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