I'm twenty-five today!

Whoa...a quarter of my lifespan just flew pass me! Feel so captive to the carousel of time. No return but only looking back at how I've been living my life. And I can never feel happier where I am now because I got nothing to complain about. The favour and blessings from the Lord are more than enough for me. I survived the stormy years of teenage life and young adulthood, and I'm all gird up to take on more in the next few years. Praise God!

Actually, for the past 25 years of my life, I've never really perceived my birthday to be a special occassion. For many of the years, it just came and went. If you ask me how I celebrated my sweet sixteen or 21st birthday, I really cannot give you any answer. My memory of those times is simply fuzzy. When I was young, I remember that my mummy would come back from work with a birthday cake on that day, and we would all hover around the cake that night, and sing a birthday song and cut the birthday cake. She used to buy those creamy sponge cakes that you get from the neighbourhood bakeries; and there would always be the "Happy Birthday, Charlene" written in icing on the top of the cake. I would blow the candles and cut the cake. There won't be any presents cos' I would have exhausted all my "gift privileges" before October (I would beg my mum to buy me the latest toys as my birthday or Xmas presents in advance). Those were the days. We stopped doing the cake thing for some time. Nowadays, we do dinners minus the cake (heh, unless it comes free with some bday discount; but rarely do we do the blowing of candles ritual at home). I have never had one of those MacDonald's parties. It was something every kid wanted for their birthdays (the 80s babies esp would agree with this), including me. It would sure be weird to have one now though. Hmm...still can't figure out why everyone was so crazy about it then.

Today, though, was rather special. And I'm recording this because I want to capture this and remember this in the future. When the clock struck 12 the night before, I started receiving several SMSes with birthday greetings. Subsequently, the next day I received more SMSes and some birthday messages and virtual gifts on facebook and friendster (the beauty of electronic media and birthday reminders...haha, can save money on bday gifts too =) sincere nonetheless =)). Dolled up and clad in the most youthful-looking top in my wardrobe, bright and cheery, I took off to Vivo for main service at ten-ish. Fast forward to after service: I received a huge sunflower stock from me beloved youths. Really pleasant surprise cos' I thought they wouldn't have known (again, the beauty of bday reminders and friendster). That in itself had me grinning from ear-to-ear as I navigated the walkways of vivo after service with my sunflower and invited stares from people strolling through the mall. After that, had a nice lunch at Beach Road and got my fix of Ah Balling which I've been craving for a few weeks now.

Unsuspecting, I went back to church after lunch. Everything seemed normal. Did back-up for youth service--Jer is getting so smooth as a worship-leader, so proud of him!--and we breaked to discuss our skits. All this while, I was oblivious to the "conspiracy" that was brewing in the next room. Different ones took turns to present their skits. Then our cast for the last skit (which was "save for the last" in EQ's words) took to the stage. Again, everything started per normal, and nothing was peculiar. I was anticipating Tine's defining moment---her most "deh" performance, but it didn't come. Instead, this cheeky girl got a few members from the audience up onstage to check out this red box that she was holding. She gestured to me to join her and peek into this box, and then she urged me to open it. As I opened it, everyone started singing "happy birthday!" This "naughty" bunch had hidden this scrap book they made for me in the box!! Ok, for those of you who were there, you probably get the picture of what I'm recording here. For those of you who are simply clueless about what I'm trying to say (which is really ineffable or difficult to express in words), the bottomline is, I was, in Ashton Kutcher's words "punked" heh. It was really unexpected. Me being the cry baby I am, was touched to tears instantly. Ern, Ja and Bell said some sweet things that made it even harder to turn off the tap. These "crazy" kids (and I mean it in love, affection and jest =)), had spent so much time, effort and monies making this scrap book. They even pasted my picture (which was taken of me holding the sunflower which Ram took for me in the morning) on the cover page. That was an enormous suprise and one of the best birthday gifts ever! Thanks guys!

There were actually more suprises after that (skilfully crafted I must say)....hehe but I won't be divulging much here. The guru will prob not be pleased if any trade secrets were readily disclosed to others ;) All you guys @ church are great at creating surprises! Besides, it's now 1 am and my birthday is over! Gotta go to work tomorrow too. All I can say is that, the gifts I got today were given with much love and warmth. I may be older today, but I'm just so glad that my last 25 years have been worthwhile. The SMSes, well-wishes, hugs, and gifts speak volumes of God's favour upon me. Praise God forever and ever, Amen!

---<@~Farewell SIBERIA~@>---

So long, farewell, are we to bid Adieu....

