It Is Well With My Soul

We sat in silence, watching as my 3rd Uncle played a Theresa Teng song on his guitar and harmonica. It was a touching dedication to my grandmother. The song was one of her favourites. 3rd Uncle had sung it to her almost 12 years ago in the same black vest and white shirt. It was a repeat performance. Just like last time, all her children and grandchildren were present. But back then, it was for her birthday. This time, it was at her funeral.

My father was always the kind to put up a brave front. I wanted him to know he didn’t have to. I got up from my seat and walked over to him. I didn’t want him to sit alone. As I sat, he placed an arm around me, his other to his face. I could tell he was shedding tears. Earlier, as we chatted privately, he told me how he never cried when my grandfather died almost twenty years ago. But this time, it was different. We had spent the last few hours chatting, and he seemed almost nonchalant about the whole thing. But I understood my father. He was the kind that hid intense feelings behind casual conversation. It was a kind of coping mechanism. I put my arm around his shoulder and bowed my head as the pastor said the final prayer.

My grandmother was a feisty and determined woman. She had a stroke when she was only 29, after giving birth to her fourth child. Yet, in all she managed to raise six children with the little money her husband earned as a policeman. She had never step foot into a school in her life, yet she understood the importance of education and how to spend wisely. In her Eulogy, my third Aunt revealed how each and every sibling had borrowed money from their mother at one point or another in their lives. She never turned them away empty handed, even when the children didn’t always return the money. In fact, she made it a point to help out any other relative who was in need. She was every bit the matriarch of the family.

No one other than her children, grandchildren and relatives would ever know or remember my grandmother. But to her children, she was the greatest. In ending her eulogy, my third aunt proudly declared that grandma was the best mother in the world. And at that last line, all the siblings nodded and shed tears. Sad as it was, her death came almost as a relief. She had been bed ridden and in an almost vegetative like state for almost four years. She was a pale shadow of who she used to be before her second stroke. My uncles and aunts had tried so hard initially to put her on the road of recovery. And when it was apparent that there was not going to be a recovery, they focused instead on making her comfortable. The last time I visited her, I couldn’t tell if she could still recognize me. Her eyes stared blankly, but my father insisted that she could still hear and could still feel touch. So I reached out and held her hand. It was actually the first time I had actually touched my grandmother. My relatives had never been particularly touchy. It turned out to also be the last.

After the prayer, we were all called to give our last respects to grandmother before her body was to be sent for cremation. We all gathered around her coffin, looking at her through the glass. The undertakers had dressed her in her best cloths and her hands were placed above her heart, almost like in a praying position. My third aunt sobbed openly. My uncles stared in gloomy silence. Most of the grandchildren were holding on to their parents, trying to offer comfort. My mother stood next to my brother. Many many years ago, my mother had tried sharing her faith with my grandmother. But my grandmother rejected her. She defiantly declared that money was her god, probably to spite my mother. But here we were today, saying farewell to her in a Christian ceremony. She had converted almost 2 years ago, after her stroke, when one of her sons approached her again on the matter. I reminded my mother of this later over tea, and she nodded her head with a smile. “God works in his own ways…” she said.

Indeed.

I found it ironic, that my own father, once a theological scholar, a preacher and once the beacon of faith in my family, who knew and understood so many things about faith, had none of it in his heart……. while my grandmother, bed ridden and unable to talk, unable to ever read or study the scriptures, who once idolized money, could accept the faith offered to her at the end of her life.

The ending song was the beautiful and comforting hymn “It is well with my soul”. A song with great meaning, and a great story behind it. Among the chorus of voices, I could hear my father, singing it with all his heart. I was sure he knew the story of it too… And through his tone, I felt that perhaps with the way things turned out for my grandmother, it was well with his soul too…

Please let me share this song with you, and the story behind it, in memory of my grandmother. A song I have been singing to myself since last Sunday.

Sad News

Various Artists - Amazing Grace Mp3
Mp3-Codes.com

I received an alarming message from my brother early in the morning.

"I just got news... Ah Ma is dying..."

11.00pm I got another message from him


"Ah Ma just passed away. She breath her last breath just moments ago."


What sad news to start the morning. After lunch I made my way back to KL.. there was to be a Wake on Saturday and a Funeral on Sunday.. then it was back to Singapore for me..

The 4 hours drive back north, my thoughts lingered on my grandmother. She was the typical chinese grandmother type.. wearing floral 'ah  ma' cloths as sort of a uniform, swearing profusely in Hokkien whenever she was angry, and always reminding us not to talk while eating dinner. That was before the stroke. Her last few months of life was spent mostly in bed. She could neither move, talk or feed herself anymore after her second stroke. The last time I saw her, I wondered which would be crueler... keeping her alive and in pain like this, or allowing her to die a natural death. I guess the question is moot now.

