My imposter syndrome as a Christian.

Impostor syndrome is a strange feeling. It is a term first used by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978 "to refer to otherwise successful individuals who felt their achievements were undeserved."

In the papers today, journalist Zhaki Abdullah personally felt that way as he wrote:-

"After graduating in 2008, I have hit most of the major milestones of adulthood, I got a job, got married, had a child and moved into my own place. Yet on some level, I have always felt like I have been pretending at adulthood."

And Zhaki is not alone in feeling that way. 

He added, "while (impostor syndrome) is not classified as a formal mental disorder, as many as 70 per cent of people have such feelings, according to research published in the International Journal of Behavioural Science in 2011."

Even famous writer like Neil Gaiman and renown astronaut Neil Armstrong felt that way at some point in their lives. 

For Neil Gaiman, he "had nightmares about having someone show up at his door one day to tell him to get a real job instead of being a writer."

And for Neil Armstrong, he once told Gaiman in a function attended by "artists and scientists, writers and discoverers of things" that "he felt less accomplished than other people."

While I don't know whether Armstrong felt that he was an "imposter", I guess the feeling of inadequacy (or fake-ness) in the midst of other equally, if not more, accomplished individuals is quite natural. 

I think if we walk down that road and start comparing with others, there is just no end to feeling the "personal shortcomings" regardless of how accomplished we are. 

And unless you are a dictator who lives in an artificial cocoon of self-elevation and grandeur, where there is no end to the sycophancy bestowed on you by eager beavers no different from the mindless fans, no one is ever spared the same feeling that Armstrong or Gaiman (or Zhaki) experienced at some point in their lives.  

But, be that as it may, I am writing this morning about another form of imposter syndrome I once felt (and sometimes am still feeling). It is a sense of inauthenticity that quietly gnaws at my soul. And it is of a religious kind. 

As a Christian, I felt this most intensely when I am in an evangelistic service or some spiritual seminar when overseas preachers take over the stage in front of thousands of smitten believers. 

Somehow, there is what I call the feeding the frenzy syndrome when you are on an elevated stage and the expectation of the crowd reaches stratospheric levels. 

This usually comes after the emotions of the congregation are all psyched up by the lachrymose worship and praise songs. 

While I am not saying that it is improper to be jubilant and rejoicing in our faith, what I am however saying is that most of us risks leaving our brains at the door as we rush headlong with our bleeding hearts into the altar of indiscriminate blessings and promises being hosed straight at our faces.

And in a charged up environment like that, we often take everything being uttered at the pulpit hook, line and sinker.

This is where I developed that imposter syndrome as a believer.

I had personally attended countless of such mass gatherings in the past, and like an all-you-can-eat buffet bar, I grabbed everything I can with both hands and swallowed them whole. 

If a preacher claims healing unconditionally, I munch it down without thought. If a preacher announces a revelation of indiscriminate prosperity and blessings to all and sundry, I devour it with mindless relish (and that usually comes before a collection). 

And if a preacher proclaims the end of days in his lifetime (or very soon), I rush home to set up a hermitage of weeping, fasting, sackcloth donning and ash showering. 

Although I do that no more, I have in recent years been to a few of such services where hungry believers desperate for a breakthrough in their lives and/or the lives of their loved ones latch on to such promises as if their dear life depend on it.

To be honest, I somehow understand their cries for help and relief. I too was once in their shoes praying for a loved one to be healed but saw our collective fervent prayers fall on the auditorium's carpeted floor like thunderous pin-drops.  

My point here is that there is this undeniable gap between our prayers of faith and our cravings for signs and wonders. 

Let me clarify that this post is not about not praying and believing because of unanswered prayers, but it is about not being so naive and suggestible about bold claims of answered prayers.

You see, if Jesus’ ministry were defined strictly by signs and wonders, he would not have missed the opportunity of demonstrating the greatest miracle in his lifetime by walking out of the hung Cross totally unharmed just before he heaves his final breath (that is, it would not be “Lord, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing”, but instead, “Lord, it is about time you show them what you are made of”).

So, forget about the empty tomb where only a few had witnessed it. Let's go for broke and stroll down from the bloodied Cross and leave hundreds of skeptics speechless. That would surely go down in the annals of history as the greatest supernatural event of all time. 

