Academic Year 2012/2013 in Lincoln, UK

The term has started. Summer vacation had ended. Classes resumed. Life abroad once again.

I guess the best phrase to describe how I am right now is "in a limbo". I'm still dreamy, sleeping and eating a lot. In other words, "pigging". I know that it takes time to get over the vacation mode and all but with the upcoming classes and project preparation, I have no idea where all these are leading me to. Sheer exhaustion, maybe? I know I am blessed, in the nation where international students complain that fees are exorbitant and not enough chemicals in the lab to go around for their projects and lacking of support blah blah..., I'm fully sponsored by Erasmus Mundus for two whole years (a year had passed since) to study and get a short research project done by end of July 2013. How blessed can one get? I can only have God to thank and rely on for this abundant grace.

The potential for a month in Malaysia during the December-January winter break is definitely tempting... Yum yum... But chances of me staying in Europe/UK after this are slim enough for me to consider touring some of the European countries which I haven't stepped my foot on... Travel or home?? Travel? Home?? Both are equally tempting!

Some of my coursemates commented without thinking much that I worry too much. I am a born planner. Used to be a worrier. Yet right now, despite anxious in trying to plan my way around, I worry of nothing much really. Yes, I felt challenged and upset when people carelessly trying to "assure" me not to worry too much. I learned one thing, it is good to have plans, though sometimes plans DO change greatly. Been there, done that. Yet, I still enjoy the changes which take place in my life though these changes, too, wrecked my plans. This is growth and experience that money cannot buy. So, why not plan first? Why not plan ahead? Being flexible with a plan is better than choosing to be so flexible that there is no plan ahead. So yes, I AM PLANNING what should happen after I'm done with my EM Masters in Forensic Science. If I want to get a good stipend for a Ph.D position somewhere, I need to start planning ahead. And with a lot of prayers and trusting that God is the Author of my life, I'm sure I'll be somewhere He has in mind for me. So, yes, PLAN. And please, people who think I worry too much, get out of my life, for goodness sake!! LOL. Not that they are in my life anyway, except those times when I become a useful tool to them.

Alright, time to get ready. I'm blessed by God with good friends here in Lincoln... One would be accompanying me to visit Riseholme College in the countryside for a couple of hours and few will be gathering for Asian dinner later. How great Thou art, my Lord and my God!!!

Surprised by Oxford - Carolyn Weber

I requested to review this book a year ago when I started a new chapter of my life in Europe. It took me a year to read this book. By taking it slowly, the testimonial of Carolyn Weber made a deep impression within me. I am encouraged by her choice despite being 'different' as in being a Christian in the world. This book will definitely give an impact to anyone who finds it hard to accept the existence of God, newly-baptized Christians struggling to 'fit in' as well as for those who have been Christians their whole lives. Also, she entwined within her conversion story another story of how God comes first in all relationships and how she met her husband. This is definitely a book which I will recommend to everyone.

Disclosure of Material Connection:I received this bookfree from the publisher through the BookSneeze®.com [...] book review bloggers program. I was not required towrite a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255[...] :"Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."

God the Joker

When people said our God is a joker too, it was pretty hard for me to imagine. But indeed. He plays funny jokes that bind people together. The decision to stay in KK for vacation which I made was kind of unplanned, uncertain, unsure. Yet, I have decided to trust that He will provide me with means of transporting myself somehow.

This is part of Him being the Joker...
I went out this morning to Kingfisher without knowing how will i be going home later. my final meeting was with Aunty Agnes who had a meeting in church so I tagged along so as to meet Jesus in Blessed Sacrament. Also to figure out how to go home later. i thought i saw my friend's car so i texted her. By the time I entered the chapel, i told God to provide to my need. a message from my friend... Gues what?! she is right there in the chapel!

This made us laughed until tears formed in our eyes. It has been a while since a divine joke happened to me for sure. It was a direct practical of 'walk by faith, not by sight' (c.f. 2 Cor 5:7). What I truly believe is He provides all that I need, though not always according to my wants. and always... in His good time..

Weekend Away to Cardiff

I'm on the last weekend prior to my 6-week vacation in Malaysia (plus the craziness of visa application). I'm very blessed to have met awesome Sabahan friends who are residing in UK right now :) We're on a road trip to Cardiff this weekend to watch the London 2012 Olympics women's football match between Great Britain and Cameroon. Definitely blessing from God to have the golden opportunity to be a part of Olympics in my lifetime. Despite the fact that an unfortunate situation happened to one of us just yesterday, she has decided to go ahead with our plan. I'm proud of being her friend, and admire her ability to cope with composed mind. I see how God is working in her life.

