Tell Me Why
From University of Toronto Chinese Christian Fellowship
Whenever I introduce myself, I always say the same thing and I pretty much get the same response. Take my dentist for example. She recently hired a new oral hygienist. You have to understand that she is a very talkative person.... While my mouth was open throughout the appointment, her’s was going up and down, and up and down, non-stop.
“So where do you go to school?” “University of Toronto.” “What do you study? What year are you in?” “Third year. Aerospace Engineering.” “Oooohh!! Sounds like a tough program. You must be really smart!”
Then she went on for 30 minutes talking about this friend of hers who went to Harvard…
That’s what most people see when they find out what I study. But let me tell you my side of the story this year.
These past two and a half months have been rough, and the only way for you to understand me is for you to hear it. Sigh. I was pretty down and out. Didn’t want to do anything. “Sigh”
It’s “sigh” when I’m in the hustle and bustle of getting assignments in and studying for midterms… and knowing that no matter how much I study, I was guaranteed a failing mark in a course called dynamics. I didn’t want to go to class, so a skipped a few here and there. Couldn’t do problem sets. Didn’t hand them in. Didn’t understand the lectures. So I didn’t write the quiz. I just wanted to quit. I lost the passion, my morale, my spirit was crushed.
It’s “sigh” when I go to my PEY (coop) seminars, and the same message keeps on popping up: it’s all about being competitive. And I thought: life is like that. It never stops, and yet, where does it all go? We compete for schools, scholarships, universities, jobs, promotions, and even when you retire, you compete for placements in seniors’ homes. Why am I doing this?
It’s “sigh” when I go to Sunday school and we’re reading Eccelesiastes. It talks about life – how meaningless it is. And then it offers this little tidbit of wisdom: “it is good and proper for a man to eat and drink, and to find satisfaction in his toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given him – for this is his lot.”
I was thinking who I was and how I worked while riding the bus one night and I came to realize that life is about satisfaction. In life, you take on jobs. And you do them and you get results from your work. Then you come to a fork in the road: either you’re satisfied or you’re not. If you are, you’re happy and you move onto the next job. If you’re not, you find more resources (time, energy, money) and do the job again. And again, until you’re satisfied and you move on. The key in this loop is deciding whether you are satisfied or not.
Then I did some more thinking. How do you decide whether you are satisfied with something or not? How do you measure satisfaction? You can look at your marks (the numbers) – results-based. Effort-based. Completion-based. Experience-based. But all these things didn’t give me any amount of satisfaction, not where I am right now. I always believe things can be done better… and so the cycle never stops.
You can imagine all these things and more all flying through my mind, all at once. The biggest question of all was “why.” All this climaxed last week, Friday. You might have noticed I was a little snappish, tired-looking, grumpy, bothered by something. Mainly, I wanted to be by myself. To think, to get away, to take a breath and not feel suffocated.
Jon and Gizelle noticed and even though I wanted to be alone, they caught up to me and we made our way to Kowloon together.
Gizelle: "Sam, are you okay?"
Me: "Just thinking."
Gizelle: “Thinking about what?"
Me: "Thinking about why. You know... tell me why..."
Gizelle, singing: "Ain't nothing but a heartache..."
When I went to bed that night, I thought about the lyrics and the words reflected how I felt...
Tell me why. Ain’t nothing but a heartache? It’s a pretty serious heartache for some passion and purpose. Ain’t nothing but a mistake? It seems like I made one, or a billion. I’m looking for my fire… my one desire… and if only I could say “I want it that way” things might be better… but I didn’t.
I was just “sigh”. On waking up late Saturday morning, I suddenly remembered a verse.
“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men.”
I looked it up, and completed the verse.
“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.”
At that point, everything just stopped. I took a breath. It was a clean breath. Refreshing. I’m not just working, I’m working for the Lord. Better yet: God has promised that I will receive an inheritance as a reward. And note this: I’m not competing or working towards this reward. It’s there. Fresh air. A purposeful peace replaced the downtrodden spirit.
Things do look different. The measure of satisfaction is not of me, but of God. And God, being a Father to his son, is always satisfied when the heart is in the right place. Results are insignificant. It doesn’t matter what the task at hand is. Satisfaction is always there, which means happiness and contentment, is found no matter what the outcome.
It’s an ideal model. I know I will forget. I know I will lose perspective when things get muddy again, when I will look at my results and my products of the labour and not be satisfied… Or I will focus on the job, the hardships of it, and the uncertainty of the future. And really, I have nothing to hang onto except this:
That God will keep reminding me, that my friends will also remind me, and that I will remind myself…
“Whatever Samuel does, he works at it with all his heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since he knows that he will receive an inheritance form the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ he is serving.”