Modem's Working Again!!!

I'm finally back.

My modem's been out for some time, and after that its been a crazy time of replying some overdue emails.

Sigh.

Anyway, so much has happened, I dun even know where to begin.

By right its been a really great week. Met up with Paul on tue for my birthday dinner, where we pigged out at Fish & Co. Had another feast on fri at Shangrila's The Line, a new international buffet restaurant that promises to bring your waistLINE to new horizons. On thus I met up with the worship team in True Way Presbyterian Church to work on a combined worship. Saturday was Charlotte's 21st birthday party. And just tonight I had a pretty good run.

Yet in midst of all this, the whole thing abt Sho dying somehow still bugged me. The last email I received before my modem crashed was Jody sharing abt his prayer request for the message he was to give at Sho's memorial. Naturally, the first message I looked for my mails came in, was how the memorial went. And I guess its always moving to see how an occasion like a funeral could cause so much hope to arise out of people. Nevertheless, something abt the knowledge of how death has hit someone whom I know, no matter how remote, always seem to have affect me. Especially when it hits someone so young. I mean, someone's grandparents who passed away... that I can understand. And somehow the week passed by with just that hint of a cloud over me, and a rather sober mood that tempered all the fun I was having.

Anyway, today during the sermon, something that my pastor was saying just triggered my thoughts, about how love so often really does run contrary to reason. It was like a mini epiphany, sitting there and almost half dozing off (Wasn't the sermon. I was, for some strange reason, exceedingly tired.) when that one line he said suddenly triggered the train of thought.

I guess the guiding principle I try to live my life by is that love has to fly in the face of reason to a pretty large extent, in order to distinguish itself from mere pragmatism and reason. When a mother looks at an errant child and chooses to still believe in him despite recognizing and acknowledging his misdeeds... that's how we know the depth of the mother's love. Something that flies in the face of all conventional wisdom, that stay "in spite of all this, I will...".

And mebbe that's the hardest part of love. Both the giving of it, as well as in the taking of it. When someone you really cared about lets you down, or disappoints you, not only are you expected to forgive, you're expect to walk the second mile, and give back exactly the same level of trust as you did before, often in the knowledge that you will only be hurt in exactly the same way over and over again. On the flipside, knowing how undeserving you are of someone's love, you tend to run away, so as to not run the risk of disappointment if you are indeed not offered that gift you so long and crave for.

Strangely enough, that was the main message I took home from the sermon. Cos it was actually a minor point that my pastor was making. Yet it served to remind me again of the unconditional love we're all called to lavish on one another. My birthday was a time when I saw very tangibly the care and love I've been privileged to have been on the receiving end of, and of which I've tried to return in kind on the days leading up to my next birthday. Yet loving each other is so easy when its expressed with ice-cream, feasts, and just good times spent with one another. The harder part is to still be looking out for each other when we're so bogged down by our own burdens and concerns that everything else gets overshadowed.

Something tells me our ministry honeymoon is coming to an end, and things are gonna start to become more and more challenging. I pray that this will be a reminder that I keep myself anchored to, that our ministry will always be based on love for one another instead of on agendas. The onus is on me to not only learn to love those who labour with me, but to also learn to love reciprocally, that I learn to expect and accept being loved by them.

Grins.

I know it sounds really easy.

But its hard for me.