Taking Heart

Blessed are the undefiled in the way,
Who walk in the law of the Lord!
Blessed are those who keep His testimonies,
Who seek Him with the whole heart!
Psalm 119:1,2 NKJV



Whole heart? "Whole"? OK, for the sake of splitting hairs, the New International Version and New American Standard say "all your heart". The King James is a stickler for the terms whole, complete, entire.

To be honest, who knows what goes on inside the human heart? Other than it being deceitful amongst all things, the seat of affections and the compass that veers a person throughout life? Many things keep the heart running, so to speak - joys, fears, ambition, hopes, dreams, disappointments, anger, etc. And to sum it... a person is the sum of all there is in his heart...

It is so easy to thank God when things are going well, when things are looking good study or career-wise, when family is showing each other love and consideration, when you have plenty left over in your bank account. When your kids make choices that bring joy and glow to your being. When despite hardship and suffering, you see value in your investment.

It is not so easy to be grateful when all those things are non-existent and you cannot see even half a step ahead of you. It is definitely not fun to be lost, destitute, purposeless, or worse... wandering in the wasteland of hope deferred. If anything could exact the cruelty of a slow execution, this has gotta be it. A gradual chipping away of the soul leaving a vacant shell of a body in its wake. Talk about the Living Dead.

Anyways.

The Psalmist said those who enjoy blessing are those who had given God their entire heart, warts and all. Like... he wasn't talking about sifting through the heart's contents and presenting only the choice parts, you know... keep the ugly bits under wraps since they are slimy muck (as if God could not handle such things). He said to give God the whole, entire, complete heart. No holds barred. Who would not shudder at the thought of being totally naked before God, stripped to the core, vulnerable, raw and defenceless?

No wonder we put up all kinds of fronts - rebellion, ignorance, triviality, apathy, or worse, a religious veneer to gloss over the obvious shortfall. I had been guilty of those things, although not in that order. All this in vain hope that God will pass by my weaknesses and let me be.

And God, being God, would not allow the defect to fester. Really, it is soooo hard to give God the entire heart. And unlock those hidden little chambers which hold on to their sordid little desires and secrets. Secrets too precious to be given away. But the blessed soul knows. Knows that no matter how deep the fear of violation, the freedom that ensues is more than enough to cover, restore and renew.

Perhaps too much has been said about the Six-Inch Journey from the head to the heart. Time to put some feet into those words and chalk up more mileage on the proverbial longest trip for man.

One Tragedy Less Would be Good

"How long have we been brothers?" Zilong (Andy Lau), the title character in the movie Three Kingdoms :Resurrection of the Dragon, asked his sworn brother Ping-An (Sammo Hung). "Thirty-two years and four months" was the reply. That was more than half of Zilong's lifetime. Albeit being one of the legendary 5 generals of the formidable Shu Kingdom in ancient China, Zilong was not mentioned in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. That aside, the film was true to its literary depiction of the Shu Kingdom as the protagonist.

The film began and ended with Zilong and Ping-An, chronicling their fateful first encounter to the battleground where one met his valiant end while the other assumed greatness by proxy. Their lives, though panned out differently, had one thing in common - both had come full circle and ended up where they started. They spent the better half of their lives fighting for a cause, only to find very little reason to do so at the end.

Such are tragedies made of.

I had some hard thinking to do too. After spending 6 years living for a cause, have I come full circle? All that I wanted was to have a family growing and maturing in the ways of God. Maybe I was too hopeful. Or maybe I had heaped too much expectations on myself and on them. Maybe I had played God too many a time. Maybe I need to release them all to Him and move on with life. Maybe.

Ecclesiates tell us that life is meaningless apart from God. Do I need to plunge the depths of futility to understand what that means? Or... maybe I can simply fear and love God, obey His commandments... and set out like a junior Augustine... do whatever I like?

Don't know. But the world certainly don't need another tragedy.

Ramblings

March went by in a daze. It was election month. And for a while, everything else took a backseat whilst conversations went on furiously in coffee shops, kopitiams, mamaks, boardrooms, bedrooms... you name it. Who wagered which party was going to win, stories of corruption (old tales... yawn), cronyism and all the rest of it. Election fever was on!

Even the bible studies took similar slant. It was by no accident either that we were going through chapters 19 and 20 of Exodus, which spoke about the preamble and the formalization of the constitution for Israel.

Many parallels were drawn, allusions alluded, mental gymnastics exercised finally dare I say, tho we were not altogether wiser about the state of politics in Malaysia, we at least learnt that God's covenant with Israel all those centuries ago has ramifications for us today.

I love history for the way it progressively unfolds human nature. I just hate the idea of it being a subject for examinations. Love the relational factor, hate the rigidity of the structure that attempts to contain it.

Just as well, because beneath the rules and regulations and laws - meant to govern behaviour - isn't the ideal to live a life so exemplary that laws are no longer needed? But...ah, I am in fantasyland.

I digress.

Tomorrow we wrap up our 3-week analysis on the 4th Commandment, The Sabbath. After tracing its origin in Genesis, we looked at its institution in Exodus as a commandment, its part in the moral and ceremonial practices in the Old Testament, the controversy it sparked when Jesus interpreted it for the pharisees... and finally, its significance for New Testament christians. Phew!

And like those coming-of-age movies, the class discovered that the quest for one thing can open up doors of understanding to a bigger picture, beyond what was initially expected. What the students expected was a neatly-packaged doctrine, nicely presented in a "do this but don't do that" label (a product); but what they got instead was a process of thinking, re-thinking, interpreting and re-interpreting (an education, hopefully).

I must admit that I have learnt much too, thanks to these students, without whom I would not force myself to think a few steps ahead. The preparation for the studies have benefited me greatly. Tiring, but worth it.