New Year's message

This is my New Year’s message. It is entitled “6 stinking habits to get rid of”. I could have called it “6 stinking habits to watch out for”. But, this alternative title may imply that one has yet to be infected by any of the stinking habits and thus has to watch out for them. Should it be taken this way, then it is inappropriate. You see, most of us, I believe, are able to identify with some, if not all, of the stinking habits that I am going to list down for the simple reason that we are guilty of having committed them at some point in our life. So, there is nothing to watch out for as if it is coming our way like a flu virus. It should, with some urgency, be gotten rid of - like weeds or piled up garbage. So, here are the 6 stinking habits we should get rid of in the coming New Year. Or, if you like, habits to watch out for if you have yet to be infected by them.

1) Me-First habit. Let’s face it, this habit is the first sin of the created Universe. The story of the supremacy of self-interest is as old as Adam and Eve. The world’s system runs on this me-first philosophy. Politics is all about “how will this decision influence my poll rating?” Movie and music stars are all concerned about how popular they are to their fans. And even ministers of God sometimes fall into the trap of self-elevation at the expense of God-glorification. So, no one is exempted from this stinking habit Numero Uno. When we don’t get our way, or when others got their way instead of us, we sulk, sulk and sulk. Some sulk discreetly; others sulk publicly. One way or another, our attitude undergoes a vegetation transformation into a “bitter gourd”. Envy is one avenue this habit rears its ugly head. Deep inside, we can’t stand it if our neighbor is more successful than us. Somehow, some thing inside of us dies a little. Somehow, we get derailed by jealousy and rage. Apostle Paul once said that we should “rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.” (Rom. 12:15) With all honesty, it is easy to mourn with our neighbor. Misfortune invites willing and easy company. But, can we sincerely rejoice with our neighbor? For some, we seethe with envy when good fortune befalls on others and not us. Envy has its roots in self-glorification and that’s why we have to guard against this insidious habit. It’s easy to say at this point that we should put others first and ourselves second or a distant third. Words are like air molecules. They come and go like a draft. And we are usually unmoved by it. So, let’s go beyond words (although words would inevitably be used here). Let us hatch a murder plan. Let us plan the death of self. Let’s be self-killers. Paul calls it “self-crucifixation”. Jesus calls it “self-denial”. I call it “self-cremation”. Whatever you call it, I think you get the point. And the point is to die to self and to live for Christ daily. The process calls for daily discipline and a watchful spiritual eye to monitor our thoughts, our speech and our actions. If we resolve this coming New Year to make this important change, one little victory at a time, on a consistent daily rate, I am sure that by the end of next year, our life would then be deserving of the praise that comes from our God for it is written in John 5:44, “How can you believe if you accept the praise from one another, yet make no effort to obtain the praise that comes from the only God?”

2) Count your curses habit. This is the opposite of counting your blessings. This is a negative outlook. While the optimist sees the glass half full, the person inflicted by this stinking habit asks, “Where’s the glass?” People with his habit are generally grim-reapers or bad news harvesters. They are unable to see the positive side of things because they do not have enough faith to believe in it. They are prone to catastrophe-ize all events that have the potential to turn sour. They are blindsided by the negatives to even bother to accentuate the positive. As such, this is one habit that you have to eradicate because it determines your ultimate response to all situations you face in your life. Let us accept that bad things will happen, without giving us an advance notice. You cannot RSVP tragedies because they issue you no invitation or warning. But, just like there is immense power captured in a single atom, there is awesome strength embedded in one choice. Do not underestimate the choices you make on a daily basis. Where you are today is the result of the choices that you have been making all this while. You can therefore do a forensic tracing of all choices made thus far and each of these choices will add up to the sum of who you are and where you are today. Thus, from an atomic point of view, you can harness the power of free-choice by responding in a way that progressively brings you out of your trial instead of sinking you deeper into it. Negative thoughts darken the chambers of your soul. It drains your spirit and saps your resolve. Beloved, take charge of your life and deals positively with adversity. Do not surrender to your trials; remaining helpless in the sea of trouble. Instead surrender to God and put your hope in Him. Let God preserve your spirit, lift you up and deliver you out into the light. Remember, as long as your lamp continues burning, the darkness will make their timely retreat. So, this is the take-away lesson in regards to this habit: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. (Roms. 15:13)

