“I’ve never prayed before so can we just talk?” -Thousand Foot Krutch, In My Room

"Down under the night sky, I'll lay in wait. Praying to who ever will listen to me." -Young Guns, Bones

“The Lord is a refuge for the oppressed, a stronghold in the times of trouble.” -Psalm 9:9-10

Recently, I have needed help. Things just seem to keep not going my way, no matter how hard I tried. It truly feels like my chance for success and achieving my dreams is flying farther and farther away with each passing day. I have also felt extremely alone, even though I try my best to surround myself with people who care about me. It's not their fault I feel this way, it’s just how I am. I’ll go through times where I have really high highs, and then it plummets to extremely low lows. It's hard for me to carry on with what I want to do with such a thing consistently dragging me down. One night, I had an idea. It came seemingly out of the middle of nowhere, what if I re-accepted religion into my life?

I can mark the exact time I turned my back on my religion, the year was 2014. 2014 was the worst year of my life. 2014 was the year I lost everything I had. 2014 was the year I suffered alone. I have written about this year before, but even that lengthy article can not do justice to what I went through that year. No amount of words can ever capture the way I felt and the things I did in response to how I felt. A good example of how low that year made me, I developed insomnia and would only sleep about 2-3 hours per night, but yet I still struggled to find the motivation to get out of bed in the morning despite laying wide awake for hours previous.

I turned my back on religion that year for pretty obvious reasons. I had done everything the Catholic church I had attended years previous and growing up had told me to do. I did everything I was supposed to, and no angel, no miracle, nothing was coming my way to help me. I didn’t understand. Can I blame myself? No. None of it made sense, but then again, nothing made sense to me those days. I abandoned religion because I truly, deeply felt like it abandoned me in my ultimate time of need. So now, years later, here we are.

It was weird the night I decided to pray, but I put everything on the line and called out to the big man himself in my head. I expressed my concerns about my future, I asked for help with the hardships in my life, asked for strength and guidance in something I have been trying to achieve for a while, and prayed for the ones I cared about. When I was done I felt a sense of clarity, like I just lifted a ton of weight off of my shoulders.

Recently, I was reminded of something that I have heard throughout my whole life. It is something you have probably heard of before; “God only gives what you can handle, everything happens for a reason.” I have always followed the second part, and I am a firm believer it is our job to find the reason for everything that happens in our lives, both good and bad. No matter what, I need to move forward. I have reembraced God into my life and hope this was the right action to take. From this point forward, if I go down, we go down together, and when I rise again, we rise together.