Faith and Fate

    Faith is complete trust or confidence in someone or something. Fate is the supposed force, principle, or power that predetermines events. If you believe in fate, then you believe everything happens for a reason. That reason can be different for everyone. I do believe in fate, and my faith in God allows me to believe that He is controlling our fate.

    In the book, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, the author uses the main character to show how people's fate is all connected in some way. When Eddie dies he meets five people in heaven whose deaths were all related to him in some way. For instance, when Eddie was a child he was almost hit by a car. The driver of the car swerved to miss Eddie, but then he got in a wreck and died. Throughout the book, the story of all the characters shows that many other lives are affected by every event in our lives. The Blue Man tries to explain this when he says, "That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed."

    This book made me think about my own faith. The author writes about heaven being a place you go where your life is explained to you by five people that were in it. In the Epilogue the author states that the secret of heaven is “that each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.” I think that if you feel this is true, you would almost have to believe that there is some greater power guiding our stories. At times Eddie did not have faith in himself or anything else. He even admitted that some of his life he’d spent hiding from God. Maybe God still had faith in Eddie though, and helped to shape his fate.

    “That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind.” The quote listed above is from The Five People You Meet in Heaven. This quote really made me think about fate and faith. I think the author is trying to explain that everything happens for a reason. Even when you are not affected by an event, someone else is. I do strongly believe that this is true. Some people may think their fate is controlled by luck or chance or other things. I believe that God is somehow in control of our fate. He is watching out for everyone and that is how our lives are all connected.