What Keeps You Believing?

This was the question someone who read my blog asked me. It stumped me, to be honest. It's tough when you believe in your country and your ability to make a difference in it,...and not quite sure to explain why.

I've decided to give the person an answer on my blog because I felt that there could be others, asking the same question.

Wanting to bail out from this country and moving to a place where the environment suits your soul and beliefs. Where things are more straightforward and less complicated - and perhaps where people understand your values and struggles. I'd be lying if I said that migration hasn't crossed my mind.

What keeps me believing?

I think it's because I have faith that change will come, and only come, when God determines that the time for change has come. We are all but pawns in God's greater pre-determined plan. And every little effort we make, is another ripple towards that great change. We cannot help but to be a part of that change - to fight, to fall, to suffer, to learn, to return stronger and wiser and to fight again. And we may even not see the conclusion - for the pinnacle of the desired change to be reached.

We don't have the power to determine conclusions in Life. Only God does. The only power that we have is the CHOICE to strive (or not to strive), despite not being able to foresee the conclusion. The only power we have is to live and strive according to what we believe in, despite all adversity. And to not sell out.

For instance, Communism only became a reality about seventy years after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto. Even a powerful economic idea takes time to take root and will only explode in a society that was ready to embrace it - in this case, the Russians under Lenin.

Change takes time and reformists are by nature, impatient. And therein lies the paradox of all reformists - passionate about their beliefs but sometimes, too easily drained by disappointments. In their people, in their system, in their country.

What keeps me believing?

Faith, that the good guys will win eventually. That the time will come either while I'm alive or after I'm dead. But I believe that God's on our side - as the old saying goes, if God be for us, who can be against us?

A sense of obligation - that I'm a small piece of jigsaw in the large puzzle of change, in a time spectrum undefined and that I have to play my role, within there.

A desire to live as I believe, in a life that I can be pleased with. You have to like giving to others, to be willing to live for something, that you would die for.

The small guys whose lives we touch and change permanently, from our efforts - because it matters to them. And the compounding ripple effects created from there, within generations. As a close friend used to say: "We're not fighting for the majority that wants for nothing, but we're fighting for the minority in the country that does want something more."

That I think I can make a difference in the long run and that every single fall prepares me, for a bigger future battle and victory.

That I belong here - I can be a migrant in any other country, but I can only be an anak bumi here. And it can't be taken away from me.


I think that's why I still believe, despite all adversity. I'm home, really.