C'est la Vie

I sit here at my little desk at the college, looking out the glass paned doors at the dusky world outside. The mountains are periwinkle smudges behind the trees. The colors are dimmed by the lack of light, brightened only by the occasional streak of lightening, and the result is a world that looks hardly real. This is the time of day that I most enjoy, and this is the time of year that I love best.

"C'est la vie"... melodramatic phrase of phrases which is offered up in appeasement of that unfeeling, apathetic, Eris-of-gods, Life. Oftentimes I hear even the more consistent of young, aspiring atheists slip up in such a maxim. In my ever-rebelling, generally unthinking generation, there may be no Truth, no God, nothing able to impose absolutes and thus dethrone their autonomy, yet there is always Life, and no escaping of that fact. They are not yet to that level of hard-hardheartedness, or perhaps they fear what dark and lurid cataclysm might ensue should they deny it.

So why name a blog after such a platitude? To an extent, because I'm partial to French...and then there is that tiny "rebel" in some obscure corner of my mind which raises it's fist in protest that so enchante a saying be found amidst the dregs of non-thinker's "punch". Such is life...well, what is life, reality, truly like? I am young, my life can be summed up in less than two decades, I was even too young to be properly obsessed with boy-bands of the 90's for crying out loud! However, one beauty of universals is that I too can know, really know, at least on an objective level, about life.

So, as a human being, made in the image of my Lord, I go through life with the end goal of bringing glory to He that formed first man from dust, who knit me together in my mother's womb. Life, it is beautiful. How often I forget this, being too wrapped up in the mundane, day-to-day occurrences to think, even for a second, how I am living a life so finely orchestrated. Every single moment, monumental or nondescript, is for my sanctification, for His glory. When I was a child I customarily would make my mind up in one way or another: Today I will sit at the table and do my homework. As the carpet pooled into indents behind my seven year old feet, I would nearly make it to the chair at the table, book gripped to side, pencil clutched in earnest childish grasp. Just as I was about to sit, I would spin quickly, faster than even God could blink. I fooled Him, was my smug thought; and carpet fibers gently chafed my elbows as I flopped belly-down on the floor to do my homework. Is it horrible of me to smirk at the thought that there are so very many who believe, as I did at seven, that if they shirk, yes even deny, the law of God, they are somehow thwarting His purposes?

My life has been, well, simple...easy, sheltered, wonderful. Life is beautiful. Not because mine has been generally uncomplicated, but because were it to suddenly wax bitter and forlorn, I need not grow bitter and forlorn with it. I have been gifted with grace and mercy unending. Life is beautiful. No sorrowful 'barely-hanging-in-there' until we all get to heaven, no dread of dragging aching bones through yet another day. So I do the mundane, and I glory in it, dammit! I get up at 4am every morning to drive to my dead-end job, I clean the house on my days off, I try to offer variety in my dinner selection every evening; sometimes I fail. I go to class and pick out the glimmers of truth from the muck of post-modernism, I sit in Starbucks drinking cafe au lait while I type and ponder the possibility of sharing what I write. I love Shakespeare, I love rainy days, I love a man with an intensity and passion which words, even words (and I love words) cannot quintessentially express. With unadulterated joy, down even to that distant corner of my soul which shrinks from exposure... Fear? There is no need to fear. Trust? Absolutely, in the rock of my salvation. What is man? But a breath... Obsolete when the wind passes over this frail blossom. "But you, oh Lord, sit enthroned. Forever your memorial abides through generations all."

Such is life.