R³

Why are we so fast to believe what the world says, yet so slow to believe what The Bible says?

I’ve caught myself in a hypothetical dilemma.

In most medical dramas, we have often seen how hospital staffs break the news of a failed surgery to the family members. They cannot afford to commit professional suicide by being too emotionally attached to the dead patient due to the frequency of deaths. Surgeons can literally go mad if he takes every failed surgery personally; he thinks that he has indirectly murdered the patient by failing to save their life. In this sense, I think this understandable and perfectly reasonable.

However, these are only but physical lives that are wrestled in between our temporal realm. Is it reasonable for church workers to detach their hearts from the people they are trying to save spiritually? People are the church’s main focus, but so is the hospital’s. Ain’t the spiritual death rate is comparable to that of the hospital?

Is this professionalism or reasoned apathy?

 I realized that most of the inspirations from my post are from the people I interact with. They often suggest topics for me to write about, both knowingly or unknowingly. Hence I thought why not extend this brainstorming process to all who read this blog? After all, I hope to make this contemporary blog relevant to the masses out there, with its Christian perspective.

So do hop over the “Suggest A Topic” page and show us your chaotic thoughts!

Criticism is like the chiseling of a stone. Every chip that the sculptor allows to land on the block of stone either destroys it, or beautifies it. A good chip makes un-life a step closer to near-life; an objective criticism adds to brilliance.

A leader provides the raw block of stone; he gives the main idea for his team members to improve on. If the chisels dare not chip, the team have failed. If the raw block is poor, it is hard to cut a fine sculpture; the leader has failed.

However, in history, there have been some instances that a master sculptor (Michelangelo) transforms a poor stone into a masterpiece. In such cases, I believe he should be the leader in the first place.

“Leadership is more art than science.”
-John C. Maxwell

“Madness is the inability to communicate your ideas. It is as if you were in a foreign country, able to see and understand everything that is going on around you, but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don’t understand the language they speak there.”
-Paulo Coelho’s Veronika Decides to Die

“Collective madness is called sanity.”

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) - Cite This Source

And to think that I thought “mundane” meant boring. What an apt word to describe the life on earth.

Mundane

Life on earth is meant to be mundane! God created it precisely this way in hope that its mundaneity* would spur us on to look for the real deal. Compared to heaven, earth is indeed mundane. Sadly however, when humans do without a thing for a time long enough, they forget the existence of it. They find themselves adapting to its absent and taking it to be the norm.

We take earth to be all there is, comforting ourselves by busying ourselves around a track without a finish line. In a way, we have assimilated ourselves into a perverted edition of “The Sims”. Leading virtual reality-lives and forgetting reality; we led our reality-lives forgetting eternity. As entertaining as earth was created to be, when placed in comparision with heaven, there can be no word more apt to describle but “mundane”.

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.”
-C. S. Lewis: Christian Behavior

*Imaginary word

Been very busy as of lately. Church camp and work has a habit of clashing when it comes to work momentum. That explains the less frequent postings.

Looking on the bright side, it shows that busy-ness hold a sort of temporal cure for the random musers out there! Anyway, I have not been doing much of thinking recently, but here are some of things that others have been pondering about that have provoked me to do like-wise. (So much for that mental sabbath…)

May they be your pearls of wisdom or pills of insanity.

[From Wei Ting's Blog -2 June 07]

Yknw what amazed me in pirates’ movie was the fact that to come back from death one has to rock the boat and spin it upside down by sunset. because sunset on death island meant sunrise on our side of reality…

[From Xiang Yu's Blog - 22 May 07]

trees are like humans……
and some love God. u know them. the tallest ones, which are also the ones with the deepest roots. the ones that reach up to the heavens so that they can touch God’s feet. and the ones that go so deep into the earth so that they can feel God’s middle.

the tallest ones. so that when they shout “i love God”, other trees can hear. so that when they dance in the wind, praising God….other trees can see.

the tallest ones. so that they can feel the rain first. so that they can see the sunrise first. so that they can see the sky turn indigo first. so that they can feel the sunrays first.

the tallest ones are the ones that stand out and stand up.

[Jie Hui's Blog - 6 June 07]

All of the posts regarding Chile. This one thing that hit me quite hard.

“Coming to missions is like a baptism of fire. It builds your character in ways that my peers back home would never have had. The experience of a different culture really helps to broaden your view about the world.”

[Winnie's Blog - 31 May 07]

…they said the state of my table is the state of my mind…

[Missions' Conference - 31 May 07]

“We talk of the second coming; half of the world has never heard of the first.”
–Oswald J. Smith