Dear Santa,

My name is Katie. I am 7-years-old. I've been a good girl this year. I've never asked for anything before because you have to give stuffs to the other good girls and boys. I know Christmas is not about presents but the spirit and the joy and the baby Jesus. Mummy says so. Thank you very much for donating many things. This year Daddy stays at home alot. He and Mummy talk loudly all the time. She always saying we don't have enough money anymore. So I won't be getting any for Christmas. All I'm asking is that less then $20 is a power puff girls sweater so I won't be cold. The shop is medium size but I would like a larger size so it can last me longer. Thank you so much, I love you. I promise when I'm older next time I will donate stuffs to the less forchunet! :) If you are feeling nice maybe you can bring me some dolls to play too? I like dolls because I can play and make the Mummy and Daddy love each other. When you are reading this is the North Pole say hello to Mrs Clause and all the raindeers please! Thank you again from the bottom of my pinky heart!

Love,

Katie

A Message For Dom7th and Shao Tuan

As some of you already know, I will be flying off on Friday night to the Abode of Peace, or so they call it, for some peace in the lush jungle. Well, not really, but it will certainly be an exotic getaway, and it will be during the time of the year I usually spend with you guys making preparations for Christmas and youth camp. So I suppose it is only natural that I leave you all with a few words before I see everyone again next month. At least that way I don't actually disappear entirely.

First, as some of you may be oblivious to what it is I will actually be doing, let me attempt to describe the terrors that await me on this perilous journey. In fact, this Sunday, while all of you are nodding your heads toward the speaker for more reasons than one, I will be swimming across this exact river at least three times wearing something similar to this. In the coming weeks, I will also be traversing this, eating this, avoiding this and killing this amongst other life-threatening feats in hopes of getting this, and it's all because of this. Awesome huh. You bet. And I deeply regret that you cannot join me. But honestly speaking, I am both excited and apprehensive about this trip. It has been said that this exercise will be duly unforgettable, and I suspect that that will come to be in both painful and comic ways, the difference between the two chiefly being a matter of time. Well, I will find out soon enough, and you will know when I get back. Otherwise, I'd be grateful to be kept in your prayers.

To Dom7th, I must say that I am envious that you guys are finally going for a mission trip, after much procrastination over the years, and that I can't be there to join you in one voice. To those who are going, I've seen much effort being put in during the rehearsals on Sunday afternoons. But I urge you to also commit more soul into prayer. When hiccups occur, it's the heart and faith you will need to persevere in your ministering to the unevangelised to make God look great. Remember that it is He who empowers you to perform what He commands, and it is He who promised to be with you to the end of the age when He commissioned your outreach. Pray, friends.

On a more practical note, I gather that communication will definitely be a big issue. The language stuff. What to do? Or rather, what is there left to do with so little time? Let love speak. Let actions converse. Let your servanthood to their community articulate the gospel of the servant Christ. Know that their souls, like yours, matter in the eyes of God, so they should to you too.

To the youth committee, I know preparations for youth camp are underway. I'm not sure how many you have attended previous camps, but all four I've been a part of over the last eight years has each been a miracle to me, and I believe to the lives of others as well. So treasure the miracle that God is using you to materialise. Plan and execute with heart and hope so that when the heartbreak comes, you know God is using it to strengthen your hope in Him. And trust me, it always comes.

I'm also ecstatic that you guys have chosen the Gospel to be the theme for this year, and thus equally regretful that I won't be there on all three days. If you realise how foundational and far-reaching your choice of theme is, then you must also know to be as meticulous as possible with the delivery of your material, and also the preparations that precede to ensure that. By nature of its theme, this camp has the potential to set in stone a bible saturated and gospel-centred infrastructure for the fellowship and its years to come. Let that be your long term vision, to make us a Bride who knows, loves and honours her Groom.

Lastly, for the many of you who are enjoying your holidays now, have as much fun as you can before you grow older, really. But I want you to be very aware that idle time is a fecund swamp for the proliferation and infestation of sin. And I say that with gravity. Someone once said to me very wisely, "Sin will take you further than you ever wanted to go, keep you longer than you ever wanted to stay and cost you more than you ever wanted to pay." I guess I'll just leave you with that.