3) The dog ate my homework habit. Did the dog really eat your homework? Or maybe, you didn’t perform well in school and you didn’t want to show your parents your poor results? So, we needed to blame the poor dog? This habit will make us a finger-pointing marksman. We are always right and the blame lies with everybody but ourselves. For people infected with this habit, saying sorry is truly the hardest word. It is as if saying sorry will bring about a full-blown emotional tumor. Let’s humble ourselves this coming New Year. Let us own up to our flaws. Let’s take personal responsibility for our actions. Stop passing the buck or blame. Let’s direct the interrogation lamp on ourselves and let God search our heart. For the heart is above all, deceitful. When something goes wrong, and it sometimes will, we have to look within ourselves to find the cause. Even when the fault lies with others, we cannot overlook the fact that we may have contributed to the failure. We have a part to play in a wrong turn, a misadventure or an accidental letdown. Take a marriage for example. Who can remain blameless in a fight, an argument or a separation? Any takers? I realized that a marriage can survive anything, any trial, if one spouse musters the courage to shock the other by admitting to his/her faults and saying sorry for it. A sincere apology after some quiet reflection may be the hardest thing to say but it is a definite step towards reconciliation. Basically saying sorry turns the attention on our flaws and this tactical change is crucial in keeping anger and unforgiveness at bay. Something magically lights up when we see the wrong in ourselves and this mindset will keep us from focusing zealously on the wrong of our spouse. When the focus changes, we will then be able to deal with our faults, to realize how our actions have hurt our loved ones, and to express genuine remorse thereafter. The next natural step after feeling the convicting sting of regret is to say “I’m truly sorry.” A wise man once said, “Few things are more powerful than having the common sense, wisdom, and strength to admit when you’ve made a mistake and to set things right.”

4) Leave it till tomorrow habit. This habit is self-explanatory. Although tomorrow will surely come, it is not a guarantee that we will accomplish what we need to do today by tomorrow. Beloved, do not have the delusion that tomorrow will be longer than today. In fact, logically speaking, if we leave what we need to do today till tomorrow, then the time we have tomorrow will be very much constraint, or limited. More work for tomorrow will mean less time to finish them. And less time to finish them will mean that we risk putting off tomorrow’s workload to the day after tomorrow. Well, I think you get the point. The heart of this stinking habit is procrastination. And we procrastinate for many reasons. We procrastinate because we are avoiding certain outcome out of fear. We procrastinate because we lack guidance, directions or goals. We procrastinate because we are plain lazy or self-indulgent. Or maybe, we are just too weak-willed, discouraged or disillusioned with ourselves to take the next step in life. Whatever the reason, this is a bad habit that we have to deal with directly. As there are numerous reasons for why we procrastinate, there are also varied solutions. For this letter, I will only single one out and that is: Seizing the opportunity! We will only walk down this corridor of life once and most opportunities will only knock once. If we do not seize them as they come by, we may have lost them forever. But in order to seize it, we will need to know what we want in life. What is our goal now? What do we wish to accomplish? What is our passion? Do we have an unfulfilled wish? What activity gives us the most joy? Take the first few days of the New Year to reflect on this. If something is worth doing, and is within our budget and ability, then stop putting it off to the next day, the next year or the next life. Beloved, let’s not live for the past but live for the future. We cannot change our past, our mistakes and our failures. We cannot change how people look at us for what we did in the past. The opportunities in the past have all passed; so stop allowing your past to plague your present and to limit your future. The aim is to start afresh and anew. The New Year is waiting for you to fill it up with meaningful goals. If you hear God’s voice calling you to make that commitment for change, then do it. God’s calling for you in the New Year is to embrace life, to advance forward, to take the risk, and to change lives. For it is said that, “when we choose to seize our divine moments, we create an environment where others are unleashed to fulfill their God-given potential.” So, let’s start a chain-reaction, initiate a transformation, and make a difference. And when the time comes for us to leave this world for good, we would have this anchored assurance that we have lived a good life, one that God and our children can be proud of.

