I think I'm a poem coming out of the mud.
And I think I shouldn't let anyone but God tell me who I am.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Divine Cathedral Halls
Daniel Loke
"In back rows of pews and
On the beach where waves lap gently on the shore
In grand auditorium halls
And spaces where summer turns spring into fall
I hear your gentle whispers of love and my name on your lips
The sweetness of your breath lets me know I am complete
Oh how I love the look that I see in your eyes
When every morning you brush open mine
Do you remember the day that we met when you told me you loved me
And helped me see that all your
*Shades of sunsets shine for me
Tainted glass I did not see
The pains of love etched into stone
My longing to call you my home
Winds are wild and deer run free
Bells chime joyous melodies
Miles of coastlines echo all
My longings to cushion my fall
Your longings that echo through the walls
Of divine cathedral halls
Of premature births and of the young one’s mirth
And unblemished hazel eyes
Of violins, guitars and songs
Of right and wrong, and beauty untold in the skies
Of science and wonders, of time and thunder, your heart romances mine
You came to court me, you chased and caught me
You have my heart and I find I am
Drawn to the steeples of whitewashed cathedrals
Where words that are spoken are to no avail
Do you remember the day that I left yet you told me you loved me
And helped me see that all your"
As of now, this is my favourite mood song, and Daniel Loke has just become one of my favourite lyricists!
"In back rows of pews and
On the beach where waves lap gently on the shore
In grand auditorium halls
And spaces where summer turns spring into fall
I hear your gentle whispers of love and my name on your lips
The sweetness of your breath lets me know I am complete
Oh how I love the look that I see in your eyes
When every morning you brush open mine
Do you remember the day that we met when you told me you loved me
And helped me see that all your
*Shades of sunsets shine for me
Tainted glass I did not see
The pains of love etched into stone
My longing to call you my home
Winds are wild and deer run free
Bells chime joyous melodies
Miles of coastlines echo all
My longings to cushion my fall
Your longings that echo through the walls
Of divine cathedral halls
Of premature births and of the young one’s mirth
And unblemished hazel eyes
Of violins, guitars and songs
Of right and wrong, and beauty untold in the skies
Of science and wonders, of time and thunder, your heart romances mine
You came to court me, you chased and caught me
You have my heart and I find I am
Drawn to the steeples of whitewashed cathedrals
Where words that are spoken are to no avail
Do you remember the day that I left yet you told me you loved me
And helped me see that all your"
As of now, this is my favourite mood song, and Daniel Loke has just become one of my favourite lyricists!
"The Pursuit of God"
"Every one of us has had experiences which we have not been able to explain - a sudden sense of loneliness, or a feeling of wonder or awe in the face of the universal vastness. Or we have had a fleeting visitation of light like an illumination from some other sun, giving us in a quick flash an assurance that we are from another world, that our origins are divine. What we saw there, or felt, or heard, may have been contrary to all that we had been taught in the schools and at wide variance with all our former beliefs and opinions. We were forced to suspend our acquired doubts while, for a moment, the clouds were rolled back and we saw and heard for ourselves. Explain such things as we will, I think we have not been fair to the facts until we allow at least the possibility that such experiences may arise from the presence of God in the world and His persistent effort to communicate with mankind.”
- A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
Vinna emailed the CG this quote.
It's so deep it cuts.
It's so true I feel my heart hanging.
A. W. Tozer is such a genius, putting into words what I can't about those moments where I literally felt "a sudden sense of loneliness, or a feeling of wonder or awe in the face of the universal vastness".
It's good to know that there's someone out there who understands how you feel, who felt it before you did, who thinks weirdly like you do.
- A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
Vinna emailed the CG this quote.
It's so deep it cuts.
It's so true I feel my heart hanging.
A. W. Tozer is such a genius, putting into words what I can't about those moments where I literally felt "a sudden sense of loneliness, or a feeling of wonder or awe in the face of the universal vastness".
It's good to know that there's someone out there who understands how you feel, who felt it before you did, who thinks weirdly like you do.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Running on empty
Fourth day of my alone-ness, and I'm about to have an emotional meltdown.
Never realised how unnatural it is to enter an empty office - "it is not good for man to be alone" is taking on a whole new meaning.
I feel...weird. Isolated. Disconnected. DIsenfranchised, almost.
