Post ARPC mass meeting, a bunch of us went for drinks at Adam Road hawker centre. Amusing table talk centred around what guys should do to get girls interested in them (hint: it may not be the ability to carve salad bowls and candle-sticks. Or worse, crying while being moved at how well you carve the bowls).
Which led DaMooMan to joke, "It's all church camp's fault. Now every girl in ARPC wants a guy like Pastor Joshua Ng. What hope is there for the rest of us now that he has set the bar so high?" Apparently, Joshua's much lauded choking up when talking about little son and his little Star Wars reenactments with said son had endeared him to many women at ARPC.
I thought about it - I definitely must have thought "awwww....look at how sensitive and sweet the guy is." But that was not the big thing that moved me most. It was more like a "look at how much God matters to this guy." What some of us girls found really moving about the whole thing was he was not just crying about missing his son, but more because he was moved that his little son knew why his father had to sacrifice family time to spread the gospel. That last heart wrenching plea for us to live for Christ and live out His ways sacrificially in all that we do, spreading the true gospel was amazing.
for a man (or woman for that matter) to be attractive, and assuming he/she is going for a godly partner, all he/she really has to do is to seek God first.
It seems to be a simple win-win situation actually. If in becoming more godly, you end up attracting a very godly man/woman, you hit the jackpot - a walk closer to Christ and a new ministry focused more on your spouse and children. If in becoming more godly, you end up still not getting attached, you also hit the jackpot - a walk closer to Christ and an abundance of time and freedom for opportunities to minister . In both cases, you get contentment and joy, albeit in different ways.
But the source stays the same - God supplies the joy.
Singles like me can live on that hope. Joy comes in many forms and singlehood and marriage are both equally lovely gifts because they come from a lovely Giver.
As an odd postscript, I just got my first clandestine inquiry if i minded being "set-up" with some mysterious guy. heh. guess it was just a matter of time before the "setting up" phenomenon came my way. i hear it's catching on in our little church post church camp.
________________
yet another postscript - conversation with the Moth and CatGirl at church. Thought it was funny because it kinda reminded me of the kind of rubbish conversations about pop culture that might happen in Seinfeld or in Clerks (the Kevin Smith movie)
Moth: I hate touchy feely...!
Me: No you don't you are a musician and music is all about the touchy feely
Catgirl: Bach is quite mathematical actually.
Me: But he likes jazz and soul..that's quite touchy feely.
Moth: No it's not. It comes from here (jabs his own chest)
Me: and that's not touchy feely? in a manly way? anyway It's called SOUL ... that's quite touchy feely
Moth: I am NOT touchy feely. I watch war movies like Band of Brothers... Saving Private Ryan
Me: Saving Private Ryan is like the girliest war movie around.
Catgirl: Yeah actually it is quite touchy feely.
Moth: No it's not!
Me: Oh come on...the last scene where the old guy is weeping over the grave....
Catgirl: "I hope my life was worth it...." sob sob
Moth: OK...ya that was quite (rubs goose pimples on hand and shivers)...but it's not a girly movie!!!!
heehee.
Thursday, June 30, 2005
Monday, June 27, 2005
it is well with my soul
a far wiser follower of Christ once wrote this song a long time ago. he had lost his family to tragedy and yet found within him some kind of courage and faith to stand by everything he believed. HIs words I imagine must have been so incredibly loaded with pain and tears as they found themselves immortalised in paper and in music. Yet these same words helped sustain him and bring hope to many others who hear it decades on.
I pray I will always learn from his example in all my problems - big and small.
It's one of my favourite hymns by far and a good thing to remember post weekend angst:
When peace like a river attendeth my way
When sorrows like sea billows roll
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say
It is well, it is well with my soul
It is well (It is well)
With my soul (with my soul)
It is well, it is well with my soul
My sin, O the joy of this glorious thought
My sin not in part but the whole
Is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul
And Lord haste the day
When my faith shall be sight
The clouds be rolled back as a scroll
The trump shall resound and
The Lord shall descend
Even so it is well with my soul
I pray I will always learn from his example in all my problems - big and small.
It's one of my favourite hymns by far and a good thing to remember post weekend angst:
When peace like a river attendeth my way
When sorrows like sea billows roll
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say
It is well, it is well with my soul
It is well (It is well)
With my soul (with my soul)
It is well, it is well with my soul
My sin, O the joy of this glorious thought
My sin not in part but the whole
Is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul
And Lord haste the day
When my faith shall be sight
The clouds be rolled back as a scroll
The trump shall resound and
The Lord shall descend
Even so it is well with my soul
my way or the highway
the weekend has been full of reminders about how the way of Christ is truly divided from the way of the world. Sometimes my life is so content that I forget that the essential call for followers of Christ is to be set up in opposition to the world.
i hate confrontation although i recognise the need for it. Increasingly I have been convicted of the need to speak up and be bold about the gospel and everything it implies on my life, values and outlook. But when I actually try to do it, despite all of God's warnings , I am still strangely shocked by how hard and painful it is to live by His ways.
My life can be in an easy, happy, cruise control mode. I can choose to coast along, not dealing with family, friends, strangers in a deep and meaningful manner. I can live as a surface follower of Christ with simple, happy pithy sayings, shallow assurances of 'i will be there for you" "i will pray for you" etc. or i can really commit my life to doing it right and really really be there fopr people or pray for people.
the challenge is too much:. Love is so difficult. Truth is so hard.
How do you act in graciousness and patience and kindness and yet not back down on voicing on the truth, and possibly causing pain to others and hassle to your own life? How do you rest assured that a life devoted to humbly serving God and serving people is not a stupid choice in a world that tells you your status depends on your money, your title, your romantic conquests and your earthly possessions?
i should not be shocked and scared but i still am. we live in a scary world. go out on a limb to live out in truth and love and there may be a strong chance that you will get bitten, get hurt, get downtrodden, get misunderstood, get mocked or laughed at.
by my own understanding, i should either pretend not to see the needs around me and coast along in "blissful, blind christianhood" or get all self-righteous and angry about things. but by leaning on God's understanding of the world, i see a far more frightening and yet more fruitful response ; persevere, fight, run the race, love with all your mind and heart and strength whatever the cost.
in the morning, i talked with Pastor Ting about the problem with having to be an example of Christ-likeness in a non Christian family. in the night, i had a disturbing conversation with my father about the life and ambitions I have chosen to live for. It was not like we quarrelled or anything, it was a pretty decent, nice conversation. but I felt the burden of how silly my life must look to him sometimes - i don't make the kind of money that my exalted Rafllesian peers must be making right now. I did not run down the scholarship path that I was expected to. I still think he wishes I did so just to set his mind at ease that I have a good future.
i went to bed, wretched and in tears. it was pretty painful to think through whether I was truly not trying hard enough to do the things i could be doing, earn the kind of money that i could be earning. I think the only way I got to sleep was because I kept pleading to God, "Please be real, please be real, please be true. Don't let me be put to shame. My whole life is staked on the fact that you are true." Sent out a bunch of pathetic SOS type SMSs to friends, the way you fling out bottles to sea hoping for a rescue response.
In the morning, I woke to messages in virtual bottles, floating back on a sea of ether. The many encouraging SMSs from fellow "fools in Christ". Their many words of Truth brought peace again. Picked myself up, found my daily bread and continued walking, the way it has always been for every Christian since Christ walked earth.
