BLOGGER



Youngest kid of six with an inferiority and black sheep complex, but determined that God saves not just his soul to heaven but the remainder of his manic-depressive life, so others won't say he became a Christian and remained a jerk.


MAIN THEMES

On identity
i won't be transparent before i'm opaque. and you'll get to know me starting from the small things: who my favourite bands are. what kind of movies i like. who are my heroes.

On Christianity
I’m convinced that when confronted with sincere, real love, the Jesus factor will become obvious. But let’s not plant the cross before we carry it. I’m not trying to con you.

On dreams
Some dreams are meant to be achieved. I know that. But maybe other dreams are meant to drive us, privately. Never known to anyone but ourselves.


OTHER THEMES

On melancholy
It is a sadness that, when choosing between crying and sighing, will choose sighing. I'd almost say that melancholy is being sad about sadness itself.

On memory and nostalgia
It saddens me when life moves forward and people decide that certain things are worth forgetting.

On language
I've learnt that the word irregardless is filed as a non-standard word in the English language. That's a lexicographer's way of saying it's not a real word.

On politics
Crowds are fickle things. So when we stand in the thousands and cry against the present government, do we know who we're actually crying for?

On society
People always want the best for themselves. But I want to sometimes take second or third or fourth best, just so that the loser down the road doesn't always have to come in last. It must feel like shit to always come in last.

On growing old
Leasehold property make me feel sad. It doesn't matter how old the family photos are that you put on your wall. It's your family but it's not really your wall.

On philosophy
I ask you, if God loves everyone, and if God is also incapable of loving evil, how can there be such a thing as an evil man?

On a daily basis
One line quips, like this.


CHAT





Wednesday, March 30, 2005
ON GOD'S GRACE, FREE WILL AND A FEW COLD BEERS

I learned to drink beer in Melbourne. I knew how to drink beer before that but i really learned to enjoy it sometime in my five years there. of course, that is not to say that i am at all a drinker. i barely drank, even then, and i'd have perhaps a beer a month!

(but i did enjoy it).

i remember hearing all these stories, especially when i came home, of people who prayed and asked God to take away their tastebuds for cigarettes. and God answered. for these people, they miraculously stopped liking the taste of and everything associated with smoking. now, i never prayed to stop liking beer. maybe my mum did - she said she got worried, though the worry was, of course, unnecessary.

but you know what? i lost it. it was on the very day we shot the alleycats video (we being bracket pictures, my old job) and after the shoot, we sat down for a drink (we now being bracket pictures and the alleycats guys) and the beer tasted really foul. it was Tiger beer, by the way, and it tasted really awful. i never saw that coming. my boss took the rest of my drink and i went away that night wondering what had happened.

i tried beer again on another occasion, making sure it was a beer i normally liked. and again, it tasted really bad. i can't account for it, you know. i can only ascribe it to God taking away that enjoyment, cos i didn't find any joy in slugging down a cold one. i tried twice again, months and more months later, going for smooth good beer like Corona and they all tasted like piss. (if i knew what piss tasted like, of course).

so i laid it off. i gave it up to God and told Him that if He wanted to take it away, then it was completely fine. it's not a good habit anyway. i won't go as far as to say it's sinful to drink beer - i think that kind of legalistic morality misses the point. but i will say it's not a good habit and i was glad the habit had left.

and then, i went back to australia.

actually, it started quite a little earlier - with ironically, another Tiger beer while having a dinner of crabs with my cell (ok, so drinking beer on a cell outing might sound a bit odd, but i highlight again the paragraph above). and it tasted quite good. i perhaps had a beer or two across chinese new year and then, in sydney, it happened again. i enjoyed beer. what was going on? stella artois tasted really good. i looked forward to trying out my favourite beer, san miguel, to see if i "still had it".

and then i thought about God's intervention and how that might come into play. i thought about it - was it God the first time? i really disliked it, for no reason or other. maybe it was my mood, or the beer, or my tongue. if it was God, why did the liking come back? God takes and God gives, right? right. God gives.

this is my interpretation of things: God took away my tastebud for beer to show me something. i guess He wanted to show me that all big bad habits start as small bad habits. he probably also wanted to teach me that finding joy (in fact, any joy) in a drink (any drink) was ultimately a futile enterprise if that drink was not His Son's blood. and then - now here comes what makes our Father amazing - he gives me back my tastebud. after i've had time to reflect on drinking, on what it means, what it does, and after i've had time to consider what He feels about me drinking (albeit only once in a while), He goes and lets me like it again.

why does He do this? because He is a God of free will! how awesome is that? the same God who allows us to hate Him so that when we love him it is for real has allowed me the option to take a drink i used to like and now like again with the full knowledge of what it.... "spiritually" tastes like. it's a feeling and more than a feeling, i know it. He's letting me enjoy beer again so that when i abstain from the drinking habit, i am doing it not because i don't like the taste anymore but because i choose it. when He removed my liking for it, it was called Grace. now that He's given it back to me, it's called Choice.

i'm concluding that our Father in Heaven is a God of both choices and grace. He will always allow us to choose, but where He knows we aren't strong enough to choose well, He will be gracious and step in, soften things, make crooked paths straight. any christian will tell you that there are days where He answers prayers like a floodgate gone go. and then there are days where He holds back. it's the same principal here. my straight path has gone crooked a little now but i've got new shoes and a better map to take me there.

now, there are people who prayed for God to make the cigarettes kick go away, and it worked. i wanna find one and ask them if it came back.

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Genusfrog [ 8:04 pm ]

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