Look at this, no posts in days and suddenly two posts in one day. Woohoo! So it’s highly coincidental but this is important because:
I just realized something today.
I used to want to know with a yearning that tortured me to the point of death that my ex was hurting grievously for what he had done to me. That he was vomiting nails, pulling out whatever hair he had left, crying until his eyes were just sockets of sunken pools of liquid pus. When that didn’t suffice I used to imagine hearing news of him being run down in a horrific accident leaving his legs and mouth a mere stump of mangled mess.
I know I was horrible but pain does a strange thing to a normally non-violent peace loving tree-hugging person.
Today when somebody was telling me about him I realized that I didn’t care anymore. And not in an apathetic attitude. As in, it doesn’t matter to me any longer. It doesn’t matter whether he’s defecating gold or has eyes made of sunken pus.
In fact in all honesty, I wish him well and all the happiness, love and food he desires.
Fact is, I’m happy where I am. If it means he had to happen for me to happy, I’m okay with that.
Sometimes when you just want to stop believing in everything, we need a little reminder of the Word of God that tells us to hold on fast. For “the night is almost over, day is coming.”
“I heard the song of peace on earth, goodwill to men.” Harry Belafonte
Nothing like a Friday night, listening to Christmas carols even though it’s barely even mid-November. It’s a nice calming feeling, like butter and toast, or watching Meet me at St Louis, or eating marshmallows in front of a fire. Of course, in this tropics, a fire in your house is the last thing you want, but it’s the feeling obviously.
So let’s not tiptoe on eggshells. This time last year, I was in a very different place. I was a working corporate and was very much in a world of my own. It was enjoyable but it wasn’t really a passion and we all knew I was just doing it for the (albeit good) cash, but I told myself, I would not stay there longer than a year. I made a promise that if I got an offer even remotely closer to what I was meant to do, I would.
And God took matters into His own Hands. Not even six months into the job, he set me up on a dream job interview and they offered it to me within five hours. Two months later and I was knee deep with 40 plus eighteen year olds, trying to teach them Biology in the most effective and interesting way possible.
Even when I was walking through an oasis in my personal life, when I walked into that lecture theater or classroom, it was my refuge. Those kids meant more to me than they would ever know.
Blossoming young adults, in this day age, they watch you and they notice everything about you. Within an hour they make a decision on whether you respect them enough for them to respect you in return. They make snap judgments and most if not all, is accurate. We give them less credit than they deserve. They notice when you’re not well, not in the zone, when you’re wearing new shoes or sporting a recent manicure.
Taking on something as serious as an educator of young minds is something that can get quite daunting at moments. Sometimes I’m deeply overwhelmed by the gravity of it all. However, when I’m in front of them and I teach them something that makes the light bulb go on in their eyes, it’s a feeling like no other.
I see those wonderful teachers that have been doing this for 40 years and who haven’t lost even an ounce of their passion and all I want to do and be, is that.
I remember the teacher that used to line us up and cane our palms for talking in class. I remember the lecturer that made me look at Biology in a totally different light. I also remember the lecturer that believed in me so much that he offered me an internship just so I wouldn’t have to leave Australia. He went on to write a wonderful referral for me to obtain a teaching permit.
Our teachers don’t realize that they teach more than just a predetermined syllabus to us. They educate our minds and characters, and play a part in molding us into the individuals we are today. After all, we spend most of the first years of our lives in school.
Okay so I’m sort of treading of on a different tangent right now but the point I want to make is this; if I can make even one small difference in each student’s lives, whether it be academically or not, I would have reached my goal. Whether I am succeeding yet or not, I am striving everyday to become a more responsible, mature individual, so that I am even slightly more worthy to teach them to be the same.
“Well I see you there with the rose in your teeth, one more thin gypsy thief,” Leonard Cohen.
It’s one of those days where it’s rained all day and all you want to do is curl up in bed with a good book and never leave. Well let me tell you, the migraine and the double power outages I’ve experienced has more or less made that impossible. All’s not lost however, after all, it’s a Saturday and the weekends are always good.
It’s time for something introspective I think.
I’m very happy that I’m in a good place now. It’s taken some time to get here but I am here. I think maybe I’ve said this before but it doesn’t matter, I’ll say it again.
I drove my colleagues to our annual staff dinner a couple of days ago, and while they were loudly shouting over each other to be heard in the car and I was maneuvering through the madness that is Malaysian traffic, I couldn’t help but feel that I was happy about where I was at that very exact moment. I’ve come a long way, but not so far that I no longer recognize who I am, but far enough that I know that I am exactly where I am meant to be at this point in my life.
For the first time in a while, it doesn’t feel as if my world is threatening to cave over me. That doesn’t mean that I already have it all figured out yet but that’s good. I think life is about a journey of discovery. You figure out who you are and where you fit and about your purpose along the way. It’s not meant to be something you immediately figure out. Where’s the fun in that?
