How life woke me up for good.

I have this strange recurring dream. It was a dream about how I tried to befriend life. I dreamt that life was a person, a childhood friend. I dreamt that life was real and tangible, he was not beyond comprehension. I could see life as he stood before me. His features were blurry but not imaginary.

Life was friendly at first. There were no surprises. He was an open book. You could read him from cover to cover. There was no hidden agenda. Life was not indecipherable. Those days together were filled with joy. We had lots of fun.  We ran with time. We were free and easy. We enjoyed each other’s company. Life was a great friend. He was a great friend to play with.

It remained that way until we grew older, life and I that is. That was when life became a little less predictable. He became a little more self-conscious and self-minded. Somehow, things started to change. I grow up. I mature. I have ideals. I change. I can accept all that. But I always thought that life would be different. I always thought that life would be consistent, that is, dependable and reliable.

I needed life to be unchanging as I changed. I needed life to stay as he was so that I could always return to a refuge-like tree house when things got bad outside. But I guess that was the part of my dream that turned a little darker than I’d like. Not really a nightmare though but still the disappointment was real.

As I aged, life also aged with me. They say familiarity is the enemy of awe and life was not immune from it. In my dream, I felt a little queasy as I got this feeling that life was becoming tired of my company. I felt that way because the signs were showing and the seams were fraying. Sadly, I saw less and less of life. Our friendship thawed away.

You see, before things changed, life would visit me everyday. There were no exceptions. I could count on his friendship. Then, as time went by, life’s visits dwindled. He skipped a day at first. Then, he skipped a few days. Sometimes, I did not see him for one whole week. And one day, just like that, life stopped visiting altogether. There was no forewarning, no notice, no RSVP.

I was lost. I started to experience biting loneliness. I felt abandoned. At first, I thought life was playing a game of hide and seek with me. It was a game we used to play during fonder days. But the difference now is that there’s more hiding than seeking. More missing than finding. More disappearing than discovering. 

This was the part of the dream that I fought hard to keep it all together. This was the part of the dream that I shed silent tears for life, for myself. I refused to let go of life. I refused to accept this end of our friendship. I huddled in one dark corner wallowing in a state of despair, fear and even outrage. I was an entangled hairball of mixed emotions. My disappointments soon turned to frustration. I was angry with life. Truly pissed. Some would even call it a hissy fit.

What kind of friend was he. He left me out to dry. He left me without saying goodbye. This much life owes me. He should have set the rules of our engagement. He should have made things clear. He should have told me that it was only for a time. It was only for a season. And it was never a friendship that is based on reason. In short, life shouldn’t have given me false hope.

I hate to admit this here but I was fuming and I sworn that even if life were ever to return, even for a passing visit, I would ignore him. I would give him the cold shoulder. I would not acknowledge his presence. My vow was to forget this friendship forever. To erase it out of memory.

Just at this time, this strange moment, I felt the earth underneath my feet shook. I thought it was an earthquake. Then, my whole body convulsed. It was real and I felt it in my bones. The next thing I knew was that I went into a free fall. I was falling as if gravity was swallowing me up. I struggled for a while and I opened my eyes. I found myself beside my bed, on the floor. I had awakened. I went over to my window and peered out. It was just past the morning dawn and I could see the beautiful cloudless horizon. Then, it hit me like comet showers.

Life had not gone anywhere. He was always beside me. He was waiting for me to wake up. As much as he wanted me to wander in a dreamworld of make-believe, he desired even more for me to wake up to a world waiting for me. No doubt this world will disappoint. No doubt it will leave me stranded, cold and even lost. The pain may even be more pronounced in the real world than in dreamworld. But life is telling me that in dreamworld, I will always be a fugitive from reality. I will always be escaping but never experiencing. In short, I will never really live since dreaming is anything but living, experiencing and learning.

Then, just at this time, life handed me an epiphany. I realized that I had been playing hide and seek with life all along. The main difference here is that in dreamworld, I was the one hiding. I was hiding away from life in the bubbled security of my treehouse, never stepping out to explore, to dare to fail, to learn from it, and to move forward with courage. And the tragedy is that as long as I am in my dreamworld, I will never be found by life. The contrast is jarring. Life is to death what living is to dreaming.

