I went to see a show called, “The Music of Michael Jackson” on Saturday at the National Arts Centre. It was a show celebrating Michael Jackson, where the conductor rearranged his music in a different way to unite the orchestra and rock band with some guy who represented MJ as the singer and dancer. It was a great show. My friend and I both got student rush tickets – meaning we paid $12 each for seats that were normally sold for above $100. To top it off, we got seats in the box lodge – the best seats in the house. So we got there on time and in the box lodge, there are only two rows, two seats each. We were in the second row.
The people who were supposed to have the seats in front of us hadn’t arrived by the time the stage manager welcomed us and introduced the show. So seeing this as a great opportunity, I urged my friend to move up into the front row with me. Now we could see even better. I didn’t want to waste the nice seats in front of us, especially if the people weren’t going to come. So we took them. It was great. We were about two feet closer to the musicians and we could even hold onto the balcony and that’s next level. Sometime during the first half of the show, two people came into the box lodge and sat behind us. I looked back, and realized that they were probably the people who were supposed to be in the seats we were in but they came late.
During the intermission, my friend looked at me as if to say, “Um… shouldn’t we tell them we took their seats?” I shook my head and shrugged, “No, it’s rude of them to come late. Too bad”. To me, I didn’t do anything wrong. They came after the show started so those seats were fair game. They gave up the rights to those seats when they didn’t show up at 8pm. I am not moving. Plus, we’re shorter. If we switched seats, then we wouldn’t be able to see everything anymore. Their tall bodies and heads would be in the way and ruin the show for us (there were parts during the concert where we were standing, so we would have definitely been blocked). Even more, the people never said anything – they didn’t tap me on the shoulder to ask me if I took their seat by mistake (FYI - no, it was not a mistake). They didn’t do or say anything to show they were upset, so I refused to feel bad. If you don’t stand up for yourself then I’m not going to offer to move. If they asked, I would have moved. But they didn’t, so I had nothing to feel bad about – or so I thought.
After the show, my friend and I were walking to get some gelato and we talked about what happened. I kept giving her reasons as to why I didn’t feel bad and she kept telling me that she still felt wrong and bad about it. It’s funny because I knew she wouldn’t say anything to the people behind us because she’s shy. I think she expected me to do something about it – to return the seats to their rightful owners for that show.
I thought about it that night. Yes, part of me did feel bad and I knew that she was right. However, it felt good to have those front row seats in the box lodge. I was greedy. I already had a great deal in getting cheap tickets in one of the best seats, but when tempted with even better seats, I couldn’t resist. Then it hit me. Say I was shop lifting in a store and the owner saw me but didn’t say anything because I looked scary and they didn’t want to mess with me. If they let me leave their store with something that didn’t belong to me then I’m still a thief. It’s still wrong. So fine; I was wrong. I should have offered to give the seats back and if they were willing to let us short people enjoy the show then it would be okay.
It’s funny because my friend knows that I am a Christian and one time she asked me if it prevents me from doing what I want to do. I told her no – I don’t want to kill anybody, I don’t want to cheat, so everything’s cool. But she caught me stealing, so clearly something’s up. Being a Christian isn’t about being perfect. People look at us and criticize us for being hypocrites because we tell people they are wrong and point the finger when we also fall into sin. And that’s exactly why we need Jesus. If we were perfect, Christians wouldn’t need Jesus to die for our sins. We accept that Jesus died for our sins because we know that we are sinners. We do bad things all the time – just like how I stole those seats. I even got my friend to steal them with me, and took advantage of her timid-ness to keep those seats. I’m a bad influence. I manipulate my friends. So that’s why I need Jesus even more. I still sin. Even after knowing that Jesus died for me and his love is all I need for me to be happy, I still forget. I am still easily tempted by things that Satan knows is my kryptonite.
A friend I met at small group told me yesterday that people watch us. That’s part of why I was so afraid to let people know that I am a Christian. I was afraid that they would judge me and point out my flaws. I was afraid of finding out that I’m still a bad person, and even worse – I proclaim to be someone who wants to love others but I still do things that hurt. Once people know that I am a Christian, they will watch and point out the times I fall on my face. Then I will cry and they will say, “See. You are a hypocrite. See. You’re just as bad as I am”.
It is still true that my faith in Christ doesn’t mean I can't do what I want to do. I try my best to do what I think is right, but sometimes I fall too and listen to the evil voice that disguises itself in excuses. The consequence of this is that when I realize what I’ve done – then I am reminded that I am a sinner. Knowing that God still loves me is what brings me back to try and stop sinning - to be good again. I am sorry that I’m not perfect, that I let my God down and that I am not a “perfect Christian”. There is no such thing as a perfect Christian. We are all flawed.
