The Way had a different approach to hedging against lack of results, it was called The Law of Believing.
The Way differentiated between "faith" and "believing", even though both words were translated from the same koine Greek word, πίστις (pistis). Although their definition of "faith" was never entirely clear, it was vaguely defined as "an inside job", something accomplished by God within you, while "believing" was an action that you took. You actively believed what God, via the Bible, said, and you acted upon that belief. For example, if the Bible said that you could be healed of disease, then you believed that promise and reaped the result of believing it. Perhaps you've spotted the hedge?
Of course the problem was that it all depended on whether or not you were really believing, and in the circular logic employed by so much of religion, if you got the desired result then that proved you were believing; conversely, if you didn't get the desired result it couldn't be God's fault, you must not have been believing. This article of faith ensured that anyone who suffered from chronic illness, financial difficulty or any kind of problems just wasn't believing. The initial doctrine describing how believing was defined as believing what was written in the Bible morphed into several related practices. One was the tendency for Way people to say that they were "believing for" something, sometimes something as insignificant as a parking space. The other was the increasing tendency to view whatever "leadership" said or did as blessed by God, so if something bad happened to a leader, it wasn't that they "weren't believing" - they were being attacked by The Adversary (Wayspeak for The Devil).
Like I mentioned in Part XII I transferred from the Queens Village Way Home to a different Way Home in the Richmond Hill neighborhood after some incidents that should have caused me to question the whole foundation of The Way, but instead had the opposite affect of causing me to double down on my Way commitment. During the next six months a combination of more red flags and what looked like genuine miracles pushed me even further into Way-World. The red flags perversely convincing me that a deeper commitment on my part would be the solution to eliminating these speed bumps in my life. The apparent signs, miracles and wonders further convinced me that it was all real.
