If you know me, you know I’m a geek,
even a double geek. I enjoy science and learning and I also I seem to see
analogies and connections in strange places. A couple of months ago, I saw a
connection in my biochemistry class that most people wouldn’t have thought about while sitting in class. I’m
just that strange.
My professor, yep, the same one I quoted in the last post, was talking about
activation energy diagrams, which we students are all familiar with from gen chem so
we were just reviewing it. If you aren’t familiar with it, it just shows the
reactants of a reaction on the left and the products, or what is made, on the
right. In the middle is the activation energy, like the hill that has to be
climbed before the change can be made from the reactants to the products.
While Dr. T was explaining this, I was
thinking about how it is like us. We start off as one thing in this life and
our potential is to be something else, something bigger and better. But in
order to get there, we must pass through some hard things and go uphill for a
long time. Without this uphill climb, we will remain the same. It’s easier not
to try, but we get nowhere and our potential is never reached.
In many reactions, the activation
energy required to pass over that hill is so high that the reaction would never
happen without a catalyst. The catalyst helps the reaction happen and the
reactants changed to the (at least in my analogy) bigger and better product
while the catalyst is available to go off and catalyze another reaction. Of
course, that catalyst for us is our Savior. Without Him, we could never get
over the hills in this life or the biggest hill, to attain eternal life. With Him, we will be higher at the end than where we started. With
Him, we can be changed to something better, whatever our individual potential
is.
A few days after
this class, with this still in my mind, I read the following quote by Haruki Murakami, a best-selling Japanese
writer, from his book Kafka on the Shore, which I haven’t read. I love the imagery of this.
“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that
keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you.
You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like
some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't
something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with
you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is
give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up
your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step.
There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white
sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of
sandstorm you need to imagine.
An you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic
storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake
about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will
bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that
blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.
And once the storm is over you won't remember
how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in
fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come
out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this
storm's all about.”
― Haruki
Murakami, Kafka
on the Shore
