thursday morning tute

Tomorrow's the last of the Thursday tute - the one I always wake up late for (BUT only actually slightly late ONCE... not so bad hor... haha) because the tutor is so blur we can never get anything done properly and I guess I just subconsciously dread going for it.

But tomorrow's my last chance to not have a kan cheong breakfast before it. I shall be punctual! With a proper breakfast!

my sweet friends

I've such sweet sweet friends! The dearies, upon reading my entry on missing S'pore food, went shopping last week to get me S'pore foodstuff, intending to send them over to me. And yeah, "intending" is the word... because sad to say, their wonderful efforts were thwarted by aussieland's [in]famously superstrict laws about foodstuff from other [questionable? haha] places entering the land.

BUT nevertheless, and I mean this with all my heart although it sounds so cliche, it's the thought that counts, truly. I now appreciate this phrase more than ever, because when Cal told me about their plans and how they went shopping and everything, and all the way to the post... I was, and am, really really so touched. Thank you dears!! :)))

Had another good session in CU last night, learning more about Christianity and science. Contradictory? Opposing? Mutually exclusive? Or can they actually go together?

The guy who spoke to us was a thoroughly 'science-guy'. Woah. He's so scientific lor. Can rattle off all the various scientific theorists and "a scientific theory can never be proven, only disproven" thingys type of person.

He told us a bit about his background. Thoroughly science-guy (oops covered that already). Worldview all along since high sch was very scientific (of cuz). Was never into Christianity. He said he didn't really like Christians, bcuz they were 'kinda always in your face... never leave you alone'. But science doesn't answer everything, and as he found out more about God, the bible, christianity, and life, he realised that science and God doesn't contradict each other; in fact, very much the contrary.

I guess each individual will have their own bugbears/barriers/reasons on not being able to accept Jesus. Regardless of how it may seem so evident through people's changed lives, or miracles, or science, or knowledge, or what-have-you... that Christianity is not just another religion, ultimately, it is your heart that has to be convicted - wholly - to accept Him. Otherwise it's just head knowledge, or pure religiosity which will be unable to stand the test of trials and life's very hard questions.

On my last note... the part about Christians being 'kinda always in your face'... erm, if I have been so to you in an ungracious way, I really apologise for it. But I also hope that I have been 'in your face' enough [in a manner of love], because that's cuz I care, and there is a reason for it. After all, it is true that Christianity is a in-your-face thing isn't it? It demands all or nothing, and it doesn't offer a bed of roses in your life magically. But it sets you apart for a life of eternity.

Some sites of interest: www.iscast.org.au / www.answersingenesis.com

Books to explore:
The Case for a Creator: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Toward God and
The Case for Faith: A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity - both by Lee Strobel. (I haven't read them myself but I intend to.)

only in Your time

This beautiful song spoke to me this morning:

In His Time
In His time, in His time
He makes all things beautiful in His time
Lord, please show me every day
As You're teaching me Your way
That You do just what You say
In Your time

In Your time, in Your time
You make all things beautiful in Your time
Lord, my life to You I bring
May each song I have to sing
Be to You a lovely thing, in Your time

I'm reminded of so many things through it - patience, God's sovereignty, God's promises (like Romans 8:28, Isaiah 55:8-9), obedience...

This is a precious period of learning to wait, in obedience. Thank you Lord for all that you're teaching me. In Your time Lord... help me to see that Your ways are higher than mine. I want to see the big picture and not angst over the seeming puzzles in my small picture. But in Your time.

Thanksgiving:
- the great synthesiser at the college arts centre, that i can still continue to brush up on my piano plus sing praises!
- for all the lovely jazz CDs i can borrow from the library
- for the blessing of the CD player from my dear friend :)))
- for the gift of music to mankind

community-based rehab

The morning lecture was such an inspiration. Community-based rehabilitation means really going out there to equip people with the skills for living. Which is not such a take-for-granted thing if you're disabled in a third world country with little resources (think nearest hospital as 2 days away, no therapist to make splints for your fractured bone...) and a harsh environment (think rough un-wheelchair-friendly terrain... how to even go outside your house to the toilet? how to use the toilet that is a hole in the ground if you're in a wheelchair?) to boot.

These are the people in already poor communities, and yet, when stricken with illness or disability, it hurls them even more down the poverty line.

