Love Of This World

I met Pastor Lijuan for lunch today. I've really missed my chats with her, both sharing with her the things that are going through my mind, as well as the things that I'm going through. She's been a real pillar in the second service for the past 4 years, seeing us through the really rough moments till what we have today.

I was sharing with her abt how easy it is to become very jaded, in light of the many unhappy things that I always see around me, of the people you trusted who turned out to be such a disappointment, of so much cruelty and banality that humanity seems to be capable of... and how that very often leaves me wondering about why I should trust anything in my life to be able to turn out good. It thus paralyzes me from living, since it leaves me very much afraid that the minute I start to believe in anything again, it will invariably leave me hurt and disappointed.

Then after I shared with her all this, she reminded me of some of the spiritual giants of the past, the "desert forefathers" of the faith. Of how whenever they hear of more evil and more tragedy in the world, it drives them to have an even greater and deeper love for the people and the world. Therefore despite all that they see and hear abt what's going on around them, their response is always one of gentleness, of grief and of sorrow.

And that really got me thinking. Because I remember a time when I would grieve at hearing of bad news. I would react when I see news of poverty, of disaster, of injustice. After that, I would start to tell myself that its too tiring to live life like that. If I were to always allow myself to be overwhelmed with sorrow whenever I hear about injustice in the world, I'd die of exhaustion - both physical and emotional. So I start to harden my heart against it.

I do this by letting myself to first be overwhelmed with anger upon hearing the news. Then I can justify to myself that I need to control my anger, because it is not good to harbor resentment. Thus I force myself to not respond to it in anger, the end result being that I stifle my emotions from having a response at all. In due time, my heart gets hardened and conditioned to what goes on around me, and I find that I'm no longer as tender hearted as when I first started out.

I guess that's why love is always the much harder route to take. It takes a real man after God's heart, as well as a great amount of courage and determination to always respond with more love whenever we witness or hear abt the lack of love shown to those in this world.

To be able to recognize that when Jesus wept over Jerusalem, that was our example of how we need to react to a world that we similarly see as being headed for destruction.

I guess as I am doing my reflections this season of Lent, this has been the most fruitful lesson learnt.
And its no wonder that it came out of a conversation with Lijuan.

Shepherds have a way of leading their sheep to where the grass is.