What is Faith?

Recently I was asked to write an article on faith - not from a religious point of view, but from an everyday, coping with struggles point of view. I thought it would be a fairly straight forward task, but it turned out to be anything other than that!

My first draft at this piece was terrible and lacked any personality at all - 'I' just wasn't in it! So I sat down and tried again, this time really thinking about what the word faith meant to me and that was when it hit me - I had lost so much faith, in religion, in man, in the medical profession and most of all in myself. After some real soul searching I managed to put myself straight and write the article, but I learned a lot from the experience.

We often talk about having faith in various things and in ourselves, but in reality that faith is so very fragile and is often wavering before we even realise that things have got bad. For me having faith in myself was the biggest problem and I needed to evaluate myself, if you like, to discover that actually I am good at many things, I am worthy and I am good - why is it that we loose these beliefs so easily? The next problem, I realised, was that I had so little faith in my fellow man and in particular the Doctors that were supposed to be helping me, but whom I felt let down by. But then I realised how those who had let me down had actually helped me so very much - they had made me stronger, but most importantly they had taught me to trust my own intuition, and that in turn led me to have greater faith in myself.

Sometimes it is important to just stop and take stock, to look within and see if we're happy with what we find - we're all so busy getting through this life that these things often slip without us even noticing and before we know it we're plagued with searing self doubt, or we've just become incredibly jaded. So today please take a little time to stop and smell the roses and take a little peak inside to see if any readjustments are necessary :)