the end of the affair

i did not mean to do it but i spent my entire morning sitting at a coffee shop trying to finish Graham Greene's The End of the Affair. It just got so engrossing I decidded to push aside thoughts of work.

I am floored by Greene's insight and his ability to put simple words to the tangled, complex struggle between wanting to do the right thing for God and wanting to run back to the security of the wrong things.

what an amazing work - deceiving in its brevity.

Think I shall pick up The Power and the Glory next. Wow.

The Art of Life

Was musing with RBF over dinner about life choices and how they shape the person you become. It's amazing to consider how a million tiny choices that we make moment by moment seem to edge us towards a better or worse path. Only when you look back at all the decisions you have made thus far do you suddenly see clearly how you slowly but surely created the person that you are this moment. How strange and humbling to know your "Yes" and "No" to whatever comes your way leave indentations in our clay-like selves: what kind of life, what kind of self have we sculpted ourselves into?

I always liked the analogy that our lives were like a giant carpet being woven. On one side, you can only see a crazy criss crossing patchwork of threads that seem to make no sense even though you thought you swore you wove correctly. But when you turn it around, you suddenly see the pattern in full glory and all the stuff suddenly makes sense.

Sometimes I think if God left me completely alone to paint the picture of my life with my limited imagination and limited understanding of my character, I would have made one screwy mess of it.

I can totally see how "but for the grace of God, go I".

Without God making me wise up to my inner idiot, I would have turned into one of those girls I hate. I would have become one of those awful, fashionably left-wing, liberal jerks with a smart mouth full of empty diatribes about the unenlightened of society. I would have painted my opponents with broad stereotyping strokes. I would have loudly and intelligently backed all the "right" social causes without the humble wisdom to put in the tough work required in the face of unlovable human beings. I would be a terrible, affected windbag with words of sound and fury, signifying nothing. I would have been a pretentious awful, awful person.

Without God's merciful revelation of my insecurities and healing power of Love, I would have probably gotten myself into countless flings with the worst sorts of men. I would have given up everything for a cheap semblance of affection. I would not have understood what real love looked or felt like. Though I don't really know much of her life, (and I don't want to insult or oversimplify what she has gone through) somedays I think I would not have been that far off from taking the path Annabel Chong took. I read about her and I don't feel disgust for all that she has done. I just think how realistically speaking, it would have been entirely possible for me to have decided to do the things she did. I think of her and wonder what I would say if I had the chance to have coffee wih her.

For me, without God, my life would have been mud. A long wallow in the dark, shifting quicksand.

With God, though...

...My life is on solid rock and one sure footstep after another, I know I can navigate even the most precarious lands though I see no map in sight.

...and my days are sun-kissed where even the most melancholy and tear-filled days are edged with the gold of hope.

To my fellow traveller CL, its good to know yet another who understands the taste of a life sweetened by God's timely and kindly revelations.

How good it is to be Beloved.

And better to know that the good life is already a gift within everyone's grasp.

Oh, that more should reach out and taste it for what it is.

When You're Happy and You Know It

"It won't do
to stir a deep desire,
to fan a hidden fire
that can never burn true.

I know your name,
I know your skin,
I know the way
these things begin;

But I don't know
how I would live with myself,
what I'd forgive of myself
if you don't go."

It's nearly midnight and I am clearing emails that have racked up while I was away in China. Am killing time before I can treat myself to a midnight cab ride home. Meanwhile, Suzanne Vega's Caramel is doing a honeyed, languid drift from my iTunes.

I liked Caramel the first time I heard it because Suzanne Vega's smoky voice makes it sound amazing. It's a bittersweet ode, a melancholy tribute to the cunning tangle that poor romantic choices weave around the human heart.

It would make an apt companion to Ha Jin's novel Waiting. Intrigued by how fast R and RBF had thumbed through the book in Xinjiang, I nabbed the well-thumbed copy and finished it during the hours spent in Beijing traffic.

Waiting is about frustrated romance - it's about the 18 years of waiting endured by officer Lin Kong's vibrant girlfriend Manna before he gets the divorce he has been craving for from his homely wife Shuyu. It's not a pretty tale and though nobody dies physically, they die emotionally. The realisation Lin Kong reaches about himself and his women is truly tragic. With restraint and reserve, Ha Jin paints a stark picture of how so many lives and budding romances come to be lived in quiet desperation.

In my 20s, I had throughly convinced myself I was in Love. I was too green to understand it was not Love but simply Desire. Desire can grip your heart so tightly that "having a crush" is no misnomer. Desire can crush your noblest thoughts and senses into nothingness if you let it. Desire can make such an incredible fool of you - you rejoice with crumbs; you weep in paranoia and fear; you loll around the dark mud of your insecurities; you shut your ears to truth and wrap yourself in a cocoon of martyrdom and lies.

With 30 round the corner, I think I have learned for myself how to tell Love from Desire. Love is about choice and commitment: an adult decision to give and receive both bittersweet truth and the merciful rain of kindness. Desire is simply not interested in all that. Love is Grace - a bit of heaven on earth that any of us can dispense if we humble ourselves enough.

I think I can say I have found firm ground. Somehow in the middle of a Good Friday solitary prayer in Kashgar - the kind of prayer which my 20something self would have happily let spiral into maudlin self-indulgence - I realised I have come to some strange restful place. I was pleasantly surprised to look for the usual tears and self-flagellation - and yet discover they simply were not there anymore.

It's a place between knowing - finally - exactly what I want in a man and yet trusting that it will be far better for God to keep me single than to settle for anything less. And being able to look beyond that to Love the world beyond.

It's the kind of thing you keep telling yourself in your 20s but are secretly unsure if you are not just deceiving yourself.

It's a completely different and liberating feeling to finally realise it's the truth. And that i understand and find pleasure and peace in it.

In Kashgar, I saw rows and rows of amazingly green grass crowned by apricot trees. It was still early Spring and the sharp bite of Winter was still in the air. Some of the branches were still dry and dead but oh - the promise! - the promise of Spring and Summer was pushing out in the sweetest hues of cream and pink. Those apricot trees set on grass so amazingly, vividly green have become the most beautiful thing in my mind's eye. It is a picture of Spring, and Hope and Promises Fulfilled.

The apostle Paul declared passionately "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!" (2 Corinthians 5:17)

Indeed, my dear dear God, my sweet Saviour Christ, the old has gone. And I believe, with a fresh heart, that the new has and will come for me.

I think I am happy.

And when you are happy and you know it, and you really want to show it -

- You clap your hands.