I recognised some of the issues, challenges and funny anecdotes the lecturers brought up; it reminded me of my short time in the Maldives earlier this year. I identified especially with the importance of cultural sensitivity when in another culture, the huge but very real challenge of geographical distance, and of the "you'd think people knew these common sense strategies but you'd be surprised - they don't!" thingy.

And I realised suddenly in the middle of the lecture - wow! I've already been doing CBR in fact! It's like I didn't even think of my trip then as this, to me it was like a trip where I'm doing what I can, with my OT skills.

I'm excited, and I know that somewhere in me there will always be that desire to use my OT skills in practical ways in less advantaged communities, even if it's for short trips each time. After all, what will be most useful will be to train up locals in the community, or set up viable programs there that can be effective, helpful and independent in the longrun.

Actually it's been an amazing week of learning lotsa things, on many fronts. :)

Thanksgiving (so many!! just a few here...)
- for the opportunity to be doing what i love
- for being able to still have some comfort [asian] foods here
- for the mooncake festival this sunday!
- for the friendships you've provided
- for my health

*thank you God!*

spring blossoms

Seasons

Don’t you love the seasons,
The change in countryside?
As though we needed reasons
To pause and go outside.

To view with awe and wonder
The everlasting scene,
To rest from work and ponder
What all of this can mean?

Is budding branch of spring
Or glistening drop of dew
A means that God may use to bring
Belief in Him to you?

His are the summer’s radiant flower
And autumn’s rich display.
Through winter gale He shows His power
To lead us in His way.

- By Mary T. Hoffman -

I can't get over the beauty of spring all around me, and the wonders of the changing sesasons. Suddenly the little tree that was bare and wintry just a few weeks ago is now totally covered with blossoms. Wow...

Take time to be amazed at the wonders of gorgeous creation around you today - how can a tiny wonder in the form of that little intricate flower being anything else but the work of an awesome Designer?

satisfied... almost

Ok lah. I am satisfied... haha. I just returned from dinner with friends at a restaurant which serves authentic Malaysian food and is raved about by practically every M'sian/S'porean student here, or so I heard.

Out of all the mouthwatering menu options (it's tough when you haven't eaten hor fun and laksa and chicken rice and fried kuay teow and etc etc etc for more than 2 months and you have to make ONE agonising choice) I finally chose the 'curry laksa'. Mmmmm.

But then, when it came, I was like 'er, yellow noodles?' After some clarification with my friends who brought me there I realised that it's actually curry noodles, so... it IS curry laksa, but m'sian style. Ohhhh... I see. I would be lying if I said I wasn't a liiiiiitle bit disappointed, that it wasn't the laksa I had expected - Katong style. But really, I think I must be dreaming lah. How to expect Katong laksa in my ulu-nated suburb here right...

All said and done, I must say that it was nevertheless good curry 'laksa' overall! I typically don't eat yellow noodles - just don't like the 'yellow' smell, if you know what I mean. (Fellow yellow-noodles-disliking pple will understand exactly, haha). But thankfully this yellow noodles didn't have the yellow smell. And surprise surprise, it actually has bee hoon inside too! In s'porean cuisine lingo I'd prob call it Combination Curry Noodles-Bee Hoon (cuz it has a whole myriad of ingredients like chicken, char siew, brinjal...).

Oh btw, for the uninitiated, s'pore laksa uses 'chu mi fen', which is literally translated to 'thick rice noodles'. Basically it is about as thick as yellow noodles, but it's white. And s'pore laksa doesn't have things like char siew (which is roast pork) and brinjal inside. So yeah, you can imagine why I was a bit taken aback when I saw the curry laksa just now.

But yes, it was good still. And I'm satisfied. The 'almost' bit is juz that tiny lil part of me who is still yearning for katong laksa. :P

Amazing how cuisine is so much a part of one's culture, so much a part of one's sense of utter familiarity, comfort, solace.

Another academic week has flown by again. Gosh!! So so so fast. Tomorrow's Friday again and yay! That means I'm meeting the rest (some of the CU-ers) before my 9am class to pray tomorrow again. I really look forward to it, so much so that I usually bounce out of bed bright and early on Friday mornings to have my leisurely breakfast and still be on time/early to meet them (in contrast to... in particular, Thursdays haha... where more than twice I woke up so late I couldn't have a proper breakfast sitting down at the kitchen *sigh*. I'm trying to recitify it don't worry. It's JUST thursdays.).

