"If you don't feel strong desires for the manifestation for the glory of God, it is not because you have drunk deeply and are satisfied. It is because you have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Your soul is stuffed with small things, and there is no room for the great." - John Piper
I've never been so confused as I am today.
My confusion is like the definition of space.
Variable, and it can only be explained by the surrounding matter.
As a person, we often face a time when we don't quite know who we are. We can be anyone! Because who we choose to be may vary. It is in those times that our stands, morale, and values are tried. We are truly asked to define ourselves for who we really are. The choice is ours, and the path is also ours.
What then should we do since the outcome will also be ours?
Everything is variable in this world. Every choice and outcome. Every event. Everything is slipping from our grasp like water in our hands. There's nothing we can hold. The only thing we can hold on to is what is given to us.
Even so, there's only one thing that never failed me; that has remained constant all my life. That is God.
Yet with his steadfastness in a variable world, it seems intimidating. It feels like a standard to meet to. It feels like a steadfastness that we will fail with our variable nature. But it isn't about how variable we are as a person. It has always been about how sure we are in the very nature of God. And through this, we will be able to face a variable world, with an assured trust in the God who holds all thing in its place.
"Why fight for something you already have?" He said, then thought to himself.
It was better to keep what you have on a shelf, and make sure it stays. Put cages, satisfy their wants! Just as long as they stay there. I will distract them for as long as I can! He walked in his very own form of pride and perverted glory. But then he noticed, that over there was someone who wasn't his own. He looked on in greed and anger. He wanted that man in his possessions and could not bear with the fact that he wasn't in his grasps. He would try everything he could to lure that person to his abode. He listed all his devious schemes in his mind. He had a list of plans to keep someone from being free, to stop someone from truly living. He even knew the subtle ways to lure them. He was Satan. And there he saw a man who was against him merely by not being under his rule. He took all his weapons ready for the kill!
But then he stopped himself and he raged.
He murmured to himself, "Then there is also God."
So here I am. 22. I still feel like the little girl that fell asleep on the bridge wing with the salty breeze blowing. I still feel the same. Nothing much has changed. The only thing that changed is my view on things, my likes and dislikes, and my relationship with others. Basically, only opinions have changed. We feel like time is moving on, but we are stuck in time. The order of life goes on, and we are born, grow up, then never know when we die.
I remember first owning a yo-yo, and how I treasured it. Today, it's only kept as a memory to me. Likewise, what we feel so strongly of now, might not be what we will feel later. How would we know then, if we have progressed in life? If that itself is based on what we are doing presently, or our current view on things?
We pursue one thing after another, we achieve one thing after another. Our experiences become words on pages without meaning to a prettily bound book if we do not, learn from our experiences. If we do not make the right decisions, and if we do not do what is right. In the end, it is our heart that matters through all the things that we do.
Experiences stay a memory, but deeds last a lifetime.
All thinking is founded upon faith.
Evolution is a faith based upon Darwin's theory that humanity was not born by the
creative intentions of a Deity, but by a completely mindless, trial and error selection of random molecular patterns. It's god is the Big Bang, Chance, and Matter.
Concerning Evolution, C.S Lewis once said, "I have felt its perfect grandeur..." however, he continues, "If my own mind is a product of the irrational...how shall I trust my mind when it tells me about Evolution?"
Evolution is a concept and it is not based on evidence. Even if it were,
"With the right facts but a wrong faith you can come up with the wrong answer
for all the right reasons." (James Nickel)
Think about it. And since you are, where does your faith rely on?
Remember that time when you trusted your one friend entirely, shared everything to that person, and shared what you had with? Do you remember how it felt when you realized that you did not receive that same care in return, how you found that that person did something to you that broke your trust? The pain and disappointment is in-explainable. It was a pain that, if you do realize, had you not bestowed your trust upon that person, you would not have felt it.
Imagine now, if you knew that that person would betray you, would you still have given that person your full trust? Will your love and care, your time be just as freely given? Frankly speaking, I would not.
I was thinking about Judas Iscariot today, and how he had chosen to betray Jesus. It doesn't mean that just because Jesus knew what Judas was going to do that Judas was destined to betray. Judas had a choice, and what choice he was going to make, Jesus knew. Yet, Judas was given the exact discipleship all the other disciples received.
