In full swing

The Balancing Barn located near the village of Thorington in Suffolk.  

A playful abode with the swing adding a whimsical touch. 

When I was looking at this picture, 

it reminded me of my relationship with God.

Just as the little girl sits on the swing, 

confident that the house will not collapse on her; 

so, too, should I also place my full confidence in God,

taking my place where He wants me to be,

knowing that I am under His protection

and He is always supporting me

even though I may not always see 

the full picture from where I'm at 

 

A nice gesture

I was very touched when someone said to me earlier today that she had prayed for me the day before. Sometimes I forget that I also need to depend on others and to seek seek help and/or prayer when I'm in a bind or facing difficult challenges etc. A mental note to self - no man is an island. :-)

Longings of the heart

The holy passion of the bride (by Micke Bickle)

Longings of the Heart

Into every human heart God has built seven specific longings that can be satisfied only through our identity as the bride of Christ. As we come to an increased understanding of the bridal paradigm and allow Jesus as our Bridegroom to meet these desires, I believe the Holy Spirit will cause us to overflow in emotional wholeness, with gladness.

It’s important that God supernaturally strengthen our emotions. I believe an unprecedented emotional crisis will confront all who live on the earth in the generation in which the Lord returns. Sinful perversions, occult activity, divine judgments and martyrdom will reach the highest intensity ever witnessed in history. Supernatural emotional strength will be vital in light of the coming global crisis of social, spiritual, economic, political and emotional disruption.

Only a satisfied people who are happy in God will be equipped to stand in that hour. God intends to empower us and give us all the emotional resources we need by answering the longings of our hearts.

1. The longing for assurance that we are loved. This is where we begin our introduction to the romance of the Gospel. In every heart God has placed a craving to be pursued, delighted in and enjoyed—first by God, then by our families and friends. It is so integral to our identity that we become emotionally crippled when we feel rejection and shame from God or from others.

2. The longing for enjoyment. There is a second craving in every human heart— a longing to marvel and to be fascinated, awestruck and filled with endless wonder. The secular entertainment industry has identified this human longing for enjoyment and has exploited it commercially—to their own profit and to our ruin. So many of us search endlessly through worldly entertainment and recreation to fulfill this God-given craving.

3. The longing to be beautiful. Every one of us longs to possess beauty and to feel beautiful. No wonder: A beautiful God created us in such a way that we long to possess and feel his imparted beauty. Unfortunately, our culture has an obsession with physical appearance and vanity because it seeks to answer this legitimate longing in a wrong way. Most of us pursue carnal beauty because we feel so unsettled and unhappy when we feel ugly.

4. The longing to be great. In the core of our being, we long to be successful and noble. Our great God created us with the pursuit of greatness programmed deep within our emotional genetics. Sometimes we misunderstand this longing and assume that we must repent of it, but this isn’t true. We cannot repent of the God-given longing to be great—only of pursuing it in a wrong way.

5. The longing for intimacy without shame. We long to know and be known before the Lord. God put this longing in us because he wants us to find its deepest satisfaction in experiencing intimacy with him. This spiritual intimacy is available to the redeemed.

6. The longing to be wholehearted and passionate. In our hearts we long to possess the power to abandon ourselves completely to God. We long to avoid the spiritual boredom, disloyalty and compromise that leave us broken and discontent. We desire the ability to give the deepest affection of our hearts back to the Lord (see Matt. 22:37).

7. The longing to make a deep and lasting impact. As human beings we are desperate for a life of meaning, relevance and significance. We long to make a contribution to the lives of those we care about. We experience great enjoyment when we bring pleasure to others.

        

 

On my knees

Lighting up

Isaiah 60:1-3

Arise, shine;
      For your light has come!
      And the glory of the LORD is risen upon you.
       ² For behold, the darkness shall cover the earth,
      And deep darkness the people;
      But the LORD will arise over you,
      And His glory will be seen upon you.
       ³ The Gentiles shall come to your light,
      And kings to the brightness of your rising.

