Can't believe its been more than a week already. Time certainly flies when you've got a lot on your mind. Last week was when Ravi came to town, and its been a time where I had to go back to some of the thoughts that shaped a big part of the way I looked at my faith, and to reflect on how far I've come since.

He spoke on a topic abt "Recapturing Wonder... Living Life To The Fullest", and I think that may have proved to be the most apt topic for me in a long, long time... Last time he came was 4 yrs ago, right before I've started NUS, and where ideals were again raised up within me, seeing university life as a chance at a fresh start after the dreariness of NS. Little did I expect that 4 yrs down the road, I'd have become so disillusioned, and so blind to all that I had held up not so long ago. I was set wondering what had gone wrong. Was it cos of my failure in my relationship? Was it cos of my dramatic failures in my studies? I think its neither. I think it actually is because in my 4 yrs of blind service to God, I've forgotten to take time out for God. I looked at my journals that I've started and abandoned over the past 4 yrs, and realised that I've not been able to keep a consistent quiet time of more than 2 months, before I'd drop the practice again.

So much for relying on God in all my 4 yrs.

Couple of weeks ago, before Ravi, I wrote abt cynicism and how I believe that ultimately it has to do with the fact that I allowed the vission of this world to cloud my vision of God. Something Ravi said really caught me. He said - "The only way to transcend the physical and the sensual while retaining their essential features is to bind them to the sacred." What he basically meant is that the only way for the things we see ard us, what we label as "reality", can only be overcome if we acknowledge that its real, through the perspective of God's presence and God's greater reality. I think that's what I allowed to happen to myself. I've learnt to see things detached from God's reality. So I construct for myself two sets of "realities", one where God reigns supreme - that's what I preach on the pulpit on sundays, and one where the axioms I proclaim on sundays inevitably falls short - what I espouse in my everyday life.

Maybe that's why my whole week goes by in such confusion and depression, and I find myself unable to experience the joy of the Christian. I can appreciate the long-suffering that a Christian goes through, and even the fulfillment that results from my faithfulness, but somehow that joy has always managed to elude me. And if joy is supposed to be central to the Christian faith, then I shd be having a different experience from what I'm having now. Its one thing to have someone say how nice a person I am, yet I think its a totally different thing for someone to tell me that they see the joy of the Lord in me.

Think this thought shall stick with me for a while...

Pondering...

Reflecting...

Praying...