Tuesday, October 24, 2006

The things that are harmless

My body is aching now from the very tiring day I had going through a footmarch the whole day. That plus the fact that tomorrow will be the start of break and I am not joining it. Anyway, I won't deal with that anymore since I can not really do anything about it, I refuse to stay at the barracks since everyone is either talking about break or preparing for it.
Anyway, I had a short chat with a friend I met last year in a conference I attended. We started talking about this activity that she will be attending and then we had some sort of an exchange of thoughts about something. I do not want to explain what that activity was about but our topic focused mainly on being careful with the things that we get ourselves into. I started by asking her if she did not feel weird about the people behind the activity that she will be attending. I was trying to start a conversation and I asked her because I felt something different with the people that organized that activity. I felt that the people were trying to manipulate us into doing something and it was all for selfish reasons.
When she said that she also felt that something wrong was happening, I then asked her why is it that she still got involved with the people. She said that she ignored it because it wasn't that serious and that she was just an observer, she does not intend to immerse herself with the people. But I wondered as she was saying this because the same people just sent her to a foreign country and she will attend another activity by the same organization this december. I do not wish to put conclusions that she is being tricked into something, for all I know I may be wrong. My concern is that she ignored the feeling that she initially felt believing that there was nothing wrong with what she was doing. She simply felt that it was harmless.
I remember a message I heard sometime ago at church. The message touched on the life of David, yes the same person that God described as "a man after my own heart." He may just be the person that almost reached the idea of perfection that God wanted for each of us and yet he was not sinless. He committed murder and adultery. Well the story started when he saw Bathsheba bathing from his window. He was enticed and yet he ignored it because he was just watching, it was harmless. From that "harmless" incident, he committed murder by putting Bathsheba's husband in the frontlines of an ongoing war to die and then committed adultery. For most people, the reality of situations do not immediately manifest itself. Sometimes we tend to ignore the little whispers that we have inside us not because we feel that it should be ignored but because we fail to grasp the reality of these feelings. Sadder still because we simply say that it is harmless dismissing the whisper altogether.
When I was around six or seven, I took the change that my mother left in our kitchen. At that time I always wanted to buy softdrinks which costed five pesos. I began with just taking five pesos, but sometimes there were more money, sometimes there were even bills. My five pesos became 20 pesos and then 50 pesos and finally I was able to steal 500 pesos. Well, I am not proud of these things. To just put some justice to the story, when my mother learned of my mischief, she pounded my fingers with a screw driver until some parts of my finger turned violet. People may consider that harsh but I did learn my lesson. The five pesos I took at first seemed harmless. I reasoned that my mother had lots and lots of coins and she wouldn't even notice that five pesos was missing. That was also my reason with the 20 peso bill up to the 500. It began because I thought what I was doing was harmless. I ignored the whisper I heard from within me all because it was harmless.
I guess my example can be very obvious as stupidity and it may not necessarily apply to my friends case. But the point I am driving at is that there is something in us that guides us and warns us about things. I do not know if people listen to this "whisper" as I call it but I believe that these are whispers from God. David fell into sin despite of how Godly he is because he ignored these whisper and as for me, I was just immature and naughty. The point is it is not always that we are able to see the implications of the choices that we are making. I think for most people it is because of that uncertainty that delays their action over something. But for others it is because of it that they plunge into that decision believing that it is harmless. The question there is how do we know? One may argue that it is better to find it out rather than spend the rest of your life wondering what it was. I do not know how to go about that but I am presenting something that I truly believe in. The whispers of our heart are whispers from God. Most people ignore it simply because they lack the faith to believe that a Supreme Being is there that is guiding them and always directing them to the right path. In reality, nothing is certain in this world, everything boils down to faith. It is easy to have faith on things that we can see and is real but not all things are like that, in fact most of the things in life are just incomprehensible and beyond our understanding. The exercise of faith is what decides our life. It is not something that can be explained by any cosmic science but it has been proven to work in the lives of many great people. It comes from the acceptance that life is not in our control.
My time is running out, I have to finish this entry now although so many ideas are still playing inside my head. Maybe I can write about the same topic some other time. I have to go now.

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