The Struggle Of Faith

As I briefly covered in my last blog post, Christianity plays a big role in my life especially with health issues. It can be extremely hard to keep a strong, solid faith in the midst of health issues or even struggles in life in general. How do you keep a strong faith while dealing with struggles in life? Let me tell you, its not a piece of cake. For me at least, when my health issues began to take a turn for the worse, my faith was a big issue for me. I didn’t understand why a God so great and powerful would question me with health issues affecting every single aspect of my life. Everything changed and in a matter of months, I was bed-bound, malnourished, and required tube feedings and IV fluids and medications to stay alive. So why would a God so amazing make me suffer? Why do I have to live my life like this?
When this all worsened, I didn’t think my faith would be as much of a struggle as it was. I didn’t think much of it at first-slowly not praying as much, not having as much of a desire to go to church and read the bible, et. It didn’t hit me until my one day when I went to church, I realized how much I was drifting off mentally and not totally paying attention. My relationship with God was slowly weakening and overall I didn’t talk to God nearly as much as I did before.
Faith can be such a hard topic when you are dealing with struggles in life. This is because people can fail to trust God’s plan for them, and when things get hard, we tend to look for someone to blame. In my case, I didn’t necessarily pray to God and say “its all your fault!”, but more indirectly began losing my faith and my trust in God. So how do we cope with this and keep a strong faith when its hard?
When I realized how my faith was weakening, I was honestly scared at first. Scared for my faith and what was going to happen. This hit me rather hard and quickly, and deep down I WANTED to have a strong relationship with God. I started to trust His plan for me and reading similar stories others had experienced. I reached out to instagram, and met so many other people experiencing the exact same issue. I quickly grew my health account to over a thousand followers in 6 months, and had such a good community to lean on. People understood EXACTLY what I was going through, and I have made some of my closest friends through this whole process.
The biggest advice I can share to others experiencing similar struggles is to be there for others and ask for help. Don’t be afraid to open up and share your experiences with others, because chances are there are so many other people going through something similar. You can lean on each other and even work together to gain back what you’ve lost.