Musings

Ling was asking the other night why a series of photos I took over the weekend at home haven’t been put up on our blog here nor the Flickr album we’ve got.

Answer: I’ve been sitting on them! Half of the posts I’m doing these days is on Hannah. The remaining half is split between photography, entertainment, and a fraction of that remainder still on News & Letters. I try to spread out posts across topics, and of late try not to turn our blog here into a dominantly baby one.

The funniest thing though is that the Baby Blues posts are the easiest for me to do. They’re centered on Hannah, and unlikely to offend anyone – and I have a window of at least 10 years before Hannah gains the necessary language skills to comprehend my posts on her LOL. The entertainment posts are critical and by necessity at least semi-analytical. Those require brain power, though they’re enjoyable to write as I like drawing relationships between a film I’ve just watched to films I’ve seen already.

The hardest to do by far are the News & Letters ones, since I’m writing on something that’s current + this blog is Google-able. The days in which I could derive some entertainment value by engaging in online wars are long gone past me. These days, when I post something on current affairs up, I restrain myself not because I’m afraid of engagement when someone disagrees. I’m just tired of it and don’t see the point unless it’s with someone I know in person and whom I can trust to state his or her case politely. I post and write for fun and because writing invigorates me, not to fight with someone I don’t know.

So, with that out of the way, here’s the first selection of pictures taken over the weekend at home:

I took these using the Sigma 24-60mm f2.8 lens, with the late 10:30 AM morning sun shining very partially through the curtains. I didn’t use the flash, and there’s some very mild camera shake. The lens wasn’t stabilized – boo!

One of the weirdest letters to have been published in The Straits Times in recent memory was in last Tuesday’s paper. Here’s what it read (source here):

July 14, 2009
Horrified by many profanities in matinee show on NS life

I ATTENDED the matinee show Own Time Own Target at the Drama Centre in the National Library building over the weekend. One magazine lauded it as a ‘laugh out loud, rediscovery of zany side of national service’. I presumed this meant it was a family-type show and took my two teenage sons, aged 16 and 14, to the show on the premise of a MediaCorp-owned magazine review.

To my horror, I was cringing uncomfortably in my seat the whole show, highly disturbed by the language used. I do not have a problem that the language was coarse and in dialects. But it was offensive when every sentence and curse uttered by the officers (rightly or wrongly, provoked or otherwise) at the NS boys in the drama was a profanity of the female genitals.

The show was a full house, with young and old, males and females equally represented. I am sure I was not the only one who was disturbed by the excessive cursing and swearing by the officers at the recruits. My observation was that people laughed out loud not at the clumsiness of the recruits but mostly because they felt uncomfortable with the profanities.

As a mother, I find it hard to imagine that after years of sheltered school life where students are taught values, to be gentlemanly and polite and respect their elders, these boys have to do NS run by officers who do not blink an eye when they curse their mother, sister, girlfriend and the whole female population by way of conversation.

My boys were shocked to realise that NS is a rite of passage where they will be officially subjected to bullying, shouting and cursing – nothing gentlemanly at all.

If this is a light-hearted look at life of NS boys during basic military training, I fear to know what my boys will face in their real-life situation when they enlist. Please, someone, assure me this is not so.

Wee Hua Boey (Mdm)

So this is going to be a blog post about profanity:)

The online reaction to Mdm. Wee’s letter hasn’t been all that surprising. Very few if any at all persons have been sympathetic. Of everyone else, I’m guessing half are chastising Mdm. Wee for having quite an incorrect expectation of what soldiering involves, and the other half are wondering whether Mdm. Wee’s letter was intended as a joke.

Here’s the thing: soldiers curse. Everywhere, and its not just a Singapore thing. Nor is it a 2009 thing.

I’m guessing there’re a lot of reasons for soldiers cursing and swearing since time in memorial. Occasionally, the curses and swearing come about from your commanders who need to ‘impress’ upon you the urgency or importance of a task at hand (“Wake up your !@#!!! idea!!!”), and other times, it’s an expression you make to your peers as a response to a situation (“This is a !@#!@#!@# mess!”)

Whichever reason it is, soldiering is a serious business, the more so the waging of war if it ever comes to that (touch wood). When bullets are flying above your head (if ever) and there’s a chance that one of those has your name on it, will you be all nice, polite and gentlemanly to make a point?

“My dear squad-mate, could you kindly toss the grenade as far as you can so that the enemy can be hurt, and won’t shoot at us anymore?”

or

“THROW THE ****ing THING and KILL THOSE $$$$!!!!!*****”

And peace time training is supposed to simulate war time operations, with context, the physical and mental environments being among them.