How much harder it must be for Christians who have far more painful, difficult walks to go through? I am tempted sometimes to brush aside my own struggles because they sound so stupid compared to real Christian martyrs. Yet God assures us He understands and sees each of our individual pains - we don't need to feel embarrassed at our individual struggles, as long as we follow HIs way, we will never be brought to shame.
Come home soon, Lord Messiah. We need you, man.
We need your kingdom soon to replace the screwed up one we have on earth.
i hate confrontation although i recognise the need for it. Increasingly I have been convicted of the need to speak up and be bold about the gospel and everything it implies on my life, values and outlook. But when I actually try to do it, despite all of God's warnings , I am still strangely shocked by how hard and painful it is to live by His ways.
My life can be in an easy, happy, cruise control mode. I can choose to coast along, not dealing with family, friends, strangers in a deep and meaningful manner. I can live as a surface follower of Christ with simple, happy pithy sayings, shallow assurances of 'i will be there for you" "i will pray for you" etc. or i can really commit my life to doing it right and really really be there fopr people or pray for people.
the challenge is too much:. Love is so difficult. Truth is so hard.
How do you act in graciousness and patience and kindness and yet not back down on voicing on the truth, and possibly causing pain to others and hassle to your own life? How do you rest assured that a life devoted to humbly serving God and serving people is not a stupid choice in a world that tells you your status depends on your money, your title, your romantic conquests and your earthly possessions?
i should not be shocked and scared but i still am. we live in a scary world. go out on a limb to live out in truth and love and there may be a strong chance that you will get bitten, get hurt, get downtrodden, get misunderstood, get mocked or laughed at.
by my own understanding, i should either pretend not to see the needs around me and coast along in "blissful, blind christianhood" or get all self-righteous and angry about things. but by leaning on God's understanding of the world, i see a far more frightening and yet more fruitful response ; persevere, fight, run the race, love with all your mind and heart and strength whatever the cost.
in the morning, i talked with Pastor Ting about the problem with having to be an example of Christ-likeness in a non Christian family. in the night, i had a disturbing conversation with my father about the life and ambitions I have chosen to live for. It was not like we quarrelled or anything, it was a pretty decent, nice conversation. but I felt the burden of how silly my life must look to him sometimes - i don't make the kind of money that my exalted Rafllesian peers must be making right now. I did not run down the scholarship path that I was expected to. I still think he wishes I did so just to set his mind at ease that I have a good future.
i went to bed, wretched and in tears. it was pretty painful to think through whether I was truly not trying hard enough to do the things i could be doing, earn the kind of money that i could be earning. I think the only way I got to sleep was because I kept pleading to God, "Please be real, please be real, please be true. Don't let me be put to shame. My whole life is staked on the fact that you are true." Sent out a bunch of pathetic SOS type SMSs to friends, the way you fling out bottles to sea hoping for a rescue response.
In the morning, I woke to messages in virtual bottles, floating back on a sea of ether. The many encouraging SMSs from fellow "fools in Christ". Their many words of Truth brought peace again. Picked myself up, found my daily bread and continued walking, the way it has always been for every Christian since Christ walked earth.
How much harder it must be for Christians who have far more painful, difficult walks to go through? I am tempted sometimes to brush aside my own struggles because they sound so stupid compared to real Christian martyrs. Yet God assures us He understands and sees each of our individual pains - we don't need to feel embarrassed at our individual struggles, as long as we follow HIs way, we will never be brought to shame.
Come home soon, Lord Messiah. We need you, man.
We need your kingdom soon to replace the screwed up one we have on earth.
Friday, June 24, 2005
now for a very short whine...
got a deadline at 6pm.
software programme keeps shutting down.
tired from dealng with people.
hate corporations.
tired from too little sleep.
whine whine whine.
rinse repeat wash.
hang out to dry.
stupid computer.
okay time to try the programme again.
ten minutes to finish. it better work.
software programme keeps shutting down.
tired from dealng with people.
hate corporations.
tired from too little sleep.
whine whine whine.
rinse repeat wash.
hang out to dry.
stupid computer.
okay time to try the programme again.
ten minutes to finish. it better work.
Why I am a Christian or Testimony ver. 1.0
along the lines of "power of a good story' thoughts....been thinking about collecting testimony stories from people around church. Think it would be a cool project. decided to work on my own testimony first and was surprised at how fun it was to sit down and try to put my christian walk in words. Beware: Long blog ahead ( i blame church camp)
++++++++++++++++++++Testimony ver 1.0+++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Christian life is full of paradoxes. The bizarre way which God makes sense out of madness is not the easiest thing to understand. He enters your life in the most poignant and intimate of ways and yet remains heart-wrenchingly elusive and intangible. He is out of reach and yet he is in your heart.
Jesus Christ once said that the secret of the kingdom of God was given to us all. It sounds so disgustingly simple: Seek it and we shall find. Ask of it and it shall be given to us. And yet for many, it is the most difficult concept to grasp.
If we look with just our eyes and mere Reason, God is a mystery, a "profound secret", a "great mystery", irritatingly hidden.
But if we add Faith to Reason and care to look with all our heart, mind and strength, God is there. He is beautifully, heart-breakingly, miraculously, astonishingly there all before us.
He is unmistakably present in the miracle of Creation itself – any designer, architect, artist and scientist with a shred of devotion to Truth to his art can vouch for the profound sense of Intelligent Design in everything around us; He is unmistakably present in the lives of every one of His believers. When I listen to the life stories of any one who has discovered Christ, I find the fingerprints of Intelligence - masterful, intricate chess moves that shape one’s destiny and identity.
I am not saying that you won’t find Intelligence and order in your life if you never find Christ. I am saying that it’s when you find Christ, that’s when you really start to see the actual extent of how far and how deep He has touched your entire lifespan and beyond, and how intricately He has knit it into the lives of others and the fate of this Universe itself.
The realisation is quite flooring and I don’t think I can ever fully grasp it with my brain. I can barely grasp the structure of an atom or how the theory of relativity actually works. Then again, I can barely grasp basic accountancy.
* * *
My father is what Singaporeans call a free thinker. From young, he filled our shelves with philosophical books and enthusiastically touted the teachings of Tao, Buckminister Fuller, Bertrand Russell, Karl Marx and Sai Baba to us kids. He was also liberal enough to allow us personal choice in religion. My mother is a Christian. But she is also an old school stoic Chinese mother. While there were Bibles lying around the house, she never talked to me about the gospel or Jesus – she talked about going to church like she talked to me about eating vitamin C - "It’s good for you." Her advice to me about the Bible was curt, "Just read Proverbs. Very good advice. Read and will be wise."
Growing up in a Catholic convent school, I knew vaguely there was a God. Thus, my assumption from young was that Christianity was just like any other ‘good religious ideology’. Christ was almost absent in my mind. He was a mysterious, sad, pitiful figure, always present on some small cross in school. Frankly, I was probably more aware of who Father Barre (founder of my school) and Mother Mary were, given the size of their statues on the school grounds.
