me.

i find it frankly disturbing that my writing style on any given day is directly affected by what i have been reading in the recent past.

dang that was phrased badly. but anyhow.

it's like, i have no identity, so to say. i write as such because i have been reading such writing. which frankly brings up a whole slew of issues.

i discovered this miming aspect of my writing some time ago, and it has recently resurfaced in this thing you are reading. it reinforces something which my youth pastor (to-peh) often mentions (with regards to us humans), summed up as follows: what goes in, must come out

the things we choose to fill our minds with are the things that will eventually manifest themselves in our speech, our actions, our values. try making a tape of someone saying "F*CK YOU!", put it to loop continuously, listen to it for 5 minutes each night. guess what you'll say when someone next annoys you? no prizes for guessing. it's kinda like how songs get stuck in your head. (incidently i had some other things to say with regards to the phrase F*CK YOU!, so i'm typing it out in hopes of reminding myself to do it sometime.)

which is why we probably should avoid watching certain things, and reading certain things, so on and so forth. the words of a song from sunday school...

O be careful little eyes, what you see...

goes on to

O be careful little ears, what you hear

and

O be careful little feet, where you go



It's not so much that you'll be tempted into black magic or witchcraft or whatnot, although i suppose there IS a possibility there... mostly it's more about your values... how you react to annoying people, how you choose to relate to people, and the things you view as important in your life. these things (and probably a whole lot more) can be affected by content you expose yourself to, and it's not wise. In the words of Paul(was it paul?) in his letter to the Philippians:

"Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things."

An important verse to practice to become more like Jesus.


I am hopeless at writing concise entries. If you still remember how i got onto that topic, it was from "a whole slew of issues". But i'm too lazy to write about that now.



later, peeps.

a fortnightly column?

i note from the dates of my posts that my last post was exactly 2 weeks ago. validating my fears that i don't have the persistence for this kinda thing. but i feel such an urge to share with people the things that i have, my perspectives of life, that give me such joy. most of the time, anyway.


i saw a couple of birds with "training rudders" yesterday. that's what it looked like, anyway. if it had been a still photo, you'd have thought that there was a little speck of dirt right behind the bird's tail. but watching it fly, i saw how the speck was a single long feather extending from the bird's tail... for better steering i suppose. and the term "training rudder" popped into my head... like training wheels on bikes, you know.

i saw a pair of cats yesterday, mother and daughter by the looks of it. one alot smaller, with exactly the same colorations, the smaller following the larger around. they were that beautiful tawny gold colour, the colour you only expect to see on lions and jaguars and the like. if you ignored the size of the thing, you could almost imagine the smaller cat being a jaguar, such were its proportions. saw the smaller one again on my return trip.


on saturday, 5 days ago, i was heading up to Woodlands to give tuition. a girl in school uniform approached me with a collecting tin - every saturday its Flag Day for some association or other. The girl was holding the tin and stickers in such a way that the stickers totally hid the emblem on the tin... i like to know who i'm giving to. found out that it was for the Down's Syndrome Association, which i think is a worthy cause, so i fished out my wallet, plucked out a ten dollar bill, and then i heard her gasp quite audibly. funny, but a little sad too, that it seems obvious to me that no one else saw fit to give any significant amount. i mean seriously, when you give, give like you mean it! what are you trying to say when you give 20 cents and take a sticker? "yes, i support you to the tune of 20 cents. Your charity is of such significance to me that i see fit to give you 20 cents." I don't think we were meant to follow the poor widow's example in giving two mites, but rather in giving ALL THAT WE HAVE. Colin Goh once wrote an insightful article about how people in Singapore were becoming desensitised to giving nowadays, giving as a form more than anything else.... how sad.


if you believe anything, yet act contrary to your belief, you are a hypocrite.
"Anyone who knows the good he ought to do, but doesn't do it, sins."

making excuses.

the reason i hadn't posted in such a long time was that i was rather overloaded at work... what with half the people in my office disappearing overseas and the workload mysteriously doubling, i was working non-stop for a whole week. since most of my posting is done in the office anyway, that kinda stopped with the dearth of free time. as you can see by this, the second post of the day, the workload has slackened off tremendously. thank God. was getting quite irritable by the end of last week...

which is a shame really, cos plenty happened last week, which i can barely remember... sad because i started this blog partly to keep track of how i would change as a person over the months and hopefully years.... and a week's worth of thoughts have slipped away..

so here i am, making excuses. not that i'm liable to anyone for not posting... but i'm sorry anyway.

listening to on radio now: Reach by Gloria Estefan. really nice song... heard it first when i was eight, i think. olympics 92? somewhere there lah...

.

Does it matter that i don't say witty or particularly deep things that might make people actually come back and want to read more, or that i rarely say anything here at all, given that my last post was what, 2 weeks ago? This blog is peripheral to my own existence, a frill, icing on the cake. At no point in time should i give my web presence more time than i do my Bible. After all, like it says in Micah 6:8

He has shown you, O man, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justly, to love mercy,
And to walk humbly before your God

7. The Reason for Everything

For the glory of Your name.


His glory is inherent in who He is. The love and grace and truth that is His very nature shines through like light, and that is His glory. That is why we glorify Him, for who He is.

