FAITH:                             


      Today has been filled with quite a few questions of faith for me. Well for one, I should mention that I am a Christian. And a rather unorthodox one, at that. Due to a religious fallout at the age of 15, I've lost significant touch with my religious duties. Admittedly, the only times where I feel like I'm even partaking in something religious is when I pray before I eat a meal. A large part of the issue is my pride. I should backtrack a little; when I was 15, the Procreator stopped taking us (my brother, sister, and I) to Church on Sundays. I know this may come off as sacrilegious , but we were all okay with the thought of not having to wake up early to get all fancied up on a Sunday morning. We were young and naive at the time. I daren't ask the Procreator to go by myself, because she would lash out at me by saying that it would make HER look bad if her kids were there at Church, but she wasn't.
      This doesn't quite explain how my pride got in the way, however. Several months later, she had another one of her "revelations"- duly air quoted because every word and action she spouted was a complete and utter lie. We all saw through her facade. She would go on hypocritically preaching that the "disrespect" she receives (basically, any time we don't immediately give her what she wants) contradicts a Commandment. It doesn't, by the way. "Honor thy father." Not a mere mention of the mother. And subsequently, she tried to "renew" OUR (as a family) religious strength by urging us to go with her, but it was a ploy. She made her decision based on the majority agreement between the three, and seeing how we all didn't want to give in just to make her feel satisfied like she did something to strengthen our religious bonds, we continually answered no. And thus begun my downward spiral of faith. As mentioned before, the only religious thing I do nowadays is pray before meals, and my pride makes me do that in a hurried, secretive fashion, as to not have her see me and claim that I of all people was the hypocrite, since I can pay respects to my Lord (who deserves it) and not her (who obviously doesn't.) It's not like I deliberately want to be a man of bad faith. Poor practice has made it so. I've just been waiting for the right time to get back into my faith at a time that does not conflict with my pride. Selfish and foolish, I know. But I hope I'll be forgiven for my lack of diligence. Amen to that.