Dear God,

 

Often I wonder why You leave us handicapped.

 

During this era on earth, logic, science and philosophy are what rules mankind’s thought.

 

Now man believes that utilizing these forms of research and thought together will bring us to full understand of everything.

 

I’ve heard it said “A fact is just one man’s theory until another comes along with a better one.” The new theory replaces the last ‘fact’ and the new theory becomes our new ‘fact’ (consider the world being flat, for instance).

Indeed, even scientists in the same field with the same education don’t always come to the same conclusion. But each of these men believe their findings to be written in stone because their findings cannot be disproved with the knowledge we currently have. They must be proved with time, but the world is moving faster, information flows faster and no one allows time to test our findings before quoting them as fact any more.

 

And God! I am unable to prove your existence any better than they can prove their findings from their ‘observations.’

 

For that is all science is really; a person’s observations and extrapolated ‘thesis’ (thesis: position/intellectual proposition) from their observations.

 

So God, I know You. I’ve experienced you. But I can not prove You.

 

And in taking all of science, mathematics, and logic (and the many other forms of thought processes which many seem to know nothing about), I can not absolutely disprove You.

 

Why must You handicap me so, by making Yourself improvable and at the same time so necessary to my life?

 

But then I realized that even science is a form of faith. For every thought must be based upon an initial assumption.

 

So God, this is why I’m perfectly happy to use your word as my basic assumption. Because every other form of thought also requires an assumption. But I like your assumptions more, for none of them are bad. They are all wholly good.

But then, that’s based on the assumption that I know what ‘good’ is.

 

Ciao for now,

 

  ~ Nathaniel

When little, I thought I knew a lot.
Now big, I know my thoughts are little.

Like Mark Twain said “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished by how much he’d learned in seven years.”

I love to give my opinions away. It’s a cheap gift, I know. But giving others my opinions gives me self worth (sorta like keeping a blog).

Unfortunately, others also like giving me their opinions – even when I don’t want them.

But, I do like to receive someone’s opinion when I’ve already got the very same opinion. I feel they are smart because they’re clever enough to have an opinion that’s the same as mine.

So I have thousands of my own opinions and I collect yours as well (provided I’ve already got my own variation of your opinion).

Often I wonder where I got my thousands of opinions in the first place.

Naturally my opinions come from all over the place and it’s difficult to keep track of them.

On occasion I have caught myself giving an opinion away when halfway through, it occurs to me that I have no idea where I got that opinion or why I have it at all.

In these cases, I must lost face. I’ll usually say “Actually, don’t listen to me, I don’t really know.”

Hopefully I’ve only lost half my face because I was able to retract half my opinion.

Surely I’d look a bigger fool if I’d given away a stupid opinion proving my ignorance.“It’s better to be thought a fool than open your mouth and remove all doubt” was how Abraham Lincoln said.

Even stranger than this, is that over time, my opinions change. If I’ve given you an opinion and then change it one year on; the opinion I gave you loses its value.

And now I’m going to end with two opinions

… before I give any opinions away, I should know where I get that opinion in the first place, why I kept it and be sure that it’s not an opinion that’s going to change.

Really; shutting up is the best option

In my opinion.

Let’s talk about love!

Most of the time, I love my glamour girl because of how I feel. But even though I feel ‘in love’, I am still choosing to love her or to continue loving her. Feeling ‘in love’ just makes my choice to love her easier.

Though I feel ‘in love’, it is still my choice to love my glamour girl which takes my feeling of being ‘in love’ to a truer reality of love. Often when I don’t feel ‘in love’ I stop loving glamour girl for a time.

Do I stop loving glamour girl because I don’t feel ‘in love’, or do I choose to stop loving that person as a result of not feeling ‘in love’.

Asking myself these questions I find that to love is a choice.

Before we go any further, let’s define love. This is difficult enough to have its own essay - which I may write at a later date – but for now, let’s use a Greek word for love - Agape.

Love defined |

Agape love is unconditional love. Unconditional love requires a sacrificial lifestyle to attain it. Basically, if you are to love anyone this way, you are to show love to them even when you don’t wish too, and even when you must sacrifice something to continue giving them love.

Keep this definition of love in mind as you read this essay.

Needing love |

I want to be loved and feel loved. I desire it and I need it. Because I desire and need love so badly, I look for it everywhere. I cross oceans looking for it and spend time in chat rooms with people who I don’t even know - hoping for a moment of love. I want it so badly that I even try to heighten my ‘love’ senses by watching love movies, reading magazines, fantasizing or taking drugs and more.

This makes me wonder… what percentage of my acquaintances have actually found love. And from those who profess to know love, I wonder what their definition of love is.

Verb vs. Noun |

Many people tend to believe that love is a feeling. The contemporary Christian band, DC Talk has a song titled ‘love is a verb’. A verb is an action, and shouldn’t this be what love is? Acting upon your feelings to show your love requires choice. No action is taken without making a choice.