     

A small gesture

Today, I sent an sms to a dear friend, who was tired, discouraged and trying not to feel down. This was what I sent:

Rest. Sleep. Eat. Laugh. Smell the flowers. Look at the sky. Skip. Jump. Hop. Play with your dogs. Have dinner with your mom. Talk to your brother. Pray. Swim. Write. Read.

A slimy creature fishing for a tip

Dear Lord,

For the first time in my life, I met a very smooth-talking and well-meaning-sounding cab driver whom I did not like. In fact, he reminded me of slime.

I boarded the cab at YWCA around 9.30pm. He asked in a very polite tone:  "Hi Madam, where would you like to go?" When I replied: "Bukit Panjang, Fajar Road", he followed up by explaining very nicely why some cab drivers don't like to pick up passengers heading to places like Bukit Panjang around 9.30pm from town - because they can't get any passengers there and so they waste time driving an empty cab back to town. Then he said: "But, you're the boss and it's the luck of the draw for us, so I go where my customers go." I replied with a "ha ha".

He then moaned about his spate of bad luck at Changi Airport. Of the six passengers he picked up over the past two days, all of them were heading for nearby places like Pasir Ris, Tampines or Siglap. He then explained, very nicely again, to me why some cab drivers would queue up for one to two hours at Changi Airport - because they may get foreign tourists or business travellers who would give them $50 for a trip costing only $25 and say "keep the change".

He also said that sometimes, he will pick up locals who tipped him generously because they were heading for Pasir Ris and wanted to compensate him for his long wait at the taxi queue.

He then mentioned that he was very upset once when he was helping a lady with the luggage, and the lady's elderly mother said: "Let the driver do it, don't hurt your back." He told the elderly lady that taxi drivers were not legally required to help with the passenger's luggage and that under the Workman's Compensation Act, they could be compensated only if they were injured or hurt inside their cabs, and not while they were out of their cabs, and that if he had injured his back carrying their luggage he would not be covered. But he stressed to me that although he was quite angry, he told them in a cool and calm tone.Then he added that a lot of passengers were not aware of the fact that cab drivers were not obligated to help with passengers' luggage.

Following that, he talked about how he would avoid places like Clarke Quay at night because he didn't want to pick up drunks as that would set him back by one to two hours if they puked in his cab and he had to do the cleaning up. He said: "Miss, they usually offer to pay me $20 for the inconvenience but that is not enough to cover the hours and revenue lost when I've to clean my cab."

He also explained, very nicely again, why cab drivers didn't like to pick up a group who were heading to three to four places in a single trip, because they would lose out on the $2.80 starting fares that they would have earned if they had picked up four different passengers on four different trips.

I told him in a similarly nice tone that as a cab driver, he must have seen all sorts of passengers - the good ones and the bad ones, and that he must have very good days and very bad days. And I reiterated to him what he had said earlier: "Yes, it's the luck of the draw."

The journey drew to a stop, and the fare was $15.60. I gave him $17 and it seemed as if he was waiting for me to alight from the cab. I remained seated in the cab, and then he reacted by giving me my change.

Lord, there has to be some lessons somewhere in this for me. Could it be that:

- Some people tell sob stories to derive some benefits they do not deserve?

- Some people who sound polite and nice may not be so and have their own agendas?

- Some people do not believe in a fair day's wages for a fair day's work?

- The Holy Spirit in me is a very discerning judge of character?

Lord, forgive me for being so harsh on this cab driver but I really honestly didn't like him. His superficiality made my hairs stand on their ends at the end of the trip.

The human spirit

I recently dug up a book whose pages had already turned yellow, and started reading it a few days ago. Liked this excerpt:

"But this was the sense, not forgotten either then or later: that precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilisation. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last - the power to refuse our consent. So we must certainly wash our faces without soap in dirty water and dry ourselves on our jackets. We must polish our shoes, not because the regulation states it, but for dignity and propriety. We must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, and not to begin to die."