God made each person for a reason. How can an individual use this knowledge to better live his purpose?

Even just knowing that there is a reason for something is cause to struggle through hardship to discover the truth. I know people who, just because they wanted to understand a few phrases in Latin, took an entire course in Latin in college. At first they said they regretted it, the class not adding to their degree and increasing their workload, but they learned an entirely new thought process. They gained a new perspective on everything they work on, they learned to work harder, and yes, they learned how to translate those phrases they were curious about. They improved themselves in ways they may not have been able to imagine because they knew that there was a reason.

He decided when we would be born...

We can look back at previous eras and say, “Things were so much better then, people were more civilized or disciplined.” Wanting to go back is impossible, but that history remains. Maybe our preference for another age can be the motivation for us to create a good habit “from then” and apply it to now, teaching others to do so as well.

...and how long you would live.

The perception that we have ‘all the time in the world’ prevents us from living life with focus. Why fold laundry today when we can do it tomorrow? Why smell that flower now when we can do it tomorrow? What happens when we forget whether that laundry is clean or dirty? What about how bad that pile makes the room look until it’s put away? What do we do when that flower we hadn’t taken the time to admire is whithered the next time we see it? A limited time on earth isn’t a hunter pursuing us, it’s a friend walking alongside us, reminding us to use and cherish every moment, to learn every lesson we can pull from life.

God planned where you were born...

Constantly ‘looking over the hill’ distracts us from the ehre and now. The ‘when’ of our life is not an accident, and neither is the ‘where’. We may not like where we are now, but there is still something to appreciate, even if our “where’s” only purpose is to teach us what not to do or be.

...and where you’d live.

Most of us have opportunities to travel, but most often we stay because we don’t want to leave our comfort zones. This fearful complacency holds us back from growing to our full potential, from fully serving God’s plan. When the opportunity to travel comes, it’s often a good idea to take it, both for ourselves and for God.

Nothing in life is arbitrary, it’s all for a greater purpose.

If only it was so easy to see that greater good in the valleys of our lives. We say “life has twenty-twenty hindsight”, avoiding saying that we are blind in the here and now, blind to the future, and more often than not we’re also looking back on a distorted past (as David wrote in Psalms, “I see, but through a lens, darkly.”) Mountain tops make valleys in between, but a tree will grow more quickly in the valley than on the peak of a mountain, and that is very much like us as well.

There are illegitimate parents, but not illegitimate children.

This is a concept I have mulled around for decades, but never before has it been put so succinctly. Promiscuity has been a problem for a long time, but when things go wrong, society tends to blame the product which had no control instead of the guilty parties.

(I claim no ownership to Rick Warren's book The Purpose Driven Life, this is only an analyzation of it from my perspective, taking exerpts that I thought in some way particularly important or poignant and adding my thoughts and comments.)

Another abused word is "life".

There are several definitions to life, many meanings to that word. One textbook definition is "the period of animate existence, state or principal of existence."

What a cold way to attempt to explain the state of our lives. To Exist. To me, "to exist" and "to live" mean completely different things. A rock exists. The decrepit-looking tree that you see at the top of this entry exists. But what does it do? It is much the same as a human that merely "exists". Essentially, it is in a slow state of dying.

Though often used as an oversimplification, what is not growing is dying. We have to remain active, not just physically moving - repetitive motions can be made by gears and wheels, which are no more alive than unmoving rock. Maintaining the exact same pattern in daily life is probably also not living.

So what is "life"? Life is growing beyond the tiny shell that we find ourselves born into. Life is about learning to speak and read so that we can apply those skills to furthering life, to teaching ourselves and those around us - for one cannot teach without also learning.

Look at the universe. Astronomers and astrophysics tell us that the universe is moving farther apart, our sun is losing its heat, material, and intensity, our planet is growing stale. What is left in an untended state decays. Our lives are, in a cosmic sense, the blink of an eye.

So what's the point?

