not much longer to go

Parents rarely let go of children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them - a mother's approval, a father's nod - are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.

The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003) 
Mitch Albom

A few friends who read my posts said they did not understand what I meant when I first wrote about us willfully severing ourselves from our parents' lives two years ago.

And now Mitch Albom reminds me of the same thing again. My parents are in their late 50s and early 60s. There's not much longer of life now to go, unless they would return to Jesus...and rest.

mothers' day

Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! 

The Great YHWH (in Isaiah 49: 15)

Even if mothers lose their memory in trauma or dementia, and even when mothers cease to love us unfailingly and unconditionally, the Lord of the heavens and earth will not forget us.

I know that this will be important when I join many adults as orphans after their parents leave in disease and old age.

don't you worry

Adapted from Lucy Rose's Don't You Worry

what ordinary people can do

The first question we may ask is, Why do massacres and other atrocities...occur? On one level this is the easiest question to answer.

I don't mean to be glib in stating this so simply, but I believe the reason these offenses occur is because people choose to indulge their selfish and brutal urges to dominate the defenseless. They have chosen to live in rebellion against the God of love and goodness who made them, and now they are left with nothing but their own sinful nature, or whatever you want to call it - the unrestrained will to power, the unmediated libido, the nausea of existence, misogynistic male aggression. Scripture graphically describes such people:

Their throats are open graves;
their tongues practice deceit...
Their feet are swift to shed blood;
ruin and misery mark their ways,
and the way of peace they do not know.
There is no fear of God before their eyes. (Romans 3:13-18)

If people have no respect for God, no love for their Maker, I would ask the question another way: Why not pillage, rape, persecute and murder? If it feels good, and they can get away with it, why not? If God is dead or does not exist, as these people believe, why aren't all things permitted? Why should they restrain themselves? Because it's just wrong? Because it's not the way civilized people behave? Because what goes around comes around? Because they'll end up feeling terrible inside?

Within tidy circles of properly socialized and reasonable people, such appeals can seem like they actually have the power to restrain people from doing what they otherwise feel like doing. But in the real world outside the philosophy seminar room, oppressors frankly don't care that you think it's just wrong. Who are you, they ask, to foist your random moral intuition on them? Who are you to tell them or the lords of the Third Reich what civilized people should and should not do? If what goes around tends to come around, then there's no moral problem, only a practical problem of making sure it doesn't come around to you. They think, Fine, if being brutal makes you feel terrible inside, then don't do it. But it makes me feel powerful, alive, exhilarated and masterful, so quit whining - unless you want to try to stop me.

This description of a dark Nietzschean world of self-will - a vacuum devoid of moral authority or spiritual resources for good - used to seem excessively melodramatic to me. But then I got out more. The world is truly full of brutal oppression because humans have rejected their Maker, the source of all goodness, mercy, compassion, truth, justice and love.

Personally, I do not have a difficult time understanding that without God I am as lost as the oppressor. When I don't depend on the Holy Spirit moment by moment every day, I see the ugliness in me come out: selfishness, pride, insensitivity, anger, gossip, ingratitude, self-righteousness, self-deception, jealousy and covetousness, to name a few.

For most of us these latent forces of great sin are kept in check by various social and cultural restraints, but we should be under no illusions about what exists at the human core. Perfectly ordinary human beings are actually capable of being mass murderers. In Rwanda...When all restraints are released, farmers, clerks, school principals, mothers, doctors, mayors and carpenters pick up machetes and hack to death defenseless women and children. And this happened in a nation where 80 percent of the citizens identified themselves as Christian...the person without God (or perhaps worse, the person without God but claiming "God", "Jesus", "Muhammad", whatever) is a very scary creature.

Good News About Injustice (1999)
Gary Haugen

confines of fear

Have you smelled the fear of cats trapped in dingy, dirty traps by pest control companies? They cry for fear of their lives and it makes your hair stand and your heart frustrated and anxious.

The Holland-Bukit Panjang Town Council of Singapore has reverted to aggressive cat 'removal' to appease complaints from literally a few aggressively animal-hating (i.e. shouting and insulting animal carers)residents. I do not use 'culling' because it typically refers to selective removal of cats with biologically 'inferior' traits so that the other cats flourish.

Cleaners appointed by the town council to do this dirty job have locked kittens in electrical rooms to starve them to death. A shipyard worker and his daughter rescued one kitty out after they realized the mommy cat kept crying anxiously outside at an electrical room for her baby inside.

Another one was seen being strangled by a worker. Others have just been culled by pest control companies in traps so dirty that didn't matter since the cats wouldn't be in them anymore. One community cat who had an ID/microchip was put down by AVA...so what's the point of the ID if you don't bother checking?

A neighbor contacted the President of the Cat Welfare Society a few days back, and the cleaners in our area has been changing every day ever since. While the cleaner used to say that he was appointed by the town council to do so, now he only said "I don't know! I don't know!"

The trouble with such indiscriminate killing is, the cats that are complained about are not caught. The cats who are disruptive and pee to mark territory are the street-smart ones that avoid people. Instead, the people-friendly ones get caught as they are the easiest targets. In this aspect, cat killers are not different from cat abusers. Still, the complaints keep coming in because the territorial, dominant cat of the colony is still not caught - or even neutered!

Wasn't Singapore encouraged to convert stray cats into community cats just a few months ago? In Bukit Panjang, this has BECOME not true even though it has been for the past 5 years. Here, the only cats that can exist are domestic ones - all community cats MUST be put down.

Moral of the story: how long more can you go on appeasing the few, unrepresentative animal-hating people? And what has happened to us who live in the cities? Have we grown so used to concrete prisons and sterility that any nature that is not domesticated is inconvenient and abhorrent? 


"I've been worrying that we all live our lives in the confines of fear" - Ben Howard


----


June 11 update:


Great news! Holland Bukit Panjang Town Council decides to stop 'removing' cats from my estate and is now working with Cat Welfare Society and cat carers. It's also amazing to see how fast the person in-charge changed in his disposition towards cats, so fast it seemed unconvincingly...superficial. Anyway, you can read the awesome news here. 

real courage

King Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to deliver us from it, and he will deliver us from Your Majesty’s hand. But even if he does not, we want you to know, Your Majesty, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.

Shedrach, Meshach and Abednego, 6th c. BC

  

Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things - trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. 

Puddleglum to the White Witch, Narnia: The Silver Chair

I would call such zeal a farce if it were misdirected and insisted on something like "I believe shoes are living organisms". I would also not quote from a random piece of fiction except that C.S. Lewis intended Narnia to be an allegory of Christ, people and the Kingdom of God. But I am convinced that God exists and has reached down to us. I want to be able to bank everything on him - him or nothing...to have a faith in him that is courageous and big enough to trust in his infinitely bigger being. And to live my short time here according to what I know he wants me to do.

 

rest

You strive, old man
And you strive again
Your heart too proud to rest
You labor on, singing those songs
To cover your weakness


Do you fail to recall
Who you really are
And who caused you to be?
Return, old man
Return and rest
To a burden light and yoke easy

Abide in your Savior

Abide in his love

The labor of God is to trust - in his Son

All you possess -
Do you forget
As if by your own strength?
You earned it all
He gave you all
Everything you have


Your righteousness, your life to breath
Your daily bread and wine
Is blood, is flesh
Is love, is death
Your faith in endless life


Open up your doors
Oh my heart is slow
Open up your doors
Let the King come in


Abide in me, Savior
Abide in me, love
And daily I'll take my cross
Follow after you, Lord


Abide in me, Savior
Abide in me, love
The labor of God is to trust