—

When I was doing my NS fulltime so many donkey years ago, there was profanity going around. The profanity level was at its highest as a new recruit. I remember my ‘Encik’ – Senior Non-Commissioned Officer – being especially… colorful, and he had a way of fitting in genitalia terms into every possible sentence, even when he was talking about food.

I never felt that the language was intended to be taken personally, even when he was screaming at my recruit platoon for not jumping / running / walking / marching fast enough. I think the terms used was simply a way of emphasizing a point of activity. So, yes initially some of that swearing did unsettle a couple of us, but we got over it quickly.

And what’s even more interesting is that as I progressed from recruit to vocation training and then finally was posted to my permanent unit, the swearing got far less. Oh, there were still the occasional F*** bombs now and then, but there were very few soldiers around me who were cursing with the same intensity as during that three months of recruit training.

And during my last Reservist training stint, the number of times I heard someone curse was, I don’t know, maybe just twice in the more than 2 weeks I was in-camp. And no bodily terms were used.

So, things aren’t really that bad. And even for the brief period where there is a lot of it going around, it’s just context.

And besides, if going through the army was supposed to imprint permanently swearing and cursing into your daily conversational patterns, I would be hearing a lot of it around me among my friends, colleagues and acquaintances – but I never.:)

I typically steer clear of controversial topics on this blog. Over the 18 years I’ve been online now, making my opinion on a sensitive subject known in the public sphere has never led to anything good.

On this occasion though, I’m facing an increasing disquiet that I thought I’d just make a brief mention of it. One of Monday’s news items read on The Straits Times:

$500,000 pay for New Creation Church leader

THE New Creation Church, which made headlines for raising $19 million on one Sunday last month for its upcoming multi-million dollar building, pays good money to its staff too.

The independent church paid one employee between $500,001 and $550,000 in its last financial year, checks by The Straits Times showed.

The church did not confirm if the amount went to its leader, Senior Pastor Joseph Prince, but told The Straits Times that its policy is to ‘recognise and reward key contributors to the church and Senior Pastor Prince is the main pillar of our church’s growth and revenue’.

The article also notes that the Senior Pastor donated a similar sum of money to its building project.

OK, it’s their money and not really my business. And I’m sure the church is doing great things. But I’m uneasy that the church awards monetarily its leader for the ‘revenue’ (!!) it receives. Also, that church governance saw fit to lavish a servant of God with such large rewards (his alleged return back to the church not withstanding), and for the church not saying who is receiving the princely six digit sum.

In fact, why stop there even? If the church gets even bigger, why not – along the way later – also reward its leaders with bungalows and private jets? That’d be congruent with the church’s policy to “recognise and reward key contributors”.

$500,000 isn’t a small sum of money. Heck; I think Ling and I live about comfortably and spend within our means with an eye on our savings too, but our combined income is just less than a third of that! In my opinion, $500K is well in excess of the needs of modest, middle-class living.

I’m just thinking now also of the early apostles who spread the gospel under a lot more difficult circumstances than today. Did they receive one hundred donkeys every year as a reward for the work they did?

The letters expressing sentiment on the payout has also started appearing in the newspapers. For instance, one writer yesterday wrote:

However, I do not put the blame for such obscene pay cheques on the elite group of church leaders; rather, I would lay it on the congregation.

During the Chinese New Year period, my family and I visited one of the classier church buildings and attended a service. We were taken aback when a special offering, referred to as a hongbao for Jesus, took place. We were surprised to see many in the congregation willingly coming down the aisles to drop their red packets of money in the baskets held by the pastors and leaders. In return for giving, devotees received a spiritual blessing of prayer.

I was amazed at the congregation’s willingness to give without really knowing where all the money was going to. (There was no mention of the purpose of the collection other than giving it to Jesus.)

In the forthcoming days, I’m pretty sure a couple of things will happen. There’ll be more letters to the forum page questioning the payout. There’ll also be letters from the church’s loyal flock defending the payout.

But even in the latter, the damage is done. That a large church which has been in the news recently for being very rich is now showering its leaders with big sums of money in this time of financial prudence is going to just invite more skeptics to point their fingers at how Christianity has become associated with big dollars. And that rising tide of cynicism is the thing that worries me the most.

Taking a break from music posts and returning to an thread where I was writing about lessons in life.:) A groupie in our small group Salmon Run once remarked that the greatest threat to the Holy Spirit is our (human) ability to rationalize everything we do.

It certainly doesn’t take any stretch of the imagination to contextualize the above. Just take a look at any of those controversial issue reported in the papers. E.g. the debate online and in media on homosexuality here in Singapore. Any biblical verse that’s supposed to be straight forward gets debated and argued upon by both sides of the issue.

