Faith. Forgetting why something is done in one's own life can be the greatest of all wake-up calls. Upon no-room-for-bull type reflection on the direction one is taking and realizing the hopeless end that it encompasses, any discerning individual will stumble upon the notion of how life has become something that holds no room for faith. Especially with lives that revolve around school... where time is roughly delinated into studying, eating, going to the bathroom, playing, and if time allows it... sleeping. A place in which merit is associated with one's ability to barf out information on a page within a alloted amount of time... and knowing fully well how one must behave in order to get the best results... faith has somehow becomes secondary if not irrelevant. In my opinion, this irrelevance stems from our own inability to TRULY accept the idea that most things, if not all things, are out of our hands. To work within the academic paradigm, the application of simple probability equations will point out how "out of control" we really are. Only through a percieved notion of control that stems from an innate need for control, order, and structure do we put ourselves through all this bull. In equating particular types of highly improbable and unlikely behaviours (studying 12 hours everyday and 3 weeks in advance for a midterm or... *gasp* studying ahead), with success... we percieve control. But reality is reality... and life rarely, if not ever, goes perfectly according to plan. Let's just admit it and get it over with. We really have no control over our lives... we're just tagging along for the ride. In reality, through all the tears and through all the "pain we percieve and feel"... we're simply lying to ourselves due to extremely limited foresight. Maybe this limited foresight, which translates to ignorance in my opinion, maybe a blessing in itself. History and humankind's actions within history as discourse is the prime example of how short-sighted we really are. We all have instances and events in our lives we would like to forget that have stemmed from our own short-sightedness. We claim we cannot predict the future, but when we get to a certain point in our lives and we've lived through enough experiences, we can begin to equate that certain behaviours lead to certain outcomes... and no... lightening will not strike the professor on the way from their office to the classroom and spontaneously combust the freshly photocopied test papers they're carrying. Maybe this bliss-filled hope in imagining the possibility of such events happening is this blessing of short-sightedness. The reality of human action is in the fact that life on this Earth will usually continue with or without us. (Sans nuclear holocaust or some other apocalyptic disaster) Sometimes... it's better not to know then to know it all. It's like the Matrix... in knowing that it's all fake... in knowing that actions and consequences mean pretty much nothing. But then again, how can one argue that our lives are that different. Doesn't reality gain validity when we ourselves attribute such validity to it... regardless of it being real or fake? Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is similar to this analogy in the sense that they too were ignorant of certain things before gobbling up the fruit... they were "naked" and they didn't know it... As Christian... knowing that there is "life" after this life... how can we hold validity to this life on earth at all... when it parallels the notion of life on earth being a constructed existence apart from the real life that awaits us after we croak. Do we validate life through the simple fact of short-sightedness and by being preoccupied through such trivially insignificant matters in our daily lives? Then again... why didn't God put us in "heaven" in the first place? For our own good... no matter how you define "good"... we need faith. Through our limitations that we percieve compared to some unreachable ideal, we will never be what we define as being "perfect". The whole notion of a happy and good life is lost on God... we will never be that comfortable and we really never are. In reality... we are in desperate need of him because he brings validity into this life that is fake and irrelevant to the core. Like living within the Matrix... we are ignorantly content in living out lives that hold worth measured on insignificant and invalid measures that should ultimately be rejected because they simply perpetuate negative human interaction and the idea of a worthless existence. In the simple notion of not choosing to believe that there is someone out there... we are in essence, rejecting the fundamental law of existence in itself because in order to be something, we must first come from something... and knowing that all "somethings" are subjectively defined... no truly objective measure of reality will ever exist as long as we reject the concept of faith. Because it is in faith we are able to accept everything as it is, and not as it should be.

I want to be your hands.

I want to be your feet.

I'll go where you send me,

go where you send me.

The days can go by pretty quick and then suddenly it hits you like bird poop falling from the trees.

Fear

Many older individuals that I have talked to during my childhood have claimed that such fear that tends to arise in your heart is normal. They keep clamouring on about how you have to do this and that and be this and that... when at that age all you want is a damn Super Nintendo for Christmas. The memories of being given "the lecture" on how to be successful in life by Korean adults other than my parents remain all too clear in my mind.

But as I "grow older" (my older sis would laugh at this cause to her I'll always be that little irresponsible brother asking for money... which I still am, thank you very much), I've caught myself on more than one occassion... saying the exact words that these Korean adults preached into my little ears many years ago.

Upon reaching an end (graduating), I've figured out that... there really isn't a "cathartic end" that we all envision or even expect in our hearts and minds. That this "future" we keep talking about is really simply about the here and now. Relativity... what we do, we will eventually become.

So what exactly is this dark and wretched mystery that dwells within my heart? Uncertainty is only the absence of a self-fulfilling propechy... the Lord may have made, but also guides us towards a particular destination. So in placing greater emphasis on the journey or the destination is useless because both matter equally.

Let me explain.

Upon reaching a destination... we never really stay very long do we? And while in constant movement toward such destination... an action we like to romanticize by calling it "a journey", we never really remember very much or derive all that much from them... when you really, really, really, really think about it... it is our placement of importance that becomes encapsulated into words such as "journey" or "destination".

Generalizations drawing from subjective and abstract experiences you say?

Sure. So what?

It doesn't matter how you really get there... the road you take... or where you're really going in the first place. We take the road because in the end... we choose to. We arrive because we choose to. Therein the power of human existence... the ability to choose by the grace of God.

Choice.

If you've ever guessed on multiple choice questions and expected to get answers correct... you'll probably find that you'll get most of the answers you guessed marked as being incorrect.

Maybe... just maybe... we make the wrong choices for the right reasons.

An intriguing oxymoron n'est pas?

We choose in life... most often never knowing what lies behind such doors of choice. Usually making all the wrong choices... and once in a while making the right one.

What the hell is it all for anyway... when even after all the choices have been made and forgotten

...you're left with fear in your heart and pain to pay for a failure in something not even real.