God made this world too small for us! Our desires are greater than our realizations; our dreams are sweeter than life, and our hopes vaster than our loves. We have an ocean of desires, but only a cup with which to dip into the universe and skin our shins on its fences. This is the basic cause of all yearning and all suffering. We were made for the infinite. We have wings on our soul, but we beat them against the cage of our body and the triviality of our cities.

The first response of all religion to the torment of the soul is that we were made for God. If we already had it in our soul to love God for whom we were made, there would never need to be any sorrow. Sorrow to some extent supplies the deficiencies of our love. We often learn to love the law that fingers should not stuck on a fire by having our fingers burned. A loving obedience of our parents would save us from the disaster, but where love failed, pain slipped in to teach us the needed lesson. Made for God, we bury ourselves in the trinkets of earth as if made only for them. We build our nest in the earth, hoping we can find contentment there and yet sorrow comes like a firebrand to burn it. As pleasures satiate, as our body gets fed up with thrills, as friends forget, and as power makes us uneasy, we say more and more in our heart of hearts, "Oh, God, does everything pass but Thee?"

The mission of sorrow is not only to remind us that this earth is not all, but also to help expiate and atone for our sins. Sorrow is placed near evil to help redeem the soul. Thus sorrow need not always be external as sickness or accident; it can be, and most of it is, internal - a malaise, a discontent, a gnawing of conscience, a feeling that all is not right, an emptiness and a loneliness. It is the latter kind of sorrow that is drawing many hearts and souls today back again to God. Nothing so much wants a heart to be filled as a deep thirst. It was under this analogy that Our Savior converted the woman at the well. She already had five husbands and the man with whom she was living was not her husband. And yet she thirsted for love. It is also interesting that she is the first one in Scripture to apply to Jesus the term "Savior of the world." And what Jesus saved her from was emptiness and thirst.

This latter quality of thirst might be called anguish rather than sorrow. Everyone suffers from anguish, even youths in the midst of their joys. Anguish is in some way related to hope, a feeling that the universe is not vain and that the aspiration of the soul ought to be satisfied somewhere. Pessimism looks to the past which it believes cannot be redeemed, but anguish looks to the future, with a hope that the past can be undone. Anguish comes too from a realization that one has powers that have never been used, and this makes the soul look out to a higher realm where they can be summoned to exercise and action. Anguish is not born of weakness, but of strength and possibility, just as sorrow is born of limitations.

Modern man, instead of being driven to despair, can begin to hope, for in anguish God is urging the soul on to a love that lies beyond all love, and a "Beauty that leaves all other beauty pain." It is the peculiar quality of this century which has amassed more wealth and power than any other century, to be also the century of greatest anguish. Those who regard this emptiness like that of a canyon fall into despair and darkness; those who see in it the emptiness of a reed can pipe the tunes of the Infinite and be made merry with the song.

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Faith . Hope . Love - Welcome donation. Thank You. God bless. 

By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Sunday, May 24, 2009

I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!

I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.

HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -