About Christianity

i have a friend who works in a hospital as some sort of trainee doctor. and she sees many kinds of patients. she always tells me about her experience in the hospital. well we talk nearly every night, if we have the time. yeah, and so, there are happy stories, and there are sad stories. as for me, usually i am quite emotionally detached because i am not the one witnessing the events and well, i am not related to them in any way, even if they are suffering.

and if you want to call me heartless or what, you think again. are you really able to feel sad for someone you don't know? or is that sadness just an emotion you forced upon yourself so that society sees you as a compassionate human? whatever the case, it doesn't really affect me. well the point of this post is not this.

we always pray and ask God for the little and big things in our lives. from the passing of exams to getting a pay rise, from getting married to raising up a kid, from asking for healing of sickness all the way to the peace in middle east, we ask God for a ton of things. and always, we ask for good things. natually, who would ask for bad things? no sane human, according to my logic, would do such a thing.

but you know, life is not always smooth. the (little) tragedies in our lives, they do happen.

and what if, one day, we finally met with the (little) tragedies in our lives? why do i bracket the word little? because i know, for many of us, no matter how 'tragic' our lives are, it is still not counted as tragic. to some, what we have gone through may be a lot, but to others, like what i always say, they would gladly take over our position add 10 times the suffering. but nevertheles, it is still a tragedy to us. so it is up to you to say if your life is tragic.

today, the story was about a cute atheletic teenager, in a famous school, with a brigh future ahead, suffering a stroke and end up in hospital, and is suffering from cognition problems now. also, she cannot walk or talk properly now. imagine, that happens to us. then, what will you do?

honestly, i don't know what i will do. to accept the good things from God, we take it for granted sometimes, and sometimes we do show our gratitude and really appreciate it. but what if one day, God decided to bring us down? then, what will we do?

it is very nice to read an inspiring story such as that of joseph and job in The Holy Bible, but it is totally another thing to experience that ourselves. to lose what we have earned for, to see what we have gone. how will we feel?

maybe, then it will be a test of faith again. will we trust in God again? even though we know there is a God, will we still follow Him. i have a friend, who told me he believes in God and His existence, but that he would rather go to hell than to trust God again. will we, end up like my friend?

sometimes, life is really hard. honestly, if i am in the position of that teenage girl, i would rather die. suicide (don't come and talk to me about how it is wrong to suicide). and the problem now is, she doesn't even have the capability to suicide.

how great is our faith? sometimes we may think we will die for God if the time comes. dying is easy. serious. but living in a state worse than death? will you still keep your faith? you have to think carefully, and answer it.

somewhere along, i read a quote which goes something like, 'i do not pray that God will remove your burden. but i pray that God will give you enough strength to carry it.'

talk is easy, right? i think, all christians should ask ourselves this question. how far would you go to believe in God? no matter what happens? if that is really what you think and believe, good for you. for those like me who are unsure, i think, we can only pray and get in a deeper relationship with God. for me, i don't dare to say i will still believe, because, this kind of thing never happened to me before. and so, how will i react? i seriously don't know.

faith. this is one of the things we need to enter heaven. without it, we will definitely go down to hell. and now, what will you do to keep your faith? how far will you go and keep that faith? this is very important, now that (i assume) most of us are still in a blissful position, we can think what we can or will do if that situation ever comes. because, if you don't, and one day you find yourselves like that cute teenager who lost nearly everything, and if you lose your faith, then, what will happen to you?

losing faith at that time, let's not talk about going to hell. by losing faith, you have effectively thrown away the most effective support you can ever have, that is God. i know it is easy to talk, that's why i can talk so much.

one day, if ever you or me end up having a (little) tragedy in our lives, i hope, we can still keep our faith. because, i think, that is the one thing most important for you. at that time, perhaps the most important thing to do, is to keep your faith. so i hope, all readers of this post will be able to keep your faith no matter what happens.

'the winner has been decided. strength and lies. those are the two things you need to live.'

'you're wrong. if you live only on power and lies, the only things waiting for you are conflict and sadness. in order to live, you need a heart that can trust others! you understand that perfectly, and yet you run away! trust your masters, trust your friends, and also trust yourself. that is true power!'

'a heart that can trust others? with that... my sister was...!'

'right now, honoka is still believing in me and waiting for me!'

'can you really protect your sister with that naiveness?!'

