The pursuit of YHVH

Two weeks ago, the father of my best friend passed away suddenly from a pulmonary aneurysm. His name was Tito Nonong, a man of integrity, a loving father and husband to his family. He was a missionary who served God above all.

It makes you think about how fast the blink of an eye really is. It makes you think about the insignificant things we do on this planet and where do we go after all that important insignificance. The next day, an 8.9 magnitude earthquake hits Japan.

The Bible talks about frequent earthquakes and widespread famine signaling the supposed second coming of Jesus Christ, a.k.a. the day of judgement, a.k.a. the end of the world. This supposedly marks the beginning of the end, followed by nations trying to kill and gut each other out. It’s what we might someday call the Third World War.

There’s a lot of the stuff in the Bible I’m still taking with a grain of salt. I went from being a Catholic to a logical atheist to an agnostic to currently, someone who believes there is truth out there. I just realized one day that I have to believe in something and I have to discover what that truth is.

Everyone knows about the successive earthquakes in Haiti, Chile, and Japan. The great first-world country of Japan, the third largest economy in the world, is now down on its knees and praying in the face of a stock market breakdown and potential nuclear catastrophe. It’s the worst quake to hit in at least a hundred years, strong enough to send even the tremor-hardened Japanese people into a panic.

The big NGOs all over the world are also anxious about the global food shortage to come in the next 20 years, brought about by climate change and overpopulation. If you don’t believe in climate change, just ask the not-so-happy people in a fishing village off Surigao Del Sur. Their home, Mahaba island, is slowly being swallowed by the Pacific Ocean. And there is also a big concern for population control, as expressed by the popular demand for the RH Bill.

Great Leap Forward

One could argue that there has been famine all throughout the history of mankind. But the last great famine was the Great Leap Forward in China, when Mao Zedong disastroustly attempted to turn an agricultural nation into an industrial power overnight, killing around 40 million Chinese people in a span of three years. It’s been more than 50 years and there’s hasn’t been one great famine ever since.

Now there’s something going around in WikiLeaks that Japan has been warned over the safety of their nuclear plants. According to Britain’s The Telegraph, while it responded to the warnings by building an emergency response center at the Fukushima plant, it was only designed to withstand magnitude 7.0 tremors, which is 2.9 magnitude short for last Friday’s disaster.

So maybe we are too proud a race, with all our technological advancements and earthly aspirations, to believe in a Higher Being that can wipe out everything in a fraction of a blink. Or just plain too busy to see, with all the hassles of EDSA traffic and everyday concerns, that while all these things are important, they are insignificant. Are we preparing for a 7.0 quake, when a much bigger one is coming?

All I can say is there are many astounding things in this universe that cannot be explained by logic alone. It might be time to do some rethinking, and some believing.