Going to Cardiff is like tracing path of a dear friend to me. This person used to be there for quite a bit yet I can never fully understand the conditions of the place this person used to live. Stepping my foot there perhaps may lend me a helping hand to better understand my friend.

This whole year, God is my Pillar of Strength when I'm weak and my Hope when all hope seemed lost. Never once did He abandon me despite my frequent delinquency. Instead He remains there until I decide to let Him out from my invisible pocket of life. Nothing is greater than His amazing love for us. Wrapping up this academic year in Europe and a new journey starting in the UK in September, I really hope and pray that God will continue being my center of life and may all the friendships I share with people from all walks of life be according to His plan which is to prosper and not to harm me (c.f. Jer 29:11).

I find that God calls me to be His witness despite my imperfections and shortcomings. I can never justify my past, but through the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus, my body becomes the temple of the Holy Spirit. Hence, it's my honor when God calls me to His witness to spread His good news to the ends of the earth. Whatever He has in mind for me, I trust it's the best for me.

"Here I am, Lord, is it I, Lord?
I have heard You calling in the night.
I will go, Lord, if You lead me,
I will hold Your presence in my life."

Assumptions AREN'T Truth

In case you assume you have never assumed something, then you must be God. I'm not God, and I assume too many times too. Imperfect! Horrible! If Cindy does it, then Cindy is big bad guy. But when others do, well... it's normal apparently. ROFL!! I must be some stone age personality in museum!

Yet, I know and have been reminding myself to not assume, because I know assumptions are not truth, no matter how old or how "grown up" we are. Take it lightly or seriously, frankly speaking, none of my business.

Assumption no. 1 people always make is grownups don't forget easily and manage their lives awesomely. We must be a pendrive if that's the case. Even pendrive sometimes loses the data and requires reformatting of its system. A reminder will not kill, seriously. Even adults messed up. Open any news site and you can read a recent report of Colorado shooting where 24-year-old guy shot people to death in cinema. And how HIV is still being transmitted despite people having the knowledge of how it transmits. Call that grownups. Yeah. Grownups indeed. A bunch of kids playing Montessori playgroup games.

Assumption no. 2 people usually make themselves believe is this: individuals are how they want themselves to see, and not who these individuals really are. Not truth but just a fantasy of their minds and all the gossips and judgements they assume of the someone. We might as well become fishes in the aquarium and let "visitors" assume we are what they think they know.

Stop assuming what you perceive as truth, and start seeking the real thing. Why use a fake leather bag when you can afford a real deal? I started to try to seek truth about people whom I know. Why people still wander in the desert when they can stay in the oasis? No se. Locos? Maybe.

Blessed day.

It's Time to Say Goodbye

Time flies. Love stays. Truly. Indeed.

Swiftly 5 months passed me by without me realizing. My final module here in Portugal ended last Friday. Reality jolt. I'm leaving Lisbon, a city I have grown comfortable to for the past few months. Another two days and I'm heading to Madrid to gather with Malaysians living in Spain, and the flight to UK. It is harder than I imagined to bid farewells, to the senior citizens I met in Igreja Corpo Santo's Irish Dominican parish, to my two Malaysian friends residing in Lisbon, and to the foreign friends I met in church..

I said goodbye to my Slovakian friend after mass over light lunch, hoping one day our paths will cross again. Earlier I bade goodbye to Gosia from Poland, then Agi from Hungary, promising we'll meet during summer. Plans changed and I'm going home earlier than I planned. There's UK visa application to submit and administration work to complete prior to my proper summer vacation home.

I have come to love colourful Lisbon and it's a huge pity that I didn't even visit Porto nor Coimbra nor Faro. I will try to make it to caveman's "Disneyland" Sintra before leaving. I will be back next summer for sure, to cover places I didn't cover. Though the banking system sucks and education system was far too relaxed for my likings, life is good here. Especially spiritual nourishment to feed my spirit man. It is appreciative that I went for pilgrimage to Fatima. GOD called me to Europe as a witness for His church. I hope I have been doing my part of witnessing despite being a woman of imperfections.

