by the tiniest amount. Their lives suggested that the conclusions my mind had reached might not be The Truth of my life.

I opened my heart to this little treasure: “It is possible that faith, joy, and hope are 100% available to me, even if I cannot feel any of those things right now.

I could borrow the possibility that something existed beyond what I was currently able to feel.

It was like seeing the faint light of a lighthouse far off in the distance. I was still in the dark. The water was still rough, and I had no idea how I was going to reach the shore. But that little flash of light told me that the darkness was not everything.

And back then, that was enough. When I didn’t FEEL like I had any lightness, any faith, any hope, there was something helpful enough just to know it existed.

Thankfully, my mind typically didn’t say, “Look what they managed to do. Why can’t I do that?” By grace, somehow my mind usually said something along the lines of… “Someone else is having this same experience I am of terror or grief or shame…AND they see lightheartedness right in the middle of it. Maybe I am misperceiving my own reality right now. Maybe my own five senses and my own adorable little brain are not capturing the truth.”

Somehow, that was enough.

Maybe this is one of the reasons we come together—the reason we have other people in our lives…even if they exist only in books or on podcasts or TV shows. Because of them, we get to borrow lightheartedness. We get to borrow a sense of humor. And we get to borrow faith. Faith that something beyond our mind’s ability to comprehend is here for us even if we have no experience of it right now.

Maybe the greatest thing we can offer when it all feels bleak or scary or hopeless is a willingness to just stay open. Not to try and BE more lighthearted or more hopeful or more joyful. But to simply hold the POSSIBILITY that right now, whatever is unfolding just might not be what our minds are telling us it is. And maybe, there is something in the center of even the most intense experiences that is here to walk us home. Even if we can’t see it or feel it.