To live for ourselves is to live from moment to moment. How does that impact those around us? It is not a directed, controlled life. It is chaos, slowly decaying, slowly dying. Only we can lie to ourselves and say that "this is the life".

So that is one thing that life is not, which brings this back to the question of what is it? Life is what we do to our surroundings, how we treat our neighbors. Only the constructive things that we do really last. To build up others at the same time builds up ourselves, that is living. That is working against the universe's progressive chaos and death. Every action should impact others, and every action should be constructive, or should we really be living and acting that way at all?

There are many things that are baffling to us, that appear completely impossible.  Sometimes we discover the "perfect perspective" that reveals "the great truth" about this object.  Sometimes we never find it, but that doens't mean we give up the pursuit.  An African proverb goes, "Not all who pursue the zebra catch it, but he who caught the zebra chased it." We find an oddity and seek to explore it - that's what we call human nature.

Now think for a moment about how that "instinct" became a part of us.  If we follow the Darwinian idea of evolution, we wouldn't have it.  Boldly striking out isn't as staying safe in the safe zone you know and slowly outstripping your opposition.  Humans don't have centimeter-thick craniums, yet we love sticking our heads where they "don't belong" to learn what's there (Surprisingly, spelunking is rather fun).  We don't have efficient lungs or a comparatively large esophagus (when compared to other mammals, from dolphins to gazelle), yet we train ourselves to run.  In many cultures, those who can run well are held in high exteem.

We don't have wings and light bones, yet we gaze longingly at the birds and build heavier-than-air flying machines instead of utilizing our capabilities of climbing.  We lack claws or sharp teeth, but instead of wasting away we sharpen sticks, stone, and metal and can cleave mountains.  We lack webbing or fins, yet we build great ships driven by turbine-propelled propellers (technology still hasn't caught up to God's Design for undulating fin-motion in any commercial scale).

Though we as humans seem to lack so much that nature has in abundance, those lackings have forced us to adapt by creating tools. If there is a river, we build a bridge. If there is an forest, we cut a road. God intentionally gave us these blunt fingers, feeble muscles, and a powerful mind so we could overcome, meet challenge and rise above, it, becoming far stronger than we would have been with "just enough".

The problem is being able to see things properly.  Perception can be a great ally or a drastic weakness, depending on the circumstances.  Earlier I mentioned that a common post signature of mine is "Just because it can be explained doesn't mean it isn't the will of God."  Another one is "Every stepping stone in life was once an obstacle before you saw it in the right way."

Life is more what we do that what happens to us. Will we see the hardships facing us as a millstone grinding us down, and send out all that negativity on other people?  Or will we use that grinding stone like a swordsman uses a whetting wheel to sharpen his blade?

Once we discover a new way to view one aspect of life, it makes it easier to review the next object and conquer that as well.  But even this isn't enough, because what good is something that is never shared?  As I mentioned in "The Responsibility of Power", it is the duty of people who have to provide for those who don't have, and this goes as much for knowledge as material goods.  Certainly, there is only so much we can do without infringing on the free will of others, but this deals with personal responsibility.  Criticism is supposed to be constructive, each event in life is supposed to help build us up as much because we will force it to help us as much as we have a responsibiility to help others.

That simple goal of growth is why God put us here.  In our beginning we are dull, wrapped up in ourselves, and useless.  Forcing those challenges, that fire of the silver furnace, is what turns us into something greater. A tool, sharp and ready, brandished to face tribulation and appreciate joy.

No mountain comes without a valley, and no visage is ever just what it first appears.

We all have many aspects of life that we wish were different.  Maybe we wish the weather were warmer (or colder), that it rained more (or less), that people would stop acting immature, or...

Some of these things are "just there", others are a direct result of our decisions in how to interact with the world.  We can blame God, or we can decide to use that trial and grow because of it. We can be bitter, or choose to grow in spite of the trials.

One day, a Christian reporter was interviewing a silver smith at work one day.  As the silver smith put a new block into the flames, the reporter asked, "The things you make are so beautiful, so pure.  How do you know when the silver is ready to come out of the fire?"