It took a couple of emails to remind me that I'm still alive and have things for which I can move about purposefully. Don't know what caused me to switch on my laptop - possibly saving grace - but I'm glad I did cause if I hadn't, I probably would've crawled beneath my table and spent the day emo-ing away.
Yes, that's right.
Leaders are human too.
(Thanks Edwin, for reminding us all of this very overlooked fact.)
Xingqi and Chee Onn return tomorrow - Hallelujah!
I'm reading Joanne's email and it puts some blood back into my veins...helps me to feel my flesh and remember my human-ness.
After sleeping in for four days and popping my yellow anti-histermines, I'm glad my physical health is almost back to normal.
Now for the mental and emotional bit.
One thing I do know, is that I need to be on my knees praying a bit more often. There's always a million and one reasons distracting me whenever I try to do that - I know, it's diabolical. But if I ain't praying, I ain't got nothin' to run with.
Never realised how unnatural it is to enter an empty office - "it is not good for man to be alone" is taking on a whole new meaning.
I feel...weird. Isolated. Disconnected. DIsenfranchised, almost.
It took a couple of emails to remind me that I'm still alive and have things for which I can move about purposefully. Don't know what caused me to switch on my laptop - possibly saving grace - but I'm glad I did cause if I hadn't, I probably would've crawled beneath my table and spent the day emo-ing away.
Yes, that's right.
Leaders are human too.
(Thanks Edwin, for reminding us all of this very overlooked fact.)
Xingqi and Chee Onn return tomorrow - Hallelujah!
I'm reading Joanne's email and it puts some blood back into my veins...helps me to feel my flesh and remember my human-ness.
After sleeping in for four days and popping my yellow anti-histermines, I'm glad my physical health is almost back to normal.
Now for the mental and emotional bit.
One thing I do know, is that I need to be on my knees praying a bit more often. There's always a million and one reasons distracting me whenever I try to do that - I know, it's diabolical. But if I ain't praying, I ain't got nothin' to run with.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Rainbows, ponies and stardust.
My eyes hurt from staring at the screen prolonged.
A lot emails to compose today - first to Nicole to tell her about Acts 29 (that's the pet name for our school outreach project for now), then to Mooks for the notes from our two hour long phone conference, but not before I'd spent an inordinate amount of time figuring out the best way to put PACE and shepherding groupings onto a document, and then finally, there is the gospel tract, which I must say, I am very proud of now that it's gone through a round of editing and I've put in two new pages and changed the cover concept :)
Oh-kaaay.
That's a mighty long paragraph.
It's 5.46pm and I'm taking a bus to toa payoh after this post to meet Belle. I hope 剪刀饭 has reopened by now! I'm so tired I can't even msuter up energy to be excited about our date, though Belle is totally lovely and I'm very happy to be meeting her, but it's all up in my head now, trickling very slowly down into my heart cause I'm slightly down with the flu. So glad I slept in the extra hour this morning.
Hope I recover before Xingqi and Chee Onn come back on friday.
Yinky gave me a DVD yesterday on Mother Teresa! Whooo-hooo! She rocks! That's both of them - Yinky and Mother Teresa, haha! Had the worst meal at MOS ever - seafood rice burger tastes like blanded cardboard and the milkshake tasted gross after it melted. Jeanne cheated my feelings about the seafood rice burger! Ok actually, I think we just have very different taste.
You know that feeling when you make a prediction about something which you actually don't want to happen and it really happens? Yeah, it's that feeling, and I'm feeling it now. I could do ten consecutive backflips down the stage and he'd probably still not notice.
I had red bean soup for lunch.
And a bite of bread leftover from breakfast.
I want a really good dinner.
5.53pm.
Hope the teddy bear is staring at me.
You're so innocent, Hope, and so carefree.
I wish I was like you.
Well, Hope isn't all that carefree honestly, because he's stuck sitting on the tissue box on my office table where I left him, and he can't move until I decide to move him, but I can imagine a teddy bear heaven where he'll get to run free in a really, really big grass field in breezy weather and a cornflower blue sky overhead, tugging on the string of his colourful paper kite.
Maybe that's my heaven - the one I dream of.
Tap, tap, tap.
Trying to figure out how to end this post.
Hmm...how about a cliffhanger?
