Gaining Faith.

Everyone has faith of some kind; a faith in something. What is your faith? Mother Earth? Allah? Buddha?

Still others are searching for faith. To simply believe in something. They are marked by a nagging restlessness and they recognise that there is a depth in their heart that simply has not been satisfied by any earthly thing.

If that is you then this may be of interest.

If you are seeking faith, this restlessness, the seeking and questioning in your heart is the perfect place to start. These feelings prove that your heart is ready and open for the next part of the journey.

I found faith of my own many years ago. It all started back in a church when I was about eleven.
I had grown up independent and proud of myself, my life, my accomplishments and I just happened to be generally happy. And why not be? In all honesty, I didn't believe I had a need for God.

But in any case I had been dragged to Church by my family and I was stuck there for better or worse to come face to face with this God who I didn't exactly believe in anyway.

It was a very different Church to those I had been in previously. They had a band and drums and singers and were actually singing cool songs instead of the outdated, out of tune hymns I had only ever heard sung in Church before. But it wasn't the music that impressed itself so deeply on me as much as this strange sensation I felt when the music was played. There is no other word for it: it was otherwordly. It was connection to something strange and bigger than myself. It was most definitely something I had never felt before. It startled and unnerved me.

I literally had no choice but to come back to Church. You don't really get to choose too much when you are eleven do you? So I kept coming back, week after week. And each week I would find myself being swept up in this music. I started to understand the feeling I was caught up in: it was Love. A pure unadulterated Love and it was from Heaven.

One of the first things I started becoming aware of was that my heart was really hard. I was proud, I wanted to live my own life without God interfering. I didn't want God to interrupt the wrongs things that I did. I liked my life the way it was. When I think about it, it is a bit cool that I could even realise this at eleven. That had to be a gift of God.

But somehow this love that I felt proved irresitable and every week I could feel my heart softening more and more as I gave myself over to this God who seemed to be asking for me. This was the point in my life when I really began to see for myself that God was real. Insanely amazingly, deliciously real. WOW.

But this was just the beginning of my journey....