Yet, Jesus chose otherwise not just to fulfill the prophecy, but because there is no greater miracle in this world than a life reborn. And that has always been the gospel since the beginning of time, that is, to reconcile all unto Him. 

In the end, physical miracles transfix the heart only for a season. A heart transformed however lasts for all seasons, and like the life of Christ, impacts generations. 

It is therefore not about answered prayer so much as it is about a transformed life. It is not about delaying death due to sickness as it is about confronting death and asking, "Where is thy sting?" 

And it is surely not about being rich in this world by clinging to the promises of prosperity as it is about being rich in God through following the steps of the risen Christ – wherever He takes us, through the valleys and all.

Coming back full circle, it is therefore not about signs and wonders at our beck and call as it is about fulfilling His call and purpose in our life.

So, I sometimes still feel fake about my faith when I assure others that God has plans for them to prosper, to be the head and not the tail, and to succeed in whatever they are doing and not encounter failures because our God is undeniably successful in all that He does.

I know this is what the hearer wants to hear, and I proclaim it in a way that it is heard that way. 

Again, to be honest, I really do not know what God exactly has in store for a life I lay my hands on. He deals with each of us individually and personally. It is a lifelong relationship for each of us and the journey is without fail a fraught one. 

He doesn't hand us a fixed map which clearly spells out the booby traps along the way and shows us how we can overcome them if we follow a 5-step program or a 7-step manual. If anything, he lights our path one faithful step at a time – and mind you, the surrounding darkness at most times is not adequately illumed. 

In other words, no two believers are created alike. No two share the same journey of faith even though the destination is the same. No two succeed or fail the same way as one may fail successfully and the other may succeed miserably. 

All I know is that to resist being an imposter of the faith, I have to confront my own failings, acknowledge my vulnerabilities, and then take each step and each day He sheds light on at a time. There will always be surrounding darkness before me, and faith - for me - is to keep moving forward as His light leads. 

That is the only way I know to live an authentic Christian life in this trying journey empowered by growth, hope and resiliency. For the ultimate fulfillment of faith is not in asking for providence to remove every obstacle standing in my way. It is on the contrary to follow in His footsteps to walk through everyone of them. Ours is an overcoming faith, and not a convenient and easy one. Cheerz.

The great perversion and the greater overcoming.

He got 34 years and a maximum of 24 strokes. But I can't say that criminal justice was not done in his case. It most definitely was, and redemption for him took a backseat that day when he was sentenced. 

In all my writings, I am always biased towards redeeming a man. 

I believe every man deserves a chance, if not multiple chances. And if it takes a village to raise a kid, then it takes a lifetime for some to find redemption.

But this morning, this bias was sorely challenged by a man's most incomprehensible crime. And the prosecution calls it "one of the most heinous cases which we have ever seen."

If I had judged him, and therefore stood to be judged myself, then so be it. 

You have to see the abuse from the eye of the child. 

She was only seven when she had to put with his regular sexual abuses. He was her mother's lover. She called him "shu shu".

She told her mother about the molest, but she reprimanded her and refused to intervene. 

She therefore realised it was futile because the only one who could protect her, not only did nothing, but disbelieved her. 

After he got married to another woman (who bore him a son), he even invited the girl and her mother to live with his new family. 

From that point, the girl's mother became his mistress.

All this time, he was jobless and relied on the two women in his life to support him. His wife had to work and his mistress gave him $350 a month for household expenses. 

After they moved in, his molest turned into rape. He also forced her to perform oral sex on him. It reports that he did it in broad daylight while others were at home. 

Alas, the girl became "so conditioned to his abuse that she automatically took off her clothes when he summoned her. She was then only below ten years old."

And because he frequently assaulted his wife and her mother when he was drunk and even hit the girl when she tried to protect her mother, the girl feared angering him. He even went berserk when she befriended her male classmates. 

But that was not even the half of it. 

The girl only learned that what her shu shu did was wrong when she was Primary 5 and attended sex education classes. 

At 13, she mustered the courage to seek help, but not from her own mother. 

She instead went to the man's wife and she referred her to a social worker. 

A police report was lodged in June 2016. By that time, the man's wife had already divorced him and moved out with her son. 

That's not the end of it. 

When the man, 47, heard that he was a wanted man, the girl's mother gave him $800, and he spent four days evading arrest before surrendering himself to the police. 

