Words to live by

Does anyone of you have a phrase to live by? By now you all should know that I live by the phrase 'Always keep the faith'. Since it's always on the header of my blog. Actually I didn't believe in it for that many aspects of my life initially. It began when dong bang shin ki split up in 2009, and Micky and Jae had these words on them. So it became a phrase for Cassiopeia to hold on and believe in the 5 of them. Go to any DBSK video or JYJ video on Youtube and you will mostly see 'AKTF' or 'Always keep the faith'. But that's a story for another day, if I might.

I always knew about faith, but I never really understood the meaning of it until I took pure literature in Secondary 3. It was from Joyluck club, my favouritest book of all time. There was a comparison between 'faith' and 'fate' in one of the stories. And in the book it was said that although both sounded quite similar to the Chinese mothers, they meant completely different things. (At this moment now, I feel like watching the movie. Shall do that after I finish this post)

Fate was kind of like giving up, believing that you have no control over your life. And that everything is fated to happen even without you doing anything. I used to, and still believe in fate sometimes. Actually it feels kind of like Faith, but this has a more nonchalant feel towards life. Like resigning yourself to something.

But Faith was something different altogether. Faith is having complete confidence in something or someone, that things will turn out fine, or even better than fine, good, I would say. It's not easy to have faith. Sometimes it get so difficult to keep on believing in something when things turn out so bad, threatening to erode the faith that I have. When things don't occur in your favour, you might question 'Why? Why? Why?' like I have so many times. When you have put in so much effort into something that you really really want, and yet you don't get what you want, not even close to what you want at all. In such times, my faith wears really thin and at many times, I have been on the verge of giving up.

But we need to understand that when life (God) doesn't give you what you want, it's because He's preparing something even better for you. All those failures are just lessons to make us stronger and more prepared for the future. Although yes, you might find it difficult to accept that you haven't gotten what you want and can't see what lies ahead since we're always too focussed on what we don't have rather than appreciating what we have in our hands. We keep thinking of the failures and blaming ourselves for what we have done (or not done), and brush off our successes as luck. Failures hit us so hard that it gets so difficult to believe and continue having this faith.

But what we need to do is just pick ourselves up and remind ourselves that we need to keep on believing. For one day, everything will turn out fine in the end. And if things are not fine, it's not the end. So I guess my faith came from God, from reading the daily e-mails I receive from God's minute and Bible gateway. And it has made me into who I am today.

I don't know about you, but I always feel better knowing that someone (of a higher power) is watching out for me. There are still days when I feel upset and lament over why things are not going well for me, but I take comfort in the thought that faith is all I need.

A phrase I've been seeing a lot of recently is 'Live by faith and not by sight'. It's from the bible but many of my friends have been posting in on their walls on Facebook. Trying really hard to live by faith. Not an easy process but definitely enriching and fulfilling at the end of the day.

So there, that's how my 'Always keep the faith' came about. It's funny how it all began with being a fan of DBSK and how it has turned out to be such a pertinent phrase in my life, isn't it?