lifesong
Everyone needs compassion
Love that's never failing
Let mercy fall on me
Everyone needs forgiveness
The kindness of a Saviour
The hope of nations
Saviour, He can move the mountains
My God is mighty to save
He is mighty to save
Forever author of salvation
He rose and conquered the grave
Jesus conquered the grave
So take me as you find me
All my fears and failures
Fill my life again
I give my life to follow
Everything I believe in
Now I surrender
Shine your light in
Let the whole world see
We're singing, for the glory
Of the risen King
Jesus, Shine your light in
Let the whole world see
We're singing for the glory
Of the risen king
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
-3:04 pm
Hm the first three papers we got back today weren't too bad, except that social studies was quite a disappointment. I guess it was probably because I didn't do enough practice for the SBQ and kind of lost focus on the required points in order to get the maximum marks. I don't think I even looked at the LORMs before the test. That was definitely a major oversight. Well, it's not like I can change anything now.
Maths was the high point of the day! I didn't fail, and got a much better result than the last few maths summative tests. But then, I lost quite a few marks (almost 8 marks!) to carelessness, despite repeated rounds of checking! Argh. I felt like smacking myself on the forehead so many times because I realised that I had so many glaring careless mistakes, errors which were unpardonable. The most regrettable one was the errors which were carried forward to the next question because the parts were all linked and required you to use the answer for the previous part to solve the next. That whole question was 14 marks and I only managed to score 8. Blah.
But oh wells, that's that. I'll just work harder next time. At least I'm improving (:
Anyways, I observed that paper-checking time is usually met with two different reactions. 1. The people who are confident that they'll do well, and don't really mind too much if they get a lower mark than expected because they know they can better. 2. Those who have absolutely no confidence in themselves and think that their results are going to be extremely bad. Sometimes, their definition of a lousy mark is 18/25. (What?! Actually, I consider that to be quite a satisfactory score.)
The perfect example of the latter kind of student is a good friend of mine. Aye, though she is a really smart girl, she just falls apart if her results turn out to be below expectations. She's competitive; I can tell from the way she asks about how everyone did, although she doesn't quite realise it herself. I think I've blogged about her and her perfectionistic personality before.
I can tell that she has a few distorted cognitive patterns, which results in numerous warped paradigms about herself. She puts so much value to her academic results that she really pushes herself to the max, or even beyond her limit just to achieve what she calls success. That's a high price to pay, not to mention that it is not worth it at all. Hello, the world's not going to end although you got a 32/50 for maths. She calls it an "ack!" result (meaning, enough to make her vomit blood), even after she bargained for an extra two marks and happened to get it, which makes it 34/50.
There she was, complaining about her marks and I felt like rolling my eyes (ok I know it sounds really bad but I couldn't stand it). It's nauseating and irks me to no end. Some people did a whole lot worse than her and didn't even shed a tear, or act as though the sky was falling down. Some people just can't get things into perspective and attach too much value to fleeting things which will fade away. There isn't any eternal significance in how many As you get. After you die and go to heaven, God won't care one bit whether you passed your bio test or not.
It's always the eternal things (character, moral values, prinicples, investing in lives) vs. the temporary things (grades, much-coveted certificates, money, knowledge). We must learn to discern what is worth investing our time and effort in and not restrict ourselves to a life not worth living. If you work so hard, just for your own selfish goals, without doing anything which makes the world a better place (no matter how small that action may be), what's the point of living? If you're stressed and sad all the time, is living just to achieve the world's definition of success really worth it? Living for the expectations of others, to me, tremendously depreciates the value of life.
Of course, from a third person's point of view, it's always easy to say things like that or judge the way other people live their lives. But I'm not being judgemental here. It's just that I feel I have so many other schoolmates who are like her, chasing after papers which will be blown away by the winds of time and eaten by moths, or turned to dust of the earth after some time. They're all missing out on the point of life; it seems they don't live a life of purpose and meaning. Maybe it's just that my purpose and what I deem as meaning is different from theirs. I've learnt a costly lesson, and now I know what's important to me in life, what my priorities are.
On your deathbed, you don't want to look back on the last 70+ years of your life and regret anything, or can't seem to think of anything you did which made a lasting impact in someone else's life.
What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? [Matthew 16:26]So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. [2 Corinthians 4:18]I just hope that my friends and others like her will realise this before it's too late.
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