Blender

My house is undergoing renovations. In a few days' time, my family will be evacuated to my grandparents' next door, hence I will not be able to blog. These are some thoughts, just random and all 'blended' together, that have come to me over the last two days or so.


Just now, I was reading through C.S. Lewis' The Horse and His Boy. I liked the very last paragraph:

Aravis also had many quarrels (and, I'm afraid, even fights) with Cor, but they always made it up again: so that years later, when they were grown up, they were so used to quarrelling and making it up again that they got married so as to go on doing it more conveniently...

A friend of mine believes we are likely to quarrel more and more in days to come. Now if we keep making it up again each time, I wonder if our future might not lie along the same path...


I was born on the 31st of July, right in between Julius and Augustus Caesar, two of the greatest rulers Rome would ever know. My Zodiac sign is Leo, reminiscent of the great lion Aslan. My Chinese name is wang, 王, which refers to 'king.' So many kingly symbols, yet I am not a king, heheh... still, it's a nice thought.


As I try to do my backlogged Maths homework, I finally realise why I dislike it so much: I'm a person of words, not numbers or symbols. And not just any kind of words, but on the side of literature and language. Hence I find even Hebrew and Greek less puzzling than Mathematics, but history and economics on the same level of obscurity as, say, Physics.


Mart de Haan, president of Radio Bible Class (RBC) Ministries, publisher of the well-known Our Daily Bread devotional guide, wrote the following in his Decemer 'Been Thinking About' column, which I received via e-mail:

Christ may come today. Or He may come tomorrow or 100 years from now. But that’s His decision, not ours. Our part is to make sure that if He does come today, He will find us doing His business rather than our own.

Doing His work means looking for His return, but not waiting. It means living with an expanded anticipation of possibilities.

Maybe today we will find the grace of Christ to be better than the relief we are seeking. The apostle Paul repeatedly asked the Lord to remove an unnamed “thorn in the flesh” (2 Corinthians 12:7). But when the problem remained, Paul surrendered to God’s purpose in the pain. He discovered that he would rather experience God’s strength in his weakness than to have no problem and no sense of how desperately he needed the enabling grace of his Lord.

Maybe today we will have an opportunity to bring the rescue of Christ to someone in need. This is the high purpose of God. All who have discovered the love of Christ have been called to care for others as He has given Himself for us. Our call is to work together with Him as His hands and feet to the needy and lonely people in our lives. The challenge is not merely to wait, but to keep on praying, working, and watching, in the spirit and purpose of our Lord.

Maybe today we will see our Lord rescue us through physical death. Because we don’t know if Christ will return in our lifetime, we need to be realistic about our own mortality. While the will to live is a gift of our Creator, we must also come to terms with a willingness to die in Christ, if that is the will of our God. Only by being ready to meet Him in life or in death can we find the courage to live without an obsession with self-protection and fear.

Maybe today Christ will come. This is the hope that re-emerges when we have our eyes refocused on the ultimate rescue of Christ.

The parts I highlighted above resonate very much with me. I believe this is what incarnational faith, which is a reflection of the great Incarnation some two thousand Christmases ago, is all about:

To know that grace is present in the midst of trial and pain, to be 'wounded healers' (to use a Nouwen phrase) ministering to others in their need, to be mortals aware of just how fleeting our lives are, and to be concerned with the business of the Kingdom rather than the businesses of the earth.


I really admire Isaiah the prophet for saying in Isaiah 6:8, "Here am I; send me!" But more often than not (and a lot more so lately), I find my sentiments echoed by Moses more than most other prophets; "Here am I; send somebody else."

In the Renovare Spiritual Formation Bible (NRSV), Gregory of Nyssa is quoted in the profile on Moses. He wrote in The Life of Moses;

This is true perfection: not to avoid a wicked life because like slaves we servilely fear punishment, nor to do good because we hope for rewards, as if cashing in on the virtuous life by some business-like arrangement. On the contrary, disregarding all those things for which we hope and which have been reserved by promise, we regard falling from God's friendship as the only thing dreadful and we consider becoming God's friend the only thing worthy of honour and desire. This, as I have said, is the perfection of life.

There is yet another prophet in the Bible with whom I identify, more so than Moses (for Moses was a leader, yet I hardly consider myself one; David [Tan], yes, but not me). His name is Jonah. Here I need to reflect a little bit more, but I will certainly write about it in due time.