Of Life and God...


It feels great to be alive… to be just breathing and taking in everything around me or everything that life presents me with. I have been in this world twenty-three long years and I’d say that I had a pretty good life. True, I may have had encountered sad and bad experiences. But, all in all, yes, I have had a wonderful life, thank God!

Life is full of mysteries and as Milan Kundera so aptly put it, life is lived but once and we cannot experiment on choices like the way we could in science projects in order to see the best result. In life, once we have made our choice, then that’s it, there’s no turning back. How do we know that “not going for that foreign scholarship” or “selling that ring that belonged to our great-great-great grandmother” would actually result in the achievement of all our dreams or result in having bad luck follow us all our lives? That is one great mystery of life. Well, when you actually sit down and think about it, if we knew what lay before us, life would actually lose its marvel. It wouldn’t be challenging at all. It would be like some kind of special delicacy that lost its flavor.

It is actually fun to think about what the world would be like if every person knew what was before him or what his actions and choices would result in. If that were the case, would anybody in this world ever be a failure? I mean, wouldn’t it be just weird and stupid for a person to continue with an endeavor if he knew that it would result in the destruction of his life, a whole lifetime of regret and heartaches or even his death?

Don’t we often find ourselves in crossroads? We would always find ourselves torn between that road and this road. Much as we think and reflect about it, the two choices would, most of the time, weigh the same and so we decide to just go on and leave everything to the Fates! We, Filipinos, are so fond of saying “Bahala na!” at times like this. It would often seem that there are people who always make the right choices and end up very, very successful that they make us think how lowly our lives are compared to theirs. At bad times, this kind of people would even bring us to as far as question God about the lives that we have. And then, there would be some people who seem to never get bad luck out of their way and end up as failures and the biggest losers. Now, seeing this kind of people would make us happy and grateful that our lives haven’t been as bad as theirs. And again, we would remember God and thank Him.

I’m not sure if it was Ernest Hemingway who said in one of his books that people always come to God as last resort, when nothing could be done or when nobody in the world could help them. And, oh, isn’t that so true with most of us? I wonder how God, perfect as He is, takes this. Not that God is comparable to people, but if you were in such a place or position where most people only come to you when they need you and forget about you as soon as they get what they want, how would that make you feel? I, for one, would really feel insulted and take that as some kind of a slap on the face. I sure am thankful that God isn’t like me or any human being at all. That idea gives me the assurance that God is never cruel and judgmental. Because if God were, I don’t know what would become of the world and humanity!

God and life are both full of mysteries- mysteries that I would rather leave as is. I love and enjoy life as it is. I love and thank God that He is as He is. And, forever I will… :)

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