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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, February 03, 2010


There is a landfill. it sits across town, maybe even across state, from where you live. every evening, you put the trash out and someone brings it there. and then, there's a furnace. they're not the same.

no difference with our sins. sometimes, we push our sins around, from one compartment in our hearts to another. and we dig deep holes so we can bury it and keep it far from sunlight. and we think that's a good way to deal with sin. just like how we think landfills is a good way to deal with our trash.

but we can bring our sins, like our daily waste, to a furnace, where it can be burnt up. we can light a match and watch it go up in smoke. scientifically, furnaces generate heat and heat is an energy source. so burning up your daily trash is one way to renew energy source. unlike a landfill, it's not just a spacehog. it's actually good for something. and so is bringing your sins to get burnt up.

so the question for myself - and all of us, i guess - is this: have we been moving our private trash from one place in our lives to another, digging holes to cover it up and dressing it so no one notices? maybe it's time we went to the giant furnace on which Jesus hung, and emptied our trashcans at his feet. after all, did he not become trash so that we didn't have to keep it all inside?

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Genusfrog [ 4:47 pm ] | 3 comments

Thursday, October 29, 2009


What i'm about to write is something i'm still wrapping my head around. if it's offensive, or factually erronneous, or full of holes, engage me on it.

*

a lot of christians keep a close eye on israel and the israel situation. because of the origins of our faith, it's not only natural but almost intuitive to do so. i also know a lot of christians who are very pro-israel. my own pastors are leading the line on this, so again, i think this position is fairly mainstream.

but there are things about israel - and christians' unequivocal support of them - that bug me. i guess at the heart of what i'm struggling to understand is this: is the israel of today the same israel as that of that of the old testament? or perhaps i could finetune the question a little.

is national israel today the same israel as that of the old testament.

one more finetune.

is national israel today the same "israel" as that of the old testament.

i can understand it if christians are looking at an old testamental israel with hopes of the endtimes. i can understand it if christians bless an old testamental israel because God said that whoever curses them will be cursed. it's not that i don't get it. but what israel are we fixated on today?

the old testamental israel was an israel of a testament. they were an israel of a promise. this present day national israel does not look like that israel. when i read the papers, it hurts to see that the national israel of today's trust rests not in their God YHWH, but in a nuclear stockpile and an allyship with the united states. what is so "israel" about this israel?

i'm a chinese christian. i know nuts about what it means to be semitic. but i know that israel's finest moments have always been when the odds were stacked against them and they trusted God to deliver them. sometimes, by sheer miracle (the parting of the sea), sometimes by sheer absurdity (jericho's walls), and even many times by military strength (david's many conquests). but the God of the old testament also did say that it is not by might nor by power but by the Spirit, and this is the same God who wouldn't let David build his temple because of the blood he shed.

as a christian, i wish i had a testamental israel to look towards for the hope of escathology. but no such israel seems to exist. the existing israel's trust is not in God - chosen people of God that they supposedly are. they protect themselves like how north korea and pakistan protect themselves. what's so special about an israel that looks like that. maybe it's also apt to ask what's so special about any christian nation that protects itself like that. nothing. nationalist militaristic nations are, if i may adapt the yiddish term, goyische, and i have no intention to fixate on them.

national israel today is a goyische israel.

why is the christian church so fixated about a goyische national israel?

i'm not. i'm not even impressed.

nothing about the middle east today, and its conflicts, inspires me to love and revere this same YHWH more. as a bypassing observer of the mainstream press, the nation we learned to love in the old testament today bears for me an embarrasing testimony to the rest of the world.

just more of the same weapons, only in different hands. really, what's so special about it?

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Genusfrog [ 3:10 pm ] | 0 comments

Thursday, September 24, 2009
BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS

A peace keeper keeps peace from the position of peace. A peacemaker makes peace from a position of conflict. I'm a peace keeping kind of person. But peacemakers are more blessed.

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Genusfrog [ 9:54 pm ] | 0 comments

Monday, June 01, 2009



Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they shall be filled.

when i seriously get into a piece of work, i tend to forget everything else. i forget that i need to sleep. i forget that i need the loo, or to shower. and i forget to eat and drink.

maybe that's a bit like the beatitude.  

because when we seriously get into the business of life, it's easy to forget about righteousness. it's certainly easy to not hunger and thirst for it, like how we hunger and thirst for food. hunger and thirst for food is habitual. it's routine and repetitive, and in a span of one day, we are physiologically reminded of it three maybe four times.

but righteousness is not like that, is it? who among us has a spiritual pop-up that reminds us, on a daily basis, that it's righteousness time?

yet, the beatitude is instinctive and daily. it's not implying something seasonal, or in spurts. godliness is an everyday thing.

blessed are those who long for godliness every day. they will have a meaningful life.

i'm amazed at the nourishment metaphor. jesus once said "my food is to do the will of him who sent me". that's his food. that's what he hungers and thirsts for. it's what nourishes him. fills him. satisfies him. satiates him.

sustains him. 

doing the will of the father. that is food. like clockwork. hunger and thirst.

blessed are those who feel the need for God's work. they will never run dry. 

