Mitch Albom and "Three Cups of Tea"

I just got through reading Mitch Albom's Have a Little Faith and The Five People You Meet in Heaven.

Mitch Albom has a knack for sentimental writing, and both books had their share of corny sentences, but they both left me with a really comforting sense of duty to my life when I finished them.  When I put them down, I had this urge to change my life, but in very subtle ways that asked rather than demanded to be changed.

The Five People You Meet in Heaven opens up a world beyond my peripherals, those connections with people I don't even consider a part of my immediate life.  However, Albom attempts to remind the reader that our lives have repercussions far beyond what we live for, and he delivered that message in a creative and emotional way.

Have a Little Faith is about the lives of two men of God whom Albom personally knew.  Their stories of faith far differ in their approach, but he finds the common ground for the two men of different faiths, and it is that their lives are substantially more meaningful than any success stories of the modern day man.  Their lives are modest, but the good they produce outweighs any egocentric dreams and accomplishments that we are all infatuated by today.

Another book I got to squeeze in was Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.  This is a semi-autobiographical book about the life of a single man who literally changed the lives of thousands of children in Pakistan and Afghanistan by building schools in their villages.  It follows the life of Greg Mortenson as he struggles through countless obstacles to found education throughout the two countries, one school at a time.  Mortenson's life may seem a bit glorified through the pages, but he certainly deserves the praise as he scrapes the money up for the children on the other side of the world while living homeless in California at the start of his endeavors.  A very good read.

A moment

There's a lot of things I think I need to change for myself, and these considerations all come from a deep inner feeling than any rational thought.  Although I do rationalize the feeling, what really convinces me that I need to change comes from a dull and persistent thudding from my chest just above my stomach.

I think what really initializes it is that even though I try to be a good person, I know I'm not ideal.  And I like things to be ideal if it's in my power to make it so.  But I'm constantly reminded that I'm lacking, and it's also a fault of mine to want to excel in everything, and so I'm in this perpetual cycle of inspiration and disappointment that I can't seem to break out of because I just don't want to settle.

It's a painful reminder whenever I look out into the world, and I realize my life is drinking in what my eyes are seeing, when really my heart should be eating from the feast that God has prepared for me.  I think that's where this alien feeling of mine originates from the most- knowing that there's an outshining heaven, but infatuated by a vain world.