An evangelistic post on faith and shit.

Don’t you just look at people sometimes and wonder; what drives them? What is it that, no matter how many times they’re knocked down, no matter how many times their spirit is crushed and their dreams shattered, always manages to pick them up and help them to start again?
You see people all too often in horrific accidents that lead to a loss of mobility – they are put into an induced coma and it is all but their sheer strength of mind that helps them to open their eyes, learn to move, to speak, to walk, to start to put their lives back together piece by piece.
Of course there are always those unfortunate ones who will be left behind, those who cannot move on and rebuild.  They are not to be pitied, they are not the weak, they are merely ones who believed so strongly in the element of their life that failed, that they cannot comprehend life without it. Again, you see them all too often; those who have taken their life because they can’t cope with the changes, those who rely so heavily on others for support you wonder whether they are really alive at all. Then there are those who, like my grandmother, never truly recover, but go through all the motions – a shadow of their former self.
So I come back to my question: what is it that some people have that drives them on? Is it religion? Or just faith, perhaps not in a God, but in some sort of divinity, a way of life. Is it their belief in themselves, the conviction that only you can truly determine what you will be? Or is it their belief in someone else, their absolute certainty that this person is their life, their reason for living? Is this love? Or just devotion?
Have they never experienced loss, experienced the feeling when all has been taken from you? Or does this conviction just lie in the hope that this something will never go away?
This reminds me of a Doctor Who episode a couple of weeks ago (don’t judge me, I have unbounded love for this show)where a creature fed on the faith that others had. At the end of the episode, the Doctor had to save Amy from the creatures clutches by breaking her faith in him. She survived, but it was like something inside her was broken without this faith.
Whatever “it” is, I envy and admire those people who can have such

unwavering faith in something. They show the rest of us just how beautiful it can be.