But in the world that I had awakened to, I was found. And it was the only way life could find me. Now the role is reversed. The rule of the game has changed. In the real world, I am the seeker and life has mischievously gone to hide. I am therefore set free to explore, to seek and to discover. To experience failures, to learn from them, and to recover.

And seek I shall because as long as I know I still have a friend in life, I will play my part to find him. I will spare no effort in this game life has set for me. And being a true friend, I know life can't wait to be found. So, herein lies my new adventure with life in the real world; which will not only be fun, it will also be highly rewarding in the end. Cheerz.

A headless chicken Christian

Last year, I posted the following facebook SOS call:

"Hi, help needed. My relative called me tonight and he sounded really excited (he's not someone who'd call me late at night). He said he had invited a prophet to his place next week. He told me that the prophet is 100% accurate when he prophesied over his life, career and family!

He said that this is how the prophet works, "You must raise up your hands, both hands. The higher you raise them, as an act of surrender, the more accurate the prophecy."

My relative said he'd specially reserved a place for my family to attend and he promised me that I would be impressed. My relative is the lachrymose (emotional) type and he once sworn to me that evangelist Todd Bentley was the real thing. He really wants me to go and be blessed.

But unfortunately, I am a bit hesitant after watching some of his videos. I can't find anything written positive/negative about this self-proclaimed prophet. All I scooped up is that he was a graduate of Oral Robert University. Anyone knows this prophet? Is he really 100% accurate? Is he really the real thing? Should I attend? Or should I decline and then express my concern to my relative? Cheerz out!"

After the above post, I received a few interesting responses. One of them encouraged me to go and "buffy-slay" the questionable prophet. But I declined as this is a case where my spirit is unwilling and my body is near comatose. Here is why.

I've been a Christian since 1985 at the Reinhard Bonnke's crusade. I affectionally called him my spiritual godfather.

Since then, I've been through the roller-coaster ride of charismatics chaos. You name it and I've slammed dunk it. I've shook in the spirit, slain in it, giggled and, my god, laughed with it. I've danced and bounced like spirited mexican beans with it, spoke and even screamed in tongues by it. I've sometimes interpreted tongues with strange confidence. But most of the time, I was wholly perplexed and was groping in what I would deem a glossolalia  blackout.

And the list goes on. I've given all my pocket money to the church under the Avanzini's "100 fold" ministry, served with missionary zeal, and done cold turkey door-to-door evangelism. I've even argued for God (or for myself or for personal pride - take your pick) with unbelievers, pre-believers and post-believers (the latter is a group of christians disillusioned with religion).

I've naively believed in Kenneth Hagin's "name it and claim it" ballyhoo, prayed with spiritual machismo for the alive but hurting, almost dead but hoping, and the passed on whilst disbelieving; all of which wrestling for their lost souls like a sales quota to meet. And finally, I've done my fair share of demon deliverance and I once ran after a man who was allegedly possessed by the spirit of monkey god under the proud grin of my pastor.

Oh, nearly forgot, I have also had visions of heaven, hell and that "club med of a middle ground" Catholics call purgatory, I think.

If there ever were a razzie-like award for the archetype chicken-without-head Christian, I should win first prize hands down, face frown and head clown.

For many years, I was a three-miles-wide, 2-inches-deep Christian, running on empty and seeking the thrill of the belief and not the belief that truly fills. Alas, I have put the "flesh" carriage before the "spirit" horse and now I think my relative is just about running the same course.

You see, this is the "dis-ease of humanity": that is, the thrill of believing and never really believing. This is the misdirected un-ease that comes from misguided belief.  It is like subscribing to a magazine but never once reading them. It is like seeking the gift and not the Giver. Former televangelist Jim Bakker, with hindsight and contrition, wrote these words from a prison cell in Rochester Minnesota, "Don't fall in love with the gift wrapping, fall in love with Jesus Christ, the Gift of eternal life." How true from a man who had in the past spent much time busy unwrapping gifts after gifts without much reflection on the love of his Giver.