When he was arrested, and charged for statutory rape, his first response was to accuse the girl. He said she seduced and flirted with him. 

DPP Khoo said that the man had "wrecked the girl's life and caused a rift between her and her mother." 

Now, it reports that the girl, 15, is living with with her maternal grandmother. 

Expectedly, she confessed that she felt very insecure about herself and "worries about being judged by others." 

She said to the prosecution that "she misses her mother."

Lesson...? 

While it is not possible to contact the girl, as her privacy should always be guarded and protected, I would like to tell her that there is absolutely nothing wrong with her. 

I want to tell her that no one judges her. No one with a conscience should ever judge her. 

I wish so much for her to face the world with restored confidence to know that there are people out there who love her truly, treasure her deeply and wish only to see her recover, to become stronger. 

The society still cares - nevertheless.

Amidst the cruelty and pain, there are people around who stand for justice, sacrifice for others and protect with love.

I also want to tell her that she is a brave soul; much braver than I am. She is a hero in my eyes. 

I would love to tell her that she is always pure and innocent and her struggles and overcoming are inspiring. 

Her courage, her innocence, her love for her mother (after what she had gone through), her strength to move on are simply empowering.

As a father myself, I want her to know that her life is precious, full of potential and her future awaits to fill it with her dreams, hope and joy. 

Every father wishes his daughter would eventually marry to the love of her life, to a protective, reliable and trustworthy husband. And I wish the same for her - no less. 

More importantly, I wish she will grow up to find trust and hope again and start her family with children of her own to enjoy, guide and protect. 

Most of all, I pray she would eventually find peace and closure in this tumultuous world she is living in. 

In every corner and bend, life will still be challenging, sometimes trying, and at times, soul-wrenching. 

But, I pray that she will be surrounded by love, hope and faith and will move forward to grow in resilience - never giving up and never giving in. 

And I also pray that her past would never hold her back from living in the present with courage and strength, and from living her future with hope and love. Cheerz.

The addiction of attention.

Maybe the Select Committee set up to address Online Falsehood has glossed over one thing? 

The addiction of attention? 

I guess the question is ultimately this: What drives people to post with such frequency, immediacy and urgency? What do they hope to achieve at the end of an online post?

Is it to educate the public? Is it about being the first to inform and update them of the latest happening? Is it to warn people of some social breaches and infringement, or some shadowy characters in the real world to be avoided, shamed and arrested? 

Or is to tell people how happy, good, fortunate, rich, contented, godly, smart and/or irresistible the one who posts is? 

In other words, is it to put our best curated image on self-sterilising social media? (Am I guilty of the same as I post this?)

Well, it is all, or part, of the above, and probably more. And the social media giants like Facebook and Google leech, exploit and thrive on such cravings for mass attention from its billions of customers.

In fact, the uglier truth is that it is a mutually parasitic relationship where we get to enjoy our 7-min of fame and attention, and they get to harvest our personal data to sell to those who are hell bent on feeding our needs, fears, hopes, delusion, vanity and ego for profit. 

It's a vicious digital loop where more will want more and much will have much, that is, attention, data, profit and all. 

Although today's Sunday Times' "Insight" section had highlighted the danger of online falsehood, the legislative measures proposed to deal with it, and the importance of the freedom of speech, what would probably escape their attention is another tongue-in-cheek article which sniffs out the root-cause of this leviathan-like craving for attention.

It carries this disarming title, "If you're happy and you know it, then stop posting about it." The cheeky author is Krista Burton, a writer for online magazine Rookie.  

It is about lovey-dovey couples celebrating their "weekiversary", yes, every week since the time they gallop down the aisle, and without ceasing. 

This is what Krista (who is involved in a relationship) wrote that sums up her exasperation: -

"The couple are nice people in real life and they are in love and that is wonderful - and they are terrors on social media. The weekiversary posts are just the tip of the iceberg.

There are also close, glistening photos of their home-cooked nightly dinners (kissy face #shesakeeper). There are unrelenting, near-identical pictures of one of them napping next to a cat (heart-eyes #allmine).

The content is nauseating and compelling; an endless highlight reel of two people who are strangely uninterested in keeping small joys in their relationship private."

