What is faith?

This is a question that I have had to struggle with this last year. What does it look like to have a full relationship and to walk by faith? How do I continue to live my life while facing disappointments, heartbreaks, and struggles all while keeping in mind the ever so faithful One who has my best interest. Often times I find myself looking up and questioning how much my life is on the track it is supposed to be on. I question that I will end up where I am meant to be, that I will end up with who I am meant to be, that I will define things how I should. 

When I think of what faith is, a line of a novel comes to mind. It is a line that touched me so intensely at the time of me reading it, and it came at a "cross roads" in my life. It is from the book Redeeming Love, a book by a Christian author that I believe finally captures the true heart of MY God, the loving, forgiving One that I long to trust and put my faith in. In it, the character of Michael is faced with the challenge of his struggling ex-prostitute wife who he rescued and learned to love, and allowed her to love him. She is about to run yet again from the fear of the love that he has shown to her broken spirit. He knows that if he holds on to her then the person she is meant to be will never come to be, but letting her go seems like a task that will break him. Finally, after he comes to this conclusion that he loves her and needs her to be the women she could truly be, he decides to let go. He looks up to the heavens and he asks God, "If I give her to you will you give her back?" No answer came. This is the epitome of my faith, of my... life. Blind faith. It would be easy for me to hand over my career aspirations knowing that when I got it back I would be a big movie producer for movies that will change people's lives. It would be easy getting over breakups and heartaches if I knew that the man I was meant to marry would be more then what I would imagine. It would be easy to hand over the dreams of traveling if I knew where I would go, if I knew that I would adopt all the children I want to. But life is not easy and faith is never meant to be easy, if it was easy then it would be something different. 

Every-time I read Redeeming Love something hits me differently. When I read it a year ago, life was changing and this is the part that hit me. If I hand my heart to someone that I have dedicated my life to who I know is the only One who has the power to handle it carefully, I no longer have control over it. I handed over something a year ago and it took another year for me to learn that the broken pieces I thought I was picking up from it was just a task on becoming the woman I truly want to be rather then a fault of the only true loving One in my life. 

With this, as I feel the shift of summer coming I feel a change coming. A deep breath and faith is the only way to step into the future that seems so blurry and unkown. I guess I will just have to face it... with strength not my own.