Day Sixteen

If you ever want to lose faith, hope and love in a giant motherfucking hurry, get divorced.

I grew up within the bubble of Christianity; I went to church, Sunday School, Christian private school and Christian University. Let's just say I learned a lot about Christ.

Even when I didn't believe in the things I was learning, I still dug deep, chewing the material like an overdone steak. I wanted to squeeze as much as I could out of what I was learning so that I knew for sure what I believed to be true and what I did not. I wanted to make it my own, which is important. I'm glad I did.

Grace is one of the foundations of Christianity (my favourite topic of all time; I could talk about grace for HOURS). Faith, hope and love are the mothers of grace in that it takes faith, hope and love to first unclench our fists in order to receive and give grace. And we need grace because grace is movement. It's action. I can't just say, "I grace you" and stand there like a donkey. I can say "I love you, I have faith in you, I have hope in you" until I'm blue in the face but I won't show it without grace. Hee-haw.

See? This post isn't even supposed to be about grace but I can't stop!

I want to talk about faith and hope. Ask anyone who has been through a divorce how much their hope and faith in anything has changed and they will tell you that they either have very little left, or none at all. Standing at the alter, the couple is pregnant with hope for the future. They have dreams and ideas of what life will be like together and while they're exchanging their vows they're teetering on the edge of this free-fall not caring how risky it is as long as their bodies are intertwined on the way down.

Divorce causes the death of this hope and nothing is more disabling than hopelessness. 

Faith (in God, or in relationships, or in the capacity to love and trust again) is like the very first baby step toward rebuilding hope. It's a choice, whether or not we're going to stay stuck or move forward. I used to silently mock the ignorance of faith but after trying it out myself I now view it with respect. I used to think that only children and needy pathetic adults depend on faith (and maybe some do just to fill in the gaps of their own ignorance, allowing them to be lazy in their spirituality) but now I realize that it takes massive amounts of both courage and humility to have faith to move forward, to take that first step.

And that's where trust is formed, is rebuilt, by that very first baby step of faith. Without that first step, trust is empty, the future is hopeless. And only by the grace that we give and receive are we able to even imagine taking that first step of faith. Knowing that we aren't perfect and understanding that it's okay to be just as we are in that very moment, are we then able to unclench our fists and let go.

And as we free-fall, we learn that we don't hit every branch on the way down, that sometimes we can actually fly. And we wouldn't have been able to feel the invigorating feeling of flight if we hadn't made that conscious decision to let go in the first place. Have faith, have hope, and love...and I promise you that by grace you will get un-stuck, and you'll give this life something to remember.

Move it.