Faith, faith, faith.

I’ve been thinking about faith a lot.

I came across a deck of soul coaching oracle cards with the tagline “What your soul wants you to know”, and I chuckled. I said, “Okay, soul, what do you want me to know?” as I shuffled.

Faith.

Faith and I have a long sordid history. I gained faith and lost faith when I gained, then lost my daughter. Her middle name was to be Faith. I struggled for years to regain my faith – faith in anything – after I lost her.

And the past several months, I’ve been struggling with having then losing faith all over again, as I suffered through the trauma of 2010, losing my dreams and my uterus. I’ve found myself, again, sitting here with no faith and wondering what to do and where to go from here.

And then, just after surgery on my very first outing alone in months… I ask my soul what’s up, and I get “faith”.

Faith. Faith.

One day, after I took Pace to work, I was sitting at a stop sign at a one-way intersection. Traffic was pouring by, and I was stuck at the sign for several minutes. After a few minutes passed, I got frustrated and impatient. I’m ready to go! I thought, and was aggravated when traffic didn’t care.

But then, I took a deep breath. I had a moment of pause, of quiet. I watched several more cars pass by. I looked in my rearview mirror; there was no one behind me. I wasn’t in a hurry to get anywhere. There wasn’t anyone waiting on me. The morning was peaceful and entirely mine.

I took another deep breath. Peace washed over me. I said, “You know what? I’m not in a hurry, there’s no one waiting on me. I can sit here for an hour with no harm to anyone.” Another deep breath. “I’ll get to go whenever the time is right. It will happen in exactly the way it is meant to happen.”

Faith.

After Pace came home from BlogWorld, we had a huge fight. She’d told me she’d made friends with someone we had, in my perception, agreed to keep at a distance. I was hurt and angry and upset. It took me days to work through my feelings. And then, one morning, Pace said, “I think you might want to ruminate on openness. You seem very divided on the issue; you’re both attracted to and repelled from openness.”

So, I sat down to write. At first, anger flooded out. I didn’t think I would get through it; I’d been so angry for so many days, and it had thwarted my every attempt to work through it. But as I wrote the same words over and over (openness… dig down deeper… openness…), I began to tap into deeper, darker fears.

I can’t be open unless I feel safe.

I can’t feel safe unless I have faith.

Faith.

I burst into tears.

Faith.

I need faith in Pace. I need faith in others. I need faith in myself. And I need faith in Spirit.

Faith.

It whispers through my thoughts. It dances through my dreams. On gossamer wings, faith flits in and out of my mind. Faith is always in my heart. I cover it up with fears. I hide from it, I run from it, I disown it. I banish it.

But quietly, softly, gently, faith always waits. It sits here, in my heart, peacefully waiting for me to open up and breathe it in.

Faith.

So important is this to me, that I inked it into my skin. Faith, here, on my wrist, right next to my little yellow butterfly – for what is the life of a butterfly but a testament to having faith?