Someone once told me this; when you point the finger at someone, there are always three pointing back at you.
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This is for you: Thinking Shoes, by Braille - Lyrics here
This is for me: Exile Dial Tone, by Beautiful Eulogy - Lyrics here
Tablo, in Epik High’s latest album starts off his song “Amor Fati” (Love of Fate) with, “God doesn’t love me”. He is angry – angry at God. From the translation, annotation, and commentary on Youtube, it seems like he could be referring to the fact that he feels rejected by God because he is different from what society believes he should be like. I like this song because it reminds me that I have felt that way too.
In elementary school, I found that I got along better with the guys and preferred to play games with a tennis ball at our “ball wall” rather than run around playing “Red Rover” or whatever else the girls did. I was more interested in making my own Beyblade than talking about pink pants, and fixing things that broke than painting my nails or playing with Barbies. This was my weekday life, and I told myself I didn’t care what other people thought about me. Then the weekend would come, and things changed. I dreaded Sunday mornings. My mom would force me into a handmade dress and make me wear itchy stockings so I would be presentable at church. I hated that. I hated being a girl. I hated dressing up and pretending that I was someone I was not. I was not that kind of girl.
I grew up in the church, learning all the Bible stories and having people tell me that Jesus loves me. I believed that God existed and I would sing along with the other kids, sometimes singing lyrics that I didn’t truly believe. Jesus loves me? A perfect, loving God made me? Is this some kind of sick joke? Why would God make me a girl if he knew me? If he knew everything about me as the Sunday School teachers professed, why would he do this to me if he knew that I would prefer doing things the boys did? Sure, God was real, but he sure isn't good and doesn't love me. If he loves me – then maybe he isn’t all powerful because he made a mistake. If there was a line up for manufacturing defects in God’s people-making factory, I would be in that line.
Eventually, I realized that no amount of praying and hating God would change me into a boy. I decided to live my life and prove to God that I could be a boy. I could do what the boys did and there, God; I beat you. I tried really hard to make other people like me. I thought, maybe if I could get people to love me then God would love me too. I was a door mat, and I let people walk all over me. I wasn’t happy, I couldn’t meet my own needs, and in a search to find love and acceptance I became somebody else.
In high school, I took all the tech courses. I took this auto shop course, where we fix cars and learn about transportation technology. I was the only girl in my class. I think my classmates were surprised to see me, but that just fed me – I was proud to be there, proud to represent. Then I went to university to study engineering. Don’t get me wrong – I didn’t go into these courses and this field of study just to make a point and prove the world and God wrong. I really do enjoy figuring out how things work and connecting the dots between math, physics, and turning that into real life problem solving. I live off of that. The fact that it was against tradition, against societal male-female roles only supplemented my passion for engineering. That’s right, God. I’m going to be an engineer. What are you going to do about it? You can’t change me. Nobody can stop me.
Mind you, these were my background thoughts that floated up to surface every once in a while. I still believed that Jesus saved me from my sins, and that God existed and made me. I experienced other things that proved to me that God loved me, but there was still doubt, this one question he never answered. But after so many years of receiving no answers from God, the burning question in my heart faded to a glow.
So I moved out for school; I went out of town. One weekend I decided to go home and visit my family. I went to church on Sunday and there was a guest lady speaker who was talking about the roles of women in the church. I can’t remember exactly what she said (this was about 2 years ago) and I admit that I zoned out a couple times, but the essence of what I got from her sermon was that God loves us all equally, male and female. He made us the way we are for a purpose and there are no mistakes. So should I believe her? Something inside me did. I was thinking hard about what she said, the proof she gave, the cultural perspective of the people back then, and commentaries and studies people did. She is a scholar (has a Ph.D.) and the way she presented her message was very factual.
More than that, I felt conviction (in both senses; guilt and strong belief). Something inside me knew; this is the truth. This is the answer you’ve been looking for. At that moment, I realized how wrong I was. I realized my whole life, all 18 or 19 years - I had believed a lie. It’s not that God doesn’t love me. It’s that I don’t love me. I realized that God made me the way he wanted, and he put people in my life who supported me – that auto shop teacher for example, he was super nice and supportive, he was proud of me for being in that class. My family supported my decision to go into engineering, and my engineering class doesn’t discriminate against the females. God did all these things for me, and my response? I turned my back on him and gave him the middle finger. I realized that all along he was trying to show me love. It was just that I misunderstood and I refused to let him change me. I refused to believe that he was good, that he loved me because I believed the lie that Satan whispered into my heart. God didn’t make a mistake. That day, I realized that he made me the way I am and he loves me regardless of how I see myself.