Meeting a special virtual friend who carves his name on my prayer list this early June too is a blessing from God. My almost daily encounter with him made me realize my needs are more important than my expectations and God will fill in my needs according to His time. My expectations and desires instead may not be healthy for me. Nobody would say McD is healthy food but everybody craves for it once in a while. Also, the need for me to be honest with myself and with God about how I feel. It's a daily challenge for me, for living in denial is always a more comfortable option for me. So facing this virtual friend, I'm brought to the level of being completely honest with him for once. I have no idea if we would ever meet but I look forward being still completely honest if we could become true friends in real life.

Two more days to go. Plenty to pack before DHL picks up my luggage... Adios!

Guarding Your Heart... From What?

Today's first reading was taken from Hosea chapter 2. I saw this article on my Google Drive but the link was dead. I managed to find back the article from someone's blog, and find that it is a good reminder to myself, and perhaps to you who are reading too. Being afraid to get my heart broken, being afraid of all the commitments and responsibilities, being afraid that nobody can handle my idiosyncrasies, probably I have closed my heart to the possibility of deepening relationships with people around me. To enter into deeper relationships means taking risk of having my heart broken, taking risk of commitments and responsibilities, taking risk of having a person who may actually handle my idiosyncrasies with smile and amusement to his own. I'm not a risk-taker at this point. I guess, at this point, I need to let God lead me instead of me telling God what kind of person I desire to be with. My needs may not be met by a person with traits I desire anyway.

And so, here's the article. Enjoy!


Guarding Your Heart … From What?
by Lindy Keffer 
Some of us become so intent on "guarding our hearts," that we may be missing out on some things that God has to teach us. Lindy discusses the idea that protecting ourselves from possible hurt may not be the best way to go about our relationships.


What was God Thinking?Apparently, God didn't read Finding the Love of Your Life1  before commanding His prophet Hosea to marry Gomer the adulteress. If He had, He would have known that a propensity for prostitution is not something a man of God should look for in a wife.


Is it just me, or does anyone else's sense of moral outrage flare up over Hosea's story? I mean, come on. This doesn't sound like Passion and Purity.2  Not much I Kissed Dating Goodbye3  going on here. Not only did Hosea fail to guard his heart, he ran headlong into a relationship full of pain. And he did it at God's command.


When I first heard Hosea's story, I had a difficult time swallowing it for a couple of reasons. Obviously, it's heart-breaking to watch the prophet give himself to a woman who repeatedly betrays him in the beds of other men. But as hard as that is to stomach, it turns out to be a beautiful metaphor for God's insatiable love for His unfaithful people. The bigger wrestling match in my mind was over what this story has to say about human love. Sure, I know that the book of Hosea isn't intended as a marriage manual. But I also know that God never commands His servants to do something that falls outside His plan, and that includes His plan for marriage.


So how do we reconcile the fact that, while God's command to Hosea can't possibly go against His design for marriage, it sure seems to fly in the face of the advice given in Christian relationship books?


I Don't Hate I Kissed Dating Goodbye
First, let me say that I wholeheartedly agree with Christian authors who counsel believers to stay pure, honor marriage and make wise decisions in choosing a spouse. Likewise, I detest the worldly idea that we should use one another to gratify our own lustful desires without a thought of lifelong commitment (or even a second date). For the most part, I think Christian relationship books were written to encourage us to live toward and within marriage in a way that honors God's design for it.


But, I also think that Christian culture has turned relationships into a formula — do it this way and you will arrive at the altar with the ideal spouse and without emotional scars. We talk about "guarding our hearts" and avoiding "emotional prostitution." We set conservative physical boundaries — sometimes deciding to go no further than hand-holding and hugging before marriage. But do these things really get at the point of Christian courtship? I say no, and here's why…


On Guard
When we talk about guarding our hearts, we usually mean being super careful about how much personal stuff we disclose to someone in whom we're romantically interested. We think of it as a way to save our emotional intimacy for our future spouses. There's only one problem with this idea. It's not actually biblical. The phrase "guard your heart" comes from Proverbs 4:23. Read in context, it's clearly talking about guarding our hearts against sin, not people.4 


As usual, the Bible calls us to a standard higher than the ones we construct for ourselves. Guarding our hearts against sin includes much of the wisdom that's already built into the Christian dating culture: It causes us to choose our company carefully, steer clear of physical activity that arouses our sexual passions, and factor the lifelong nature of the marriage commitment into our interaction with potential spouses. It also asks us to dig deeper — to go beyond the neat boundaries outlined in books and lectures and wrestle with God regarding our own sin.