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Genusfrog [ 12:20 am ] | 0 comments

Monday, May 25, 2009



Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth.

really?

unblessed are the dominating, the earth won't go to them.

really??

not the mighty? not the forceful and powerful and triumphant and aggressive? not pushy people? not the bloodthirsty, ambitious and ruthless people? not the bullish? the dominant? the bossy?  

not the type A personalies?

the colerics? not them? i always thought that the colerics will inherit the earth (and the phlegmatics won't notice it!)

oh wait. it says inherit. 

inherit.

the colerics rule the earth, that we know. the mighty and forceful and aggressive stampede through business and politics. the bossy boss. and the dominant dominate. but inheriting the earth is not the same thing as rampaging all over it. rampage is taken.

inheritance is given.

inheritance involves a father making a choice. and the bible says that God chooses his meek children to hand the earth to.

so what really is meek? i've learned that meek is not weak. it's not timid. the original greek word is praus and it denotes "strength brought under control". they say that praus is like breaking the will of a horse until it will let someone sit on it. before you break its will, it's strong but you can't use it. after you break its will, it's still strong, but now you can... 

harness it. 

meekness, it seems, is like that. the earth is not going to people whom God can't harness. 

blessed are those who'll let God harness them. he'll entrust the world to them.

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Genusfrog [ 12:48 am ] | 0 comments

Sunday, May 17, 2009



Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted.

what is it to mourn? do we only mourn when someone dies? is it...

grief?
sorrow?
a deep sadness?
feeling depressed?
feeling broken?

feeling totally shattered?

what does a mourner look like? he weeps. he's inconsolable. in ancient israel, when you mourn, you put a sackcloth over your head. it looks weird. it must be depressing to sit around with your head in a sackcloth for days. but they did that when they mourned.

loss is absolute, but grief is relative. i've never lost anyone close to me before, but i've felt the grief of a mourner. it's painful. and until someone walks you out of it, it's a very dark place to be in. like being in a sackcloth.

that someone walking you out of it, that's comfort. someone holding you when you're crying your eyes out, that's comfort. someone putting things into perspective, that's comfort.

comfort is soothing. it is care. it is reassurance. it is relief.

blessed are those who are broken inside. they will find relief.

but isn't this circumstantial? can you be constantly sad? what if you've nothing to mourn about?

really?

can't be constantly sad? where i have lunch, there's this lady who goes around hawking some really useless furry toys to the office and construction crowd. she's never gonna make a sale there, and even if she does, it's never gonna sustain her. what's she doing there? who does she need to feed? where did she get those toys and how long has she been trying to sell them? how many of those things does she need to sell before she can go home each day? and what's it like for her to go home every day with her basket still full of nonsense?

she breaks my heart.

and life must break her heart.

and if you were her, it's not hard to be constantly sad. and sorrow is no longer episodic.

blessed are those who are brokenhearted because of life. someone will care for them.

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Genusfrog [ 3:25 pm ] | 1 comments

Tuesday, May 12, 2009



Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

poor in spirit.

as opposed to... rich in the flesh?

who's rich in the flesh? tycoons? self-made men? people who are sufficient with the things of the world? what does that make the poor in spirit?

people who are insufficient in their own spirit? a poverty of the will?

bankruptcy inside?

and what's this kingdom of heaven?

a kingdom is a territory. a sovereign territory. like saudi arabia. but this is the kingdom of heaven. it's the sovereign territory of heaven. with a demarcation. and a king. Jesus said that when john the baptist showed up, the kingdom of heaven started advancing. people started laying hold of it.

it's not an earthly kingdom. maybe it's not even a cosmic kingdom.

i've heard people say that it's a kingdom in the heart. that since john the baptist arrived, this kingdom was doing all that advancing in the hearts of men. and people were repenting.

blessed are those bankrupt inside. God's kingdom will advance in their hearts.

does that make sense? what if you were not bankrupt inside? what if you were fortified inside. say, maybe you have a fortress for a spirit. can the kingdom of God advance in your heart? in your inside?

blessed are those who know that they can't do it by themselves. their hearts will become God's territory.

