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?

A Day in the Oceanarium

"All the earth will declare that Your love is everywhere,
the fields will exalt, seas resound,
hear the trees joyful cries,
praising You and so will I,
a new song I'll sing,
Lord, I will glorify and praise Your Holy Name!"

This is a song which means a lot to me, the very first few praise songs I learned in Lifeline worship team. Today I finally rewarded myself for the completion of the Forensic Botany module and the report -- with a trip to Oceanario de Lisboa. Indeed it's one of the finest oceanarium I had been so far. I was in Aquaria KLCC and Oceanarium of Barcelona. They too are good with quality collection of marine life but the open sea concept of this oceanarium is just innovative! I went round and round yet not one side is the same as the other. Ample of space for everyone to have a good look at the sea creatures. The marine life is well taken care of. This is definitely something Portugal must be proud of! All descriptions are bilingual - Portuguese and English.  I wished I have seen the one in Valencia too... I heard that is awesome too.

I thank God for the few months in Lisbon. It just feel like there are so much Lisbon has to offer that my plate is constantly full! Another few weeks before I fly home.. I still have yet seen Sintra which was described as magical by some. I want to see what someone had seen so that I know what he went through... and the zoo of Lisbon also is in my list. Not forgetting Porto too...

There are just so much... yet time is limited :) The best is the church community whom I have come to know... and starting to serve in liturgy of the Word. That's God's goodness in my life..

Sacred Heart Feast Day

"My heart is restless until I find rest in You."

I think it's a famous quote of a saint.. but I don't quite remember whether it's St. Augustine or St. Jerome.. Indeed, my heart has been restless for the past one week battling with my human nature. Only God knows the amount of pain I experienced in this wrestle. Yet, all the dark nights of my soul led me to this conclusion: that I am nothing without God. And it's by His grace that I am where I am now.

I can't ask that anyone should change for my sake neither should I change for the sake of anyone. Yet, it's within the broken  human nature to please others and be who they are expected to be.

God loves me as I am, no matter how imperfect I am. I rejoice to be called His beloved daughter. His plans and visions are beyond the comprehension of my limited mind. All I ask is He leads me to where He finds best for me to be, to my beloved whom He finds favour in, whoever that may be.

In Jesus I trust.

All of My Days

All of my days I will sing of Your greatness,
All of my days I will speak of Your grace,
All of my days I will tell of Your wondrous love,
Your love in my life... Your Love...

I have been in an emotional roller coaster since yesterday and the heavy heart is once again set within me. For the whole of yesterday everything seemed to be so blinded and so suffocating. I thank God for a friend or two who acted as His angels to walk me through the intense loneliness I felt last night. God's wondrous love ministered to me by the most unsuspecting one. He uses the most unlikely person in His time as His instrument of love. I pray this person receives as much comfort as he has given.

God is always the glorious One and when morning came, the sun rose and my heart warmed up to the sun. I rewarded myself by purchasing online in Apple Store Portugal a blue iPod Shuffle 2GB. And yes, personalized by engraving my full name on it. It's kinda weird, as initial thought was to engrave Psalm 37:4 on it. Never got around engraving such important message anywhere :/ Then running errand to the bank. Gee.. I have to run to the bank again :( The account number had an extra number.. I hope there's no transaction at the moment!!

Afternoon spent leisurely downloading praise & worship songs for gym. Planetshakers and Hillsongs of course. To prepare for the arrival of my latest addition to my gadget family :p I'm excited for his arrival the day after tomorrow bearing imprint of my name on him. Yep, my iPod shuffle is a guy. Hahaha!!! It's like tattooing my new fling. Ok, I had been loyal to my gadgets.. ermm.. somehow *chuckles*

I had been thinking a lot about how I have reacted towards some people, and what brings joy to me. Can I bring real and true joy to him/her/them through my words and actions? Or am I using him/her/them to selfishly feed my void? Even initially I had pure intention to reach out to a lost brother or sister, sometimes I lose sight of my intention, mission and ministry. I lost sight of God.

Tonight I was reminded by a dear sister, Annel, of the words from Isaiah, chapter 55, verses 8-9...
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."

Indeed a tight slap on my face. I have used a wrong method to minister and an even more wrong intention. Out of curiosity our friendship started. I forgot sharing life is a story of a lifetime, not a mere one, two-week short-term flings. I thank God He showed me once again the way that leads me to Him. Though a narrow gate, but a bright and shiny one, because He stands there in His righteousness.

Pax vobiscum.