having served in 3 different bodies, 2 in UK and 1 in SG, i am disappointed and discouraged in having to note at the end of the day, your fellow brothers and sisters in Christ are cliquish people.
i should not go on to say that if you’re not in their clique or in the same wavelength as them, they probably won’t listen to you, or hear you out. much worse, they start creating their own programmes or meet ups and leave you out.
i think i’ve been awake to countdown the past 13 years or so:
97-98: slept into the new year wearing a black adidas shirt
98-99: countdown party at suntec i think
99-00: suntec countdown party – yes those were the days. orange adidas tee
00-01: think i was in a cab on the way to a friend’s place
01-02: somewhere, think was with the bestie
02-03: talking to the ex in her kitchen
03-04: in the movies, watching some movie featuring diane lane, with the bestie
04-05: …can’t recall… but surely i was awake! probably at a kopitiam?
05-06: on sheares bridge, photographing the fireworks, again with the bestie, supper at crystal jade thereafter
06-07: at a friend’s place, with bestie and friend from uk
07-08: showered my way into the new year since………….
08-09: watching countdown show at home with the gf
09-10: with the gf and jc batch mates at tim’s, champagne toast
interestingly, i’ve chatted with at least 3 pple who’ve felt that there’s no big fuss about counting down and so decided to stay home. maybe should do more of the same
i recall that some 10-12 years ago, brother J set the bar for sincerity – cycling to my house, inter alia, to deliver a handmade Christmas card. so i told him i’d do something similar yesterday, but of course in the mobile jukebox and using already printed cards. it’s interesting to see the range of response – from people who’d do a Peter (and not allow Jesus to wash his feet) to people who’d return you double – a card in exchange for a gift (maybe I should have thrown in some starbucks vouchers – next year maybe). no hard feelings for those in the Peter category, just a keen observation.
still, the most meaningful Christmas was two years ago- Pastor B’s challenge – “So you all have done your Christmas shopping for the year – what gift are you giving God this Christmas” – a bunch of us spent the Christmas weekend cleaning up an old folks’ home, it was a humbling yet fulfilling experience.
as many people have already commented, there is a danger of falling into the commercialization of these occasions without knowing the true meaning behind it. john 3:16 – the unreplaceable Gift. whoever said Christmas is a time for partying? for getting drunk? or think that it has to be a romantic occasion (as seen in serendipity and love actually)? it is sometimes good to be still for a while to perform a system of check and balances on yourself – i’m not saying outright that you can’t party or celebrate it with a loved one (and getting drunk should not be an option), but i think we should search our hearts before indulging in all these.
she told me over the phone lasts nite that she observed a lot of people buying gifts at the malls - to the extent that she wondered if there were more Christians here than we thought there was – well the typical cynical response from me was that it was a politically correct thing to do, especially in the office these days. still, i am thankful that i got prezzies from some of my (subordinate) colleagues and i felt bad not being able to give them something in return.
merry 2nd day of Christmas – time to dig into some char bee hoon from Ghih Moh.
i think we live in a very sad world… i wonder how the world has become where there is distrust, people don’t take what you say at face value and you have to be questioned and doubted what what you say or do.
my point of view comes from how i went for an interview with a doctor who might potentially be sued… and the way hospitals work these days are like law firms… everything you do/ say document it down… that’s the only way to cover your own ass…
today i found out that our rival firm is being sued too… what happened to the days where people would just trust others… where people would tell their own God “thy Kingdom come, thy will be done”… rather than have the i need to find a scapegoat mentality
i’ve been telling people that the way to play the game called life is to know how to cover your own ass… or to know people who can cover yours… so that , for example, in my case, screw ups like what i did on friday won’t make me feel like i wanna beat myself up and tear my PC into 2
it’s sad…
hopefully blogging puts me to sleep… the sky is lightening up now… jetlag
it was absolutely brilliant to return to the uk, a land where even in london, you get the occassional smile from a stranger, a tunnel visioned biz exec who says thanks for giving way to him during rush hour, where pple are generally nice and polite
i still feel a cultural shock having been back for 2 years – the only thing that i agree with what grandfather says is that singapore will take a long time before it becomes a gracious society, and true enough, when i touched down and went over to t3 to whack some sorely missed food, no one held the lift door for us, in particular a family of four who seemed free and relaxed – they were determined to get out of the lift first, squeezing past our trolley, pretending that they were the last to do so! work wise, i am still not used to the straight to the point, blunt, direct way of certain people – yeah yeah time is money but at the end of the day where does this get you?
