BlogCatalog

The Christmas tale.

Who really remembers Christmas as a birthday?

Christmas is drawing ever nearer, and the festivities are about to hit full volume all over.  Christmas trees have decorated every hallway and every atrium; Christmas lights spin their ever-growing webs everywhere; and Christmas presents are exchanged back and forth amidst all the Christmas spirit.

Never mind the near-forgotten tale of the Yuletide tradition–never mind the fact that Christmas is a birthday like any other.

Amidst all the happiness that melts our insides, amidst all the affection that we spare for another at only one time of the year, we forget what the birthday boy actually has to offer us in didactic soliloquy.

So what has Jesus got to say?

Well, Jesus’ message for the day seems, very significantly enough, the same as any other: live with love and care. Don’t leave anyone out.  Extend your giving hand to those you’ve never laid eyes on before–like He’s been telling us for ages and ages on end.  The warmth and joy of the festive season is everyone’s to enjoy–which just happens to be a gift of parity from above.

Let’s all be merry this Christmas.

Hello Hurricane.

Hurricanes are never pleasant.  They’re symbols of impending doom, of hardships and pain, of tragedy.

But what makes hurricanes worse is that we don’t do anything to deserve them.  Even the most gracious of all people can be unknowingly struck by a hurricane, and the destruction they’d face would be wholly undeserved.  They’re mercilessly random, preying on anyone, good or bad, with murderous intent.

And throwing God into this scheme of things makes me wonder: why does God do this?

This is that well-known problem of pain.  It’s the age-old question that bugs every theologian: if God cares, and He can do whatever He wants, why does He give us scratches and bruises and ailments?  Even worse, why does He give us hurricanes and earthquakes and tsunamis, all of which we didn’t possibly do anything to directly deserve?

Okay, let’s look at this objectively.  Who deserves a hurricane to rip through his life?  Murderers?  Evil people?  Exactly who’s good and who’s evil?  How could we systematically differentiate between such people?  Could we depend on God to set aside a list of criteria that one must meet morally to be spared from His hurricanes?

You see, you can’t trust anyone to be so one-dimensionally wicked.  Honestly, who are you to condemn a person you think lacks conscience?  How do you know that this seemingly evil person isn’t the most caring father ever, or very friendly to his coworkers, or knows how to love his wife with perfect spousal affection?  God made us fallible beings; but because of this tendency for error, we are all guaranteed mistakes in any arena of life, morality included.  We’re all designed to be evil–but we’re all designed to be good too.  Could we condemn others to divinely inspired hurricanes more than we could condemn ourselves?  Of course not.

Why, then, has God created hurricanes in the first place?  Why couldn’t we live just as we have, minus the hurricanes?  Is that possible?  Science tells us of the contrary.  I’m no expert scientist, but I don’t know how God could craft our world, then simply outlaw hurricanes from the proceedings of nature.  God doesn’t compromise like that.

We forget what’s at stake here.  We forget that God probably made hurricanes for a reason–and a great reason at that.  We forget that what we’re complaining about is our frustration, our tears, our frayed lives.  If we just rid of this great bias against pain, if we simply embraced our lives for what they were, wouldn’t it all make sense?  Wouldn’t we learn that no hurricane is enough to silence our love, our power as people?  And wouldn’t we remember that even if a hurricane swept our lives away in one horrific second, God awaits us in Heaven, where we can live greater lives than the one we come from?

God knows more than we do.  God loves us.  Why don’t we trust God, and hope for the best?  After all, that is exactly what faith is.

The great roleplay.

Does God really hold your hand?

Life is a great roleplay.  Everyone has a verse to contribute, a line to act out, a script to understand inside-out.  And presumably, if everything works out well, then the finished product gleams with power and meaning; if not, then–well–it’s subject to improvement.

But do we have an audience to act before?  If so, then who would that be?  Would it be God?  Maybe.  But to accredit God to be a mere beholder within our imaginary crowd of onlookers would be a bit short-sighted.  God’s the director and producer; He’s the writer, the cameraman, the janitor who looks for entertainment to complement the insufferable monotony of His job.

