Flexibility to the will of God.

“Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”

-Matthew 11:29

Unconditional love is so hard to accept sometimes. To sum things up, I walked out of my first paper today wondering whether I could ever live the way I felt God wanted me to live. To study so hard and feel so lousy after the paper. I’m feeling a mounting resistance to God’s spirit. Talking to GK on the way home although she was trying to be encouraging, somehow made me felt worse instead. Compounded to that my mom and my sis asked me how did I do and I didn’t know how to reply. All it took was an examination to make me feel so wasted. And the rest isn’t over yet.

The tensions during examination period can make you feel weaker than normal and more susceptible to sin, especially with supremely lousy thoughts about myself. Di Song said my last week’s worth of events probably took subconscious toil.

“His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.’

-1Peter 1:3

I took some time out to pray, and to reflect on the verses that my friends have sent me and encouraged me. Praying for my friends who are taking their exams, giving thanks to the Lord for seeing us through today, and asking the God to turn my disappointments into a sacrifices which can be used to display His glory all helped to prevent me from turning inwardly and close myself up to the great glory that God is displaying in my environment, which I couldn’t see because I blind myself to it.

I’m leaving many things left unsaid, but I like to end by saying that amidst all these struggling thoughts, I still firmly believe there can be no other more awesome being for me to leave my burdens and essentially, my whole life with. And I pray that too God continues to break me down and humble me so that I can be used greatly by Him.

Love Tempers.

Today’s sermon by Preacher Tan Hock Sim on 1 Corinthians 8:1-13 touched on tempering knowledge with love. Knowledge and wisdom is useless without love. Especially with regards to equipping the spiritually weaker brothers and sisters-in-christ. There is a lot of wisdom on freedom, knowledge and how love tempers all that needs space and time to reflect on. I pray that my fellow brothers and sisters are reflecting on this message too.

Quite nervous and exciting for the upcoming exams. : ) All the best to our best! There are lots to update, but see you readers after the exams are over on 7th May for me.

“Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,” says the Lord Almighty.

-Zechariah 4:6

Trust and Tarry no more.

Revision has been fruitful thus far only for Singapore Society. But I shall continue to remember that it takes effort to turn disappointments into sacrifices. Recent happenings have also affected me in ways that are quite unexpected. I feel pain too in my own ways. But yet, am thankful of this consciousness that have developed which reminds me to turn back to God in supplication and thanksgiving.

A need to be broken down by God has suddenly become so urgent in view of recent developments. Trust and tarry no more.

Some recent events:

Consider Christ Week

Consider Christ week is a three day long outreach and educational programme in NUS organised by VCF to educate the students about the meaning of Easter, and its significance to Christians. I signed up for the “陪谈” so that I can talk to interested students after the week is over. Talked to Eunice and Esther (the twins) today! One more person to visit in Malaysia. They stay in Klang. : ) With the lack of internships knocking on my door for a year 1, it would be a good time of consolidation and spending time with dear friends, especially those coming back from all over the world that I could not do during semester time.

There was a skit titled “hands”, that briefly shared on what Christ meant to us.

Kumu shared a very interesting testimony. Didn’t know he was a first generation believer…

There was a mini-worship session before LT Jaya (a worker from Ravi Zacharias ministry) talked to us about Christianity. He said many interesting things that gave me more than my fair share of food for thought. This is on top of the sharing that Lawson and Pam (a missionary couple) gave when I was at FES with Rixin and Jasmine earlier in the day.

Adrian a graduate! Currently working at MCYS. He is closer to me that I am closer to him. Lol! : ) He is 3 generations in front of me as chair of IFG. Am thinking already how to involved future generations of IFG grads in the work that we are doing. Let the vision continue to fester!

My PGP neighbour Khoa, IFG people Noi and Jae came down for the programme. Were so glad that they stayed. I pray that God continue to open up their ears to listen and their hearts to accept the most wonderful gift on Earth.

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禱吿.

There are a thousand and one things to pray to you about, to manage expectations, to expend on wisdom. Keep all of us close to Your heart…

So close that I can hear your heart beat.

Islam. A Short History.

The external history of a religious tradition often seems divorced from the raison d’etre of faith. The spiritual quest is an interior journey; it is a psychic rather than a political drama. It is pre-occupied with liturgy, doctrine, contemplative disciplines and an exploration of the heart, not with clash of current events. Religions certainly have a life outside the soul. Their leaders have to contend with the state and the affairs of the world, and often relish doing so. They fight with members of other faiths, who seem to challenge their claims to a monopoly of absolute truth; they also persecute their co-religionists for interpreting a tradition differently or for holding heterodox beliefs. Very often, priests, rabbis, imams and shamams are just as consumed by worldly ambition as regular politicians. But all these is generally seen as an abuse of a sacred ideal. These power struggles are not what religion is really about, but an unworthy distraction from the life of the spirit, which is conducted far from the madding crowd, unseen, silent and unobtrusive.

In the Hindu tradition, history is dismissed as evanescent, unimportant and insubstantial. The philosophers of ancient Greece were concerned with the eternal laws underlying the flux of external events, which could be of no real interest to a serious thinker. In the gospels, Jesus often went out of his way to explain to his followers that his Kingdom was not of this world, but could only be found within the believer. The Kingdom would not arrive with a great political fanfare, but would develop as quietly and imperceptibly as a germinating mustard-seed. In the modern West, we have made a point of separating religion from politics; this secularisation was originally seen by the philosophes of the Enlightenment as a means of liberating religion from the corruption of state affairs, and allowing it to become more truly itself.

