Suffering Succotash!

It's easy to lose sight of the reasons why we do things. Just last week an old friend of mine from school told me that he reads my blog. He went on to say that every week I say the same thing "This maths test was hard." Granted maths at UWI is not easy, I thought about it for a moment. Is my life the sum of it's trials? Is it possible to have a life of synergy? You know, my life means more than the sum of it's individual events. To throw in a little maths, if every event was either a negative one or a positive one then it would be possible to have a life that amounts to nothing just because I had one really negative experience (5+4+1-10 = 0). That sounds really bad but I don't think that is true. I'm not going to go on and present some deep philosophical idea but simply put life has meaning.

This meaning is found in God. I just finished reading a book I got for Christmas called "Can Man Live Without God" by Ravi Zacharias. It's a really interesting book. It looks at Atheism and Anti-theism and Theism and the implications of these beliefs and then it looks at the meaning of life and then who Christ is and if he really mattered. I thought about it for a while. If man could live without God, then man would be God (the supreme being) and therefore man could live without himself lololol!!! But most people don't see that. If man could live apart from God, then he could do whatever he wants to, no rules! In a few words, all you see is what matters therefore do what makes you happy. I've realised that this is the mind set of a lot of people today. This is the easiest way to live because you do it and it makes you happy, do it again - like smoking weed. But what if doing what makes you happy turns around and makes you really sad? Like jumping off a cliff with no parachute makes you really happy then you die (hopefully)? What do I do?

I ask myself a lot, "What is the place of suffering in this world?" We can't escape it, people suffer - you suffer. The question is not, therefore, who suffers but one more of why we suffer. I think that if we answered this question then we would have a better understanding on the meaning of life. This is where the two schools of thought - Atheism and Theism differ greatly. This is where Monotheism and Polytheism differ. This is where Christianity differs in monotheism. We have seen and heard a lot about the Haiti situation among other events that are occurring or have occurred and each of us has our views on it. If we translated this down to our own situation would we have the same views on the issue?

Christians are not masochists (we shouldn't be) but we do have a belief about suffering. There are two types of suffering: Godly suffering (eg Matthew 5:11, Hebrews 2:10, James 5:10 ) which makes perfects us and there is the type that is the result of sin in the world (Romans 8:22, Genesis 3: 14-19). Sometimes it's hard to figure out which one is going on in your life. James 1: 3 says "Consider it pure joy, my brothers when you face trials of many kinds because the testing of your faith brings perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything." Looking over my week, and well my life, those long nights of work, inability to sleep well sometimes, days of frustration when things don't go my way and basically waiting on God to come through on his promises, I could say I forgot that last week. When everything is good it's easy to throw these verses at others when things are bad for them - to be their support - but as some may say, you can only take so much.

I always wondered what people found in me, that they kept coming to me and telling me things I would rather not know. It was good listening and empathizing with everyone up until the point where they got their results. Life threw something at them and they bounced it off of me. Life threw something at me and I took it (real smart, I know). There are many reasons for that, which I choose not to disclose, especially on a blog. We are all made for a purpose; each of us (to use ecclesiastical terms) has a "cup to drink from". Some may be bitter cups (like mauby) and others may be sweet cups (like mauby lol). But really now, as easy as it may seem, is it worth throwing away your cup (or drink)? We all could do the easy thing that feels good and destroy the world further or we could actually care enough to find out what this life is all about and be ourselves, as we were meant to be (like Switchfoot said).

You've been reading for a while so let me end. Jesus said "Be on your guard against all types of greed, a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions" (Luke 12:15). Life's not the sum of its discrete events. Considering my maths example at the beginning, what on earth am I here for? What on earth are you here for? Is this life all that matters? Should our choices be self-driven while our consequences impact others?

It rained on my parade last week but that didn't stop the band from playing.