Journey mercies

While waiting for a cab, Andrea and I were talking about coming technical training. My boss has recently been very enthusiastic about his plans to convert the sales people into technical people and the technical people into more salesy people for HA (high availability, scuz the IT lingo) purposes.


Andrea: I wonder if we'll get certs (certificate) at the end.

Me: What does it matter. It's the skills that we're going to learn that's most important right (considering the fact that we can't flag our paper certs in front of our customers)

Andrea: Haha... this is such a Singaporean thing. Everything is about CERTS!!!

Me: -__-"


*********


While chatting with my business partners, one the company MD and the other a senior sales manager, both Singaporeans. After entertaining them with different funny stories about myself (embarrassing ones).


Me: I didn't do too well with university but anyway, who cares. A degree is just a passport into the working world anyway.

MD: HAHAHAHAHAHHAHA you're so funny! You really think differently lah! *Like it was the most incredulous thing he ever heard*

Me: ... ?


*********


While having dinner with a friend.


Y: I don't have a cert. *Pause with expectant face*

Me: *Expressionless face waiting for Y to give me a point*

Y: I don't have a degree, just a diploma.

Me: Okayy...


Conversation continues with Y's ambitions to save and earn enough money to buy a condo and car and just do any job that earns the most.

While I am incredibly grateful for what my parents have provided for me to not have to suffer certain insecurities Singaporeans tend to commonly grapple with, it sometimes surprises me how short-sighted they can be at times. Well, actually, I think most people across any country do grapple with insecurities of life (let me right now squeeze in the fact that it doesn't help when they have no security about where they are headed in life and after life), just that it comes out in different forms.

But by golly, these Singaporeans are too obsessed with getting a paper that certifies they mean something in this life!!!

So the entire blood testing episode on Monday went like this...


Me: Oooohhh... errrrrr.... aahhhhhhh... wait wait WAIT! Is it painful? Can you give me painkillers? *Breath in breath out* ahhhhh... wait arrr... okokIcandothis...

Nurse: Maybe if you don't look and played with your iPad.

Me: Mmmm... no. I don't want a surprise prick. I need to watch it. Wait arr... fuuuu... okokIcandothis...

*Prick*

Me: OOoooooooooo... ay ya ya...

Nurse: Ok, done. If you look at the chart above, 1 being the least painful and 10 being the most painful, how would you rate the pain of the blood test?

Me: Err... hmm... 3?

*Pause*

Me: Ok, no lar, 2.


What a cunning way of belittling my fears. I STILL don't like blood test.

Me on the phone in the cab: No, I don't understand. What do you mean, why can't you test IF I HAVE HIV?!?

Cab driver: ...


I was so agitated about the conversation that it only hit me a few hours later how it must have sound to the cab driver. It's because I had to do a health check and confirm with the Singapore government that I am not HIV positive and do not have TB before they will grant me PR status. So I did a generic health check under a company package, hoping to kill two birds with one stone.

But the hospital called me this afternoon saying my blood test doesn't cover HIV testing. What made me blow my top was not them telling me I have to pay additional charges to get the testing done (after what I already felt was an over the top charge on the health check).

It was the idea of them drawing more blood from me.


Me to nurse on the phone: It's not about the money ok!!! I just DON'T WANT TO BE PRICKED AGAIN!!!

One thing most of us in church agree on is that The Pastor is a very patient man. If ever any of us needed to talk to him, he would always make time for us. And because he ends up talking quite a bit as well, an hour's worth of conversation with him is actually very short. We wonder how he manages to squeeze in all his time of ministering to people, pack his studies in, travel as much as does, does all his studies (he has several Masters) and yet still be able to spend that much time talking to people.

When I lived in a different country from him, we would randomly call each other up to catch up. He is an exceptional man who moves very closely with the Spirit's flow, so whenever we called each other, it usually means something is up in the spiritual realm. We actually rarely speak with each other just because.

I don't speak as much with him anymore, not for the last 6 to 12 months, since he got really busy with his work in East Malaysia. And I miss that. But it also tells me how spiritually independent I've gotten, and he doesn't need to spend much time pushing me along anymore.

