--- Insight article, Winter 2008 ---
You know you're bad in the kitchen when you manage to mess up instant food. I tried making curry once. I suppose, if it was from raw ingredients, I wouldn't feel as bad. But I messed up instant curry. What happened was...I felt a great urge to eat curry. As I was really hungry when I started food preparations, I decided to make more of it. I read the box..."add x amounts of water, makes y amounts of curry"...well. What if I wanted more? I really, really wanted curry. I looked at the mixture...it looked like it can handle more water...so I add 3x the amount. Meh, maybe it'd be a little dilute. Who reads labels on boxes anyway?
Maybe I should have. I quickly ended up with curry soup, which did not look very appealing at all. Using my amazing engineering deduction, I figured that the best way to handle this situation was to reduce the amount of solvent on hand. Rice absorbs water. Lets dump rice into the mixture! Completely overlooking the fact that cooked rice already absorbed alot of water, I proceed to dump all my rice into the soup. Needless to say, I had to put up with curry congee for the next three meals.
From all that, one could gain many life lessons. I suppose the most applicable one I can think of is trust. How much do I trust this box? How much do I trust the instruction it gives me? Will following it give me...satisfaction? It’s interesting, how much we trust the things around us to bring us happiness. We hang out with friends, we do well on school. We eat ice cream, we play hockey. Anime, YouTube and StarCraft all have their place. We trust all these things to bring us happiness...sometimes without even realizing it. I sometimes wonder...can I really trust these things to bring me happiness? One day, when I don't have my ice cream, don't have internet and broke my StarCraft CD...where can I turn then? If school is going bad, and marks is how I feel good about myself...obviously I'll feel worse than someone who sees school as lesser importance.
This isn't saying that these things are not good. As students, school should be a priority. Friends and family are valuable gifts from God. And how can anyone say that ice cream and cookies are are not good? Rather, I think the importance is realizing that we are dependent on these temporary things. Where would I be without them? Swinging from one fad to another, hoping that if one thing grows old, we'll move onto the next. With these, are we simply addressing the symptoms? Surely, the answer must be somewhere. If only I got the perfect job. The perfect grades. The perfect guy. The danger about the perfect partner is that...well. He/she won't look that way forever. Attitudes and personalities change. Situations change. People come and go. So does health. Happiness is fleeting. Instead, I'll point to a deeper feeling. We speak often of joy. What is joy? According to Paul...
...the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control...
- Galatians 5:22-23
It is important to note that...
- The fruits of the Spirit is a result of God's grace...because you've already been touched by Christ, you have fruit. You can't produce fruit of the Spirit without having Christ first
- Are these fruits simply emotions? No, they are more personality characteristics. Transformed, after all, by Christ. Given that then, we can note that happiness is not the same as joy. One can be joyful, even in sadness.
I think this is where I have to trail off. I wish I could comment further on this concept of Joy, but I can't. If I do indeed have joy, I don't know how it feels or what it's like. Reading various passages and commentaries did not provide me with something objective to comment on. Perhaps, it's not possible to comment on it, it being someone so abstract. I will end off with this paragraph...
"The presence of God brings joy. Indeed, even the Psalms of lament give evidence of joy. The situations of those psalmists were not happy. There was no laughter in their lives. They were not having a good day. But joy remained because they still knew about God, they could still pray to God, knowing that God always cares for his people (even when, inexplicably, he seems not to be doing anything to fix what's broken)." - Scott Hoezee, Sermon on John 16.17-33
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