faith, hope and love...part 2

When faith is 'Faith', it is not faith,
When hope is 'Hope', it is not hope,
When love is 'Love', it is not love;
but
When 'Faith', 'Hope' and 'Love' die,
then we discover faith, hope and love.

this was taken from a Sunday School teacher's sharing. she asked all of us to think about it...and i thought about this long and hard. at a deeper, more fundamental level, deeper level (deeper than the one i am at as i write this), something clicked inside me...

i understand that at some point, all of us think that we know what faith, hope and love is all about...usually when things are going well. but the truth of the matter is that we don't.

we can only know what faith, hope and love are when we are in our own moment of Gethsemane and when with Jesus, we can cry out aloud as He did on the cross :Eloi eloi lema sabachtani (which means 'Father, Father, why you have abandoned me?)...caught up in pain, a haze of sadness that seems to hang over us and threatens to choke us in its insidious but powerful grip and worse, a paralysing despair that nothing we can ever do will bring us back to where we were...

because as the last vestiges of what we had presumed to call faith, hope, and love fall from our beings - nothing but a pretentious and naive belief as yet untested, a hope that was built on self-sufficiency and very human dreams and ambitions and a love that was so narrow, so limiting in its reach - we discover that true faith, true hope and true love have started to grow in our heart's soil. our eyes have been opened, we have shared in what Jesus went through more than 2000 years ago...we begin to understand really what it's all about...

p/s i was very stressed this morning, i know... because when i was talking with my friend, i didn't sigh. i just said out loud ..."SIGH." and then i spelled it out "S-I-G-H", as i did when i was in Midvalley once, and i went "KEDAI. K-E-D-A-I. SHOPS. S-H-O-P-S".