the problem with problems

Well i did some meditation while walking along marina square. Before all you New Age flunkies and Wicca wannabes tell me thats impossible, i wasn't trying to become one with the universe or tap into some mystical cosmic force. Nope. Just chewing on the nature of God, thank you very much. And for the atheists out there, yes there is a God. For the feminists, yes He's male. And oh yeah, for you gay-rights activists, he's not gay. Ok. Can't believe the sheer number of disclaimers you have to put up just by mentioning God.

Well so i was doing some meditation. And economic theory slipped into this. Thats how the logic eventually panned out anyway. So imagine you have a major problem coming up soon, like exams. Ok, i guess you don't have to imagine. The absolute negative value of this problem is fixed. But your present valuation of it is not. Its pretty simple really. When your exams are 6 months away, they are hardly a bother. In other words, in the grand scheme of life's problems, its a minor issue. By the time your exam is tomorrow, its the biggest problem you have. In a nutshell, the size of your problem does become bigger the closer it is to you.

For you math-o-philes,
Present value of problem = Absolute value of problem * e^-rt

I can almost hear my critics now. What's God have to do with all this? Let's get hopping then.

The question becomes slightly more complicated when you try to solve the problem. Ever get the feeling some problems are bigger than you can handle? Or that they suddenly are bigger than you thought before? I'm sure you have, otherwise the nile would be more than a river in Egypt to you.

Essentially, at any fixed point in time, you have a cap to your own ability. Over time, with effort, you can raise this cap. But at any one time, thats all you have. At this same point however, your problem might have already 'grown' bigger ie its looming closer now.
So you begin to feel overwhelmed. Nothing surprising there. In fact, one could almost say you're doomed to failure. In another translation, you need a miracle. It actually never ceases to amaze me as to how few true atheists there actually are. Atheists would simply accept this situation and attempt to do better next time. There are no miracles for them since there is no God. Yet it seems that every time the situation overwhelms people, they start asking for miracles from a God they proclaim they don't believe in. Then when God does not respond to them, they take it as proof that God doesn't exist. Its kinda like you not believing in me, then you ask me for an apple. When i don't give it to you, you take it as proof that i'm a figment of my friend's imagination.

And yes us God-believing folks are truly better off, when we realise it. God being God is a constant. Kinda like the absolute value of the problem. The value of God is also absolute. The variable here is perspective. You don't have to discount the value fo God over time for the simple reason that He's an eternal being. He's always there, all the time.

So now you have a problem bigger than you. Oh no. You're doomed. The problem looks so big, it even looks bigger than God. Hold on a moment, is that actually possible? Well by definition no. But how did that happen? Its all about focus. The nature of focus is that you can only focus on one thing at a time. At best, if you're mentally very well disciplined, you can focus on a few SIMILAR things at a go. Problems and God, however, are diametric opposites, in that God has no problems. So as you choose to focus on your problems, they tend to be closer to you and thus larger. This automatically means you're not focusing on God, so He seems smaller.

So at the end of the day, the simplest way to deal with problems is to focus on God. Realise that regardless of how big the problem is now, God is still bigger. Just because your exams are tomorrow does not make God shrink. There is no correlation. So its the same-sized God whether your exams are 6 months away or tomorrow. Have a piece of peace pie to go with that.

Thats all for now. Ciaoz.