Keeping the Faith

**Warning: spewing of a cocktail of thoughts about religion, and human psychology.  If it doesn’t make sense then I apologize in advance** 

I’ll be the first one to admit that I’m jaded in terms of my religion or any other religion for that matter.  In fact, it’s not even just being tired of it, the more appropriate term would be disillusioned.  Does this mean, that I’ve turned my back on God? Nope.  Does this mean, that I don’t believe there is a God? Certainly not.  All this means is that I recognize that religion for all it’s tradition, holiness and truth dispersal is still and always will be run by men.  Men, who are prone to well……..human weaknesses.

All I have is this undeniable faith that each experience is there to make me grow as a person. I’m well aware of God’s presence in my life.  Years of living have shown me that God does exist and that overall, there is an underlying principle for all that we go through (good or bad) in life.  It all matters in the way we choose to see it.  A bad experience can be viewed as a lesson, a blessing in disguise or a forewarning.

I’ve noticed that a lot of people pray to prevent awful experiences from happening to them.  Yet, life was never really meant to be lived in such shielded circumstances.  One problem I see that makes unfortunate events more painful is the resistance to accept such circumstances.  If we could just close our eyes and pretend that the experience is not there, then it might go away. Denial of the truth is such a perfect waste of ones time.  Not only does this prolong the situation and inflicts pain over and over again , but also, provides a disabling result when what one needs to do is to move forward.   

Psychology has come up with the Five Stages of Grief. Denial is the first stage, then anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance. Although, people will not experience all, normally it takes three or two of stages to happen in a person.  Acceptance is the final stage in any eventuality of grief and it is what helps people to move on from devastating events in their lives. 

We view events in our lives with the same biased thoughts processes that our personal experiences have provided us through the years.  Normally, our reactions are the same to a given situation.  Neither, trying to understand the events nor seeking an underlying principle because in our minds it just is.  It takes brutal honesty within ourselves to come to terms with what happened (or what is happening) and to accept the circumstances for what it truly is.  To believe that it is happening for a reason.  Embracing it with both arms and things become much, much lighter.  

Religion is supposed to make things easier to accept.  A lot of people declare that they have tons of faith.  They believe in God and believe in the afterlife.  Place them in an unsavory position and the biases and insecurities come out.  Point is, if one has true faith in the afterlife and believes that that is the ultimate goal of a human, then all these unfortunate incidents that hurt, should not matter one bit, as all we need to do is to keep our eyes on the goal. Makes sense?  I don’t know, you tell me. 

I love Bon Jovi’s Keep the Faith single.  It provides so much insight when things go the other way in our lives.