Held

Yes I feel rather piggish, you know lazy, greedy….though not half as intelligent as the pink (or beige, or brown, or black) creatures are supposed to be.

Par example, (and btw that’s one of the few phrases I consistently catch while listening to French radio in my desperation to help myself with the French listening test that’s coming up! anyway..), I just gobbled down a slice of the most delicious Bombe au Chocolate from Le Pain Quotidien thanks to my wonderful housemate who da-pao-ed it for me. First tasted it in the charming rue Mouffetard branch in Paris, and was very glad to find out that they have branches in London too! (Marylebone, Kensington and Royal Festival Hall if you’re interested.)

So, now it looks like I just had a chocolate dinner! That after my chocolate cereal breakfast and my honey-lemon pancake lunch! Which is especially bad because I haven’t been exercising, or leading a “healthy lifestyle” of sufficient rest, nutrients and all the rest of it. “Règles pour vivre en bonne santé”, something we recently read in class, to learn l’impératif and vocab I think, but anyway, I violate most of the rules quite thoroughly, like “faire du sport deux fois par semaine” (yes I find it hard to manage exercise twice a week), or “dormir 7 heures par nuit”, and most definitely not “manger du poisson une fois par semaine” since I stopped buying salmon.

But, I have also adopted a new non-piggish habit: of climbing and squeezing past this particular set of gates to get to my school library each Sunday. Rather monkey-like really, and very un-glamarous, but beats wasting ten minutes to walk all the way round the compound to the only open entrance. (haha, ying can be zebra/flamingo-like, I can be pig/monkey-like!) Why they cannot open the pedestrian gate I really do not understand! Especially since there is a guardhouse there, and the guard sitting there must see me and many others walk pass, AND must know we’re climbing through the gates since there’s nowhere else to go once we pass them by. AND they always grin slightly as if they know what I’ve just done when I pass them again on my way out. Hmph. So, they could very well watch for suspicious persons walking in nicely and lady-like through the gate if they are watching for suspicious persons walking past to clamber up and squeeze through right? If I see them again next week, I think I shall ask why.

It’s been a funny weekend. Yesterday morning, the little girls in my class were happily filling in their worksheet and colouring, when one of them suddenly asked, “Are you married?” I must have reacted with disproportionate horror, because another one quickly said, “But you’re older, you’re grown up, we thought, you CAN be married!” And then the littlest of them, just six, comes running over to announce very excitedly, “My friend, she’s got 16 boyfriends!” But she did try to reassure me when I asked how old she was. “I’m 6, but my friend, she’s 8!” It’s so funny, even if possibly slightly worrying, they live in such a different world from the one I grew up in. I shall remember these moments and not the rest when I think of those children and the school.

—

We all find it hard right, to understand why people supposedly walking in the light still flail frantically as though in darkness. All too often, I cannot understand myself, and that plank in my eye, blocking out much in my own line of vision, somehow magnifies the speck of sawdust in my brother’s. It takes much to remember that “partners in the gospel” (Phil1:3:5) are always works-in-progress, not a single one has “arrived”, not till the day of Christ.

So, as we sang in church:

“We turn to Christ amid our fear and failing,
the will that lacks the courage to be free,
the weary labours, all but unavailing,
to bring us nearer to what a church should be. “

“We turn to Christ from all our restless striving,
unnumbered voices with a single prayer -
the living water for our souls’ reviving,
in Christ to live, and love and serve and care.”

We turn to Christ.

Daddy says I’m still besotted with snow, and well yes maybe, but I really haven’t seen much of it, nor on all that many occassions, so it’s legitimate. (: But I can’t take any photos this year because my camera is still suffering from “memory card error”, and I haven’t had the opportunity to find out what that is or how to fix it.

But yes, there’s a glorious blanket of clean, white snow outside. It’s amazing how something as cold as snow can warm my heart so.

Having had a few interesting discussions about the intensity of emotions recently, I went and dug up this article I read awhile back which made something of an impression on me then. (can’t remember if I’ve blogged it before actually!) Thought it worthwhile to put this excerpt up here, if anything to remind myself to stop dwelling on/obsessing over my own thoughts.

Connecting

And there is the other side of longing — for whatever reason, it just happens. We long for the company and attention of certain people for no clear reason. This longing might have a physical dimension, but the physical element (if present) is only part of the whole experience.“Some people come into our lives and have a gift to give us by arousing intense longings,” wrote Gail Godwin in Father Melancholy’s Daughter. “Often they are not all they could be, in themselves. But some intensity in us exactly matches some intensity in them, some essentialness in us meets a similar essentialness in them…. Whatever the outcome of these feelings, mightn’t they suggest the possibility of a union far better than anything we have so far known?”

When I first came across this quote, it was as though a window had been opened in a room that had been too stuffy for too long. I realized that the phenomenon of feeling a connection with another person is just part of life. I suspect it could happen to one person multiple times during the course of a life, because we are created for intimacy. In this life, the most intimate bond is marriage, but in the next world we are not given in marriage. It is impossible to guess how we will know each other in the world to come, but we do know that the aching and separation we experience down here will cease. Only then we will understand what love is.

Perhaps part of what we call “infatuation” is the experience of seeing, for one moment, the real person before us, in all their God-given glory and fragility. People’s faces, especially, can break our hearts. “There is nothing so astonishing as a human face,” wrote Marilyn Robinson in Gilead. “Because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it.”

Loneliness and longing are often tied together. Many of us long for people with which we can’t (for whatever reason) have the level of closeness we might crave. Still, we can still see our longings as a bittersweet gift if we can look up from the tangled web of our own desires and see that they point past us, past the other person, to something more infinite.

