As I was driving home last night, I paused on a song as I was flipping through radio stations. As I listened to the first lyrics of the song, my mind did not immediately roam to God or faith or religion. Rather, the lyrics brought to mind the people I have in my life (or back in my life) now and how wildly different my life is now from what it was a year ago.
I rarely write or speak of my faith for multiple reasons. Over the last ten years, my faith journey has taken some crazy turns, and my faith now looks very different, even entirely unrecognizable, from the beginnings of my faith in junior high and high school. At some point, I began finding myself disillusioned with the ideas of faith that I had come to grasp as truths. When I left for college, I moved away from the cloister of people who had shaped my faith for so long, and I began to encounter more complex situations where the ideas I had been taught no longer fit with my deeper, internal understanding and beliefs of how others ought to be treated. I began to find my simply defined faith challenged by bigger ideas.
While at college two hours away from home, my home church disintegrated (to become something bigger, it turns out), and I lost even that tether to faith. I was forced into a situation where I had to form my own understanding of faith. I struggled (and sometimes still do struggle) to listen to “Christian” music or messages because I began to find them trite, cloying, hypocritical, or disappointing, and sometimes all of the above. I began seeing hurtful messages that were sometimes interwoven with messages people meant to be wonderful and healing. It has taken years of healing fellowship within my church for me to come back to an equilibrium with my faith, even though my faith probably still doesn’t fit many people’s theological definitions of what faith ought to look like or be.
The one truth of my faith that I have been most influenced by, which has always felt genuine and honest to me, is the concept of agape love. Unconditional. My sister used this word again recently, which was the first time I’ve consciously thought about it in a long time. In high school, the word was commonplace in my vocabulary, and although it has fallen into disuse throughout my faith journey, the concept of agape love has remained the foundation on which my faith is built.
In listening to lyrics that spoke of being thankful for the scars, I was reminded that faith was the reason I was able to make one of the hardest decisions I have ever made, and the reason I was able to choose healing over brokenness. It was not a moment of thinking, “oh, of course, this is clearly the choice God wants me to make.” It was a lost, broken, and pleading appeal to my faith, desperately hoping that life could get better and that God would not want me to choose misery out of fear of the unknown. I found strength in having faith in the future, faith in possibilities, faith in the people I knew would be there for me on the other side no matter what I decided, and faith that my Higher Power would want better for me. This desperate, ugly, raw version of faith is the reason I am in a healthier, more self-actualized place in my mental and emotional growth than I have ever been. Faith is not for the faint of heart. It is much easier to continue on as things have been. It is much easier to encounter fair-weather faith. It is much harder to meet your faith in the midst of the pain.
My faith has always been found in people. My faith when I am lacking faith appears in the calm, constant existence of people in my life who care about me and want the best for me. It appears in their ability to love me the way I need to be loved and their insistence on reaching out to me beyond walls I’ve constructed to hide the hurt or to keep the hurt at bay. It appears in the friends I haven’t spoken to in weeks or months who can somehow sense when I need them and still know exactly what to say. I have learned my faith from the people who never fail to make me smile or laugh regardless of what’s going on in my life and who remind me just how healing joy can be. I have learned my faith from the people who can simply hug me and heal something deep inside of me that I didn’t even know needed healing. I have learned my faith from showing others this same Love.
Agape. Unconditional. Constant.
Mountain Mama's Daughter 
Leave a comment