Having considered the above lamentation of the soul, I have a few charismatic burnt scars of my own. Some of which have sadly turned into psychological keloid scars, still itching with pain. And that is also why I felt a little mentally jaded with the shenanigans of spiritual charlatans, quacks, and even religious dilettante.

Sigh, I guess, quite unfortunately, my beloved relative will just have to take the unavoidable path on his own and discover for himself the emptiness of religious fanaticism and cuckoo-ism.

On my part, I will try my level best, with gentleness of spirit and tact, to warn him of the hidden booby traps along the way. This is in line with this wise saying: "Teach a man to think and he will hate you. Make him think that he is thinking, and he will love you." Between hate and love, in this case, love is the better teacher. Cheerz.

My treaty with reality

CS Lewis was said to have made a pact with life, a treaty with reality. It was a necessary treaty for his sanity during the First World War in 1914, and compounded by the early death of his mother to cancer. When he was enlisted to fight on the battlefields of France (in 1917/18), many of his Oxford buddies died, in particular, one close friend, Paddy Moore, whose mother, Mrs Moore, was like a mother to him.

In Surprised by Joy, he wrote, "I put the war on one side to a degree which some people will think shameful and some incredible. Others will call it a flight from reality. I maintain that it was rather a treaty with reality, the fixing of a frontier."

This treaty with reality sets the buffer for Lewis against the carnage of war, the random deaths and the inordinate pain and suffering of life. More importantly, it was a treaty that guarded him against the indiscriminate gravitational blackhole of the meaninglessness of life.  It was a frontier that separated him from living while living and dying while living. A liminality from the fiefdom of bondage to the freedom to live.

Borrowing his analogy, I personally have my own treaty with reality, my pact with life. It is a treaty representing everything that is against the denying of everything that is good about life. It is a treaty that refuses to believe that we are the blind, random and mindless result of evolution; that we evolved from some serendipitous accident on a grand cosmogony scale. 

It is a treaty that chooses to embrace the best of mankind, to see the silver lining in the worst of us, and to uphold the hope that nothing is as bad as it seems; even death. Because if you think about it, death is but the continuation of a life in another way. For we can bury the body but not the memory. We can cremate the shell lifeless but not the love enduring. We can miss the physical company of our loved ones but not the unbreakable spiritual connection that their living years have so diligently sown in our lives. 

This treaty is necessary. It is crucial. Breach it and my borders of aliveness become blurred, diluted, even contaminated. Imagine radiation poison that dissolves into the bloodstream of life and destroys it gradually, surely, and with blind abandon. E.M Forster once wrote about his characters that “wandered like cardboard symbols through a world that was paper-thin.” That is to me the violation of this treaty. We wander soulless into a world without wonders like clockwork machines punching around the clock, meeting deadlines, making money, and making a name for ourselves, without end. A life is to be loved and not exploited. A soul is to be redeemed and not driven. And a spirit is to be set free, not imprisoned.

So, I choose to preserve and protect this pact with life. I elect to make it real, this treaty with reality. It is a covenant that makes sense of the senseless. It is the only way my life can fully live, and in death, fully come alive in the hearts of others. It is like the defining hole in the donut. Although unseen, it is what makes a donut a donut. Denying the unseen in my life is to deny what it means to be me.

There is much more to this world than is revealed to me. And I do not want to live my life in pure abstractions. I do not want to live my life confined within a world made up of complex theories, however grand and unifying they can be. I do not want my world to be ringfenced in a neat formula, expressed in numerical terms, and reduced into a college text. There is undoubtedly more to it, much much more, and I don't want to view life from a kaleidoscope of scattered scenes. I want to view it from the summit of eternal perspectives.

