What is love? Is it being loyal, completely committed to somebody, willing to die for them? Is it merely a matter of somebody’s commitment to one another? Or is it something different, something deeper. Jesus died for our sins, and “loved” us no matter who we were, unconditional love. Agape love. What is agape love? Is it stupidity? 1 Corinthians 13 tells us that love is patient, love is kind, and is not jealous. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. It is not rude or self seeking, not easily angered, and keeps no record of wrong. Love rejoices in the truth.
With it, we can do anything, without it we are nothing.
Ever since i began to think about life, I never understood what the purpose of love is. It seems stupid and inefficient. Why would somebody keep no record of wrong? Then, we are simply setting our lives of for disappointment as the person commits the same wrongdoing once more. Why hope? Why hope for the best when you know the worst is coming and your hope will be shot down. Why be honest? Honesty only gets people in trouble because the world is not a friendly place. These are the thoughts that have been with me my entire lifetime. Even when i first began believing in Jesus, I thought, God, I believe in you. But making humanity makes no sense because you humanity is a failure. Why would you sacrifice some of your perfection for utter shit? What did we do to deserve it?
I wondered what the difference between love and an addiction was. Many people I see are addicted, whether it be to video games, looks, facebook, anything. Do they love facebook? I am sure that they are committed to facebook. They probably never forget about it and always return to it. For my example, i will use facebook. What makes an addiction to facebook any different from love. I feel that many people would say that the difference is that they wouldnt give their lives to save facebook but they would give their life to save a person or something they love. However, i find it contradictory that they are in the process of giving their lives to facebook by spending so much of their time and life on it. So i wonder what makes love so much better? And, if love was out there, why was it so hard to find? Why was it so much easier to find a computer than to find out what love means? And more personally, why couldnt i love?
I had been loved by my mother, father, step father, and step mother. I couldnt have asked for better parents. It isnt like my childhood is messed up which scarred me for life making me incapable of love.
So i still come to the question of what is love. I guess there are two things that we consider love, genuine love and lust. the obvious difference is that lust is for personal gain while love is for somebody else gain. And, that is the only difference that matters. Every action that we make can be determined an action out of love or out of lust. If i were to donate money to the poor, it could be because I care for the poor, love them, and hope that they may be able to live with a little less hardship. Or, it could be because i want to feel good about myself and make others think that I am a good person. I could confront somebody because I see that they need to change in order to be a better person. Or, i could confront them because I am really pissed that they continually mess with me. Love is outward, lust is inward.
And yet i wonder if humans are capable of love. We say we love Jesus, but do we love him? Or, do we lust him because we know that we need him.
Can we love God? Righteous men in the bible are not described as God-lovers, but God-fearing. However, the greatest commandment is to love the lord your god with all your heart, soul, and might.
American Pacifism
I am writing this not because I want to or think it is interesting. I am writing this because it is what I see. What I see makes me depressed, sad to the very center of myself. I am watching my fellow young adults and the children of this country grow up loving nothing. I am finding that the American life is nothing more than a set of rituals that stresses efficiency and luxury and denies us passion. We do not love; we depend. We do not have passion; we have a busy life. We do not have time; we have a schedule.
Children
We are corrupted as soon as we are able to walk. Our children are constantly drawn to the television, as they sit in front of it, entranced. When not allowed to watch television, the child throws a fit because he or she likes to watch television. The violent cartoons are funny to them, and they act like a pacifier to the child. The parent allows the child to watch television because it makes their life easier. If a child has a portable screen with them such as a game boy, all the nearby children gather around to watch the child play. From the youngest of ages, we are taught to simply entertain ourselves. The parents allow this to occur because when the child is entertained, they can have their own life. Not only does the child learn to entertain himself, but he also learns to deal with being separated from his parents at a young age. At an even deeper level, the child learns from his parents to take the easy way of life because the parents took the easy way of life with them. I used to do nursery for my church. I would take care of the young children and I would play with them. I was always saddened when one of them brought a gameboy because I saw how the majority of the nursery lost the will to play with each other and began to watch the child play his gameboy. Even as children, we are losing the ability to be social and interact with others. Then, the child begins to grow up and become tired of their childish cartoons and want more.
Teenagers
As we grow older, our innocence slowly fades. We stop asking blunt questions, stop doing what we feel and become even more bound to the ways of the earth. We grow tired of the cartoons that we used to watch. We feel that we need more. We don’t know what it is, so we search what is around us. We all find ways to pacify ourselves. It could be playing a video game, watching television programs, going shopping, reading online blogs, surfing the Internet, grades, or even worrying about our appearance. As we grow up, we potentially get trapped in even worse addictions such as drugs, substance abuse, domestic abuse, sex, anything. The longer we do these things, the more that we need it. Soon, we become dependent on it. At that point, we almost completely forget what we love, what we could have a passion for. All is lost in the abyss of apathy.
