The Hill... is conquered

The Hill is Conquered!

Today I finally conquered the hill on Tinian. Who knew that I would have to walk all the way to the airport road before I reached the top of the hill! Once there, you could clearly see the north end of the island and the island of Saipan in the distance.

I thought I would be much more elated to finally get to the top, but today it had been a foregone conclusion that I was going to get there...so it was rather anti-climatic. However, the view from that point is wonderful! Saipan looks much bigger,and taller, than I thought it would. The other end of the island looks much farther away than I thought it would....

My next goal, perhaps, will be a walk to the other end of the island…a walk of about 10 miles (a twenty mile round-trip). The top of the hill is two miles from our apartment (a 4 mile round trip), so I still have a long way to go. The north side of the island (all leased by the US military), is much larger than the south side where the village is, and is totally unused (other than the tourists that travel there to see the sights).

It is obvious that I still have some work to do to get in shape to walk from one end of the island to the other. In the meantime, I think I will explore some of the side roads I have passed on my walk up the hill. It will give me time to work up to a longer walk.

Just as I was turning around to go back, the ambulance and a train of cars came up the road to go to the airport. They had come to receive the body of Navy seaman Anamarie San Nicolas Camacho, who was killed in Bahrain a few days ago, and it got me to thinking...

Life is certainly complex. Sometimes it is hard to know how to be happy. On the one hand, I am an American citizen and have the privilege of pursuing my dreams of happiness; I am happily married with five wonderful children and (?) hard to keep track of how many grandchildren (they are coming rather quickly now); Terri and I have the privilege of living on Tinian...we are and should be happy! And yet, there are always tragedies in life that make us pause. Senseless deaths like this one, and that of Efrain Palacious, forces us to stop and ponder our lives.

If the things we hold most dear can be taken away in an instant, then how can we be happy? We work all our lives to earn money, to raise families, and to make something of ourselves...and yet, homes burn down (my father lives just outside of San Diego--just two miles from the fires), thieves break through and steal, economies crash and we lose our jobs (I know about that!), and worst of all, even our loved ones can be taken away in the blink of an eye...How can we go through all of this and still find joy in life?

The only way I have found to make sense of it all is to step back and see the BIG picture. I believe that God actually planned for all of this to happen! He wanted his children to gain experience so that they could become like Him. In order to do that, they had to know good and evil intimately, and then to choose. God did not want to force His children to become like Him! He gave us agency and the ability to act for ourselves, then placed us upon this earth to experience the full range of yin and yang, the full measure of universal karma.

To some it may seem cruel, but most should be able to see the logic in God's plan. By permitting us to experience both good and evil, God tests us to see what we will become. Will we choose to submit to the evil, and become evil ourselves, or will we choose to be good, and reap the rewards promised to those who choose that path? There was no other way God could insure that those blessed and/or punished did so with their eyes open. In fact, if you really want to get philosophical, there was no other way for us to experience true joy!

How could we know what joy and happiness was, if we had never experienced the opposite? How would we know dark, if the sun never set? Without the universal opposites (think good and evil, yin and yang, light and dark, male and female, etc.), there would be no knowledge. And if you want to delve even deeper, if we were not given a choice (our agency), we would not know freedom. If a person only has one choice of action, does he have freedom to act? Without placing both positive and negative consequences in front of us, there would be no choice, there would be no freedom. We would be God's puppets! I don't want to be a puppet. I want to be free, even if it means that I risk losing blessings due to my poor choices.

So how does this help me be happy? By understanding that all of this chaos was designed to be here to give us experience, life becomes a challenge. I am pitting myself against the powers of the universe--knowing that if I choose correctly I will win blessings, and that if I continue to choose correctly I will gain an eternal reward.

Last but not least there comes faith. By understanding that an intelligent being created this world, and knowing the chaos and despair we feel was designed into the world we live in, gives me hope and understanding that there is a better life after death. Even science has finally come to the understanding that nothing can be destroyed--it can only be changed. If you burn a stick, the stick doesn't simply cease to exist, it is changed into light and heat. When we die, we do not cease to exist, we are simply changed! Now what we are changed into is a theological debate that has raged for centuries. Personally, I believe that my intelligence--the real me inside this body--will continue to exist. That all who die will not only meet again, they will live again--as families.

If we are given our agency here, why not there? If I choose to live in a loving relationship with a wife and children here, why not there? If there are powers that exist that can create what I see before my eyes, why does not that same power have the ability to re-create, or resurrect, what has gone before? To me it has become simple logic.

If I was walking in the middle of the Sahara desert and found a gold watch (keeping perfect time), would my first thought be: Look what the sand made? Of course not! That is illogical. My first thought would be: Who made this? It would be foolish to think that the sand created a gold watch! So if I was a traveler through the chaos of the universe and came upon a world like ours, filled with complex life, would my first thought be: Look what the universe made? Of course not. It is illogical. I would look for the intelligent being who created this world. And by finding Him, I would find the key to the universe and to life's mysteries...

When looking back from the top of the hill, you can see the Big picture. Even though you can just barely make out the ocean on the south side of the island, by standing on top of the hill I can see and understand the island much better. Perhaps if we could see our lives the same way--seeing the Big picture instead of the small victories or tragedies--we would have a better understanding of life and how to be happy...

I'm tired, but at least it is downhill most of the way!