Gregory Peck, an American actor, once said, “Faith gives you an inner strength and a sense of balance and perspective in life.”
To have faith means to have complete trust in something. Many people associate the idea of faith with religion, but it is truly more than that. Faith is what drives us and gives our lives meaning. We need faith in order to wake up each morning and go about our day believing that we are making an impact on this world with everything that we do. We need faith when we start even the smallest task, to believe that there is a chance that we will finish it properly.
Faith, however, is most quintessentially defined as the trust we place in the people around us, especially those that have done nothing to merit it.
There has always been a debate about whether human beings are capable of change, or whether they were predestined to be good or bad people even before they were born. If it is true that a bad person can never change, then what is the point in placing our trust in such a person?
Imagine that each person is a book with pages that are filled with uniquely special stories. The stories within them are the experiences that have shaped them and made them into the people they are. For some people, these stories are happy and peaceful. For others, they are filled with pain and loss. When we meet a new person, they open up and allow you to see a page in this book. The longer we know them and spend time with them, the more pages we get to read. Eventually, we may form an opinion on whether they are good or bad. That is, we will decide whether they are worthy of our trust and faith.
In rare cases, this process may instead lead us to stumble upon a far more interesting truth. We may discover that the words ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are much too simple to define the complexities of human nature.
We can never fully judge a person and pre-determine what their actions will be. People who have always had a history of doing good things can suddenly snap after a bad day. On the other hand, someone who is consistently cold and indifferent can surprise us with a sudden act of kindness.
So, faith should not be something we give people as a response to our judgement of their character. It must be a natural response – something as easy as smiling or breathing.
Having faith in people means choosing not to reduce them into nothing more than the bad choices that they have made in the past. It also means seeing them for all the beautiful things that they are capable of doing in the future.
At the end of a road filled with true faith are the gifts of love, friendship and partnerships that last a lifetime. Our faith is an art that can change people and the course of the stories in their books.
