The Big Word.

you know, a few days ago i was totally bummed and depressed about how i had grow so little in a year's time. how my faith had probably been stuck there and i've been in a comfortable place. i wanted to say so much about myself : about how even though i've signed up to serve in a number of church ministries it feels like i'm still serving Man not God and all that self-absorbed things.

today, Jesus decides to remind me about The Big Word.

what is The Big Word (that it is so important that even before i mention it, it must be capitalized?), you say?

life.

l-i-f-e.

four simple little letters that sums up everything. your existence, your beliefs, your attitude, your personality, your mindset, your friends, your family--life.

tonight, after a day full of life at Angsana(teaching English to primary school students) and serving officially for my first time in Actsposure(photography ministry) at REVO service, just right after i had shortly arrived at a friend's birthday celebration party, my good friend received a text message from her mother informing her that one of our ex-schoolmates' mother had passed away. 

just like that.

life.

fragile as the ants beneath our feet. we're the ants and God is the feet. (bad analogy because God doesn't want to take our lives away simply to kill us, He only thinks it appropriate to rid us of our fleshly bodies when He knows it is time) it's so easy to take away life, to bring them back to Heaven. supposedly it is an event of celebration, that a soul is back with the Lord--but as human beings, we were conditioned to deny death. to fear death in almost every single possible way. to shun death, to escape from death, to never admit defeat to death until your last breath. however, it is also as human beings that we were conditioned and taught to accept death. and not just death--but all things. 

as human beings with blood pumping through our veins and arteries, neurons connecting to create thoughts, a complex and sophisticated creature altogether, we are taught repeatedly in life to do one thing : move on.

as the greatest and proudest beings to walk on Earth, we are, after all, not God. or Gods. we do not possess that ultimate quality, the immortality, and certainly, not the power to control time. what we do is done and what we do not do is not done until it is decided to be done. we have no power to undo or redo our actions. the first and only rule to life is this : do not regret what you have done, for you cannot rewrite history, not even your own, no matter how hard you want it to be fixed. 

"living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what Next or How. the artist never entirely knows. we guess. we maybe wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark." -Agnes de Mille 

although i don't entirely feel like this all the time, but there are some sense in this quote. we are never one hundred percent sure of what's going to happen. as much as we all hate it, there is always doubt. there is always a very tiny drop of doubt in that sea of faith you have. we're humans. we're designed that way. we're designed to question, to be curious, to weigh out possibilities. but we hope anyways. because hope is light to the darkness in our hearts, and we chase after hope. we grab onto it. we try our hardest not to let go. and when the thing happens, even when it may end up bad--we still have hope in our hearts.

it's a difficult process, to stay hopeful in our darkest hours. 

yet we must persevere. we must push on.

because it is the only way to live. to never never never give up.