My earliest memory of encountering God was when I was around 8 or 9. My mother had dragged me to church one Sunday morning. At worship, I saw an old woman standing in front of me, her eyes fixed towards the ceiling, her hands raised heavenward. She was consumed in her devotion to praising something I did not understand. I remember thinking, "God, if that’s you inspiring her, I also want it. Give me that big thing that she is experiencing." I closed my eyes and willed for the ceiling to open, or for a big voice to boom in my little head. I wanted The Big Feeling. But of course, nothing of the sort happened. I was mildly disappointed but gave no more thought to it. When you are a kid, you don’t focus on things like that for long.
My other key Christian influence at childhood were the books that I read: The Dragonlance novels (inspired by Mormonism), the Narnia books (by the famous Christian theologian CS Lewis) and Lousie M Alcott’s Little Women series (filled with Christian references). Vague as it was, those books showed me something important. I knew at heart there was a big lovely Good Thingamajig out there. I talked to that Good Thingamajig in moments of desperation or when I was simply searching for Someone smarter and larger than anyone I knew to talk to. I called Him God then. But I did not really know Him. We were acquaintances.
God in my teenage years was reduced to pretty PASS IT ON cards that I liked buying. He never went beyond being a nice grandfather in the sky with good advice. Growing up was difficult. Wrestling with problems is tough when people assume you are mature enough to handle them yourself, and when you are smugly convinced you can handle it yourself. Life then was a potent cocktail of angst over grades, looks, hormones, psychotic friends who played mind-games, eating disorders and a constant roller-coaster of a tussle with self-esteem. I hated myself at times – tried half-seriously to commit suicide once at 14 at the height of my misery with said-psychotic friends; stared at the mirror countless times, willing myself to be prettier, skinnier, sharper-nosed, smaller-mouthed, narrower-shouldered, smaller-armed, taller, more delicate, more feminine, more more more more.
I realised I was never going to be enough and the pain of it all was that I had to try anyway because that’s the way the world works. No excuses. Just Do It. The Best is Yet to Be. Daughters of a Better Age. Awaken the Giant Within. No Fear. The list went on and on and on. There is little grace in a world where you are expected to be your own Maker.
My struggle with eating disorders and chronic self-hate ended in university through a combination of self-help books, simple growing up and sheer dumb survival instinct. The best thing I realised through my wilderness years was this - I was basically a stupid and selfish person. For me, my eating disorder was a selfish thing – it came about from a world-view that cared nothing for others, but all about me. I never thought about loving them. I just wanted their attention and their envy. Yet simultaneously, I hated people for their stupidity, their shallowness and judgementalism. I wanted to win at a game that I despised. Quite frankly, it takes one stupid, shallow, judgemental person to recognise another. There was nothing to be proud of about recognizing the sinfulness of the people around me. The only reason I could see it was because I was just like them. No better at the heart of it. You cannot quantify sin. Sin simply does not work like mathematics or science. When sin is present in you, it’s just present. Not in less or more quantities. Just present.
In my second year in university, a weird guy from my crisis hotline society walked into my studio, bought me a cake and talked to me about how he was praying on a rooftop when he got a vision from God to talk to me. I like freaks, being a bit of a freak myself. So I listened. We ended up becoming really good friends as it turned out. He was confused with my stand that I believed in God and Christ but was not a Christian. So I agreed to check out his church service for the heck of it. And that’s when everything changed.
I remember making dumb jokes about how his church’s colour scheme were all shades of papaya and it was secretly the Cult of the Great Papaya. I remember going with the flow and singing along with all the happy worship songs. What I will always remember is how suddenly a great overwhelming feeling came over me and I suddenly started to cry. Like Big Big Big Crying. Unstoppable, uncontrollable crying. But it was a crying that was not sad or painful, just salt water coming from eyes kind of crying. It was not cathartic or emotional at all, it was just tears pouring out without reason. I looked at my friend with a mute look of, "what’s happening to me?" and he was traumatized like, "WAH LAU. What’s up with you?" The rest of the service I just sat in my seat, not hearing any thing. Everything was a blur. I had no idea what just happened. I could not explain it. And over supper, as I talked to my friend, we decided nobody could really figure out what that was all about. It seemed that it did not really matter whether I cried because it was God having his Ha-Has or because I was deeply neurotic. The most logical thing seemed to be – Go to church, find out what this God is about once and for all. If I see anything I did not like, I was free to leave. Maybe somehow I could figure out this whole nonsense. It seemed like a no-brainer, win win situation.
And so I stayed. And stayed. And never ever found one reason to leave and found many many more reasons to stay.
The longer I stayed in the Church of God, the more I realised He was the only thing that made everything make sense. The early wonder at nature I felt, the yearning for Big Good Something in my heart, the realisation of my own culpability, my own shallowness and how it worked with the world’s shallowness. And it hit me too that the very first prayer I prayed when I watched the old woman raise her hands to Him had been answered in a roundabout strange way. I got my Big Zap from the sky like I wished as a kid. It was like God knew what I had asked for, given it to me and yet taught me along the way that knowing Him was more than just a search for elusive feelings. Time and time again, He worked that maddening way. I asked Him questions, begged Him with requests and He would answer them in strange, off-tangent but yet on-the-dot ways.
And along the way, I understood Christ – His grace, His sacrifice, His example. Only recently have I understood why they say the fear of God is the fountain of life, the beginning of all wisdom. Before knowing God and Christ, I assumed Hope was Optimism. I now know that real Hope has a foundation, as solid as a rock, as eternal as time. I embrace the knowledge that there is going to be an End of all things and that Day will be one where all injustices will be dealt with and judgments will be made. Every evil-doer who got away with their crimes will suddenly realise they have not gotten away at all. I fear and revere this Day where the earth will yawn out its dead and every good and bad deed will be made known.
The secret hope all of us have in our hearts that the world was meant to be a better place is real. Scarily real. And knowing God means I have been Graced with the chance to be on the side that will not be judged as harshly. I know I do not deserve to be on that side. All I did was believe in Christ, cling to His extended hand. And somehow that is enough.
Maybe this life is actually prosaic.
Maybe thanks to my childhood love for fantasy epics of heroes and quests, I am inclined to see poetry in mundanity.
Maybe I am psychologically inclined towards wanting my life to be an epic, for Life to have a quest, a big Happy Ending. Maybe I am wrong about God and His hand upon my life.
Maybe at the end of days, this will all turn out to be a big hoakey mistake.
But for now, I seriously doubt it. I believe with all my being that He is Right – the Right-est thing I have in my life – and He steers my life towards an end beyond my imagination. He is the One thing I cannot afford to and never want to lose.
++++++++++++++++++++Testimony ver 1.0+++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Christian life is full of paradoxes. The bizarre way which God makes sense out of madness is not the easiest thing to understand. He enters your life in the most poignant and intimate of ways and yet remains heart-wrenchingly elusive and intangible. He is out of reach and yet he is in your heart.
Jesus Christ once said that the secret of the kingdom of God was given to us all. It sounds so disgustingly simple: Seek it and we shall find. Ask of it and it shall be given to us. And yet for many, it is the most difficult concept to grasp.
If we look with just our eyes and mere Reason, God is a mystery, a "profound secret", a "great mystery", irritatingly hidden.
But if we add Faith to Reason and care to look with all our heart, mind and strength, God is there. He is beautifully, heart-breakingly, miraculously, astonishingly there all before us.
