Faith

Earl Bakken, electrical engineer, pacemaker inventor, and founder of Medtronic is an interesting guy.  He thinks faith heals.  At least that's how I understood what he told me a few years ago in the conference room of the hospital he founded on the Big Island of Hawaii.  


North Hawaii Community Hospital is beautifully situated in Waimea.  It is the highest tech-highest touch healing center I've ever visited.  It even has a director of holistic services who oversees a program that includes reiki, prayer blanket ministry, pet therapy, aromatherapy, and guided imagery. Their vision is to treat the whole individual through a team approach to patient-centered care.


But, it was the faith thing that caught my attention.  So, I asked him, as an engineer who's company's products have saved thousands of lives, what does faith have to do with it.  He responded, it's the person's faith that brings about healing, the technology alone is insufficient.  In a document entitled The Healing Environment in Blended Medicine at North Hawaii Community Hospital, he writes: "We know the importance of the intangible, of faith..."  


My favorite definition of faith is "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."  Faith and vision are inextricably linked; and are sorely needed in times of stress and uncertainty.  People who have faith don't usually focus on the way things are; they focus on what can be.  They imagine it, describe it, believe in it.


Faith holds the power of transformation.  It means we stop talking about what we don't have and spend time talking about what could be. As Jim Lord, author of What Kind of World Do You Want writes: “It takes courage to break from our routines and bring our ideals, hopes, and dreams out into the open; to make them legitimate topics of conversation; to shift our sense of what is and what is possible by changing the way we talk about it.  It takes courage to reclaim our power to change the world.” 


As with hope, faith is contagious.  Albert Schweitzer said, “I am convinced that far more idealistic aspiration exists than is ever evident.  Just as the rivers we see are much less numerous than the underground streams, so the idealism that is visible is minor compared to what men and women carry in their hearts, unreleased or scarcely released.  Mankind is waiting and longing for those who can accomplish the task of untying what is knotted and bringing the underground waters to the surface.”


Whether we are religious or not, faith plays a key role in leadership.  Whether as a nonprofit executive or a member of a board, championing the ideals of our organization's cause, seeing the world as we imagine it can be, and inspiring others to follow is our responsibility.


So, let's keep the faith.