This week has been one of the most outrageous and tense in my life. It baffles me repeatedly how a piece of paper can change my future irrevocably. As to what some may call good fortune but what I would prefer to see as the answer to a question that I have been asking for sixteen years, I am simply amazed that I am alive and that I have achieved the grades I have longed for.
I was given a book during Christmas called “The Sparrow” by Maria Doria Russell. Over the week, reading it, I was filled with fear. I have never been so frightened while reading before. It was almost as if I was one of the characters, the words concealing a truth or at least one version of it that was too difficult to accept. There is a difference between the knowledge of God and the sensory feeling that God exists. In those pages of rice-wine pale-lit white that I held between thumb and forefinger, a man was searching for the answer. I thought, am I like this man?
The problem, I realised, was that if I were to meet Emilio Sandoz, Jesuit priest and main character of “The Sparrow” who is in a way betrayed by God by what he endures in blood and tears on a newly discovered planet, I would be unable to tell him with absolute conviction: deus vult, God likes it that way. My faith was insufficient, and therefore shaken. The implication of such a realisation was the quality of fear I experienced, which in turn led to the masochistic momentum that prevented me from just putting the book down.
To love comes very easily to me. I could probably fall in love with a slab of concrete if I spent enough time with it. If God is love, then are we falling into God or does God fall into us and what exactly would that mean? Does it mean we can never love anything without God in the picture? Does it mean that God exists only when we experience love, but that would make him too temporary a deity. Who are the agnostics, the atheists, the skeptics if they know love but know not God?
And so pondering, I prayed and asked: please give me a sign.
Without hesitation, it came to me yesterday; twenty minutes later with the results in my lap, on the way home and weeping silently at last.
My life has begun again. And apart from God, as I thought back on the colossal preparations for the GCE O levels, it was a confusion of places, people, words on paper, music, roads, lectures, books, tears, laughter and pain. Fear, dulled but present, suppressed beneath the essays and textbooks, caught between the dark circles on a friend’s face. 6 a.m. mornings, 2 a.m. nights. All these fade into one another.
A voice from long ago saying, “You told me once to fight the good fight.”
I hope I have. And to all my friends who did not do as well as they expected, do not be disheartened. There is so much ahead for us that you cannot possibly imagine. God has a bigger plan for you.
Hey, very good post. You usually have good content. Entirely agree with every thing you just posted. -John Tyler