Taking TOK classes this semester has made me very skeptical about life. Mundane phrases such as "I'm telling the truth," mean anything but mundane. Truth, used in this phrase, has ambiguous definitions that can never be defined perfectly and completely. What is truth? How can anyone define it?
To me, faith is like one of these phrases; ambiguous yet mundane. As long as I can remember, I have always woken myself up at 9 A.M. to go to church with my parents, without knowing anything about what faith actually was, and how it affected my life. When I was young, church was a place to go and play with friends, plus they gave you free gifts and food. I questioned nothing; God created the world, Jesus died for the bad things we did, so if we were good, we could go to heaven and live happily ever after.
But, as I grew older, I got distracted. My family moved back from England to Korea. I faced hard times as I tried to fit into a Korean environment. I spent many sleepless nights, just trying to finish my homework, taking twice as much time than everybody else. I had nosebleeds everyday, due to the stress that I was facing. My grades were crawling on the ground; I barely passed, and sometimes, I didn't even manage to do that. Church seemed pointless to me. I was so preoccupied with the things that I had to overcome that I started to build a wall between me and God. And every year, as my stress levels grew higher, so did the wall.
There wasn't really a certain point in my life that I finally accepted God and became a Christian. It was more of a gradual process, still in effect right now. After coming to TCIS, I wasn't stressed and worried about my life as I was before, so I decided to give God a shot. It was only after making efforts that my faith slowly began to grow. Faith began to make holes in the wall that I had built.
Even now, I still have not managed to break down the wall completely. Faith is still an enigma to me. But, every time I find myself unconsciously turning to God, unconsciously praying and unconsciously feeling guilty about sinning, maybe that is the faith I relate to in my life.
2 comments:
Hyansoo, I love the way you write. Sometimes that wall between God and us seems really thick and very tall but God always gives me another image - that of being in the palm of His hand - wall and all. He can always see me - I have to choose to see Him and set my wall aside. Mrs.Mc.
Hyansoo~ I think faith is one of the many things that is not shaped by birth, and like your personal experience, I think faith is a growing process. Faith is what you develop as you watch the faith that your surroundings has, while the depth of your faith is determined by your devotion to that certain faith. Having said that, “how should we treat those whose original surroundings had a faith that was conflicting with some other faith?” becomes a big question. The biggest problem that my brain faced was the questions that were raised by skeptics, asking “Aren’t missionaries putting pressures to the people who are not as “uncivilized” as they are by superficially aiding them with food and cloth just to change their belief? PLZ share your thoughts~ I need help
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