Losing The Plot

Today I heard 飞越迷雾 being played on the radio. No, not the one written by Weilun, but the one by Emil Chau.

A quick calculation tells me that its about ten years now, since my life was changed so much by that camp we held in ACS. From the spiritual encounters I had there, to the kind of friendships and fellowship that were made there… Back then I got to see how God works when a community is able to be of one heart and in once voice, working together to serve one God… I started to think back to all the people who had worked together in that camp, people that I got to know throughout the six months’ of prep that led up to the event itself… Its hard to imagine just how much has changed since then…

10 yrs on, so many of us have gone our own separate ways. Some went their own ways to pursue their studies and chase after their dreams. Others sought a church that better suited them. Some left, burnt out by church and friends alike. Others just split fellowship due to differences in ideals, unable to accept the differences in each other. I remember thinking to myself that such a community held together by a common love and pursuit of God MUST be one that could last a lifetime. Of course, I’d imagine that there would be some who moved on as time went by, that some of the bonds would lose the intensity it had… but never would I have imagined that in a span of less than 10 yrs, the sort of fellowship and bond that we had enjoyed back then should have come to such a state.

I can’t help but note that the fellowship was not merely diluted over time as other ministries pulled each other away… nor was it simply a case of people naturally moving on in life. So many of the fellowships were forcefully broken, and the friendships either irrevocably broken or else have been reduced and diminished to a kind of wariness and distance between each other that totally cheapened the kind of bond they used to have.

It made me wonder…. Even if every one of us had been guilty of adultery, murder or blasphemy, would it have warranted the kind of state our fellowship with each other has degenerated into? Because whatever the reason might have been for the estrangement or alienation, the big picture of how little acceptance we ultimately have for each other is more than just a little frightening. I think of the kind of fervor we had back then in serving God together… how we’d be watching each other’s backs and carrying each others’ loads…. And I look at how we now subtly hint at each other not doing enough while stabbing them in the back… and I see for myself that as much as fellowship can be such a beautiful thing, a broken fellowship can be so much uglier.

Its such an ugly thing that you’d have thought all of us supposedly mature Christians would have been aware of how blatantly wrong it is… but no… we all somehow manage to justify our broken community using scripture… giving reason for why we choose to alienate ourselves from each other. We argue over a life that fails to meet the standards we set down for each other (in the name of Christ, of course), as if anyone could ever meet them to begin with. We fight over church and ministry strategies and break bonds of partnership we had with each other, as if those strategies bear consequences that are greater than stumbling the brother or sister we so callously discarded.

It always starts out so small… a discontentment with someone that we chose to paper over… the cracks underneath continue to grow, and in time a chasm has sprung up in the friendship. At that point it time, it take so little… anything, in fact… to tear away the paper and expose the gulf that now divides the two brothers and sisters. We then start to blame each other for the distance that has been allowed to grow and fester.

你迷了路觉得人心不古
山高水低看不见来时路
你迷了路爱恨悠悠忽忽
峰回路转逾走不出白云深处

In a different context, I suddenly see what an apt song we chose to be our theme song. Our church seems to have been engulfed in the mist… and we all seem to have lost our way. What’s the point of a booming and successful ministry if I look back and all I can see is a trail of destruction and ruin? At what price would I have then built my success on? Aren’t we all one family?

飞越迷雾把生命看清楚
明明白白掌握你的路
经过跋涉之后你总能够
拨云见日重回到最初

This song was played on the radio as I was on the company bus that ferries us from the MRT to the building… and as these thoughts and memories came to my mind, I was surprised to find myself tearing. I mourned the fact that I am unable to celebrate the euphoria and the experience of that camp, in light of how it proved to be such a transient accomplishment. The scars of broken relationships and shattered fellowship is a legacy that continues to this day, and I guess no one can say he or she hasn’t been guilty of it as well. And I guess until we can fly out of this red mist, all the talk of building a ministry and building a community will always be met by me with a tinge of regret and cynicism… after all, if something that great can be all but swept away to naught in the space of less than a decade, what chance do we now have? Until we somehow rebuild the ruins, what’s the point of trying to build new things from amongst the debris?

I guess part of me really wishes for what the song says… that in light of so much that has gone wrong, we may one day be able to “经过跋涉之后你总能够拨云见日重回到最初”.