God's Own Fool

Funny that over dinner I shd with Paul yesterday I shd have just mentioned that the most sensible woman in the world can be an absolute wreck of nerves and senses when it comes to affairs of the heart. And perhaps himself being a pretty good benchmark, lemme expand that to include all people on planet earth. Every bystander can see in the most crystal clear manner possible, just why the relationship is an absolute diasaster - yet the party involved will somehow cling on to the "hope against hope" that time and stubborn resolve would prove its critics wrong. And how we celebrate the odd story in a million where indeed the critics have been confounded, where love in all its grit has triumphed over all.

All that is a prelude to what I just learnt tonight. a friend of mine, inadvertently at first, perhaps... let slip that she had driven all the way to her ex's house, so as to somehow allow the proximity to him (in this case, his car) temper the grief of the broken relationship. Of course, my first reaction was one of astonishment at the desperation the gesture more or less signified. Yet the secondary reaction was one of a sheepish recognition, since I myself have many times been guilty of the same tendency, if not the exact same act.

The many times I would find an excuse for myself to pace Holland Village and Jelita Cold Storage, hoping for a glance of her, an opportunity to 'accidentally' bump into her. How it took me the whole of 2 years to wean myself off the habit of instinctively scanning every room in church that I walk into, hoping to find her there. The times back home when I'd imagine the conversations I'd have if I did bump into her... I guess we all have our indulgences as we try to let go, little by little...

I guess God made love to always be the most illogical thing in the world. When the bible talks abt how the foolishness of God is the wisdom of man, I can think of no better example than the love God displayed. How else could we ever explain a God dying for the sake of us? Sometimes we've heard the message so much that we've become numbed to the sheer ludicrity of such an act.

Somehow God dying for us has become quite a logical thing to do.

And I guess its right about that time that we stop being captivated by the magnitude of God's love, measured against the sheer inanity of His sacrifice. Tonight I find myself very much humbled by the timeless truth of God's love showed in how He sent His Son to die on a cross for my sins. Because when we appreciate the beauty of the act, and not be so quick to apply theology to it, the absurdity of God's gesture would be many times more foolish than the most ridiculous act you could imagine a lover to be capable of. Much more stupid than what my friend did tonight, or that I ever did in the past.

I find myself very much in the mood to celebrate love, suddenly. I spent my dinner trying to wrack my brains with Paul, for a song to sing at my sister's wedding. I've lamented about how my lack of a love life seemed to have stifled my ability to write lyrics that exalts love. I wasn't half as keen as Henry & Bernice were to find a christian song, figuring that a secular one would do just as well. Yet right now, there is a much different picture in my mind, of how the love of a man and woman will always look cheap if it exists in and of itself, measured against the incomparable love of Christ. To thus celebrate a marriage without that Sovereign Love as the backdrop of it all would very much cheapen any love story, no matter how much the couple in question feel like they're fulfilled.

Michael Card always writes songs like no one else I know. His lyrics paint pictures in your head that would have put to shame anyone who believed that "a picture paints a thousand words". Tonight this song somehow surprised me by touching off something inside of me.

God really makes all things beautiful in His own time.