He is unmistakably present in the miracle of Creation itself – any designer, architect, artist and scientist with a shred of devotion to Truth to his art can vouch for the profound sense of Intelligent Design in everything around us; He is unmistakably present in the lives of every one of His believers. When I listen to the life stories of any one who has discovered Christ, I find the fingerprints of Intelligence - masterful, intricate chess moves that shape one’s destiny and identity.
I am not saying that you won’t find Intelligence and order in your life if you never find Christ. I am saying that it’s when you find Christ, that’s when you really start to see the actual extent of how far and how deep He has touched your entire lifespan and beyond, and how intricately He has knit it into the lives of others and the fate of this Universe itself.
The realisation is quite flooring and I don’t think I can ever fully grasp it with my brain. I can barely grasp the structure of an atom or how the theory of relativity actually works. Then again, I can barely grasp basic accountancy.
* * *
My father is what Singaporeans call a free thinker. From young, he filled our shelves with philosophical books and enthusiastically touted the teachings of Tao, Buckminister Fuller, Bertrand Russell, Karl Marx and Sai Baba to us kids. He was also liberal enough to allow us personal choice in religion. My mother is a Christian. But she is also an old school stoic Chinese mother. While there were Bibles lying around the house, she never talked to me about the gospel or Jesus – she talked about going to church like she talked to me about eating vitamin C - "It’s good for you." Her advice to me about the Bible was curt, "Just read Proverbs. Very good advice. Read and will be wise."
Growing up in a Catholic convent school, I knew vaguely there was a God. Thus, my assumption from young was that Christianity was just like any other ‘good religious ideology’. Christ was almost absent in my mind. He was a mysterious, sad, pitiful figure, always present on some small cross in school. Frankly, I was probably more aware of who Father Barre (founder of my school) and Mother Mary were, given the size of their statues on the school grounds.
My earliest memory of encountering God was when I was around 8 or 9. My mother had dragged me to church one Sunday morning. At worship, I saw an old woman standing in front of me, her eyes fixed towards the ceiling, her hands raised heavenward. She was consumed in her devotion to praising something I did not understand. I remember thinking, "God, if that’s you inspiring her, I also want it. Give me that big thing that she is experiencing." I closed my eyes and willed for the ceiling to open, or for a big voice to boom in my little head. I wanted The Big Feeling. But of course, nothing of the sort happened. I was mildly disappointed but gave no more thought to it. When you are a kid, you don’t focus on things like that for long.
My other key Christian influence at childhood were the books that I read: The Dragonlance novels (inspired by Mormonism), the Narnia books (by the famous Christian theologian CS Lewis) and Lousie M Alcott’s Little Women series (filled with Christian references). Vague as it was, those books showed me something important. I knew at heart there was a big lovely Good Thingamajig out there. I talked to that Good Thingamajig in moments of desperation or when I was simply searching for Someone smarter and larger than anyone I knew to talk to. I called Him God then. But I did not really know Him. We were acquaintances.
God in my teenage years was reduced to pretty PASS IT ON cards that I liked buying. He never went beyond being a nice grandfather in the sky with good advice. Growing up was difficult. Wrestling with problems is tough when people assume you are mature enough to handle them yourself, and when you are smugly convinced you can handle it yourself. Life then was a potent cocktail of angst over grades, looks, hormones, psychotic friends who played mind-games, eating disorders and a constant roller-coaster of a tussle with self-esteem. I hated myself at times – tried half-seriously to commit suicide once at 14 at the height of my misery with said-psychotic friends; stared at the mirror countless times, willing myself to be prettier, skinnier, sharper-nosed, smaller-mouthed, narrower-shouldered, smaller-armed, taller, more delicate, more feminine, more more more more.
I realised I was never going to be enough and the pain of it all was that I had to try anyway because that’s the way the world works. No excuses. Just Do It. The Best is Yet to Be. Daughters of a Better Age. Awaken the Giant Within. No Fear. The list went on and on and on. There is little grace in a world where you are expected to be your own Maker.
My struggle with eating disorders and chronic self-hate ended in university through a combination of self-help books, simple growing up and sheer dumb survival instinct. The best thing I realised through my wilderness years was this - I was basically a stupid and selfish person. For me, my eating disorder was a selfish thing – it came about from a world-view that cared nothing for others, but all about me. I never thought about loving them. I just wanted their attention and their envy. Yet simultaneously, I hated people for their stupidity, their shallowness and judgementalism. I wanted to win at a game that I despised. Quite frankly, it takes one stupid, shallow, judgemental person to recognise another. There was nothing to be proud of about recognizing the sinfulness of the people around me. The only reason I could see it was because I was just like them. No better at the heart of it. You cannot quantify sin. Sin simply does not work like mathematics or science. When sin is present in you, it’s just present. Not in less or more quantities. Just present.
In my second year in university, a weird guy from my crisis hotline society walked into my studio, bought me a cake and talked to me about how he was praying on a rooftop when he got a vision from God to talk to me. I like freaks, being a bit of a freak myself. So I listened. We ended up becoming really good friends as it turned out. He was confused with my stand that I believed in God and Christ but was not a Christian. So I agreed to check out his church service for the heck of it. And that’s when everything changed.
I remember making dumb jokes about how his church’s colour scheme were all shades of papaya and it was secretly the Cult of the Great Papaya. I remember going with the flow and singing along with all the happy worship songs. What I will always remember is how suddenly a great overwhelming feeling came over me and I suddenly started to cry. Like Big Big Big Crying. Unstoppable, uncontrollable crying. But it was a crying that was not sad or painful, just salt water coming from eyes kind of crying. It was not cathartic or emotional at all, it was just tears pouring out without reason. I looked at my friend with a mute look of, "what’s happening to me?" and he was traumatized like, "WAH LAU. What’s up with you?" The rest of the service I just sat in my seat, not hearing any thing. Everything was a blur. I had no idea what just happened. I could not explain it. And over supper, as I talked to my friend, we decided nobody could really figure out what that was all about. It seemed that it did not really matter whether I cried because it was God having his Ha-Has or because I was deeply neurotic. The most logical thing seemed to be – Go to church, find out what this God is about once and for all. If I see anything I did not like, I was free to leave. Maybe somehow I could figure out this whole nonsense. It seemed like a no-brainer, win win situation.
And so I stayed. And stayed. And never ever found one reason to leave and found many many more reasons to stay.
The longer I stayed in the Church of God, the more I realised He was the only thing that made everything make sense. The early wonder at nature I felt, the yearning for Big Good Something in my heart, the realisation of my own culpability, my own shallowness and how it worked with the world’s shallowness. And it hit me too that the very first prayer I prayed when I watched the old woman raise her hands to Him had been answered in a roundabout strange way. I got my Big Zap from the sky like I wished as a kid. It was like God knew what I had asked for, given it to me and yet taught me along the way that knowing Him was more than just a search for elusive feelings. Time and time again, He worked that maddening way. I asked Him questions, begged Him with requests and He would answer them in strange, off-tangent but yet on-the-dot ways.
And along the way, I understood Christ – His grace, His sacrifice, His example. Only recently have I understood why they say the fear of God is the fountain of life, the beginning of all wisdom. Before knowing God and Christ, I assumed Hope was Optimism. I now know that real Hope has a foundation, as solid as a rock, as eternal as time. I embrace the knowledge that there is going to be an End of all things and that Day will be one where all injustices will be dealt with and judgments will be made. Every evil-doer who got away with their crimes will suddenly realise they have not gotten away at all. I fear and revere this Day where the earth will yawn out its dead and every good and bad deed will be made known.