supper last nite was good and the talk about officially starting work in less than a month was censored – but it got me thinking – it is a sad fact of life now that we have to resort to cover your ass (mind the language – figure of speech here) or know enough important people to cover your ass – what happened to trust? is distrust or being hard to convince a facet of our post-modernism culture now?
you can put me on record too that if it’s God’s will that i am made EP one day, and if it happens that the firm’s interest and my values cannot be aligned, i will leave, and probably start out on my own
if i may share a little ambition of mine – no it’s not to become SC, but to become an accredited mediator some day – i strongly believe that’s my calling, and I believe that has been implied somewhere in the Bible, something about reconcilliation but I will have to look that up another time!
the above aside, i find it a divine coincidence that one of the songs that was sang during the service at LCGC was “I Surrender”, and my last Sunday there 2 years ago, it was the same song being sung. Hmmm. I believe God brought me back to allow me to see how wonderfully He has made things turn out, that I did not have to cling on (sentimentally) to my days in LCGC, especially still wanting to stick my nose into things regarding SF (now FF)… I believe I have not revealed this, but a dream came true about a year ago, when the FF was formed because that was what I always desired was the best way forward for our mix of international students and bbc grown up youths in LCGC, praise God for that!
finally, if you consider me a good friend, and if the day comes where it appears litigation has screwed my character upside down, please tell it to me straight in the face – symptomps: sarcasm, guai-lan-ness, cynicism
a few thoughts have been rambling through my head this few days… in light of having to be aware (pun not intended) of certain issues
as a Christian, i think that you should never try to impose your Christian values on others, especially in this day and age, without having given due consideration to the secular world… my views here are that of a Christian mind you… but even the Bible has also taught us to give due regard to the secular world, to people who don’t know Christ.
People don’t like to be told what to do these days… they want to have their own choices, eg when it comes to abortion, sexual orientation etc etc…gone are the days of conservatism… i believe in hate the sin, love the sinner, and being all-inclusive… however when push comes to shove, measures have to be taken to arrest the shove from turning to a forceful bang down…
i cannot imagine the day when say 30-40 years down the road, it’s normal for a kid to say “this guy is my father, this other guy who is his partner is my mother”… so in a way i am aware that they probably wanted to make a point, albeit in a controversial big hoo ha way of preventing the further erosion of social values
in the UK, it’s an offence (although this hasn’t surfaced yet) to discriminate someone based on his sexual orientation eg if a church refuses to marry a homosexual couple, the church can be liable under the Equalities Act for discrimination
so someone has to step in to prevent our values from eroding.. the example i cited 2 paragraphs above is extreme, and i believe that before this can ever happen, Christ would have returned.
on another note, the garment has also spoken about 3 divides that we need to tackle… of keen interest to me is that between singaporeans and non-singaporeans
to be fair, i think the main problem is that we as Singaporeans always try our best to adapt to other people’s culture – we even fake an accent to make ourselves understood abroad, preferring not to impose our singlish on others. however, i believe it takes two hands to clap, and if you try to create your china or usa here and thinking it’s the way to go, then in a way we singaporeans cannot be blamed for drawing a line between us and foreigners…
for what profiteth a man if he gains the world but loses his soul?
a word about retention. i know that for some of you, you’d already receive news of it, some not yet. but in any case, we had only so much of control in it, the rest, if i may put it this way, was and is in God’s control. in the meantime, i think there’s a lesson for us to learn, through this whole retention saga and economic crisis – for us to learn to be content in whatever circumstances. By contentment I mean:
1) that you have a place in the firm, if not,
2) that you have sat thru PLC, passed it more or less, and that you have a certain # of days left to fulfil before being called to the bar
3) that in times like this, beggars are no choosers, and so if you have to apply to a liti dept of a particular firm, just do so, rather than be headstrong about wanting to do corp and corp only
at the end of the day, i dare say the legal sector as a whole is not as badly hit as other sectors eg the banking sector, and that there is still a job of an adv/sol for everyone who has gone thru 2) above.
for those whose places are still not confirmed, i pray that you will not be competitive and that you will not use under the table methods to secure your retention, at the expense of others. are you sure you’ll not feel guilty about it at the end of the day when the dust clears?
i make no apology for being harsh in the above entry. if anything, forgive me for not being able to emphatize fully. if i may end of with a familiar story that Mr L shared at thanksgiving, a story which i dare say helped me stay peaceful throughout this uncertain time:
the disciples were out with Jesus on the boat when they encountered a storm. Fearing for their lives, they woke up their Master. He immediately calmed the storm and the waves and rebuked them for having so little faith.
