What if you could see a lifetime in a moment?

What if you could see a lifetime in a moment? 


What would you see? 


How would it change you?


Would you let things be?

I trust you would not see things as they are. 


Your vision will be cast wide, deep and far.  
    


Imagine a lifetime squeezed into a moment, 


And a moment revealing all there is to know in a lifetime. 


You will see them all in a glance,


From birth to death, 


All events happening in one moment enhanced.  


All the successes and failures availing themselves before you.

All the labor and regrets converging at a point for your preview. 


How would you respond in that moment with this blessed hindsight? 


Will it still matter whether they're wrong and you're right?


This insight would tame your unruly emotions. 


It will make them less deserving 
of your attention.
 


No doubt you will discover the ugliness of humanity. 


You'll see how men's thoughts devolve into depravity. 


But you will also see the best in all of us. 


As rawness is overcome by love and brought to task. 

With such wide-lens view in the wink of an eye, 


You will spare no time to focus on words that are quickly disavowed with time. 


Your anger wouldn't be stoked by a nasty word or two.


Neither will hatred and bitterness burn deep within you. 


A moment's provocation will readily lose its hold, 


Because the insight to future hope will somehow turn anger cold. 


If a man is incorrigible as his future is moot, 


Then engaging him will surely not bear much fruit. 


With that revelation beyond time and space, 


You will let go and not a second to waste. 



If a man will be remorseful of 
what he has done, 


You will not pursue a point to prove it just for fun. 


You will tame your tongue and let it be, 


And let time show his errors for him to see. 


No confrontation would be worth engaging for long. 


I suspect you will let bygone be bygone. 


Surely, you will be less quick to judge a man, 


Lest your judgment returns to haunt you when he makes amends.


For every person there is a sorrow past.


Judge not that moment and burn all bridges fast.


So, if you see a lifetime in a moment, enjoying this vantage point, 


Wouldn't you stop yourself from reacting and coming to a boil? 


Actually, you don't need to see it all in a moment's span,


For it is already known to you way before hand. 


I ask of you to give a life a lifetime to bloom, 


And hold your wrath as you give 
it more elbow room. 


People will surprise you more than they will let you down, 


Because we're learning from our mistakes in the here and now. 


Be assured of one thing though that is common to all,

And that is how we will without exception,


Stumble and fall. 


So live and let live, and be wise to forgive. 


For a life is just too short, 


To allow the hurt to outlive.

Cheerz.

What I think when I think about God...

If I am challenged to think about God, this is how I will think about God. There is nothing that he cannot do. He has no limits. He is God anyway. He created everything that has existed, is existing and will ever exist. Some of his greatest creation apart from us are time, love, free will and the universe or multiverses. He started it all and will ultimately end it all. He is personal too and that is what makes my belief in him so real, intimate and agreeable. He has created me in his image and my enduring hope is that I can expect myself to look like him. I take image here to mean appearance as well as human traits and emotions. 

I can therefore trust that he feels how I feel and he sees what I see. I can also trust that he loves me unconditionally because he would not have gone through all the trouble of creating everything humanly conceivable and possible for my existence and even thriving if his love was ever conditional.

God in my mind is perfect. He is perfect even before I had the mind to think that he is perfect. Although I would never come to terms with perfection or understand how it works in my world, I am at least comforted to know that God is perfect and he works everything out perfectly in a time he calls his time.

He has no beginning and no end; or else he would be less than the perfection that my mind has come to conceive him to be. He is also everywhere. Theologians call that being omnipresent. But his presence is never intrusive, never a bother unlike the secret surveillance of a police-state. In fact, I can think of his presence in my life as reassuring, inspiring and even empowering. It is like the meeting of soul mates where the dialogue between them can only be understood by them and no one else. It is therefore exclusively personal. It is also an intimacy that not even marital consummation could compare.

Paradoxically too, this relationship is also inclusive in that it would not turn me into a recluse, a snob or a self-complacent preacher. It would not make me repellant to others, to myself or to him.

But I have to understand that God can at the same time be a mystery. He can be a perplexity so perplexing that my limited mind could never completely unravel. Because he is God, he has to remain God. And being him is to be beyond what my mind can fully understand. This mystery has to be what it has to be and that is to be a mystery that would surpass all human understanding (but not human yearning of course).

He would have to be one or two steps (or innumerable steps) ahead of the learning curve or human scientific discovery. He would have be measured by infinity while we are measured by miles. He would have to inhabit an eternity while we survive only a lifetime. He is God no less and we are just not. He cannot be penetrated in the same way that a cell, a gene, a subatomic particle, a quark, a dimensional symmetry or an energy force can  be penetrated. He is beyond the means, probe and tools of all human earnest endeavors.

For to know everything there is to know about God would be to know nothing more there is to know about him. And to know nothing more there is to know about God is to arrive at exactly where he was and is and will be and that is inconceivable even with the best of human ingenuity and imagination. To arrive at this preposterous knowledge would spell the end of his divinity and the start of our impunity. This is one eventuality that will never be eventuated. Fat chance.