---

these are the words said during a fight between 2 people - one who is trying to protect his sister, and the other who failed to protect his sister. the boy who failed to protect his sister because he trusted in the wrong person and lost everything he had because he was weak grew up to become a man who believed in only strength and lies (acting).

because he trusted the wrong person, he lost his sister, and subsequently everything. and now he saw the one fighting him believing in others, trusting in others so much that he could not stand it. he could not believe that the one fighting him could save his sister like that.

in our lives, there are times when we trusted the wrong person. all humans are selfish. it is just how selfish we are. some are willing to betray others and sacrifice a relationship, some are not. the cost of trusting the wrong person, it varies. for some, it involves a hurt experience. for some, it is money, for some it is a life. and depending on our character, our age at that time, and the cost that we had to pay, we all change differently one way or another. even for adults, they will change. for kids, the impact may be so great that they grow up into a totally changed person, just like the one who believed in strength and lies.

all humans by nature starts off as trusting. as a kid we believe in others and trust in others easily. and as we grow up and through the different experiences we accumulated we got wary of others to a different degree. by nature we want to trust others. just that sometimes, the world we live in are so different that there are people who totally shut out and refused to believe in anyone other than themselves. power, money, strength... etc these are all earned with the effort of the individual to protect oneself from others. and as one trust and believe lesser in others, the dependence in all these grew. and we turn our trusts and faith from humans or God to these things that we can manipulate.

as humans, everyone wants assurance. because the world is big and we are small, we need something to hold us up so we can live on. unforunately, not all of us have the privilege to do that. we all want to trust in others, and despite our actions of rejecting others, we know deep down in our hearts that if we live on power and lies, if we live depending on no one but ourselves, what awaits us at the end of this road is nothing but conflict and sadness. we understand that if we want to live, we have to trust in others. like the man, we know it. yet like him, we reject this.

sometimes there is nothing we can do. because in our experiences nothing good come out from trusting others. because we don't want to get hurt again. so despite knowing we have to and we ourselves want to believe in others, we could not bring ourselves to do it. instead, we close ourselves up. to put it simply, it is like people refusing to cross the road anymore in their lives because of the accident they had when they crossed the road in the past.

maybe, we have already gained back what we had lost, be it money or some other things. maybe, there are some things that can never be gained back. one thing is for sure, we had not got over the betrayal we had experienced. we are unable to apply what we know in our practical life. well, maybe so far what i have said is an extreme case where only a minority of the human population felt. but somewhere in our lives, we would have been unable to trust others to a certain extent, and shut ourselves out. that is normal i guess?

usually we would get over it by ourselves, since our personal tragedy usually is not a tragedy at all and instead just a minor bump in life. but like i said, there are really others who fell and could not get up again.

for those people who had not yet get up and are reading this, if really trusting humans are that difficult for you (i do understand a little bit of that feeling though), why not start by trusting God first? maybe you are wondering, if there is a God no such tragedy would happen to you right? i cannot explain why a particular incident happen to you, and in my blessed life who knows nothing about tragedies i can only say that there is a God you can trust. maybe, this sounds like some bullshit coming from someone who didn't know anything about pain, but since i do not go through extreme sadness or pain, this is the best i can do.

this may sound repetitive, and maybe you have heard till you are sick of it. but still, because you may not have understood it despite being repeated to you so many times, i would say it again. God loves you, so He won't betray you. God knows everything, so He is able to guide you. God owns everything, so there is no need for Him to betray you to gain something. there is a need for us to trust, and we want to do that. but because we cannot trust in humans, so, maybe, try trusting in God for once.

for those of us who know people like that... well at least pray for them if you are too lazy to help them. or show to them how trust and friendship works. a relationship that does not work like a transaction. a bond that operates on love. a friendship that is based on genuine feelings instead of self-interests. only when those who cannot trust others see that can they convince themselves to take a step forwards out of the prison they had closed themselves in.

actions speaks louder than words. afterall, those who had been betrayed most probably had been fooled by the words of others long ago. so they do not believe in any kind of sweet words anymore. proving it to them, that is the best way. and slowly, little by little, we can guide a person out of that jail cell, out of the place where no trust lives in.

we always see this kind of scenes happening in anime, to the point it is almost cliche. but people still like this kind of stories. why? because it reflects a part of our lives, a portion of our feelings. it is real to us, to a certain extent. because we can immerse ourselves in it, because we can identify with the characters in it, we like it. so, if we can identify with the tragic guy in the story, we can also see that we can be in the shoes of the one who pull the 'guy-in-prison-cell' out of that place into a world with trust. with our actions, we may be able to save someone.