It's over!

A LEVELS ARE OVER! Time to get my life (and my room) back in order, and move on quickly. I have many more things to think about - decisions, decisions, delirium.

Anyway, I fancy my chances of getting As for the sciences and maths, but for GP and economics it's really a big question mark. An ideal situation will be straight As! GP and economics have always meant quite a lot to me, but I usually can't score as well as the other subjects. I'll just see how it goes. Hopefully whatever grades I get would lead me to something and somewhere God wants me to study. And in the best case scenario, a good scholarship either from NUS for local study or a strong organisation for overseas study, so I don't have to spend my parents' hard-earned tens of thousands of dollars for my degree.

I've really been wondering, how do people's lives change over time? Very surely, life doesn't end after JC. There's still university to go through, a career to pursue and a family to build, among many other things. All these factors would probably be part of most of my contemporaries' lives. Right now, I can't clearly see myself emerge at the top in wealth and repute in 10 or 20 years' time. It's not that I don't have dreams - I have incredible dreams - but the future is just so vague. After all, I've come so far in 18 years, and there's still more than three quarters of my life to live. How am I supposed to know how I would end up at the age of 50, or even just 30? I could fill the role of an important pillar of society, or remain in relative anonymity. The troubling thing is knowing that every major decision I make will have implications, profound or otherwise, for my future.

And next comes success. Is the definition of success different to each individual? To me, the fundamental basis for success is the same - power and influence. Please don't let the image of a ruthless dictator come to your mind. They are only critical for success, because they are the only means through which our ideals can turn into reality. And success for everyone, as far as I know, is to change society to the way he wants it to be, for the better or for the worse.

So, I have many things to think about - with God!

Life's Complex Web of Relationships

I deleted the previous post, didn't think that having GP essays here would be of any particular interest to anyone haha. Anyway life's good for me, only 2 more papers to go before I can say bye bye to JC life (unless I go back as a teacher, which is very highly improbable).

Dismissing life as being simple may perhaps be a little too, well, simplistic. I know life's much more than that. It's not just life in the long term, as in the major decisions that you make e.g. university degree, career path etc., but also life in the short term. I refer to those little trivialities that don't really matter over time, but are vital for sustaining your dwindling interest in living life, such as a nice encouraging note, or a cheery smile on your old grandma's wizened face. Occasionally, these trivialities could turn out to be annoyances that bug you so much that you scream "God!!" in utter desperation. And yes, they usually cause you to ask why God put you through such a rigourous - and painful - perfection process.

As iron sharpens iron, so a man sharpens the countenance of his friend. - Proverbs 27:17
As can be inferred from this verse, one tool particularly useful to God when He shapes us into perfection is other people. When people meet people, relationships develop, and herein lies the problem - relationships can be very complicated. Here are just some examples:

1. Parent vs. child: Parent must learn to give child freedom, but must teach him to exercise self-discipline in enjoying this freedom, ironically through discipline itself. Child must respect and honour parent, but sometimes doing so simply because he is the parent (especially when the parent is being unreasonable) reeks of disgusting hypocrisy.
2. Friend vs. friend: The absence of trust eventually brings misunderstanding, then backstabbing, and then hatred and so on. I'm sure there's little else I can comment on without sounding preachy, except that when such things happen, it is up to you to make a value judgement. Should you have made such a friend in the first place, and should you forgive and forget or make a clean break? If you really must determine a winner, the one with courage (to do what's right in the eyes of God - and not what's convenient) usually prevails over the one with selfishness in his heart.
3. Boy vs. girl: I'm still a teenager (with all the angst, insecurity and - OMG - acne that comes with being one), so ARGH WTH WTH WTH.

Try counting the number of relationships you have with other people. You'll still be doing so on your dying breath - there are 6 billion different people on this planet. It's just too easy to be caught in life's complex web of relationships. So we shouldn't be afraid of getting caught, it's bound to happen at many points in our lives. But let's not struggle on our own and become further entangled, but let God extricate us with His peace and wisdom, and learn from the process.