Overwhelmed

AAAAAAAAAaaaaeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!



Edit at 9:45PM

OK, feeling slightly calmer now after my third cup of tea for the day, and listening to "On Fire", "This is your life" and "Beautiful Letdown" from Switchfoot CD on repeat....three of the slightly 'calmer' tracks....sigh, I love this album, I have listened to it soooooo many times since I saw them in March, and I'm still not sick of it. I really like the bass lines in "This is your life" and "Beautiful Letdown"...makes me want to learn how to play bass, hehe. Actually, I really really want to learn how to play guitar properly, but of course that requires practise, and motivation, and time...and it's like, meh, I'm going to be stuck playing variations of A, E, G, D and C with one strumming pattern forever and for the rest of eternity :P

Playing music is kinda all about spaces....spaces between notes on the keyboard, spaces between your fingers, spaces of time between one note and the next...I guess with a different instrument you have to learn a new set of spaces. Or am I oversimplifying things?

Well as usual, the reason for my overwhelmed-ness is leaving everything to the last minute. And the worst part is leaving preparing a Bible study to the last minute. How many times have I been told that that is a BIG no-no....actually, it's worse than that.

So my Bible reading has been going not-so-well for the past couple of months (read: understatement), and for our pharmacy small group we take turns leading each other. So I volunteered to lead next week's study (which is now tomorrow), thinking yeah, that's a good idea, it'll force me to read my Bible during the week. And do you think that worked? Nooooo. So here I am on Sunday night with half a Bible study AND a half-finished report which is due tomorrow. Oh the shame.....Am I the world's dumbest Christian or what? Or maybe just the most incompetent. And what the heck am I doing blogging? Stupid, stupid, stupid.

I think the tea-and-Switchfoot-induced calmness is now wearing off.

*SIGH*

Why am I like this?

Pop Culture 2

I can see clearly now the rain has gone. Gone, like yesterday is gone. Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. Somewhere over the rainbow. Somewhere out there. Somewhere.

The young and the hopeless girls and boys - gotta tell you: breathe. Breathe in now. Climb every mountain. She's so high, high above me...Can you take me higher? I keep on fallin', falling like rain. Take my breath away, the wind beneath my wings smells like teen spirit. It's getting harder and harder to breathe.

Hey now, you're an all star, some kind of superstar. Quicker than a ray of light, a champagne supernova. From a distance, lifestyles of the rich and famous shimmer. Some might say: hello, welcome to my life, goodbye. Hollywood. So predictable.

Let it be. Good riddance, american idiot. Time after time, you're forgiven not forgotten. I will remember you. Memories: stuck. Can't get you out of my head. Addicted. Just like a pill.

Tomorrow - so yesterday. If only I could turn back time, rock around the clock. Clocks: Tick tock tick tock....

What you waiting for? What would you do? That's all I ask of you.

Puddles of Sky

Have you ever looked down at the ground after it's been raining and seen the sky, reflected in puddles of water? Last week, when the sky was clearing after it had been raining, I was looking up at it, thinking, wow that's nice. And then I looked at the ground. It was the same sky, but in a dirty pool of water. And I thought, hey, that's us.

Puddles of Sky
Formed and fallen from the glory of above
Collected on earth for a little while
Reflected in our murky depths
An image of where we were formed
An image from which we fell

Lost and found in translation

Hanging out with my uni friends is always a novel experience. We're a pretty random group of people, although on the surface we appear relatively homogenous: Chinese, skinny, glasses, backpacks...like a lot of other pharmacy students. But "Chinese" is a rather broad category when you think about it. We're not huge as far as groups of friends go, but between us we cover the ABC-Honky spectrum pretty well, and we can never seem to hold an extended conversation in less than three languages. We all grew up in different countries, and there's a nine year age gap between the oldest and youngest person...but somehow we all ended up in Sydney, starting a pharmacy degree at the beginning of 2003.

Last night we went out to celebrate my 19th and Shirley's 28th (she doesn't look a day older than 18 though :p) - we went to Green Box for karaoke (sooo asian) and had dinner at a sushi train restaurant. As we have done so many other times, we sang songs in English, Cantonese and Mandarin, and talked over dinner in various combinations of English, Cantonese and Mandarin. And as usual, I didn't understand a third to a half of what was being said the first time round, the same jokes had to be repeated at least twice.....

Sometimes I wonder why we choose to do things like that, and how we all ended up hanging together...you would think that the first thing you look for in friends are people you can speak the same language as....I mean, if you were most comfortable speaking a certain language, then you would most likely hang out with other people who were most comfortable speaking that language too...right.....?

But you know what, I really enjoyed myself last night. It was cool. (Especially the purple cake!) And I realised that friends....they're people, that when you're around them, you know you can just be who you are, and it's alright. Even if it's different to the rest of them. And you don't feel you have to try hard at being something you're not. No pretentions. No fakeness. You can think the other person is weird....but, you know, it's alright. You're alright with it, and they're alright with it....it's just alright.

Yeah, this is corny, and I don't know what I'm talking about. I don't really know how to put it. It might sound kind of obvious...but I don't think you can always get that with people. It takes time. And you know it's real when it's there even though you don't see each other that often.