What good is it to say you love somebody if you can’t back it up with action? Like the song ‘more than words’ by Xtreme, if you really want to love, there must be an action and for every action there is something you must sacrifice.

This is why I say that to love (according to the above definition) requires a choice. To stop loving also requires a choice. If I stop loving glamour girl, I find that it’s because there’s something I want back. Usually it’s my time or my money, but sometimes it’s my sanity. There probably aren’t many people who would sacrifice their sanity for love without having a feeling. When I think back to when I felt ‘in love’, I find hundreds of examples where I acted a fool to prove my love to the glamour queen (women need to see love proved).

Why is it that I am so willing to sacrifice my sanity for someone when I feel ‘in love’, but not when I don’t feel ‘in love’?

I’ll let you answer that one…

Blind love |

We all know the adage ‘love is blind’, implying that we make stupid choices when we are ‘in love’. When I feel ‘in love’, I start making choices based upon ‘in love’ feelings, rather than making choices that are best. It seems that no matter what my glamour queen does, I can’t help but love her anyway. And this is good! Provided I’m not being conned, I’m loving her unconditionally (note that adding ‘ing’ to a word makes it a verb).

But when my ‘in love’ feeling goes, I find my thoughts, and wish for self preservation and self desires rather than those of my glamour queen. I begin sacrificing her desires for mine, she stops feeling loved and reacts toward me in a similar fashion. We start to wonder where the love went, and tomorrow we divorce!

Once the feeling goes and I’m running logically, I have to actively make choices to continue loving my glamour queen if I am to keep the love and feeling.

Love spring |

So where do my feelings initially come from anyway?

Perhaps you’re going to tell me that I don’t know the first thing about love, that you can have love at first sight – that I need to really know what it’s like to have that feeling from the first moment. By all means tell me, but read on first.

A friend once told me that he would not want to marry a Thai girl, because as a developing nation he was worried that she would only ‘love’ him for his money. He wanted true love; he wanted someone to love him for whom he was.

I asked him why he thought that a Thai girl would only want him for his money. He responded, “Isn’t that why they are attracted to white guys?”

I answered “mostly yes” but asked him, “Why are white American girls attracted to you?”

We came up with a few possibilities. His looks, his charm, or his popularity were a few. So I asked him “Aren’t you worried that your white girlfriend doesn’t love you for whom you are, but rather loves you for your looks and your popularity?”

He admitted that “Yes, it takes time for someone to know him very well, which means that he can’t be loved for whom he is until they really do know him.”

My instantaneous ‘in love’ feelings aren’t showing love, and I’d be deceiving myself if I ever believed otherwise. I’m not condemning these instantaneous feelings – they’re great feelings, but I want to be careful to separate who my glamour girl really is, from those initial appearances which tempt me to love her in the first place. I get to know my glamour girl because of those instantaneous feelings.

Let me ask you this…

If you never had those initial feelings about someone, would you give up on trying to find someone to love?

These feelings help us to find someone to love. But those first few feelings of mine aren’t true love until I decide to choose to love that glamour girl despite how I may feel in future.

The command |

The bible is a great place to find quotes on love. As a refresher, I looked some up. Surprisingly, I found that all quotes on love in the bible are commands.

Corinthians commands men to “love your wife”, and Jesus Christ said to “love your neighbour as yourself.” And nowhere does the bible end these commands with “… when you feel in love”

I often wondered why the bible doesn’t tell children to love their parents but rather “obey your parents.” It occurred to me that children don’t yet know what it is to love.

Children know what it is to be loved, and they can only show love as they have been taught by their parents. Ever noticed that parents must tell their children to ‘love’ others, to share with others and treat their friends as they would be treated. A child loves his/her parents because they are looked after by them. It isn’t until a child is older will s/he realise that they love their parents because of who they are rather than because their parents are their provider (incidentally, this is how love works with Jesus Christ and his Father and us – though some people never get past the childhood understanding of love – always asking for something as a child would in a candy store and feeling emotionally down if they don’t get it).

So what am I to do?

I’m commanded to love, but I don’t always feel like giving love.

This is why it’s a command. I can choose to love despite my feelings and as I learn to love more, my feelings will grow. In fact, I have found that when I choose to love even when I don’t feel like it, I start to love loving and don’t necessarily need others love to keep me happy. I find that I needn’t rely solely on others returning love to keep me happy, or to keep me feeling ‘in love’.

To stay healthy, I’m going to love. I’m choosing to love, despite how I feel. And I’m going to learn to love when it’s necessary and correctly weather I feel ‘in love’ or not.

Happy ending |

The love movie never really ends does it? It usually ends when Elvis gets the girl (Elvis always gets the girl). The movie stops when both Elvis and the Girl feel ‘in love’. Ever notice how he has a new girl in every movie? Obviously he didn’t follow through on my choosing love principles. Though you can’t blame him for that..

…I hadn’t written this essay yet!