He’s also one of the roleplay’s greatest stars.

You see, God also takes center stage in the great roleplay that is life, contributing verses with great gusto, working the clockwork of life.  What verses, you ask?  What has God said and done in the history of our world that merits our notice?  Isn’t God always hidden, always silent?  When have you heard Him?  How did you hear Him?  And what role, exactly, does He assume in our roleplay?

Well, let’s think:

1. Every verse you contribute comes from God. Simple enough.
2. Every verse you respond to, every verse you sense through your bodily faculties, comes from God. This is equally straightforward to understand: everything you’ve come to appreciate throughout your life comes from His divine intentions.
3. Every verse you contribute warrants response from God. The response is almost never tangible, and you may never notice.  But God works in subtle ways–because He works from within.  He doesn’t change wars and genocides and the geography of our planet for your well-being; He changes your heart, your psychology, your thoughts.  He arms you with the psychological tools to battle any unrelenting circumstance.  This is the one thing that we often fail to understand–and probably for good reason.  We forget that pain and suffering and humiliation are all God’s gifts, and can be most beneficent to anyone’s character.   We forget to rid of our human bias, and empathize with God, who bestows us with our lives and just probably knows what He’s doing.
4. Every verse or response from God warrants a response back. Just how we ought to respond, we will find out soon enough.

So there is God in the great roleplay.  Whoever thought that God laid supine, twiddling His oversized thumbs, uncaring and invisible, are in for a brilliant awakening.

How to understand?

Is God here? We'd never know.

This is probably the greatest qualm that believers face–for good reason.  If we’re to cultivate a relationship with God, if we’re to strive for accordance with His powers and His choices, we need understanding.  But how?  How could we bear to understand something so mysterious, so invisible, so frustratingly silent?  If He won’t give us a reply to our prayers, if He won’t even leave us a message from above, how could we know Him?

Well, the simple and honest truth is: we can’t.

We know we can’t.  And it’s a good first thing to realize–a decent stepping-stone into the realm of belief.  It’s only called belief and faith because we don’t know for sure.  Faith is only faith because it requires more of us than simple cerebral assurance.  Remember God’s response to Job, a man angered and disappointed with God’s mystery?  He spoke in a tongue Job couldn’t understand; He frenzied in His majesty, knowing that Job knew nothing of Heaven and God. 

But we do know a few things.  We know how the world turns; we know the workings of night and day.  We know of the tides, of gravity, of trees and nature and all the other things that inhabit the Earth.  We know how to build skyscrapers; we know how to bridge ourselves over the widest waters; we know how to live and breathe and survive.  We know how to take pleasure; we know how to restrain ourselves.  We know of evolution, of the workings of this planet, of the order of this universe.  We know how to be good and evil; and we know, most importantly, that we ought to be good, that good should trump evil at all costs.  We know how to fail, but we also know how to pick ourselves up and succeed.

From what we know, we can craft some understanding about God.  Because God is responsible for everything–because God is our ultimate Creator and Guide–if we know life, we can know God.  Life is God’s ultimate gift; if we understand the workings behind God’s gift, then we can guess God’s intentions, God’s powers–we can empathize with God.  And from here begins our quest, which happens to involve just a little bit of thought.  We’re almost there; we’re closer than any of us might have ever imagined before; and for all this time, we’ve always been this way.

Hello.

Welcome to life revisited.

One of the ever-present human impulses is our want for rules.  We seek formulas and cubbyholes that ensure success and fulfillment everywhere.  We want to figure out the clockwork, the mechanics of life.

Well, at least I do.

And I’ve thought about it a lot.  I still think about it–almost everyday.  Actually, I find myself wondering more these days.  I wonder why God has allowed my life to fall down a particular crevice; I wonder why God has lifted me out.  I wonder how God feels, on the Heavenly throne on high, pulling the strings, caring for us.  I wonder why our lives are the way they are; and most importantly, I wonder what we can do–what we should do.  I wonder what powers God entrusted us with in crafting our lives and our bodies and our hearts.  What makes us the best life-architects we can be?

These are the questions I ask you.  And these are the questions I’ll try to answer.