Huh??

Random thoughts at 12:30 in the morning.

What if I go to bed and don’t wake up?

I miss the old kind of playgrounds that I had in my neighborhood when I was 10.

I should have jogged more this week.

Even if there was a cure for my procrastination, I’d probably never get down to actually curing it.

There’s so many jobs I’d have loved to given a try at, and being a counselor would surprisingly have been one of them.

I miss my dad’s old Toyota.

And I REALLY REALLY miss my dog. (I still think I should have dug up the urn containing his ashes when we moved house.)

I think sentimentality is my greatest and most annoying trait and weakness.

I’m failing miserably in my ambition to finish reading a book every 2 months.

I need to be more disciplined in my quiet time and scripture memory. Right now, its erm… not really in existence. Guess the good news is that only way is up.

Whatever happened to the companies that made OHPs and transparencies? Did they many of them suddenly go bust?

I think I’m a terribly unattractive man who has grossly overestimated my ability to be charming and likeable. And my ego has just chosen to reject that statement as being true.

I seem to have hit my quota of movies. All I’m nowadays interested in doing is to watch re-runs. An age thing, maybe?

I haven’t had prata since forever. Ugh. Then why the hell am I still so fat? No wait. Ah yes, it’s the durians. And the damn mooncakes.

I’m beginning to think that I’m not really a techie sort of guy. I can’t rattle of tech specs like many of them do. I’m more of a rave-abt-tech guy, whose thrill is more in wanting to buy it, than actually going ahead to own it.

Somehow, as much as I know bitching abt people is not a very church-leader thing to do, there’s a part of me that loves the hypocrisy of slamming someone here, then offering my brightest smile when I bump into him/her.

Why is it so hard for me to just go lie down on the damn bed and try to sleep?

Yes, I’m having trouble sleeping tonight.

What's In A Name?

Just the other day as I was with a friend, we started talking about a common friend we had, and we laughed as we jokingly wondered why we bother still remaining friends with someone like him.

I guess that thought festered in me.

I started thinking about the institution of friendship, and just how haphazard it is. What exactly prompts/drives us to take up someone as a friend, and what exactly would it take to cause the opposite reaction?

I mean, the label itself can be so ambiguous. Afterall, ANYONE can be a “friend”. Some use it as a greeting “Hello, friend”, the same way someone else might go “Hello, stranger”. On the flipside, there are those others who go to great lengths to differentiate their friends. They have “acquaintances”, “casual friends”, “church friends”, “school friends”, “colleague friends”, “best friends”, and some whackos even have a category they coined as “top of the world friend”. (No, I’m serious!!)

Where do we learn all these stuff from? Take a look at the namelist in your handphone. Would you consider those inside your friends? How do you draw the line?

And what about those people you would describe as “we were once friends”? It could imply everything from a fallout to merely losing touch. Or, in most cases, it was a deliberate choice to drop the friendship, hence the losing touch. We would admit that in these cases, there is such a strong contingency of biasness at work. The things we readily forgive in someone are absolutely unforgivable in another.

I say all these not to raise rhetorical questions in the hope of sounding smart. In fact, I know how silly this all sounds. But they say that before 20, you collect friends, at 30 you sort out those you wanna keep, and after 40, you work at keeping those friends. So even though I’ve dropped the ball quite a bit in recent years with regards to friends, I’m at the point in time where I am wondering how I should be sorting out my friends.

And this whole “friends” business is just so slippery! I mean, everyone knows what a friend is (duh), but try defining what it means to you. The minute you come up with a definition, I PROMISE you, that there will surely be a friend in your list that contradicts your definition. Unless, of course, you only have, say, 5 people on that list. OR that you have a super-duper generic definition, like “a friend is someone I know.” (In which case, Lee Kuan Yew would qualify as a friend, even though technically it is an extremely one-sided friendship.)

I’m beginning to think that the best place to start with friendship is with “Permission”. If I choose to permit it, the worst kind of friend that only exploits you, stands you up on appointments, and never calls you first, will continue to remain a friend. And I have also in my rare moments rejected a friendship that was offered, since I don’t really like the person in question.

