Have Faith

Having faith is something that I believe is essential to having a healthy life. You can have faith in religion, you can have faith in life (that everything will work its self out), and you can have faith in yourself. I have faith in all three of those things. Having faith is what has gotten me through some very hard times in my life and it has made me into the person I am today. "Have faith" is an expression that I embrace every day.

The first thing that I have faith in is religion. I am a Baptist Christian and have been since I was born. Growing up, I was taught about Jesus Christ and what it is to be a Christian. My family and I aren't typical Christians but we have a strong love for God. I have faith that God is watching over us and loves us with his whole heart. I have faith that here is a Heaven and that I will meet those that have passed there one day. It is comforting to me to believe that there is a life after death and that there is a loving presence watching over us. I lost an uncle when I was young to leukemia and the way I got through that was leaning on my faith in my religion. I believed and was comforted by the fact the he was with God and that he was no longer in any pain. My faith in my religion has a big impact on my views of life today.

The second thing that I have faith in is life, that things will work themselves out. Over the years, I've experienced some bad things in my life. Things always seemed to constantly be going in a bad direction. My parents were fighting all the time and eventually got divorced. My uncled died, I started having seizures and almost failed the 6th grade because of them, and all the while my sister's alcoholism had progressed. But I eventually got through it all. For a while, though, I thought that things would never turn out right. But I began to learn to have faith that the things in life that seem too much to bear will eventually work themselves out. It turned out that my parents getting divorced was the best thing for them and for us because we no longer lived in a hostile environment where tension was tangible in the air. My seizures eventually stopped and, with hard work, I passed the 6th grade to move on with the rest of middle school. My grief for my uncle has never gone away, but I have learned to live with it. Even the situation that I never thought would change for the better resolved its self and that was my sister's crippling alcoholism. Today, she is a recovering alcoholic and I am very proud of her. Even though those events have had an affect on me, I was able to accept these things for what they were and how they turned out because of my faith in life. I will always have faith in life, that things will work themselves out and turn out right.

The third thing that I have faith in is myself. Wow, I really struggled with this one for many years. Sometimes it's far more easier to have faith in others than it is to have faith in yourself. To have faith in yourself is to build yourself up and you are afraid if you build yourself up that someone will knock you down. That's very painful and something no one wants to experience. But sometimes it's not even someone else that knocks you down, it's yourself. For many years, I had low self-esteem and I battled, and still continue to battle, depression. I doubted my self-worth, thought that I wasn't good enough. That I was somehow lacking as a person. To make a long story short, I felt this way all through middle and high school. Every time I would build myself up, I ended up knocking myself down with thoughts like "I am nothing" and "Nobody could ever love me". I don't know when I decided that enough was enough and that I wanted to be happy. But I guess I decided it at some point because for a while now I have been thinking more confidently about myself. I also am on medication for my depression. I can not describe the major difference in me from who I was only months ago to who I am now. I no longer have low-self esteem and I have been successfully handling my depression. I no longer have those self-loathing thoughts about myself. If it wasn't for the support of my family and my boyfriend, I really don't know if I would have been able to have faith in myself to get myself through all of that.

Having faith is an essential part of having a healthy life for me. It has gotten me through many ups and downs. I am a better person today because of my faith in my religion, in life its self, and in myself. It takes courage to have faith, because faith is not a tangible thing. Have courage and have faith and it is guaranteed that things will work out alright in the end.