Faith in nearly nothing  

Being an educator amazes me. This week I asked my students to come up with a storyline. It should center on the concept of “Faith”. To my surprise, the stories were not only about the religious faith. Instead, some of them focused on failed faith. They mirrored their feelings to specific promises and prominent figures to present day.

While faith teaches us to believe in a specific concept, ideal or a higher being, it could also lead us to be faithful to nothing. Most teenagers today who are going back to school physically are now feeling the effects of the inflation. At first, they thought it was cool to go back to the campuses but now it is a struggle to even get a ride home. They question the promises of those in government to give them a better life. More importantly, they go back to what they held onto before the election. That was their faith then.

Once again, the peso is hitting an all-time low. The current stock exchange market is not doing good at all. Our economic indicators tell us otherwise that we are on the way to progress. Although it feels like we are not directly affected by the exchange rate of the dollar, little do we know that it has a huge effect on even the most basic commodities. So we bring back the words said as an oath, which were leverage for people in leadership today. They said to bring back our old glory where our currency is stable. Further, they said we should go back to our golden years where the countries in our region looked up to us as the role model. Once again 100 and more days after, we feel no movement at all.

Nowadays I understood what is meant to have faith with nothing at all. It is holding on to a hollow rod, which at any point, you could break and shatter into pieces. It is very frustrating and at times embarrassing. We thought we can be at the forefront but we couldn’t.

But maybe this time instead of having faith in nothing we can hold on to what we believe to be true. It may not be necessarily be about the religious aspect but believing in what we can do instead. We don’t have to rely on officials who could not deliver as much as we can them to. It is time to collaborate and innovate with individuals who can make our lives easier.

At the end of the day, faith is a very complex subject. It is up to us how we define it or how we want to exercise it. The absence of it doesn’t make us less of a person too, but having it also makes a lot of difference. As an educator, we inspire the young ones to also have faith.