My Faith

Good morning, God.  I thank you for this new day, full of potential and possibility, in a world where I've experienced a great deal, and where I've shared a great deal with many wonderful people.  Life is full of amazing things, and it really is up to us to make the most of them--which I certainly don't do all the time.

If I had to point to one element of myself that keeps me from getting the most out of life all the time, I'd have to point to my faith.  Perhaps it's because my faith isn't strong enough, or perhaps it's because I neglect it more than I tap into it.  But when things get difficult or start going wrong, it's very easy for me to get stressed, to start to feel a sense of hopelessness or even despair.  It sometimes takes me a while to reach the realization that those feelings are misplaced--that things really are fine, and that I just have some obstacles that I have to take care of as I move on in life.  Those obstacles don't define me, though they may limit me; they don't define my life, though they may complicate it.

But for so long I've struggled with my faith--my whole life long, to be honest.  I've always felt that I've been caught in a Catch-22, that so many things were going wrong in life (my dad's alcoholism, my depression, my lack of meaningful relationships, among many other things) because my faith was weak, but that my faith couldn't go strong because so many things were going wrong in life.  It was a horrible feeling, one of being trapped on a treadmill that I had to keep running on, even though I didn't want to and even though I was going nowhere.

As I've grown older, though, and hopefully even a bit wiser, I've come to realize that the faith is one of the major determiners of how my life turns out.  I used to see faith as a result of my conditions, rather than seeing my conditions as a result of my faith.  It's been a very difficult turnaround to make, and I would like to ask you for some advice on how to do so.  I do want to turn it around, and I hope that you're able to give me some words of wisdom that will help me to strengthen my faith, to make it a much more central focal point that I can use as a point of reference rather than as a peripheral element of my life.  Could you help me out on this?