Siberia's destiny finally cast in stone...After fighting valiantly the battle of dwindling numbers, she succumbed to the pernicious force of migration. One by one, the deadly blows struck her. First, the flight of our longtime president to the greener (or grayer) pastures of Laughborough. The loss of leadership marked the disintegration of the flourishing county. Next, our honey bee decided to shift her colony to the bustling town. Shortly after, Othello's love packed her turtles, big and small, and shipped them to the town. Apparently, she secured the last and most coveted plot of land (just within the perimeters of the town). With one remaining inhabitant, Siberia officially announced its closure. The vibrance has dissipated into desolation. Once in a while, travellers will saunter down the thoroughfare to seek a sip from the well. What's left is only that picture taken in her prime and beautiful memories for her alumni to savour. We mourn now, but we rejoice at the birth of a new age, one more brilliant than its preantecedent.

~the lone ranger

EVAN ALMIGHTY

Went to watch this movie at GV Marina last night. Despite the lackluster reviews, decided that it was a show I originally wanted to watch cos of its biblical relevance and cos' Steve Carell's such a cool actor, and of course on a Fri night when every other show seems to be fullhouse, that seemed like the next best alternative.

It didn't disappoint me however. In fact, I was pleasantly enthused by the lessons I caught from the show. I could empathise with Carell's Evan Baxter cos' he had to do what he had to in faith (well, God didn't give him a choice I guess). But the amazing thing was God was that each step and provided him with everything he needed to perform the task he was called to do.

Nonethless, the greatest challenge (and hence most significant learning point of the show for me) was dealing with a world that not only lacked the understanding he had, but also antagonised and taunted him. Though I haven't been placed in such extreme circumstances, it made me ponder over my ability to stand the test if the situation arises. The Christian road was never meant to be easy and even now I do face challenges occassionally (and I do fall very often!) Still, I felt kinda emotional watching this comedy cos' it reminded me about this calling we have to stand by and persist in our faith in this faithless world.

Anyway, the jokes were pretty good and had me chuckling quite a bit. Steve Carell did not let me down. He was amusing as the prim and almost to the extent obsessively compulsive Evan Baxter. Some of the funnier moments were his transformation into the likeness of old testament Noah (haha....became one of the Beetles), his accident prone behaviours during the construction scenes, and of course who could forget his shaving ritual--the part where he shaves his nose hair three to four times using various methods...whoa! Heh, maybe I should get one of those nose shavers from Mustafa as Xmas presents for my guys friends come Dec. His African American exec assistant, Rita, was hillarious as well. She makes the funniest comments. Not to mention the spectacular scenes of the ark and the animals just following him around (the fish one was exceptionally funny). I thought it was a great comedy actually.

Just a quote that was pretty insightful and impactful:

God talking to Joan Baxter (Evan's wife):

Let me ask you something. If someone prays for patience, you think God gives them patience? Or does he give them the opportunity to be patient? If he prayed for courage, does God give him courage, or does he give him opportunities to be courageous? If someone prayed for the family to be closer, do you think God zaps them with warm fuzzy feelings, or does he give them opportunities to love each other?

May it encourage those who are going through struggles in their Christian walk or feeling that their prayers have not been answered.

Frazzled mind...

It's been a while since I journalled about my life. The past few entries had been figments of my aspirations to be a voice to certain issues close to my heart. And it has been a while since I really slowed down to reflect on my own thoughts. Largely due to the wearing and hectic life I've been leading recently I guess. Especially so for these past two days which have been exhaustingly eventful...but still not as so as my cognitive world...

Thursday, 16 Aug 07
Yesterday, I missed the office retreat so I'm kinda clueless what transpired. Good thing or bad thing I don't know. But anyway, while everyone was enjoying the day out of office and playing their captain's ball, I was stuck in an unfamiliar building doing the gruelling and ponderous GRE test for 4 hours! My mind frazzled...it was fried. As I did the first math test, I started to realise I had insufficient time and I started to tikam. It was then that I felt a deluge of anguish just come over me. I knew it was a goner! In that state of distress, I forced myself to sit through three more tests (one verbal and one more math), even though there was this intense inner voice telling me to run out of the examination room. After that four-hour torture I braced myself to face the uneluctable truth. And as expected, I didn't do well enough on my math (surprisingly my verbal did pretty good even though I tikamed for quite a few...haha...maybe if I did it seriously I would have gotten them wrong...). So that means that I have to endure the whole process again be getting another re-rest. Sighs...all this for the sake of grad school. Pay money, go back to mugging, plead with people to write referee letter for me...all to pursue a dream that would expend five more years of my youth on studying! Hmmm....worthwhile? I really don't know whether I would ever make it to the States next year but I keeping the faith and believing that God will lead the way---for better or worse to me but definitely the best in God's plan for me. No matter how tough and minute the chance may be, I think it's worth a fight, to try and overcome all odds and make it to grad school in US.

