It ruined mine. I’m an alumnus, so I can say this. Why? Because you wouldn’t ever be able to stand to live for yourself. If before you were happily contented spending your life away playing your favourite video games or watching your favourite TV series, you won’t be able to do this after AtSCA. At least you won’t be able to do this without suffering grave mental, emotional, and spiritual ache. OK, actually it might just be me.

Let me be short, AtSCA will ruin your life in three ways:

1. You’ll be disturbed.

Seriously, not the mentally disturbed type, like psychos. But close to it. In AtSCA, the nice little bubble that protects your little fantasy world from the harsh world of reality will pop. Your fantasy world of getting rich for yourself, of collecting nice gadgets, cool cars, of dreams of big houses, of the world of your video games or favourite TV series, of not caring about other people but working for your own welfare, all these run the risk of dangerously popping. And once it pops, what’s left? The real world, social awareness, and friendship with the marginalized. That’s disgusting! Says the pampered person inside the bubble. Of course it is! Especially if you’ve been living your whole life inside a bubble.

Your nice dream-life behind white picket fences will be disturbed. It will hurt. But as the nicely-mustached, circle-faced man says, “Once you pop, you can’t stop.” There is a happiness that can be found in understanding and being with the marginalized, in understanding the issues of the unheard, of trying to help or fighting for a cause, that people happily living inside the bubble of mundane luxuries will not be able to access. It’s the happiness of being, truly, humbly, simply, human. It’s the happiness of being with the world, the real world. It’s the happiness of embracing a world much, much wider than your own. It’s a truly, wonderful happiness. BUT you’ll be disturbed. You’ll keep thinking of them. You won’t be able to live for yourself. You’ll be living for things bigger than you, you’ll want to. You’d be restless if you don’t. You won’t be able to stand it.

2. You’ll be weird.

Yep, people will think of you as weird, why? Because you care about things not a lot of people care about. You’ll be outside of the mainstream. While the mainstream is about getting rich and being happy, you’ll be about making the poor not poor, and making other people happy. You’d be illogical in the sense that you’re doing things that will not make you better in any way. You’d be different, you’d be thinking about things not a lot of people think about. Social justice will be on your mind, preferential option for the poor, finding God in all things. People will sneer at you and say, “Huh, another religious freak.” The thing is, being cool is not caring, it’s like the laid back guy with black shades, chewing a gum, sitting like he wouldn’t move if the world crumbled down in front of him. You won’t care about being cool, you’d be the weird guy, thinking of solutions to problems the majority are too… “cool” to care about. The environment, the state of education, social inequality, urban poverty, land grabbing, mining.

3. You’ll love.

Yes, that cheesy L-word. You’ll truly love. Not the juvenile kind of “I’ll give you the world” love, no. You’ll truly love friends. You’ll truly love org mates, and friends in urban poor communities. You’ll look at the faces of visiting farmers or fisherfolk and want to embrace them. You’ll look at the image of a pitiful, dying, bloodied person, nailed to the cross, and want to kneel down in front of him. You’ll start loving the world. And everything in it. The ugliness, the injustices, the stricken, the weak, the pitiful, the outcasts. You’ll find the bloodied person nailed to the cross, inside them, every one of them. And you’ll love all of it. It’s a life-changing experience. A no-turning back one. And you won’t know why, you won’t be able to point to a reason as to why you love so much. You just do. That’s what they say true love is, right? When you don’t know why, you just do. It’s crazy, it’s illogical, maybe, but it’s true love, and true love is the happiest thing that could happen to a person. It’s heaven on Earth, when you don’t know why and you just do.

So after all these, why would you ever want to be an AtSCAn?

To answer this I might circumvent and talk about the meaning of life, about having a purpose in life, about wanting this singular life that we have to have some worth.

But I’ll just give you my answer, it’s the simpler one. I just do.