"Certainty is the most terrifying thing to me. I think a life of faith is not a life of certainty. A life of faith is a life of doubt. And i think it is so healthy to doubt. It is so healthy to doubt oneself, it is so healthy to doubt any assumption we make about how to live. Certainty starts war on behalf of ideology. Certainty that, "I know and you don't". That's the scariest thing to me." - Andrew Garfield talking about Silence
Showing posts with label faith. Show all posts
Showing posts with label faith. Show all posts
on truth and reality
Aristotle’s definition of truth:
“To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true; so that he who says of anything that it is, or that it is not, will say either what is true or what is false.”
Reread and you'll get what he meant :D
i wish i could
- Matthew 5:5 (The Message ver.)
major minus
Yesterday I read on the newspaper about an Indonesian doctor who was killed in Mogadishu, Somalia, a region of conflict. He served as a member of Doctor Without Borders (MSF) and was killed by a local Somalian who has just been fired from his job, at the MSF.
It somehow reminds me of an old friend, who was a sweet like-able guy. I remember there was a church event where we were split in group to play some games. I saw a very different side of him that I had never seen before. He became so serious about the games and acted sometimes too furious when he didn't win. Soon after, I learnt the stories about how he was born and raised in a region of conflict in Eastern Indonesia. About how he missed a bullet that was shot right to his head, and survived. The way of living for survival penetrated to the blood became a character he carried with him on daily basis.
This life is a hard place to live. No matter how hard you try to reconcile with life, it will always be bitter. This is a world of pain, of sickness, of tragedy. It has been a while since I started to feel sick every time I heard people talking about "wanting happiness". Q: "What do you want in life?" A: "To be happy." Oh stop that crap already. To me that sounds like an answer given by a sixteen yo girl. Stop avoiding sadness as if it's a disease. You think you'll reach happiness with marriage, tell me how you feel when problems strike. You think you'll be happy if you buy a thing, see how long it last before you get bored. It's just a cycle so stop overrating happiness.
Anywayyy, I have stop admiring Coldplay since Viva La Vida, all the costume thingy just didn't work for me. And I didn't care at all about Mylo Xyloto until yesterday when I tried to stream the songs just cause I need some new sound to accompany me doing my things. Only one song that really caught my ear and I've been listening to it over and over again ever since.
o tidings of comfort and joy
God rest ye merry, Gentlemen
Let nothing you dismay
For Jesus Christ our Savior was born upon this day
To save us all from satan's power when we were gone astray
O tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy
O tidings of comfort and joy
Christmas song that I've memorized since the first time I sang it the third week of Advent. My pastor's right, it's simple yet it contains the main thing about the gospel. People should sing more of these hymns instead of all those popular meaningless out of context pop songs.
Sometimes I wish Christmas is celebrated as peaceful as Easter. I mean I wish they take off all those ridiculous decorations everywhere. I walked everyday to office passing through an apartment building, which has restaurants and shopping arcade on the podium. They hang and decorate with a massive use of styrofoam to create ginger house, santa, candies, and snowman. It's irritating. Really? Snowman? Can Christmas be less and less commercialized and romanticized and americanized? I even searched out about the use of a tree as decoration on Christmas cause I've started to wonder whether we actually need it.
Christmas can be the busiest time for many people in church, so I like the idea of my church to "slow down" since the first week of Advent. And really go back to the gospel.
2 days ago, a friend of mine who's not a believer told me how troubled she was and she said, "No matter how hard we try to go back to religion, to the essence of praying, it is always the nature of human being to stand on the opposite site of religious belief." I said, that's true. Which is why in Christianity the concept is always that it's God who came first to human being, not human being who try to find God, which is of course impossible. Which explains Jesus, the God who became human being. To reconnect us to God. To save us all.
Merry Christmas.
between hope and hopelessness
so young for death, we walk on shoes too big
and i lay face upturned on the palm of God
pushed on by the fingertips of dreams
they haunted me, consoling me
and i had thought that i would die here
but you pushed me on, you pushed me on
Corinne Bailey Rae - I Would Like To Call It Beauty
It was earlier this year on March when I went to Corinne Bailey Rae's live performance. She performed songs from her newest album, The Sea, but little that I know that it was out two years after the death of her husband. And about it she wrote this:
"I have experienced a lot of beauty in the loss, in the way that I've been able to survive. The way I feel like I'm being held - held up. I guess the song is about the amount of beauty that is in grief because of the way that people hold you up, and forces and nature, how they hold you up. There's a lot of mystery in God, and I've felt a lot of healing. I guess I can say that I have felt something protecting me and comforting me."
Sometimes the idea of God seems so vague for some people. A friend once talked about how she sees believers that seem so naive turning to God when they're facing hard times and construct some "holy" reasons on why bad things happen, in order to help them making sense of the suffering. I said I don't know and what she said sounds true somehow. But then I said, if that thought helps then why not? It's better to believe in something rather than believe in nothing. How many people out there lost the battle of life because they don't have something to believe in that holds them up. It might not be true, we never know, but at least in God, we survived and are surviving.
I literally cried when I heard the song and read her story and I can relate to what she said above. In the end no matter what people say about God, no matter what is written about it, you'll know it when you know it, you'll feel it when you feel it.