Her death isn't unexpected, but sad nonetheless. I have many mixed feelings in receving this news. I was never particularly close to her. Yet there are things about my relationship with her that I remember till today. Many small incidences, insignificant as they were, somehow remain embedded in my memory even till today. I will write about it more when I get the time.

She was my grandmother, the mother to my father. Her blood runs in my veins too. Without her, there would be no me today. And for that, she has always had my respect.


May your soul ascend to the skies and find its a welcome in the house of God where from above, He, and now you, watch over all of us...

Rest In Peace Ah Ma....

Paint My Love

It's the picture of a thousand sunsets,
It's the freedom of a thousand doves,
Baby, you should paint my love...

Paint My Love - Michael Learns To Rock

:-)

Cheekiness

There is a certain trait about me that most people have never seen (or known); I’m cheeky. Despite my serious demeanour and way of thinking, I can in fact be rather cheeky at times. I don’t know how to describe how I go about this cheekiness.. but only that I become naughty, daring and playful at the same time.

The reason most people have never seen this about me is because I only do it with people I’m intimately familiar and comfortable with. And as far as I am aware, I’ve only been consciously cheeky around two people; my wife and my mother.

My mother has known this about me even before I realized it myself. I was playing a little prank on her one weekend, and upon finding out she said “……. You’re so cheeky la.. just like when you were still small. Always playing tricks on your mother…”. I was dumbstruck. I had not realized that this was a repeat of my childhood behaviour. In my mind, it was a fresh and novel prank I was pulling on my mother. I guess mothers do know best after all.

The wifey of course discovered it only after it was too late. I think it wasn’t until a year or two into our relationship that I started exhibiting signs of cheekiness. I didn’t plan it. It just sort of turn out that way.

I cannot recall if I have been this way with any other person. 

 But I think that I probably do it with people I feel very intimate with. So if I start winking at you, beware. 

Simple Things

Simple things make me happy; like watching the look on my other half when I make her laugh; like seeing a beautiful sunrise and being glad that I force myself out of bed; like feeling the intimacy of a warm hug.

My other half tells me that I seldom laugh. Instead, I smile a lot. She says there’s this look on my face when I smile. While some seem the kind that burst out in happy laugher, I was the kind that gave a mild and controlled grin that only hinted at the joy that was truly held within.

It still shocks me how well she can read me sometimes.

The Value of Art

I’ve always been one to enjoy instrumental music. I remember growing up listening over and over again to my father’s cassette of the guitar band The Shadows. I’d close my eyes and follow the tune in my head, picturing the little musical notes riding up and down the scale.

And despite not having any words at all to convey what it’s trying to say, instrumental music had a way of conveying its own meaning to the listener. They get you excited, sad, happy, light, sombre, tense and even playful just simple by the progression and pattern of notes. And that kind of resonated in me. That magically, emotions can be conveyed and feeling can be shared with not so much as a word. There is something so simple, so beautiful, and so mysterious about to me.

I have been described as a person of many words. But what people don’t understand about me is this – words fail me sometimes. There are times when the words that form in my head to convey the feeling that is within is inadequate. There is no word to describe the intensity that I feel sometimes, or the conflict and harmony that exist together at the same time.

And that’s where the music comes in. It expresses what the words cannot. Like right now, when my heart is filled with many different feelings and thoughts; forlorn over certain things, thankfulness over others, a bit of regret, a bit of joy, a bucket load of remorse, a dash of hope. Hard as I try to put it in words, there is no describing it.

I began to understand how not just music, but also song, dance and any sort of art help people complete the expression that’s in their heart. Why some people naturally burst out in song or dance, play the guitar, paint, draw, so simply just hum. There are verses, there are choruses, there are variations and there are bridges. There is form and pattern in art, yet it’s not robotic or clinical. It’s fluid, natural and organic. Like our bodies, our souls, our lives.

There is nothing ground breaking is what I am saying here. Most people who haven’t stuck their heads in books, numbers, figures and charts (or aren’t engineers) like me would have figured that out long ago. Art, like music, song or dance is the projection of the heart that resides in us. To deny it is to deny our hearts, and to deny our hearts is to deny our lives.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival. ~ CS Lewis

Personal Growth

Here's what I've observed about personal growth:

Growth usual is preceeded by some sort of contraction in personal happiness followed by a brief but rapid period of learning.....

In other words, we usually screw up before we ever learn anything.

Grasping With Evil

I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. 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. Romans 7:18-19

Many nights.... nights like this, I find myself haunted by these verses. Nights like this when all the sinful nature within me surfaces to the ground. I do the things I don't want to do. And I don't do the things I want to do. And I find myself helpless, powerless, defenseless, against my own thoughts, against my own will. It's as if I am a mere spectator in my own body. It moves of its own accord. It does as it pleases. It goes where it wants. And while somewhere at the back of my mind, a voice screams out for me to stop, the body continues on its journey, easily ignoring the desperate but faint sounds of conscience.

