freewheelin.

i feel like i just took a huge tumble. and i'm free falling!
not in a bad way, not in a good way either. for once, i seriously don't know where i'm going
please catch me somewhere!

on little silly prayers...

sometimes i pray about the most trivial and stupidest things like things that are barely life changing. things like.. it was my last night in Kedah and i hadn't had my favourite dish (called dua pan) from a particular stall that i'd been dreaming about since i was still in spore. but i was too paiseh to make my uncles drive out in the middle of the night to buy it (they only open during supper time!). so I half-wittingly prayed to God for it to appear on the table that night. strangely, while i was showering my father hollered from outside to ask if i wanted dua pan. of course i said yes la. and he said "there's a bowl waiting for you downstairs!" my aunt had brought some back on her way home from her mother's place. so my dua pan really appeared on the table that night!

but i didn't know what to think! i just passingly whined a prayer out and it didn't matter THAT much whether i had my food or not. and it's not like some big magical thing that happened. it is an easily logical and very happen-able coincidence. but then, i did ask God and it came true. i couldn't decide if i was amazed it. so sometimes God pampers us haha. anw my point is that i often have a tendency to negate small coincidences and answers to prayers (that i even forget about).. deep down there's a small voice saying "it can't be!" because something so small and silly can't qualify for God's magical quality. but i reasoned and thought that if I believe in a God who is in absolute control of everything that happens in every millisecond, and even bothers to know the number of hair on the head of every human being, how can a bowl of dua pan appear on a table without His knowledge?

i'm reminded of an entry in ODB on feb 9 titled God Incidents. when i read that a week ago i thought about how true it was that God often intercedes in sensible and coherent ways... rather than magical marvels or big spectacles that we naturally associate with God-size.

yeah the dua pan was grrreat! (:

Design by Robert Frost

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth --
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth --
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.

we did this poem for literature class this morning. Frost is a famous pastoral poet and one of his favourite things to do is to take the intricacies of nature, tangible or not, as a prism for deeper thought. in this poem he writes about a white moth, a white spider, and a white heal-all (a flower) that were found together. all three of them are abnormalities because moths, spiders, and heal-alls in white are rare. and the chances of them being actually found on top of each other puzzled him. as he appreciates the fine details of the tiny insects, he contemplated whether things do happen randomly, or whether there is a creator behind all these. if there is a design, shouldn't there be a Designer (with a big D) behind it?

what surprised me more was the way my obviously Christian lecturer used this poem as an opportunity for some not very subtle evangelism. whenever he sees a cockroach, a fly, or some other gross insect at home, he never kills them. he would admire how beautifully made they are and how astounding the compound eye of a fly is. HAHAHA. anw, like Robert Frost, he's so captured at the finest designs of living things in our world (and so am i!). he shared his personal opinion that if there is creation, there has to be a Creator behind it. a design has to have a Designer behind it, and it's God. especially so if we notice how designs of the tiniest things are actually so astonishing.

of course I agree with him and identify with his passions. I admire his effort and courage to share this with the class and his colleagues (they were sitting in his lect too) and put up his opinions about Designer Creator God big on the screen. it hit home that no matter where we are - whether in a secular or Christian environment - we are in ministry and carrying His banner, especially if we know that it is where God means for us to be. there are other Christian profs who evangelize in their classes too!

I'm really enjoying this course more n more. i'm looking forward to the film and books (: nevermind waking at 6.30am. it's worth it (whenever i can actually get up and drag myself to sch on time)! literature in the early morning is a strategic time. it is like why Jesus does His quiet time in the morning every day. it is when minds are usually the freshest and not polluted by the heat and happenings of the day. aiyah, i should have taken a literature minor!

when will the past quit returning. each time i think it's over, things always begin to surface. when is it going to end?! freaking pest. like it's trying to rub open my nicely healed wound. but then, they say, when u've laid it all down.. what difference does it make anyway? nothing changes the steadfastness of the cross. God never disappoints when i trust him. changing my perspective is tough..but worth the try.

He picks you up each time you fall.. it's so cliche but it's so real.. literally. sometimes i can't even string a thought together to talk to him.. but he knows my heart. and every single time He's always right there. i think it's safe to trust in Jesus.. cos He'll never break my heart.

i would love to eat all the great foods in all of the world.

new year thoughts

i can't believe we're going back to school on monday. time is flying so fast it's practically teleporting itself ;(

nevertheless, it's been a wonderful break. it's one of the best holidays i've ever had. really enjoyed the month this much. most precious of all, i'm grateful that my cousins could gather for christmas and birthdays or just to catch up and make up for all the lost time this year, and also to spend time with other loved ones after such a long time apart. i'm also very happy tt good friends have come home from overseas. among many other reasons to rejoice.

it's going to be the last bittersweet semester in school. argh it's really coming to an end. despite all the stress and agony, i like uni education. so enriching.

anw most of all i wonder what God has planned. so many things can happen in a single year. surely, there'll be major changes as i graduate. i don't know if i'm more excited or nervous. like really dunno what's going to happen! at the end of the year, what kind of a person will i become? for better or for worse? for now, i think that if, at the end of the year, i'm still running the race hard, i'll give thanks and praise.

buildings...

yesterday i was on the bus traveling through the rural east of Singapore and i was curiously surveying the environment (potential for future living haha). while the bus was parked at a red light, i saw this huge community centre building that looked pretty nice and my mind began to run through the kinds of activities there that are actually feasibly doable even though i always associate them with aunties and i thought maybe i should try them. anw the point is, when the bus began to move pass the building, (to my surprise) i realized that it was actually a church building! with a cross that i couldn't have seen from the red light spot.

