It’s quite hard to measure what’s worthy in the span of our human lives. We invent a lot of devices to measure what’s with worth and what’s without worth.
There’s this great moment in the 2007 movie ‘The Bucket List’ where Jack Nicholson’s character received a letter for Morgan Freeman’s character. Jack Nicholson’s character sincerely found something truly valuable other than the billions he had, and when he was giving a eulogy, he instantly knew what was valuable and what was worthy.
As a kid, I wanted to become an astronaut. I don’t know if that’s something worthy, but I expected to become one. Maybe in the future I will become one, but right now, I really don’t know.
Everyone has expectations, even little kids, we sincerely think we can be astronauts or game developers. As much as how awesome that sounds like, sometimes reality isn’t like that. That statement sounded pretty harsh, and pretty negative – well, I thought I was going to have my first million before 25.
When I was a lot younger, I had some perspective of who I will be at a much older age. Exposed to real people and fictitious characters, I slowly grew up in a world where having a lot of money was the obvious fruit of success. Excess and avarice were glorified. At a young age, money, career and achievements were worth a lot to me. I got myself a lot awards and medals at a young age that, right now, tucked away in our storage room as colorless and unrecognizable pieces of metal.
We fashion our inner beings for what we think has weight and worth, unless you let yourself be fashioned by a Creator.
I was blessed enough that my parents became devout Christians, who pushed me into everything I know about God, money and everything else. In a place where God is glorified, somewhere along the way, God kept showing me who He really is. Brick by brick I gained identity in Him. Slowly and painfully, through the course of time, I began not to care about the life I wanted to have. It wasn’t due to some self-righteous act, in fact, at the beginning it kind of hurts.
Recently, me and Elain had a distaste for unhealthy foods, it left a bad taste in our mouths – we kind of hate certain junk food items. That became the same way for me in some areas of my life. Due to some circumstances of divine proportions involving perfectly placed people and relationships, wasting time and blindly chasing a hazy idea of 'success’ in the expense of more 'important’ things had lost it’s taste.
Suddenly, making better software was worth a lot to me, being a man for Elain became more important to me and I’ve stopped counting my age. I’ve heard enough amazing life stories to conclude that time is a human concept and it doesn’t matter whether you’re young or not. Time is something we placed 'worth’ on, people didn’t see that its intent was to measure something hard to comprehend.
Me and Elain just lay around our house during weekends working on the things we love to do and things we know that are important. She likes to do arts and lead her small group. I love to study programming and build experimental projects. We both go out with friends ocassionally. We constantly both work on cleaning the house and working on our marriage. These may not seem 'highly ambitious’; as if ambition is only understood when climbing some vague ladder of success.
I do not have the millions, nor the cars, the fictitious businesses, the per-annum interest returns from million peso bonds and apartments that I wanted when I was younger.
Life right now isn’t so bad, I know that for a fact, because last year on my birthday, my awesome family and fantastic friends put together a website filled with their greetings. I also currently work with an amazing group of sincere and authentic people who continues to push me forward.
Life is definitely not that bad, and that’s certainly true, after all I got married to the woman of my dreams at 25. We eat pancakes in the morning and get to live a fulfilling life together. Midnight at September 17, she surprised me with hand-made, personalized, water-colored greeting card. It may not seem much to many, but that card is worth a lot to me.
If there were multiple versions of my life at 26 years old, I believe that there couldn’t be any better than this life right now.
I didn’t build who I am, Jesus built my life and that’s worth a lot, and I know it’s worth a lot because He died for me.