Law School Reflections: The Beginning

Very too often we find ourselves caught up with unnecessary complications, standing between cross roads, wondering why we were even there. What exactly is the point of this all, we ask in between work, before getting that same silence hanging on the air as if we didn’t ask loud enough. And then we go back to our rushed lives, doing this, or doing that, almost finally accepting this is everything there will ever be in our static life.

This series of posts I am planning on starting (Law School Reflections) is actually something I am doing on impulse. Last night, as I was doing advanced reading, I came across the Roman Law section and Gaius, a Roman jurist who asserted how important it was to associate the political history of a people with its laws, and said, “I perceive a thing is complete only when all parts are assembled, and surely the most important part of a thing is its beginning.” I stopped and thought about it for a while before allowing a smile to spread across my face, remembering how, just last Saturday during the Law School Testimonial Dinner and Acquaintance Party, I realized how close to life law really is, after all. I picked up my marker and wrote what he said on the white board on my bedroom wall.

Gaius was right. How do we even see our lives in a complete picture without even going back to the beginning? Or, how do we pick up all the pieces without starting somewhere?

John 1:1-5 speaks of Jesus Christ as the beginning. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. (NKJV)”

How are we to deny the essence of our existence if we fail to establish within ourselves, our beginning? And how do we know where we ought to go without knowing (or remembering, for those who already knew) where everything, including us, began?

This post is not where I am to prove the validity of God’s Word or if Christ really is the Messiah. I am writing this under the assumption that you are reading this because you are a professing Christian, set to follow Jesus Christ with your whole heart. Now, where is our beginning, and how does it tell us where we ought to go?

When we realize and remember that Jesus Christ is our beginning, all our actions would point back to it, just like how an effect points back to its cause. When we get lost in the tangle of life’s threads, – work, studies, and ministry – always remember that our own string starts somewhere and that is with Jesus. Know that our life should be anchored to our Lord and we ought to go back daily, tugging on the line to make sure we’re still in place, and remember that the source of all these is He who has pursued us first. And unless we do that, and unless we rid of all the noise just to get back to the starting point, our lives would be as pointless as a tree without its root.

When Gaius said that the most important in assembling the parts to make us complete is the beginning, I agree with him. And that Beginning is urging us, amidst toiling and busy schedules, to go back and see that there is more to Him than just being the starting point of everything. Are we not set to strip off life's complications and see ourselves assembling to completion by fixing our eyes on the Beginning, who also happens to be the End?

“My beloved spoke and said to me: ‘Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.”

Song of Solomon 2:10

"'I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End,' says the Lord, "who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.'"

Revelation 1:8

Life. Death. The In-Betweens.

I let my thoughts take a sharp turn as I stare at the picture of this dead man I barely knew, while his wife, still alive, retells how things had gone last Sunday night – the night her husband left her.

It has been common knowledge that this old woman had been my grandmother’s close friend, but I had no idea that all these years that I knew her, she had a bedridden husband. Not until tonight. I stare at his blow-up photo a little bit longer and I wonder how he must’ve looked like, alive. Or how he must’ve been as a husband, sans his last few years of paralysis. Or how they spent their time together as young lovers.

I couldn’t think straight and singularly, as with a normal thinker could – one thought at a time. It was always several self-conversations at the same time.

Maybe it is because the second cup of coffee I just had an hour ago is starting to charge me up with more caffeine than I usually need. Or maybe, I am just too distracted by the grammatically incorrect message on the ribbon strapped around the flowers. Either way, I shouldn’t care which is true. Neither would change my attitude towards that moment. Besides, I feel a headache coming. Somebody makes a round to offer a bowl of greaseless peanuts. I hesitate, but dig my fingers into it to scoop a handful.

My eyes eventually resort to wandering all over the tiny room, darting from one sad bulb of flower to the next, as Pastor Nemuel’s exhortation on True Rest drones into my ear. The tiny holes on the metal seats in front of me are making me dizzy, I blink a few more times to rid of the headache building up, and I start to delve into obscure universal truths about life. Death. Some more life.

My thoughts get put on hold for a moment by the mere mention of more deaths. My mom and my boss initiate the small talk on today’s breaking news, according to social media – children poisoned after the nation-wide deworming. The funny feeling in my stomach begins crawling upward again. To my chest. To my throat, gagging me. If they truly have died, I think about how the children are not aware of the commotion they are causing back here in the land of the living. Images of limp, lifeless little bodies flash in my mind and I think about the end times, and this, probably being a part of the signs.

I am showing signs of mentally freaking out myself, but today I make sure to confirm with official news from official journalists, lest I fall into the gullible citizen category again. Three hundred children all over Western to Northern Mindanao are directly affected, as rumored, but nobody died after all, and it was, according to the Department of Health, only a side effect of taking the deworming pills when having worms more than an average child’s. My mother and I breathe a mental sigh of relief, and, mentally, knocking ourselves in the head for being paranoid for a moment. But in-between seconds, I still wonder how much of the truth they are covering up this time, and if this kind of truth could raise the dead, if there were any.

I go back to my thoughts; my eyes return to the picture of the grinning, toothless old man, against an edited sky background, as if assuring us, “I’m alright now. I’m resting.” I wonder if I’d look the same on a picture frame like that, when I’d have my turn.

It’s funny how living on earth is more of a pain than what comes after death in Christ. I think about the living mourning for their dead. Perhaps death* is more of life than life itself after all. I shake my head, smile, and look around, taking note of the faces. Perhaps it truly is.

*the kind of death one reaches while in Christ.