OK, that's it. I should stop blogging about stuff I can't express properly in words.

I was just guessing, at numbers and figures...

It's occurred to me that the phrase "happy birthday" might be a bit of an oxymoron. After all, what exactly is there to celebrate? Another 365 days spent on this planet. Got born and still not dead yet. Getting older. More responsibility. People expecting more from you. Or maybe less, once you get past a certain age.

The amount of time between each birthday as a fraction of your life keeps getting smaller. Which means the older you get, the faster you feel like you're getting older. Ageing is an insidious phenomenon.

OK, so it's not like I'm turning 90 or anything. But all of a sudden it's like, where did all that time go? I still remember being eight and thinking, I'm going to be nine soon...how could that already be a whole decade ago? Yesterday I was queuing up for the toilets at church, and the lady in front of me (someone's mother from the Cantonese service) turns around and says, "Wow, you're all grown up now...I haven't seen you in a while." Nod and smile. Yeah. Hmmm. Grown up. Hmmm. Not my brain though. I think part of it is a few years behind the other part. Hmmm. Yeah.

So. Today I have been around for n years, where n is an integer. That only comes around once every 365 days. I suppose that's a statistically uncommon enough event to celebrate, just for the sake of it.


Nineteen

365 days
Are all that remain
As the end of a decade draws near

365 days
Left of being teenage
What has changed in the time you've been here?

Nineteen trips around a star
Nineteen orbits' worth of scars
Nineteen years
Breathing atmosphere
Nineteen years of who you are

Just one single day
Is what passes again
'Til the earth turns its face from the sun

Just one single day
In the middle of May
That was when my time here was begun.

A time to be born and a time to die

So I'm probably blogging too often these days for people to keep up, but I've been thinking about all this stuff recently, and last night I came up with so many questions, I had to write it all down in some kind of logical order...

Questions:

• Is a new soul formed at the moment of conception? Or do souls already exist infinitely in eternity, and "insert" themselves into a body at the right time (presumably at the time of conception)?
• Assuming all souls incapable of forming a decision about whether they want to follow Jesus are saved - does this mean that technologies such as IVF and stem-cell research contribute to the expansion of the kingdom of God? (The reasoning behind this being lots of new embryos being created and destroyed = lots of souls incapable of making an informed decision about salvation = lots of people in heaven.)
• Do we have the equivalent of earthly relationships in heaven, i.e. friends, brothers, sisters, cousins? Even if we don't, will we recognise the people we had relationships with on earth? What about the people who never had a chance to be known by anyone? (Sorry, this is going to be a rather pre-natally focused post.) This also goes back to a question I posted a few days ago - what will our resurrecton bodies look like? What age will they be and will they be recognisible as us? Would you be able to recognise someone who died as a baby?
• Does the soul of a senselessly created (and aborted) embryo have equal value to God as the soul of a mature Christian person, who has undergone persecution and trials, tests of faith, development of character, etc?
• Say one assumes yes.
• Is this unfair?
• Is it fair that the person who ran the marathon of a long godly life should have the same eternal fate as the person who made it halfway down their mother's left fallopian tube?
• Or are we rewarded according to what we've done on earth, during our life "under the sun"? What if you never made it to life under the sun? How then can we be equal in God's sight?
• How then can there be such thing as eternal justice?

So I guess I am questioning the existence of the eternal justice we as Christians expect to happen on that day. Please don't stone me yet. I'm just curious.

...Makes no difference who you are

Well, my birthday coming up. So I thought I'd make up a wishlist.

My Wishlist

• more sleep (or the equivalent in units of wakefulness)
• more wisdom (of the Biblical variety)
• direction, and a good sense of direction
• a few siblings (~ my age)
• an extroverted personality (maybe for a week, just to see what it's like)
• 20/20 vision, good insight, seeing the invisible and seeing reality
• perfect pitch (not essential, but would come in handy)
• time, time management, and better timing
• to fathom what God has done from beginning to end

You know, the simple things. I'm not asking for much.

When you wish upon a star...

Spent some of last night sitting outside on the fence of someone's house with a friend, looking at the stars and feeling slightly cold. Must have looked like druggies since we had our hoods on and my friend was holding a beer. Ah well. Started a conversation about what the soul of an unborn baby would look like in heaven, and what age our resurrected bodies would be when we got them.

Will we have personalities in the new creation? What about children/babies who die really young? Could you somehow use their DNA and extrapolate out a persona? Even if you could extrapolate, could you have a true personality without having experienced any environmental factors besides your mother's amniotic fluid?

How weird would it be if our resurrected bodies came back as the age we were when we died? There'd be heaps of old people and embryos and foetuses floating around in heaven. So strange. What if we all came back with young healthy bodies, but with the wisdom of old age? More than that, we would know God.

"Why did I not perish at birth, and die as I came from the womb?....Or why was I not hidden in the ground like a stillborn child, like an infant who never saw the light of day?"
~Job 3:11,16

Sigh....the burdens and the joys of being chosen to be more than a fluttering heartbeat on an ultrasound screen.

Under the sun...

A new day brings us no closer to tomorrow, and leaves yesterday no further behind.

I get so tired of feeling like this everyday...

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