My Obsession with Nazi & Holocaust Related Films

I can’t recall when my obsession with Holocaust and Nazi/Third Reich related film began. I just finished another one last night, Valkyrie. There are too many movies that I watch and forget about eventually but not these. These stories live on. If I ever have the chance to visit that part of the world, as much as I would like to see all the places where these stories were told, I do not know if I can bear it.

These are what I have watched so far

Valkyrie
Defiance
The Boy in Striped Pyjamas
Hitler: The Rise of Evil
The Pianist
Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
Life Is Beautiful
Schindler’s List

And these are still on my waiting list

Inglorious Basterds
The Reader
Adam Resurrected
Downfall

Any other good ones you can recommend?

rk

Building with Burnt Stones

I had the wonderful privilege of listening to Pastor Ray Bevan speak last night. He is the senior pastor of Kings Church in Newport, UK. Such a funny and lovable guy that one. It turns out that prior to his ministry, he was a member of a professional pop-rock band which was managed by the same people that managed the Beatles. He is a small man but my….he is BIG on humor, life and God. I was thrown off my feet when he opened his mouth and sang (to God) a modified version of Rod Stewart’s, Have I Told You Lately. Ahh…that voice and the sincerity that came through converted me all over again. I hope he will sing it for us again when we all get to Heaven one day.

As wonderful as the opening was, the meaty part of the night was his message about a God of second chances. It continues to bewilder me how the right messages come together at a time when I need to hear them most. Here are some notes I have taken last night.

Title: Building with Burnt Stones: There is no Plan B (God only has Plan A) Plan A here refers to our destiny. We are the burnt stones. God builds his purpose and his church with people who has been burnt by life, people who has messed-up.

• Do not disqualify yourself because of your failures.
• It is what happens inside you that matters not your failures.
• God recycles failures.
• Our failure is not an issue to God. Our pride is.
• God can handle your honesty.
• Never confuse consequence with judgment.
• Consequences can be a good teacher. Accept them, learn from them but don’t be condemned by them
• When God deals with you about your failures, he always deals with you confidentially. Just you and God alone. You don’t have to worry about other people’s opinion.
• The most essential thing to know if you want to be a recycled stone is to never underestimate the power of mercy.
• God re-routes you to get you back to Plan A.
• Christianity would be very easy if it’s not for our humanity
• God knows it is awfully slippery out there. He knows our humanity.

rk

Why?

I’ve read many responses on the catastrophe in Haiti. This one from Seth Barnes tops them all (emphasis mine). I have been frustrated with things at home lately and struggled with unanswered prayers. None of them could be labelled tragedy, yet one of the first thing that came of my mouth in my rant to God was, why. It is a natural human response. It shows our humanity. But God calls us to something better, to set our vision higher.

Too often we Americans let our rational minds spin with speculative and convoluted proof-texting. And I want to say, “Can we just stop having to explain this God of ours in ways that bring our tiny minds a shabby and evanescent peace? Can we just let his response be the one that he took four chapters to give Job* starting with, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?”

God help us when we go through our similar tragedy one day, be it through cancer or a car accident. We will have a choice, to bow at the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil and ask “Why?” Or, to bow at the tree of Life and worship. Let’s choose the latter, knowing that our God weeps for his children in Haiti. – from How God Feels about Haiti

rk

Que(ue) Sara Sara

These days, to avoid the church queue,  I attend services at our overflow room at Gallery West instead of the main auditorium. Who knows, there was a long queue there as well.  Reason? Pastor’s sermon overran by almost half an hour. He always does that! I was bored from the waiting and started playing with my mobile camera. Later on, I felt a little mischievous and decided to go against the church rule of  “no unauthorized photography and audio/video recordings within service premisses.” I secretly turned on the video function on my mobile as I made my way into the service venue when the queue started moving. Unfortuantely it is no good to show you because it is lopsided. It’s almost impossible to keep the camera upright and undetected. Who knows, I might attempt again if  I am ever in one of those moods again. Shh…don’t tell anyone. 

Outside Gallery West. The bright yellow lights on the left is actually Pearl River Restaurant. Poor thing they had to deal with this every Sunday.

The other part of the queue. Right below is the ballroom where we usually hold our Chinese service but it was reserved for another event yesterday.

Looking down from where I was. That’s the atrium next to Balaclava.

rk

RBC Ministries’ Bi-annual Bible Conference

I was at RBC Ministries’  Bi-annual Bible Conference for 2 nights last Thusday and Friday, learning from the life of Elijah from Bill Crowder. They are the people behind the widely received, Our Daily Bread.

Inside St Andrew’s Catherdral’s New Sanctuary just before the conference starts. They have been letting RBC use their sanctuary for free for a few years. God bless you guys!

Bill Crowder. He is as good a teacher as ever. Can you imagine expounding on several verses (only) over 2 nights? That’s intense study!