For a while now I've felt I don't have that many friends in Singapore, very unlike Malaysia and the UK. If I wanted to hang out with anyone during my free time it would be with a very small number of people and they tend to be folks I knew from Malaysia. But of all the people I truly delighted spending time with was The Pastor and his little girl.

It was really simply because when I am with the both of them, I knew they enjoy my presence. The Pastor and I have known each other long enough that the 10 years of history means our friendship is already on auto cruise. And his kid, well, I've learnt to simply ease myself to her level and that means listening to her struggle to tell me about her school and friends, and most importantly, to focus 100% playing with her.

I don't know what started my thoughts, but for a while now I've been mulling over what it means being Mary and Martha, two sisters from the gospel of the Bible. On one hand, Jesus commended Mary who would spend time sitting at His feet listening to Him speak while Martha was busy getting stuff done. But Martha's faith, especially in how she responded to Jesus when her brother died astounds me. She believed in Christ with such a deep, quiet and strong faith that no amount of grief could shake, while Mary who was commended by Christ was gripped by grief.

What does it mean to be both Mary and Martha?

This was something that was somehow playing at the back of my head for a while though I don't know why it does. Actually I do, it is the Holy Spirit actively teaching me. And He kept pointing back at The Pastor to learn from his example.

I don't fully understand yet, all the different elements there are, but one thing I'm now fully convinced of. That is to be fully committed to the people that crosses my path and to delight in them. For all their strengths and weaknesses, and to put aside my personal preference for certain personalities, conversations and experiences and to listen and hear their character, personality, words and experiences. And doing that does mean sacrificing my favourite TV programme, my work, my books, my energy and time, and to increase my strength to understand them and why they enjoy things that I have no appreciation of.

I have such a choleric personality, I would really much prefer impatiently pushing people who add no value to my goals and objectives aside. Especially if they are talking about really the silliest mindless things. To learn to be fully committed to people that I might one day share my joy that is Christ, with them through the trust that is built with them, must really be what it means to be Mary.

To take the passage on Mary literally and assume that it is only about spending time with Christ is too short-sighted. Time and time again Jesus was only too exasperated by people who took His words literally and applied it one dimensionally with no understanding of spiritual things!

But to be like Mary is to be fully committed to the person you encounter, even when they don't serve a purpose to your self-centered goals and objectives. It is laying aside your own goals and objectives to see and hear them. It is when you see them and hear them that you learn who they are and then you can truly love them. And The Pastor's kid teaches me this best. She can't talk to me on my terms, but I have to talk to her on her terms, her level. And the more you spend time to see and hear the things of God and love the things of Him, the two separate visions, of man and God merges into one. And something beautiful happens.

I'm only slowly coming to a realization of what it means to choose as Mary did. I am not that eloquent in describing the quiet but wonderful joy that spreads through the being that is intoxicating to the soul but it is not a spiritual high that comes from mass emotions shared by a large group hyped up by carefully prepared sermons and meticulously prepared worship bands.

It is not an intellectual satisfaction in understanding a rational string of conclusions that the mind has managed to unravel by itself.

It is like seeping joy from understanding that dawns slowly in the midst of an action of faith like a spilled wine glass where the red wine seeps into a white rug.

What kind of person would you choose to be:

a) Book smart
b) Street smart
c) Book smart AND street smart

You'll probably be smart enough to know what the right answer is. Believing in Christ and studying the Bible and a thousand other books expounding the Bible and its teaching is being book smart. Learning to do what it says at all times with discernment, wisdom and with great cunning is being street smart.

After 2 years The Pastor harping on this I'm only slowly starting to understand! Talk about being a slow learner.

Am dog-sitting Maggie, a toy poodle while her owners spend the weekend in home town. Seems like she doesn't quite like taking pictures, this was the only decent shot I could get of her.

Me: I thought my glasses got unusually tight by itself and was hurting the back of my ear. But I took my glasses off to rub my ear and realised that I have a pimple on that spot that's why it's hurting.

My manager: o_0 ... Okayyy... thank you for sharing with me such... interesting and personal problems like that...

Me: Andrea's on leave today so I have no one else to tell this to.

My manager: Okayyy... I'm glad I could help.