It’s not my intention in this post to present on what I think about homosexuality, though I think my small groupies have heard what I’ve got to say about that LOL. I’ll say what works for me though; and it stems from another simple truth that I believe in, that…

“There isn’t any temptation that you have experienced which is unusual for humans. God, who faithfully keeps his promises, will not allow you to be tempted beyond your power to resist. But when you are tempted, he will also give you the ability to endure the temptation as your way of escape.” (1 Corinthians 10:13)

This is the second of three ‘anchor’ verses that have helped me simplify many things in life. Like the first one, the full significance of this verse came from QT during my full-time NS days.

The context of the learning was based on a story told in the copy of Our Daily Bread I was using, and the author gave the classic story of if a murderer came to your home wanting to kill one of your family and wants to know if he is home, do you tell the truth or lie?

If we were to take the verse literally, it’d mean that the right thing to do would be to tell the truth. Because God will never want us to break a commandment of his in order to keep another. OK, the verse uses the word ‘temptation’, but if I remember rightly, the author of the entry believed it means ‘in all situations’.

It’s easier said than done. I believe many of us would lie simply because in our minds, to tell the truth would mean the murderer would then step right in to kill our loved one. It’d be utter madness not to do everything to protect our family, including lie. But thinking aloud, doesn’t this stem ultimately from fear of what we can’t control?

Instead, what if we were to take that leap of faith and to trust in God… that if we were to completely trust Him in all things, whatever happens would be His will and it would be the best thing that can happen?

Yeah this all sounds hypothetical, and until someone comes into our home in The Rivervale and threatens to do the same, who knows what we’d really do or say.

But in a simpler context, I think there’s a lot of meaning and application from this verse to everyday life: that we should stop trying to project what we think to be the right and desired outcome, and instead strive to just obey God’s commandments, and trust Him in what happens in our lives.

We usually close of our bible study with prayer requests. And recently Ann jokingly remarked that I don’t seem to have many requests.:)

There’s a long-winded explanation for that. I don’t have many specific requests because putting aside all my posts here about toys I’m interested in LOL, I really don’t have many actual needs and wants.

Why’s that? It comes from a simple truth that I believe in: that everything I have and every difficulty I face is part of God’s plan for me, and while I’ll pray for confidence and courage, I won’t pray for specific outcomes unless it’s absolutely clear in my head what God’s will is.

My belief stems from a promise God made, and it’s in the epistle Paul wrote to the Thessalonians who were under persecution for their beliefs. Worried, Paul said to the Thessalonians:

“In all things give thanks for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you all.” (1 Thess 5:18)

I was first struck by this verse when doing my quiet time while in full-time NS 17 years ago, and it’s remained in my head ever since. This is one of my three ‘anchor’ verses that I always remember, and it helps simplify the challenges and situations that come on all too often.

There are three key phrases in this verse:

- “In all things…”, which well means in everything.

- “Give thanks…”

- “The will of God…”, it’s God’s will.

In everything that happens, give thanks because this is part of God’s plan for you. Paul didn’t tell the Thessalonian converts to give thanks only when the going is good, and not to give thanks when their goats were lost somewhere, or when they were faced with some huge calamity on their door step. Rather, things are happening because it’s part of God’s plan, and there will be some lesson, learning value, or opportunity that will come as a result.

(more…)

We never stop learning. My firmest beliefs in one matter or another comes from lessons in life imparted by people, events and literature who’ve made a big impression on me through the years. So, here’s a new series of posts that I’ll write about these lessons.:)

The first in this series is about something we were discussing about during bible study last Friday on the topic of how love grows and matures in a marriage. At one point we were reflecting on how each of our spouses have changed from courtship to marriage, and Ling shared that I’m less patient than I used to be before marriage.

Truth to tell though, I don’t think that’s entirely accurate. It’s not that I’m impatient. Rather, I just absolutely hate wasting time. Not that I can guarantee always being punctual for every thing I attend to, but in my consciousness not being on time is a huge thing to me.

OK, so what’s the story behind this belief? Well it came from my Godmother. 17 years ago I was in NTU and in debating. Now, students being students, some of us routinely came late for our training sessions. My Godmother was a much-loved teacher among students in the faculty, and usually soft-spoken. She never yelled at the late comers, but there was no mistaking her immense displeasure. (more…)

It has been a trying period for us after my gynae informed me that my test results showed that our baby may have chromosomal abnormality, especially Down Syndrome.

