Why Settle?

Was blessed with words today. Habang hinihintay ko si Dad kaninang umaga while he was at work, was reading The Jesus I Never Knew ni Philip Yancey. Actually, double blessing kasi si Yancey na ang author ng book, si C. S. Lewis pa ang kino-quote nya.

In his chapter about the Beatitudes, Yancey talks about how in the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord honored those who our society usually looks down on: the poor, the meek, the weak, the mourning. While unrecognized in the mortal world, meekness and humility are celebrated in the world after. Sa world na to ano ba ang sine-celebrate? Hindi ba fame and fortune? Ano ba ang hinahanap-hanap lagi ng tao? Hndi ba "a good time" (eat, drink, and be merry and all that)?

Yancey emphasizes his point by extracting from C. S. Lewis' The Weight of Glory...

"If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea."

How long have we been looking for and pursuing temporal and superficial gains and glories in replacement of the eternal, essential, and true? Sa lagay nating mga "makamundo", we think we have a huge deal pero in reality, in the light of eternity, peanuts lang yun lahat.

Why do we so often settle for what this world has to offer when we can have so so much more in the next?