That’s my spot on day 2.

rk

Why I Want To Be A Farmer: A Singapore Parent’s Rant

(This is an email exchange between me and a friend. After all my ranting, I thought it was quite funny. Please forgive my language. It is written in typical Singaporean-speak. Don’t report me to the Singapore Speak Good English Committee hor.)

how are you my friend? have not been able to catch up for a long time. now school reopens liao, very sian. have to watch over their studies again. when will it ever end… how are you and family?

hello my dear friend, talking about SIAN… mine still a long long way to go man. Ya, when will this ever end??? dealing with no.1 is already stressful. plus another 18 mths old no.2, I am like a crazy woman everyday. No.1 is in K1 now and I can feel the study stress and demands already. can’t imagine when she gets to primary school. how are your kids doing? work is ok for me and family is ok too. i am going for a break with hubby to Bangkok on 28/1 to 1/2. I need this badly. luckily I have very supportive sisters to help to take care of the gals during our absence. I really miss those carefree days when I can travel as I like…. why nobody warn me about loosing FREEDOM + Financial Burden + STRESS + WORRIES = kidS!!!

My dear, i feel the same way too. sometimes i fantasize about “running away from home” for a while just to see how they will manage on their own. <evil grin>

i am having a hard time with my teenager. hai…talking about it will only upset me more, so i won’t share. he is in Sec 3 now. no. 2 is in P3. watching over their studies makes me hate studies all over again. with this type of mind-set how to be positive and encourage them? last Friday i attended the parent-teacher meeting at no.2’s school. lagi sian. one parent commented (after the teacher’s presentation) that the curriculum and expectation is too tough for p3 but the teacher said, bo bian, nowadays it’s ike that. if they don’t push up the standard, we will loose out. i think they meant, the kids + SG. it’s like every school is training their kids to be geniuses in every field. this trend is not only in SG hor. my nephew in KL has to take exams for certain papers in 2 languages! mind you, it’s the same paper and same questions but in 2 languages (english + chinese) to show that they are proficient in both because he is in a chinese school. she sends her 1yr old boy to brian-training classes every week! at 1 year old, i could only eat and shit. looks like my countrymen has caught the singapore kiasu bug. makes me just want to be a farmer lah!

these days schools always talk about parent’s involvement in a lot of the school-based programs. i know it is supposed to be a good thing and i know it is probably true that it is better for the kid’s learning journey BUT poor parents! we have to do school all over again! just when i thought i am finally done with school, projects and exams! sigh… can somebody just kill me!!

this trend looks set to continue or get worse. you think the current situation is bad? wait till you hear this. our dear MM feels that we are getting complacent and distracted and falling behind children of immigrants. said something about us having too many CCAs and not focused enough in our academics. so you see my friend, it is survival of the fittest all the way.

looking at the way things are going, my kids may well end up as farmers.

rk

Decoding Love in Relationships: A Non-Expert’s Attempt

I would like to pick up from where I left off in my last entry about my Dad’s need for companionship. Recently a friend tweeted, “there are too many similarities between love and companionship. the sooner I know the difference, the better”. It is easy to cross that line and not know it because the boundary that separates them is very often vague. There are too many overlapping emotions. Anything that involves the emotions is complicated and at risk of being misunderstood. It is said that love is verb more than it is a noun.

Dad seems to tie companionship with a soul-mate. He uses both terms interchangeably. I, on the other hand, feel they could be separate, serving different purpose and having different characteristics. The fact that Dad have had several companions showed that none of them were able to fulfill his need for emotional connection for long. To me, these companions were merely there for a season. They connected with him and fulfilled certain needs at different stages of his life. I do not know to what extent he confuses them with a soul-mate. My criteria for a soul-mate closely resembles that of a covenant friend. I see a companion as someone who shares the same interests, energy level and possibly even the same life goals as me. We desire each others company so long as these shared characteristics remain. Once these change, we start to drift apart. There is less expectation from a companion. A covenant friend however, is someone who looks out for you and sticks with you closer than a brother, accepts you like a family, understands you inside-out, shares the same values as you and is willing to take risk with you for your own sake. A soul-mate is a companion and covenant friend combined.

And then there is spouse. Ideally, our soul-mate eventually becomes our spouse. But for a soul-mate to qualify as successful marriage material, there should be an element of romance and mystery. There is always something fresh about this person that you want to spend your lifetime knowing. And of course, physical desire counts as well. Personally, I do not know if this is a realistic expectation. I personally have not come across such a combination. Judging by the divorce statistics, it seems to be so. If a soul-mate has all the ingredients for what makes a good spouse, then it appears that most of us did not end up marrying our soul-mate. Why? Was it because the feelings were only platonic? Is there even such a thing among opposite sex?