Well, now that all is said and done, I will be able to eat my ferns in peace. My prayers will be with all of you even as bloodsuckers of all species besiege me at night.

Till 17th December, adieu!

If We Had Followed Through

I was sifting through my inbox when I chanced upon this series of emails sent by The Sister. They date to about 4 years back. Attached to these emails were photos of random church people gathering in familiar homes, some scribbling at their bibles, some talking and gesturing, others just looking cosy. Right. The 40 day PDL Campaign. We were supposed to weave the photos into some sort of video collage.

Now, my church is like this lego toy. There's the kids block, the youth block, the young adults block, the not-so-young young adults block, the adults block, the old block and the really old block, which also happens to be the really big block. The good thing is that there is integrity. The bad thing is that there is no integration.

That's why I immediately wondered why we didn't continue with cell groups. It's quite surprising actually because most churches do employ the system of cell groups at a church-level. And they worked at that time, evidently from the photos, but only for as long as they were there. It sounds like a simple question, but I doubt those who decided then would be able to answer my question now. We don't have that many lay-shepherds now to do it, but we would have more if we didn't stop then.

We must have missed the point when we ran the campaign 4 years ago. The model for fellowship (or worship, or missions, or anything else) was certainly not something to be completed, fulfilled or finished in any sense within 40 days. At least not in the way we celebrated it as if it were the culmination of some great spiritual awakening. 40 days was in fact the time given to kick-start a biblical and practical way of running a church that should last for as long as the people believe in it. How grave it is a mistake to mistake an end for a beginning!

I know a church which does this thing called 'Lifegroup'. Basically, at whatever age, you're thrown into a cell group of people around your age and you have meetings with that group for pretty much the rest of your life, hence Lifegroup. This system has its weaknesses, but the level of accountability you can expect to be nurtured from that is just amazing. We are nowhere near that, and dangerously so.

I think we have brought many people in, but we haven't made many people feel at home. That's why they tend to exit where they entered. A house is a building, and a home is a house with people in it. The house of God must be the home of His bride. We don't do marriages in churches for no reason. And that's also the purpose of ascribing locality to an omnipresent being. If even I feel this way, I speculate at what those who just came in through the door are thinking.

Imagine, if we had followed through, we might be home. 4 years is a long time. There might be a harvest now. At the very least, we won't have to be so afraid of our new neighbours at Buona Vista.

A Topic For Grown-Ups

I might get shot for writing this, but oh well, here goes.

As everybody knows, they've announced that the elections will be up and running anytime from the end of this year to the start of the next. The results, as always, won't be unpredictable. But then that begs the question, why should they be unpredictable in the first place?

I think it's a valid question. I'm not sure if we really crave to see more support given to the opposition than they already have now even though everybody seems to think so. Pap himself has always asked them what better domestic and foreign policies they could possibly offer that either he or his own ministers haven't thought of. Even the Clock, the most successful of 'foes', as it were, has never brought anything creditably new to the table.

So if it is novelty that people are looking for, it's definitely not what they're going to get, if they're not as silly as they are bored. And they'll be the ones who knowingly determine that in the end. It's a little like a magic trick. You ask how it works, but you don't really want to know, because then it loses its worth to your disillusionment. So in the end, we only cast votes for the illusionists who best mesmerise us on the stage of happiness, prosperity and progress.

It's not a bad thing. It's just, a thing. A generation thing. You see, for any opposition power to truly have a bid for power, it must oppose. Hence opposition. Like duh, right? Well it's really easier said than done. In other words, it has to pinpoint something, find some policy, some ideal about Pap and his men that's really contentious, and then become crusadingly polarised against that, electorally. That's how Lenin did it, that's how Obama did it, so it's doable. After all, Pap was once opposition himself, wasn't he?

Furthermore, there's never been tangible conflict among Pap and his men. Well, not yet. But a new age dawns. Maybe when the friction can no longer be contained, when some men decide to leave and swim to the other bank, maybe that's when the unpredictable will happen. And those men will be the one of the most insightful men to have ever graced this political landscape.