5) Life’s like a box of chocolates habit. When Forest Gump uttered this now famous line in the self-titled movies many years ago, no one knew exactly what he meant except that life is generally unpredictable because you never know what you’ll get. My own interpretation of this winsome line is his: life is not limited to the perceptual confines of our five senses. In my view, life is more than what our eyes can see, what our ears can hear, and what our hands can touch. Atheists who use science to call for the end of religion has this to say to sound off the death knell, “the materialist universe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” (Richard Dawkins) We must guard against such thought because it is one-sided, dogmatic and tainted. Atheists’ scientists will not admit that science cannot explain a lot of things. The beginning of the universe (or cosmos) is still a mystery, an impenetrate-able one. The erratic and at the same time synchronized behavior of a pair of subatomic particles are another mystery that still escapes rigorous scientific observation. The theory of neo-evolution has yet to close the gap between us and our next primate cousins. The link is still missing. Neuroscientists are still unable to come up with a coherent concept of our consciousness, our experiences and our varied emotions, and questions about how is it that the whole of our personalities is much greater than the sum of our parts still remain largely unresolved. Even an activity as simple as reading, involving various integral section of the left hemisphere of our brain, is immensely complex. How the words on a page get registered on our retinas and processed at the back of our left hemisphere (occipital temporal poles) and converted into perceivable meaning that can move us to tears are too complicated for anyone to fully understand. So, life is full of mysteries. What we cannot see doesn’t mean it does not exist. Some of these mysteries will never be solved and we have to accept that someone out there knows and holds the answer. Maybe, we are not created to solve them all. Maybe, we have to admit our limitations. Maybe, the universe is created to be enjoyed and not to be dissected into discrete parts for research. And without faith, and a sense of awe, we can never fully embrace life and enjoy what life has to offer. A famous theologian once said, “He who enters the sphere of faith enters the sanctuary of life.” Indeed, the parallel thought for this is: And without faith, it is impossible to please God.

6) Grudge bearers habit. Of all the bad habits listed above, this is the most vicious and condemning. I have learned that we have to travel light in this world. Carrying a grudge and nursing it will only burden us in our life’s journey. We have to let go and let God deal with our hurts, our pains and our disappointments. In this life, we are sure to get hurt. Our loved ones may betray us. Our close friends may abandon us. Our pastors may disappoint us. No one is perfect. So, we need to come before God this New Year and surrender all our hurts and pains. Beloved, forgiveness breaks the curse that binds us to a life of bitterness and retributive rage. Forgiveness is an act of love. No one is so unlovable who doesn’t deserve our forgiveness. There is always a quality in others that is redeemable and we can always focus on it to forgive them. It is said that forgiveness breaks the chain of causation because he who forgives another, out of love, takes it upon himself the consequences of what the other person has done. As such forgiveness always entails a sacrifice on the part of the person who chooses to forgive. Whatever the injustice or the pain caused to us, we can surely pray for the spirit of forgiveness to take charge of our spirit and to do a purifying work to remove the hurts and pain of the act from our memories. With the passage of time, and with a submitted heart, we can slowly but surely extend the hand of forgiveness; even to those who are least deserving. We can do this because God has forgiven the worst in us. Let me end this letter with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr, “We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.”

Beloved, these are the 6 stinking habits we should eject out of our system. Pray for strength to deal with each one of them at your own pace and time. If we move forward from here and resolve to change ourselves for the better, I trust that in the years to come, we will be more authentic Christians, living the life we have always wanted.

Here’s wishing you all a blessed, victorious New Year 2010.

Friday;s Recap (111209)

Dear Cell, let me caution you first: this letter is not a letter about answers. It is in fact a letter generating more questions than answers. Answers to what, you may ask. Well, answers to all the questions you have about God, His existence, His love and His power. For those of you who attended Cell last Friday, the discussion was a challenge to our faith. The challenge was this: How do people come to the conclusion that there is no God or that God is cruel and sadistic? How do you answer them? Let’s go for the jugular. Professor Richard Dawkins, an atheist extraordinaire, will take the first shot at our religion with this shockingly invective quote, “God is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction. Jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloody thirsty ethnic-cleanser; a misogynistic homophobic racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicial, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously, malevolent bully.” When you finally come exhausted after poring through the Oxford dictionary to find the meaning of those big, long words, you can take this rabid quote as the signature, all-compassing mantra for all non-believers with a religious axe to grind. It is like a convocational pledge, a national anthem or an initiation oath-taking for the hot headed atheists, the narrow-minded agnostics and the vindictive free-thinkers.

