When I think about faith, I think about the difference in my life just three years ago. My faith was dried up, cracked to the touch. I believed in things that were killing me.
I’d quit believing that having faith in something greater could lastingly do anything for me. I also believed I had a right to feel this way because of the struggles and horrors I’d witnessed throughout my life. Back then, the ongoing hell around me had me tangled as I spent most of my days for several years with my son in a children’s cancer hospital. Eventually, I completely surrendered my faith and my life to substances that offered me relief for just brief seconds.
The possibility that there could be compassionate faith like I’d never known, showed up when I had fallen well below rock bottom. The hope offered to me came from the least likely of persons. She told me my addiction is my disease just like my son’s was cancer. She never judged me, she opened the door to hope and then sat there with me until enough faith showed up for me to take one step. Just one. She never asked for more than that.
I was being offered the chance of a lifetime to begin to recover much of what I’d lost in life. A simple solution where one step followed by another and another would eventually add up to a life I’d never known filled with promises, a fellowship, and even more hope. All I needed was just enough faith in that one minute to make one move towards a life I’d been so afraid to live. Filled with gratitude and faith, I choose, anew, each day to surrender to my compassionate Higher Power. Directed, I take the next right step and then the next.
Connie C
