Papa Mike's Long Journey Home: Faith, Family and the Marine Corps

Sometimes it takes a lifetime to discover the importance of your faith. It can be a long and difficult journey for many. Nothing is more important than your faith. Believing that there is a God who loves you and whose mercy will save you in the end is essential to achieving your inner peace and happiness.

Both faith and wisdom evolve. Our concept of God as children is quite different from the one that we embrace during young adulthood, let alone old age. Wisdom is achieved through the school of hard knocks and in making all the right and wrong decisions in your life. You get knocked down a lot, but you stay in the game. Something bigger than you pulls you through the tough times.

I could not have written this narrative thirty years ago, let alone five years ago. Most of my life has been taken up with work and raising my family. My life has been filled with many blessings, as well as many failures and personal setbacks. I have dealt with tragedy, as well as joy. I have let people down and once in a while lifted someone up.

Faith is a gift from God. Faith is trust. Seeing something in our physical world makes it a reality to us. Not seeing something, but believing it still exists, requires trust. A lot of people thrive on their self-reliance. They do things their way. That's fine. But when the stiff winds come into our lives to try to blow us off course, we need to be able to stay on our feet. The inner strength we need to survive these storms comes from our faith.