Will I Recognize Myself?

 

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