I made a promise...:)

So I promised Chudi that I'd make a post this week. Yo....it's been so long since I wrote in this thing. I know I know, I made a promise to this blog to update it on a regular basis, so it seems that even though I keep promises to friends I have no qualms about lying to this page. Well it wasn't a lie per se, I've just been soooo busy. Like crazy. I'm getting a masters degree in electrical engineering and I graduate this May. Yeah. That means that I have to work on my thesis/project report. Although graduating or not, any electrical engineering semester is enough to severely curtail any non-engineering activities. Which is ridiculous because this...this whole slave-in-school-then-get-the-dream-job-then-work-and-earn-money-till-you-die thing is not the real world. All this is fake. It means nothing. Absolutely nothing. It's not real life. Real life is what happens while I'm in class being lectured to about digital communications concepts. Real life is what happens while I'm scribbling funny math symbols on whiteboards. People get sick, they die, they find God, they get baptised, they lose their families, they are born, they get robbed, they...

Yesterday we had to give presentations in our Project Management class. I gave some weak report on a large scale 3G cellular deployment that happened back in the day. It was as boring as it sounds, and the paper that I reviewed in preparation for it was even more so. One of my classmates got up and started addressing the class when her turn came up. Now she's a serious student and is normally pretty sharp but last night she was hemming and hawing, losing her train of thought, reading from the paper itself and what not. At one point after a particularly bad run she paused and said "I'm sorry y'all I saw something earlier and it's stuck in my head", then she looked back at her paper, took a breath and was about to start again when she changed her mind, stopped suddenly midbreath and blurted out instead "Today I saw somebody commit suicide...I'm sorry y'all I just can't get it out of my head". Then she took another deep breath and stumbled through the rest of her presentation. I have no idea what she said, I have no idea what she talked about. All I could think about was how pointless this class, this whole American/Jamaican/Whatever Dream facade is. All this doesn't matter, this DOES NOT matter. When I die I won't care about what a matched filter does. When I die every material thing that I've worked for...money, degree, house, car, land...that won't mean anything to me. The only thing that'll mean anything to anyone is how many people I shared with about God. On judgement day no one will care whether I shared my job search info with them, what they will be affected by is whether I shared my faith with them. Meaningless, meaningless everything is meaningless. The writer of Ecclesiates was right...he's been right and he'll continue to be rght until man no longer roams this land.

After class I got a ride home with a friend and we had a really great talk. I shared my life with him, how and when I became a Christian (5 years and counting baby!), and what that means to me. I shared about how being a Christian isn't just about giving God lip-service (Matthew 15:7-9) but about really living your life for Him because, to me, anything less than that is like spitting on the cross.That's how I feel. We talked about that Romans 2:17-23 scripture...there's no way to not be convicted by that. "...You who preach against stealing, do you steal? You who say that people should not commit adultery, do you commit adultery?...As it is written: 'God's name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you'". It's truth. It is. There's no denying it. As Christians we have a responsibility to God, to others, to ourselves, to the commitment we made when we said "Jesus is Lord". So we talked and he got open with me too and shared some of what his relationship with God is like and has been like and what he feels like he needs to change in it. That's real life folks. That's it right there. It's not about money or jobs or school or any of that. That stuff's all fake...not that it's not important, I mean we all need to eat but it's not what life is about. When it really comes right down to it to it the only thing that really matters is God and each other. That's it. Everything else is an illusion, nothing more than a means to an end. I'm not going to miss out on that anymore. I'm going to live my life in the real world. Don't get me wrong, I'm going to keep working on this degree thing - or whatever else God puts in my way - to the best of my ability as if working for God and not for man. But it's not going to be my focus, I'm not going to waste my life chasing after a lie. That's not what God made me for, that's not what He made YOU for. I'm going to ask God for wisdom to help me live my life in the real world. What are YOU going to do?