anw my thought is this! i thought about most of the church buildings that i've seen in Singapore. they actually look religiously void, save for the cross, the name of the church, and the gazillion banners that hang around its premises. even then, they typically look just like any other public building that you see around. there isn't the aura of the Christ or anything like those crazy medieval church architectures you see in European countries. well, one point for secularism!
but why do church buildings in singapore look like that while buddhist temples and mosques and hindu temples look SO religious? they even have all their gods displayed on their roofs! it's like when you walk past them you really know you're treading some serious religious ground. while people like me can actually mistake a church for a community centre.

well.. it's not that it's a totally bad thing. even though there's absolutely no distinctiveness and the churches (that do not use colonial church buildings) have really blended into the modern sanitized secular environment (sometimes really state of the art postmodern kind), i guess it subconsciously gives the idea that the religion is not an out-of-our-world thing but something that is real and relevant to everyday life today. and maybe looking like a community centre isn't so bad because the church does kinda function like one except that they have Christ.

but can you imagine if churches today have their distinctive form of architecture? it doesn't have to be grand with ancient-looking adornments or expensive.. just something more than looking like any other thing on the street. the church is supposed to be special!

a night to remember.

it's 1.30am and somebody's cooking pancakes..! the smell is killing me but i know there's nobody in my kitchen :(

i know i must be in bed now because i have an important early morning tomorrow. but i just had one of the most memorable nights of my life.
i was standing at my window in the dark looking out and feeling the wind. and something was strange about tonight. the clouds were so close SO CLOSE i think i could touch them if i had a 10m long arm! and the wind was blowing them across the big sky towards the south. it felt like the whole earth was moving and the big sky was shifting. and i could see the different layers of clouds and the stars that twinkled beyond them. the whole earth was converging for a grand assembly down south. it was majestic.

the night felt so limitless. it made me feel kinda lonely in some way.
i saw the stars and i remembered that the pretty twinkle had traveled millions of weary light years to meet my eyes for just that one second.
this God is unfathomable.


i must thank my mom for not installing window grills!

Perils of Secularism

Recently i've been reading up a little on religion in our secular world aka the godless world. it's feels coincidental that i've been stumbling across such material. and it also happens to be my ISM topic, which until this afternoon, i've been ready to change entirely. the sudden rekindling of interest really took me back to my paper's proposal, which incidentally is in dire need of editing before sunday.

i just opened the book The Dawkin's Delusion today. i'm only a third through McGrath's critique on Dawkin's The God Delusion. but it's already spoken so much that led me to think about the secular delusion. i kept thinking about jo zheng when i read this book cos i first heard of The God Delusion from him.

most people in the world think of religion as something additional to humanity. something that was constructed through history and was infiltrated into cultures and everyday living in various parts of the planet. with this in mind, the secular world is then depicted as the default “natural” world - the ideological world that humanity was "born into". secularism is associated with a blank space; an impartial platform void of religion for the human race to congregate and connect with one another; where rationality is assumed and hence should be privileged in all big and minor political arenas. but it isn't that.

what people fail to see is that secularism is essentially another religion itself. it is not a neutral world and it is not free of ideological constraints. like other religions, it has its idols of worship, its cultures, practices, beliefs, etc. just as silence is also a sound, secularism is also a faith. a faith that is placed somewhere else that just happens not to be categorized as 'religion'. Believing in the secular world requires your subscribing to and internalizing certain beliefs. faith in self, faith in money, faith in capital, faith in the satisfaction of self-fulfillment, blah blah blah. these faiths were constructed too! it entails your believing in other people's words. you learnt individualism from people, you learnt consumerism from people, you learnt the value of capital and status from people. other people taught you to believe in these. and other people told these other people to believe in these. how is that different from the legacy of religious thoughts? is the fervent preaching of these secular beliefs to the next generation any less of an "abuse of freedom" than parents inculcating religious beliefs in their young?

what if secularism was something that was additional to humanity? what if religiosity (as we know it today) was the "default" world that humanity was "born into"? or what if there was no "default" world to begin with? (i do not believe in that)

anw there was something in the book that seriously jumped out at me. McGrath was addressing Dawkin's argument about the extreme improbability of the existence of God. Dawkin himself had asserted how virtually impossible it is to quantify how improbable the existence of human beings is (God is even more complex than this and hence existence of such a Being is even more improbable). Besides the problematic association of complexity to improbability, McGrath pointed out the obvious truth that despite the high improbability of it all, humans are here. we exist. the point is that "we need to appreciate that there are many things that seem improbable - but improbability does not entail, and never has entailed, non-existence. The issue, then, is not whether God is probable but whether God is actual."

this really jumped out at me because it brought me back to the essential search for truth. for what is reality and what is actual. you could spend your whole life circulating about the probability of that 99% being true, yet miss the whole truth altogether. God could be your 1%. and then you ask.. which God(s) is it? you really really can argue and debate till the cows come home and all the way to your grave. it's never ending, seriously. but the crucial point is not about debunking what isn't. nor is it about what it could or could not be. the most crucial thing is to find out what it is.

it isn't about the 99.9% that could be, but the 0.1% that is.

.

till today, i still can't reconcile the person i knew with the kind of person he later became. they're mutually exclusive.

but i've concluded that it is certainly true that only a real crisis can bring out a person's true colours. when it thoroughly tests you for the kind of person you are and challenges you to the point where you are stripped bare to your bones and you won't even be able to find the thinnest mask to pretend to be something better. and that's who you really are, what you are really made of, and what you really stand for.

he probably never realized he was capable of such ugliness before it all happened. but he is, and that's it. the worst part is, he still doesn't realize how immature he is.
neither have I ever imagined that i could be so hateful and unforgiving.