Life's like that?

As I was habitually tidying and re-reading my private blog, I came across this (erm, not really as I remembered writing this entry) and thought it suitable to post. As this is an article taken directly from my private blog, once again I am stepping out of my comfort zone(actually,I had it written on word doc when I was not in country, where the place I stayed had no internet, but then I procrastinated when I came back, wondering whether it is safe to post it.) The eagle story was told by one of my teachers some time ago so the part about the exact period of time they had to undergo may not be accurate as it had started to fade out of my memory when I first wrote the text below.

2008 March 06
Life's like that?
When I walked home from school, I saw a minor near the corridor of a block near my house. One of its legs was torn but surprisingly, it was plump and shows no signs of its leg being broken. How did the minor managed to feed itself so well? How did it move around? Or did it the other minor which was near it fed it, that is why is it thin? No matter what, it needs a lot of preservation and determination with a goal-to stay alive.

It is like this in life. When you meet with a misfortune, be it physically or emotionally, you need to have a specific goal which acts as a motivation together with perseverance, then you are able to get out of the darkness in your life. However having a religion, we believe in our gods and as Christians, we believe that with God, nothing is impossible. God heals every wounds and even our conscious when we ask for forgiveness sincerely.

In school today. I had two presentations, one is to teach the class chapter 5 and 6 of Pride and Prejudice and the other was the GP IT presentation. I did not have the time to look through the notes that I am suppose to present to the class as I was doing up on the IT presentation which I had spent quite a reasonable amount of time to research but about 80% of the information was not applicable to the question that was given to us. As a result, I was not very well prepared for both of the presentations. The first one was quite smooth as the teacher helped me along, most of the time. Hence, it was not mostly embarrassing on my part.

However for the GP IT presentation, I was quite nervous and my hands went cold and limp even though we had a run through during the recess. On top of that, the weather today was cold and I was sitting under the fan. My hands turned yellowish white and sticky. I admit that I am not the very religious type and did not pray for God's help during exams and when I needed his help especially when the pastor did not preach on it during that particular week's sermon (the exception of this year's Chinese Poetry Recital). I'm quite strong-headed, stubborn as a mute to be exact. However today, I sang contempory praise on his presence in our life,
犹如草原上的小草，
蓝天中的小鸟，
我整颗心被幸福围绕
哦，我慈爱的天父
认识你真好
今生今世
我不再寻找

你使我抛开一切烦恼
喜乐充满在心头燃烧

认识你真好
认识你真好
今生今世
我不再寻找

哦主啊，
认识你真好
认识你真好
只愿分分秒秒
在你慈爱的怀抱
Just when I sang it the second time, a bird flew up and down the classroom block vertically, with a background of green forest and a pale pastel blue sky. This fits in the lyrics of the praise. Is it coincidence? Is it an encouragement from Him? It might be just a coincidence but it might also be an encouragement. At that point in time, I took it as the latter and tried to calm myself down. The presentation ended up alright but I almost made a scene of myself when I squatted down behind the teacher's table and started to tear the sides of the cards, a habit adopted from one of my best friends. Soon, I switched back to my hypersensitive self and started interpret everyone who talked softy to each other and looking at my direction as saying how weird I am and the likes. I closed myself up and avoided looking at them in the eye. However, as the day ended, one by one they waved goodbye to me, slowly switching back to my 'normal' self as I took it as after all they did not mind my weirdness or something like that.

I realised that when I start to drown myself in negative thoughts and react to my discomfort, I was not able to treat everything as normal even though they might not be talking about my faults. Even when you are down and God does not seem to help you, He might be helping you in the sense that it would make you stronger as you grow up. Some of us would treat every misfortune as 'that is life, it cannot be changed, you have to accept it', 'that is just fate lah, what can you do' but is it really fate, really 'life's like that'? Even a minor could survive despite having its leg torn and feed itself until it is twice the size of a normal sized minor. Eagles which are over forty years had to undergo a long and painful change to survive as its wings are heavy due to the large amount of feathers and its beak had curved inwards so much that it is touching its breast. They could either wait for death to come or they fight their way out. Eagles who fought their way out, used huge stones that are near their nests near the top of the mountains to break their beaks and plucked all their feathers off their wings. This whole process lasted for around 3 months. If the animals are able to fight their way through to survive these hardships and misfortune, why couldn't we who are at least bigger in size stand up and bear with all the discomfort to prepare oneself for their survival in the future? Hardships are meant to 'polish' one, doesn't it?

Is it really 'life's like that'?