Martial Arts, Trees...and our Destiny

Today is dreary.  And rainy.  And cloudy.  And cold.  All in all, it's a perfectly lifeless sort of day—one of those days when you just want to curl up with a good book and a couple of warm, freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies.  But instead, I went to martial arts for four and a half hours this morning, cleaned my room, walked the dog in the cold and cloudy and rainy and dreary world outside our nice warm house, and now I'm thawing frozen chicken in a bowl of warm water in the sink and trying to write a satisfying blog post.  It would help if I could define the troublesome word "satisfying."  I think it's sitting on the couch, with a good book and a couple of warm, freshly-baked... oh, never mind.

I did get a pretty neat look at our lives (as in, the meaning and purpose behind them) today, though.  Mr. Hite, our martial arts instructor, talked about something really neat in class today.  He's a Christian, and he often rolls a Bible study into lesson time while we're all standing there sweating.  I think that there's something about the hard work and Bible lectures going hand in hand that helps us remember them both better, and I know that I'll remember this one for a long time.  Mr. Hite was telling us about how we need to go at our forms with passion, since we know how to do them, and that we need to think of the end of our forms when we're doing the beginning, because we need to set the mindset that we will end up at that ending, even if it's hard to accomplish.  Then he went on to compare it to... can you guess?

A tree!  (Of course...what else would you compare a martial arts form to??)  He explained that a certain tree was in God's plan at the very beginning of its life—when it was in the seed, and even before it was in the seed.  He said that God saw the tree at its full potential, all grown up, and then took that image and squished it up smaller and smaller until it was just a seed.  Even though the seed didn't look much like the tree God envisioned it to be, He knew what He wanted the tree to look like in the end, and held the image in His mind, shaping the tree to become a masterpiece.

Then Mr. Hite compared us to the tree.  He said that God did the very same thing with us.  God thought us into the person He wanted us to be, and then squished and squeezed us until we were really little and put us inside our mothers.  Then he said that God has an image for us, too, just like the tree.  He wants to see the destiny He made for us be fulfilled.  The only catch is that it doesn't happen unless we let Him shape us into the image He wants us to be.  The problem lies in the fact that we don't want to be shaped into that image—that it takes time, and learning the hard way, and being passionate about our lives, and according to Mr. Hite, that's why we're born screaming!

Who knows, maybe it's true!

And that's my satisfying blog post for the day.  Now I'm going to go make chocolate chip cookies.