Letter to God
I saw this title "Letter to God" for writing contest a few months back at writingcash.com and decided to participate in it. My idea is to portray a fallen humanity - made in God's image but lost in sin, yet not totally without hope.
Dear God,
I am not sure how to begin this prayer. I am not even sure if I am in an acceptable position to pray to You. It is serious to offend a king due to lack of respect for his office, but it is far more serious if I speak words carelessly without knowing my position before the Maker of the universe. Pardon my boldness, God. My conscience tells me it is my duty to acknowledge and pray to my Creator but I have little knowledge how to reverence You as I should.
I am both amazed and perplexed by humanity. You have given us higher glory than all other living things and granted us the power to manage and rule the world. Above all other creation, we are the beings endowed with superior gifts of morality, reason, will and emotion. We can think, relate and express meaning through our words and make profound impact on history which surpasses our mortal lives. All throughout history, the marks of human glory are displayed in every department of life including culture, music and arts, science, philosophy, history, and many more. One can never finish contemplating the achievements of all the great minds and contributors in our history.
So glorious and beautiful we are, yet the painful paradox is we are also beings capable of unimaginable evil who have been passionately heaping up our own destruction. The history is filled with the testimonies of our guilt, confusion and darkness. We have been disillusioned and shocked by our depravity but strangely we never seem to learn our lesson so history keeps repeating itself. We exploit, cheat and murder our fellow beings. We are full of hatred, envy and pride. We destroy the earth and pile up problems for our future generations. The great gifts of reason, will and emotion ironically become dangerous tools in our hands.
We are even more hopeless in our relation with You. Instead of holiness and righteousness, religion has been the platform of our greatest abuse and hypocrisy. We created images of You using our own imagination, used them to gain power for ourselves, led multitudes into terrible bondages of religion, putting heavy yokes on them and implanting fear to manipulate them. Our history of theocracy before modernity was a dark picture of evil leaders abusing Your name to gain power for their own end.
After enough frustration with our own man-made ideas of You, humanity massively rebelled against theocracy and used the gift of reason to reason You away from our lives. We declared that we no longer need You but we could thrive and handle everything on our own. We thought we could do well with arbitrary values created by reason with no relation to You, but only to end up in despair of our moral bankruptcy as we saw the horror of genocide, holocaust and the world wars. We were lost and felt that reason is not enough to guide our lives and is not the ultimate thing.
As our reason has failed us, now we decide that we can know nothing for sure therefore we would not want to be absolute about anything. We no longer admit universal principles. We trash all the big pictures and live in mini-pictures of our own making and relative social constructs. We rationalize ourselves into irrationality and think that pragmatism is the way to go.
The prevalent pursuit today becomes materialism and our mindset is highly individualistic. Many of us admit You into our lives only as a tool to prosper ourselves or to advance our own way. Religion becomes a customized package where people remember You only to call on Your power to get what they want. Many others despise such hypocrisy but still decide to live their own way.
With relativism, we have plunged ourselves into greater perplexities. Without universal principles to guide us, we are moving into more confusion where barbarianism is taking over civilization. With the rise of terrorisms and the increased frequency of natural disasters which suddenly take everything we have unawares, many of us are still living lives in our own narrow world and are ill-prepared for the reality that might destroy all our plans and pursuits anytime. We are so trapped by ourselves and are powerless to break through the bondages we have set for ourselves.
Through these all, we have never treated You with the honor that we should. Once we misrepresented You and we suffered the bitter fruit. Then we made ourselves atheists and suffered the bitter fruit. Finally by making all things relative we simply ignore You and we are still as lost as ever. When we do well we live as though You never exist. When we achieve success we boast of all the gifts we never earn. But when bad things happen we curse You and forget that we have denied You. Then when we get into troubles of our own making, we blame You for Your gifts we have abused. How consistently inconsistent we are! We continually make historical jokes of ourselves, witnessed by all generations.
What hope do we have, God? Unless You reveal, how can we know anything right at all? God, You are beyond our understanding. Without You, we can only continue to build up wrong understanding of You and ourselves, as we have done all along. Yet I am amazed that You have kept Your peace though we have been accusing You in our foolish ignorance. I have reason to hope as I see tokens of Your mercies to us through Your sustenance of the world and Your kind preservation of humanity for so many generations. The historical lessons have been repeated again and again. God, I pray You have mercy and give us the right heart and the right understanding.
