Adjective Weekend
It's the Weekend of Adjectives. Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Black Saturday, Easter Sunday. At least, I'm pretty sure Saturday is supposed to be "Black", although really if you go by the weather it'd be "Gray" or "Drippy" or something. It's been raining all day, which I like; unfortunately I have a cold, which I don't like.
I've been meaning to write this post up for awhile. Yes, I do know it's been more than a week since my last post. I've been fine since then, though time's passing frighteningly quickly and I really really have a lot to study and no sense of urgency at all--I think I'm almost approaching a point where I'm incapable of inflicting stress upon myself. Quite disappointing and it does say a lot about the sort of willpower I have, but... at least I managed to wade through a bit of Math. Now I just gotta draw up the Organic Chem charts, do some more Math, and maybe memorise the Physics equations or something. It's the last week of lectures next week, and we're all busily happily panicking while telling everybody else how little we really know.
Somehow I never imagined education to be quite like this.
Anyway... the other day, on Maundy Thursday night, the Campus Crusade had a service to commemorate (it took me awhile to remember how many "m"s go into that) and one of the songs they sang had this line about how Jesus lived the perfect life and died a perfect death, and...
Well. I've known for ages that Christianity, whatever its oddities may be, you can't get away from that fact that we're the only bunch who celebrate the anniversary of the death of the founder of the faith. You don't find anybody else going out and singing songs about how wonderful other people who died were and are and will be. You can, I imagine, forget Christmas if you really want to. That's a celebration in itself, but it was after all, a beginning. The pop of the champagne cork, so to speak. It's pretty and it makes a loud gush and draws lots of attention and it marks the beginning of whatever. Good Friday is more like a sigh of relief at a job well done--and, you have to admit, it's one of the mainstays of the faith.
After all, no death means no resurrection, which (as Paul wrote) means horrible stuff about the entire faith system.
So there was a perfect death, which is to say that He who died was perfect. But living the perfect life? Obviously His life was perfect, i.e. without sin. That's how to get a perfect death. But then the little oddity crops up...
We sing a lot about His perfect life without actually thinking about what it entails. Perfection is a concept easily glossed over but impossible to probe into, you know. The ideal situation never occurs because it's too difficult to create. But I realised that day that my idea of the "perfect life" differs hugely from His. I imagine His idea of the perfect life rather differs from everybody's; I mean, who thinks of a perfect life as one in which you own nothing? Or one in which you get betrayed left and right and end up dying, framed as a common criminal by the authorities who don't like it that you've been exposing their weak spots? Or maybe a perfect life is one in which you try to tell people about God and all they want from you is a free buffet dinner and instant surgery.
For some reason I think my problem here isn't that I can't live a perfect life because I'm not able to. It's probably more to do with the fact that my idea of a perfect life is the perfectly comfortable life. It's really quite simple if you look at the concepts: God's idea of the perfect life is the one that is lived in His will. Our idea is, correspondingly, the one according to our own. So you can't have both: two opposing concepts simply will not mesh, and compromise between the two means you'll wind up with neither.
It's rather an odd idea, and I don't think I've got it quite pat at all. But from what I can see, it rather demands a shift in lens if I'm going to change my idea of "perfect life".
...last Thursday, they (I think it was the Japan Appreciation Club) had this Japanese Culture exhibition near a canteen. It was pretty nice. They had lots of yukatas and accessories that you could dress in to take photos with (2 photos a dollar), and I admit it looked really, really attractive. And they had this little inflatable pool, I think, and they put goldfish in it. Then they sold people small handles with loops (looking rather like a tiny tennis racquet with no strings), then put paper in the loop for them to try to catch the fish with. It looked pretty fun, but extremely difficult. In the end the stall-watcher was offering to help people catch the fish; I guess even they didn't know what to do with the leftover fishes.
I've been meaning to write this post up for awhile. Yes, I do know it's been more than a week since my last post. I've been fine since then, though time's passing frighteningly quickly and I really really have a lot to study and no sense of urgency at all--I think I'm almost approaching a point where I'm incapable of inflicting stress upon myself. Quite disappointing and it does say a lot about the sort of willpower I have, but... at least I managed to wade through a bit of Math. Now I just gotta draw up the Organic Chem charts, do some more Math, and maybe memorise the Physics equations or something. It's the last week of lectures next week, and we're all busily happily panicking while telling everybody else how little we really know.
Somehow I never imagined education to be quite like this.
Anyway... the other day, on Maundy Thursday night, the Campus Crusade had a service to commemorate (it took me awhile to remember how many "m"s go into that) and one of the songs they sang had this line about how Jesus lived the perfect life and died a perfect death, and...
Well. I've known for ages that Christianity, whatever its oddities may be, you can't get away from that fact that we're the only bunch who celebrate the anniversary of the death of the founder of the faith. You don't find anybody else going out and singing songs about how wonderful other people who died were and are and will be. You can, I imagine, forget Christmas if you really want to. That's a celebration in itself, but it was after all, a beginning. The pop of the champagne cork, so to speak. It's pretty and it makes a loud gush and draws lots of attention and it marks the beginning of whatever. Good Friday is more like a sigh of relief at a job well done--and, you have to admit, it's one of the mainstays of the faith.
After all, no death means no resurrection, which (as Paul wrote) means horrible stuff about the entire faith system.
So there was a perfect death, which is to say that He who died was perfect. But living the perfect life? Obviously His life was perfect, i.e. without sin. That's how to get a perfect death. But then the little oddity crops up...
We sing a lot about His perfect life without actually thinking about what it entails. Perfection is a concept easily glossed over but impossible to probe into, you know. The ideal situation never occurs because it's too difficult to create. But I realised that day that my idea of the "perfect life" differs hugely from His. I imagine His idea of the perfect life rather differs from everybody's; I mean, who thinks of a perfect life as one in which you own nothing? Or one in which you get betrayed left and right and end up dying, framed as a common criminal by the authorities who don't like it that you've been exposing their weak spots? Or maybe a perfect life is one in which you try to tell people about God and all they want from you is a free buffet dinner and instant surgery.
For some reason I think my problem here isn't that I can't live a perfect life because I'm not able to. It's probably more to do with the fact that my idea of a perfect life is the perfectly comfortable life. It's really quite simple if you look at the concepts: God's idea of the perfect life is the one that is lived in His will. Our idea is, correspondingly, the one according to our own. So you can't have both: two opposing concepts simply will not mesh, and compromise between the two means you'll wind up with neither.
It's rather an odd idea, and I don't think I've got it quite pat at all. But from what I can see, it rather demands a shift in lens if I'm going to change my idea of "perfect life".
...last Thursday, they (I think it was the Japan Appreciation Club) had this Japanese Culture exhibition near a canteen. It was pretty nice. They had lots of yukatas and accessories that you could dress in to take photos with (2 photos a dollar), and I admit it looked really, really attractive. And they had this little inflatable pool, I think, and they put goldfish in it. Then they sold people small handles with loops (looking rather like a tiny tennis racquet with no strings), then put paper in the loop for them to try to catch the fish with. It looked pretty fun, but extremely difficult. In the end the stall-watcher was offering to help people catch the fish; I guess even they didn't know what to do with the leftover fishes.
Comments
i would love to learn ^^