A lot emails to compose today - first to Nicole to tell her about Acts 29 (that's the pet name for our school outreach project for now), then to Mooks for the notes from our two hour long phone conference, but not before I'd spent an inordinate amount of time figuring out the best way to put PACE and shepherding groupings onto a document, and then finally, there is the gospel tract, which I must say, I am very proud of now that it's gone through a round of editing and I've put in two new pages and changed the cover concept :)
Oh-kaaay.
That's a mighty long paragraph.
It's 5.46pm and I'm taking a bus to toa payoh after this post to meet Belle. I hope 剪刀饭 has reopened by now! I'm so tired I can't even msuter up energy to be excited about our date, though Belle is totally lovely and I'm very happy to be meeting her, but it's all up in my head now, trickling very slowly down into my heart cause I'm slightly down with the flu. So glad I slept in the extra hour this morning.
Hope I recover before Xingqi and Chee Onn come back on friday.
Yinky gave me a DVD yesterday on Mother Teresa! Whooo-hooo! She rocks! That's both of them - Yinky and Mother Teresa, haha! Had the worst meal at MOS ever - seafood rice burger tastes like blanded cardboard and the milkshake tasted gross after it melted. Jeanne cheated my feelings about the seafood rice burger! Ok actually, I think we just have very different taste.
You know that feeling when you make a prediction about something which you actually don't want to happen and it really happens? Yeah, it's that feeling, and I'm feeling it now. I could do ten consecutive backflips down the stage and he'd probably still not notice.
I had red bean soup for lunch.
And a bite of bread leftover from breakfast.
I want a really good dinner.
5.53pm.
Hope the teddy bear is staring at me.
You're so innocent, Hope, and so carefree.
I wish I was like you.
Well, Hope isn't all that carefree honestly, because he's stuck sitting on the tissue box on my office table where I left him, and he can't move until I decide to move him, but I can imagine a teddy bear heaven where he'll get to run free in a really, really big grass field in breezy weather and a cornflower blue sky overhead, tugging on the string of his colourful paper kite.
Maybe that's my heaven - the one I dream of.
Tap, tap, tap.
Trying to figure out how to end this post.
Hmm...how about a cliffhanger?
Monday, January 18, 2010
Junkyard Letters.
Wow. It's been two months already.
Fingers hover over the keyboard and...zilch.
Nothing.
That's a sign that I've been doing too much, or not blogging often enough to capture the moments.
I think it's the latter.
How do you capture those moments anyway? It's not like I can whisk out a laptop and internet connection when I'm sitting by the pool at 11pm and thinking through the day, or when I'm on the bus and a really epiphanical thought hits me.
Will we remember any of this in a thousand years to come?
Maybe it'll be like Joshua Harris' dream, where there's drawer after drawer in a filing cabinet in a large room in heaven where all our memories will be stored, including all the smart and stupid things we said, as well as all the things we never said.
And then I'll be able to see just how many people have read my posts, and know how accurate my feelings are cause about right now, I feel worthless. I bet if my posts were books they'd be the kind forgotten on a really high shelf in a dusty corner in the book store and one day, when they're clearing out the shop, they'd discover the existence of my posts-books and then...
I don't know.
Maybe they'll laugh as they remember what was written inside, or be curious cause they'd never read it and the books look really quaint, with the yellowing-pages, old ink and dust. Or maybe they'll throw it out for recycling without a second glance.
I really, really, REALLY like Donald Miller.
Maybe that's not too accurate. Let me rephrase.
I really, really, REALLY like Donald Miller's writing style.
I mean, I wouldn't actually know if I liked him unless if I met him in person, right?
But he's so honest, honest in a way I've always hope to be but realised I've always fallen short because I'm too busy embellishing my thoughts with fancy words that would have swirls and prints all over if you transposed them into a picture that by the time I hit 'publish post', I've glossed a layer of shine over all of it.
Myabe God is teaching me how to be honest.
Like, honest as in "through the heart" and not "from the heart".
Lil' C said that when commenting on Mark and Chelsie's dancing (the "Bleeding Love" one by Tabitha and Napolean, who are, incidentally, a really awesome hip hop choreographer-couple) and I've not had anything else make so much sense to me before.
Maybe that's slightly exaggerating, but what I'm trying to say is that dancing through your heart is so important a truth that it can be applied to so many other things in life, such as writing.
