"The Baby In My Womb Leapt For Joy" by John Piper

What!? Only two more weeks to final deadlines!!??

Row, row, row your boat

Gently down a ditch

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily

Life is such a -

Blessing.

团结合一，迎向光明

The Truth that shines for all to see
Invites your heart to make abode
Within Its herded sanctuary
Resplendent with the sinner’s hope.

~tc

Don't be shy to nod in agreement

An incomplete list of familiar sensations that we don’t so often pause to appreciate. It was fun trying to put deliberate thought into such subtleties. Here are a few.

1. The chilling twitches and shivers down your spine when your body tries to cope with the sudden loss of heat following the discharge of a golden fountain into a porcelain bowl.

2. The way your eyes melt and your nose implodes with swarming tension because you need just that one more dust particle to sneeze.

3. The volcanic eruption of concentrated lemon fluid that occurs when a certain small red dome is squeezed.

4. The way slime, snot and bacteria would caress the back of your throat every time you inhale a little too hard and swallow without much thought.

5. The way panic compels your body to manoeuvre around the house ten times faster than normal when you wake up five minutes before you need to leave the house.

6. The way certain death sends you back to sleep for a little while more before causing your body to manoeuvre around the house ten times faster than normal when you wake up forty-five minutes after you need to leave the house.

7. The default lethargy on days when there’s PE.

8. Peace after war in your abdomen after you find out it was actually just a really long and smelly fart that you needed, not without sweat though.

9. The denial of it, which may be the most convincing act people will ever see you perform.

10. The psychotic joy derived from learning that your teacher is on MC that causes you to dance around and flail your arms like a monkey who has just discovered that the former ninth planet of the solar system is not called Pluto but Banana.

The Great Deep

Before the stars were put in place
A Ghost pressed lightly on my face
I forked and fused where coasts imposed
With fins and scales in blue abode
Unbolted wrath, cry heav’nly gates
I swallowed Yahweh’s godless race
Save eight whose faith was true and pure
That which at Yam Suph hope ensured
But quick to stray, this errant lot
Whose prophet saw my creature’s jaw
T’was then I frothed my fury’s worth
E’en now my shape consumes the earth
But when He came, I knew t’was true
He raised his hand, my rage subdued
My death the final victory hails
But first from me will darkness rise
The beast who comes in thirteen one
To charm the daughters and the sons
But He who wipes the tears from Man
Will cast the Fiend into the depths
‘Tis then I shall be truly gone
And Heav’n and Earth shall be reborn.

~tc

11.5 more months is a long way to go

I secretly admire some people.

I was just retrieving my towel from the bamboo sticks outside the kitchen windows to bom-bom. The outer walls of the building had undergone rhytidectomy and whitening. As of today, it boasts of a pallid, dystopian blue-grey complexion. Then I went into the enclosure and maltreated my skin cells with shower lotion pudding. So I saved the observation for writing this now. No wonder they woke me up yesterday; the foreign workers who were scraping tint off my windows early in the morning. Outside my house. Five (it's higher than you think) storeys up on a rickety platform. Valiant beyond measure.

Then there’s Ajeet. The Indian floor-sweeper who greets me like Spongebob on coke every morning at the void deck before I drag my tuckered out atman to school. Amazing enthusiasm, I think. Ajeet's not his real name though, but he looks like one. Thin angular face, tributaries of wrinkles, once my height, maybe thrice my age, expert with the broom and the pan. Sounds like an Ajeet to me. Maybe it’s the cleaving prick of double vowels. Well, as long as it serves my memory.

Oh yeah. Ever noticed leaflet-distributors? Flick of the wrist; here, it’s paper, take it, now. It floats momentarily at your belly-level; maybe half a waist-length away. For a second you’re compelled to grab it to help the poor man finish his job. For a shorter second he detects your hesitation. No I don’t want to hold anything. Your feet agree. Sleight of hand; the pathetic slip of vellum withdraws to prone position to join its wad of clones. A blur of white and black. He preys on the next all-suspecting commuter. And the next, and the next, and the next. The escalator is my futon, he says. What professionalism.

And I continue to survey the golden mean between being humble and diligent.

In church.

Feliz Navidad, próspero año y felicidad

New Year Sonnet

Should old acquaintance be forgot
In days of auld lang syne
And new connections be explored
In ever-changing times?
With him I laughed, with her I fought
To both I say goodbye
How oft’ shall souls my mind besot
If age I’ll never find?

When everyone has finally caught
Their chance to sing this rhyme
For all our lives what we have sought
Will bring us home in time.

Christmas Sonnet

The candy lights on Boulevard
Could match up to a Christmas card
In terms of sweetness none prefer
But not as bright because apart
From Santa’s cherry lavish girth
I pen a virgin’s giving birth
The song she sings from heav’n inspired
Exploding with rhapsodic mirth

A peace that reigns supreme on earth
For you and I has He reserved
What better gift I cannot tell
Save God Himself, Emmanuel.

~tc©