But however spiritual their aspirations, religious people have to seek God or the sacred in this world. They often feel that they have a duty to bring their ideals to bear upon society. Even if they lock themselves away, they are inescapably men and women of their time and are affected by what goes on outside the monastery, although they do not fully realise this. Wars, plagues, famines, economic recession and the internal politics of their nation will intrude upon their cloistered existence and qualify their religious vision. Indeed, the tragedies of history often goad people into the spiritual  quest, in order to find some ultimate meaning in what often seems to be a succession of random, arbitrary and dispiriting incidents. There is a symbiotic relationship between history and religion, therefore. It is, as the Buddha remarked, our perception that existence is awry that forces us to find an alternative which will prevent us from falling into despair.

Perhaps the central paradox of the religious life is that it seeks transcendent reality in earthly, physical phenomena. People have sensed the divine in rocks, mountains, temple buildings, law codes, written texts, or in other men and women. We never experienced transcendence directly: our ecstasy is always ‘earthed’, enshrined in something or someone here below. Religious people are trained to look beneath the uncompromising surface to find the sacred within it. They have to use their creative imaginations. Jean-Paul Sartre defined the imagination as the ability to think of what is not present. Human beings are religious creatures because they are imaginative; they are so constituted that they are compelled to search for hidden meaning and to achieve an ecstasy that makes them feel fully alive. Each tradition encourages the faithful to focus their attention on an earthly symbol that is peculiarly its own, and to teach themselves to see the divine in it.

In Islam, Muslims have looked for God in history. Their sacred scripture, the Quran, gave them a historical mission. Their chief duty was to create a just community in which all members, even the most weak and vulnerable, were treated with absolute respect. The experience of building such a society and living in it would give them intimations of the divine, because they would be living in accordance with God’s will. A Muslim had to redeem history, and that meant that state affairs were not a distraction form spirituality but the stuff of religion itself. The political well-being of the Muslim community was a matter of supreme importance. Like any religious ideal, it was almost impossibly difficulty to implement in the flawed and tragic conditions of history, but after each failure Muslims had to get up and begin again.

Muslims developed their own rituals, mysticism, philosophy, doctrines, sacred texts, laws and shrines like everybody else. But all these religious pursuits sprang directly from the Muslims’ frequently anguished contemplation of the political current affairs of Islamic society. If state institutions did not measure up to the Quranic ideal, if their political leaders were cruel or exploitative, or if their community was humiliated by apparently irreligious enemies, a Muslim could feel that his or her faith in life’s ultimate purpose and value was in jeopardy. Every effort had to be expended to put Islamic history back on track, or the whole religious enterprise would fail, and life would be drained of meaning. Politics was, therefore, what Christians would call a sacrament: it was the arena in which Muslims experienced God and which enabled the divine to function effectively in the world. Consequently, the historical trials and tribulations of the Muslim community – political assassinations, civil wars, invasions, and the rise and fall of the ruling dynasties – were not divorced from the interior religious quest, but were of the essence of the Islamic vision. A Muslim would mediate upon the current events of their time and upon past history as a Christian would contemplate an icon, using the creative imagination to discover the hidden divine kernel. An account of the external history of the Muslim people cannot, therefore, be of mere secondary interest, since one of the chief characteristics of Islam has been its sacralisation of history.

The Preface from the book “Islam, A Short History” by Karen Armstrong.

The silences of Jesus are as eloquent as His words

My love is silent because I love beyond the power of words to express it and beyond the understanding of the human heart. Also, it is silent for your sakes – that you may learn to love and trust Me with pure, Spirit-taught, spontaneous responses. I desire for your response to My love to be without the prompting of anything external.

God will do wonders never before done, if you learn the mystery of His silence and praise Him every time He withdraws His gifts from you. Through this you will better know and love the Giver.

-Streams in the Deserts

.

If the last two weeks are thunderstorms and snowstorms, then this week would be the renewal and peace that comes from the wisdom earned from the faithful heart that petitions to God, who gives freely without asking.

My weak impatient heart cry out because I think that God does not answer at all or He answers in a way that I believe is less than the best. In fact, the silences of Jesus are as eloquent as His word and may be a sign not of His disapproval but of His approval and His way of providing a deeper blessing for me.

I will yet praise Him, even for His silence.

The Servant King

From heaven You came, helpless babe
Entered our world, Your glory veiled
Not to be served but to serve
And give Your life that we might live

This is our God, the servant King;
He calls us now to follow Him
To bring our lives as a daily offering
Of worship to the servant King

There in the garden of tears,
my heavy load He chose to bear;
His heart with sorrow was torn,
yet not my will, buy Yours he said.

Come see His hands and his feet,
the scars that speak of sacrifice
Hands that flung stars into space,
to cruel nails surrendered

So let us learn now how to serve,
and in our lives enthrone Him
Each other’s needs to prefer,
for it is Christ we’re serving.

The Christ’s Breath

I am

a hole in a flute

that the Christ’s breath moves through -

listen to this

music.