We are but a fraction of him, a loose shard of an image of him. At best, we reflect only a part of him that he chooses to reveal to us and no more. His sovereignty is where our knowing and understanding of him ends and the impenetrable mystery of him starts. This is a fact I must accept if I am to be challenged to think about God. It is a non-negotiable term of the start and end of my mental conception of him.

Theologians call this gap faith as the existential bridge to connect what we know and what we will never come to know. And for this reason and this reason alone, the mystery of God would be both the source of my continued believing in him and the source of my continued doubts about him. This faith-driven-doubt-ridden struggle in my heart planted by the one who deems it fit to put it there for reasons exclusive only to himself is the reason why I will forever be inspired and tortured at the same time by him. It is a struggle that will always keep my faith alive and almost dead at the same time for the purpose of subsequent reviving. 

It is a dichotomy of two minds fighting for prevalence, preemption and precedence in my life. Ironically the road ends for me the moment it starts for me. It is a human discovery to not discover humanly further. It is the dead-ending of the beginning and the beginning of the dead end.

If my mind is about knowing everything about God, then the end of this journey of knowing everything about him is the start of believing in him with this mind-challenged faith. This same faith will never tell me enough about the gratuitous sufferings in this world and a loving and all-powerful God. It will never tell me enough about the trump of evil and the torture of the righteous. Neither will it tell me enough about the deliberate hiddenness of God, the death of an innocent child, the lust of an ungodly man, and the injustice of oppression, religious hypocrisy, natural calamities, human sexual abuses, the rejection of those different from us, the hubris of men, and the soul-wrenching pain of doubts.

Faith must thus fill in the gap for me - even when sometimes faith has a short but no less flexible reach.

Herein ends my challenge to think about God. It is a challenge because he has created me to know him and to know him is what will ultimately define me. Yet to know him is not to know what I am dying to know about him. It is a subjective itch that I can never objectively scratch. This mystery about him is put in place to set me apart from him, but at the same time, to join me together with him. It is therefore a lifetime struggle of faith over doubts and doubts over faith. That is to me the authenticity of faith and to deny it is to deny what he has created and destined me for. And if his intention has always been to keep the believing in him meaningful, suspenseful and even painful, then he has done it most perfectly. Amen. Cheerz.    

I walked with God, and nearly died of sorrow.

I dreamt I took a walk with God. It was a slow walk, a stroll. It was a walk to nowhere. He was unusually quiet. He did not make a sound. I tried to look at his face but something restrained me. All I could see was things around me. Initially, I saw the beauty of nature. The landscape of mountains. The cool endless breeze. The ocean and the streams and the placid rivers. I also saw the royal expanse of the sky above. It was an awe-consuming sight. I was soaking it all in.

Then things turned a little dark. I felt something amiss. God was not the least ruffled. He was as calm as a rock. He kept his composure. But I was getting nervous, really worried. I knew I would be safe with him, the Creator of the universe. Yet, I was feeling the foreboding closing in.

Then, I heard a scream. It was a sharp piercing one. It was at this time that I witnessed my first tragedy. My heart raced. I saw a gang rape. My peace was shattered. She was young, no more than ten. It was somewhere in a remote village in South Africa I think. The girl was tasked to fetch water for her sisters back to the village where they lived. They were all starving, dying of thirst. The girl had no choice. She drew the shortest end of stick. She had to go out.

The men were young. A group of six at least. They didn’t look like they knew what they were doing. They had no hesitation, no visible guilt registered. It was getting dark and they each took their turn with her. Each of them eagerly waiting for the next one to end, impatient even. Lust paid no heed to anything else. Strangely, she did not beg or plead with them. She just screamed, high-pitch. And it was heartrending.

I saw splatters of blood and a frantic struggle for life. It lasted for what seemed like hours. The contrast was deplorable beyond words. On one side was violence personified. On the other was innocence ravaged. It was life viciously drawing out life from a helpless life. I couldn’t understand the barbarity. I was speechless; yet I couldn’t do anything. I tried to reach out to her but again I was restrained. It was as if it was not meant to be for me. My will was ring-fenced somehow, straitjacketed.

I then turned to God, stupefied and stunned. I couldn’t understand God’s silence. He didn’t even take a look. He just walked on. He was not the least troubled. Unlike me, God was unmoved. Though he was not in a hurry, he was nevertheless stoic. He just walked by. 

The scene changed after that. Before me, I saw a beaming horizon. A silhouette of dispersing light. The night turned into day. As dawn broke, we kept walking. It was a walk to nowhere. I dared not ask. God didn’t seem to be interested to talk.

My mind was still on that little girl. Her life so young was destroyed. Though we had covered much distance, my heart stayed at the exact spot where the girl met her fate. I even felt a tear or two streaming down my cheek.