The secret hope all of us have in our hearts that the world was meant to be a better place is real. Scarily real. And knowing God means I have been Graced with the chance to be on the side that will not be judged as harshly. I know I do not deserve to be on that side. All I did was believe in Christ, cling to His extended hand. And somehow that is enough.
Maybe this life is actually prosaic.
Maybe thanks to my childhood love for fantasy epics of heroes and quests, I am inclined to see poetry in mundanity.
Maybe I am psychologically inclined towards wanting my life to be an epic, for Life to have a quest, a big Happy Ending. Maybe I am wrong about God and His hand upon my life.
Maybe at the end of days, this will all turn out to be a big hoakey mistake.
But for now, I seriously doubt it. I believe with all my being that He is Right – the Right-est thing I have in my life – and He steers my life towards an end beyond my imagination. He is the One thing I cannot afford to and never want to lose.
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
the power of a good story
have been thinking about how much power a story has to pass a message.
sometimes we need logic and reason, structure and order to get a point across. that's why we learn argumentative writing and academic writing, the nitty gritty 'topic sentences', ' thesis statements' etc. etc. I find this style of writing easiest to teach because it is so sensible and inherently clean to the mind. Any student can grapple with it - the weakest students in fact grasp the concept of order the best because they are so desperate for something to build something out of their confusion.
i find fictional writing, narrative stories the hardest to teach because you start to go beyond the realm of the logical brain and into the realm of imagination and feeling. Argumentative writing just requires you to think well. Narrative writing requires you to think coherently, feel deeply and see deeply. Good narrative writers instinctively watch the world, understand people and feel wonder where most people see mundanity.
Ravi Zacharias once said that grownups lose their sense of wonder because as we get older, it takes larger and larger concepts and things to capture our imagination and fill the gap of emptiness within.
you see, we were all built for another world, another time and place. we were built for better things in the beginning. but things Fell apart and inside every human being is a nagging horrible sense of loss, brokenness and emptiness. As children, we fill up that nagging sense of Something Wrong easily because we don't know much about the big picture of life yet. Swimming in the sun, gorging on ice-cream cones, playing with the neighbour's cat, hearing a ghost story, Christmas presents....all these things filled us up because our world view was so small.
As we aged, and experienced more of a broken world, we soon realised how truly large the gap within us is. Suddenly all those little things that used to fill us up were great but not enough. We needed bigger things to fill us up. And we spend all our life searching for the bigger thing - money, technology, ideology, philosophy, marriage, ambition, career.
Ravi Zacharias notes profoundly that the only thing big enough to fill that yawing abyss within us - is the very concept of God. The wonder of a God who Loved so deeply that He made HImself flesh to save a creation that wanted nothing to do with Him.
There is something moving, mystical about this whole Christian story. Sometimes I fear when we approach God and His Word with just a Mind, we forget He called us to approach Him with our Heart and our Strength as well.
Why do we feel so ashamed to utter out words of Love for Him? Why do we fear being laughed at for daring to utter out how much we Love and worship this Divinity? Are we too proud to show our tears, our dependency? Are our clever little analysis and intellectual theories and apologetics another way of disengaging ourselves from humbleness?
Sometimes, I want to get down on my knees in church because the weight of His majesty forces no other response out of me. Sometimes my hands are yanked towards heaven because the gravity of His Love and sacrifice pull that response out of me. Sometimes His sorrow and anger cut me right to my sinful, black heart and moves me to cry, sometimes to sob.
And yet, I am aware that choosing to worship in Presbyterian circles means that I hold back and keep it in check. Sometimes I just raise my hands anyway because I think it's all for God, who cares what the congregation thinks. But I have never dared to kneel because it just seems so ostentatious, and everytime I cry at church, I try hastily to cover it up, to brush away tears for fear of making the person next to me uncomfortable.
At church camp, I had loads of fun worshipping with a 15 year old girl in service. 15 year old girls never question strong emotions. They are at the age and of the gender that wears emotions unabashedly on a sleeve. I was glad she was my companion at the last service at camp when we sang hymns. I did not need to explain to her my copious tears at all those ancient words of worship, she just smiled and understood. She herself had cried the other night as she listened to me, J and P play Big Sisters and advise her about all the things she needed to look out for in her walk as a young Christian woman. She told us she cried because she suddenly felt God was so beautiful.
Any how, I sm not entirely sure what I am trying to get at. I think I am still grappling with the whole 'The Word is Living' and the 'Gospel is Alive' realisation I got from camp. This is me making sense of madness I suppose.
God's story is so powerful. So. Alive.
These days I cannot seem to put it in any other better words.
recently read Donald Miller's "Blue Like Jazz" - non religious thoughts on christian spirituality. He helped crystallise some thoughts for me on the mystical quality of Christianity that we post-mod academics shy away from talking about because it sounds like so much hippie kook-dom.
Am putting away my intellectual Christian apologetics books for now and going back to attempting to read the Word cover to cover to understand my God.
At the end of the day, while I can theorise and explain Christianity, when people ask me why I believe I know what answer actually sits at the edge of my smart-arse tongue, at the edge of my adult heart.
It's an instinctive answer, a girly answer, a childish answer, an answer that smacks of dependency and emotions and illogic. An answer that I find hard to share with people who are not Christian for fear of feeding the myth that Christianity is a brainwashing cult.
But there it is in all its honesty. An answer that I cannot chase away.
I love Him. I love Him. I love Him.
and He loves me. Stupid, nasty, ugly, pretentious me.
The simple wonder of it all...He. Loves. me.
and for that, I will try my best to give Him everything I can.
I can't think of a story that has gripped my heart, mind and strength more than that.
sometimes we need logic and reason, structure and order to get a point across. that's why we learn argumentative writing and academic writing, the nitty gritty 'topic sentences', ' thesis statements' etc. etc. I find this style of writing easiest to teach because it is so sensible and inherently clean to the mind. Any student can grapple with it - the weakest students in fact grasp the concept of order the best because they are so desperate for something to build something out of their confusion.
i find fictional writing, narrative stories the hardest to teach because you start to go beyond the realm of the logical brain and into the realm of imagination and feeling. Argumentative writing just requires you to think well. Narrative writing requires you to think coherently, feel deeply and see deeply. Good narrative writers instinctively watch the world, understand people and feel wonder where most people see mundanity.
Ravi Zacharias once said that grownups lose their sense of wonder because as we get older, it takes larger and larger concepts and things to capture our imagination and fill the gap of emptiness within.
you see, we were all built for another world, another time and place. we were built for better things in the beginning. but things Fell apart and inside every human being is a nagging horrible sense of loss, brokenness and emptiness. As children, we fill up that nagging sense of Something Wrong easily because we don't know much about the big picture of life yet. Swimming in the sun, gorging on ice-cream cones, playing with the neighbour's cat, hearing a ghost story, Christmas presents....all these things filled us up because our world view was so small.
As we aged, and experienced more of a broken world, we soon realised how truly large the gap within us is. Suddenly all those little things that used to fill us up were great but not enough. We needed bigger things to fill us up. And we spend all our life searching for the bigger thing - money, technology, ideology, philosophy, marriage, ambition, career.
