2025-05-11

Because of the car release yesterday, I had to extend my patience and wait inside the Toyota office for five hours. It was the longest wait I had done in a very long while. I did not expect that processing a car loan takes such a long time on top of yesterday, actually waiting for the release of the car. Since that took the living patience out of me, I had to attend the church today via a livestream.

Since today was still about the idea of hope as laid by St. Paul in the Letters to the Romans, what struck me was the line that focuses on imagining a kind of earth that does not have war, pain, famine, poverty, and all the negative things in this life. What I felt at that moment was that I was being forced to imagine a kind of heaven, or at least heaven in one of its most famous interpretations. It felt forced to me because I was doubting if it is really the kind of heaven that is promised to Christians by arriving at the Kingdom of God. Perhaps it felt forced because it sounded a bit regressive when in my head, I am imagining the Garden of Eden.

Possibly, it could be, but what strikes me is that as I imagine this heaven, a nagging thought occurs in my mind: but is that really it? What if it is only how we imagine heaven and not based on what God actually means as His heaven?

But then again, we are beings that came after the Fall and therefore our imperfections is what made us humans. It is in our nature to reflect ourselves back to nature, which is inherently imperfect. We view things only as part of what we can see and what we can perceive. What we can experience of the world will always be imperfect and that sense and reality of imperfection is what we are capable of doing. It may be the Kantian noumena. It is this inability to see things-in-themselves, or Plato's world of forms. In this case, we are bound to look at the imperfections of things, which is precisely what I think to be the primary cause of why is it so easy for us to find the fault in other people. In a sense, it is a defense mechanism that we often apply whenever we are threatened or confused. Our brains are too comfortable in looking at things pessimistically that we even have made it a mode of thought that can govern our reality. Precisely also the reason why it is hard to do good things and be consistent about it, to hope, and to have faith.

I am still too far from trying to believe in God, but I think I am becoming closer. In all these intricacies, where I may not have liked the entirety of the preaching earlier, it has introduced me to an idea where I would not have otherwise thought of (at least in this manner or at this very moment). Man's capability for reflection is such a powerful thing.