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.