But, the implied question yesterday was this, does Dawkins have a point? Maybe not the whole spiteful load of it. But the undertones and sentiments behind his quote are unmistakable. Without misquoting Dawkins, I think we can say that he is of the view that there is no God. Or, at least the probability of His existence is so marginally negligible that it is as good as taking it as a generally accepted and universally sensible confirmation that there is no God. Period. And you don’t need to be a Professor to share this sentiment with Dawkins. You can be a preschooler and still be able to identify with him. A year ago, my son, who was only six years old, casually asked me this question, “Daddy, how come God can hear us, and we cannot hear God?” Of course, this is not exactly an expression of doubt by a young boy but it is the cornerstone of all theological questions about the existence of God. It always starts innocently enough and, if left on its own to fester, it can grow into something catastrophic for the devout Christian parents, possibly leading to a renunciation of one’s faith. So, we as Christian parents have a sacred duty to fulfill and that is, to protect our children from the pernicious thinking that comes with Dawkins quotes. But how do we do that? Do we have better answers to offer that will annihilate all doubts?

Honestly, when Jezer asked me that question, I took it quite seriously. I thought it was too early for him to challenge me in that way, so nonchalantly, so disarmingly and so innocently. But of course, I knew Jezer didn’t realize the full theological weight behind that question. But I knew as the years roll by, when he grows older and wiser, the question will be less innocent, less amiable and maybe more confrontational. The older Jezer will want an intellectually satisfying answer and expect me, as his father and a cell group leader, to give it to him.

At this stage, many religions have come forward to offer their answers to a variant-form of the same question posed by Jezer. When the tsunamis struck South East Asia and took the lives of fathers, mothers and young children alike, altogether 250,000 lives were taken that fateful boxing day of 2004, the religious journalist, Gary Stern, went around mosques, temples, churches and secular communities to scout for answers and he wrote a book about it entitled, Can God Intervene? His question was simple enough but the answers were far from simple. He started off with this, “Is the mystery of God’s role in the tsunami any different than the mystery of God’s role when one innocent person suffers?” The question makes two presumptions about God. First, God has a role in all the natural disasters in this world, whether man-made or otherwise. Second, God’s role was and is and will always be a mystery, largely unexplained and situationally obscure.

Well, the theologically correct answer is that there is no difference. God is equally mysterious in both situations. There is no way to know why natural disaster happen in a place and time we least expect it to strike and take away so many innocent lives and why an individual has to suffer unexplained illness without any fault on his part. If it is a mystery, it will always be a mystery and explaining it fully will only take away the mysterious elements out of it, thereby making it a known fact rather than a mystery. Of course, telling my son that it is a mystery will do little to sate his intellectual appetite. He would want to know why it is a mystery. Or, is it just another tactic Christian parents employ to avoid answering the question?

Here, the atheist’s answer would be the easiest and even most tempting. In the book, Gary interviewed David Silverman, who is the national spokesman for American Atheists, and his answers were the most rational of them all. “If you combine benevolence with omnipotence and all-powerfulness, you can’t have natural disaster…Either God sent the tsunami, which means he is not a nice guy, or he didn’t know it was going to be there, so he’s not omnipotent, or he couldn’t stop it, which means he isn’t all-powerful. You can’t get all three. If you think about it, natural disasters disprove most religion, especially Christianity.” What is even scarier is that Silverman became an atheist when he was only 6 years old (my son’s age) when he said, “I realized that God is fiction. I kept asking questions and getting non-responses.” Silverman did not stop there. His religion bashing was most frightening and vitriolic with this conclusion in the book, “(Silverman) thinks most people are atheists. They innately understand that life doesn’t make sense and that no one is in charge. But they pretend to be believers so they don’t have to face the truth. They don’t want to deal with it, so they pretend that they believe in the invisible, magic man in the sky. That’s why when you challenge them on it, they get so defensive, angry or withdrawn. Prayer is a form of self-hypnosis so that people can convince themselves they’re not going to die. A natural disaster is a shot of reality. People doubt mythology when they’re confronted with reality.”

Well, my only wish is that my son is not as “enlightened” as Silverman was when he was six years old and took a path wholly different from mine.

At this juncture, I can get a little creative with my answers. I can tell my son what Reverend Tony Campolo once said. Basically, Campolo conceded that God was not in control of everything. He said that God limited His power by personal choice. It was the same choice He made when He sent His son to be slaughtered by His own creation. By sending Jesus, God made a conscious choice to limit His power by not interfering when Jesus was scorned, whipped, bound, tortured, ridiculed, misjudged and crucified. The bloodied, wretched and dejected face of Jesus at the cross was the epitome of God’s self-imposed restraint of power. It was therefore for a greater purpose that God had tied up his own hands. It was for universal salvation that God chose to turn his face away from Jesus at Calvary. As for the tsunami and all such natural disasters, I can tell my son that God chose not to act because that was the only way we could experience the full plethora of what we humans constantly clamor for, that is, “freedom of expression, will and choice.”