Waiting for Your light,
A Seeker
I am not sure how to begin this prayer. I am not even sure if I am in an acceptable position to pray to You. It is serious to offend a king due to lack of respect for his office, but it is far more serious if I speak words carelessly without knowing my position before the Maker of the universe. Pardon my boldness, God. My conscience tells me it is my duty to acknowledge and pray to my Creator but I have little knowledge how to reverence You as I should.
I am both amazed and perplexed by humanity. You have given us higher glory than all other living things and granted us the power to manage and rule the world. Above all other creation, we are the beings endowed with superior gifts of morality, reason, will and emotion. We can think, relate and express meaning through our words and make profound impact on history which surpasses our mortal lives. All throughout history, the marks of human glory are displayed in every department of life including culture, music and arts, science, philosophy, history, and many more. One can never finish contemplating the achievements of all the great minds and contributors in our history.
So glorious and beautiful we are, yet the painful paradox is we are also beings capable of unimaginable evil who have been passionately heaping up our own destruction. The history is filled with the testimonies of our guilt, confusion and darkness. We have been disillusioned and shocked by our depravity but strangely we never seem to learn our lesson so history keeps repeating itself. We exploit, cheat and murder our fellow beings. We are full of hatred, envy and pride. We destroy the earth and pile up problems for our future generations. The great gifts of reason, will and emotion ironically become dangerous tools in our hands.
We are even more hopeless in our relation with You. Instead of holiness and righteousness, religion has been the platform of our greatest abuse and hypocrisy. We created images of You using our own imagination, used them to gain power for ourselves, led multitudes into terrible bondages of religion, putting heavy yokes on them and implanting fear to manipulate them. Our history of theocracy before modernity was a dark picture of evil leaders abusing Your name to gain power for their own end.
After enough frustration with our own man-made ideas of You, humanity massively rebelled against theocracy and used the gift of reason to reason You away from our lives. We declared that we no longer need You but we could thrive and handle everything on our own. We thought we could do well with arbitrary values created by reason with no relation to You, but only to end up in despair of our moral bankruptcy as we saw the horror of genocide, holocaust and the world wars. We were lost and felt that reason is not enough to guide our lives and is not the ultimate thing.
As our reason has failed us, now we decide that we can know nothing for sure therefore we would not want to be absolute about anything. We no longer admit universal principles. We trash all the big pictures and live in mini-pictures of our own making and relative social constructs. We rationalize ourselves into irrationality and think that pragmatism is the way to go.
The prevalent pursuit today becomes materialism and our mindset is highly individualistic. Many of us admit You into our lives only as a tool to prosper ourselves or to advance our own way. Religion becomes a customized package where people remember You only to call on Your power to get what they want. Many others despise such hypocrisy but still decide to live their own way.
With relativism, we have plunged ourselves into greater perplexities. Without universal principles to guide us, we are moving into more confusion where barbarianism is taking over civilization. With the rise of terrorisms and the increased frequency of natural disasters which suddenly take everything we have unawares, many of us are still living lives in our own narrow world and are ill-prepared for the reality that might destroy all our plans and pursuits anytime. We are so trapped by ourselves and are powerless to break through the bondages we have set for ourselves.
Through these all, we have never treated You with the honor that we should. Once we misrepresented You and we suffered the bitter fruit. Then we made ourselves atheists and suffered the bitter fruit. Finally by making all things relative we simply ignore You and we are still as lost as ever. When we do well we live as though You never exist. When we achieve success we boast of all the gifts we never earn. But when bad things happen we curse You and forget that we have denied You. Then when we get into troubles of our own making, we blame You for Your gifts we have abused. How consistently inconsistent we are! We continually make historical jokes of ourselves, witnessed by all generations.
What hope do we have, God? Unless You reveal, how can we know anything right at all? God, You are beyond our understanding. Without You, we can only continue to build up wrong understanding of You and ourselves, as we have done all along. Yet I am amazed that You have kept Your peace though we have been accusing You in our foolish ignorance. I have reason to hope as I see tokens of Your mercies to us through Your sustenance of the world and Your kind preservation of humanity for so many generations. The historical lessons have been repeated again and again. God, I pray You have mercy and give us the right heart and the right understanding.
Waiting for Your light,
A Seeker
posted by Mejlina Tjoa @ 1:17 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Aptly written, yet very personal. ~Godsis
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