It's great when we gather in unity to pray over the campus. No we don't 'say prayers'. No set prayers to 'go through'. Among other things, we pray that the people around us and all the strangers we see milling around the uni, will begin to seek for something that will fill their life and that what each will find will be something that will satisfy in an eternal manner - a relationship with the God who is yearning for us all to return back to a relationship with Him. As opposed to temporal things that satisfy perhaps for the moment or for a short while (drugs, food addiction, smoking, sex, booze) or even for a longer while but nevertheless ultimately temporal (academic achievement, fame, glory of achievements after achievements). Not all these are good, not all are bad. But they're all temporal.

Last week we also prayed earnestly for the situation in New Orleans post-Katrina.

Tomorrow, what God leads us to have a burden to pray for, we'll unite in prayer over. Looking forward to it!! :)

what are your occupations?

Am taking a break from my readings. I was reading a journal article on 'occupations and well-being', where the authors are trying to establish a link between how the things we do invariably affects (whether positively or negatively) our well-being. Perhaps most of us haven't really thought about this, but it's really so true right - how what we DO (i.e. the occupations we engage in) affects us in so many ways.

Hmm okay it sounds very cheem and airyfairy right. Lemme try again. Lemme use an example from my reading.

Take for instance the old lady who lives by herself in a not-so-safe neighbourhood. (think in terms of american context okay? it's not superbly take-for-granted safe in some places i guess.) She does not really go out of her house to the supermarket, because she could well be mugged along the way. So she ONLY goes out when she utterly needs to.

So what's the problem you ask? Well, think of your own grandma. Does she go play mahjong with her kaki? Taiji at the park downstairs? Visit her grandchildren? I'm sure doing all these make a grandma (or anyone of that age) happy and contented. In other words - a sense of well-being.

Compare the two elderly ladies and it should be obvious about how the things we DO affect the way we feel. Of course, the fact that the first lady's environment is to 'blame' for her social isolation is another issue...

But that's a really simple example to kick things off. The same will apply for all of us I'm sure. There will be some things we do which really make us happy, and some that are, well, just neutral perhaps. Most of us probably can engage in occupations that make us who we are, or characterises us, quite easily. E.g. being a student. Or playing a sport. Or just going out to town tonight for a movie. So generally well-being should be quite high.

Some might not have that liberty. In S'pore it's not easy to get around with a wheelchair for example. Being a student, say, at NUS, wouldn't be impossible but it'll be pretty difficult i'd imagine! (Sorry don't mean to shoot NUS - you've got a beautiful old hilly campus but it's HILLY! and full of steps.) Going to town for a movie similarly isn't impossible but it sure won't be easy. (trust me, we've tried this as a student project before.) So what happens? One tends to not to go as often as he might like. If you have an outgoing personality, that will be really disappointing. Well-being not as high as it could have otherwise been.

An important occupation for me this weekend was cooking, and learning new stuff about dishes, new ideas for things to try, and the works. Heh. I'm sure it increased my well-being by several notches. Firstly, I get to eat yummy food made by my friends and myself that are reminiscent of food back home. Then, the whole satisfaction of actually successfully completing the task (in professional jargon it's called task mastery) definitely definitely pushed up my well-being. =) Also, the reminiscing of gd food and fond memories with friends over a familiar local dessert was also very comforting. Hmm. Well-being upped even more. You get the drift.

Integrating what I learn with my own life occupations and resultant well-being eh? ;)

Lesson of the day: What you do affect how you feel! (occupations impacting on well-being) So, choose today to engage in things that will have lasting value. Hopefully things that will satisfy and add to your well-being in the long run.

For the record, this has been a glorious weekend of:
- liver with asparagus in dark soy sauce and lotsa pepper
- tang yuan (thanx ks!)
- black glutinous rice aka or-chok (thanx shar!)
- maple flavoured pancake breakfast (thanx to my craving for hotcakes haha)
- bittergourd with chicken soup
- sambal fish (thanx ks again!!)

Looking forward to grilled calamari tomorrow. =P

accumulation

I guess it took a while to get past the inertia and actually sitting down to do this blog thing. Still not used to it lah. Quite a few things/ideas I wanna jot down however... but it might turn out randomly. Let's see...

