things are organic

I've never given much thought to life.

At some point in 10th grade, I was sitting through my non-honors biology class in high school sleeping through every single lesson, hating the microscopes that would never line up with my four eyes, knowing that the exams would all be repetition and regurgitation, and... ultimately hating the fact that the high school football players thought it was cool to copy off the shy, awkward Asian kid who knew how to bubble in the right answers on his Scantron.

Contrast it with the year before, when I had just taken earth science in my small private Christian school in Korea and absolutely aced it. Yes, it was memorization back then too, but at least things weren't alive and moving. Rocks were rocks. Sedimentary or metamorphic or whatever. And I was also taking computer science for the first time, and somehow ended up loving it so much that I decided to major in it. The building blocks aren't asymmetrical, messy, skin-prickling cells, they're bits. Ones and zeros. Absolutely as clean and pristine as a baby's butt.

But living things are a different story, and they were just... boring for me. You just can't manipulate living things as easily. You wait, they grow. The whole thing is one long process. Whereas programs make the imagination come to life in seconds.

I was constantly saying: "Yeah, I don't like studying living things." And looking back, I wish my parents were farmers or something because I think I would have appreciated things that I never appreciated living in my college-town, clean-room, suburbian surroundings. I never appreciated life, or nature, or any of that.

I've never given much thought to abortion. You see, I hate conflict, and abortion is exactly one of those things that is sure to cause it. It doesn't matter who you're talking to. It's like talking about Christianity, the War in Iraq, Macs vs. PCs, Michigan and Ohio State, or the taste of the school lunch that day. For some reason, everyone has an opinion.

So... I just heard this short audio clip about abortion, and it triggered a thought in me.

The one big problem about the way I used to see the world is that I basically live in the Matrix. Everything is a number. Easily definable. Asians are smart, Macs suck, things made in China are cheap, everything with a Nike logo on it is instant quality.

But when you ask questions like... "Do you know your best friend? What's he like?" "Describe the beauty of nature." "Who are you? How have you changed in the past few years?" "How has God transformed your life?" There just isn't a simple answer. You can't put it in black or white. I always hated these questions, and it makes a lot of sense. English majors are good at this sorta thing, engineers absolutely hate it.

I think the biggest question in abortion is, "When is a life a life?" But trying to define that is like asking when a tree is a tree and not a seed or when a teenager is an adult or when spring becomes summer. You can't draw those lines. And even if you did, everyone's would be somewhat different. And I don't think we were meant to have the answer to those questions.

And as humans, we look for loopholes. I ask things like: "God, exactly how much do you want me to give? $13 or $14.20?" Or... "exactly how many days did God make the world in?" Or... "okay, so exactly how much do I need to work to get an A in this class?" (I've been struggling through thoughts like this these days. My heart doesn't exactly want to willingly love God. It would rather grudgingly serve and keep control of itself.)

But maybe, perhaps, God wants our hearts. Maybe he wants us to stop bickering about where to draw the line and learn what it means to love people. To love people who've been in hurtful relationships, to love those who have made mistakes, to love the unborn children, to love the pained mothers, the victims of rape, the rapists... and maybe at that point, just maybe, we might know what was actually right. Maybe then we'd really understand what it meant to appreciate the sanctity of life.