Words I didn’t believe.

Not too long ago, during a particularly miserable period of my life, I had lost faith in humanity and went searching for redemption. I signed up for a volunteering program to teach English in a more remote part of Taiwan in the north.

At the end of the program, we were asked to give a short speech reflecting on what we had attained during our time there.

Trying to sound insightful, and as always striving towards an ideal (even when perhaps I shouldn’t have), I said something which I didn’t feel at the time. Something which my spirit could feel was meaningful and was True but something I could not yet relate to; if anything the two weeks of teaching had left me more dispirited.

“You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.”

– James 4:2-4

I said that I finally understood the importance of nurturing and believing in the next generation; that it was of superlative importance. Perhaps my younger peers and the camp instructors thought I sounded convincing; gallant even, but in my head I was hardly convinced.

In fact, it sounded to me more like I was desperately trying to convince myself that that was the case out of fear. It was fear because I had already deduced that if even here, even here amongst little children who had barely seen anything of this gigantic world of ours, I could not find and preserve a small flame of hope: there would be no reason to live.

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.”

– 1 John 4:18