Hong Kong and what matters

Well, I know I should write about HK but what can I say? It's description as ''Asia's world city'' is accurate. HK is a bustling, eclectic collection of people and cultures. You don't know what language you'll hear, what someone will try to sell you or what skinned animal you'll see in a restaurant window. The food was as excellent as it was diverse: Indian, Vietnamese, Singaporian, Cantonese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai--but stay away from the western food. Some areas are an amazing consolidation of wealth: ultramodern skyscrapers with interconnecting shopping malls so that you can walk miles and see a thousand stores without ever having to touch the ground and some areas are exactly what you'd expect from China: an amazing consolidation of crowded produce and gift markets with ceilings of overlapping billboards.

Needless to say, the view of the city from the peak was unprecedented, everything was dirt cheap, the 100 ft buddha was impressive and the Chinese temple grounds were immaculate.

Seeing the world is great and all but I get the sense that it's just another one of those things that leaves you wanting. So, I don't know if the rest of this post is an abuse of readership--this being a Japanese travel blog-- but I'd like to post some exerpts from my personal journal that have nothing to do with traveling or Japan. Maybe I'm able to post it because I'm three months removed from the content but I consider it something I'm still going through. Its a bit of a personal testimony and religious in nature. I know it's a practice in pontificating, it might be a little hard to trudge through and will leave me a bit more vulnerable than any other post but I'm prepared to take those risks because in my weakness God might be glorified.

Personal Journal Part I:

9/4/06

How long can I live so compartmentalized? I seem to have belief without true practice. My life and convictions are a gross passivity and not an active living thing; mine is not a life of unceasing faith but a continuous contradiction between creed and action. In a sense, my life should be a verb rather than an inert, stagnant, superficial noun. As a noun I am prone to being altered, my state is compromised with time, a thing breaks and rusts. A noun is an object, it waits and rots while things happen to it, whereas, as a verb, I would be acting on the world around me without a schism between thought and action, there would be fruition for all my intentions or at least a sincere striving for fruition. A verb is complete and indestructible in the instant of its occurrence and continues to ripple throughout eternity without compromise to its original essence. A verb is an explosion, an outward expression of its own exuberance and a celebration of the reason for the action. Whereas a thing is like a slow implosion; an inwardly focused object concerned with and affecting only itself and its own eventual atrophy, a thing waiting to fall apart that passively witnesses its own demise. I am a dying object but with stirring convictions; my spirit desires to do one thing but something immobilizes me. I seek liberation from this prison of inactivity and false activity. That is to say, I am stuck in the prison of believing in God without acting like God exists.

In my life, without fail, after troughs and peaks of conviction I always end up existing nominally. Right now, I am this or I am that. Right now, I do this or I do that. Can I rise above the rut of this confused state of form and appearance without true, consistent substance? Can I truly and uniformly be and do what I know I should? Can I have a constant, definitive nature other than the nature of contradiction, the nature of saying and believing one thing and doing and being another? I yearn for a nature that is a solid and not an ethereal, capricious gas; a life that is solidly built on the foundation of Jesus Christ. I look at the span of human history and the history of my own life and I see the Gospel of Christ as the only historical hope for eternal life and a loving God. Christ rose from the dead and, as the only begotten Son of God, He conquered the death that I deserve. And to have faith in God and to love Him because that happened liberates me from Sin and death and, along with Christ and His church, I am an inheritor of eternal life. This is the foundation on which I seek to build my faith, my life and indeed, my every action; this is my struggle.

I pray for power to overcome my sin and then, when that fails, I ask God to take control and rip the sin from my life and then, when that fails, I ask for a mixture of the two. As if God and I can sail my ship in tandem. So I am thrust around from passivity to activity, submission to sovereignty over my life but both routes, and all routes in between, seem to lead back to existential compromise and a resurfacing of my habits: lasciviousness, pride, vanity, greed, laziness, fear, intolerance, brooding malevolence and indifference towards others (ect...). I can hold out or hold on for a short while with a will buttressed by prayer but time and circumstance and boredom and desire and temptation are unceasing. The enemy strikes with these prongs on all possible fronts at any possible moment. It is an unwavering adversary that apparently wants to divide me against myself and God. It tears my very essence apart into two opposing entities and pits them against each other until all that remains is despair and confusion and an aversion toward my Creator. In other words, I become that which wants to do God’s will and that which wants to rebel. In this way, the enemy, that which causes me to do what I know is actually harmful and terrible in the eyes of God, creates an unnecessary struggle for morality in me. I know that all has been forgiven by God and all that remains to do is grow closer to Him but the sin injects a harsh legalism into something as simple and pure as a relationship. This legalism brings guilt and shame spoiling my relationship with God transforming it into something mechanical and cold; thusly God and His love are pushed away by my sin. God becomes an antithesis to part of my nature; in other words, as I rebel and sin that rebellious part of me grows and wants to see God, the adversary of my sinful self, disappear from my life.

But oh how my spirit desires to be free from this abominable contradiction of knowing there is a God and an eternity but continuing to live like there is not. I do not know if a person can lose his salvation but I know that sanctification can be lost. The world, with all its mechanisms of contentment, is one big neon distraction beckoning me to come closer and forget God. Indeed, this fallen world is a well orchestrated system for the de-sanctification of human beings.

Thanks for reading, to be continued...