Eric's Beijing Diary

Yesterday Jazz and Lili met me downstairs outside my building, and we walked through the falling snow to one of the campus cafeterias. It wasn't heated, but the food definitely was. Nothing like a bowl of piping hot beef noodles on a cold winter morning. I'm definitely going to like the food in this place. After breakfast, Jazz and Lili showed me around the campus a little bit, then took me out to the main gate so that I could catch the bus to BICF (www.bicf.org). BICF operates four busses that pickup throughout the city. Fortunately, one of them comes by Beihang.

Howard Davidson was speaking on the topic, "What on Earth am I Here For?" Very appropriate question. BICF is doing a series right now based on the runaway best seller, The Purpose Driven Life, by Rick Warren. Davidson began by quoting Simone Weil, "There are only two things that pierce the human heart, beauty and affliction." His point was that there are certain events which allow the Eternal to come through. I started to think about this. I tried to focus on a moment of beauty and a moment of affliction in my life that helped me to get in touch with eternal reality. For beauty, I picked the most recent--the Bering Strait from 40,000 feet. Serene. Awesome. Vast and incomprehensible. A moment when, to deny the eternal is to deny reality. For affliction...well, that's harder, not because I can't think of anything, but because what I can think of is what I don't want to remember. I prefer to forget those things which are behind and press on. Nonetheless, there are moments which come to my mind, and they all do have that one thing in common..they forced me to look beyond the cirucumstances such as they were at the moment, and hope for something better. Moments of intense beauty, and moments of intense anguish, these are the times when our attention is forced; we cannot help but consider the Eternal.