About Christianity

chinese teacher left behind students and ran away on his own during the sichuan earthquake. what do you think of this statement which was in the news? what is the first impression you have?

let me see..... he don't deserve to live. he is heartless. he is a coward. he ought to die. he is not fit to live. a rotten man. are these the thoughts that came into your mind? if it is, see, you made another mistake. because, who are you to condemn him?

let me say first, i read the headlines, and not the article. but what i am saying is not related to that. that is not important, because, i am going to address the issue of humans judging one another too quickly. no, i am not defending him. i am not judging him.

so he ran, leaving behind his students and leaving them to die. he got slammed, he got flamed and he got condemned. maybe you think he deserved it, because if he just stayed, he might have saved some lives. some of you more noble people may have sacrificed your lives to save that few kids, or as many as you can. afterall, they are children with a bright future. fair? it seemed so.

how about we look from another perspective? his perspective.

what if his parents had not yet died? what if he has a family to support? here, i am assuming his parents are still around and he has a family to take care of. please note, in china, the women do not work, or seldom work after they got married. traditional thinking. the man brings in the bread. in china, you only have a kid. his parents most likely only have him as the only child.

now... the situation in front of you. an earthquake. someone got to die. you either save the kids and risk dying, or you leave them to die and get a higher chance of survival. obviously, he chose the second one. are you condemning him again? think about it again. if he die, who is going to take care of his parents? if he die, who is going to take care of his family? would you save a few kids and let your family suffer, or risk getting condemned and slammed and insulted and flamed but able to live on for the sake of your family? so what if your name got written down in the newspaper as a crisis hero who died but your living family suffered? if you die, that's the end of you.

no, i am not saying the reason why he ran is because of that. he might have other reasons. or he might just like you say, a coward who care for nothing else but for his survival. what i want to say, people do things for different reasons. who are we to judge him? if i have a family, i would rather get condemn and live, than to die a crisis hero. planning to slam me? you better not do it on my website.

same for other things. sometimes people do things that are 'evil' or 'bad'. we are quick to judge. we hear one side of the story and we jump to conclusions. always being full of ourselves, always think other people are no good. but what if, we are in the same situation as them, what would we do? 'i would definately save the children.' is that what you think? no. unless you go through the whole thing yourself, you are not fit to comment on anything. yes. not fit. because no one can talk about what they do not understand. it makes us an even worse hypocrites than we are right now. we may think we will save the kids, but when the real thing came, what would you do? what would you do?

i am not saying you are also another coward who will run away. who knows? you might be a hero. you might be a coward. you might stay. you might run. whatever you do, who are others to judge? everyone has different purposes in life. who are we to judge others?

so, the next time something like that happens, big or small, in war or peace, in any kind of situation, do not judge. of course, i am saying this as a person who has not undergo any tragedies in life. maybe, if something bad happen to me, like someone come and kill off my loved ones, i would condemn him too. because we always talk about things we don't understand. always.

but there is this statement (from memory) from a character in a game (True Tears) i played, which is translated as :

it is true i cannot understand you. but it is because i cannot understand the pain, that i can give you support. it is because i don't know the suffering, that i can encourage you. if i truely know and truely understand, then, maybe i could not even utter a single word.

what i want to say is, encourage people, and not judge them. i am saying this from the point of a person who never experienced a single tragedy in life, which is why i am able to say it. this post is kind of contradicting, eh?

i was at the train station one evening, going back home from work. i was walking and reading my manga (japanese comics) along the platform when suddenly i heard a child screaming very loudly in a voice full of fear.

the little girl thought she was lost for a moment, in that train station. from the looks of it, she was around 3 years old, 5 at the most. with a very loud voice full of fear she kept screaming for her mother. everyone turned to look at her, but luckily her mother was nearby. let's not talk about how her mum let the kid wander away. the point is, the kid got terrified when she thought she was separated from her mother in a place which was not in her house.

question is, why did she get terrified? the answer is obvious. because her mother is the only one she knows will take care of her, who will protect her. nobody else could be trusted. in a foreign world which is not her home, in a world full of the unknown and strangers, it is logical that she will cling to her mother. all children did that. i remembered that me too, when i was a little kid, got terrified when i got separated from my parents. all children, by default, by instinct, cling to their parents, because their parents will lead the way, because their parents will take care of them. in their absence, a child cannot do anything at all. that is how dependent a child is of her parents.

moral of the story? in our own way, we are like little children of God. how surprising then, that when we got lost in the world of sin, we are not terrified. sometimes we even want to break away from God, from the Father who will lead the way, and protect us. we want to get lost, get trapped in a world of unknown and a world of dangers. we thought we became independent, and we didn't scream in fear when we got separated from the Father, we didn't run about looking for Him like the girl in the train station. we thought we were ok. but are we really ok? like the little kid, if our Father (in her case is her mother) is not there to take care of us, not because He failed us but because we insist on getting away from Him, who will protect us and help us in the world of darkness? who will lead us to the correct way?

i am not saying we have to scream like a little kid everytime we sin. what i am saying is we have to give the same seriousness or even more when we got lost spirtually compared to the little girl who got lost for that few seconds. in that scream i could clearly sense her fear and her terror as she desperately cried out for her mother. will we then, cry out to our Father when we get lost to allow Him to lead us? or will we think we are independent enough to walk on our own?