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Genusfrog [ 2:20 pm ] | 0 comments

Tuesday, May 05, 2009
ON TAKING YOUR CROSS

Hey. wait a minute.

Jesus says "anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me" in matthew 11 when he sends out the twelve. the cross doesn't show up until much later, maybe about two years later, when Jesus actually gets nailed to one.

was he prefiguring it?

isn't it strange that Jesus should tell his disciples to take up a cross long before Jesus would himself be subject to it? wouldn't they have found his invitation quite random? surely they had little concept of what the cross would mean to them at this stage.

say you went up to your teacher or pastor or hero, and he said "put a noose around your neck and follow me", wouldn't you find it strange? 

i know what Jesus is doing here. he's inviting them to immitate him, because he knows that one day, they too will have to take up their cross and die for the truth. it just never occurred to me that Jesus was talking about the cross long before the crucifixion. 

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Genusfrog [ 11:50 am ] | 0 comments

Tuesday, April 28, 2009
TO QUOTE: ON RELEVANT NONCONFORMITY

"What if we could say to our kids, 'You are different; you are Christian.' We are a contrast society, not just a hip counterculture. What marks us as different must be more than something external or superficial; it must be a peculiar way of living ... Our hope is that the posmodern, post-Christian world is once again ready for a people who are peculiar, people who spend their energy creating a culture of contrast rather than a culture of relevancy. If we are to be relevant to the world we live in, we must be relevant nonconformists." 

- Shane Claiborne, Jesus for President

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Genusfrog [ 1:41 pm ] | 0 comments

Sunday, March 22, 2009
BIBLE IN A YEAR: REPEAL

In chapter 1, pharoah decrees that "every boy that is born" must be thrown into the nile. we know that moses escaped this watery death, but why is it then that he had male contemporaries? were they all older than him? aaron, his brother? the beat up hebrew in chapter 2? the two hebrews who were fighting later on? all the migrating israelites at the crossing of the red sea? just how many "every boys" slipped through pharoah's net? and how long before that decree was repealed? ancient egyptian enforcement musn't have been much better than malaysia's. 

(Exo 1-2)

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Genusfrog [ 5:19 pm ] | 0 comments

Saturday, March 21, 2009
BIBLE IN A YEAR: LONG

At the risk of sounding as whiny as king david, here's a piece of psalm that adequately speaks about my dread at reaching this part of my bible-in-a-year schedule.

Psalm 6:3
"my bones are in agony ... My soul is in anguish. How long, O Lord, how long?"

to which i hear the creator of the heavens and earth reply "pretty long. you're only on psalm 6 - we managed to put together 150".

to which i say that this is positively the last time i'll whine about the psalms. 

(Ps 6)

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Genusfrog [ 5:06 pm ] | 0 comments

Friday, March 20, 2009
BIBLE IN A YEAR: WHINING

I don't know if you've ever heard anyone say this before, but i'm not a big fan of the psalms. i can't get into it, not more than one psalm at a time and even then, the tone of the psalms always irritate me. king david comes across as a big whiny spoilt brat who, no matter how many times it happens, never gets used to the fact that if he has enemies, he needs to stand up to them. nothing wrong with getting the Almighty involved, but it doesn't make his whining any more readable. okay, so it's made its way into holy scripture and so i'm supposed to like it. but i'm struggling. lord, he knows i'm struggling. maybe one day i'll write a whiny psalm whining about the psalms. 

(Ps 1-8)

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Genusfrog [ 4:12 pm ] | 1 comments

Thursday, March 19, 2009
BIBLE IN A YEAR: GUILT

It's only just occurred to me how matthew ends with two hangings. one is, of course, the hanging of Jesus on the cross. the other is the hanging of judas on a tree in a field. the bible says that he was struck with remorse. He had already tried returning the silver coins to absolve himself of some of the guilt, and when the chief priests with whom he'd been dealing refused to accept it cleanly, he tossed it at them and went off to hang himself. i don't know. this is a very sad picture for me. it's a picture of someone who cannot get over his remorse, and is literally defeated by it. i know cos i know what guilt feels like. but i still don't know guilt that feels worse than death. i guess judas knew that kind of guilt.

(Matt 27)

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Genusfrog [ 10:36 am ] | 0 comments

Friday, March 13, 2009
BIBLE IN A YEAR: COMFY

Why didn't jacob's family just pack up and go back to canaan after the famine was over? didn't they see it coming, that one day a new pharoah would preside and not value their contribution? by the time their family got to egypt, it was already two years into the famine. surely they could have returned to canaan before they got enslaved for the generations till moses. why didn't they just get up and go home? was goshen too comfy? 