We bring glory to God by doing as He commands us, for His commands serve to bring Him greater glory. We recall Jesus' prayer, " I brought glory to You on earth by doing what You commanded me to do."

To live for God is the only way to live. Everything else is merely existing.

-taken from Chapter 7, The Purpose-Driven Life, by Rick Warren

I testify to the truth of the above passage. ben.

serving the nation.

duty clerk tonight. basically means i stay in camp and answer phone calls, amongst various other duties. gets abit boring sometimes, but what to do?


what to do is indeed the question. this duty thing is a 24-hour duty thing, confined to a fairly small room. on this, my fourth attempt, i have finally succeeded at bringing a good book (The Unquenchable Worshipper, Matt Redman) and actually sitting down and reading it. was earlier unwilling, having given in to the lie that i wouldn't be able to concentrate on what i was reading what with all the high-ranking personnel wandering around and occasionally handing out punishments. but today's been good, so far. nothing much really happened. hallelujah. actually finished the book (it's really itty), gonna move on to some other stuff i brought. hopefully this duty will become a time of rest for me rather than a time of dread (the duty clerk tends to come into close proximity with a certain disciplinarian "affectionately" known as the DarkSide, who was mercifully absent for much of today).

one problem is that this fairly small room has a computer with an internet connection. rather distracting. bored guys should not have internet connections, for explicit reasons. also, the duty clerk tends to get "arrowed" with all kinds of menial tasks, which means that there might not be much spare time at all, which has its good and bad points. but the accomodations are pretty terrible by army standards. i get an old, worn mattress and the floor. and a pillow. and several phones to wake me at all hours. which is frankly unappealing, seeing as i've had trouble sleeping the past two nights. i remember back in JC, one frequent prayer pointer was for a good night's rest. i may start that again.

To quote Matt Redman(approx.), "Setting aside time for God often results in God becoming more apparent in all other parts of your life". I think this post might be testimony to that.

Did i mention that i've been on the verge of falling ill this whole past week? air-con is not doing my throat any favours, prospect of unsatisfactory and interrupted sleep tonight, and a packed schedule tomorrow. time to pray.

schizophrenic me (cont'd)

like the title says. cont'd.



or discont'd, rather. i had wanted to say some things on the dual nature warring in each Christian, and about the different facets of my personality which i saw taking sides in the fight, which i thought was pretty important... to know which parts of your personality to indulge and suppress respectively..... but it was all getting far too "me"-oriented, which was plain depressing. another time, perhaps....


in the empty space following that last "....", i found myself consciously trying to come up with something to fill that space with... something witty perhaps, or simply a comment on something close to me... struck me as being "poser"-ish... is it? i mean, just 'cos i need to think awhile to bring the thought to mind doesn't mean i feel any less strongly about it right?

right?




come to think of it, this entire blog is "me"-oriented. no wonder it seems depressing to blog..

schizophrenic me.

nine days since i last said something here. this is the exact reason i refused to start blogging earlier... i have such little perseverance. rarely stick to anything for any large period of time.


and yet its so important to write things down... writing things down gives more perspective somehow... forces you to think through the happenings and events that pile up in life like some major multiple-vehicle highway smashup... so important to preserve some of these strange, fleeting thoughts that help tease out the intricate weaving that makes up myself... who am i? to quote (roughly) from Sun Tzu:

Know thine enemy,
know thyself.
A thousand battles,
a thousand victories.

That's how i think it goes anyway. Know thy enemy, know thyself... both equally important in finding victory.

*this muse is interrupted for some breaking news! i heard a crow in the kitchen, and instead of strolling over to chase it out with my sheer bulk (compared to the crow, of course), i sprinted into the kitchen yelling incomprehensibly at it. and as it flew off, i laughed at the sheer absurdity of it all. quite fun actually!=)*

i browse some of the blogs of acquaintances i know, and these lyrics came to mind:

Blessed are the shallow
Depth they'll never find
Seemed to be some comfort
In rooms I try to hide

The last two lines are beyond my ken. someone explain them to me, if you will. But the meaning of the first two seem plain enough to me. Some people are so content to live life for all the activities and happenings around them... they never seem to stop and ponder the meaning and the wonder of it all... why do we live? people such as i, who agonise over philosophical things, things that seem of little consequence to this world that cares about material things... yet...

like Sun Tzu says, know thyself. ever since young, i've always tried to analyze myself and my motivations, driven by the love of God, to make sure that nothing i did was for my own glory. i have had sufficient trouble with arrogance in the past, and even now. looking up a bible verse just a little while earlier, i came across a mindmap i made when i was in... sec3? pondering why people raised their hands in worship, and whether i could or should do the same. and i figured it out, but i realise that i have forgotten, since i never wrote it down. must go find out again. i guess this is where the blog comes in.

i had more to write, but i'm tired. been a crazy week. i haven't even touched on the title of this post yet.... perhaps later.

shocking stupidity

literally.

trying to plug my handphone charger into the socket in the dark... usual 2pin charger, without the earth wire... managed to plug exactly one pin into the socket while my fumbling fingers closed upon the next plug.

i guess its one of those things you simply have to experience once in your life. wow. shocking stupidity.