I've heard many people say that faith is the only thing that gets them through the tough times. It even seems that some people think that faith is the only thing that can get them through. "Life's too hard," they seem to say. "I can't handle it without faith."
I've never really understood this mentality. I know from personal experience that it is quite possible to survive life's harshest blows without relying on imagined support from a fictitious being. My partner and I, in fact, went through some seriously nasty crap right at the beginning of our relationship.
There was the stalker, for example. A mentally unstable individual was harassing us by phone at all hours of the day, even as late (or early) as 4:30 in the morning. We managed to get him arrested after about two months, but we endured his terroristic threats and verbal abuse throughout that period.
There was an unexpected pregnancy. It turned out to be a borderline ectopic pregnancy, the embryo being just outside the fallopian tube and not in the uterus where it belonged. As if the financial worries of having a child weren't scary enough, we now had financial worries of a complicated pregnancy, and the even more frightening prospect of it being an unsafe pregnancy, possibly requiring surgery. A month later, after multiple exams and blood tests, lots of worry and headaches, it ended, unfortunately, in a miscarriage. Neither of us had really wanted a child at that point in our lives, but neither did we want to lose it.
Hot on the heels of this event, my partner's father suffered a cerebral aneurysm. This caused us to make a rapid trip across the country to be with him. He died two weeks later. A hasty decision brought on a return trip home, then, to pack up our lives and move 2000 miles away to be with her family.
From the time of the first trip out west, up through the relocation, we were without income for nearly two full months. Having no savings, this was a tremendous setback, complete with tremendous stress. There were one or two other nasties in there, too, but this gives you an idea of what this four month period was like. One event on top of another on top of another... It seemed as though it were never going to end.
Despite the fact that all these things began within weeks of us getting together, our relationship survived them. Neither of us have religious faith. We both made it through these events without praying to the imaginary, without begging God for mercy, without trusting that God would provide. Certainly it was a period that we don't want to have imitated in the future. But we know that if we do, we'll get by. Without faith, without God. We'll rely upon the only thing that has consistently proven trustworthy: ourselves.
I don't consider either of us to be much stronger than the average person. There's nothing spectacular about our survival instincts. Anyone can tolerate life's blows without having faith. In fact, it might just be easier to do. Once you realize that events are just happenstance and not directed by some outside force, it seems simpler. You don't find yourself blaming some evil entity for torturing you, nor do you find yourself questioning some supposedly benevolent god as to why you're being tortured.
You simply deal with it.
