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.