``I'm Tired, Boss''

``I'm tired, boss. Tired of being on the road, lonely as a sparrow in the rain. I'm tired of never having me a buddy to be with to tell me where we's going to, coming from, or why. Mostly, I'm tired of people being ugly to each other. I'm tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world... every day. There's too much of it. It's like pieces of glass in my head... all the time. Can you understand?''

---Stephen King, The Green Mile

There are days that I feel like that. Is today one of the days? It is a little too early to tell.

That scene as played by Michael Clarke Duncan in the film adaptation was one that stayed with me throughout all these years. A quiet, simple scene that was full of emotion that I feel ill-equipped to describe properly, despite being some kind of a quasi-writer myself (or was it just a hack, in the sense of the generalised ``hacker'' that I keep alluding to?).

I do feel the compelling urge to just want to hug something or someone and just curl up and sleep with it/them in my arms, forgetting about the world, even for a moment, and feeling that sense of safety and comfort that seems sorely missing in my life these days.

``Eh MT, thought you were a Christian? Doesn't God provide you with that kind of support? If you can still feel like this, does it mean that you're not really that faithful a believer after all, and are just as phoney as those who proclaim the prosperity gospel, right?''

It... doesn't work that way. God's promise in the form of Jesus' sacrifice at the cross and His subsequent resurrection is about fulfilling the law of having sinful humankind be reconciled with God, after the Fall of Adam and Eve for disobeying God. It is about future glory, and the cultivation of the soul through the Holy Spirit to be ready for when we are done with our time on the mortal plane.

It was never about achieving some kind of ``heaven on earth'' state, where there is no pain, no anguish in the now. As long as I am still bound by my flesh, I can and will still suffer whatever nonsensical temptations that my flesh brings with it to me---that's the core concept behind being a disciple of Christ. The realisation that we are all sinners, and even though Jesus has redeemed us from God's wrath through His death and resurrection, we need to live up to our regenerate selves through taking up our cross daily, to deny ourselves against sin, to follow Him.

So yes, while my fate in the far future into eternity is assured, I still need to live through this life first.

Speaking of living through this life first, I recently read Holy Sexuality and the Gospel: Sex, Desire, and Relationships Shaped by God's Grand Story by Christopher Yuan. The key takeaway from it is that an ego-centric identity is the true sin that we should all be aware of and work against. Part of the transformation of a believer is to shift the ego away from personal self-interest towards one that is God-centric (or more specifically from the New Testament, that is Jesus-centric since Jesus being both Man and God is infinitely more identifiable by us as humans). People who start declaring this identity or that identity, or prematurely judging people in terms of their actions as being sinful or otherwise have both sinned, no matter their self-declared intentions, the sin being completely ignoring God's ultimate moral authority over all. That as believers in a church body, it is our duty to help our brothers and sisters in Christ to redirect themselves towards a life that is centred upon Jesus, while keeping in mind that we are no better than they ourselves, and that all are sinners who need Jesus to save them (see Matthew 7:1--29). Religious hypocrisy is one of the biggest pet peeves of Jesus that He keeps pointing out to in the gospels, and it makes me sad that despite having the entirety of the Holy Bible today, we still see that as a norm.

Dr Yuan does a better job at explaining all these than I---he is with a PhD on this topic after all---and I think that this overarching theme used in reframing of what has been largely a series of cherry-picked skirmishes is helpful in seeing the world anew.

It does give me comfort. But again, I am still human, and need to work through some crap still.

------

Theological discursions aside, I went back to my Minecraft map and did some quality of life adjustments. I moved my Nether wart plot to make space to grow me some cocoa beans that I had grabbed from my deforestation runs in the jungle biome way out in the map. After doing that, I built a couple of automated farms for my melons and pumpkins, and situated them on top of my manual farm.

The last thing I did was to build a small and simple lava farm in preparation for future builds where I would need stupid amounts of lava without necessarily having to hunt for these pools in the world. Unlike the video that is present in the linked-to page, mine is literally just an enclosed lava source block with attached pointed dripstone and a cauldron beneath it. I do have 2 double-chests worth of lava from deep mining before, but it's always good to have a renewable source somewhere within reach as well.

Anyway, I think I'll go for a ride on my bicycle. It feels right, and I've been too tired throughout the week to do so---time to rectify that.

Till the next update.