Having Faith Is Not At All Easy, But Here’s Why It’s Totally Worth It
As much as anything, faith is the constant fight within you. Not a resistance or a struggle, a perseverance that accepts the insanity of the task ahead. A sometimes broken soul that wakes up each morning, and just takes the first step.
Sometimes the act of faith is much more than just your surrender to the mass of uncertainty you have no way of deciphering – it is the acceptance of a deep, deep scarring that you learn to cherish and admire. Years of countless moments of impossible frustrations; dead-ends on roads you invested ridiculous amounts of time in pursuing; deceptions in places where your absolute trust was the only factor keeping you sane. Faith is reflecting on all of that, and wholly owning it as part of who you are, what you have become, and where you are going.
It is not a “surrender” to the forces which have no quantifiable meaning; it is the empowerment in a moment of time where you embrace the fact that you have absolutely no control over a single moment in time ahead of you, but that you have absolute control over how you will respond to it, and that even in your most broken state, you will be okay after all is done.
This is where I am today; whole-heartedly captivated by the utter acceptance of who I am, as I am, and what that means for me going forward. This is where I am when I speak to the man I love and see infinite amount of hurdle ahead with, and choose to love him with a ferocity that, with any less level of faith, would destroy me. It is the place from which I take on professional tasks that defy my knowledge, and proceed to work through them, methodically, slowly, with an unshakeable certainty that with time I will master the task. It is also the same place from which I can now reflect on the people in my life whose words and actions at times broke me, and not feel any ill will towards them. Embrace our infallibility and how we all get lost in our own fears, making violent stabs at any source of security we can grab it, and sometimes act as bystanders that take the hits of others. That’s okay.
It is just as much the space from which I feel no shame or need to apologize for not wanting it to be different or quieter or smoother or tamer. The place from which I can tell somebody, “this doesn’t interest me”, and not actually feel bound by their acceptance or non-acceptance of my path. It is the tap that I switch off when the pressure of the negativity gets a little or lot too high; the flow in my life that I accept is far from perfect, completely skewed, and demands to be cultivated daily. That’s what faith is; it’s a daily practice of not giving a shit about how terribly wrong it can be, and loving it anyway. Of looking fear in the face and admitting your utter terror; quivering as you step forward into a direction that paralyzes you, but moving forward anyway.
It’s being completely and totally aware of how hard and painful and breathtakingly horrific the future could be – yet working as hard towards it as you can.
What faith is not is an external catalyst; a person, place, event, or period in time in which surrender and acceptance simply blur and inertia only propels you forward. It’s a choice, a constant choice, to be as you are and love as you can and do your best even when it is, in the end, totally inferior to the result you seek. It’s knowing that you’ll be okay if your lover decides not to love you anymore; if you fail so spectacularly that, only time and humility will let you rise again; that if you are all alone and stuck and confused and shaken by the infinity of uncertainty ahead of you – you will choose to be okay. And you will be.
As much as anything, faith is the constant fight within you. Not a resistance or a struggle, a perseverance that accepts the insanity of the task ahead. A sometimes broken soul that wakes up each morning, and just takes the first step. A person that has no fear in admitting to themself or to another that in a given moment in time, they may be doing shit or feeling ecstatic – but feeling no shame, because it is human and part of their path. A person who has faith that, through the best and worst, through love and rejection, through success and adversity, through friendship and loneliness – they will pull through.
It’s an unwavering kind of faith, strengthened only by continuous attempts to destroy and discard it, only to choose to have it all the same. 