It was at this time that something distracted me. The scene around me changed in a wink of an eye. What unfolded was a mother holding on to her precious baby in the delivery ward. The mother was overwhelmed. She was crying. The baby was surrounded by loved ones and they were all rejoicing. They were laughing, celebrating and even dancing. The joy was infectious. I smiled a little. I could feel God was smiling too.

Then, time sped up. The clock on the wall went wild, oscillating nonstop. The juxtaposition between passing time and the growth of the child was almost comical. As time flew, literally, the baby boy grew up fast. His was a family of enduring love and happiness. It was like watching a wonderful blessing blooming before me in real time. I was deeply inspired. I wished that this could go on forever.

God and I were still walking but somehow the walk appeared to slow down a little.  It slowed down to allow me to see how the boy became a teenager, a young adult and a man and then he got married. I saw the wedding. It was glorious. The crowd of witnesses. The tears in the parents’ faces. The confession of love. The exchange of vows, the heartwarming embrace and the mutual kiss that sealed a lifetime together, forever. For a moment, my heart returned to me. From where it was earlier, it returned. I was quite settled, resolved. I could sense that God was pleased too. I know this because I could sense a warm glow from him. It was a glow that assures you, comforting and empowering even.  

In a glance, the wedding was over. It was the honeymoon now. I guess the lovely couple went on a world tour. I saw images of many places around the world, exotic locations, to-die-for sceneries. They were very happy and very much in love. I was even envious. Then, the scene changed again, just abruptly as before. Alas, I sensed that same ominous feeling creeping in.

This time, I forced myself to look at God’s face. I wanted his response to my premonition. But I couldn’t see anything except darkness, complete immersion in blackness. A shrilling shattered the silence. A phone call and a hello and everything stilled. Dead calm. God was still around. I could sense him. But he was again silent. It was becoming a rather familiar trait of his.  Then, I heard sobbing. It grew louder, louder still. I saw the parents on their bed, hugging each other, crying like a baby. Their faces contorted with sorrow that broke me down too. I cried with them knowing the worst had happened.

I saw the phone hanging by their bed. It was a call from the police reporting about a car-crash. I didn’t need to know anything further. I knew who were the victims. I knew what happened. Apparently a lorry driven by a drunk driver beat the red light and smashed into their car. The lovely couple were dead, instantly. Just like that. They died in a car crash. Their precious young lives shattered in a moment. Their future ended even before it had a chance to start.

I went into another shock, jaw-dropped. I was angry now. I shouted at God. I shook with apoplectic rage. WHY? I yelled. You knew it all along right? I exploded. Surprisingly, God stopped walking. His brisk steps ended, dead at its tracks. He reached out for my hands and held them. I could feel his touch, his hands. It was a firm grip no less. I also felt a strange tingle, a warm quiver.  Then, we vanished, literally. There and then, we were no more. I lost all awareness for a while. The next scene was Calvary. God took me back in time. 2000 years to be exact.

I saw the Cross. I saw a man hung, taunted mercilessly. I saw everything. The bloody nails. The bloody crown of thorns. The bloody back. The bloody Cross. I saw the tears. I saw the pain. I saw the suffering. It was heartbreaking beyond words. I was speechless again. There and then, hung, was my savior. He was the Christ. My helpless redeemer. The tortured messiah. He was also God’s only son. And God turned away. He did nothing. Not a thing. He just walked by. But this was one mind-numbing tragedy I quietly followed him in lockstep. We just walked away.

Strangely, God led me back to the future and we returned to the first tragedy I had witnessed. This time it was different. This time he did not walk away. This time, he intervened. He immobilized the young rapists, rescued the little girl and returned her to her sisters. I was encouraged by the sight. I was thankful to God.

Next, God stood in the middle of the traffic junction. It was a familiar scene to me. He was waiting and I was watching, eagerly. Like clockwork, the lorry came with a mission to perdition. Everything happened so fast. God redirected the lorry, away from harm’s way. He saved the young couple. They didn’t even realize that God had saved them. I have to admit that I was relieved, smiling even. I then held on to God’s hand and squeezed it. I was proud of him.

After that, in a snap of time, we returned to Calvary. I saw Jesus, dying. This time, God did not hesitate. There was no warning. He walked towards the Cross. He drew near to the crowd hollering for his son’s blood. I saw the same resolve when he saved the girl and the young couple. God raised his hands with determination and wanted to end the suffering, the grave travesty. He wanted more than anything to save his own son. But something shook me hard and I shouted at him. I shouted at God. I cried out. WAIT!

Instantly, there was total blackout. Silence returned. I was all alone now. I searched for God. Worried. Then, a distant glow appeared. It was God - I knew that by heart. But he was leaving me. He had to go. I then managed to catch a glimpse of the lover of my soul. I noticed a tear streaming down from his face. The tear met with his reassuring smile.. Before he left, God whispered to me. He said softly, “My son did not die in vain. No one who lives for me dies in vain.” And then I woke up, stunned. Cheerz.