Eternal Possibilities

These experiences hint at the type of closeness we hope for in the world to come, where we will be known, even as we are fully known, as we experience an intimacy with God and all redeemed creatures that we can only faintly imagine now. The aches we experience remind us that we still live here, in our shadowy bodies and broken world. But our longings can also remind us that we are moving toward something more.

On the most fundamental level, our aches point homeward. As Frederick Buechner wrote, “Beneath the longing to possess and to be possessed by the beauty of another sexually — to know, in the Biblical idiom — there lies a longing, closer to the heart of the matter still, which is the longing to be at last where we finally belong…. When I think of all the beautiful ones whom I have seen for maybe no more than a passing moment and have helplessly, overwhelmingly desired, I wonder if at the innermost heart of my desiring, there wasn’t, of all things, homesickness.”

Sometimes we have to dig deep to understand what we’re really longing for. Often the things we think we want wouldn’t actually satisfy us if we could have them. Our deepest desire, buried under and running through all the others — is for union with God and all redeemed creatures. That desire comes from the One who planted it in us, wounding us that way so that we can follow our aches home.

Stacks of things-to-be-done surrounded (and still surround) me on my desk, under it, by the bed, but me, I was daydreaming. The way Dot described on Friday- replaying scenes of my childhood through my mind without really realising.

While thinking about something someone said about prayer, I remembered quite suddenly and vividly this one Sunday in Sunday School – this was the time when I was that closet cynic and rebel making snide remarks in her head over every single little thing adults in church did or said- that time when us upper-primary sunday-schoolers had to sit/perch on the tiny chairs in the AVA room in the kindergarten block (can’t believe I know the exact room) listening to auntie LL talk about… praying.

The memory’s so distinct I wonder why it never came to mind before! I was sitting in that corner from which you can’t see the main door, and sarah and amelia were there too (we used to learn the week’s memory verse last minute before class during announcements or brief talks like the one auntie LL was giving). She started talking about emergency numbers like 999. “You can’t dial 999 for no reason or you’ll get into trouble! But I tell you there’s another secret number, can anyone guess what it is? It’s what I call God’s telephone number. Anyone know?“

And me in my 12-yr old head was thinking: obviously we can’t guess so just say la, and then thinking: that’s clearly just to get our attention, and: what’s the link man among other things. But she did get my attention I guess. “It’s 333!” Another groan in my head. “Actually, it’s Jeremiah 33:3, so if you remember 333 you’ll never forget the verse.” And I think: so silly! the 333 combination can be found in any other book in the bible what, how to remember it’s Jeremiah right? Probably also: the verse isn’t a telephone number, it’s just asking you to pray like the bible always does (it does, but it talks about way more too)

But you know what, I remembered! Jeremiah 33:3, and what it says, and it’s been some 9 years since the fact. I had to look it up.

“Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.”

It’s so strange! Especially since there are all these other ones from Jeremiah that I know by heart or are familiar with cos they’re so commonly referred to, but still had to flip and flip and flip to find. Like:

29:11 “For I know the plans I have for you”, declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future. then you will call upon me and come and pray to me and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.”

or

17:9 “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind, to reward a man according to his conduct, according to what his deeds deserve.”

or

10:23″I know, O Lord, that a man’s life is not his own; it is not for man to direct his steps.”

Anyway, I’m thankful for auntie LL’s giving to the Lord, the horrible snide thoughts her kind words provoked, only impressed deeper what she’d shared on my heart, so subtle! I’m thankful, for divine love, mercy, grace; that despite my rebellion God should pursue me till I gave my life to Jesus; that 9 years down, today remembering all of it, I can say yes, I have called to Him and indeed, He has answered.

Here’s the chorus of a song I’ve been listening to:

Help me not take for granted
that You should speak to me
That I should hear Your voice
sharpening my days
Help me not take for granted
that You show yourself to me
Jesus Christ my Lord
who alone has seen Your face
What sacrifice, You made to set me free
So wash me of my guilt,
To God I can draw near, in faith.

- God Speaks, Hwee Yen (from a cd I picked up last summer while back home)

I miss them. The ones who’ll always be younger than me even when we’re all old and wrinkly and grey-haired haha, sisters are special friends.

And the ones to whom we’ll always be little girls. haha. The ones whom God blessed with 4 rascals beautiful girls! But I do do thank God every single day for my mummy and daddy, two people who love each other, love Him and taught us all to love Him too.

My family I think, is one of the bestest of the many wholly undeserved gifts in my life. Someone was talking yesterday about pre-London syndrome, you know, not wanting to leave Singapore, and since my last departure to London is possibly long-gone, I’ve identified in myself a post-London syndrom- missing home. Which somehow is always intensified in the month of January, when people fly the air of Singapore back to London with them after Christmas breaks. Haiyah, I wish I were home…oh why won’t one of you come online now?!

oohooh! guess what skype is ringing! “shi hui (sweetblueberries) is calling”.. yay.

“After forty days Noah opened the window he had made in the ark and sent out a raven, and it it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth.

Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. But the dove could find no place to set its feet because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark.

He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf!

Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.”

- Genesis 8:6-12

The dove returns to the ark and into Noah’s hand.
The olive leaf, of peace and life, is brought back not by the black bird of prey that is the raven, but by the white, mild, humble, patient one that is the dove.
Uncertain hopes replaced with certain joy, an olive branch, new life is possible after all.

I said, “Oh, that I had the wings of a dove!
I would fly away and be at rest-
I would flee far away and stay in the desert;
I would hurry to my place of shelter,
far from the tempest and storm.”
…
But I call to God,
and the Lord saves me,
Evening, morning, noon
I cry out in distress,
and he hears my voice.
…
But as for me, I trust in you.
- Psalm 55:6-8, 16-17, 23