hope

it feels like week 10 though it is only the 3rd week of the semester. somehow there is the feeling that this sem might be the sem that i'll crash. won't be a very nice feeling considering i was given a pretty cool lifeline from last sem's results. oh well.. i think a lot is just mind games. so it was good to meet up with pastor ian and daniel last night, to give my mind a sense of sanity. we are going through this book Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster. It focuses on the simple basic christian disciplines - meditation, prayer, fasting, study, simplicity, solitude, submission, service, confession, worship etc - in a very deep manner.

This line pretty much capture the essence of what i've find it hard to reconcile

"Picture a long narrow ridge with a sheer drop off on either side. The chasm to the right is the way of moral bankruptcy through human strivings for righteousness. Historically this has been called the heresy of moralism. The chasm to the left is moral bankruptcy through the absence of human strivings. This has been called the heresy of antinomianism. On the ridge there is a path, the Disciplines of the spiritual life. This path leads to the inner transformation and healing for which we seek..."

Hmmm... I dunno, its tough to thread on this thin ridge when life whirls around in a catastrophic manner. Its hard to keep that mental space of stillness for God when the mind is so stuffed up with the day's events. Sometimes I just want to give up striving altogether, when I sit down and ask myself : "for what?". And then I realize it is such a self-centred question. Maybe the question is rephrased, to reduce the degree of self centrism, and I'll ask myself: "for who?". Rather sadly, I can't say with all my conviction that it is totally for an invisible but omnipresent God. Maybe there is always that sense of a tangible hope that threading on this ridge will make past and present crap seem a little more bearable, and perhaps explainable. But maybe, my idea of 'hope' is quite wrong after all. It's interesting that Paul places 'hope' at the end and 'suffering' at the front when he says 'Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character, and character, hope'

So I have to suffer first before I am given that space to hope? I thought the conventional way is to hope first so that any sufferings that comes after the hope will be lighter to hold. But, perhaps from Paul's perspective, 'hope' is really not a means to any ends, but rather an end in itself. Actually, it's pretty clear that Paul's hope is somewhat in the heavenly realm, an intangible and inexplicable sense of joy when the hope of returning home to God becomes a tangible reality. A hope that I fail to see because I'm blinded by my own little hopeless pursuit of things tangible and nice. Maybe my friend was right after all, he told me it is one thing to wait with hope, it is really quite another to have a hopeless wait. What am I waiting for? It's hard to tell myself i'm waiting for nothing... really.