Faith rests on the strength of confidence—confidence far stronger than anything that can come from mere wishing or mere desire. Consider this powerful, universal promise:
Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them. (Mark 11:24)
Jesus said unto him, If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth. (Mark 9:23)
`Behold, I say unto you that whoso believeth in Christ, doubting nothing, whatsoever he shall ask the Father in the name of Christ it shall be granted him; and this promise is unto all, even unto the ends of the earth. (Mormon 9:21)`
Unfortunately, this promise does not apply to those who have less than perfect confidence:
...without faith you can do nothing. (D&C 8:10)
6 But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed.
7 For let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord. (James 1)
It isn’t possible to have such unshaken confidence based merely on desire. It isn’t possible to have complete confidence in what you are asking without any reasons to believe.
If you are wishing, you are not exercising faith. If you are guessing, you are not exercising faith. If you don’t know what you want or what it will take, you are not exercising faith.
Confidence comes through gaining and reconciling to information. Gaining faith requires gaining information. We read that the ancients had great faith because of their efforts in searching and obeying God’s recorded word:
Wherefore, we search the prophets, and we have many revelations and the spirit of prophecy; and having all these witnesses we obtain a hope, and our faith becometh unshaken, insomuch that we truly can command in the name of Jesus and the very trees obey us, or the mountains, or the waves of the sea. (Jacob 4:10)
2 ...they had waxed strong in the knowledge of the truth; for they were men of a sound understanding and they had searched the scriptures diligently, that they might know the word of God.
3 But this is not all; they had given themselves to much prayer, and fasting; therefore they had the spirit of prophecy, and the spirit of revelation, and when they taught, they taught with power and authority of God. (Alma 17)
Faith requires looking into every resource you have at your disposal to search for understanding of the subject:
`Search diligently, pray always, and be believing, and all things shall work together for your good, if ye walk uprightly and remember the covenant wherewith ye have covenanted one with another. (D&C 90:24)`
This includes everything in the scriptures, as well as all good books and people you have access to.
Faith means daring to dream of outcomes that would otherwise not happen, searching for a path to obtain them, and exercising both obedience to the path and sufficient effort to obtain them. If you have not bothered looking into resources that you have the means to investigate, how can you expect God to show you what to do?
Desires are not fulfilled merely because we really want them. You can’t merely wish something were true and still manage to exercise the complete confidence necessary to obey God’s commandments. You can’t overcome ignorance or incompleteness with desire. You have to become: you actually have to know and you actually have to act.
The Lord cried in agony for the Father to spare him death on the cross:
And he said, Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt. (Mark 14:36)
Surely, if it were possible to have your desires fulfilled just because you want them fulfilled, the Father would have granted Jesus’ request.
Jesus said: “With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:26) All things are possible, but not in all ways. This is one reason why desire alone is not enough. Desire must be coupled to the effective actions that lead to obtaining the fulfillment of the desire. Reason is the only means whereby those actions can be discovered and a significant source of the motivation to complete them.
All outcomes have a path to obtain them. Unfortunately, the path to what you do desire usually includes actions you don’t desire. In other words, the gift almost always comes in packaging that you won’t like. You can usually have what you want or do what you want, but you can rarely have both. Reason is the only way you can objectively measure whether the outcome or the path is more important to you through logical examination of the value of the outcome and the cost of the path to reach it. Valuation of outcomes through reason will update your desires, showing you what you really want. Reason will show you what is worth the actions it requires. It will also resolve the frustration that comes when you erroneously think you want multiple mutually exclusive outcomes.