Education may not be enough

Every life and every course of action is in line with God’s sovereign will. There’s no such thing as an accident with God.

There’s this story about a man who was sitting under a nut tree. He looked up at the tree and said, “You know what, God, you don’t have a lot of intelligence. You have made a huge tree like this to hold a tiny little nut, and you make small plants to hold huge watermelons. It just doesn’t seem to make scientific sense. You’re not a great engineering genius, are you?”

Just as he said that, a small nut fell off from the tree and hit him on his head. He exclaimed, “Thank God that wasn’t a watermelon!”

I’ve heard people say that education is the way to alleviate poverty. I can’t agree more. But just like any other blanket statement we hear, we need to qualify it. After all, there are highly educated people who still end up financially challenged. And educated criminals are all over the place. Many people with multiple educational degrees are feeling empty and unable to find the meaning in their existence.

I’ve heard of stories about university professors who purposely debunk the existence of God and militantly propose humanism to their impressionable and innocent students who may just believe everything they say without carefully considering them. The great media mogul Malcolm Muggride said, “The weird concoctions of pleasure that are offered today are stranger and stranger all the time. We have educated ourselves to imbecility, and we have amused and entertained ourselves into impotence.”

When it comes to entertaining ourselves, there’s a strange phenomenon at work in this idea of pleasure. Many philosophers and learned men have been endlessly seeking for the ultimate fulfillment but couldn’t find it. Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, the super stars of the ’60s, hated having to live another day. Listen to what athletes who have gone on the fast lane have to say – life on the fast lane doesn’t deliver what it promises to deliver. It now takes more and more to deliver the same degree of satisfaction. We have tried new ways to bring the same degree of amusement, and the ways to achieve pleasure are getting stranger still. Haven’t you noticed the way we watch television? Three channels are no longer enough – we need a hundred and three nowadays. The hunger for entertainment is insatiable. 

Man is lonely, period. And it’s becoming more and more complicated to keep entertaining us. It’s taking more of the imagination to keep us happy night after night.

French philosopher and political activist Simon Weil said, “Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet ecstasy, as the good. No desert is so dreary, monotonous and boring as evil. But with fantasy it is the other way around. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound and full of charm.”

This is where God comes into the picture. It’s in Christ alone that we find inherent worth. God loves us, and this love is not predicated on our educational attainment or in our investment portfolio. God loves us unconditionally, and this love gives us intrinsic worth, and enables us to extend love and forgiveness to others.

This is an area where we should be “educated” as well, if we are to truly alleviate poverty.

(Francis Kong will do his highly acclaimed whole-day seminar “Culture of Personal Excellence” on October 17, 2013 at CCF Makati, A-Venue Mall, Makati Avenue. For further inquiries, please contact Inspire at 09158055910, or call 632-6310912 for details.)