Bits & Pieces (28 December 2016)

Epiphany: Playing YouTubes mixes of Hillsong, Maranatha and Hosanna music at night instead of surfing the Internet or being on Facebook.

 

The spirit of giving: My first gift this Christmas was to Médecins Sans Frontières. I also decided to ask most of my family members and relatives what they wanted for Christmas to avoid heavy deadweight losses from gift-giving. It meant they would not be surprised but it minimised the losses from giving people what I liked, rather than what they wanted/needed. 

 

I also thought very hard about my gifts for friends and colleagues, weighing heavily towards practicality. Apologies if your gift was not what you had wanted. My thoughts are limited by my brain. Nonetheless, it was a good exercise in learning to give well.

 

Christmas: The season is always a mad rush for me. This year, however, my BFFs expressly stated "no gifts" although I still slipped in two gifts for two kids while half of my extended family was away or couldn't make it. I also bought vouchers for most of my family members. So that cut down quite a bit of the gift buying for me. Some gifts are still with me and at least one gift is still in transit!

To my family, relatives, friends and colleagues, thank you for your gifts but more important for your presence. Thank you for being such a big part of my life. It is the reason why I wake up most mornings thanking God. Other mornings, I just tumble out of bed, take a quick shower and rush to work. 

 

Jesus: The Alpha and the Omega. I had more time this year over the Christmas break to contemplate a few things. 

 

First, Maranatha. Come, Lord Jesus, come. I cannot comprehend man's hand in Aleppo and closer to home in Myanmmar. There is so much I don’t understand about God's sovereignty and His judgment of man's culpability. But all will be judged when Jesus comes again. So perhaps not now, but definitely in time to come. 

 

Second, Immanuel. God with us. Christmas is about this good news. God coming down in the human form of Jesus to show us a way back to Him. God is holy and just. We have all fallen short. If you think that God is far apart from us, Jesus is proof of His closeness to us. 

 

Jesus came, reached out to those who needed him and suffered everything on our behalf (rejection, ridicule, humiliation, pain, grief, suffering, and finally crucifixion, with the sins of the world on him). He was resurrected, indicating that God has accepted his sacrifice for us.

 

Third, The Call. if you believe in Jesus and acknowledge that He is your Lord and Saviour, you have a way back to God and eternal fellowship with Him. When God sees us, He sees us covered in Christ. This is the good news. God already accepts us, warts and all, because of Jesus' sacrifice on the cross. By His grace. You are free. And you belong to a royal priesthood and you are a son or daughter of God. Merry Christmas.

Bits & Pieces (8 January 2017)

+ Important moments are moments like dinner with a BFF and her five kids at Prive Cafe. We also helped the cafe tune its guitar at the kids' corner. We chose a song to play. A Beatles song, of course. In My Life. 

 

+ No more leaving after this leaving: Following a group chat, I got to thinking about dying. We are all dying. As a new day dawns, we are ever closer to death. What, then, for us is the most important moment of our lives? The moment is now. Being aware and accepting that we will all die one day makes us treasure life and people more, adopting a "carpe diem" approach to every day. It doesn't mean that we have to seize the day as the world defines it; we have to seize the day according to what we consider important and eternal. Dare to curate our lives, time and resources so that we devote all these to all that is the most important to God and us. Invest what we have wisely for eternal returns. Be answerable to God, not man.

Ecclesiastes 12:7

and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.

 

+ Raise the bar: Attended the first service of 2017. The message was hard-hitting. Avoid being lukewarm and spiritually passive. Re-align and re-adopt a right posture of running after God with wild abandon. Jump into the river; avoid walking around it and seeing it from a safe distance. Desire to always be in the inner courts. Avoid setting our spiritual bars so low. Pray. That’s the one thing that God has impressed on me in 2017. 

 

+ A storied life: “I like the etymology of the word “experience” - it comes from the Latin experentia - to try. So all that you have lived through, it is unfinished business, still waiting for you to come back to it one day and give it a story.” - Boey Kim Cheng

Heaven and hell

Have not read C.S.Lewis in quite a while. Some authors make you think; he makes you think hard. Needed to take notes as well. Sarte has this line "hell is other people" while Lewis' view, I think, is that hell is what one personally defines it to be, aside from the blibical concepts of heaven and hell. Hence, one person's heaven could be somebody's hell, in a sense.