THE SECRET LIES IN “FAITH!

What is faith? A moment of certainty that springs in the heart of man and becomes a
perpetual guiding light to one’s life.

Faith; the heart and soul of human existence. Without faith, life would be as empty as a
heart without the gushing blood; as a forest without its lush and as a nightingale without
its song. Life without this key element is neither possible nor imaginable. It is the sole
drive that has lead men and women alike to rise to the many heights and leave their mark
in the sand of time. They showed the world their metal and enraptured the world with
their undiminished grandeur. They made themselves invincible-owing to the tremendous
faith they had in themselves! Faith and its force can not be limited to the narrow scope of
words. The topic is as diverse as its power, but I’ll try to explain how important and
indispensable a tool it is in the hands of human beings.

Faith is not just in one’s own abilities. It is also in the circumstances and the
understanding of time’s ever changing nature. These people of faith are well equipped to
change the tide of times. They can alter the very circumstances to suit themselves. Their
irreducible passion and a steady gaze like that of an eagle on its prey; they do not waver
till the time they achieve their objectives. They have consummate faith in their abilities
and they can not allow anyone or anything to hamper their endeavors. All they believe in
is that they have a purpose that is noble enough to enable them to ignore the world for a
while and dwell in the dreamland of their aspirations. They wish to take their struggle to
its final culmination point. This journey is easier said that done. It involves pain. It
requires sweat, blood and tears. For those of us who have experienced this level of faith,
must know how it has the ability to transform a human being into someone invincible.
And let me say, this process is as rewarding as it is tough.

On a lighter note, being youngsters we face many problems when we are growing up.
The peer pressure and the constant mental stress seem incurable in the first glance, but a
deeper understanding will explain that even this plague can be remedied. To distract
one’s attention from the inconsequential attitudes of people one can truly become the
driving force to one’s destiny. If we know who we are and if we identify ourselves with
our own aims and ambitions, then only can we reclaim our respect in our sight. Having
reclaimed our respect in our eyes, we can do the impossible. Only those people cannot
achieve their goals, who fail to identify themselves and forget the meaning of their own
lives. Once we do this, then faith becomes our torch and along our way we keep lighting
new torches and continue making our lives worth living.

Had there been no faith, there would have been no prophets, no saints and no mystics;
who braved through the basest of accusations, the most criminal of all afflictions and the
most disheartening of all failures. Yet they persisted and went on with life. It is said that
if a difficult situation does not kill you, it makes you tougher. So that was what happened
with these people. These holy men had Divine light guiding them all along; but the
interesting part is that this conviction can be true today also. The method is simple!Let us
put our belief in God and then leaning on our abilities, realize the impossible, something
beyond compare. The prophets that I am referring to belonged to this very earth and if
They’d had no “faith,” God would have long deserted them. The most fascinating
characteristic of these people is that they “love to believe”-and so they are rightly termed,
the faithful. God detests the confusion in human heart, its disbelief and sense of
uncertainty.

What I see around me there is a total deficit of character. Unfortunately, we do not have
many who can boast the ownership of this resolve that we term as “faith”. Today I see my
people shackled in the Western culture and ideologies that are alien to our identity. Least
of all, people tend to feel elevated in honor and blessed if they can somehow enact the
west in appearance. In reality, these imitations lead to creating a vacuum inside us when
we try to wipe off our own self and try, fruitlessly, to relate it to something we are not.
This way we lose our identity; thus, we lose all faith in our “real” self and thus we get
lost in this labyrinth, which I like to call identity crisis.

The kind of leaders we had at the time of independence of Pakistan, had unparalleled
resolve and faith in our destiny. Although many proved treacherous and deserted the
ideology later on but the handful at the time continued to “believe” in the ultimate fate of
Muslims. Much bitter is the reality that in the following years we belied our claims. The
faith went out, and so did the very purpose of our existence. No one lives for ideals and
higher principles. We were no longer faithful to God; to our people; to our soil; and
above all, we lost all interest in developing and building the foundation of our future on
self belief. Our belief system, ruefully I say, got messed up real bad. We neither believe
in our selves, nor in our destiny. The destiny of any nation lies in the faith of a brighter
tomorrow, and not in helpless despair. So long we have been lead in the dark with a few
faint glimpses of light, but the bigger picture remains dark and dismal. Why not start
believing so that at least this darkness begins to dissipate. Let us fix our gaze on the
bright future and let the sense of optimistic faith guide our way.

Let us pause for a while and reconsider. Did we create this land for nothing? Did we
create it so that Times Magazine called us the most dangerous and corrupt nation on
earth? Were these the forces that lead us to migrate and inhabit this land? The simple
answer is NO! Being the youth, we must develop faith in ourselves again. We need to
work tirelessly on our characters, our moral strengths and the ability to change the tide of
times to our convenience. There should remain no doubt that we can do it and we have
done it. We have had a history of taking the world by surprise. Be it the 1947 partition;
the 1987 nuclear explosion or the2009 Twenty/Twenty world cup victory. But the
problem is that these things have happened with real time lags and eventual breakdown of
momentum. In my view, we need the “faith” to guide our way and the consistency.

It’s all a question of how far we can go in believing in ourselves and how deeply we can
penetrate in our talents. Let us not conform to the limits set for us by others. If people call
us lunatics, let them. After all there is a very thin line between lunacy and intellectualism.
Let us forget what others comment and do, and let us focus on our own hidden talents and
work towards unearthing them. Let us become ideologues and romantics again. Let us
dream the impossible. Let us start to dream; let us believe in a promising destiny awaiting
us and become the catalysts of change ourselves. We should be agents of free opinion and
originality.

My message to the readers is that the secret lies in “faith.” Our lives revolve around a
single most magnetic force and that is faith and belief. One must have the “zauk e
yakeen” as Allama Iqbal puts it. For nations are built and destroyed upon the basis of
belief and disbelief. Do not get disappointed in the present times and lose all spark and
hope! Remain hopeful and positive. Believe in change and become one yourself.