Public Secrets

When asked how I know

so well, I simply say, "I

do it by doubting."

When asked how I write

so well, I simply say, "I

do it with a pen."

When asked how I speak

so well, I simply say, "I

do it consciously."

When asked how I sing

so well, I simply say, "I

do it around friends."

When asked how I act

so well, I simply say, "We

do it everyday."

Sunrise

When your heart begins to break for those paralysed by the blindness of sin, you know that God has awakened your soul to bleed the very love that spilled from the veins of Christ as He choked on Calvary.

And oh, how sweet and rending it is an awakening to this sunrise of godly grace!

The Button and The Finger

At the heels of my previous post, The Button, I shudder to find myself guilty of what I'm about to accuse, but I write on.

I've recently been quite cast down at my workplace by just one person. I simply can't see how anyone can treat everybody under his management merely as a means to an end, no more than that, and still have a clear conscience. The unbridled hypocrisy in every conversation shared is simply piercing to me. And its effect on the spirit is as jarring as having Marx preach alienation to your ears ten hours every day.

It didn't take me long to remember that this was in fact commonplace in the corporate jockeyship. Or in fact in any group of organised peoples. I was just not used to it. Still, is my shock misplaced?

Yet, if my faith isn't where it is today, The Button would have sunk me right into those blameworthy shoes, if I'm not already one foot in. Wrapped around his little finger, I guess I had no choice but to look at my own hands. Furthermore, the Apostle Paul's exhortation for us to become all things to men for the sake of the gospel - we easily turn it on its head by our callous desire for men to all but become mere things to us. Therefore the button is not the problem. The button-pusher is.

I think it's fair to say: If there is no love, then there is only utility. Learning how to love is a tiring affair, and I rest my soul on the hope of this godly appeal.

We must play. But our merriment must be of the kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feelings for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner - no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.

C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

The Button

I've come to learn that the art of persuasion concerns itself not with bulletproof logic or silky eloquence. It's about pushing the button.

Not too long ago, I theorised that everyone has a green button and a red button. If I want to convince someone of a matter, I must keep my finger on the green button and never hit the red button. If I want to achieve the opposite, I simply need to hit the red button once, maybe twice. For the sake of my job, and for fun, I put this hypothesis to the test.

And I was not disappointed. Perhaps I was, in the 'human' sense of it all, but not by how well the theory worked to my ends (I had only sufficient gonads to try the red button once). So, if you want to know how to persuade someone, simply find out what his green and red button is.

Of course, whether what is said makes sense remains staple to the package of persuasion. But like how you won't have rice without the dishes, sense becomes nonsense when it is seen as sense and sense alone. Ironic, no?

But this is, after all, quite sweeping a sweeping statement. Hope has it that a good number of people do exist who assess matters as justly and objectively as they can. I struggle to be one of them. And I guess all this only goes to show that while humans are by nature rational creatures, hardly are they ever reasoning creatures.