About my sins

 

Last time, I talked about my emptiness and the healing of the life problem through finding God and establishing a new relationship with Him. However, this was not the end of the story. In fact, it was the beginning of the story. After gradual subsiding of the excitement that I had at the beginning when I was connected to God, the Absolute Being, I found myself being conscious of some rules that, I thought, I should observe in order to be a good Christian. It was as if I had a guest (God) at my home and I wanted to look nice in the guest’s eyes. All of a sudden, I came to feel nervous and uncomfortable.

 

People say that, while Buddhism is a religion of personal awakening that concentrates on self-discipline, Christianity is a religion of relationship that emphasizes love to God and love to neighbors. Self-discipline is not easy but we may be able to attain it to some degree if we resolve to do. In this sense, I think that Buddhism is a religion feasible for humans. When I, as a Christian, learned about love from the Bible it sounded sweet to me and I thought that love would make me happy. Soon, however, I found that the ‘love’ is something I cannot do at all. That was why I felt nervous and uncomfortable. I was excited with God at the outset but I didn’t love him. To be frank, I didn’t want to care about him much. I wanted to keep living my own life, at least, when I was alone. But it was too late. Now I was caught by the ‘impossible’ religion of love.

 

Of course, ‘love’ and ‘relationship’ are not foreign words to us. Rather we use these words everyday and spend a lot of resources for experiencing the taste of genuine love. When a man and a woman fall in love with each other, there is natural chemistry between the two persons, which blinds them and makes them see each other as most beautiful or handsome in the world. Sooner or later, however, the chemical reaction fizzles and their true faces are unmasked. The consequence is usually more negative than positive and, as a result, their excitement turns into disappointment. Some endure their disappointment and continue the relationship, but many people break up the relationship and choose to live a lonely life rather than to tolerate the partner’s shortcomings.

 

This is the typical happening in human relationships. Love in such human relationships is closer to selfish lust than to the pure love taught in the Bible. When I was not a Christian, I was often called a good person, kind and considerate to others. What I have been learning and realizing more clearly since I became a Christian, however, is that I am not a good man, not to mention a man of love. I found that I was extremely selfish and self-centered. I was sheer disabled in terms of love. To make matters worse, this problem was not limited to me. My eyes opened and I could see that everybody was selfish, pursuing self-interest. In Christianity, such selfish and self-interested people were those whom I should love out of my heart. This was God’s command. I felt that I was being sucked into a quagmire. Against my expectation, Christianity was not an easy religion at all. It was a religion demanding of the disabled MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: “Love your enemies.”

 

I didn’t want to live such an impossible life. First of all, I didn’t want love my enemies. Moreover, I didn’t want to pretend that I was doing what was impossible. Even if I became able to do it, how could it be beneficial to me? My conclusion was this: I should pull myself out of this quagmire as early as possible. And I said good-bye to my Bible teacher and withdrew myself from the church. Then I felt free, but only for ‘a week.’ I could not help going back to the church and continuing the Bible study. At that time, I could see and understand myself more clearly: I was a sinner and, nevertheless, I was being loved. Someone told me that while I was absent my Bible teacher had been praying for me with many tears. “Am I worthy of the tears?” I asked to myself. “Of course not!” And I had a glimpse at the meaning of love taught in the Bible. As I realized that I was a sinner, I knew that I had been seeing a woman in front of me, the Bible teacher who had been carrying out the MISSION IMPOSSIBLE for a poor sinner.

 

Even now when it has passed several decades since I became a Christian, I cannot fathom the depth of my sinfulness or my selfishness. I believe that it is getting deeper in proportion to my understanding of myself. Like I did in the past, we may think it as a matter of course for people to be self-centered and self-interested. In fact, however, being self-centered and self-interested is sin and evil. It destroys every relationship and makes it impossible for us to love God and love our neighbors. Selfishness is like a black hole. It sucks everything into bottomless deep darkness and never spits it out. It does not make us happy. It severs our precious relationships with God and people, and throws our soul into unbearable loneliness and unquenchable thirst. Examining the world carefully, we can see that selfishness is producing all kinds of crimes and ugly scandals endlessly. This world is flooded with such miseries and we are being swept by the flood of sin. This is the scary picture that I have learned from the Bible since I was caught by the love of God and found a true rest in the ‘uneasy’ relationship with Him.