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The Stories That Have Shaped My Faith
Bits and pieces of wisdom create a mosaic
If I had to describe my faith and belief system in two words, those words would be “cobbled together.”
The first pebble in the mosaic is the concept of a loving God. That belief was rooted in me from earliest childhood, but was challenged when I attended a fundamentalist Christian school for several years.
What I was taught there absolutely terrified me. It took years to dislodge those pebbles and disentangle those lessons from what I truly believed, and when the last remnants of fear were finally gone, my trust in a loving God was still there waiting for me.
And then there was the huge span of years where I wasn’t actively involved in any religion. But as a person with many fears and a tendency to live deep inside my head, God, faith, and spirituality were never far from the surface.
Searching for courage
I collected pockets full of pebbles wherever I could find them, turning them over in my hands and working them into the mosaic when they felt right.
Some of those pebbles were the examples I thrived on — stories that randomly came my way about people who survived tragedies I could only imagine crumbling under and people who maintained some seed…
