Alone on the Battlefield, Essay Example

There are times in my life when I think that I should have done some things differently. Maybe I should have taken a different class, maybe I should have tried a bit harder to get that dream job, maybe I should have worked harder on maintaining some of the relationships that were important to me, and maybe I should have spent less time on the things that were not as important.  When I find myself falling into this way of thinking, I try to take a moment to remind myself of all the things in my life that I value and that I am grateful for, and I also remind myself that all of my decisions, the good ones and the bad ones, are what led me to this moment in my life. In just this past year my marriage fell apart, and in the moment I realized that it was over, I found myself thinking all of the negative thoughts about all the things I could have or should have done differently to avoid arriving at that point in my life. It was also in that moment, however, that I finally realized that I was not alone, and that I had never been alone. It was in that moment that I began to find a relationship with God.

I was raised in cultural environment where God and the Church were important parts of life, where religious holidays were celebrated, where saints were revered, and where no one ever questioned whether God was something real. Despite this background, I never took the issues of religion or God very seriously. God was some distant figure, more of an idea than a real presence in my life. I was raised by my grandparents, and divided my years between New York and Puerto Rico. My grandmother, especially, was very devout, and I can recall many times where I saw her with her rosary beads, praying to the Virgin Mother. I never questioned her beliefs, or my own, but I somehow managed to think of God as a supernatural force that stayed in the background, and who did not have any direct impact on my daily life. It wasn’t that I did not believe in God, it was just that I never gave Him much thought. Even as a child, when I said my prayers at night, it was something I did because it was expected of me. I sent my messages to God without ever expecting to receive a reply.

As the years went on, and I became an adult, the daily reminders of God slowly slipped away. I eventually joined the military, and today I am an active duty soldier stationed in Germany. There have been many times over the years that I have had conversations with people about God, or religion or spirituality, but none of those conversations left a real mark on my soul. It wasn’t that I had lost faith in God; it was more that I had never really developed faith in Him in the first place. Hearing other people talk about their faith always left me feeling as if they were speaking some sort of secret language, or that they lived in a world I could not understand. I believed that they had faith; I just did not know how to share that faith with them.

Life is full of battles, and as a member of the armed forces I understand what it means to go into battle and to have faith that my fellow soldiers will be there for me. It is life’s small battles, the most personal ones, which sometimes left me feeling unarmed and unsupported. At the beginning of my marriage, I was grateful for the feeling that my husband would be by my side when I faced the battles of life, and when he told me that he no longer loved me, I felt alone in a way that I had never felt before. It was not just my faith in my husband that was broken; it was my faith I everyone. If the person I loved the most could let me go into battle alone, who could I ever trust again?

In the center of this storm, of this emotional battlefield, I had a friend who asked me the question that would change my life: “Do you have a relationship with God?”  It was difficult for me to understand this idea at first, but as the emotional pain of my divorce started to fade, I realized that I was drawing closer to a personal God that had always been there for me, waiting patiently for me to realize it. As I began to turn to God to seek answers to life’s questions, I began to understand that this was not the distant God of my childhood; this was a warm, caring God who simply wanted to remind me that I was never alone and was always loved. Now, as life’s big and small battles rage on around me, I have faith I will survive them with God by my side.