Our life is like a quilt in making. With every experience that we allow into our lives, we add a thread. As we think over our lives, we run our hands over that quilt and see where some areas are darker than others and yet are just as beautiful, because every color in union makes a masterpiece when viewed from a distance. We cannot erase what is already a part of that quilt, but we pick up our needles and thread and keep going, hoping that over our lifetime, it gets stronger and better and more beautiful.
And through it all we find that a single solitary thread runs right through the quilt, in consistent, hardy patterns. Though it may be more faint in some places, it is never lost.
And just when you think your life is about to fall to pieces, you realize that it is literally hanging by a thread. If it is not already resting on it.
“For the mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be removed.”
Def Leppard: ”If you got love in your sights, watch out – love.bites.”
I teach Biology for a living and in one of the topics, we discuss that one of the ways that sexual reproduction introduces genetic variety is by the random union of an egg and a sperm, both with a completely unique genetic identity themselves.
Which one of the eggs is fertilised by many of the million sperm cells that is released is a completely independent event.
The resulting zygote is a combination of both its parent’s DNA and is therefore a completely unique individual from everyone else, including its siblings and either of its parents.
Image courtesy of Google
As I was driving to work this morning I was struck by the fact that if it is true that we were each designed by God to be completely unique in this fashion, then we were made perfect even from the very beginning. If He knew exactly what He needed us to be then He ensured that our mother’s ovum carrying the perfect half of the DNA that was needed to make us, was present in the right position of the fallopian tube. He also ensured the other half of our DNA required to make us, would come from our father’s sperm cell that would swim the fastest and fight the hardest to fertilise the ovum first.
It only seems random because there is nothing that seems to determine this. Nothing biological anyway.
You and I are the product of the best gene rearrangements of our parents’ DNA. We are the products of viable successful fertilisation and if you knew just how difficult it is for the egg to be there at just the right position and what a treacherous trek it is for those sperm from cervix to egg, you would understand that even after all of that, the right sperm cell met the egg, and fertilised it first, among all the other millions of its mates.
Even reproduction is just half the story, implantation in the uterus and development comes with its own risks as well.
And yet the right halves were combined at a great deal of expense, with the fusion of a perfectly unique set of features, abilities, talents and personalities to make us who we are today. With talents and capabilities that equip us to do what we are meant to even before we were conceived.
I am who I am today because I was a carefully thought out process which was set out in blueprint first before successful implementation. If that is random, then everything else has to be.
Listening to Carla Bruni :“Que tu m’aimais encore, c’est quelqu’un qui m’a dit que tu m’aimais encore. Serais ce possible alors ?”
I figured with all new things being made new that it is only fitting that I change my blog header too. I love reading the book of Isaiah. It has many chapters that promise deliverance out of darkness into light by a God that loves indiscriminately, totally and abundantly.
Many times in our lives, we feel broken beyond repair until one day we wake up and realise that all the while, God has cocooned us in the web of His love, healing us silently but surely until we are ready to burst out from our hiding places and embrace again what He is waiting to give unto us.
All He asks of us is to forget the past and dwell not on things passed.
Isaiah 43 : 18-19 “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.”
He bids us fix our eyes forward on Him because it is only then that He can achieve in us what we have been made to do. God has indeed equipped us for so much more than we believe we are limited by.
It is only when we emerge from our cocoons that we can
Isaiah 54:2 “Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch your tent curtains wide, do not hold back; lengthen your cords, strengthen your stakes.”
If we choose to stay in our cocoons, completely healed but abundantly afraid to break away from our pasts and march into our futures and claim what is rightly ours , we will never be able to embrace again what is rightfully ours.
I have said it before and I will say it again. We are made completely and perfectly to do what God has designed us to do. It may take us one day or a hundred years to discover what that is but if we truly search with open hearts, we will be led to it. In fact, every single day will show the work of God being fulfilled right before our very eyes.
The only thing we can be sure of is, He never lies. Though all may leave us and abandon us, God is the only one that remains faithful to the end.
Isaiah 54: 10 “Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed.”
And it is with those words that I echo right along with Carla Bruni in Quelqu’un m’a dit. (Thank you Nichita Stanescu for your translation).
“I’m told that our lives aren’t worth much,
They pass like an instant, like wilting roses.
I’m told that time slipping by is a bastard
Making its coat of our sorrows.
Yet someone told me…
That you still loved me
Someone told me…
That you still loved me.
Well ? Could that be possible?”
Every line in the Word of God promises us that that is exactly possible. Whether or not we choose to believe it, is however, a completely different story.
Listening to: Lauryn Hill “It could all be so simple.”
Amen Lauryn.
Sometimes all the drama gets a little tiring.
He said. She said.
He didn’t say that. She never said this.
Just kick the shit and get out.
Sometimes you have to be away from it all to understand the meaning of silence. For what it’s worth, it is such a relief when some things just
come.to.an.end.