At my age, the average probability of conceiving a baby with Down Syndrome is 1 out of 311. But for me, the probability turned out to be 1 in 38. To add to my grief, I was also high risk for two other chromosomal abnormalities. Having taught sexual reproduction in human beings to my biology students for the past 8 years, I know too well of the defects of Down Syndrome and the options that laid ahead of us. I felt like being told that I have a terminal illness and my days were numbered. The difference was that our baby’s days were numbered before she was born.

I was comforted and thankful that Yang was firm about keeping the baby regardless of his / her health status (we didn’t know the gender then). The trauma and guilt would had been too much for us to bear if we were to opt for abortion so we didn’t consider that option at all. So we committed everything unto Him who is able to keep us from falling and went ahead with amniocentesis to confirm whether the baby has those defects. I’d rather know whether the baby was healthy then than ‘discovering’ it after delivery. Some mental preparation and time for ‘acclimatising’ to the reality is, in my opinion, better than being thrown into the deep end when the baby does arrive with a genetic defect.

The scenarios of caring for a Down Syndrome child kept coming to mind every day since my gynae broke the news. As much as I want to trust God for His good and perfect will, the future looked bleak and I lacked courage to want to try for a second one. I wasn’t angry at God for our situation. In fact, I was wondering whether He was punishing me for my sins. Whatever reason He had, it must be good because of His nature.

And I’m thankful for understanding and supportive parents-in-laws.

During this period of waiting and wondering, I did muse about an abnormal child having greater blessing than a normal person. For example, a normal person can be laden with all sorts of cares and burdens of this world but an abnormal person can be most care-free and content in life. Of course, a mutant is a mutant and often a social stigma. Nevertheless, I’m glad that more and more people are willing to accommodate non-normal individuals as part of society.

So I went for amniocentesis 2 weeks ago. I was a bit frightened because it involved a small risk of miscarriage. Yang was at the hospital with me then. A doctor inserted a thick needle through my abdominal wall to reach into my amniotic bag (water bag) to withdraw a sample of my amniotic fluid. It contained cells shed from the baby and these were cultured and then screened for any extra chromosome amongst the 23 pairs of chromosomes a normal human being should have. This screening would also reveal the sex chromosomes of the baby, whether XX or XY.

On Tuesday night, a staff from my gynae’s clinic called me to break the good news that the baby was normal and a girl (XX)! Yang and I were so relieved and also grateful to God. We want to thank everyone who prayed for us and encouraged us (we didn’t share about our struggle with many). We are grateful to God that Pris, our small group friend, reminded us that all children are gifts from God. She and our small group didn’t know our situation then.

Finally, “Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” James 1:2-4

The most dreaded instrument at our home decades ago was the bamboo cane. I have to hand it to our mum. She was a suffer-no-fools, take-no-prisoners person when it came to ill discipline or bad grades.

One thing I always remembered though was that she never took joy disciplining the three of us. I think the tough love she showed worked, since none of us at home turned into brats, had reasonably ok grades, and certainly didn’t get into bad company.

More than 30 years later, circumstances are pretty different. In some parts of the world, cane a child and you’ll have child welfare services coming on your head. I often really wonder what’s the reason for this change. Is it because our social perceptions of what is acceptable punitive measures has changed? Or we’ve all become ardent believers of soft-approaches when it comes to misbehaving children at home.

We’ve now got persons like the following principal of a preschool declaring that she does not believe in caning, as one can read from a letter to The Straits Times she wrote:

I am the principal of a preschool, and to me, caning is a form of abuse. It sends the message that adults are bullies, and that one can resort to violence if the other party fails to understand what you want.

Being a parent does not give one the right to hit one’s child. It shows disrespect to the child. Would you hit a colleague if he does not follow instructions or disagree with you?

Her letter has garnered some attention both in the ST thread and elsewhere, with many readers pointing out that her letter hasn’t made any mention of growing juvenile delinquency or misbehavior around the world.

I’m sure that many growing up children or young adults will vote against caning if they were given the opportunity to. But I wonder how many of them will vote the same way as parents.

That’s one area Ling and I were talking about for our forthcoming daughter. How and when to discipline? Well, I’ve got it in my head that I don’t think we should discipline our child for poor academic performance. Physical discipline should be used only when nothing else works, or the child misbehaves in the way that is potentially life-threatening. Like if she brings out a knife from the kitchen and threatens someone with it… *touch wood*!

An interesting related discussion here too though the context is discipline in UK schools.

My Christmas post!

One of the two discussion books our small group has been studying this year is on family. And as these discussions go, a couple of times the issue of having children has come up a few times. The opinions in my small group and from my other friends span the entirerange: “No way José”, “Still deciding”, and “Would love to have”.

