This is even more important when it comes to our spiritual lives. Life will not always be plain sailing and we must be prepared for head winds and rough seas ahead. In order for us to maintain an unwavering faith and not have a 'faith wobble' at every crisis, we need to keep ourselves anchored in the hope of Jesus and keep practicing our coping tools. Your faith and hope go together - without the one, the other will always tend to 'leak' out. To use the analogy of flight, faith is the runway from which your hope takes flight. You need a solid foundation of faith in order for your hope to remain steady when you are hit by a storm. To achieve this, your faith needs to be based on WHO God is, and not what He can DO, otherwise when bad things happen that you don't understand, you will not survive the storm well.
The only way to learn who God is, is to spend time with Him. We need to be reading His word, the Bible, daily and speaking to Him through prayer. When we are undistracted and open to hearing the Holy Spirit, we give God the opportunity to give us a personal revelation of Himself. We also need to take time to write down our answered prayers, so we can remember them when we are faced with a lack of trust, faith or have doubts and need a breakthrough.
In other words, we need to already have a game plan in place and have all the necessary survival tools at the ready, BEFORE the storms come, so that we can be prepared for them and get through them unscathed. Knowing our weaknesses and trigger points will help us to be better prepared and not fear the storms of life.
(Based on 'Unwavering Faith' Sermon by Robert de Jongh - Shofar Church, Century City, Cape Town)
