The Battle Worth Fighting

Hello everyone! I hope you all doing well.

We’re only just a few weeks into this new year, and already it seems that I’ve hit the floor running.

This will be a year of big change for me and my family. Because this is the year that we’re going home.

Going home.  I’ve always associated a feeling of bittersweet nostalgia to those words. I’ve learned that one of life’s paradoxes is that we always long to leave home, and we always long to come home.

The Philippines, as my place of birth, will always be one of my homes. Though I dread the traffic, the pollution, the masses, the crime and the politics, there is no other place on earth that can claim to have nurtured a significant part of me.

It’s the one place I long to be, and the one place I loath to be.

I’m reminded of Jesus’ words on His way to Jerusalem:  

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones God's messengers! How often I have wanted to gather your children together as a hen protects her chicks beneath her wings, but you wouldn't let Me.

(Matthew 23:37 NLT)

It will take a lot of effort to change my country into something better than it is. And this is the ultimate paradox: to change it, I need to change myself.

Everything will depend on how much I can change myself.

I’ve just finished reading the chapter in The Road Less Traveled by M.Scott Peck dealing with the subject of Grace.

It inspired me to take stock of everything that I am right now. The result is the following poem that I’ve written, which I would like to share with you all. After I’ve finished writing it, it sounded very much like something that I’ve read somewhere before. If any of this sounds familiar to you, please let me know so I can properly acknowledge the source.

Earlier in Dr. Peck’s book, in a chapter dealing with the unconscious, he says that when we discover something “new”, we’re only finding what was already there before. Sound familiar?

History merely repeats itself. It has all been done before. Nothing under the sun is truly new. Sometimes people say, "Here is something new!" But actually it is old; nothing is ever truly new.

(Ecclesiastes 1:9-10 NLT)

Anyway, I’m not sad not to be original. I’m just happy I can express my thoughts to share them with others.

Here then is my poem:

THE BATTLE WORTH FIGHTING

How do you fight a battle you cannot win?

How do you fight a battle against all known sin?

With all your heart, with all your soul, and all your strength.

With tooth and nail, with your very last breath.

Until the last moment, until you’re begging for death.

This is the only battle worth fighting, the one worthy of it all.

This is the battle worth sacrificing one’s own life for.

This will require everything; it will require our absolute best.

For this is a battle for survival: the battle of Life over Death.

This is the battle of good versus evil, between God and the Devil himself.

This is the battle I’m fighting, and I’m fighting to save my Self.

May the Lord help me, may He equip and prepare me well.

May He help me win my way into Heaven, for defeat means a descent into Hell.

May He arm me with His Knowledge, may He sustain me with His Grace.

For this is a battle of attrition: a grand marathon of a race.

This prayer I send out to my loved ones. May it serve them well.

For this is The Battle Worth Fighting. Who can win it?

Only God can tell.

I know it sounds dreary and pessimistic. But I’ve come to accept that all truth is like that at first.

But now I know, that those who stick with the truth -- who remain loyal to it -- are rewarded with something infinitely more precious.

They are rewarded with Life.

God Bless all of you!

Regards,

Chris

PS:  Oh, and if you’re discouraged and depressed with the Book of Ecclesiastes (like I was at first), let me end with the words of the Prophet Isaiah, who, based on historians, wrote over two centuries after the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes :

You have heard My predictions and seen them fulfilled, but you refuse to admit it. Now I will tell you new things, secrets you have not yet heard. They are brand new, not things from the past. So you cannot say, 'We knew that all the time!'

(Isaiah 48:6-7 NLT)

And

For I am about to do something new. See, I have already begun! Do you not see it? I will make a pathway through the wilderness. I will create rivers in the dry wasteland.

(Isaiah 43:19 NLT)

What is that something new? For that, you would have to read the New Testament. J