(Reproduced from an earlier blog entry written on December 12, 2005. I decided to put it on again because I read an interesting piece on nightmares by Daniel, though obviously the kinds of nightmares we are talking about are quite different. Here is the link to Daniel's piece: http://mechanicalchopsticks.blogspot.com/2009/04/nightmares.html)
You've had this nightmare before. Each time it may be rendered in a different way, but the primary motif remains the same. In the nightmare, you invariably find yourself staring into an expanse of cold, unrelenting existence which suggests mild hostility. And such a frightening sight, as you always hope to ignore but never fail to notice, has an air of familiarity to it, because it looks so much like the sweet dream you had just moments ago, except that now the environs have completely mutated into something diametrically opposed to the warm congeniality you know so well when things haven't gone awry. You don't have a clear idea how you end up where you are. You only know that being there you feel a stifling sense of impassability. The frostiness that stares you in the face numbs your mind, shrivels your heart, and dampens your spirit all at once. You couldn't believe you would actually be encountering such frostiness. You're not sure you can battle it, because it seems to get tougher every time. You wish you weren't there. You wish your whole being could be transposed to another realm of existence so that you wouldn't need to go through all this -- again.
Coming out of such a nightmare, you feel physically sapped and emotionally drained. You doubt if you could sustain another trial of this kind. You know nightmares are good-dreams-turned-bad, so you feel you want to give up dreaming altogether, if only you could. But then you also know that you CAN'T, not only because you have absolutely no control over the incidence of dreams, but also because it is absurd to give up all dreams just because of the scary ones. More importantly, sweet dreams have deepened your life to a dimension you never knew existed. Without these dreams, it would appear that life is hardly worth living at all.
Nightmares would recur, but that shouldn't make one give up on dreams. The agony of sacrificing all dreams just because some of them are painful far exceeds the suffering of the nightmares themselves. This realization gives me an important insight into God's love for humans. God never gives up on us even though we could be His nightmares, because the "agony" of giving us up and having us isolated from Him just because we're not always the way He wants far exceeds the "pain" of Him seeing us go astray in and of itself. God created a relationship with humans built on love, and although it might be speckled with imperfections, it is certainly a bond too intimate and dear for Him to forego. In this light, God's ceaseless love for us makes perfect sense, because why would He, being all-intelligent, take a more painful option? The bond between God and humans embodies a love so intrinsic and deep that He will not sacrifice it even though it is being constantly compromised. His love remains unshakable and unmovable no matter how wrong things go, because only that -- not giving up -- will bring a much better outcome.
Despite the nightmares, I'll not give up on dreams: because in what seems to be an interesting parallel, they remind me of the ceaseless, unfailing love of God in all its sanity and profundity.
Monday 13 April 2009
Tuesday 7 April 2009
The devil not always to blame ...
I don't usually find the articles in Christianity Today interesting to read, but this one is quite an exception.
Entitled "Self-Examination Time," the article reminds believers of the importance of self-knowledge in proper Christian living. Such self-knowledge, the writer says, will not be possible without the illumination of the Holy Spirit. Now this may not be as hard to construe as it may first sound. It simply means that such knowledge of self depends more on your spiritual condition than your own (presumed) intelligence or inward perceptiveness. This is quite an important distinction, because many people who believe they have a good understanding of themselves often end up doing things that unnecessarily complicate or tangle up their own lives, thus causing inconvenience and grief not only to themselves but most typically to others as well along the way. The writer of the article puts such folly neatly in perspective with a quote from The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, where the master Devil advises his apprentice Wormwood on how to beguile the Christian under his care:
"You must bring [your patient] to a condition in which he can practice self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office."
Certainly most of us can vouch for the existence of people like that -- blind to their own defects which are glaringly obvious to everybody else around them. However, I think rather than ignorance, the problems with these people are more often denial and rationalization. They either refuse to confront the reality of their defects, or they re-package them into something to be accepted, even welcomed. In short, they use God to rationalize their headstrong preference to serve their own desires rather than His.
That is why the article cautions that what usually makes us sin is not so much temptation from Satan as our own hearts. We all like to deceive ourselves in one way or another, and it is not as if we are not good at doing that. Therefore the writer is absolutely right in saying that no amount of self-examination is any good if it comes solely from ourselves; it must come through a spiritual awakening, an honest confrontation with our own personality the way a mature, sincere, and well-intentioned Christian friend would.
Entitled "Self-Examination Time," the article reminds believers of the importance of self-knowledge in proper Christian living. Such self-knowledge, the writer says, will not be possible without the illumination of the Holy Spirit. Now this may not be as hard to construe as it may first sound. It simply means that such knowledge of self depends more on your spiritual condition than your own (presumed) intelligence or inward perceptiveness. This is quite an important distinction, because many people who believe they have a good understanding of themselves often end up doing things that unnecessarily complicate or tangle up their own lives, thus causing inconvenience and grief not only to themselves but most typically to others as well along the way. The writer of the article puts such folly neatly in perspective with a quote from The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, where the master Devil advises his apprentice Wormwood on how to beguile the Christian under his care:
"You must bring [your patient] to a condition in which he can practice self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office."
Certainly most of us can vouch for the existence of people like that -- blind to their own defects which are glaringly obvious to everybody else around them. However, I think rather than ignorance, the problems with these people are more often denial and rationalization. They either refuse to confront the reality of their defects, or they re-package them into something to be accepted, even welcomed. In short, they use God to rationalize their headstrong preference to serve their own desires rather than His.
That is why the article cautions that what usually makes us sin is not so much temptation from Satan as our own hearts. We all like to deceive ourselves in one way or another, and it is not as if we are not good at doing that. Therefore the writer is absolutely right in saying that no amount of self-examination is any good if it comes solely from ourselves; it must come through a spiritual awakening, an honest confrontation with our own personality the way a mature, sincere, and well-intentioned Christian friend would.
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