Similarly, Jesus loves us that much, and he is trusting us with all his love, all his care, and all his time. He calls us with open arms whatever be our outcome. That is how full his love is for us. No matter your choice at the end, Jesus offers his salvation to you here and now.
To be a betrayer, one has to have a certain trust first bestowed on him.
And many times, when we fail to focus ourselves on Christ, we do not stand far from Judas.
Will we, with all the love Christ can give us choose to be keepers of the faith; to remain faithful and true?
It is a question none of us can promise to, and will have to prove it answering it with our lives.
It wasn't a happy start today. I woke up to the news that my goldfishes had died. It didn't help that I was already sad about somethings. It was a mystery why my goldfishes died. Everything was the same. Water, food, pump. Maybe it was the temperature. I remember waking at 3am last night to turn off the fan and cuddled in my blanket still cold. I even checked if I accidentally switched on the air conditioner. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. What is fact is that they are dead. The thing about death is that it only happens once. And that's pretty much the end of the creature. And I just had to grow attached to these two little fishes. The way they hated purple, the way they got excited every time they saw you or heard you call their name. The way they looked bored simply swimming up and down the aquarium. Well, love hard, hurt hard eh. Life.
Later in the day, I had porridge. Yes, porridge. you must be wondering what porridge has to do with dead goldfishes, but let me finish. I was happily eating up the porridge when I just had the feeling that "something was in my porridge." I played the rice a little and found a weird object. I picked it up to find a piece of chapped glass. No doubt that it was the hand of God that warned me about the danger. I could have eaten it and cut my mouth all over.
As most of you would have known, I was stung by a jellyfish last week. It wasn't a simple thing, and I did lay in tremendous pain for a day and a night just hoping there wouldn't be signs of any reactions which would need me to rush off to the hospital in emergency. I had two injections, and was prescribed antihistamines, but the pain was something that painkillers, would not take away, In fact, it isn't a light thing to have the doctor tell more than three times to you that you could die if quick action were not taken. Laying there not knowing was like a mental jellyfish sting.
Where did I get stung? All over my left arm from a little above my elbow down to the back of my hand, the calf of my left leg, and the knee of my right leg. As if one spot wasn't enough. I counted the lashes I had, and all together, I had more than twenty lashes or lines on my body. That meant that the jellyfish must have been terribly long, had many tentacles, or I simply was in the midst of a school of jellyfish. What's even worse was that because a jellyfish sting is meant to paralyze its prey, my limbs felt heavy, numb, and yet pain was running all over my body. You felt like running away from the pain but your limbs would not take you to run, nor would it do any good to run.
When I first got stung. The welts on my arm were so visible that many bystanders asked me what it was, and a lady across the road asked me to go to the clinic (nice of her). The boy taking care of the toilet didn't even talk to me when I talked to him. He simply stared at my arm in return to my questions.
I rushed to the clinic as soon as I could. A friend of mine was there to drive me, and when the doctor looked at my arm, he sighed, tapped the table with his pen a few times, then gave me a prescription. I do have to thank my friend Cathy for talking to the nurse and asking her to let me visit the doctor earlier and not wait.
There were many things I am thankful about. Firstly, would be the fact that my mother insisted that I carry a bottle of vinegar to the beach. Secondly, would be my friends who did not abandon me when I needed them, and they followed me, all seven of them to the clinic. Thirdly, would be the fact that I didn't have an allergic reaction to the toxins, and died. I am lastly thankful that none of my other friends were affected by the sting.
(My friend Kings, got stung on his hand, but I am grateful that it was minor and it eased off in a few hours. If you are reading this, thank you for being there.)
I am not proud of myself for being stubborn, for my father did tell me to wear long sleeves and long pants to the beach. If I had been a sweet obedient child, I would have been free of days of pain.
Yet, I know that factors are not the ones that was my healer and saved my life. In fact, factors were brought to me only by the one who can ordain them. I refused the first warning, but still, God caused a second solution for me, the vinegar. Had my mother not insisted on the vinegar, I could have had things worse. It was entirely the grace of God that saved me, and never had his grace seem this way. The fact that God would still bring his grace upon me despite my iniquities and human nature, shows the ever redeeming love that he has. It reminds me of the love he has for us despite our sin.
