God's Wheel

GOD says to me

with a kind of smile,

"Hey how would you like

to be God awhile

And steer the world?"

"Okay," says I,

"I'll give it a try."

"Where do I sit?

How much do I get?

What time is lunch?

When can I quit?"

"Gimme back that wheel," says GOD.

"I don't think you're quite ready YET."

- By Shel Silverstein

Still my favorite children's poet.

It was tough this past week receiving news about Grandma. We have been calling up doctor friends and friends of doctors to see what alternatives there are. Can't help the helpless feeling but am reminded by this little wry poem that God is in the driver's seat.

Drawing Mr Franklin

The fifth and last charcoal assignment of this school year. Time flies.

View from a Bombay Taxi

I think, mostly, I felt puzzled during the trip.

Even though I knew (from watching the news and National Geographic for years) that India was a country with widespread poverty, I did not expect there to be so little respite from it anywhere in the city.

Other than the inside of the hotel that we stayed in, and a couple of restaurants that we went to, Mumbai was completely unlike any developing country that I have been too. If people had not been talking about it so much in the recent years, I would NOT have believed this is one of two of the fastest growing economies in Asia just by visiting the city.

It's not that the business activity isn't there. In fact, one could even say that it is pretty conspicuous - names like Tata, Reliance, HDFC, the same ones that I have dealt with frequently in the last 18 months, are everywhere in billboards. Just talking to the people, you know that there is an enormous amount of activity being carried out here.

BUT, where are the swanky glass buildings that should be rising above the slums? Where are the toll roads leading to the city from the airport? Where is the new airport? Where are the dozens of new apartments and hotels that should be adding glitter to the city?

I have been to a fair number of poor third world countries on business and vacation, so it is not that I am not used to seeing rundown buildings and primitive transport facilities, however in every of those cities, the development is clear and present. There is often massive construction going everywhere and new infrastructure (incongruent as they may be to their surroundings) spreading out from key corners of the cities. I had imagine India to be like China, say 10 years ago I first went there to work. It was nothing like it even then.

In Mumbai, I was hardpressed to find evidence of that development. There was no identifiable financial district. The so-called prestigious office towers were flaking and rusting on the outside, and I can hardly see any new ones being constructed. My boss, whom I was travelling with, commented that the city looked almost exactly like it did 6 years ago when he visited.

On Wednesday morning, my colleagues and I were stunned to find ourselves standing in front of an old complex, with squatters living just outside the driveway that was full of organic and inorganic litter. Stray dogs, many with open wounds and missing limbs hung about outside the compound (docile though they were). We were at Matfatlal Centre, a decrepit office block where my bank, and other many other international financial institutions were located.

Over the next few days, I talked and talked to people. Or rather people talked to me, and I listened to them and learnt more about India than I ever did in my entire life. I realized my knowledge of the place was almost at ground zero, a deeply ironical fact given Singapore is a mulit-racial society and I grew up with Indian classmates and neighbours.

So what do I think of India now? There were things that deeply impressed me - how highly educated and internationally exposed people were, superb service almost everywhere I went. I really enjoyed meeting my colleagues there, who were so wonderfully warm and friendly. But, I have no conclusions, not even a real insight, of the place, to speak of, even after the week's immersion. There is too much that I still need to learn about the place, from its history to the way business is conducted there. I think I will go back there again soon - both to sight-see, as well as to work. And I am telling myself to approach the country more respectfully than I have in the past.

After all, I have merely caught a glimpse of India from inside a Bombay taxi.

India

There is no substitute for travelling to a country and seeing it for yourself. I am on my first trip to India, and catching my first glimpses of it. Incredible.

On Predestination

"If God would have painted a yellow stripe on the backs of the elect I would go around lifting shirts. But since He didn’t I must preach `whosoever will’ and when `whosoever’ believes I know he is one of the elect.”

-Charles Spurgeon

Two Questions

Two questions were asked at DG this week . They led to rather lively discussion during the session, and some alone-time thinking thereafter.

The first was actually the ice-breaker question:

[What is your name]....and what is one thing that you are discontented about?

The "main" question from this week's topical study (we are taking a break from Hosea) was:

Do you think that the gospel should be contextualized to modern culture in order to win more people to the Christian faith?

The two questions were probably not intended to be related. But it did occur to me afterwards they are connected to "needs" at different levels. The first may bring up our (unmet) needs as individuals, and the second has quite a lot to do with the "needs" of modern (and specific) culture and society.

Question 1 : On Discontentment

The answers ranged from the hilarious to the poignant. We were variously discontented about work situations, family pressures, the dismal traffic condition, the lack of storage space at home. We also shared about the more amorphous feelings of discontentment - the lack of previous enthusiasm for things, the "blahness" life on this side of heaven, the loss of the first love of the gospel.

(Sidenote: even though sharing was honest, most were also eager to give thanks at the same time for other things, so the expressions of discontentment did not cause the group to lapse into any sense of despair or disgruntledness. That must be in contrast to many a secularist lunch conversation with colleagues, and a reminder of why it is important to meet God's people regularly.)

But I do think, if we all dared to let our discontentments (trivial or serious) percolate to the bottom of our beings, we would find, as the thinker Pascal says,

"This is our true state.... We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end,. When think to attach ourselves to any point and to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves usl and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes forever. Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination, we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation where on to build a tower reaching to the infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks and the earth opens to abysses. (Pascal, Pensee no. 72)"

"Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlonness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation and despair. (Pensee no. 131)

This is our condition, no matter how well our circumstances, or how mild a temperament we have developed -i.e. inconstancy, weariness, unrest.

