Inspiration & Paradox 18: Hospitality is not crowding your guest

We all know what “hospitality” to guests is all about – expressing gestures of warmth, friendliness, care, extending help, giving attention and providing a generous reception so that the guest feels a great sense of being welcomed. Clear. However, I recently learned another definition of this term from an author. It has an almost total opposite meaning of what we normally know. “Hospitality” to him is not just about sharing. It is not entertainment. It is not crowding the guest. It allows participation and freedom in the way desired by the guest. It is about providing a private place where the guest could be still and be at peace. Hospitality is basically about creating space for the guest. I love this perspective a lot.

Inspiration & Paradox 17: Life is but a dream bubble that will eventually burst?

Dreams, as we all know and agree are important in keeping a man’s aspiration and hope high and without dreams, people stop moving forward. Great men have great dreams. Without vision, people perish, and without dreams people cannot prosper.
But interestingly, if we look into the meaning of dreams, they are but a bubble, a state of abstraction, a wild fancy, unreal imagery that can never become true.

Inspiration & Paradox 16: Christian Paradox

The paradoxes in Christianity have never failed to intrigue me. The following passage describes them so well:

"A real Christian is an odd number. He feels supreme love for One whom he has never seen; talks familiarly every day to Someone he cannot see; expects to go to heaven on the virtue of Another; empties himself in order to be filled; admits he is wrong so he cannot be declared right; goes down in order to get up; is strongest when he is weakest; richest when he is poorest and happiest when he feels the worst. He dies so he can live; forsakes in order to have; gives away so he can keep; sees the invisible; hears the inaudible; and knows that which passes knowledge." -- A. W. Tozer

Inspiration & Paradox 15: Our feelings are defined by our experience

The intensity of our human feelings – happiness, sadness, excitement, dullness, etc, etc, etc is never absolute but always relative to what we expect and have experienced in life. We will never truly know what is real peace and serenity if we have never encountered chaos and madness, we will never understand what pain and disappointment is if we have never felt fulfilment and satisfaction in our soul, we will never be able to really appreciate kindness and mercy, if we have never crossed path with cruel and mean people, we will never know how sweet and gratifying rest can be if we have never experienced real fatigue in the bones, we will never realise how precious life is if our safety has never been threatened by any sickness or danger, we will never ever know how sweet enlightenment can be if we have never lived in darkness and confusion, and the list goes on and on…I know some of you think all this sounds almost too passé, but I simply can’t miss out this plain twist of life in my blog.

Inspiration & Paradox 14: Think Positive or Prepare for the Worst?

I have a low threshold for pain, that’s what others say about me. And I have been advised to not to worry too much whenever I have to go for jabs or any tests that could subject my body to some pain. I was told to think positively and tell myself repeatedly in my mind that it was not going to be painful at all. That way, everything would turn out right, so they said. However, whenever I did that, it didn’t work, I would end up screaming in pain. And somehow, whenever I prepared myself for the worst pain and tried to imagine how bad the pain could be, it turned out to be rather bearable. And how I have rationalised it is about expectations. When you set your expectation of pain too low and do not mentally prepare yourself for the pain, the actual pain experienced could be overwhelming and become more than what you can bear, whereas if you expect too much of the pain, you would in the end feel that the pain is actually no big deal.

Inspiration & Paradox 13: Don’t we adapt to our weather over time?

A friend made an interesting remark about climates and how we in our everyday life use it as a conversational piece. What seems ironically strange to us is that people who have been living in cold countries are constantly complaining and fussing about the cold, and people who have been living in tropical countries never seem to be able to get used to the heat and are always groaning and moaning about it. Logically, don’t we adapt to weather conditions over time? Obviously not, eh?

Inspiration & Paradox 12: Live for yourself or for others?

“Live for yourself and not for others, follow what your heart tells you” I could understand this common passionate saying as deep down inside, we all need to be nurtured, refreshed and empowered. If we want to move on in life and make good progress, we have to take our minds off what people say, think or even try dictate, and just fix our eyes on our goal and ambition.
Yet each of us is not an entity or stand-alone, we can never separate our existence from our friends, family and community. Our conscience tell us that we cannot afford to be selfish and that we our lives are not our own; we are accountable to people around us, especially our loved ones. How we act and what we decide to do have an impact on the happiness and unhappiness of others. Our lives seem to be all interwoven together.
Yet another intriguing contradiction in life.

Inspiration & Paradox 11: Persevere in Prayer or Yield to God’s Sovereignty?

When I was carrying my second child, I yearned so much for a painless and natural delivery that I became so intense in my request to God. On one hand, I wanted God to see my persistence and my faithfulness in asking for it as I know "without failth, it is impossible to please God", but on the other hand, I felt I should just ask once and for all and let go so that I could show my confidence in His perfect plan and that He could do as He pleases. I must say I struggled a lot in the perspective that I should be bold and persistent in asking God to act and yet humbly trusting in His sovereignty and that His will be done.

Inspiration & Paradox 10: Carrying unwanted baggages in life

It is amazing what we hold on to in life. We prefer the old to the new, the expected to the unfamiliar. We stick to wrong behavior pattern that we know can jeopardize our relationships with others. We cling on to past hurts and disappointments even though we know they can poison the wells of our inner spirit. We allow ourselves to dwell in unhappy memories and live in past glories that hinder us from looking forward. No wonder the famous St Paul said, "For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing."
We need to let go of the past and all the emotional baggage so that we can travel light, make good inroads into places we have never been before and be where we are meant to be.