God have mercy on us all, since sometimes things just won’t seem to realize it is the end and that it is time to give up and die. In biology, a cell that denies its instruction to die but that keeps on dividing, is commiting the cardinal sin of cell division; it goes on to form a tumour, rabid and diseased, tunneling its way through bloodstreams and invading foreign tissues.
There is a time when things stop being funny. There is a time when you stop playing because somebody is going to get hurt. There is a time when everything has to stop.
All I know is, since I’ve been sent off the pitch, I’m staying out of it. If this is a game for the “big boys”, I’m holding my baseball mitt firmly in my hands and watching this from the sidelines. Actually, forget that, I’m not watching anything. This is taking too much energy and I am not staying around for the aftermath of the initial crash. The car that keeps careening because the brakes are refusing to give? That’s what this game is slowly turning into.
A nightmare that will not end.
The sidelines of this twisted game is not my place anymore. I am walking back into my life that is pregnant with purpose. I’m getting out and staying out.
I know, I write in twisted lines but some things just need to be processed metaphorically before it can mean anything in reality.
I have lots to say, and at the same time, virtually nothing.
My brain doesn’t start processing thoughts in a lucid manner quite so early in the morning.
I was rummaging through my notebooks and found a piece of paper from a lifetime ago. I realised just what a different person I was at the time. It felt as though I was headed nowhere, in a hazy dream clogged with time stretched out ahead of me and burdened with a heavy heart.
In that life, I woke up at every sunrise waiting for it to set again just so I could go back to sleep. And then, I went through a phase where, I searched and searched but could not seem to find. I fasted and prayed and learned to trust, when it feels like there is nothing left to trust. I started off looking for diamonds and at the end of it was content to settle for coal, if I could at least find something.
But my Lord remained steadfast. I wrote in my prayer diary a little less than a year ago,
“I don’t know.
I really don’t know.
I know good things come to those who wait.
The best things come to those who wait on the Lord.
I know in my heart, good things are coming.
It’s just the waiting that is hard.”
I was in a really dark place at that time, what some call, the dark night of the soul. In that time, the suffering soul reaches out to the only thing in his life that is steady, the only thing that keeps his head above water. And so I did. And He reached out to me and held me close and told me gently, Trust and obey.
Ironic how the most passive of actions can be the hardest thing to do can . And yet, I waited and prayed.
And now everytime I walk into a classroom, I get that feeling that finally – I am doing exactly what I was made to do. It feels like I’m finally sinking into the hole of the right shape.
It took awhile but I will always remember what Bob Fitts said.
Listening to: Eva Cassidy “Sometimes you picture me, I’m walking too far ahead.”
Perspective is a funny thing.
It can be swayed by so many factors -
Tone of voice. Angle of observation.
Where you stood when it happened, how it sounded when you heard it. Who told it.
How you perceived it when it happened or when you heard it.
Perception itself can be influenced by many memories -
Coloured by old and tattered baggage, prejudices ; old and new.
And let’s not underestimate good old fashioned bitchiness.
So really there’s a whole layer of processing that goes on when you hear a story. The more people’s lips the story has rested on and passed from, the more it would have been flavoured with the individual’s biases, changing the story based on how they would have perceived it.
That is how gossip is born and why it is seldom unsullied.
So is it better to listen to gossip but leave it unspread? Or not to listen to it at all? We all know the famous, “I’ll tell you something, you don’t tell anyone.” Under that passionate veil of secrecy, most “untold secrets” are told quicker than you can say hotcrossbuns.
And how easy is it to listen to gossip about someone and then to forever look at that person and realise your perception about them has changed, even a little? How easily our perception can be altered by one story told under the vow : I’m not supposed to tell anyone this, but I’m only telling you, so don’t you tell anyone.
It’s a funny thing, nostalgia. It comes as swiftly as it disappears and in that instant, a thousand memories come and go in the blink of an eye. You are left reeling in its wake, a little shell shocked at the speed and yet you are fully aware of what has just happened. The effects are all too familiar and heady, leaving a soft spot in your heart and mist in your eyes. Almost undetectable, and yet entirely unmissable.
You are a different person now and yet in that instant, you are transported back to exactly where you were when you left the memory.
The little girl in the polka dot dress.
The teenager studying for her exams, surrounded by chocolate wrappers.
The young woman crying at her graduation.
All those years ago seems like a dream now but it really did happen. It was I who made all those choices and decisions that lead me to where I now sit in front of my computer. And if I were to meet myself as that little girl in the polka dot dress or the adolescent struggling through puberty, I would hope that she would be pleased to see how she turned out along the way.
I know I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life but God has been so good to me such that He has guided me to a lot of good things too, despite myself, and He has helped me learn from my mistakes (hopefully). I may not be the best version of myself at the moment but I do feel like it’s a work in progress and right now, I wouldn’t exchange places with anyone else in the world.
I'll be real.That means a very passionate, clumsy, opinonated, shower singing, chocoholic me. But you're all quite welcome to be a part of my slightly of-kilter world.
Leave your comments and feel free to dis/agree with me. We'll keep it open and real.
WHO'S SAYING WHAT