Ravi Zacharias notes profoundly that the only thing big enough to fill that yawing abyss within us - is the very concept of God. The wonder of a God who Loved so deeply that He made HImself flesh to save a creation that wanted nothing to do with Him.
There is something moving, mystical about this whole Christian story. Sometimes I fear when we approach God and His Word with just a Mind, we forget He called us to approach Him with our Heart and our Strength as well.
Why do we feel so ashamed to utter out words of Love for Him? Why do we fear being laughed at for daring to utter out how much we Love and worship this Divinity? Are we too proud to show our tears, our dependency? Are our clever little analysis and intellectual theories and apologetics another way of disengaging ourselves from humbleness?
Sometimes, I want to get down on my knees in church because the weight of His majesty forces no other response out of me. Sometimes my hands are yanked towards heaven because the gravity of His Love and sacrifice pull that response out of me. Sometimes His sorrow and anger cut me right to my sinful, black heart and moves me to cry, sometimes to sob.
And yet, I am aware that choosing to worship in Presbyterian circles means that I hold back and keep it in check. Sometimes I just raise my hands anyway because I think it's all for God, who cares what the congregation thinks. But I have never dared to kneel because it just seems so ostentatious, and everytime I cry at church, I try hastily to cover it up, to brush away tears for fear of making the person next to me uncomfortable.
At church camp, I had loads of fun worshipping with a 15 year old girl in service. 15 year old girls never question strong emotions. They are at the age and of the gender that wears emotions unabashedly on a sleeve. I was glad she was my companion at the last service at camp when we sang hymns. I did not need to explain to her my copious tears at all those ancient words of worship, she just smiled and understood. She herself had cried the other night as she listened to me, J and P play Big Sisters and advise her about all the things she needed to look out for in her walk as a young Christian woman. She told us she cried because she suddenly felt God was so beautiful.
Any how, I sm not entirely sure what I am trying to get at. I think I am still grappling with the whole 'The Word is Living' and the 'Gospel is Alive' realisation I got from camp. This is me making sense of madness I suppose.
God's story is so powerful. So. Alive.
These days I cannot seem to put it in any other better words.
recently read Donald Miller's "Blue Like Jazz" - non religious thoughts on christian spirituality. He helped crystallise some thoughts for me on the mystical quality of Christianity that we post-mod academics shy away from talking about because it sounds like so much hippie kook-dom.
Am putting away my intellectual Christian apologetics books for now and going back to attempting to read the Word cover to cover to understand my God.
At the end of the day, while I can theorise and explain Christianity, when people ask me why I believe I know what answer actually sits at the edge of my smart-arse tongue, at the edge of my adult heart.
It's an instinctive answer, a girly answer, a childish answer, an answer that smacks of dependency and emotions and illogic. An answer that I find hard to share with people who are not Christian for fear of feeding the myth that Christianity is a brainwashing cult.
But there it is in all its honesty. An answer that I cannot chase away.
I love Him. I love Him. I love Him.
and He loves me. Stupid, nasty, ugly, pretentious me.
The simple wonder of it all...He. Loves. me.
and for that, I will try my best to give Him everything I can.
I can't think of a story that has gripped my heart, mind and strength more than that.
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
i think therefore i mac
Drawing from some of the most pivotal points in his life, Steve
Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple Computer and of
Pixar Animation Studios, urged graduates to pursue their dreams and see
the opportunities in life's setbacks -including death itself.
"I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the
finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be
told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal.
Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed
around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed
college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She
felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so
everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his
wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that
they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got
a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy;
do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found
out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had
never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption
papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that
I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents'
savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I
couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here
I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So
I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best
decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the
ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food
with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get
one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of
what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to
be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction
in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every
drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and
didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy
class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif
typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful,
historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I
found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it
all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first
computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that
single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its
likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped
out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal
computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course
it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in
college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect
them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow
connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut,
destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started
Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years
Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion
company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation
- the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got
fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple
grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company
with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our
visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling
out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was
out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult
life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let
the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the
baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce
and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public
failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But
something slowly began to dawn on me - I still loved what I did. The turn
of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but
I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was
the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being
successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less
sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative
periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another
company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would
become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated
feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio
in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned
to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of
Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family
together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired
from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed
it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.
I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what
I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work
as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your
life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is
great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If
you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters
of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great
relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep
looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each
day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It
made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have
looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the
last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And
whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I
need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever
encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost
everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of
embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of
death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are
going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have
something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow
your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the
morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know
what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type
of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my
affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to
try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years
to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is
buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It
means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy,
where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into
my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the
tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they
viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it
turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable
with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest
I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this
to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely
intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to
die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one
has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very
likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It
clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but
someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be
cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't
be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's
thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner
voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and
intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth
Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a
fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought
it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before
personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with
typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in
paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and
overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog,
and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was
the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue
was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find
yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the
words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they
signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for
myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple Computer and of
Pixar Animation Studios, urged graduates to pursue their dreams and see
the opportunities in life's setbacks -including death itself.
"I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the
finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be
told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal.
Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed
around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed
college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She
felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so
everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his
wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that
they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got
a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy;
do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found
out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had
never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption
papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that
I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents'
savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I
couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here
I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So
I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best
decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the
ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food
with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get
one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of
what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to
be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction
in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every
drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and
didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy
class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif
typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful,
historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I
found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it
all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first
computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that
single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its
likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped
out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal
computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course
it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in
college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect
them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow
connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut,
destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started
Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years
Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion
company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation
- the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got
fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple
grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company
with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our
visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling
out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was
out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult
life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let
the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the
baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce
and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public
failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But
something slowly began to dawn on me - I still loved what I did. The turn
of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but
I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was
the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being
successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less
sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative
periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another
company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would
become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated
feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio
in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned
to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of
Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family
together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired
from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed
it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.
I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what
I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work
as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your
life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is
great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If
you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters
of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great
relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep
looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each
day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It
made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have
looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the
last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And
whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I
need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever
encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost
everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of
embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of
death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are
going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have
something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow
your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the
morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know
what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type
of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my
affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to
try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years
to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is
buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It
means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy,
where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into
my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the
tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they
viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it
turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable
with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest
I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this
to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely
intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to
die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one
has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very
likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It
clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but
someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be
cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't
be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's
thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner
voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and
intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth
Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a
fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought
it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before
personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with
typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in
paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and
overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog,
and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was
the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue
was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find
yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the
words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they
signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for
myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Friday, June 17, 2005
church camp 2005 afterthoughts part one
stealing the first line from Shadow's blog - "i loved church camp"
At the risk of sounding like a complete nut job - Somehow this year, I felt something almost tangibly shift inside me. As if the Holy Spirit was actually physically moving a part of my heathen self and gently replacing it with something new, something more of a Godly nature. And I could feel this change in nature come out in my actions and words at church camp itself.
