When Faith Fails…

True faith should not fail, and it won’t.  When you have been taught something your whole life, the moment  always comes when what you believe is put to the test of truth.  Will what you know get you through as promised?  Or will it fail?  If what you know fails, then what?

What is the choice when what you know fails?  In my view there are two choices and they have very different outcomes.  

1. You are hurt, deeply hurt. Anger comes, the anger takes over and bitterness sets in.  The trajectory from there, is that all aspects of your life will be tainted with bitterness and blame.  

2. You are hurt, deeply hurt.  You ask yourself, what now?  The anger comes and you feel it, then use it.  Anger is a tool, and you use it to grow and expand.  

In both scenarios there is very little difference in the experience until the part comes when you choose what you want next.  In both, you are scared, angry and deeply hurt.  The difference comes when you answer; how you will use the hurt?   It is the moment that drastically changes the trajectory of your pain and your life.

It will make all the difference in your experienced outcome and all the difference in who you become when something or someone you believe in fails you.  Will you be that bitter person?  Or will you become that inspiring person?  

Either way the events define who you become as you define your life.  This doesn’t mean these events define you, nor does it mean you have to get stuck in them.  Events don’t define you, they place the comma in your life that gives just a pause; to then allow you to write what you will become because of it.  

For so many years now, it’s felt like Grant’s death has defined my life.  It was a big comma for me.  The struggle to keep writing my life from that pause has felt scary.  To even keep trying to finish any kind of sentence of my life has brought a lot of layers to process.  

I realized that it is time to start writing my life again.  I don’t want that pause to stay forever.  I also know that it will be a defining moment in my story, and I have been bitter about that defining me.  I won’t be that bitter person, not anymore, not ever.  That’s not who I am.  I won’t let that define me as such just because it hurts.

What I believed, failed.  I see now how I can keep loving and move on. I see how to never forget, be sad and still find a happy place again and again.  I now see how to keep on creating my life just as I did before.  The creation of a life, it really doesn’t look any different from what it was before he died.  

I was always creating everything around me, it was just with him in it.   Now that he’s not in it anymore I’ve felt as if I’ve been stuck.  I have been, and I needed to stay in that space of pause for a while.  I’ll probably always need that.

But faith, faith in what is possible, or hope, that’s the kind of faith that doesn’t fail.  Faith that leads down the path of possibility. It’s when your heart guides and the reality of the world falls into that path as if it was always meant to be there.