Inspiration & Paradox 9: Pruned to be beautiful

The Chinese proverb says “To hit someone is to love that someone”. It talks about the paradoxical love that parents have for their children. Proverbs 13:24 speaks of it even more strongly: “He who spares the rod hates his son”. I remember a friend mentioned how painful the pruning process of a plant can be - all the good branches and green leaves are cut away, leaving behind an ugly, bare, insecure looking stem, all because of a belief that this will later produce even more branches and healthier leaves.
Should I inflict pain on my children by laying my hands on them, I hope I have a special enabling to do it out of true love and desire to discipline and not out of a moment’s exasperation or pure selfish need to wield my authority over them.

Inspiration & Paradox 8: Giving to the poor versus Being with the poor

I read about a very meaningful paradox on giving. It explains how so many times in life we think we have given but actually have not. This is because we always seem to be better at giving than becoming. We can give love even when we do not intrinsically love. We can be generous even when we are not truly compassionate. We can be giving to the poor and yet not meet their essential needs. “Being poor” is much harder than serving the poor. If we wish to journey with the poor, we need to lay aside our time, our power and our priorities, only then can we truly can journey in true companionship with them.

Inspiration & Paradox 7: Give in order to Gain -- 舍得

A colleague shared a beautiful, touching word in the Chinese language "舍得" (She De) which is made up of the word 舍 which means “to give” and 得 which means “to gain”, and the combination of 舍得 actually means “willing to part with”. How very true this is in life! We sometimes need to give up something in life in order to gain something else. And so did Jesus ever say “freely you have received, freely give.”

Inspiration & Paradox 6: Life is in a constant flux

I reflect a lot about my own journeys in life. What is so intriguing to me is that our life is not about moving from one highland to the next, from one state of existence to another. Life is always in a flux. It is disc-shaped, there are times when I have to start all over again, learn the same hard lesson all over again. I experience life as paradoxical. It is not made up of neat stages; seldom do I move from “darkness” to “enlightenment” and “live happily ever after” as one book that I have read puts it. I struggle for new understandings and grope for new directions all the time. How often do I have to I withdraw myself to a place of solitude and to my source of renewal so as to find fuel for the journey. It is a perpetual rhythm of my inner being.
We are on the road, we are there, but have not arrived. Yes, we are home but still on a journey. And we know we have completed the task, but there is still much that needs to be done.

Inspiration & Paradox 5: Feelings for an Object?

That day a colleague was sharing about how much he felt for his old car when it was being driven away by the buyer. I could immediately identify with him. It was the same overwhelming sense of loss when Jaz and I sold our first car in 2001. It then surprised me that how much humans can actually attach our emotions and passions to objects and material things. Following is what I wrote then about the car that then:

Strange it may seem and sound
But I did feel sad to see it being driven away
It has neither soul nor spirit, yet it is able to disturb emotions
I see and feel it everyday, I miss it now
Even more so when Jaz says, it has served us well
I know it doesn’t and cannot feel bad, but I do
Strange what things can do to the human heart
I suppose, some non-living can mean to people as much as,
and sometimes, even more than the living.

I will not call this as being materialistic because it is obviously not. It is more like a sentimental thing, you have owned and used the car for a while and when you part with it, the sadness may not be any lesser than what you would feel if it was a human relationship. But what seems to disturb me a little is the irony that the non-living sometimes can mean even so much more than the living to us. Scary, isn’t it.

Inspiration & Paradox 4: Forgetting the reason for our life pursuits

On the way home, I asked Jaz if he noticed the cars that aggressively sped by are mostly branded and expensive and we wondered why. We figured that it could be about lifestyles. Many people with high earning power lead very busy life, be it work or social, so much so that they become fast drivers on the road and have little patience with waiting and traffic jams. Ironically, people are working hard so that they become successful, get rewarded financially and can afford to slow down and enjoy the pleasures in life. Have we become so caught up in the pursuit of prosperity that we forget the reason for our pursuit or even lose the ability to enjoy what we work so hard for?

Inspiration & Paradox 3: Love-hate relationship

I am often amazed by how my girl relates to her daddy. I like to exaggerate by calling it a paradoxical love-hate relationship. She adores her daddy and treats him like her idol. She looks up to him in all aspects, loves to imitate and quotes him for even the most trivial thing and would think of ways to please him and obtain his approval. Yet, at the same time she is also extremely fearful of him. She is very afraid of his sternness towards her and hates it when he asserts his authority and metes out the punishment to discipline her.

Inspiration & Paradox 2: The beauty of irreversibility of life

I watched the movie “Wait till you’re older” today and encountered a very philosophical line in it:

“The sad fact of life is that it can never be reversed, but the glad thing about it is also that it can never be reversed.”

This is a beautiful paradox, isn’t it? We sometimes wish we could relive all those happy moments in life, but if we ever go back to those times, it also means that we have to go through the unhappy moments in life too.

Inspiration & Paradox 1: Playing God: Freedom or Captivity?

The media has been reporting that medical science has advanced to a point when parents-to-be can decide the gender of their offspring. I wonder if this freedom is a true blessing.
We earthlings are often intimidated and troubled by the unknown especially when the future appears to be bleak or when our mind could only accommodate one desired possibility. We dream we can decide about everything and have control over the happenings and events in life so that they fit perfectly into our own plans and agenda and we have complete piece of mind always. But imagine if we could 100% determine everything, including the weather, a business deal outcome, the lifespan of a pet, or the gender of the baby just to grant that overdue wish of your mother-in-law, what would life be reduced to? Wouldn’t it stop to be precious and spontaneous, wouldn’t it become mechanical and dull, wouldn’t we become captives of our own lives?
As we moan and groan in this dilemma, I am reminded of Ecclesiastes 11:5-8 “As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother’s womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things. Sow your seed in the morning, and at evening let not your hands be idle, for you do not know which will succeed, whether this or that, or whether both will do equally well. Light is sweet, and it pleases the eyes to see the sun. However many years a man may live, let him enjoy them all. But let him remember the days of darkness, for they will be many.”