I talked more to other people this year. I felt compelled to stop looking out for my security blankets of familiar friends and faces and reach out to strangers in the Body of Christ. I don't like doing that frankly - reaching out is something I have to actively remind myself to do because my instincts tell me to do otherwise. But it was really really nice to know that Christ had changed me enough to actually mov me to enjoy and draw happiness from talking to strangers.
There were times at church camp as I advised people in their christian walk or as I led Bible study, where I knew the things I was saying, the way I was saying them was truly not me at work. It sounds so corny and almost trite to say "Jesus/ God/the Holy Spirit was speaking through me", but that's exactly how it felt. Being reminded in 1 Peter the past few weeks that I am called not to be ashamed of the gospel helps me overcome the fear of saying this. I realise voicing out God's work is not trite or corny - it's real.
It's wonderfully, fearfully real to know the Gospel is alive. In me, in every Christian is something dreadfully, beautifully alive and waiting to evolve you from the inside out, waiting to emerge. If it sounds like something from Aliens, I would say the analogy is not without some merit. The work of the Holy Spirit within and how it changes us is not cute-sy Hallmark, Pass-It-On card stuff. Sometimes it is warm and fuzzy, but sometimes it is something frightening, challenging and painful.
A part of me would be listening to myself from the outside and thinking 'Wow. God you really really are alive and working something in and through me. Even now, I can feel myself changing because of you' Even more poignantly, this same feeling would come over as I listened to the pastors preach or listened to the affirming life-stories of fellow Christians at camp.
When Chris preached in the last sermon about how the gospel was something alive and passed on from person to person in a form that went beyond mere words, I understood and was moved. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word went through prophet after prophet, disciple after disciple, believer after believer.
And somehow in the centuries, this LIVING WORD, this strange amalgamation of written/spoken/emoted Word, came to me, came to Philip Jensen, came to Pastor Chris, came to each person in ARPC, came to anyone who cared to hear.
And this Living Word will continue to emerge, and go out from us to change lives.
I see it happening. My eyes are open. How amazing to see for the first time with great clarity what wiser men than I meant when they declared "The Gospel is Alive"
The fear of the Lord indeed is the beginning of wisdom, the start of the "great fountain of life" within the human heart.
so much to blog about. want to remember the people i met and the things i heard. but work calls . :)
At the risk of sounding like a complete nut job - Somehow this year, I felt something almost tangibly shift inside me. As if the Holy Spirit was actually physically moving a part of my heathen self and gently replacing it with something new, something more of a Godly nature. And I could feel this change in nature come out in my actions and words at church camp itself.
I talked more to other people this year. I felt compelled to stop looking out for my security blankets of familiar friends and faces and reach out to strangers in the Body of Christ. I don't like doing that frankly - reaching out is something I have to actively remind myself to do because my instincts tell me to do otherwise. But it was really really nice to know that Christ had changed me enough to actually mov me to enjoy and draw happiness from talking to strangers.
There were times at church camp as I advised people in their christian walk or as I led Bible study, where I knew the things I was saying, the way I was saying them was truly not me at work. It sounds so corny and almost trite to say "Jesus/ God/the Holy Spirit was speaking through me", but that's exactly how it felt. Being reminded in 1 Peter the past few weeks that I am called not to be ashamed of the gospel helps me overcome the fear of saying this. I realise voicing out God's work is not trite or corny - it's real.
It's wonderfully, fearfully real to know the Gospel is alive. In me, in every Christian is something dreadfully, beautifully alive and waiting to evolve you from the inside out, waiting to emerge. If it sounds like something from Aliens, I would say the analogy is not without some merit. The work of the Holy Spirit within and how it changes us is not cute-sy Hallmark, Pass-It-On card stuff. Sometimes it is warm and fuzzy, but sometimes it is something frightening, challenging and painful.
A part of me would be listening to myself from the outside and thinking 'Wow. God you really really are alive and working something in and through me. Even now, I can feel myself changing because of you' Even more poignantly, this same feeling would come over as I listened to the pastors preach or listened to the affirming life-stories of fellow Christians at camp.
When Chris preached in the last sermon about how the gospel was something alive and passed on from person to person in a form that went beyond mere words, I understood and was moved. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word went through prophet after prophet, disciple after disciple, believer after believer.
And somehow in the centuries, this LIVING WORD, this strange amalgamation of written/spoken/emoted Word, came to me, came to Philip Jensen, came to Pastor Chris, came to each person in ARPC, came to anyone who cared to hear.
And this Living Word will continue to emerge, and go out from us to change lives.
I see it happening. My eyes are open. How amazing to see for the first time with great clarity what wiser men than I meant when they declared "The Gospel is Alive"
The fear of the Lord indeed is the beginning of wisdom, the start of the "great fountain of life" within the human heart.
so much to blog about. want to remember the people i met and the things i heard. but work calls . :)
Friday, June 10, 2005
Tales from the Dorm Side
my first night in italy was spent in a 8 bed mixed dorm in Carlito's Way Hostel. The hostel itself was actually quite well designed and well thought out - good value for 20 Euros.
Out of 8 fellow dorm-mites, only 2 were gross. and boy, do they take the cake. and yes sadly, they are Americans - frat boys out to showcase their culture at its worst.
Seriously, many of the American travellers I met in Italy were doing their nation no favours - they cursed colourfully, they talked loudly about how "in america we would do things differently", showed off their serious lack of general knowledge, farted proudly and talked trash about their friends for the world to hear ("i mean dude, seriously, she thinks she's like da bomb but that girl is a beeeeyotch man...") bleargh.
it was like "American Pie 4: European Vacation".
It's hard not to roll your eyes when you hear 18 year old girls look at Michealangelo's Pieta and say in Valley Girl accents, "Who's Mary holding?"
hmmm....I dunno, sweetie, Ryan Seacrest perhaps?
but i digress into bitchiness.
back to tales of dorm horror.
So directions first: I had one Frat sleeping on the bunk above me and one Frat sleeping on the bunk beside me. A nice American 20 year old couple sleeping one bed down from me.
Frats had gone drinking till 2am. BY the time they stumbled back into dorm, everyone was asleep (till they bumbled in). Frat above me flounces heavily on bunk above mine and breathes slobberingly to sleep with sonorous snores.
Minutes later, I hear Frat 2 stumble in and attempt to wake up his buddy. I of course, being in the bunk below, get the choice view of seeing FRat 2's lovely beer-keg belly and boxer shorts as he tries to shake Frat 1 awake. Yuck.
Frat 2: Trip! TRip! wake up man...wake up...
Frat 1: Git the f**** away...lemme sleeep
Frat 2: TRip...wake up buddy...wake up...do it for the brotherhood man...come on Trip...I have always come through for you.
Frat 1: Shut the f**** up man...geeez
Frat 2: Trip....you owe me. come on, don't be selfish....TRip! (goes on for a good 15 min about the brotherhood)
Frat 1: whadya f****ing want? zzzzz
Frat 2: Trip, where are your condoms? I got a girl who wants me...where your condoms? come through for me buddy
(Frat 2goes on for good 10 min as his 'bro' curses him to go away in between tired mumbling. By then whole dorm must have been awake.)
GIrl from couple downstream of my bed: Listen guys, you are waking up everyone. If I just give you my condoms will you shut up and go away?
( does everyone in this room have condoms or something?? by this time, i am wondering if i have wandered onto set of some hormonal American high school movie.)
