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My life is an open book, for all to read

mine is a plain book, no matter how nice and exciting i try to make it look. although the book itself is much like everyone else's the writing on the pages is unique.

this book is not a story (epic or ordinary) and it is not an encyclopedia, where everything fits into nice segments, or a historic documentary, where the whole thing is laid out in a straight line. it is a diagram or description of facts, like the coding of a program. it is a 'map of me'. It tells my goals, dreams, emotions, and personality quirks. it explains the reasons for my actions and describes who i am. it is what makes me... me.

it might seems so simple but, like the rest of life, is not. if it were so straightforward we would all understand each other so much better. the problem is, every page of my book is written in a different language. where is the rationale in this? i don't know. ask the Author, the one who wrote my book. He understands every page and their hidden implications. naturally, my mother knows many of these 'languages'. My father is familiar with fewer. All of you can translate certain of my languages and in turn understand various pages of my book because of the time we've shared. but even i cannot read them all, let alone grasp their meaning. "know thyself" is a hard statement to fulfill.

to understand this better you have to realize i've been describing my life, my core, my self, my essence as a lifeless object, a book. and since we all have a life, it can be described as a book as well. these books are all essentially the same: they were all written by the same Author and have two covers with a binding (though some can be more appealing on the surface or more attractive on the inside). the books themselves are alike but what is written on the pages is distinctive.

this distinctiveness brings about one of every person's principal desires: to be understood. we want to convey as many parts of our book as we can to others. this is what the Author intended when he wrote us. "it is not good for man to be alone". as we relate to others and figure out how to read and understand another's book we better understand our own. as we discover the similarities in each other we begin to piece together a more comprehensive portrait of what He is like.

i encourage all of you to take the time you have to spend with the people around you and use it to better understand what makes them... them. you might be surprised what you find after translating a few pages.

"the language of love is universal" ~Ian Decour

my hope is that some day we will get to sit at the Author's feet together and have the books that we are and were meant to be read in full and made clear for us.

posted by Benjamin @ 30.1.06