To be totally honest, I oscillated a little about “starting a family”. Early on, that wanting was actually there. I mean, I had loads of fun with my nephews Danyel and Issac when I stayed at Lentor, and have a lot of admiration of how my elder brother and Jasmine brought them up. However, after I started working teaching 17-18 year olds, I started getting cold feet! I mean, just looking at the kind of trouble they get into… teenage pregnancies, and all the media reports about 17 year old girls posting up suggestive and revealing photos to attract boys and thinking  nothing of it. Or meeting up DOMs from chat lines. It’s scary stuff, especially if it’s your child who’s in that kind of trouble.

But there were two places I found encouragement in. One was from words my Godmother shared with me 15 years ago while I was a student in NTU. She firmly believed that if you bring your children up right in the first 18 years before they hit maturity, they’ll turn out OK. So, she disciplined her children when it was called for. And she has two wonderful grown-up children now, both I think in their mid and late twenties and who went on to do Ph.Ds at the Ivy League.

The second source of encouragement weren’t from words but from reason. Those fears that the children we have will turn into brats. But our own parents and before them faced those fears too, and didn’t we turn out just fine too?

OK, so one may argue conditions are very different today. We’re exposed if not outright bombarded by far more social values than our parents were at equivalent ages. 100, maybe even just 30 years ago, your formative years were spent maybe in a kampung. These days, the kids are connected to the larger world early on, and often at ages where they just may not have the maturity to decide what’s right and wrong.

But didn’t our own parents have the same fears even if the context then wasn’t the Internet or cultural invasion? Whether it’s fear of not being able to manage children, or fear of not retaining one’s beautiful body post-delivery, or just wanting to have a ‘two-person world’ as the Chinese phrase goes. If our parents had somewhere concluded not to have children, we wouldn’t be here discussing now right? Scary thought. *shudder*

After having thought it through and (re)convinced myself that having a family is the best thing we could do with our lives together, I no longer think those difficulties are insurmountable. If having children was a mistake, there would, reasonably, be plenty of parents around us that regret having children.

But none of my friends who’re mothers and/or fathers have said any such thing. Nada, zilch. Oh, of course sometimes they sound like they’re about to tear their hair out. But that’s always temporal. Their love and affection for their little ones always comes through.

One of our small group friends, Priscilla, said something during her prayer that Ling found very meaningful: that all children are blessings. If nothing else, if children weren’t supposed to be a blessing, our Lord would have said so.

He instead said quite the opposite:

“Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward.” (Psalm 127:3)

I saw a horrific image on the television today – a scared boy surrounded by soldiers, many of them equally nervous, pointing guns at him. This boy was wearing a coat, and underneath it, wrapped around him was 8 kilograms of explosives.In any other day, one may think this is a scene from a Hollywood movie about NYPD, or LA’s Finest as they attempt to defuse a bomb that terrorists had wrapped around an innocent victim. But this was no make belief scene – the boy was the terrorist, and he was to have suicide bombed a check point, killing Israeli soldiers – and also hundreds of Palestinian civilians – around him. But the boy didn’t want to die. The bomb squad arrived, and with their assistance, he managed to cut himself free after some difficulty. As the boy was about to be led away by soldiers, he was interviewed by news crews, and the look of sheer terror on his face was gut wrenching.

Is this what Palestinian suicide bombing is about? Sending scared young boys to kill their enemy, never mind their own who are around trying to get by their day’s business? That the bomb would have killed perhaps a few Israeli soldiers and a few hundred Palestinian civilians? Where’s the parity in effect and loss in this?

But will such an incident change people’s – particularly Muslim – perception of the Israeli – Palestinian conflict? I know a person fairly well over here in Perth, and he’s of Middle-Eastern origin – and he has said, on several occasions to me, that he hopes “Osama will kill all the f***ing Jews”.

When Hama’s spiritual leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, was killed by Israeli forces last week, I read a news commentary about it in a Israeli newspaper, and the writer wrote this – when a bus bomb goes off in Jerusalem and kills dozens of civilians, the Palestinians get out of their homes, dance with joy in the streets, singing praises to Allah. But, as he wrote, when a known terrorist leader who’s initiated and organised these killing of hundreds of soldiers and civilians is killed, the Israelites have not gone out of their homes to dance with joy in the street. Rather, the mood is solemn, tired but tinged with relief that as unfortunate the act was, the act was a progressive step for them to ending the wave of suicide bombers.

There is war, and war is immoral – but there are limits in war, and militant groups sending scared boys to suicide destroy whatever residual sympathy a reasonable person have for their agenda of liberation.