And of course, this is a deliberation that swings both ways. I also have had friends who seem to have deliberately chosen to drop me from their life. Friends whom I have asked out for catch up, who rain-checks me for 30 times in a row, and never calls again. Friends who have gotten married and then sends out the impression that he’s too busy with kids, family and work. Friends who have gone overseas then gone missing. Most of the time, it is easily accepted and becomes a mutual agreement to call time on that friendship. But there are times when it does hurt, when I thought we had something that was stronger. It left me wondering where did I misread the signals, and embarked on a one-sided friendship, or what had happened that I had missed which changed things?

Still, I guess I’m glad for those that have still stuck around. I have talked, in this blog, about friends that I have missed, and those that I have chosen to. And so naturally, the sentiment was either one of nostalgia, or disappointment and even anger. Yet this would be more of a time to celebrate and give thanks for the friends that are still sticking around in my life. Many of whom I only meet up with one or twice a year, but for whom I still bear a certain amount of affection for our shared experiences in the past.

With any luck, when I turn 40, and if this blog is still around, I would have something new to say, and would appear less confused about this thing called friendship.

God of Wonders

This Saturday will mark a milestone in our church, with the official opening ceremony of the Bible House. And yet I approach the event with such conflicting emotions, that I question if its just me (I can never be satisfied), or if there really are problems that I should rightly be unhappy about.

I used to say that “Lethargy is our liturgy” as a cute little jingle. Now, its becoming a very sadly tiring reality, with nothing cute about it left. I get really angry sometimes, thinking about the number of people around me in church who sit blithely by while there’s so much they could do.

Am I taking it too personally? Am I wrong to be so angry? I mean, I’m having so much difficulty finding people who are willing to just manage the powerpoint slides. How difficult can it be to reach 15 minutes before service, or to learn how to do it? I wish they could hear their own lame excuses as they politely decline, thinking there’s always someone else to do the work.

Or scripture reading. Hong Li even has to read the scriptures on occasion, since we can’t find anyone willing to step up. I bet a lot more of them will step up to give a Chinese business presentation if their boss asks them to. But if the church is asking, then they suddenly can’t muster enough effort to try. The lame excuses about how their Chinese isn’t up to standard sounds more like “I’m afraid to lose face in front of everyone if I read something wrongly. And that’s a lot more important that availing myself to God”. Sheesh!

How about worship leading? I admit that it’s a quirk I have, but I feel we need to be very careful with who we set up on the stage for worship leading. Just because you can sing doesn’t mean you are a worshipper. And since the worship leader is essentially a “lead worshipper”, how can you set such a low benchmark when selecting worship leaders? Of course, I now sound like I’ve set myself up on a pedestal. And yes, I know none of us are worthy. But I think certain criterias such as regular and faithful attendance of service, responsibility to fulfill the roster arrangements and availability to attend worship team activities are a very minimal criteria. Tragically, many of us treat worship leading as just a “thing” to get over and done with on Sunday. And so I’ve had many worship leaders who came and left in the past, and now there’s only me, Serene and Hong Li left.

I know I do my fair share of bitching and moaning also about what’s inadequate with the church. But as I told John before, there’s a difference between complaining to another who is stuck in the mud also, as opposed to one who stands on the side and just points. So many times I hear people come to me with seemingly “constructive” and well-meaning advice. Yet essentially, all they’re saying is “YOU go do it. I’ve OBSERVED the problem. Now YOU go solve it so I can reap the rewards.”

(Takes a deep breath.)

Of course, pulling it all in, the sheer weight of problems that I see in the church only causes me to marvel more at how everything is somehow still holding together. It can only be the Providence of God, keeping watch over His church. It tells me that this is indeed a very special place, one which God has been exceedingly gracious towards.

The way we stumbled from one crisis into another, yet still manage to have come so far, is what keeps me going. Like how everything invariably goes wrong on a mission trip yet God makes something good out of it, I likewise find myself strangely encouraged at the end of the day. After the anger subsides, I am left to again marvel at how God makes miracles everyday out of the broken and unworthy. I look back in sadness at those who have given up and left this church or left God, and wonder what at what it could have been had they still been around.

Yet I cling to the three things I’ve learnt – God is good, He is in control, and He will bring it to pass.