Baby-Steps

... in reading the Chronicles of Narnia..


Jewel, King Tirian's Unicorn, before going into enemy's territory with his master -

" 'If Aslan gave me my choice, I would choose no other life than the life I have had and no other death than the one we go to.' " - The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis




Lady Polly, on Susan -

" 'She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age.' " - The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis





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If being christian is about going church and doing supposedly "christian"things, we wld haf missed the point big time..... and i'm not here to advocate a total boycott of 'church/christian' things, but wat i mean is:

if 'going to church' takes place without recognizing the preciousness of 'community',

if 'going to church' becomes a focus on the lights and sounds,

if 'going to church' takes place without the reverence for an infinitely powerful&loving God,

if 'doing quiet time' takes place without the desire to intimately connect with God,

if stating 'i'm a Christian' takes place without recognizing the immense significance of the carnage done on Jesus while He was on earth....


........ if all of the above happens (the list is not exhaustive), then everything is just a religious performance.

period.



We already have enough religious rites in the history of mankind, we dun need another set of "christiany" ones to add to the list...



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Mr. Beaver: Theres a right bit more than hope. Aslan... is on the move.......

- The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005)


http://aslans.blogspot.com/2009/04/favorite-narnia-quotes.html




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I logged out of my Facebook,

Logged out of my Twitter.

Closed all my email windows.

I wanna spend my first few hours of this day re-collecting ... You.


Lord, i thank You for the past 26 years.... It has been quite a ride.... it is a miracle i live on till today, without killing myself during those depressive days, when dark imaginations ran wild and so did my sanity... i thank You that You were still there when i misunderstood You and even totally hated myself, and You were there... even when i was so starved of love and not understanding that You are the source of love, You were still there... even in the quiet quiet still of tonight, i still sense Your desire to love me so so totally, and always calling me a child of Yours... for this, i'm deeply thankful... i'm glad i'm alive till now....

... and i don't know what they next few years will bring.... and now i truly know my days are totally in Your hands, i know it's purely Your call to have me here or call me home.... with this, i also rest, since i don't know about it anywayz...

but... yeah, hey, BIG GUY/Father God, thanks for the past 26 years, and now bringing me through a season of spring again... =)



love you lots, Dad,
david




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“After four Children of Crisis volumes focusing on disenfranchised groups, Coles turned for his final volume to The Privileged Ones: The Well-off and the Rich in America.... ..... For fifteen years Coles had heard the poor talk about ‘them’: the privileged ones, the blessed ones, those with food on their table and doctors at their call and an education and a couple of cars and a house of their own with no landlord. Yet what had such comfort produced? Were the rich any happier? More peaceful? More grateful? Once again psychiatrist Coles encountered the paradoxes in human nature that seemed to defy the neat behaviourist formulas he had been taught …

… Among the poor he had expected defeat and despair; he found some, yes, but he also found strength and hope and courage. Among the rich he expected satisfaction, and instead found boredom, alienation and decadence…

… Middle class churches tend to be sweet, soothing and inoffensive, their worship services predictable and controlled. Coles himself, a product of the privileged minority, began to wonder about his own resistance to the power of a radical gospel. He could not avoid the discrepancy between the Bible’s teaching on justice and fairness and the lives privileged people tend to live, marked by greed, competition and status...... ......

.... Comfortable people, he noticed, were apt to have a stunted sense of compassion, more likely to love humanity in general but less likely to love one person in particular. Did he show compassion? As a Harvard undergraduate, he recalled with a pang, he had treated the dormitory maid as a lowly servant even while earning A’s in his ethics courses.… He was generous to be sure, but he had the luxury to be generous. He had never been in a situation of absolute dependence, the daily state of many poor people.

… Ultimately, he came to believe that the most dangerous temptation of all is the temptation of plenty. In the same breath, wealth curses what it blesses. Being privileged, Coles concluded, tends to stifle compassion, curtail community and feed ambition.

… By the time the last of the Children of Crisis volumes was published, Robert Coles had arrived not in a new place, but in a very old place. He had travelled thousands of miles, recorded miles of tape and written a million words, all of which pointed right back to the Sermon on the Mount. He had discovered that the poor are mysteriously blessed and that the rich live in peril. He had learned that what matters most comes not from without – the circumstances of life – but from within, inside the heart of an individual man or woman or child…"


- Philip Yancey, on Robert Coles (a renown child psychiatrist, professor at Harvard University, winner of Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1973 for his series of books Children of Crisis and many other awards..etc )

Being in Turkey to attend a 5-day Internet Min conference is such an honor for me, as only after registering to come, i realized it was mainly for strategic regional/ national leaders... (ha! u can't imagine my shock/dismay when i learnt bout it!) .... and frankly, i came here with much apprehension about what was my role and how would i "explain" myself to others...

now that i'm here, the past 2 days have been such REEEEECCH days of interaction and ideation that i was so so recharged!!! i realized i have been missing doing design thinking, and a huge part of MinNet 2009 is to diagnose and ideate => something which fitted in perfectly with design-thinking!

and i'm exposed to "high-ranking" ministry leaders who did brainstorming at an amazing speed and depth => great learning experience!! Their insightful comments into even movement building was so succinct and sharp that even that 1 minute answer can easily offset an afternoon of troubleshooting...

what was even more inspiring was how the conferees were dynamically single-minded in seeing the GC fulfilled with the aid of the Internet - people who are COMMITTED to a MISSION and DEFINITELY have a VISION! This i hope will be carried back and spilled over into the local ministries ...

Oh, i'll talk more next time, but one last observation was - in other countries, the Cru ministry are working so closely with local church and well-regarded as an equipping organization... but, i don't think this is how the Spore local church see us though.. food for thought...

好懒洋洋的一天。。。人生有时是得过得懒懒的， 好好的 take in all the sights and sounds ＝） 。。。 今天正有些许愁烦教会朋友的人情世故。。。也不该吧， 既然自己也没什么好建议， 不过就只觉得大家都被男女关系缠得紧紧的， 忘了爱会让人得到真正的自由， 即使设立约束也是为了在这约束里找到更“实”的自由。。。唉！ 好难搞啊！。。。。 就好比看着两个记时炸弹在我面前随时会引爆。。。祷告，祷告！

的确， 星期日就象是一个星期的美好符号， 我今天竟然能以“懒洋洋“这种词汇来形容这个短暂的下午， 也真的是幸福。。。：） 还有机会重看几集的昔日日剧， 也真的是痛快！（昔日日剧深具意义及富有深度， 百看不厌。。）




你们刚才有没有跟我一起见证了一个很漂亮的黄昏？

周一并不恐怖。：）




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昨天目睹了60多位基督教徒的洗礼。。。 好有感触。。。。 看到了老的， 少的在心里和口里宣告相信耶稣的救赎， 忽然间， 心里深深地感受到父神的喜悦。。。很深很深的一种喜悦。。。。 儿女归来， 当然喜悦啦！；）


".. and it feels like giving in, it feels like starting over, it feels like waking up... "




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