Where does love fit in? I think love is birthed when we make a conscious decision to commit to each other’s well-being and to remain committed in that relationship for life, whether married or not, although I cannot phantom why one would not. When things go downhill, love forgives, keeps us trying and motivates us to recommit ourself. The day we step away from this commitment is the day we step out of love. Love, when stripped bare in this context, looks like this. Who we marry becomes irrelevant. It only counts in our experience of the love journey we have decided to take. The problem is, many of us jump into the love wagon too hastily. I am a classic example of someone who did not understand what that commitment means. I hardly knew myself enough to know who I want to spend this love journey with for the rest of my life. And for that, the journey suffers. All parties suffer.

rk

This Is My Family

Dad said something about soul mate when we were back for the Christmas holidays. I thought he had a little too much to drink and so did not give much heed to what he was babbling about. He was in a merry mood, that much I know. My sister however was able to pick up all the clues. It turns out that Dad is having another affair. He is already in his sixties. By now, we have all accepted that Dad has an insatiable need for a level of companionship which he unfortunately did not find in my mother. So he finds himself some alternatives. I believe Mom as a women, has such a need too. She however, finds them in her children, grandchildren, friends, family and God. She has many hobbies and they provided some form of distraction. I don’t know if Mom ever felt lonely and needed a soul-mate-like-companion the way Dad does. Although they find each other seriously lacking in terms of being able to meet each other’s emotional needs, they have stuck together all these years. It is not that Dad does not love Mom. He appreciates her for her devotion to the family and her other qualities. He may not love her the way we normally see love but she is a crucial part of his life. She is the anchor in the family. Without her, his life would loose bearing. I suspect both of them knows it even though they might not be conscious of it. Mom is not an unhappy and miserable women. Yes, there have been lots of tears especially in the earlier years of their marriage but she has learned to find her own happiness while staying married to a man who openly confesses that he finds greater emotional satisfaction elsewhere. Despite the pain and craziness of it all, they still watches each others back and cares for each other. They joke and laugh as much as they quarrel and fight. Dad is always the loud, intimidating one of course. There is a lot of disharmony and dysfunction within this union. It can be very disconcerting to witness if you do not understand my family well enough. I can’t blame my sister-in-law entirely for wanting to severe ties with my parents. It takes time to adjust. Love it or hate it, we the children, took it all in our stride. For some strange reason, we still look forward to our yearly reunions, accompanied by some apprehension for the unexpected. At the end of the day, we know this is home. This is family. This is where we can be free to be ourselves, to make mistakes, to be vulnerable and still be accepted.

For all my parent’s failures, they must have done something right.

It’s All In The Name

Okay, so some Muslims in Malaysia is saying nobody else can use the world “Allah” to mean God in their religious text. Now, “Allah” is the Arabic translation for the word, God. So what is an Arab Christian to do? I did a search and found in Wikipedia that it is used by Arabic-speakers of all Abrahamic faiths, including Christians and Jews. It is also interesting to note that it was also used by pagan Meccans as a reference to the creator-god, the supreme deity in pre-Islamic Arabia. Now, I can understand why some Muslims are upset. They are worried it might cause confusion among it’s people and why they could be mislead. It is because the concepts associated with the term “Allah” differs among the various traditions and they do not want their concept of “Allah” to be misrepresented by another faith.

If you ask me, I’d say, teach your people well in your own tradition. Build in them a strong foundation of your concept of “Allah”. You can even warn them that there are others out there with a different view. You can’t build a hedge around them and expect them to grow in faith. If you believe your concept of God is true and beautiful, your best defense is simply to make that known to your people and live in such a way that testifies to it. That way, they will not be easily seduced by any foreign ideas. If they do, it is only because you have failed.

Christians have had to deal with competing ideas of God for centuries and have taken it in their stride. Just think about all the Christian cults out there. Perhaps this is something Muslims can learn from. It’s not about the competition. It’s about strengthening your own forte. 

rk

Questions That Can Change You and the World

Recently, I’ve been examining my heart for others and I ask myself these simple questions – especially when I’ve experienced pain, tension, or envy in my relationship:

Do I truly want this person to prosper? Do I want the best for this person? Do I truly want this person to flourish? Do I truly want this person to be restored? Do I truly want God to bless this person?

Here’s the kicker. If I can’t positively answer the questions above, the problem isn’t the other person…it’s me. – Eugene Cho

Pain, tension and envy. Who amongst us is not guilty of them? Eugene accurately points out the problem. These are some of the same searching questions I ask myself whenever feel a disharmony in my spirit, pertaining to relationships. Over the years friends, colleagues and even family members have shared with me their fair share of complaints, gossips and criticisms about other people. To those who were just sharing to get it out of their system, I do not give much input. But to those who genuinely want to be better people and have better relationships, I try to divert their focus to get them to first look at the situation from a new perspective. That almost always involve taking a trip down to their own heart. It is usually not a very pleasant trip. But it is necessary that we first deal with our own heart and our inner motivations. Clear the cobwebs there first if we want to revolutionalize our relationships. Once that is dealt with, we will feel liberated. It frees us to respond in a way that reflects the part of our self that is beautiful and true.

I have gone a good distance when it comes to pain, tension and envy in relationships but there is still quite a lot of ground left to cover. I am still working on it every single time those feelings surface.

The quote above was taken from Eugene’s post on Tiger Woods. It is a good read for personal-reflection (click here for full post), especially if you struggle with the same issues and well, if you want to be a better person generally. Who doesn’t?

rk