Being a typical high school teenager, I became lost. My best friend left to move to China, and I was left with people I knew, but not true friends. I lingered on the edges of a group of friends, kind of part of it, kind of not. But yet I didn’t think about it too much. I personally had pacified myself with videogames. I didn’t study, I went home, played video games, taking breaks only to eat and when forced to by my parents. I lived through my video games. I ignored my entire life because of video games and it consumed me. The only time I was reminded by my loneliness was at school. So, I went to church, which completely changed my life. However, even though I was a Christian and I loved and followed God, I still depended on the video games. I couldn’t let go because I didn’t know what to do with myself and it was so much easier to play video games than to deal with my life. Then, I graduated high school, and I entered college.
Young Adults
The early twenties is supposedly the peak of the human life. It is when anything is possible and we are supposed to live our lives to the fullest. But what does that mean? In college, it seems to mean partying, getting wasted and high, and hanging out with friends. That life to me seems to be incredibly boring and I wonder why it is suppose to be so great. The way I see it is that you get high and drunk is to forget is to forget who you are and that you are mortal. Why is forgetting supposed to be the best part of our lives? Because we live in a depressed nation. In college we get a chance to start our lives over, impress a new image on people, be who you want to be. Despite this great chance, I see it wasted so many times. We continue to do what we do best, chose the easy way. While this is different for everybody, it has the same end result, no passion.
During my first half of college, I did what I did in high school. I played video games whenever I could. I would go to class, do homework, occasionally hang out with friends, and play video games. It continued to consume me, to force me down to live a passive life. Finally, I broke free of it and I realized that I wasn’t living the life I was made to live. I forgot the passion that I had, to understand people. I forgot how to love the people that I loved, and I let my life fall apart. Luckily for me, I realized this before it was too late. However, when I look around me, with my eyes now opened, I see my peers lost just like I was. They merely exist until the next party, the next chance to get high, and the next time to escape themselves. Why do we always want to escape? Because we live in a depressed nation and are depressed.
Adults
While I have no personal experience with this, I watch adults and how they live their lives. I watch how they live a 9 to 5 job, come home, rest, cook dinner, rest, and then sleep. Occasionally they will take vacations, relaxing and spending the money that they make. However, I see very few people with jobs that they truly love. With lives that they truly love. I see people working jobs for money, to live comfortably, to live a life of ease. I see people working jobs that they do not love and are completely irrelevant to who they are and what they love.
I remember adults always telling me to enjoy my time in college, as it is a once in a lifetime experience. And I think, why don’t you enjoy your life as an adult? Isn’t that a once in a lifetime experience? Every moment is unique, but yet for some reason college is special? Is it special because it is a time to foster passions and do something with them? Why is college the time? Why isn’t the time now for all these adults. Even further, I feel like many adults wish they were young again. So they could do what? Relive their life? If somebody wants to relive their life, then they are living a life not worth living, without passion. They are using the excuse that they are too old to pursue their passion. The only valid excuse they could have for ignoring their passion is that they are too far gone down the road, too stuck in their cozy lifestyle to change.
Overall
No matter who it is, I see passionless lives all around me. No matter where I go, no matter where I look, I see meaningless lives. It is the American way, and will always be. We have taught efficiency and addictions to luxuries, we have forgotten ourselves. It is the curse of America which so many people see as blessing. It is what will destroy us as a people and keep us away from God.
Isaiah 59:2
But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear.
I have decided to begin writing 2-3 times a week, about what i think about.
I want to begin by talking about a problem i had with a message that i recently heard at an aacf meeting at ucsc. It is not a problem that i had in particular with the speaker, it was more of a problem with a phrase that speakers often use. It is the phrase, “God is first.” While at a first glance, it seems that this is the correct view. Because God is most important, God should be first. My first problem with this phrase is that saying God is first implies that you can finish the task of God. For example, say that I have a list of three things to do. First, i am going to do laundry, then clean my room, then make my bed. Once i finish the laundry, which is first on my list, i am completely done with it, not concerning myself with it anymore. This thinking does not work well with God, as God is not a task but a lifestyle. Thus, this leads me to say that God is not first on the list, but God is the list. Gal 2:20. I have been crucified in Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives within me, the life i live in the body i live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. This verse sufficiently states that we are never done with God, but yet we must be completely engrossed in him, so much so that we no longer live but we are merely bodies for Christ to use and dwell in.