My life has to defy the physical laws of this world because it was created to defy the physical bounderies of reality. My life is a countless series of uncharted spiritual rendezvous and not a blind matchmake with materialism.This is to me what conversion really means, a Christian conversion that is. CS Lewis once wrote, “A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere.” I guess I have fallen into one of those life’s traps planted by my creator. Like a hunter, he had planned it all along; and like a lost sheep, I was meant to detour into it.

Alas, some make a pack with the devil. I however choose to make a pact with God. It is to me a pact with the hunter of life, a treaty with eternity.

Let me end with the words of Evelyn Waugh, “Conversion is like stepping across the chimney piece out of a Looking-Glass world, where everything is an absurd caricature, into the real world God made; and then begins the delicious process of exploring it limitlessly.” 

My conversion ends my life in the world where plain sight ruled and starts it on a journey where sublime faith takes flight. Cheerz.

Follow my bliss into the abyss

Recently, one quote caught my attention: "You know... my whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered that my interruptions were my work." (Henri Nouwen). How true.

You know there are a few catchy titles nowadays like "girl interrupted" and "Jesus interrupted". For me, it is "life interrupted". Work is one of them, amongst others.

We are supposed to follow our bliss. But sometimes our bliss is a mirage of hope. We mistake our bliss for material success and we miss out on the real thing. So, we blindly follow our bliss into the insatiable abyss.

Has my strive to be recognized at work, my competitive spirit to impress, and my ambition to climb that career ladder become a personal obsession that I have exposed my loved ones to suffer as collateral damage? Have I traded my purpose in life for work? Am I lull into a belief that life is work and work is life?

I think that life has to be interrupted; sometimes even rudely awakened with a basin of cold water. I need to wake up to what's important, not what's urgent. I need to see a purpose beyond the 9 to 5. I need to stop mistaking means as ends, that is, work as end and passion for it as means to that end. Love misplaced is life displaced. If love is not the end of it all, then all endeavours are a fool's errand.

So back to basics I guess. Back to the time I first got married. Back to the first kiss. Back to the time I held my son's pinky finger at the hospital nursery. Back to the time I change my daughter's diapers. Back to my first confession and the first time I knelt at the altar. Back to the crossroad before I chose a path of mirages. Back to the road less travelled. Back to hope. Back to faith. Back to life. Back to love. Cheerz.

Shit! I am a Christian

A modern technophile conversion...

Shit! I am a Christian. 

I made the altar call.
Renounced being a ruffian.
I have to stand up tall.  

Since being a Christian.
I shouldn't turn back now.
Told to put faith in action.
To live a life I don't know how.  

Newly minted as a believer,
I like the house of God.
It's full of smiley people,
Who seem to have no fault.  

The girls are pretty.
The guys look swell.
The pastor is chatty.
The gospel's a great sell.  

Now that I am a Christian.
I hear it's really tough.
It starts as a mission.
And ends up really rough.  

Now that I am a Christian.
I need to really strive.
To be more efficient.
To spruce up my own life.    

But things seem different.
If you observe them close.
Members who are reverent,
Are mostly led by the nose.  

Some churches are a place.
Where rules are uniform.
As a set apart race.
To serve and to conform.  

The apologetics is simple.
It brooks no soul searching.
For any teen with dimples.
It's 5-step to explain suffering.    

Now that I am a Christian.
I hear the church is rich.
If I am born ethiopian.
Could they spare without a hitch?  

Would it make a dent,
If the Church gave most away?
If the world is drawing to an end,
Why save so much for a rainy day?

Alas, now that I am a Christian.

Where shall I go?
Every church has high attrition.
Whom shall I follow?  

But I guess I am lost.
B'cos my mind is still groping.
For the most popular cause.
In a world that's still groaning.    

This leads me to the Cross.
Of suffering and shame.
God's love is the source.
For whom His only son came.  

Jesus is the reason.
He is my only hope.
In and out of season.
I'll resist the urge to mope.  

No shit! I am a Christian.
It's not going to be easy.
This is my first decision.
To shun the need to be needy.    

So I shall serve in His name.
His love I shall gladly share.
My tongue shall first be tamed.
And "No Ssshucks!", I shall not swear.   

Cheerz.