The silver smith smiled and answered, "When I can see my face in it."

And all this flies in the face of a nation which has, by forces of good or ill, been on the (visible) forefront of civil rights.  It was the first nation to begin officially stamping out slavery, started by the Dutch and other European traders (in truth, slavery involving African Americans began purely as an internal matter among Africans. When the Europeans arrived, the ruling Africans offered African workers).  Granted, the developing economics was what spurred this change - the American Civil War was one of economics and regional versus central politics, not one of moral values.

I could go on, but it only takes a few seconds of looking through Google or Wikipedia to look at the history of "protecting rights" that has occured all across the globe.  Neither the advances the human race has made, nor the wrongs done in the past excuse or even lessen the disappointment I see in the continuing cycle of discrimination.  And the cycle is now turning against those who discriminated against most others - so say the modern history-writers, anyway.  Often the same ones who say "let's replace A.D. with C.E. because then we'll have even more wiggle room to rewrite history as we see fit, regardelss of the truth."

One of the biggest growing trends I saw lately is "male-bashing", and elevation of the importance of females.  To all females: you're only one half of the human race, you're not as different or special as you think. Get over it.  To all males: don't fall back on stupid excuses, a human is a human whether the "Gender" tag is "M" or "F".  Get over it.

In a letter to the magazine The Economist, normally a balanced, non-partisian magazine, John Lillywhite wrote "I...believe economic growth would benefit if men and women worked together, and arbitrary distinctions of gender were downplayed rather than indulged.  Perhaps young women are outperforming young men because the latter, increasingly being told they have less to offer, are beginning to believe it."

The thing that humans - all humans, not any particular nationality, creed, or "color" - need to learn is that a human is a human.  Stop making these stupid distinctions based on gender, melanin (the compound in the skin that makes it "white" or "black), or anything else.  Look at your neighbor.  Bipedal, one brain, one heart, one stomach, one mouth.  You can see "man", "woman", "black", "white", "Christian", "agnostic", "Muslim", blah blah blah.  I see "human", "human", "human".  The only difference are the excuses that each individual chooses to fall back on.  Admittably, "Christian", "agnostic", "Muslim" refer to personal beliefs that each individual holds, part of the expression of who we truly are, but that's matter for another post.

Is there really anything wrong with taking personal responsibility, working hard and honestly, and expecting others to do the same?

Though rare, I think there are the occasional altruistic individuals who genuinely want power in order to insure that the greater good is served and maintained for all human beings.  Many of the followers of Carl Marx's unfortunately fundamentally flawed idea of Communism were such people.

The acquisition of power itself is extremely important in dealing with having power itself.  For a long time, I've judged the "right" or "wrong" of an action in the context of a few key items:
     1) What is the end result intended?
     2) What were the actions that the partakers originally wanted to pursue?
     3) What were the actions that the partakers ended up pursuing?

If a person wants power, do they acquire it through means that they knew at the time they began were morally corrupt?  Did they seek out to do the least harm?  Did they see that they wouldn't be able to reach their goal and decide to slip into less morally legitimate means in order to get it, or do they stick by their moral compass? Can they do so, if perhaps not securing power might lead to even worse being done by people of lesser character?

"God won't ask you how much money you made, He'll ask you how much character you sacrificed to get it."

The same holds true for power.  Yes, there is the unfortunate tendency for "the victors to write history", but I believe that humans have proven more capable to accurate reflection of events than many of us give credit for, and this may in part be due to the increasing sensationalism in the modern television (and expanding into the often more balanced traditional media) to make the priority of selling themselves first and getting the truth out second.  However, people are still capable of accurate reflections.

