Most parents live in baby vision. No matter how old you get, they’ll always look at you and see a vulnerable, innocent toddler that needs them. Baby vision is the reason you weren’t allowed to watch rated R movies as a kid and why you couldn’t be out past 11 p.m. on prom night.

And if you have parents like mine that pretty much invented the concept of baby vision, they’re scared majoring in something like art, dance or psychology won’t lead to a livable income and urge you to look into law school because they “want you to keep an open mind.”

They’re always ready to buy you a brief case, stethoscope and a patch of land to help you become the best doctor-lawyer-small business owner the world has ever seen.

While it’s hard to explain to parents why they shouldn’t want you in a court room or near anyone’s body with sharp tools, they’re only pushing you because they care. Even more than that, they believe in you.

They believe you can be the next Steve Jobs with a little Picasso flare on the side because you can type pretty fast and your mom thinks the drawing you did of your family in first grade is true art.

Your parents are designed to see only the best of your abilities because you are a piece of each of them.

As scary as it is to see that children are no longer children, parents have to trust that they have done everything they could to make us loving, caring and responsible people.

We’re going to make it. We may not make six figures the day we walk into the business world, but we will make it. It’s ok to be broke at first and it’s ok to execute a seemingly brilliant idea and fail. Sometimes, it’s the ideas that seem the most insignificant that become the most successful.

That’s just about the only explanation for people that invented things like straws, paperclips, Snuggies and those little plastic things at the end of shoelaces.

If you want to write children’s books about kittens, go for it. If your dream is to travel the country in a gourmet food truck, buckle up and get to trucking.

There’s no guarantee that your dreams will work out the way you planned, but nothing worth doing or having does. It’s the struggles and obstacles on the way to success that help you realize just how blessed and successful you really are.

And getting annoyed with your parents when they shoot down the idea to spend your life backpacking through the mountains is easy, but remembering why they’re so against is the hard part. You think nature and freedom and your mother thinks mountain lions and avalanches.

Maybe it’s just one of those things we won’t understand until we are looking at our own children, blinded by baby vision and ready to purchase a brief case, stethoscope or piece of workable land to get their bright future started. But, if we’re always afraid to do what we want, we’ll never do anything worth remembering.

Religion can be spoken about freely, yet we tread softly when publically mentioning it.

But, the hardest idea to grasp is that having the right to spread religious awareness is certainly not the same as pushing beliefs on others.

While people reserve the right to practice religious freedom and to speak without restraint about any faith they choose, forcing others to listen isn’t freedom of speech; it’s harassment.

There are over 127 major religions and seven billion people on earth with seven billion different views of God. Some love Him, some fear Him, some question His existence and some are still searching for Him.

Some will decide that God plays no role in the trials and tribulations of life, while others will find faith the moment they see their newborn child take the first breath of being.

Whether we discover where we spiritually belong in a pew on Sunday morning or on a lonely drive with no destination, the journey to finding or forgetting God is what determines our views. We can’t be told what and who to believe in, or to even believe in anything at all.

What we learn, who we meet and the challenges we face are what we remember when we stand before Him, not the church members that knock on our front doors, or the people that stand in the quad condemning us all to hell.

And if the church goer at your front door changes your perspective, let them. Be baptized in one church, change your mind, and be baptized in another. Let what you learned in biology class make you question evolution and the powers above.

Learning from life experiences and questioning God’s ways isn’t sin; it’s human. It’s human to change emotionally, mentally, and spiritually when physical surroundings change. It’s human to simply be curious and indecisive.

Faith only exists because there are people that believe strongly enough in it to make it a reality and a way of life. Without doubters and differences, the strength of religion would never have anything to be measured against.

Because of that, religion without true belief is weak.

Never practice out of habit, don’t follow just because your parents or friends do, and don’t ever think one religion is superior to another. In a time that seems to have the explanation for everything in a test tube or on a database, people believing in any God at all is a miracle in itself.