I did not learn about faith from a book. I did not learn it in a classroom or a Sunday service, though I found it in churches many times. I learned about faith on a dirt road in December, at fifteen years old, in a body so wracked with pain that I could not stand. I learned it when my mother reached out her hand in the dark, and I grabbed it, not because I believed everything would be fine, but because I refused to let go.

That is what faith actually is. Not certainty. Not proof. Faith is the decision to keep holding on when every piece of evidence suggests you should let go.

Faith Is Not the Absence of Pain

So many people believe that if you have enough faith, life stops hurting. That if you pray hard enough, God will remove the suffering. I am here to tell you, with all the love and all the truth I have, that this is not how it works. I prayed on the dirt floor while giving birth alone. I prayed in the Church of the Virgin of Altagracia with no house, no money, and two hungry children beside me. I prayed in a small wooden house in the countryside while a cyclone swept through the city in the distance.

The pain did not disappear. The poverty did not vanish overnight. The loneliness did not lift like a curtain. But something else happened. Something quieter and far more powerful: I did not break. The pain was still there, but I was still there too. And slowly, slowly, I began to understand that surviving is itself a miracle.

“I always walked with faith, for people so often stop believing. And so, to the very end, with faith as my guide, I walked through the countryside; I fell, I rose, and I kept going. That was my journey.”

The White Horse

When I was a girl, I had a white horse. Every morning at 5:30, before the world was fully awake, I would ride through the fields with a sack in my hand to gather grass for my goats. The wind smelled of promise. The sky was still purple at the edges. And in those early mornings, I felt something I would spend the rest of my life trying to name: a sense that the world was good, that I was held, that something larger than my circumstances was watching over me.

Years later, when I had nothing — no house, no companion, no certainty about tomorrow — I would close my eyes and go back to that horse. Back to that wind. Back to that sky. And the feeling would return, just enough to carry me through another day.

In my book, I wrote that faith is a white horse that carries you home even when you do not know where home is. I meant every word, because that is exactly what it did for me. Not once. Not twice. Every single time I was lost, faith found me and carried me back to myself.

How to Build Faith When You Have None

If you are reading this and you have never experienced what I am describing, or if you once had it and lost it, I want to speak to you directly. Faith is not a personality trait you are born with. It is not a reward for good behavior. It is a muscle. And like all muscles, it grows through use.

You build it in small moments. You build it by getting up after every fall. You build it by noticing the people who showed up when you needed them most, the neighbor who shared her food, the truck that appeared on an impossible road, and the stranger who offered a hand. Every one of those moments is evidence. Stack that evidence. Return to it on the days when the darkness feels permanent.

And on the days when even that is not enough, when you cannot feel anything, when God seems silent, and the prayer bounces back empty, hold on anyway. Not because you are certain. But because certainty was never the requirement. The requirement was only this: to not let go.

What Faith Has Given Me

I will not pretend that faith made my life easy. It did not. I still walked muddy roads. I still gave birth without a doctor. I still slept on church floors. I still lost people I loved and said goodbye to the land that held my whole childhood. Faith did not prevent any of that.

What faith gave me was something rarer and more valuable than comfort. It gave me a reason to keep walking. It gave me the certainty, not intellectual but bone-deep, that I was not alone. That every step I took on every impossible road was witnessed by something greater than the road itself. And that even in my most broken moments, I was not garbage. I was not forgotten. I was being shaped.

Today, I write these words with the peace of a woman who has arrived. Not at a mansion, not at a perfect life. But at a place inside herself that cannot be shaken. That is the real destination. And the only road that leads there is the one paved with faith; imperfect, stubborn, trembling, ferocious faith.
“Faith is not a feeling. It is a decision. Make it every morning. Make it even when it costs you everything. Because on the other side of that decision—always—is a color you have never seen before.”