"God is a mystery and a healer."
abnormally born
Today we live in a society of values. To be "accepted" by the society you have to behave, to look, to dress, to talk in certain way. People expect you to meet their standards of how you should be as a person. But sometimes you aren't the person who could easily fit in to all of those. This is what the apostle Paul said,
"Abnormally born" in other version also translated as "born out of time". At that time in Greece, people put appearance as one of the highest value in society. It is normal for people to lock a child at the back of their house since it was born just because it looks ugly. Paul was born ugly, yet God accepted and used him tremendously.
It might sound superstitious and cliche but sometimes somehow the feeling that you are loved by the Supernatural helps relieving a bit of the fact that you can't keep up with this world's standards. A lifestyle writer in his column on Sunday's newspaper wrote something similar. "When the world disappoint me, it is easiest to run to God. It might sounds hypocrite, but if it makes me feel better, why not? If I were handsome, smart, wealthy, and so special, what could please me are predictable: my handsomeness, my brain, my wealth, and my specialty. And I would forget that they're all come from God."
In the end, "We don't have to live based on other people's opinion." -Pastor Dave Kenney.
wretched machine
Speaking about "religion" in a public realm where everyone can read is a bit too "risky" for me. Maybe not risky but I'm just too coward to do so. For me it really takes big courage to speak up what you believe in and i always imagine there are big letters printed on my forehead that scream "Christian" and right there I have a super big responsibility to really show what Christianity is about. While I realize I don't have the capability for it.
I feel like I am trying to drive a really wretched machine which sometimes I couldn't even know how to control. Often times I was so ready to just throw it in the garbage and let it be the end of it. But apparently, that's not how it works according to the manual. All I can do is to keep on. To keep getting up after I stumbled. Hopefully one day I'll found reconciliation with myself so I could be reconciled also with others.
Fact is, it's been more than two years that I had sort of abandoned this identity, I no longer took it up seriously on my daily basis. And it's been almost two months since I had the idea and planned to write quite a lot of things about my struggle with it lately and now I have about four different drafts that I never published. Which now I had decided not to.
Instead, I wanna put up some quote from the book Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, which was actually a legendary broadcast talks on the radio during the WWII.
Now quite plainly, natural gifts carry with them a similar danger. If you have sound nerves and intelligence and health and popularity and a good upbringing, you are likely to be quite satisfied with your character as it is. 'Why drag God into it?' you may ask. A certain level of good conduct comes fairly easily to you. You are not one of those wretched creatures who are always being tripped up by sex, or dipsomania, or nervousness, or bad temper. But if you are a poor creature - poisoned by a wretched upbringing in some house full of vulgar jealousies and senseless quarrels - saddled, by no choice of your own, with some loathsome sexual perversion - nagged day in and day out by an inferiority complex that makes you snap at your best friends - do not despair. He knows all about it. You are one of the poor whom He blessed. He knows what a wretched machine you are trying to drive. Keep on. Do what you can. One day (perhaps in another world, but perhaps far sooner than that) He will fling it on the scrap-head and give you a new one. And then you may astonish us all - not least yourself: for you have learned your driving in a hard school.
I feel like I am trying to drive a really wretched machine which sometimes I couldn't even know how to control. Often times I was so ready to just throw it in the garbage and let it be the end of it. But apparently, that's not how it works according to the manual. All I can do is to keep on. To keep getting up after I stumbled. Hopefully one day I'll found reconciliation with myself so I could be reconciled also with others.
june has past
How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d
- Alexander Pope, “Eloisa to Abelard”, from the movie Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind
dear,
mr, ms, des, bp, ay, ra, fr, aa, hs, aa, bsb, dl, al, aa, tf, at, ew, ra, jk, ss, map, pt, ia, yw, nw, as, aa, gk, th, tn, is, rl, jr, dk, aj, ys, dj, ss, skk, sr, ds, fl, ih, pk, hl
As a human being, I could be so forgetful sometimes and write about things somewhere somehow helps reminding me that something once happened. So right here right now I'm writing to note that once these people were there for me on my hardest time. Thank all of you who: gathered when I called when I was in serious need; hugged me and let me cry as much as I could; gave me theories that were comforting; stayed with me from 11pm to 5am on workday; stayed with me on the phone for hours when I was really lost and literally walking nowhere; replied my messages even at 2am in the morning; picked me up at my office accompanied me and dropped me home; kept asking if I was doing okay; met me after hour when I really need advices; cried with me when I cried; gave me job to distract me; helped me diagnose when I fell ill; being a 'shrink' who listened (read?); replied my massive direct messages on twitter; bought me frozen yogurt; passionately and cheerfully planned a team revenge; willing to fly from out of town just to cheer me up; hung out until 2am at the park; just simply approached me and asked if I was doing okay; prayed for me and asked for other prayer request; being the people to whom I could say good morning to; threw out jokes when I'm in despair; and alllll countless chats on yahoo messenger, skype, facebook chat and message, whatsapp, blackberry messenger, email, or by phone. And any other detail and simple things that I might have already forgot. I thank every single one of you, friends and strangers. Sending big hugs and much love. I hope this will remind me to always love for I am loved.
cause it's all good
To everything there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
a time to be born and a time to die;
a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
a time to kill and a time to heal;
a time to break down and a time to build up;
a time to weep and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn and a time to dance;
a time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to get and a time to lose;
a time to keep and a time to cast away;
a time to rend and a time to sew;
a time to keep silent and a time to speak;
a time to love and a time to hate;
a time of war and a time of peace.
-Ecclesiastes 3 : 1-8 (KJV)
Just a little note on another twenty something birthday. To give thanks and say that everything is good.