- Last week in CU something that was shared struck me. Background: We were discussing about euthanasia and the moral/medical ethics surrounding it. You see, this whole ethics thing is worth thinking about.. I don't just mean euthanasia but just ethical issues surrounding so many of the grey-area controversial stuff in the world. It's especially grey when there are some circumstances where supposedly 'wrong' things seem jusssst that slightly more justifiable.

So the lesson-of-the-day moment came for me when I heard this >> If you were sick, will your attitude be that of "drats it, I am in such pain, how do I end it?" OR "This is God's life, how do I use it?"

Such a vast difference in attitude isn't it? One assumes that this darn life is mine and mine alone. Now that it's not as perfect as it SHOULD be, heck it and end it. Period.

The other acknowledges that this life is not his own. Indeed, did YOU command yourself to come to life? Really, if you think about it, would you, or could you, think of your life as anything other than a gift?

It made me also remember a conversation I once had with a wise lady. She said that so many people grumble about their life. Why this, why that. She said, if she were God (and a jolly indignant God at that too, haha), she'd just think "these little people on earth are such ingrates for the breath of life in them, should jolly well snuff them out, so there!" Indeed, isn't it simply, purely by the grace of God that we are waking up each morning to a fresh new day? Could you exert that kind of control over your puny life? If something were to happen to you while you were sleeping, would you have a choice on whether you still had a tommorow to wake up to? Is this life yours and yours alone - really?

- The very next day (that would be last tues), I went for my very interesting elective... *drumroll*... Illness & Spirituality. Hmm. It was another thought-provoking session by my eccentrically intellectual lecturer. Thing that struck me for the day was how in moving to postmodernism, the individual has been celebrated and glorified even more than ever before. Just look at the New Age movement - I, me, myself... I am my own master, I influence my being... etc. Just look at the advertisements around us, all seeking to bring gratification to the self, self self.

What honestly broke my heart was to see a picture of people in the wica movement (i.e. people involved in witchery aka witches) trying to find meaning in their rituals. [Btw, "spirituality" is not = "religion", it is more defined as the finding of meaning of the self in respect to one's environment, be it in terms of relationships, or the larger universe. So spirituality is very much a "finding meaning" thingy.]

It drove home the point to me again of how everyone really is searching for meaning in their lives. Different people feel that they find it in various means. Granted, to each his own. Which I definitely respect. But how I wish that what they have found - be it thru religion, or material indulgences, or relationships - will truly satisfy... cuz more often than not, it doesn't... :(

- Which brings me to the other point I kept telling myself I will write on my blog - my declaration that I DO NOT have a RELIGION for gdness sake!! There! It's out. :D Yeap, I definitely don't have a religion. Although on official forms I have to fill up I invariably put 'Christianity' in the "religion" field, I'm afraid that what I really have ain't no religion.

A religion, in my humble opinion, gives an impression of a set of rules to abide by, based on a system of beliefs.

Me... I will never count myself as a religious person. I'm not the type to follow some u-must-do-this-n-this rules, especially if there's no gd reason behind it. I mean, my motivation comes from something much greater, u know what I mean?

Me... what I hold so dear to my heart, is my relationship with my Creator. Sounds so cliche eh. But I don't know if words can be enough to express how precious this is to me. How can you have a 'relationship' with God, one might ask? Through praying some nice prayers, thru going to church to worship a cross? No, thankfully it's not that!! I surmise that you can only have what you can term as a 'relationship' if the parties involved are all living breathing interactable beings - agree?

Yah lor! So my relationship with God is that - acknowledging His presence in my life, in this world, and being willing to be part of a two-way, active, interactive relationship.

aiyah, very hard to describe and explain properly right? Well, I'll give it another go someday when by God's grace I'm given the words adequately enough to express this.

Just know that it might be that you are finding for that one thing in life that truly satisfies you too.

(p/s. reason why I felt like doing the 'i have no religion!!' thing is cuz my neighbour keeps saying that I'm religious. To which I roll my eyes and try to explain for the umpteenth time that it ain't not religion, to not much effect. *sigh*

Ooh I've written so much I realised!! Well, I will head off to slumberland pretty soon. I'm zombified today after staying up so late to do some work last nite... *yawn*!