Many days I'm completely ridden in guilt. I find myself utterly disgusted with myself. I am unable to like myself for who I am, and the things I've done. I find myself obsessed about bringing my secrets to the grave, lest the people around me find out, and I die of shame anyway. The world classifies people into two categories. The pure and righteous, and the tainted and dirty. One is love and respected by all, the other is spat on in disgust. But there is a third kind. It is the kind that is pure and righteous in the eyes of others, but  are tainted and dirty underneath. And among the three, this is the worst. The tainted and dirty make no pretenses about who they are. You could almost admire them on how frank they are about it. The third kind is covered in cloaks of pure white, but underneath it mask a soul that is rotten and foul. William Shakespeare wrote that 'lilies that fester stink worse than weeds'. I am such a kind. I am such a festering lily.

I try. I remind myself that the grace of God is not for the righteous, but for the sinful. Salvation is not for the upright, but the fallen. I prayed to God, asking for the strength to turn away. I knew I could never have the strength to defeat my own self. I prayed to God, asking for the will to turn away. It's so hard to stop doing the things you don't want to, when in truth, you really want to. It was the most difficult of all. It still is.

With all of this, I try telling myself to drop the act of being such a nice guy. At least being outright bad and messed up was better than being a hypocrite. The nicer people's impression of me, the more people liked me, the stronger these feelings would come. I would feel like a fallen man, trying to pretend he's something better than what he really is. Like a person living a realy good lie.


How does you cure the sickness that grow from within? How do you rid a man of a shadow that tails him wherever he goes? How does a man conquer the darkness that lurks from within? Like an object that is laid before my eyes, but just out of my reach, the answer is out of my grasp.

New Blogger Layout

So after what feels like an eternity, blogger finally revised their layout.As in, COMPLETELY. I find myself fumbling over the new layout, trying to find where the new buttons are and how to navigate. First reaction - FINALLY! The old one was functional, but stale. I'm still trying to get use to it.

But if nothing but just for the sake of change, I'm happy with it. Which is funny, because I've been resisting moving to Tumblr or Wordpress or any other blogging platform because I didn't want the change. And suddenly, with a click of a button, change had come upon me regardless (albeit in a small way)

I think change is a funny thing. We want it but resist it at the same time. We long for it but also fear it.

I've met people who seem to embrace change so willingly. In fact, they even seem to live on it. They can't bear the thought of staying too long on one single thing. As if familiarity is something to be feared. People like that have always made me feel old. Because it's usually the old people who cannot embrace change. New music, new trends, new fashion, new technologies. I've always found myself digging prefering to dig into the past rather than anticipating the future. I like discovering old songs that sound good, I enjoy reading history, I enjoy seeing this that have a retro feel about them.  I enjoy recollecting and remembering how things unfold.

People always say living life is about moving forward. I think I do move forward, except I walk in reverse.

What can I say? I feel old.    

Meet Mr. Koala

	Oscar F Hills - You Do Something To Me .mp3
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

Oh brother... I'm feeling so lazy. So lazy I'll just post this song to describe how it feels rather than type it all out. Hear the melody? It's the melody of someone chilling by the barn, wearing a straw hat, playing his guitar the entire day... well.. that least that's how I picture it. And out of pure randomness and boredom, I'd like to introduce to you, this guy:

Meet Mr. Koala Bear. As most people know, despite the name, Koala's aren't really bears at all. They are marsupials. And they have life all figured out. Here's why:

Pockets
Despite the name, Koala's aren't really bears. They are marsupials. Marsupials are mammals, with pockets. I told my friends that this was a the surest sign from God that pockets were meant to be eventually invented. I once thought cargo pants (with so many pockets!) were the greatest invention of the modern times. The funny thing about Koala's is that their pockets are upside down instead of right side up.

Fussy Vegetarians
Koala's only eat certain types of Eucalyptus leaves. Nothing else. That means they are the Aussie version of the Panda, who only eat Bamboo leaves. And since they eat so much of the leaves, the even smell like Eucalyptus. Eucalyptus happens also to be a natural insect repellent. Which explains why they never worry about mosquito's or bugs while hanging out in the trees all day.

Go Green - Sleep all Day
Koala's sleep up to 18 hours a day. And they actually have a pretty good excuse for it. See, the leaves they eat are almost 70% water. That means they have very little nutrients or energy in their diet. So,to conserve energy, they sleep all day. In fact, they can't

Hard Ass
Koala's have a hard ass. No really, they do. Normally, sleeping all day in one position causes pressure sores. But in the case of the Koala, they've developed special hard asses that enable them to sleep on a tree trunk (as above) all day without feeling the least bit uncomfortable.

So there you go. Some fast facts about Koalas. They have wrongly sewnpockets, are super fussy about their food, sleep all day and the toughest part of their body is their ass, made for sleeping. Anywhere else in the world, this would have meant the extinction of them. But down under in Australia, it's a national icon.

Have a good weekend everyone. :-)