So back to this writing business...
I was standing along the corridor on the second level of Bartley, and there was this wind blowing down it. It was still and quiet, with the sound of the kids' voices coming through the wall, and it felt so peaceful. I stayed there for a bit because it was one of those moments that needed to last a bit longer than the usual moment, so you stop moving and stay in there until you feel it in you to move on to the next one.
It made me feel...alive.
So yes, getting back to this writing business, perhaps I should just put in the quote from Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years here.
"Sometimes I'm tempted to believe life doesn't mean anything at all. I've read philosophers who say meaningful experiences are purely subjective, and I understand why they belive that, because you can't prove life and love and death are anything more than radom happenings. But then you start thinking about some of the scenes you've lived, and if you've had a couple of drinks, they have a sentimental quality that gets you believing we are all poems coming out of the mud."
That's exactly how I feel.
Except that I don't need a couple of drinks to get into the sentimental mood. I think HSPs (highly sensitive people) kinda just create these moods themselves, or else they just swing into it.
My post title doesn't even make sense, but it just came and in a weird sort of way, it feels right.
Fingers hover over the keyboard and...zilch.
Nothing.
That's a sign that I've been doing too much, or not blogging often enough to capture the moments.
I think it's the latter.
How do you capture those moments anyway? It's not like I can whisk out a laptop and internet connection when I'm sitting by the pool at 11pm and thinking through the day, or when I'm on the bus and a really epiphanical thought hits me.
Will we remember any of this in a thousand years to come?
Maybe it'll be like Joshua Harris' dream, where there's drawer after drawer in a filing cabinet in a large room in heaven where all our memories will be stored, including all the smart and stupid things we said, as well as all the things we never said.
And then I'll be able to see just how many people have read my posts, and know how accurate my feelings are cause about right now, I feel worthless. I bet if my posts were books they'd be the kind forgotten on a really high shelf in a dusty corner in the book store and one day, when they're clearing out the shop, they'd discover the existence of my posts-books and then...
I don't know.
Maybe they'll laugh as they remember what was written inside, or be curious cause they'd never read it and the books look really quaint, with the yellowing-pages, old ink and dust. Or maybe they'll throw it out for recycling without a second glance.
I really, really, REALLY like Donald Miller.
Maybe that's not too accurate. Let me rephrase.
I really, really, REALLY like Donald Miller's writing style.
I mean, I wouldn't actually know if I liked him unless if I met him in person, right?
But he's so honest, honest in a way I've always hope to be but realised I've always fallen short because I'm too busy embellishing my thoughts with fancy words that would have swirls and prints all over if you transposed them into a picture that by the time I hit 'publish post', I've glossed a layer of shine over all of it.
Myabe God is teaching me how to be honest.
Like, honest as in "through the heart" and not "from the heart".
Lil' C said that when commenting on Mark and Chelsie's dancing (the "Bleeding Love" one by Tabitha and Napolean, who are, incidentally, a really awesome hip hop choreographer-couple) and I've not had anything else make so much sense to me before.
Maybe that's slightly exaggerating, but what I'm trying to say is that dancing through your heart is so important a truth that it can be applied to so many other things in life, such as writing.
So back to this writing business...
I was standing along the corridor on the second level of Bartley, and there was this wind blowing down it. It was still and quiet, with the sound of the kids' voices coming through the wall, and it felt so peaceful. I stayed there for a bit because it was one of those moments that needed to last a bit longer than the usual moment, so you stop moving and stay in there until you feel it in you to move on to the next one.
It made me feel...alive.
So yes, getting back to this writing business, perhaps I should just put in the quote from Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years here.
"Sometimes I'm tempted to believe life doesn't mean anything at all. I've read philosophers who say meaningful experiences are purely subjective, and I understand why they belive that, because you can't prove life and love and death are anything more than radom happenings. But then you start thinking about some of the scenes you've lived, and if you've had a couple of drinks, they have a sentimental quality that gets you believing we are all poems coming out of the mud."
That's exactly how I feel.
Except that I don't need a couple of drinks to get into the sentimental mood. I think HSPs (highly sensitive people) kinda just create these moods themselves, or else they just swing into it.
My post title doesn't even make sense, but it just came and in a weird sort of way, it feels right.
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