Christmas 2005

This Christmas is different. I didn't plan anything in advance and had to come into work during shutdown week, thus I had a rather peaceful long weekend. Originally I intended to use this time for house cleaning, but it turns out that I didn't do much physical cleaning, rather a lot of introspection leading to spiritual/emotional/mental cleansing instead.

GrX had a great candle light Christmas day service, Pastor Dave preached on the subject of "A Christmas Like No Other" based on passages from Matt 1:18-22. I have to admit that we have a great worship team! Bobby's team is incredible! We sang several contemporary Christian songs including some of my favourites: "Here I am to Worship" - Tim Hughes, "How Great is our God" - Chris Tomlin, and "Salvation is here"... I feel truly bathed in God's awesomeness when I sing along with the members in the congregation. Salvation is here indeed!

One thing that really left me pondering long after the end of the service is his concept of a "self quake": it happens when the very foundation of our lives are shaken to the core. Things we normally consider innate to our value system, such as reputation, approval, identity, dignity, and self-confidence, and "personal rights", etc., all those things may be shaken during our pursuit of God. (here is a link to GrX sunday messages)

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Looking back, 2005 has been quite a year for me: a lot of things happened, yet a lot of things didn't really change. I think I've experienced several mental growth spurts that hopefully will lead me to become a stronger and better person for the rest of my life. Maturity is not usually attained without growing pains. Since the start of my summer mission trip to Mongolia, I have met a continuous stream of new people, and as a collective whole, they have introduced new ideas, and forced me to see things in fresh perspectives. I think because I tend to select friends who are similar to me, I have been caught up in a perpetual cycle of reaffirming my own beliefs, and never bothered to stop and step aside to evaluate things from a different angle. I guess that is why teenagers are "young and impressionable", whereas adults are usually set in their own ways, stubborn because they have stopped learning and changing so fast.

I had a chance to read "Le Petit Prince" again recently. It's an amazing book because every time I read it, I learn something new, and I understand something a little better. It's still my favourite book, and I still do believe in the naive and innocent ways portrayed in this book. However, I now also understand that life is multifaceted. Things in the real world are not as clear cut or B&W; absolute right and wrong do still exist in principle, but there are a lot of gray areas that require individual judgment calls. Things like "Amor vincit omnia - Love conquers all" are still mostly true to a certain extent, but it does get complicated by other human factors in life. In a recent conversation JKB compared life to a game of chess: both are impossibly complex; and no one can calculate all the way to the end no matter how good they are. We should just take it one step at a time, see how things develop and react to the best of our cabilities and knowledge. Perfect information leads to perfect decisions, but life is not perfect, and we will have to learn to deal with it when things don't turn our our way... reminds me of what someone else told me a long time ago: "c'est la vie"..

I have had many quiet moments to introspect and reflect on developments in my life in recent years. Life for me before work was easy and predictable: I knew where I stood, where I was going, and what my goals were. All I had to do was follow a relatively simple formulaic line to arrive at where I wanted to be. But as I became more and more independent in my mid-to-late twenties, I learned that I must make a lot of choices on my own now, and that the end results are not always obvious at the time of decision. I have also learned a lot of things through human interactions, instead of through set formulas and lectures as I did back in school. (Arh, I wish life were as simple as those straightforward problem sets; they could be difficult, yet there's always a clearly defined solution at the end).

I recall a vague dream last night, where I compared everyone in this world to some kind of a chemical element: they all carry a different number of proton/neutron/electrons, which give them unique properties and varied stabilities. When people meet they interact in unpredictable ways: they may attract, repel, or bond, but one thing for certain is that everyone leaves some sort of an impact on others they've met and interacted with. These chemical reactions change the individual elements themselves, perhaps in fundamental ways. Some of the interactions are minimal and quickly forgotten, yet others leave indelible marks in one's journey. Life is full of dynamism, causality, and consequences: each individual one meets is an unknown variable. This fascinatingly complex situational equation is the ultimate Gordian knot.