~.*Credo in Deum, patrem omnipotentem, creatorem caeli et terra*.~

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

*[[ Happy CNY! :) ]]*

Hey! I got this from our CE2 blog and think it's very worth reading! :)

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Why go to Church?

If you're spiritually alive, you're going to love this! If you're spiritually dead, you won't want to read it. If you're spiritually curious, there is still hope!

A Church goer wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper and complained that it made no sense to go to church every Sunday. "I've gone for 30 years now," he wrote, "and in that time I have heard something like 3,000 sermons. But for the life of me, I can't remember a single one of them. So, I think I'm wasting my time and the pastors are wasting theirs by giving sermons at all."

This started a real controversy in the "Letters to the Editor" column, much to the delight of the editor. It went on for weeks until someone wrote this clincher:

"I've been married for 30 years now. In that time my wife has cooked some 32,000 meals. But, for the life of me, I cannot recall the entire menu for a single one of those meals. But I do know this.. They all nourished me and gave me the strength I needed to do my work. If my wife had not given me these meals, I would be physically dead today. Likewise, if I had not gone to church for nourishment, I would be spiritually dead today!" When you are DOWN to nothing.... God is UP to something! Faith sees the invisible, believes the incredible and receives the impossible! Thank God for our physical AND our spiritual nourishment!
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This year's CNY isn't very happening... no new clothes, no nothing, just visited my relatives from my mother's side coz all those from my father's side are in Malaysia. but one good thing was that I managed to 'be deliberate in connecting to the people whom I'm obligated to' in that I found out more about their lives and talked to them much more compared to the last time when I met them. Yup and one of my cousins kept talking to me about the University courses that I should take in future... lol stress ah. ><>< Then there's this other 4 yr old girl who looks Japanese and she's not the shy type so it's really fun to talk to her... but one thing is that it's quite hard to understand her coz when she speaks it sounds like all her words are stuck together. lol, think all children speak like that? lol the 5 yr old boy also speaks like that, but he speaks in Chinese... haha. and his Chinese is pro la, for a 5 yr old... can use quite chim words sometimes.

Anyway, on Friday during service, God taught me so much about love <3 During praise and worship, I was asking Him why many times love is not reciprocated. Somehow, we sometimes end up loving people who don't notice our love, and in the same way, we don't notice that some people love us. I guess it can get very frustrating for both parties. But He asked me first to look at the love between me and Him. He asked me not to look at loving people first, but to look at whether I loved Him first because if I can't even completely love Him, who is so perfect, then loving sinners is impossible. So I got frank with myself and I think that actually sometimes I take His love for granted. I think I sometimes start to neglect Him in my life due to all my busy h/w and CCA commitments, etc, and so in this way I am not reciprocating his love... Think I gotta put in more effort to build up this relationship.

Hmmm He also helped me realise that sometimes it's not that love is not reciprocated... it's appreciated but just that it's not shown/expressed so clearly. I think many a time, people want to see love in a more tangible form, somehow... As in, they want to know that they are loved back before they can feel secure. It's funny, isn't it, when you've put your entire trust into a relationship and then you fear that the other party is giving less than you are. Yeah and so during the very appropriate and timely sermon, He taught me about how there are three levels of love amongst people: 1) Love bounded by family obligations, 2) Sacrificial love, and 3) Love with God in the center of it... Yeah thank God for all of you.

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SIgh. If you are friends with me, will you accept me for everything I am, including my flaws? And if you accept my flaws, which are presumably the worst parts of me, would you accept me for my thoughts and ideas? I bet it would be a yes. So I guess this means you accept what I think. And you accept my beliefs. And you accept my FAITH. Now you don't.

~.*hUiYiNg*.~ says Amen. @ | Tuesday, February 20, 2007

~.* Jesus is LOVE *.~