Friday, 17 August 07
After that tedious task, I went to chalet to meet the gals from work. Just a nice cool clique that was comfortable to be with. After bantering for a while, we went to bed like all sensible working adults do (can you believe that, we were at a chalet....go chalet supposed to stay up late and have fun rite...) cos' the next morn we had to conduct the retreat activties for everyone else. Most of us ended up with poor sleep. Some of us were wide awake in our beds not knowing that we were all going thru that same battle with sleeplessness...and the warm temperature in the room cos' the air-con was on fan mode! We woke up to a rainy morning, which was the prelude to the dismal weather that dampened our moods, and almost disrupted our BBQ plans in the evening. Anyway, we got through the day's events but me and the gals were super exhausted from the execution of the retreat programme. Conducting the games was especially tiring cos' we had to constantly ra-ra everyone, but thank God it was a spontaneous and lively group that we were working with. Fortunately, the rain didn't spoil the fun! There were so many hillarious moments and people were sporting enough to perform their forfeits and buffoon around with their weird antics. Put a group of people with the forensic mind together in a room and what do you think will brew?

The BBQ went on despite the rain. Kudos to the guys who braved the rain to start the fire. The beng kan team went forth to barbeque the food under my umbrellas which smell very strongly of BBQ food now. Some of us were microwaving the uncooked food to reduce the amount of barbequeing time at the pit. Everything went on fine in spite of the hiccups in the poor weather. Phew! We all managed to eat our fill and there were some leftovers.

But I guess to me, the most memorable and heartening thing was being able to bond and have some close chats with several people during the retreat. Some were just touch-and-go, but I felt the ingenuity and sincerity in those conversations. Not just the usual office PR that we all engage in at work five days a week. I mean, we don't have the luxury of time to share facets of our lives with each other at work. But it was just nice being able to do that out of office, at a chalet.

Though we sometimes complain about work, and sometimes I do admit that I wish I were doing more psych-related work elsewhere, it's hard to imagine life without ever having to step back into office and seeing these faces that have become so familiar to me and have formed such a huge part of my life. And now as some people are leaving, office life is going to change and it's going to become an unfamiliarity again that needs some time for us to warm up to....to the fact that we're not going to be hearing the "anybody there?" ringtone for some time...to the fact that there's going to be an empty room...no one herding us to go for lunch and keeping a lookout for us at that critical hour where people are jioing everyone else...to the fact that we have fewer people to bitch about our problems to...the familiar mugs and office stuff that are going to be packed in boxes and brought away...sighs....need I say more?

Well, even then, I'm glad for these changes. I'm joyful for these people cos' great things are in store for them. It's always with a sweet bitterness that you bid farewell, but you also know that somewhere, somehow, when you meet, that nostalgia will just gush in and you'll find tremendous thrill in speaking about the good ole days! These are facts of life that we deal with. And as we grow older, we encounter more and more of such happenings. Life as a teenager was much simpler...not jaded by the real world, freshly loaded with aspirations and zest for life cos' you think that you can accomplish everything you want, and your youth is your strongest currency. As you age, you learn to appreciate friendships cos' it gets harder and harder to even meet up at Starbuck's for a latte together on a Saturday afternoon, unlike in a classroom where you die die must meet up everyday for school.

Enough musing for now...getting poigant liao. My frazzled mind needs some restful sleep. Pray that God will send amazing things into our lives and bless these friendships that have been divinely formed. God has great plans for all of us. We just need to trust and obey for there's no other way. Amen!

SLEEP, THE FIRST TO GO!

Neil Humphreys’ article (“Ah, those short wonder years”) featured on 29 July 2007 struck a chord with me. In particular, the line “But you cannot buy back a childhood” summoned a sense of regret as I looked back on my ‘not-so-wonder’ years. I hate to admit it but I was an honorary member of the ‘Go-home society’, where student life was relegated simply to studying non-stop, and social life and fun were nil.

As the load they have to bear on their shoulders grows, our students struggle to prioritise between increasing demands, against the backdrop of an unchanging 24 hours per day. At a young age, they are being compelled to perfect this balancing act, which is not a bad thing I suppose. It does gear them for the future. However, sadly speaking, many of them are unable to achieve that healthy equilibrium, and some end up failing at a costly price.

A recent Teen Sleep Survey conducted locally this year showed that our teenagers were not getting sufficient sleep. Eighty per cent of students polled slept for less than eight hours on school days, and a whooping 66.5 per cent were up late doing homework or studying. Given the insidious effects of sleep deprivation on growth and intellectual functioning, this should sound an alarm. With numerous obligations to fulfil, it is not surprising that sleep is often the first sacred cow to be sacrificed in a mad rush for time.

