Without Christ there is no Christmas. This is cliched but nevertheless true. However, these few days it was Mary I was meditating on. Without Mary, Christmas is an orphan. We owe the birth of our Saviour to a young teen girl who trusted God and said “Yes, let it be done to me as you want.” We owe a debt of gratitude to Mary for her simple child-like faith. Wisdom does not reside with the old and experienced. It resides with simple faith. A girl fresh from puberty played a vital role and her womb was the landing ground of the Saviour of the whole world. Most cultures look upon women as inferior, and they are not treated as equals and deserving of mutual respect. They are taken advantage of and patronized or ignored. Their talents, influence and gifts are not always fully appreciated nor valued. Worse they are also violated and oppressed and are objects of sarcasm, suspicion and cynicism. They are not taken seriously – unless they happen to be your mother. However, what man despises, God exalts. He did that 2000 years ago when He chose Mary – a teen girl to reveal the “arm of the Lord”, “a light to the peoples”. So do not forget Mary. Thank God for Mary and all the goodness she represents as a woman, as a believing Eve–faith, sacrifice, risk, tenderness, gratitude, gentleness, compassion, talent, strength, and resilience. It was David Yonggi Cho of Full Gospel Church, Yoido, who echoed William Booth of the Salvation Army, who declared, “My best men are women”. So today, thank God for all women and show your sincere appreciation when you wish your mother, your wife, girlfriend and daughter and sister a Mary Christmas.
Posts
Whenever I have no idea of what is good to eat at any hawker center, I follow the Singaporean rule of thumb: look for the queues. Where there is a queue, the food is probably good. It has to be good if people are willing to wait patiently for it. Though it is possible the cook is slow or the system of delivery is bad, the likelihood is that the food is tasty.
So when New Creation Church became the only church where you had to queue to get a seat, the surmise is that the “food” is good. Of course we can be skeptical or cynical and say: its bad organizing or its a image projection or whatever. However, at the crux of it, you’ll have to admit: the queuing thing which went on for close to a decade without waning says something. The “food” has lots of satisfied customers. People, including pastors, may say otherwise. However the thousands of satisfied customers rub their stomachs and say, Jia pa pa (Eat full full).
Now it seems the thousands of New Creation attenders have good news: they don’t have to queue anymore. They can book their seats online using their ez-link card number. Now this is a wonderful creative solution, one that meets a real need (even though people are actually willing to queue and wait). The pic above is what a booking slip looks like. So this is the true gospel for NCC members: no more queuing. I am happy for them. However if they are late, their passes will expire and the empty seats will be released for others and this is fair and encourages punctuality and responsibility. Technology and moving to the new facility at Star Vista has made this possible. Their first service will be on the 23rd of December 2012.
Instead of queuing just click.
Christmas is the season for reflection. It is December. Its the year’s end. Often it is seen as a time to holiday and wind down. Nothing wrong with that. It is time also to look back on the year. God has been with you every day of the whole year. We forget his inconspicuous presence in everyday happenings of regular living. Reflection helps us to unearth those gems and deepen our love and gratitude for our Lord. So we look back and count as many blessings and write a super long list of how God has shown up and blessed us through events, experiences and people. Then as holy priests we offer to the Lord a sacrifice of thanksgiving and praise.
Of course there were also those so-called negative experiences. Times when we were upset, angry, jealous, bitter, furious, and fell into temptations of various kinds. We felt humiliated, discouraged or remorseful. We wanted to give up. Run away. Hide in a hole forever. These feeling need to be processed in the context of the incidents in which they arose. Talk to the Lord about them one by one and sit and listen. Let the finished work sink in. There are gems of self- and God- discovery to be unearthed. Each year should enrich you with bags of experiences processed via the cross of Christ.
So carve out some time and take time to reflect. Take a break and shut down all electronic and digital devices for a day or a half-day. Eat, sleep, pray, journal and let God love you.
My warmest Christmas wishes to all friends and visitors of this blog. The Lord bless you with hope and peace!
A friend dropped by and handed a few free tickets to the Clash of the Continents tennis exhibition at the Singapore Indoor Stadium. Why not? I was on leave and had time to spare and had never been to one before. My wife, a neighbour and I arrived at about 3pm and managed to watch the tail end of the first match and the full match that pitted Japan’s and Asia’s No. 1 player with an Argentina player, once ranked No 10. The match was absorbing with a few light moments of entertainment though I wished there had been more intensity, more tension. Before I knew it, the match was over and two hours had passed. A few interesting things about tennis and me:
I picked up tennis when I was in secondary 2 in Swiss Cottage Secondary. There was no proper coaching so I picked up the game watching TV and reading books in the library. It was a poor way to learn.
It was a clay court and that meant preparatory work on the court before you could play. We had to even out the clay and had to drag a heavy roller up and down the court to flatten the ground. When balls were hit out onto the slope we had to climb a fence and search among the bushes for the ball.
I had a bronze medal from the national games. We played and lost to St Joseph’s and St Patrick’s and we had a walk over with either Beatty Secondary or Outram Secondary. There were four teams in the whole of Singapore. That’s why Swiss Cottage was third and I had a medal. 🙂
What, then, is the difference which He has made to the whole human mass? It is just this; that the business of becoming a son of God, of being turned from a created thing into a begotten thing, of passing over from the temporary biological life into timeless ‘spiritual’ life, has been done for us. Humanity is already ‘saved’ in principle. We individuals have to appropriate that salvation. But the really tough work – the bit we could not have done for ourselves – has been done for us. We have not got to try to climb up into spiritual life by our own efforts; it has already come down into the human race. If we will only lay ourselves open to the one Man in whom it was fully present, and who, in spite of being God, is also a real man, He will do it in us and for us. Remember what I said about ‘good infection’ . One of our own race has this new life: if we get close to Him we shall catch it from Him.” (Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis, pp. 156-157)