Trip agreeably takes condoms from the girl and stumbles out to Lord knows where. Twenty minutes later, I needed to go to the bathroom.
WAlked in to the shared bathroom and heard the showers going. My first thought was.....Oh.......crap.....they better not be in there. All I needed to hear was wonderful, tell tale groans before I hightailed out of there as fast as I could.
ew ew ew ew EW! what poor desperate backpackin' soul had Mr Beer Keg-Boxers Boy managed to con? ack.
attempting to fall asleep to the deep French Horn-like snores of Trip, the non condom sharing Frat, I thanked the fact that the second night I was going to have a private room with less drama.
thus ended my first night in the Eternal City. Go figure.
Out of 8 fellow dorm-mites, only 2 were gross. and boy, do they take the cake. and yes sadly, they are Americans - frat boys out to showcase their culture at its worst.
Seriously, many of the American travellers I met in Italy were doing their nation no favours - they cursed colourfully, they talked loudly about how "in america we would do things differently", showed off their serious lack of general knowledge, farted proudly and talked trash about their friends for the world to hear ("i mean dude, seriously, she thinks she's like da bomb but that girl is a beeeeyotch man...") bleargh.
it was like "American Pie 4: European Vacation".
It's hard not to roll your eyes when you hear 18 year old girls look at Michealangelo's Pieta and say in Valley Girl accents, "Who's Mary holding?"
hmmm....I dunno, sweetie, Ryan Seacrest perhaps?
but i digress into bitchiness.
back to tales of dorm horror.
So directions first: I had one Frat sleeping on the bunk above me and one Frat sleeping on the bunk beside me. A nice American 20 year old couple sleeping one bed down from me.
Frats had gone drinking till 2am. BY the time they stumbled back into dorm, everyone was asleep (till they bumbled in). Frat above me flounces heavily on bunk above mine and breathes slobberingly to sleep with sonorous snores.
Minutes later, I hear Frat 2 stumble in and attempt to wake up his buddy. I of course, being in the bunk below, get the choice view of seeing FRat 2's lovely beer-keg belly and boxer shorts as he tries to shake Frat 1 awake. Yuck.
Frat 2: Trip! TRip! wake up man...wake up...
Frat 1: Git the f**** away...lemme sleeep
Frat 2: TRip...wake up buddy...wake up...do it for the brotherhood man...come on Trip...I have always come through for you.
Frat 1: Shut the f**** up man...geeez
Frat 2: Trip....you owe me. come on, don't be selfish....TRip! (goes on for a good 15 min about the brotherhood)
Frat 1: whadya f****ing want? zzzzz
Frat 2: Trip, where are your condoms? I got a girl who wants me...where your condoms? come through for me buddy
(Frat 2goes on for good 10 min as his 'bro' curses him to go away in between tired mumbling. By then whole dorm must have been awake.)
GIrl from couple downstream of my bed: Listen guys, you are waking up everyone. If I just give you my condoms will you shut up and go away?
( does everyone in this room have condoms or something?? by this time, i am wondering if i have wandered onto set of some hormonal American high school movie.)
Trip agreeably takes condoms from the girl and stumbles out to Lord knows where. Twenty minutes later, I needed to go to the bathroom.
WAlked in to the shared bathroom and heard the showers going. My first thought was.....Oh.......crap.....they better not be in there. All I needed to hear was wonderful, tell tale groans before I hightailed out of there as fast as I could.
ew ew ew ew EW! what poor desperate backpackin' soul had Mr Beer Keg-Boxers Boy managed to con? ack.
attempting to fall asleep to the deep French Horn-like snores of Trip, the non condom sharing Frat, I thanked the fact that the second night I was going to have a private room with less drama.
thus ended my first night in the Eternal City. Go figure.
Italia - non basta una vita
i have so many thoughts about what i experienced in italy, i don't even know where to start blogging.
should i start with the funny bits like the Dorm of Fratboy Horror? share the simple stories of people i met and had cool conversations with? or should i go for socio-cultural observations on the Roman obsession with La Bella Figura aka Looking Good? or maybe go for the jugular - observations on the too-clever use of aesthetics by the early Catholic Church?
want to assemble my photos, sketches and journal into some kind of book but that will definitely take a while. and "a while" always means possibly never in the light of regular "things to do".
whatever. all i know is : I miss Italy.
Rome has dethroned New York to become my favourite city in the world. The BIg Apple has lost a bit of its lustre to me - no thanks in part to American politics.
I left my heart, not in San Francisco, but in Bella Roma. Florence is amazing, Siena charming and Elba gorgeous to a fault. But Rome beguiles me.
Somewhere among the multiple espresso bars, ancient ruins, dramatically manly men, dramatically vibrant women and ubiquitous dogs, I found a new place to fall in love with.
In Italy, every cup of coffee is heaven, sweet cold water springs free from spigots, antiquity and history lives with street corners and people gesture and speak with glorious movie-like abandon.
Life is a drama in Italy. Everything looks beautiful in the Mediterrenean's sharp white sunlight. Shadows are starker, features are sharper, Skin tones are bronzer, gestures are larger.
So much still unseen and un-understood. The old saying is true. Non basta una vita - a lifetime is not enough for Italy.
I read once that Italy is one of those places which is lovely to visit and fantasise about but best not to actually live in. One must be aware of the reality of corruption, slow bureaucracy, bizarre political choices (hello...pornstar politicians?) and a papacy that is still grappling with the truth of the world.
Still, love is always momentarily blinding. I am happy to fantasise about my ideal Italy for now.
I will definitely be back someday soon.
should i start with the funny bits like the Dorm of Fratboy Horror? share the simple stories of people i met and had cool conversations with? or should i go for socio-cultural observations on the Roman obsession with La Bella Figura aka Looking Good? or maybe go for the jugular - observations on the too-clever use of aesthetics by the early Catholic Church?
want to assemble my photos, sketches and journal into some kind of book but that will definitely take a while. and "a while" always means possibly never in the light of regular "things to do".
whatever. all i know is : I miss Italy.
Rome has dethroned New York to become my favourite city in the world. The BIg Apple has lost a bit of its lustre to me - no thanks in part to American politics.
I left my heart, not in San Francisco, but in Bella Roma. Florence is amazing, Siena charming and Elba gorgeous to a fault. But Rome beguiles me.
Somewhere among the multiple espresso bars, ancient ruins, dramatically manly men, dramatically vibrant women and ubiquitous dogs, I found a new place to fall in love with.
In Italy, every cup of coffee is heaven, sweet cold water springs free from spigots, antiquity and history lives with street corners and people gesture and speak with glorious movie-like abandon.
Life is a drama in Italy. Everything looks beautiful in the Mediterrenean's sharp white sunlight. Shadows are starker, features are sharper, Skin tones are bronzer, gestures are larger.
So much still unseen and un-understood. The old saying is true. Non basta una vita - a lifetime is not enough for Italy.
I read once that Italy is one of those places which is lovely to visit and fantasise about but best not to actually live in. One must be aware of the reality of corruption, slow bureaucracy, bizarre political choices (hello...pornstar politicians?) and a papacy that is still grappling with the truth of the world.
Still, love is always momentarily blinding. I am happy to fantasise about my ideal Italy for now.
I will definitely be back someday soon.
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