(Exo 1)

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Genusfrog [ 12:00 pm ] | 0 comments

Tuesday, March 10, 2009
BIBLE IN A YEAR: PATRIARCHS

The more i read the patriarchs, the more messed up they seem. it's true. and a part of me is quite pissed off that the heroes of my faith were all so disfunctional. i mean, think about it. abraham went from town to town telling everyone that his wife was his sister. he even got caught out by two kings! he then agrees when his wife sets him up for a one night stand with her maid. great job for a guy whose greatest contribution to the faith was having the balls to kill his own son. and what happens to that son when he grows up? isaac, great patriarch isaac, went and also told other kings that his wife was his sister, and then got caught making out with her in the yard. what's wrong with these people?? i don't geddit!! and we're just getting started, mind you. isaac's greatest contribution to the faith was probably handing out only the most collosally amazing blessing... to the wrong son! and the son who got that blessing? jacob, oh great father jacob. not enough that he conned his brother into selling him his birthright at his moment of weakness, he had to con his brother again by stealing his blessing (complete with fake hairy arms and a costume change) and later in life he would also systematically con his father in law of all his flocks. somewhere between all this shenanigans, great jacob manages to sire twelve sons and one daughter by sleeping with two wives and their respective maids as the two leading ladies jostle for children they can drag and drop into their folders. someone tell me. why are they all so twisted? i've read genesis about a gazillion times now but seriously, i've never felt the full power of three generations of unadulterated disfunction prior to this. the patriarchs are just out of this world. i've got no proper vocabulary to describe them further.

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Genusfrog [ 10:59 am ] | 0 comments

Thursday, March 05, 2009
BIBLE IN A YEAR: SIBLINGS

Genesis is full of sibling rivalries. and it's weird - God seems to tolerate it. ever since he favoured abel's gift over cain's, it's been a nonstop theme that pops up eveywhere. noah's sons (ham v shem & japeth), abraham's sons (ishmael v isaac), isaac's sons (esau v jacob), jacob's sons (joseph v 11 brothers). i'm thinking, what's God trying to say with all these brother wars? 

love? peace? reconciliation? or are we really in the ballpark of "I did not come to bring peace, but a sword"? is God trying to say something about allegiance? blood is thicker than water. but maybe God's trying to establish something thicker than blood. but why does he use fragmented brothers to tell this great big story about allegiance to him? i've been thinking about this for a whole two days but i still don't get it. do you?

(Gen 16)

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Genusfrog [ 2:56 pm ] | 0 comments

Wednesday, March 04, 2009
BIBLE IN A YEAR: CITY

We always think of the tower of babel as just a tower but it wasn't. it was a city with a tower. the folks built a city of bricks and tar and the tower really sounds more like a finishing touch to me. and when the bible talks about the project getting canned, it says "so the lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. that is why it was called babel...". no emphasis on the tower. no reason for us to mythicise it as the main protagonist of this episode.

all these years, i've never really read the bible for myself, or read it for details. so i guess i had it coming getting surprised like this. 

so thank you misleading bible editorial heading. i'm reading the chapter for myself now and striking out your chapter heading. i'm writing in it "city of babel".

(Gen 11)

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Genusfrog [ 2:35 pm ] | 0 comments

Tuesday, March 03, 2009
BIBLE IN A YEAR: VOYEURISM

Halfway through the Bible, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the Semites and the Canaanites were cosmically meant to always be kicking at each other. But last night, I realised that it all started with a really dumb fiasco involving a plastered Noah who got too much gear off and some voyeurism on the part of his son, Ham.

The best part about this is that there are some really bad ham sup jokes in here just waiting to be made.

(Gen 9)

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Genusfrog [ 10:16 am ] | 0 comments

Monday, March 02, 2009
BIBLE IN A YEAR: WATER

Creation is weird. there's this thing called "the deep" and darkness hovered over it. and there's this thing called "the waters" and God's spirit hovered over it. then what does God do? He sticks this thing in between "the waters" called sky. Now if that's weird, it's really because my mortal brain cannot process what it means to have water, or any matter for that matter, above the sky. as far as my natural build can comprehend, the closest thing that can get above the sky is a very tall bird.

(Gen 1)

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Genusfrog [ 10:48 am ] | 0 comments

Sunday, February 22, 2009
THERE WAS LIGHT BEFORE SUN

Genesis 1 is weird.

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Genusfrog [ 10:03 am ] | 0 comments