If only the victors wrote their white-washed stories, we wouldn't be able to look back now and see things like the fact that the "great" Thomas Edison never invented a thing, he in fact just put together a lucky brain trust and stole the credit for everything that they came out with (though I have to confess I lack respect for this man because he spent more time attacking his rivals than in the pursuit of scientific/technical knowledge).  Even certain heroes of human civil liberties, like the American Martin Luther King Jr, who championed black rights, was a known womanizer.  These facts are laid in black and white, reminding us that they were not super-humans, so even we "regular humans" can have profoundly positive impacts on the world around us.

So we say that it's difficult to gain power without losing focus of why we seek it, and it's easy to abuse power once we get it.  So what is the responsibility of power?  Why did God create a world in which some people live above other people?  As much as some may not want to admit it, life on earth is life within one form of heirarchy or another.  One person lives under another person.  So what are the responsibilities?

Well, the answer to that I've discovered is not as muddled as I originally thought when I first started to seek it.  What do people with power have over people who do not have power?  They can make policy, they can control resources.  Though some people may not like hearing such references, there are "haves" and "have nots", and it is the responsibility of those who "have" to provide for those who "have not".

That's the responsibility of power.  To provide.  God has given us the perfect example, and numerous others to show us again and again what we need to be doing, and in likeness with Biblical fashion I am going to relate it to the familial concept of a father providing for his children.  In the Middle East, it is the expected responsibility of the father to provide safety, health, and (to what extent he can) happiness to his family.  To those who have the gift of food, they should seek to give to those who are hungry.

To those who have power, they need to protect the lives of those under them.  They need to do what they can to encourage the health of their people (within reason. Such controversies such as hearings in the United States of America to ban fast food because "it is making people fat" is ludicrous, that gets into an argument of self-control I'll delve into later).  Last is the responsibility to try to protect the "happiness" of those under them. This is easily the most convoluted section, and something I will be writing on later.

I've been involved in plenty of debates on politics, philosophy, and religion.  Far too often, I hear arguments about this and that story in the Bible.  "This couldn't be true, because this can't happen", and at one point I became aware of a group of people who studied these stories and explained their feasability through science.  Some people on both sides of the debate were in an uproar about this, but what disturbed me was the sentiment from a few of them that "if it can be explained, then God didn't do it".

I know that humans like to marvel at the mystical, that's why we have professional magicians (though I agree with some that say that the entertainment field of magic has entered a lethargic stage and they are relying on the same boring, cheap tricks; but that's something for another post).  The point is: we have a fascination with things that we can't fully comprehend.  There's nothing wrong with that, this is how scientific advances are made, some people aren't content with what little we know now.

I am also quite aware that we also tend to loose interest in things that are explained.  Maybe that's one reason it's a good thing we can't concretely say exactly how Moses and the Israelites crossed the Red Sea (or even where, for those who may or have read "The Gold of Exodus").  That's why I maintain that each event spoken of in the Bible (New Testament, and Old Testament including the books beyond those translated from the Jewish Torah) is true literarily (not necessarily literally, there is a difference).  Still, I don't see sufficient reason to say that events like the crossing of the Jordan River (in like manner of the crossing of the Red Sea) or the destruction of the walled city of Jericho is anything but the truth.

Yes, these events are more than ordinary - typically called miraculous.  That doesn't mean that there isn't sound scientific explanation for how these things happened.  And that doesn't mean these events have to be any less directed by God just because they have an explanation we humans can understand.

Just because it can be explained doesn't mean it isn't the will of God.

This is exactly the sort of thing that I used to have a great time debating on Dream and Write, a website I still oversee.  Comments and other thoughts (which guests can post on said web-board) would be appreciated.  The best way to strengthen our faith is to challenge it with an open, balanced view.

Author of Isle of Dreams and Life of the Silver Tear, even some explorative fan fiction,
Ganheim

Take a look at life.  It's big.  It's mean.  It's scary.  It's not a solitary ride, we're all in the same boat and if we want the ride to at least have a semblance of smoothness, we have to work together.  In different words: no one can make it alone.