Rising stress is a reality we cannot escape today. Hence, teaching and helping our students prioritise becomes imperative. Long term consequences such as poor mental health and life dissatisfaction are often neglected in the pursuit of short-term goals like a report card with straight ‘A’s. Parents and educators need to be aware that they sometimes can become transmitters of unhealthy or rigid expectations. Poor sleep compounded by high expectations imposed on oneself, can actually form a fertile ground for the development of depressive disorders. Perhaps that is why more people are having Depression and sleep problems nowadays. This is something for us to mull over.

On a mission to CARE...

HI everyone, the concept of "care" has been on my mind quite a bit. Basically, I'm interested to know the following:

1. Why do people care? Why don't people care?
2. What would make them care?
3. How to make them care?
4. When do people care?
5. Do we care too much sometimes?
6. How does caring lead to benevolent actions?
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..
...
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Do leave me some thoughts if you do have any ideas...

Never outdated - The Holy Bible's lasting appeal!

As I read the bible more and attend more bible teachings, it just amazes me how this book which was probably written eons way way back can be so incredibly relevant and applicable even in our modern society today. Just two points I want to share that I've been enlightened towards as I read the old testament:

1. The MULTI-TASKING wonder woman of the old testament

Attended this bible conference over the past 2 nights organised by RBC Ministries (Singapore). Came to know of this through the mailer and I straightaway blocked out the 2 dates on my calendar and committed myself to attending this conference. The theme was "Making Choice Choices" and the speaker was one of ODB's very own writers, Prof Alice Matthews (an amazingly gifted woman of God who's 77 this year and still speaks with so much projection and fervour).

In one of her sermons on Judges 4 and 6 last night, she spoke of Deborah the prophetess. I just completed that book recently, so some of the stories were still fresh in my mind. But what was truly remarkable was that though little was mentioned about Deborah, this admirable woman of God, Matthews was able to extract such powerful lessons we can learn from that little amount of info. It just accentuates the richness of biblical text that subtly conveys many useful and life transforming messages that the layperson will fail to see. Well, guess that's debatable cos' the magic of the bible maybe comes in how God touches us at that point as we feast on His word and how he touches and reveals to us certain things. But anyway, she drew so much from that and I really gleaned a lot of wisdom.

Anyway, back to Deborah...In Judges 4:4, it says:

"Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lappidoth, was leading Israel at that time."

From this simple line, you can see that this woman was first someone gifted with the talent of prophesy which she accepted and used for the glory of God (MINISTRY). Second, she was the wife of Lappidoth; she had a family and in those days women had to fulfill many traditional duties as a wife and mother (WIFE). Thirdly, she was a Judge, someone who spoke God's word to the people and ensured that the people of Israel were accorded their rightful justice; she was a public servant and military leader (CAREER). The order speaks for itself--the order of priority these roles should take in our lives. Just in this one line, it shows how she weighed her priorities and how we can learn from women in the old testament. They were not all housewives, they were women who had to face the same difficulties and role conflicts as we do today. And Deborah, a woman of faith, displayed her strength and commitment to God in the way she accepted her gifts and used them but also relied on God's empowerment and truth. She was strong in character and personality. This was a woman that the millenial ladies of Christ can learn from!

2. Where are the MEMORIALS today?

As I did my Quiet Time this morning, a point was brought up to me among the notes in my study bible. The gist of it reflected how modern people can stand to gain from establishing memorials in our lives as God granted us victories and miracles. In the old testament, we read about the people of Israel laying rocks and building altars to extol the wonders of God and how He faithfully helped them overcome all odds and win the battles they had fought. And we go..."What does that God to do with us?" The fact that such instances have been repeated so many times as we read the old testament means that something is important there--something that is worth our reading and learning.

Many times we go through difficult patches of our life wondering where God is. What we fail to dwell on (since we end up spending our mental resources focusing on our current difficulties and stresses and just seeking some form of deliverance from God) is our past victories--how God restored us or delivered us in the past. Many of us can't remember those things but what we can learn is that when we recall those fulfilled promises we are encouraged and strengthened. We stand to gain from establishing memorials. Be it a journal or blog(;p) entry about our victories which we can fall back on in times of need, or perhaps a photograph of a successful event in our ministry. These can really remind us and encourage us in our times of need. But most importantly, they always help us remember that God is the source of our strength. Without God's power we could never make it through on our own. In this way, we honour Him as we "build these memorials" and strengthen ourselves as we recall past glories.

So who says that the bible is outmoded and irrelevant? In my opinion, it's the best self improvement and management book that is applicable across all contexts and life situations. Everyone can stand to gain from its wisdom. Everyday as we read His word it teaches us to be better managers of our lives and helps us to grow and become more and more like Him. Amen to that!