The problems you have when you've too close a buddy at work you talk nonsense to all the time.

Busy for all the right reasons!

Have had loads of projects cropping up now making me round around like mad. But I like the adrenaline even if it does tire me out. I'm also conscious not to make work my life.

But if any of the prophetic messages I've been receiving in the last one month around work, I don't think I'll have much a choice. I've had loads of people from different churches tell me that they sense that the Lord is going to accelerate me in my work.

On Saturday morning as I was reading the Bible, I saw an image of me and different aspects of my life (work, church, personal etc) on a clockwork cog and I saw the cog turn a notch with a click and knew that very second that that signified that things have begun to change and I am officially in a different season.

I spent a day yesterday stressing and being anxious over work yesterday and then at night before I went to bed gave it all up to God because I was too tired battling against it.

It's easy trusting the Lord in the big stuff. After all, it would be catastrophically wrong if He doesn't show that He has power and control over the big problems I have no power and control over and am upset over those. But it is so very hard to let go of the small problems to Him.

The world has so much big problems, how can an Almighty God be interested in my small problems like not wanting to lend some small but sentimental thing to a not-so-close colleague yet not wanting to tell a white lie to avoid lending it? Or how could I bring work problems that against life's bigger problems like diseases, death and mortgages seem to be small and meaningless? I know He has been prodding me in this area to let it go to Him.

So last night I said to Him I'll give it all up. But He had better not let me fall down. I felt like a toddler all over again, afraid to walk on my own wobbly two feet and warning the parent not to let me fall and hurt myself.

5 minutes later I was reminded of a prophecy I had received and recorded on my phone a month ago that I forgot very quickly because it was so vague and confusing. I played it, and it was still somewhat vague, but in light of the sequence of events and prayers I have said, it felt like it was the answer to everything.

It was an assurance amidst all my self-doubts and fears, I am on the right track. That I will and already have entered a pressure point but He will give divine distraction in order to break permanently the cycle of negative thinking that I have a habit of falling victim to. The Lord will accelerate me at work and I do not need to be anxious about anything.

According to the Bible, God had promised the father of the Israelites, Abram, the promised land that would stretch all the way to the Euphrates, to which they have not claimed. If they were to claim all that was promised today, it would mean that they would claim lands up to Iraq, Iran, and basically Middle East.

Well then. I wouldn't want to not learn how to press in and lay claim on promises that God's people have proven to fail to fight to possess. It's mine and no one's going to steal it from me.

I was having a conversation with a business partner earlier this evening talking about a project write up. As we chatted he told me to make sure the write up is so tight no competitor can come and disturb the project, like I did in the previous ___ project.

I drew a blank at what he was saying.

It took me 4 hours before I realized he was referring to a particular project I had crafted and had locked the project specification so airtight he couldn't find a way to compete in that project, try as he did. I never really understood why he had so much respect for me before this. I would like to explain why I find this conversation so funny, but my brain's a bit dull from doing OT on this current project right now.

It only just occurred to me that being a control freak works out really well in IT sales.

Been camping out at client site all week (desperate salesperson I am). I can't really add much value to my technical team prepping up for the coming project, but I want them to know I'm fully supporting them by camping out with them. I felt too guilty deciding by myself to go for a team birthday lunch, so the rest of them were great enough to decide to come to us instead.

It's nice when we're all on the same boat, same page, same vision and we're all fighting hard for the same goals. Whether or not we win this project, I feel happy spending the time working with them.

It's a high profile project, and the success and failure I feel rest very strongly on my shoulders. And it really is one of those memorable times in the making. In the first few days, when we had some glitches, an army of people came trooping to the customer site to get it fixed, which wasn't really ideal. Was it really that big a problem that needed that many people to get it done?

But, it did warm my heart, because they kept saying that everyone came to support me on this project. That's not the main and only reason, but it is because they do like and support me that they're that excited to come along and being the emotional female that I am, I am touched! It makes me want to work harder to win this project so that I can publicly acknowledge to the management that these people embody teamwork completely and are worth being called colleagues.

This is what makes the world go round eh. People. I too often forget, being the task-oriented kind of person that I am.