When I first became a Christian, I was in my 20s, and prayer was something that was kind of formal. It was something I had to remember to do. I had to, like, make an appointment with myself to remember to pray. And as I’ve grown in my faith, and as I’ve grown in my walk with God, prayer is just a conversation between me and God all day long.
It starts before I open my eyes in the morning. Before I’m awake, I say thank you that I’m waking up, thank you that I’m here, thank you for this day. And then I try to remember to invite him into every aspect of my day. And it’s like an ongoing conversation that lasts all day long, into the evening. And then I finish my night.
I have a little routine that I do every night when I lay down and I close my eyes. I try to think of 10 things that have happened or that I’ve noticed during the day that I’m grateful for, and I mentally check those off. And so prayer is a way of life. It’s not just, like, memorizing something and saying it. It’s a way of life for me.
My positivity, my inspiration, comes from, first and foremost, God. Trusting that He is good. Because if I didn’t have that, if I didn’t have that basic belief, that rock-solid foundation of knowing that I know that I know that I know that God is good, I wouldn’t be able to make it through when bad things happen.
Because bad things happen constantly. You know, there are always little bad things that happen and, sadly, there’s huge bad things that happen. And if I didn’t know that I know that I know that God is in the midst of it all, and that His nature is such that He cannot lie–God is not capable of lying, and if He says I love you, and I’m going to work this out to bless you, I have to believe that to be true. Otherwise I would go absolutely insane.
So my faith is kind of the cornerstone for being positive. But I’m naturally a positive person. I always have been. You know, I hit the floor running in the morning, and I don’t have any time or energy to slow down to complain, to, you know, bad-mouth about my lot in life right now.
If I did that, you know, I wouldn’t be able to get up. If I just stopped and fell down because sad things that happen, I wouldn’t be able to get myself back up off the floor.
Faith is the belief in something you can’t see. A lot of people say, “Well, show me, and then I’ll have faith.” Well, that’s kind of the opposite of faith. Faith is believing in something that’s not quite tangible.
But for me, faith is knowing that there is a higher power–I choose to call him Jesus–that is all-loving, all good. And so when bad things happen, because I know and I believe in my faith that God’s going to bring something good out of that, when bad things happen, my faith gives me the ability to trust that God’s going to work it out somehow, someway. And that God has a plan, even though I can’t see it.
I may not understand it. I may never understand it. I may not understand until I get to stand before Him face to face. But my faith tells me I know who I’m going to be standing before.