Otherwise, politics has always been a topic for me to avoid, until now. Real politics is like what happens in the workplace, except on a global level. At this level, those who have more power than you can't necessarily fire you if they get pissed, but they can certainly fire at you. It's where being ousted is actually the easiest option. In many ways, it's scarier. Perhaps the most terrifying thing is that it's arousing my interest quite quickly. If this is some telltale sign of growing up, that it gives me yet another reason to miss being childish. That was when making someone angry was as easy to solve as saying sorry.

Symptoms and Superheroes

Something strange is happening to me. I think I might be becoming Spiderman. For starters, I've been developing an extraordinarily strange rash on my upper body. It suddenly appeared last night like a tsunami of red spots. But they're barely noticeable even at close distance because each spot is so fine and so small. The rash is also annoyingly fickle. It can appear and disappear within hours. At least it doesn't itch at all. Now it's sort of like a faint pink constellation across my very confused skin. Also, my temperature has been hovering at some ridiculously foreign temperature of 37.2 degrees. Honestly, what is 37.2 degrees? Has anyone ever had that before? I don't feel particularly hot, but definitely more than I do feel cold - clearly not a feverish symptom.

Most interestingly, I have what seems to be a steadily improving insect bite on my left wrist. It's bigger than the typical mosquito bite, but about as large as the average pinky nail would grow to become before you decide to trim it. It has a wrinkled, stubby scab sitting on top of it as if it were wearing a maroon turban of some sort. Otherwise, there's absolutely no pain and no itch, like the rash. Or maybe it's actually part of the rash, I don't know.

Sadly, no superhuman capabilities have manifested themselves as of now. It is quite disappointing. I know I used to dream about being Spiderman a lot not too long ago. Like literally dream about it at night, not in the sense of having actual aspirations. But then again the movies about him always have struck me about the same thing. I mean, with all that web coming out of his body can you imagine how much protein he would have to consume in one day?

Perhaps the last thing to grouse about is that if indeed I were to become some sort of superhero suddenly, the transformation would have come a little too late. As it appears on my clock, I've got two hours of Halloween left. Of course one possibility is that the superhero I turn into is Superman, which will enable me to turn back time by simply flying around the earth. But not a chance I suppose. As of now I think I still look very much like the same bloke when I wear my glasses. Shame.

Not So Easy Listening

Listening to U2 makes me wish I had the time to get the Red One serviced. The circuitry is still faulty and the strings are as brittle as dead leaves. The frets are pretty worn out too the last time I touched it. But I think the fact that I was reminded of it keeps me wanting to make more tunes as soon as I get the time.

Music drags out memories when your life has a great soundtrack. I think mine has a pretty decent one. Listening to The Script now reminds me of my stint at D&N earlier this year, and the stateliness of the Supreme Court; I played their album front to back on the way to the office every morning. Listening to Powerspace reminds me of classroom life in Year 4; there was a time we ceaselessly tried to sing Right On, Right Now. We failed of course, and eventually ran out of breath. But even that sense of comic futility was evoked with a mere play button.

It's interesting how the brain generates these associations. Daniel Levitin has much to say on this, and hopefully I will read of it soon. Meanwhile, I should probably expand my repertoire. I suppose in theory, listening to the same song over and over again would continue to 'attach' new memories to the same tune as the days go by. Perhaps I'll be overwhelmed with a chronology of sentiments if I hear that particular track a long time from now. Otherwise, I might simply be left feeling very confused.

The Things That Count

Perhaps the weight of experience from life in the army can never ethically justify the way in which it is gained, but it can reveal some deep realities. It is said that experience is a difficult teacher because she administers the test before giving the lessons. I think it's just like how absence makes the heart fonder.

There is not a day here where at any one point I am devoid of frustration, anger, grief and a list of other melancholic emotions you can name. I've come to realise that after working so hard for the smallest of things, suddenly they don't seem so small anymore. And the hard part now lies in adjusting my words and actions in accordance with the people and the things whose preciousness I've come to see with brand new eyes, because there's almost no time to do so.

You could say that the purpose of every human being is to find out for himself what are the things that really count. Only upon such a discovery can one confidently take the next step with a well of joy or motivation that undergirds a life buffeted by seasons of emotions. Unfortunately, that discovery itself is usually the result of some heroic journey that also involves a lot of suffering. Well, viva la vida - the life lives.