The Good Life... a weblog about life, technology, and the Opera Web browser

This next thing is pretty heavy, sorry about that. I had a lot to unload.

It's funny the simple things that we miss when we lose track of friends. I've never been very good in keeping in touch with friends and family, so I've become use to such losses. However, the end of a friendship that meant a lot to me has left a hole gaping in my heart. One of the things I will miss most is the compassion of my friend. She would listen as I told my stories of woe (the pessimist that I was--I say was for I'm being optimistic about my pessimism, go figure!) and she had a wonderful heart to take away my pain. Sometimes I found myself walking through the halls of my dorm trying to figure out who might have that same compassion. I mean no offense to those reading this that might receive a brief visit on such a journey--I hold you all dear to my heart. Perhaps it is just my blindness that forbids me to see the heart you have to hear my tales. Perhaps it is something greater steering me away from telling my tales in the first place. Whatever the reason, I find no one that seems fit to hear my woe, so I wander on, searching....

Eventually, I find myself in prayer, not sure what to say, but just lifting up those I visited and those on my heart. God is a wonderful listener: He never interrupts, He doesn't offer silly advice, and He has such a heart to hear all our sorrow. I don't know what it is, sometimes that just doesn't seem like what my mind is craving. God is spiritual, so any response I might receive would be spiritual, in other words, not something physical. Yet it seems that is the only thing that will satisfy me; the sound of someone talking me through my pain, the soft touch of a friend, or just kind eyes to look at when my head is not hung low. I want to find these things in my spiritual relationship with God, for He is surely a greater listener than anyone I can find on my strolls and His compassion knows no bounds. Someday, I will... someday.

I am in such a state tonight because things just seem to be bearing down on me. In my History class, we're reading Elie Wiesel's Night--it's a frightful, disturbing, disheartening story written of the Holocaust by a survivor. As if that were not enough, I am doing a research paper on the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. And while I'm pouring out my heart, I might as well tell of how I beat myself up for my sins. These past weeks, I have done little of my schoolwork for no good reason and now I find myself overrun by work and it's all just crashing down on me. At this same time, I'm dealing with anger and hurt from end of the friendship I spoke of earlier.

I'm in a most precarious place. The latter problem is something in which God has instilled in me a sense of hope. Don't ask me why, but I see this as all part of God's plan and I understand this friendship's ending and I see the dawn of a better friendship. The other troubles, those I don't know how to address. I'm inclined to ask how God could allow such suffering to occur, but I know the answer to that. Simply put, without suffering, we wouldn't be able to differentiate joy. Without hate, we wouldn't fully understand and rejoice in love. Yet, with all this knowledge and hope in this heart, I still cannot understand these atrocities. I want to understand, yet I find comfort in the fact that I don't--that I do not know the hate that brought about such acts.

Perhaps that is the answer for my lack of understanding: for if I were to understand, I would know that loathsome hate. I know that I have become the man that I didn't want to be. Sins I've committed are the very things I found most despicable about other humans and those that I hated most. I still marvel that sin beat me down to such lows, that such acts could be committed by me in the name of love.

After taking a break from writing this and from thinking about it, I'm feeling much better. It's really wonderful how God showers compassion on us; I just wish that I would recognize it more readily, in order to thank Him. But, I suppose that I should never stop thanking Him, for God is good all the time.... All the time, God is good. In the end, a simple phrase can explain all of this: it's not supposed to be this way. God created a paradise for us, but we are a fallen people. This isn't how God wanted it to be and we can't blame Him for how it is. He gave us the gift of free will and this is how we've repaid Him. Shame on us. Yet, even through all our follies, He loves us still. He is the perfect father: He sees through our faults, showering us with His wondrous love no matter what we do. What a wonderful Father I have. Thanks be to God.

This day is the Christian celebration of the resurrection of Christ. This morning, the service I attended opened with the simple statement, [t]he Lord is risen; the Lord is risen, indeed! This is the day where hope comes alive and our future is given purpose. It's hard for me to describe what this day means to me, other than saying that it makes life worth living. Thank for your gifts, Father. Thank you for your undying love. I love you.

As some of you might have noticed, I've been making some changes to the template again. I'm trying to get rid of its reliance on HTML formatting and instead use CSS. I'm also just trying to make it look better structurally. At some point, I'm going to change the structure drastically, moving to a purely CSS layout instead of using HTML tables for structure. I just have to get less busy. That'll probably have to wait until summer. Anyway, this is a step in the right direction. You should feel proud that you're a witness to this. Yeah, right. :)

PS: Happy Easter!