We have thus become an open book. And I know that radical sobriety is to be 100% transparent and honest, but I am sure that that does not mean to be 100% "transparent" and "honest" to not just loved ones and friends, but every total and complete stranger online, right?

Alas, we have unwittingly traded our sacred privacy for a digital romp in the land of "Likes", "Loves", "Laughs", "Tears" and "Awesomeness". 

Sooner or later, the danger of such overexposure on a whim and fancy is that it runs the risks of becoming an integral part of our relationship or life. 

Our trigger-happiness for attention might soon become an addiction where we unknowingly put the "attention" wagon before the "privacy" or "relationship" horse. 

Kristen has something to say about this too.

"I get especially weirded out by people who seem interested in cultivating "fans" of their relationship.

While it is cute and flattering to have people make comments on a picture of you and your lover, I think it creates social pressure to stay in relationships that might actually be unhealthy.

One of my good friends stayed with her evil ex-boyfriend for more than a year after she knew she needed to leave, worrying about "letting people down". She had relationship fans. Lots of them. "I just feel so stupid," she told me, in tears. "Everyone thinks we're perfect. I don't want to disappoint people.""

Lesson? Mm...just one, and it is set against this backdrop news. 

Recently, Facebook got a taste of its own medicine - a bittersweet one.

It's about a leak (of the 2016 memo about growth at all costs) that caused an uproar in its corporate quarters. 

It reports as follows:- 

"In the memo, Mr Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook vice-president, wrote: Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies.

Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.

That's why all the work we do in growth is justified...

All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it." 

Of course, Mark Zuckerberg is quick to distance himself from that insidious memo. 

He said: "Boz (nickname for Bosworth) is a talented leader who says many provocative things...This was one that most people at Facebook including myself disagreed with strongly. We've never believed the ends justify the means."

Three memorable phrases above kept me thinking more deeply about this corporate conspiracy: "growth is justified", "to connect more people more often is "de facto" good", and "we never believed the ends justify the means."

Here, I recall a quote that "the only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves", and I don't think anyone needs to give the top executives at Facebook shovels to dig their own pit. They are doing it so well with the above pretentious statement to whitewash themselves from the cavernous space of their own well dug pits. 

Honestly, what is "de facto good" and what is one's ends to justify the means are painfully obvious to Facebook and everyone of us with a critical mind to think for ourselves, and it is ironic that I am using their product here to tell them off. Maybe it is called citizenry payback? 

And the fact that Bosworth quickly deleted the memo from the face of this earth and was the head of advertising demonstrate how glaring and unbelievable their hypocrisy is. 

It is said that the last temptation that is the greatest treason (against society) is to do the right thing for the wrong reason. It is also said that to tell the truth with bad intent is worse than any lies we can invent.  

I guess Facebook's denial and Zuckerberg's distancing in the face of incriminating evidence are almost "treasonous" acts committed against the public trust. And Facebook has sadly prostituted truth as a means to a growth-at-all-costs end.

This brings me full circle with Krista's article above and Bosworth's memo.

It is a simple, unembellished case of the blind leading the blind. While the social media giants exploit our addiction for attention, we willingly give up our privacy and data to bask in the virtual-space limelight. And this vicious loop would end up with both blind growth and attention at all costs, with a lot of unintended consequences that the society as a whole will be running helter-skelter to manage and contain.

And this is what the Select Committee addressing online falsehood would have to deal with. It is not just about half-truths, subjective truths, artificial truths or unknown truths. 

It is about the system as a whole, and how we have become an unwitting pawn in someone's hand, and unfortunately a happy pawn in that exploitative grip just as long as we get to enjoy the attention we are reaping in. 

And mind you, locked within this viciously reinforcing relationship, we are often tempted not just to post our "weekiversary" or "photos of us napping with our cats", but more sensationalised, questionable, distasteful, offensive and abusive posts, photos and videos, just as long as we get to be known or  famous in the distorted and deluded oasis of cyberspace. 

For this reason, I fully echo and support the sentiments of NLB in their fight against fake news, that is, by stepping up efforts to inculcate critical thinking skills across society. Education is still the best policy.

Because legislation alone, or too much emphasis on it, is never a long term solution to a problem that is not only systemic, but pervasive, complex, evolving, dynamic, and with many interlocking parts; especially when, in a case like this, we are also the product. Cheerz.