have a little faith

Define Life.

This sentence ends with a period but it asks you a question. well not exactly a question, but it has something to do with asking yourself; making yourself walk down to memory lane and allow nostalgia hit you; maybe let you answer bonus questions such as "what is success to you"? or "Ever been depressed"?; sometimes it will bring you to the deepest thinking.

You might be wondering then how I define life. I used to define life with something to do with "existence." I used to tell myself that people who utter words "Get a life!" create an impact on those who just exist. Of course we all exist in this world, but the question is, do we have a life? Now we're getting deeper.

Influenced by Mitch Albom's Have A Little Faith; I have a new meaning for L-I-F-E. Mitch wrote: "The story of my recent life. I like that phrase. It makes more sense than the story of my life, because we get so many lives between birth and death. A life to be a child. A life to come of age. A life to wander, to settle, to fall in love, to parent, to test our promise, to realize our mortality--and in some lucky cases, to do something after that realization."

Now this made me realize that it's true. Back in kindergarten, I defined life by do and play; having God above and my family on earth. This changed over time of course, and in elementary, I told myself that I have a good life. Which means I had better perspective than just do and play. Crossing the border from school age to adolescence, I have realized that life has something to do with death and problems too. Which made me believe that Life is sometimes up and sometimes down. When I entered and finished high school, I have ever since defined life as God's gift. So many experiences in teenage years made me discover life at its fullest. I have seen laughter; felt intense crying, been excited, happy, and lonely; been in love, seen death, been hurt and depressed; walked a mile or two, ran in the rain, developed social life, increased in wisdom, grew spiritually, EXPERIENCED CHANGE.

I have defined life as blissful, and filled with happy memories back when I was in love. I have defined life as something I couldn't take, or in short I can't commit suicide; But there's one thing I realized when I asked God to take my life once when I was hopeless; that I was talking to a greater power, and talking to Him was in fact, "hope." Cliche, because I have defined life to be so short and it shouldn't be spent on regrets; a famous quote often posted on the internet. Truth is, when we regret or when we "look back", we give ourselves a time to realize a mistake and eventually learn from it and look forward for a change. I have defined life to be short in such a way that people die too soon; and then I realized they didn't die "too soon," rather they died on the exact time they were supposed to be. The quote "Everything happens for a reason" applies on this. I have defined life to be happy and worth it if spent the right way. . .and no matter what, IT GOES ON.

At this exact time in my life, due to the storm and setbacks, I can literally and figuratively say WHEN IT RAINS, IT POURS; but God calms me amidst the storm because I let go and let Him work. Nothing under His control can ever be out of control. So the story of my recent life is that I define it as a journey of belief. As a Christian, my belief is found in John 3:16; my belief is in the Word of God, the assurance of His promises keeps me going. What I learned from Mitch Albom's experience is that "we should know what we believe, it should be in our souls. We should be convinced with the authenticity of what we have, but we must also be humble enough to say that we don't know everything. And since we don't know everything, we must accept that another person may believe something else." Now FAITH has something to do with HOW you live your life. People believe differently, whom to serve or not, what church to attend or not. This is the biggest difference we see in people when defining life.

Now it's YOUR turn: DEFINE LIFE.