I don't know what hardships and suffering you've gone through, or how you may feel about yourself, but listen to me when I say this - don't give up on love. Love doesn't give up. It didn't give up on me, it never did. Promise me that until you see for yourself and find the truth, you'll keep searching for that unconditional love God promises us.
The ending of Tablo’s song (the outro) goes like this, “Oh God, he doesn’t love me, I know, he doesn’t love me. Well, neither do I”.
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This is the song, Amor Fati by Epik High in their new Shoebox album.
Side note: In verse 3 of the rap, Tablo asks if it's okay for a sin-less person to stone somebody. He is referring to Jesus, when he stopped people from stoning a woman who committed adultery. Stoning was the punishment for someone found guilty of adultery based on Old Testament laws. I think when Jesus said, "Let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone", he didn't mean for it to be that it's okay to stone somebody. His point was to let them know that they were all sinners. Nobody had the right to make a judgement call on whether or not the woman deserved to live. My understanding of the situation he refers to is that the only person who has the right to judge whether a person deserves to live or die is God - because he is sin-less. Read the story I'm referring to here.
This is a song called Surrender, by Beautiful Eulogy. I love their album, but I think this song best fits this post. Lyrics here.
Have you ever felt like you were separated from someone? Like... you should have them in your life but they're not there. And you feel something about it but then sometimes you don't think about them and don't care.
For example, I never really met my grandparents before they passed away. I actually only met one of them when he was aged and there was this language barrier and I only saw him for maybe two weeks one summer. I have heard my friends talk about their grandparents and the things they do together on the weekends, or after school. So I know that I am missing them in my life. My parents have talked about my grandparents, so I know about them. I know some of the things they did and have some idea of what their personality was like. But I don't actually know them. I don't have a relationship with them, no shared experiences, nothing. I don't even know what they look like. I've seen photos but I don't know all their expressions and I don't have a picture in my head when I think about them. And most days I don't miss them. There's nothing to miss, really... I never had anything to begin with right? So I don't know what I would be missing... other than perhaps a similar experience to that of what my friends talk about? I'm not quite sure what you're supposed to do with an old person anyway. Would we laugh together? Would they tell me exciting stories of their past? Would they give me advice about how to go about life and pass on some wisdom?
So I think about this. My grandparents and I, we've been separated by death. I'm not really sad. On a day to day basis, I feel fine. I can live life without them and I feel like any other human being. I don't even think about them until someone starts talking about their grandparents, or when family members talk about their past. But when I do think about my grandparents, I have this feeling inside me somewhere that is a little bit like an abyss. Just some dark empty space that provokes some sort of emotion in me. I'm not sure how to feel. Acceptance? That's all I can do now anyway. Life is life. People live, people die.
And I grow up learning that there is this God. That the first human beings (Adam and Eve) used to live with God, and they lived in a paradise of some sort, the Garden of Eden. They knew who God was - they had a relationship with him. They could talk to him, they could be with him. But then this thing happened where they were tempted by Satan and sinned, acting in disobedience to God. And since God is perfect - without sin (because he can't disobey himself) then he couldn't be with Adam and Eve any more. They had to be separated because of sin. So Adam and Eve were thrown out of the paradise and their children grew up in a world corrupted by sin.
They grow up away from God. Occasionally, someone would be able to talk to God. God would appear in a burning bush, or express his thoughts through dreams and the people who genuinely tried to find him did. They were able to converse with him through prayer, dreams, visions, and in other ways that weren't in as physical a sense as if it were you and I. And God would do things to show that he loves and cares about his people by doing miracles like parting the Red Sea, or bringing plagues to captors, and giving people the strength and courage to accomplish things like freeing their people, or winning a battle. All the while, there were people who would forget about God and about his power because they couldn't see him. Or maybe because they didn't have a personal relationship with him. So they didn't really know who he was, but only knew about him. They didn't get to live in paradise, so they don't know what life was meant to be like. These were the people born into a corrupted world, so they would do things that were corrupted too. They would build idols of gold and worship them. They would envy and steal from each other, they would hurt each other for personal gains. Then someone would tell them, "Hey, God doesn't want us to hurt each other. Don't you trust him? Don't you know that he will take care of us?". Time and time again, as generations passed from ones who were alive to witness the things God did for them, to the ones who only heard about it from their parents, fewer and fewer people knew God personally.