This has been an underlying theme in a lot of the stories I've written, and it's probably the core theme to the one anime I've ever grown attached to: Inuyasha.  Chapter and chapter again, Rumiko Takahashi clearly defines that life is a group effort and even those endevours that may seem rather small will rapidly spiral out of control, and only having other people to pull our butts out of the fire saves us.

I fought with depression for a while, and there was a period where I truly believed that there was no future in the human race.  Each and every person in the entire world was corrupt, self-centered, and as a whole indecent.  Fortunately, God had more planned for me than such a narrow, ignorant rut, because I kept on running into honorable, considerate, civilized people.  They were individuals in a place where, to a negative eye, it seemed like everyone else was scum waiting to taint the surrounding world, but even I had to admit there were those exceptions, those people like me who tried to live honor, think about the effects their actions had on other people, and they stopped to appreciate some of those quieter, finer points in life.

I came out of that bout and came to realize that humanity isn't all that bad.  There are people out there who just don't care, people who aren't thinking of the greater good, but that just means that the people who do know have a responsibility to pick up the slack.  Because this doesn't have to be a bad place, we can make this world better.

Is that what "unity" and "brotherhood" is about?  Thinking of others and acting for the better interests of other people in the now is certainly part of it, but I think a large degree of it could be seen as looking out for our selves.  The saying "birds of a feather flock together" emphasizes how humans that are like-minded tend to congregate (minus applicable social barriers).  The problem is that humans tend to form very small, insular groups, and once we have our group in a way that's comfortable, we want things to stay that way.  New people?  They might upset the balance, send them away.

But a truer, broader sense of what unity should be is something that I think everybody feels eventually.  We slowly begin to see, through the events of our life and the lives of those around us if we are wise, that we as a people, not just as individual nations, need to set aside a lot of our comforts.  Bickering for petty pride, maintaining those nice hedgerows that keep new/other people out.  Some people don't want to contribute to that maintainence of the whole, and this puts a slightly greater burden on all of the people who do see the need.  That's why the people who can do something need to do something.

"It is the responsibility of those who can do something, to act when injustice or evil is afoot."

I've heard this question asked hundreds of times.  Quite a number of times, what the askers were really asking was "Why do good things happen to bad people?"  As for the answer to that, I'm not going to lie: I'm not sure yet.  "When it rains, the rain falls on the wicked as well as the righteous."

However, I do think there are several good answers to the question, "Why do bad things happen to good people?"  I'm going to focus on one, an answer which is a major theme throughout several chapters in the book The Purpose Driven Life.

Quite simply, Earth is not our home.  I know it's awefully easy to get comfortable in our ~80 years here, but we have a greater destination.  The reason we will always have discomforts here is because this is not where we ultimately belong.  Though I would hate to be immortal here on earth, I have come to agree with Rick Warren's idea that humans are designed (in the end) for eternity.  In heaven, there is no end to those "good things that never lasted long enough".

Of course, in acknowledging heaven, I must also acknowledge Hell.  About a week ago, I had a long conversation with a battle buddy of mine about Hell.  I'm sure most people know that in the Gospels, Jesus relates the Kidron Valley to hell.  In the 1st century A.D., the Kidron Valley was a burning garbage dump, a place of refuse.  I think too many people focus on the imagery of fire.  It was a place of refuse, a place where people threw things that refused to have any further use to them, a place where they left behind unwanted refuse forever.  I think that was what Jesus was focusing on, the reason why the flames are important (and mentioned) is because they may have been an interesting detail and not everybody knew about it.  However, everybody in the area knew it was a garbage dump.  Whatever went in there never came back out.

Hell is a little different from us, because the garbage thrown into the Kidron Valley was inanimate things, the decision to throw them out was made by the trashs' owner.  On the other hand, we are the ones who make that deciding choice before the end of our lives.  Either we choose God, or we choose not God.  There is no halfway.

If we choose a life apart from God, that decision of ours becomes final when we die.  Either we stay with Him, or we stay apart from him.  One of those two is our eternal fate, chosen by the life we are given.  What is our priority?  I guarantee you, the answer to that question will indicate where we're going.