Take a personal example in this case. If I want my son to grow and mature, to learn from his mistakes and be independent, I would have to let go and let him do things his way sometimes. I cannot be controlling him 24-7. I cannot be telling him what to do, how to do it and why he should do it the way I would do it. For example, I cannot tell my son who he should love, how he should run his adult life, and what career path he should take. My son just has to muster the courage to take that first step on his own and sometimes suffer the consequences arising from his own personal choices. Furthermore, it is not on every occasions that the adage “Father knows best” is fully applicable. I could be wrong about things, misjudging them, or just being careless about it. So, my son should be left on his own to grow and mature. By extension, this example, however imperfect, is the same reason why God left us alone at times to learn, grow and mature. In other words, God cannot be chaperoning us all the time. By analogy, we will have to spread our wings on our own and take flight at our own pace. So, don’t expect God to be holding on to both our wings and flapping them for us. This will only ground us further instead of lifting us up.

And by leaving us alone, this will inevitably result in some hurt and pain in our lives as we face life’s challenges head on.

Of course, this explanation suits us fine when we are talking about pains of life that bring about our growth. There are many lessons to be learnt from failures. Many people are invariably stronger, wiser and more resilient after a financial or business debacle. But how do I explain to my son about meaningless and pointless sufferings in this world. Surely, God shouldn’t restrain His power to help when an innocent wife is crying out to Him for healing from Aids which she got from her unfaithful husband. Yesterday, we talked about a little Thai girl sold into the brothel at a tender age of 12. When they raided the brothel and entered into her tiny squalid room, they found many prayers for help scrawled on her wall – most of them were left unanswered by the one person who has the power to help. She had suffered so much despite her constant, daily cry for help. It is therefore tempting to ask, Where was God when she was forcibly taken by greedy mercenaries and sold like a cheap chattel to be repeatedly violated by perverted, STD-infected men, thereby ruining her life for life?

At this point, if my son is intuitive enough, he will pester me with these questions: Why can’t God be more discerning and discriminating about his choices to limit His power? Can’t He protect the innocent, defend the weak and make a way for the sincerely earnest without compromising the integrity of our free will and choice? Can’t a perfect God strike a perfect balance between divine intervention and humanity’s freedom of will?

Maybe, I should change tack or strategy. In respect of natural disasters, I should look at my son eyeball to eyeball and tell him that there is a scientific reason why tsunami happens. It is call shifting plate tectonics. I should tell him that there are several plates in this world holding continents and countries together. There are the Indo-Australian plate and the Eurasian plate. And when these dynamic plates shift or move violently, they cause natural disasters. There is therefore nothing divine or devious about it. As such, we do not throw a few manslaughter charges at these huge geological moving plates and pronounce them guilty. How about cancer? Maybe I can tell my son that cancer works almost the same way – sometimes they strike because of man-made choices in the food they take and the lifestyle they adopt and sometimes because of blind random genetic mutation without assigning any blame, and sometimes both are contributing causes.

In fact, another way of looking at it is that cancer is the disease of the rich, well-off and long-lived. You see, during primitive times, the mortality rate is usually high and many died young. By dying young, they were spared the pain of contracting cancer because cancer is generally the disease of the relatively old. When we age, our cells become more unstable and they tend to mutate and these harmful mutation multiplies or metastasizes, causing the dreaded cancer. So, in biological terms, there is always a trade-off; that is, the good and bad in all things. It is generally a blessing to grow old. But in growing old and enjoying the fruits of old age, there are also the despicable weeds of old age and they come in the form of neurological decay like dementia or genetic haywire like cancer or vascular entropy like stroke.

In like manner, in geological terms, the earth we live in is the only planet, as far as the human telescope can capture, that can support a bio-diversity of life. We live in harmony and peace on this planet because the conditions are just right for us and all other living organisms. It is somewhat like a beautiful Garden of Eden on Earth except for some expected trade-off like earthquakes, tsunami, volcano eruptions and hurricane. In other words, in order for the majority of us to live, some unfortunate minority will inevitably perish in a way that seems unfair, cruel and mysterious.