So what can we do? How are we supposed to fix this? How can we be unseparated so that we can be with God in paradise again? How do we remove this sin barrier, how can we fill this gaping hole? How can we know God......? We don't even know what he looks like, and I'm not sure what to picture in my head either when I think about God. A bright white light surrounding some sort of human-shaped mass???
God sent his son, Jesus to earth. Jesus lived a life sin-free. He obeyed all of God's rules and commandments and loved everyone. Then he died when we killed him and hung him on a cross. But that's the physical body that died. When he died, he volunteered himself to be the sacrifice that could connect us back to God again. His death as a sin-free person was enough to justify our freedom from the punishment of sin. Then he came back to life, defeating death in his spiritual body, and went to be with God (in church, the act of baptism is a symbol of a human dying with Jesus to our life in sin and being revived to a new life, one where we can be with God).
I met a nice lady on the greyhound on my way back to Ottawa one time. She offered me part of her granola bar and that's when we started our conversation. She was from Saudi Arabia and wore a full burqua. After I asked her about what life was like in Saudi Arabia, she asked me if I believed in any religion, and eventually we started talking about the differences between Islam and Christianity. When we got to the problem of sin, she told me that she felt that it wasn't fair that Jesus was allowed to take the punishment of sin for us. She felt that each person should bear the consequences of their own actions and that's that. There was no, "PLEASE, take me instead!!" She said that there was a difference between major and minor sins. For major sins, they were less forgivable and I don't remember what she said about how you could recover from that kind of sin [This website gives the rankings of the major sins, there are 70, but I can't find anything on how to be forgiven for this- let me know if you have the answer]. For minor sins, you could waive the punishment by doing enough good deeds and by repenting (feeling remorse and regret for your actions, and making a conscious effort to stop doing it).
So in both cases, you would sin. Then you would repent. In Christianity, when you repent, you are asking Jesus to take your punishments for you - and there is no difference in level of sin (to God, sin is sin, whether big or small). You still feel remorse and regret for your actions but you also know that Jesus is there to pay the price for what you did. As for the lady, she believed that after you do good deeds and repent then the sin just disappears and the punishment is waived. So there would be no need for Jesus.
I believe that once your sins have been paid for, you have a clean slate. The barrier between you and God is removed, thanks to Jesus. "So if everyone just relied on Jesus to pay the price, then what stops people from sinning more and then repenting?", she asked. I told her that people who knew God wouldn't want to sin anymore. After I realized that God loves me and accepted the offer of Jesus' death in my place for my sins, I didn't want to be separated anymore. I wanted to be closer to him, to know more of who my creator is. I want him to be here in my life, to show me things and teach me how to love people. I wanted to find what my purpose in life is, and to give me the courage to follow that path regardless of what the people who don't know him say. So if sinning means that I would be separated from God, then I wouldn't want to sin, and the fact that Jesus is willing to pay the price for my sin doesn't mean that I want to abuse it. I know that I am not perfect, and even after accepting Jesus as my saviour (saving me from an eternity of separation from God), I will still do things that are harmful to others, and be tempted by the corruption in the world we live in (or, Satan). But instead of living in fear that I missed a prayer or didn't do enough good deeds to outweigh the bad, I am driven by love to live a life worthy of someone that God loves. When I do sin, Jesus is there for me and by strengthening my relationship with God, I can learn to be someone who sins less and loves more.
So for the people who don't know God, he is there. He is real, and there is this broken relationship between you and him. But he loves you, so he wants it to be fixed. He wants you to know him personally - not just to know about him. He wants to be reconciled with you so that you can live with him forever after life in this physical earthly body. I believe that we have a soul (the conscience/essence of me? still working this out), a spiritual body and that our physical bodies are just a shell.
Sometimes when I think about all the new people I meet when I move every four months for school and coop, I wonder about how much time I should invest in getting to know them. If we won't keep in contact eventually after I leave and if we just drift apart then what's the point? Why bother? I will only feel sad and miss them when I leave. But you know, when I think of life in a bigger perspective, when I remember that they also know God and are saved by Jesus, then I have peace in knowing that one day I will see them again. So I try my best to get to know them and develop a relationship that is supportive, loving, and good. Then when we leave our shells and go to where ever God is, we will see God and each other again. We will all be reunited.
The following two videos explain the separation from God and how to fix it. The top is done in the form of typography, the one on the bottom is a rap/spoken word piece if you prefer. Hopefully gives a better picture of what I'm trying to say...
This one is a rap by the guy above with a similar theme to some of the stuff I mentioned in this post. Lyrics here
