"nah"

Okay, so I was talking with a good friend earlier tonight. A very good friend...do you know how I know he is a good friend? He doesn't say I am right, he makes me prove it. It's an amazing educational method. There're other reasons why he is a good friend too of course...but that is beside the point, right now at least. BUT, you know who you are, and I thank you for making me come out of my moving slump to think about this! I owe you one!
Now, what I mean by we were talking, is that we were debating. It's never "just a talk" with this friend, not even a stimulating talk. We hop from debate, to therapy, and then quickly back to debate because therapy get's too boring and it let's brain cells go to waste just sitting there. And...I do not quite know how, but I dove full force into a debate about why man fell and sent him this super long message (well...long for a G+ chatbox anyway...) that I will now elaborate on for you.

Picture yourself in a "garden", where NOTHING is wrong. Would you be able to appreciate the beauty of the rose, of the iris, of the cherry blossom, without ever having seen the ugly of murder, of pain, of death?  Smell the grace and love and utter joy that fill the air, practically lifting you off of your feat with their aromas; could you comprehend this majesty if you had never had the experience of choking, having your lungs clogged shut with smoke, or of suffocating from the heat of the day?  No. I do not believe that you, I, or any human being could.
"you don't know what you've got till it's gone" (note: lyric credit goes to the guy who wrote that song about paradise and a parking lot...or something like that). This is so very true. I did not know how beautiful my relationship with my oldest brother was until it was torn apart by distance. I didn't understand the majesty of the mountains until I saw the grandeur of the desert. I didn't understand the life and bustle of the city, until I observed the death and peace of a cemetery. One simply can NOT understand something until they can comprehend it's opposite! Man fell so he could know the opposite of perfection!
When you have a goodnight's sleep, you wake in the morning feeling well and rested. How do you know that you feel this "well" and "rested"? Because you have before experienced feeing ill and exhausted! When in the arms of someone you care about, you feel their love wash over you. How do you know how special that brief moment is? Because you have felt the cold hard gaze of someone you have been rejected by! When you come home hungry form a long days work, and you are filled with a wondrous meal that seems to satisfy your every need, how do you know you are satisfied? How? Because you came unsatisfied!
Now I want you to picture a life with no pain that stabs you when you least expect it. Picture a life where you never see your parents/children fighting. Picture a life where you and your siblings never argue. Picture a life where you are never too cold or too hot, never too hungry or too thirsty. Picture a life where no one is ever sick, no one is ever dying, no one is ever fighting. Picture a life, that has never once known sorrow.
PICTURE IT!
Now, hold that image! And now, tell me that at each of those "never"s and "ever"s you didn't think of a memory. Tell me true!
You wouldn't understand if you hadn't felt the pain!
Tell me I am wrong.

I do not think I will ever be able to forget his response. All the effort I put into that, all the thought, all the emotion, all the belief, and his answer came in one, small, unexpected word. I had dived into that debate prepared for SOME sort of round about argument wherein at the end we would finally decide we actually agreed in some confusing way or another. But no...through the text I saw the word, read it over and over again, and heard it in my head: "nah".
That was it...no debate...and then I realized...how messed up we are as humans. Of course, I already knew this. Honestly? We are actually insanely stupid, irrational, illogical, blind, and ignorant. That my dear friends, is humanity as a whole. Not each and everyone, but the vast majority. Do we see what is happening? No; we simply see whatever it is we want to see.
I wanted that to be a debate. I knew I could win, no matter what he threw at me...not that he really would...as we are on the same side of the debate...but STILL! No matter what anyone threw at me, so long as they would listen to what I had to say, I could win. I love debates, especially ones where you have to imagine yourself in the scenario.
So I dove in, headlong. Then, when I got to the water, I realized that he was there to catch me. We weren't in any sort of disagreement at all, not even for the heck of it. We were in complete agreement, just with different ways of saying what we had to say.

Sometimes we will dive in and the water will be to shallow, as such we will get badly injured; but there will be times when we dive in, and the water is just right, and we can swim to shore and be victorious. There will be times, when we dive in and almost drown, and have to call upon a friend to drag us out of the mess we are in; but there will be times when we see people sail away on a rescue boat, knowing we won.
What makes me who I am, and what makes my fellow Christians who they are, is that we will KEEP diving in, no mater what kind of terrible land we might experience. Why? Because we have seen the imperfections in our own gardens, and we know that there is one without blemishes. One who's beauty, love, and joy is so great that you can taste the very noise that flows forth from the tender colors of the lilies. In knowing this, could we possibly give up because we are in danger of getting a few scars along the way? In my friend's words (*coughwordcough*) "nah".