Yet despite this condition, and its attendant miseries, we wish to be happy, and only wish to be happy, and cannot wish not to be so. And we will find the true gems of happiness from time to time - love, beauty, friendship, the good and real things of this world. Our discontentment seldom completely destroys our desire for such things, and yet the discontentment does not go away. Therein lies the paradox of being human.

The truly converted Christian is always the person who must first have known the dreadful existential experience that Pascal describes above. For there is no real "living" without having died this death. It is a critical part of the conversion process that the seeker must feel the dreadfulness of his existential existence and at the same time, the desire and hope to live. Knowledge of the condition, without hope of the other will not get him there. The hope of getting there without the knowledge of his real condition is, according to the bible, futile too. (See Luke 11:44. Ps 41:8-9)

But then, the ten of us sitting around that table on DG are Christians. Why then do we still feel discontent? In fact, it would appear that the Christian might indeed fear the infinite abyss literally more than anything in the world. Why is that so?

I think Soren Kierkegaard's classic essay on "The Sickness Unto Death" explains the real fear, and why we as Christians need not lose hope:

"What the natural man considers horrible -- when he has in this wise enumerated everything and knows nothing more he can mention, this for the Christian is like a jest. Such is the relation between the natural man and the Christian; it is like the relation between a child and a man: what the child shudders at, the man regards as nothing. The child does not know what the dreadful is; this the man knows, and he shudders at it. The child’s imperfection consists, first of all, in not knowing what the dreadful is; and then again, as an implication of this, in shuddering at that which is not dreadful. And so it is also with the natural man, he is ignorant of what the dreadful truly is, yet he is not thereby exempted from shuddering; no, he shudders at that which is not the dreadful: he does not know the true God, but this is not the whole of it, he worships an idol as God. Only the Christian knows what is meant by the sickness unto death. He acquires as a Christian a courage which the natural man does not know -- this courage he acquires by learning fear for the still more dreadful. Such is the way a man always acquires courage; when one fears a greater danger, it is as though the other did not exist. But the dreadful thing the Christian learned to know is "the sickness unto death."

I think what Kierkegaard is saying is that as Christians, we will actually be more and not less conscious of discontentment than the rest of the world, but because of that deep consciousness, it drives us to seek courage in a way and from a source that the world does not know or have. We need not belittle the things in this world that gives us joy, but we also need not feel guilty about feelings of discontentment when these things fail to give us joy. Both the joy and the disappointment is only meant to serve as a driving force to seek the Person who gives real significance to our existence.

The above may then lead us to answer, to quite some extent, the second question of that night.

(to be continued)

Grey's Anatomy (and Pain)

In this week's episode of Grey's Anatomy (which I happily managed to catch by a mad dash to the KL airport to catch the 7 pm flight back), the interns treated a little girl named Megan which had a (not unknown) genetic defect which caused her not to feel pain. Because she was an orphan and was bounced around foster homes most of her life, the condition went undiagnosed. She had wounds all over her (some of which she stapled with iron staples - ouch!) and through an X-ray, the doctors discovered she had serious internal injuries and bleeding. The little girl believed she had superpowers (well, not unusual for a kid to believe) - and would get into fights in school with bullies, asking them to punch her in the stomach repeatedly, since she felt no pain.

Was reminded of the book co-authored by Philip Yancey and Paul Brand, "Where is God when it Hurts", still the very best book on pain and suffering that I have read.

"It is pain that allows me to be free. When I started to study medicine I would probably have said that my purpose was to relieve pain and suffering and to save lives. Today after a lifetime of treating those in pain and those without pain I would say that my purpose is to relieve suffering and to improve the quality of life. The main difference is that then I thought of pain as an enemy, while today I think of it as a help, indeed as an important element in the prevention of suffering.

How often I have heard people complain about God when they have pain. They do not blame God for giving us a signal that tells of disease or injury, but why make it so unpleasant and why not make it easy to switch off? Now I know why. Today there are ways to switch off pain. Pain killing drugs quickly become addictive because the addict seems to be living in a problem free and pain free world."

Ya, too many of my actions and decisions are centred around pain-reduction, , without recognizing the benefit of pain in encouraging spiritual growth, whether for myself or others. Lord, please help me not to reach out for Telenol too quickly, all the time.

Japan Hour III

In recent months, I have been discovering that, for every 3 persons I know, 1.75 of them are serious Japanese anime fans. I am talking about the very non-hentai, non-manga-looking friends that I have known for months in church or at work. I have witnessed, on more than a few occasions, small groups of anime-ists huddled to together after Sunday service, animatedly exchanging silver vinyl discs and the latest anime blog news. Of these people, 0.75 of them are known to have developed a common pattern of rushing home from work and downloading anime series from those mysterious sounding websites, watching them into the wee hours of the night, while husbands are left to tuck themselves to bed, and the rest of us throw anime sheep at one another on Facebook.

Well, I am not exactly in that rapid-growing percentile of the population yet, but I do enjoy a good Miyazake film once in a while. In any case, it seemed like a great excuse to get good folks together for an evening, to use the condiments I brought back from Hokkaido a few weeks ago, and so we had the Episode III of Japan Hour at the Treehouse last weekend.

With the help of skilled tofu chefs, crab declawers and yaki grill experts, it was another cheery evening of hearty but relatively healthful eating. C&H even provided brilliant "real-time" Hello Kitty fireworks displays on their laptop which they video-ed in Uji, Kyoto. We were a tad disappointed with the anime movie chosen to be screened that night - Goro Miyazake (son of Hayao Miyazake) does have some way to go before he captures true Ghibli magic. Generally however, I think people were glad to have found new soulmates in one another and we toasted the happy occasion variously with Choya, Asahi and of course, Yakult. :)