Surrealism

I'm having yet another surreal moment right now. I'm sitting in Starbucks on campus listening to music and organizing my schedule, when I realize that I am the college student. I am here, living on my own, going to college at my dream school, and I can't help but feel blessed despite the hardships. There was a time that I doubted that I would be able to go to college, let alone move away from home, yet here I am! Ooh that just reminded me of a song from one of my favorite movies!! Spirit, Stallion of the Cimarron. I love that movie because it is all about horses and their personalities and warm hearts for humans, but also because of the music. The music just happens to be co-written by Bryan Adams and Hans Zimmer, so you know, no big deal... just a fairly successful 80's rockstar and the composer of movies such as the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy. Of course, when I was little I had no idea who these people were, I just liked the music, but it's cool to make that connection now. Anyways... The song "Here I Am" in Spirit has lyrics of: "Here I am, this is me. There's nowhere else on earth I'd rather be. It's a new world, it's a new start, it's a life with the beating of a young heart, it's a new place, it's a new land, and it's waiting for me. Here I am. Here we are, we've just begun and after all this time my time has come. Here we are, still going strong. Right here in the place where we belong." I love it when normal songs like this make me think of God. This song was written to be about a horse becoming the leader of a herd, and the responsibilities that come with being the leader, yet 18 year old me hears God's voice in it. It's always exciting to see the different ways God speaks to us, whether it's a song that's stuck in your head or a person or situation in your life. Once you start looking, you see God everywhere. You see him in both the beauty and pain, which is a double edged sword.
It's hard to think about God in relation to pain. Me with my math brain, I think of it like an equation relating God and pain, like they are opposites to one another: God/pain (God divided by pain). I've come up with a new relationship now, though: God=Pain. I don't mean God is the same thing as pain, I mean God is proportional to pain. If you have more pain in your life, God reaches out even further to you. He does not do this because the ones with pain are His favorites, but because He gives everybody equal opportunity to follow Him. He understands that those of us with pain have less to give, and He's okay with that. Many of us, including myself, investigate this and wonder, if God can support us when we have more pain, why does He not also take some of our pain away? I don't have a definitive answer for this one, guys. It's an age-old question that I don't think will ever be answered on Earth, however I can share with you my opinion of the matter. If we lived in a perfect world, everybody would be praising God of their own free will, but a perfect world does not and will never exist. The only time that there ever has existed a perfect world was with the Garden of Eden, but that world was corrupted by the same thing that corrupts our world: sin. I see sin and Satan as synonymous because Satan encourages sin, just as I see God and love as synonymous because God encourages love. I believe that God has a plan for each and every one of our lives, and we may choose to follow it or not, but either way, His plan will be corrupted by sin. Fortunately, God accounts for this and makes it possible for us to survive and thrive. Satan makes life difficult, but God makes life possible. Because we have free will, God's plan does not always shine through every single person's life, and because we are human, most of the time we will not see God's plan. We might only see the suffering left in its wake, and when that is the case, it is time for us to take comfort in God's embrace. You could try to understand every aspect of the plan, but then you would waste your whole life looking for something that, simply by having faith, in the end you will find: Heaven.
"But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere."
James 3:17
Love always,
Sierra