"Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has plenty;

not on your past misfortunes of which all men have some."
Charles Dickens

Monday, May 23, 2005

flood of thoughts....

1. My friend is going away...... for a long, long time!
She's going away for a whole year, perhaps longer. My dinner kaki, my friend, my confidant, my sounding board, my reality check, my babysitter....

Feel very apprehensive at this thought and yet it is only less than 2 months away! Sadness, terror, are my first reactions.

I don't like long distance relationships of any sort. I live with them but I don't like them... grumble, grumble....

2. What am I doing?
I am at the place in my life where I am asking myself if I am doing what I am supposed to be doing. I need to seek the LORD in earnest yet I am reluctant, feeling like I want to be right (as usual!) and think I know best!

3. The aftermath of Camp... TERMITES!!!
My kitchen cabinet is infested!!! noisy fellows who have been VERY BUSY while we were away at camp! aiyoooooh! praying that infestation is isolated or isolatable! otherwise, gotta move to new house liao!!!

4. Backache n such!
I got a bad, bad backache. As long as I remian motionless, I am ok. This is probably the result of the hotel bed and long car ride and AGE. I sure hope I will be better tomorrow..

5. Being a Christian aka yourself all the time!
I heard that the campers in the bus were less than civic minded on the way over to Cherating and left a mess in the bus. I feel very "pai-seh" cos the bus driver would have had to clean the bus after us. His job was to drive us there, not to clean up after us and our mess. It would have been really nice if we left the bus the same way we found it... clean and tidy. What would he think of us Christians? They're just the same as anyone else, or worse?

This "being a Christian" thing has been on my mind much. Do we tire of "being a Christian" and wish for time off? When we do take time off, what happens? Where do we do it? We must not do it when the leaders are around, lest they think badly of us..... We do it when there are non-Christians are around so we can "blend" in...

I had a non-Christian friend who said that he hated hypocrites. I agreed with him but took light of what he said. As I got to know him better, he showed me examples of what he meant and then I understood better.

It's not only when we say certain things in front of one person and something else to another, it's also the way we behave in the presence of certain people too.

I understand that different people have different interests and because of this, we may steer a conversation one way or the other. Granted that this is true, I can't help but think that sometimes we go on a tad too much on "spiritual" things to church people...

I wonder if I am judgmental here...

I wish that we could talk about all sorts of things to our brothers and sisters and not have to restrict ourselves to "CHURCHY" conversations, sprinkling in jargon here and there to seem more spiritual to our church friends. I am all for "blessing" people and speaking life to them, but let us not restrict this to conversations with believers only.

I also wish that instead, we could speak in sincerity to all who cross our path. That we could "bless" someone who is not a believer, and tell a bro or sister in Christ of an upsetting incident where we were at fault and did some "un-Christian like" things and ask them to pray for us instead of reserving that for our non-believing friends (who we think might justify our actions) for fear we might be judged by our brothers and sisters for having reacted wrongly.

I think we can and should do this but I too, have failed miserably in this area..

Let me try again, let me try again...

1 comment:

Charis said...

It's so easy for us to 'be hypocrites'. And yes, churchy talk really suck sometimes. We will not always be in the mood for 'how are you sister? God bless you sister. You are such an en-cow-ragement to me.... blah blah...."

We are supposed to be the ideal family. Families are supposed to be able to pour out the good and bad.

But I must say, sometimes, it's how people respond to us. When we want to be truthful about something, the other person has this weird look on his face and in turn tries to say something nice to justify the matter. I also notice that when the church approaches people to do something, most do so with the expectation that the other person will say yes. It's so hard for someone to say no for valid reasons, because if you say no, the other person will look at you in horror.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's a two way traffic thing. It will be hard to be truthful if the other person is not open to truthfulness in the first place.