Lastly, my son should know that no action stands alone on its own. There are ripple effects for every action sowed. One man’s policy may result in another’s tragedy. If a mother chooses to smoke, she risks a miscarriage, or worse, her child may bear the consequences of her actions. If a man seeks easy and quick profit, he may sell his young daughter to a man three times her age for a price. If the leader of a nation gives in to peer pressure and chooses to engage in war with a country for the flimsiest of ideological reason, we can expect a lot of civil casualties, resulting in future recriminations and revenge, and the cycle of violence can go on and on without stopping. So, there you have it, causes and effects are part of the reason why sufferings are so prevalent in this corrupt world.

In the end, I should know that my adult son will not be completely convinced by the above answers; because they appear to generate more questions than answers or more heat than light.

So, when that day of reckoning draws nigh, when my adult son ever come to me for answers, I would have to tell him what I told you guys all these years, “Son, I can’t give you an intellectually satisfying answer to your question, but I can give an emotionally fulfilling one.”

Let me share with you this passage from the book God on Mute authored by a church-planter Pete Greig.

“A story is told of the Nobel Prize-winning Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn when he was imprisoned by Stalin in a Siberian gulag. One day, slaving away in sub-zero temperatures, he finally reached the end of his endurance. Discarding his shovel, he slumped onto a bench and waited for a guard to beat him to death. He’d seen it happen to others and was waiting for the first blow to fall.

Before this could happen, an emaciated fellow prisoner approached Solzhenitsyn silently. Without a word of explanation, the prisoner scratched the sign of the cross in the mud and scurried away. As Solzhenitsyn stared at those two lines scratched in the dirt, the message of the cross began to converse with his sense of despair. “In that moment, he knew that there was something greater than the Soviet Union. He knew that the hope of all mankind was represented in that simple cross. And through the power of the cross, anything was possible.” Picking up his shovel, Alexander Solzhenitsyn slowly went back to work.”

Beloved, Jesus is all we need and all we have to give to my children. He is the spiritual legacy to our loved ones. In their short life on earth as compared to the eternity that awaits, our children’s faith will surely be tested and it is of no practical use to tell them that God, like a tall dark charming prince in a shining armor, will come to their rescue every time they cry for help like a damsel in distress. Do your children a favor and don’t mislead them by telling them God is some kind of a celestial Arnold Schwarzenegger, forever arming himself with machine guns, readying to aid us, and perennially sprouting the catch-all phrase, “I’ll be back.” Your children will not be immune from troubles and troubles have no eyes sometimes. They do not choose who will be their next unlucky victim. They just strike when the biological, geological and made-made clock is up. But with every storm, comes the sunshine. By the same token, with every sunshine, lurks a storm. As long as we are on earth, living our lives in human flesh, limited by these mortal bodies, we are vulnerable to life’s challenges, however unfair they may be.

Ultimately, when the storms of life come, when our lives are being tormented by circumstances beyond our control, we can choose to echo these haunting words of the atheistic philosopher Bertrand Russell:-

“We stand on the shore of an ocean, crying to the night and to emptiness; sometimes a voice answers out of the darkness. But it is a voice of one drowning; and in a moment the silent returns. The world seems to me quite dreadful; the unhappiness of most people is very great.”

Or, just maybe, we can turn our eyes upon Jesus and cry out to Him with this sincere prayer.

“Abba, Father, I know all this stuff about Your love in my head, but my heart gets hard to it and I’m tired. Please do whatever You’ve got to do (and I mean whatever) to unclench my fists. Pry open my eyes so that I can see Your tears and soften my heart so that it moves me deeply. I don’t understand why You don’t just answer my prayers, but I do choose to trust that You have heard me, that You actually do care and that You’re somewhere out there on my case. Abba, Father, thank You for all the ways You have blessed me. I honestly don’t know what I’d do, where I’d be or even who I’d have become without You. Abba, Father, I am going to try to trust You today. Amen.”

Beloved, the choice we, or more relevantly, our children will make will ultimately depend on how we have been living our Christian lives in their eyes. Let’s send a clear message to them. Let’s live out our faith so that when our children face their own crisis in life, they can always think about how we overcame ours and draw strength and courage from it to overcome theirs.

Have a meaningful Christmas with your loved ones.