So, rather than deciding that purity means not kissing before engagement, we have to ask, "When is physical affection selfish rather than self-giving?" or "At what point am I giving in to temptation and violating my own conscience?" And we must be willing to forsake anything that doesn't measure up to these standards, even if, at times, it's something as seemingly innocent as hugging.5 


For those of us who once felt safe and justified living within the Christian dating box, the demands of righteousness can come as a shock. Suddenly, it's not about checking all the boxes on the list, but about being intimately attuned to the Holy Spirit, even as we are growing closer to another person. Sometimes we are surprised at the unexpected places where sin lurks in our hearts. And that's not the only tough thing we encounter when we stop guarding ourselves against people and start guarding against sin.


Take a Risk, Take a Chance, Make a Change
As hard as it is to fully expose my heart to God, I find one thing more difficult: exposing my heart to other humans. That's probably because I have known God for as long as I can remember and have found Him completely trustworthy. Humans — not so much. I think this is the hardest part about dating and marriage. In order to get to the point of making a lifelong commitment to love someone, we must open ourselves up to (at least one) sinful person who will hurt us. Somehow, I think we've taken the Christian relationship books to mean that if we follow all the steps, we can avoid the hurt, but it just isn't so.


I don't number myself among those who believe that God takes a risk in loving us. But because we lack His sovereignty and omniscience, I think we necessarily take risks when we imitate His sacrificial love. Or, as C.S. Lewis puts it in The Four Loves, "There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken ... The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."6 


Conventional church wisdom sometimes tells us otherwise: Do not invest yourself too deeply in anyone until you know that person is "The One." I know, I know. To anyone who hasn't dated within Christian culture, it sounds absurd, but many Christian singles have bought this line. They're the ones who say, "I only want to date the person I marry." They live in fear of accidentally giving an irretrievable piece of their heart away to someone they might not wed.
Certainly, marriage is undermined when we have given our hearts and bodies away haphazardly to those we didn't end up marrying. But at the other end of the spectrum, the desire to "save everything for my future spouse" can translate into practical paralysis — we are simply unable to move forward in a relationship where the end is not known.


Who's Guarding Your Heart?The problem with this approach is that it demands that God give us a guarantee of "happily ever after" before we ever become vulnerable with someone we care about. But because marriage is always between two sinful people, it will always be a leap of faith. And for two God-followers considering the possibility of marriage, there will often be fears, misgivings and hurts as we grasp what it means to be an imperfect person who deeply loves an imperfect person. And this, I think, is the core of the heart-guarding issue. We may say we're guarding our hearts to honor God, but if we're really honest, we're trying to keep ourselves from getting hurt.


Instead, we ought to see dating and courtship as a time of trusting uncertainty. We find someone who could potentially be a godly spouse. Sparks fly — hopefully for both people — and somehow or another (depending on which books we've read), we become intentional about getting to know each other.


If we guard our hearts against sin, we save ourselves loads of pain and regret should the relationship end. But at some point, the road to marriage requires making ourselves vulnerable to someone we have not yet committed to marry. That's a scary thing, but at that point we have a choice — guard our own hearts, and, in our self-protection, lose our ability to really love. Or, let God guard our hearts, trusting that even if we are abandoned by humans, He will hide us under His wings and make us whole again.


Pain is Productive
The Christian dating culture seems to rebel against the idea that God might lead us down the relationship road far enough to get hurt, but not so far as marriage. We will go to great lengths to avoid this excruciating state of limbo. But what if this pain is fully within God's plan for us?


It's like the blind man in John 9. He didn't suffer because he sinned. He suffered so that Jesus would have an opportunity to glorify the Father through his healing. So, if you wind up investing in a relationship that doesn't lead to marriage, don't see it as a moral failure (unless you have actually failed morally). Don't see it as the thwarting of God's plan for your life. It could be that God is refining you with His fire, painfully burning away your impurities — bringing healing to you and glory to Himself as He does so.


I'm sure Hosea wondered many times why God would ask him to go through the pain he suffered in his marriage. But he honored the marriage covenant, made himself open to his wife and trusted God with his heart. Because of his obedience, we have some of the Bible's most tender words from Christ, the bridegroom, to us, His bride:


I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion. I will betroth you in faithfulness ... (Hosea 2:19-20, NIV).


What better safety could our hearts find?