Faith

I think in order to live any type of happy life at all we have to have some type of faith. When everything material and physical and tangable in your life seems like it is being dragged into a place where you can never get it back, it is that which you cannot see or touch that proves to be most powerful. A see a lot of people wear the crucifix and chain and go to church on Christmas and Easter. These people think that by going to church every once and a while they are doing their God's will. These people are what I like to call, just in case believers. This means the moral compass they use to guide them through life is so messed up they don't even know right from wrong anymore, and they do not really believe in God. But by the off chance he exist, they went to church, just in case.
You can not expect to be born into devout beliefs. For me, it was a few life experiences that showed me that there is some one or some thing out there watching me, watching all of us.
Recently I lost a friend. He was a kid that I knew for a good amount of time, and on top of everything else he was completely healthy. He liked to party and have a good time, but as long as I had known him he had never really strayed from just enough alcohol or maybe a little bit of marijuana to calm him down. A few days ago I woke up to find that he had died of a heart attack in his sleep caused by the combination of the drugs meth and coke, two things he had never touched before in his life. My world came crashing down around me as I fell into a deep state of shock and confusion.
It is situations like these where we stop and think.
Why would he do such a thing?
Why would addicts live such long lives on the drug as he dies after one use?
Where was God?
If I didn't believe that someone or something greater than you or me could ever imagine was behind this, and that this was all part of one plan to better our Earth and everything around it, I do not know what I would do with myself. It is this faith, this feeling of power that overwhelms us at times like these, that push us to move on, learn, and take with us the knowledge and wisdom we have learned from events like these.
We as people are scared of what we can't control and fear the unknown. We are scared that we will lose people close to us to disease and tragedy that we could never possibly predict. We have to put faith in the fact that things out of our control are fully within the control of another more powerful than us. We have to have confidence that in the end, everything in our lives is part of something bigger than we could ever fathom, and that we are all part of this idea, this plan, this everlasting future.
Fear is not always a bad thing to have. Most of the time, fear derives from love. We are afraid to lose something or someone that we care deeply about. To quote Martin Luther King Jr, A man who does not have anything in life he would die for has never truly lived. I am a strong believer of that. I truly pity those who believe that there is nothing bigger than the world we live in. I pray, and believe, that everything has happened for a reason.

I miss my friend.