Round Round Around

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I Hate Being Taken-for-Granted
This is really testing my patience... On Thursday, I wrote about I got so annoyed with this professor who I felt was like taking me for granted.

Well he did is again today and early Saturday morning, I received this email from someone else in the project team who gave me a task, saying that that professor asked her to email the task to me... then he called later that morning to ask me to do yet something else... What am I? Just because I am a little nice and so I can be stepped all over? I really hate being taken for granted...

Codfishy's Testimony
Well, I have just started to pen down my testimony as part of an exercise of the "Becoming a Fisher of Men" workshop I am undergoing throug now in church :) Will share this testimony when I have it done.

Going Round and Round and Round
I really wanna complain ah... Maybe I don't know the rationale behind having Townlink buses but then it is just plain confusing trying to get from one place in Pasir Ris to another... Apparently, there is a difference between buses with a "T" plate and those without... Let's just say that in the end, what could have take me just 15 minutes to travel to my cell group mate's house for dinner became a 45 minutes tour of pasir ris just because I boarded the wrong bus. But nevermind, in the end, the sumptuous dinner that my brother-in-christ cooked helped make up for it :) YUM.

Why Me, God?
I stayed the night in my brother-in-christ's house since it was late by the time we finished dinner with our other cell group mates and since I have to come back to Pasir Ris again early Sunday morning for church service. That night, I did not sleep well and was reflecting a lot on my life and how sometimes things just seem so unfair. In my mind, I just kept asking God "why me?". It was just a heart wrenching morning.

Letting Go of Your Past
Part of the question I was asking God was addressed that morning by the sermon "How to Let Go of Your Past". Nonetheless, it serves as a good lesson to learn and to remember...

It has been mentioned that we have 3 types of emotional garbage we collect:

• We rehearse our resentments
• We remember our regrets
• We reinforce our remorse

In learning to let go of our past, we must:

• First, give up our grudges as they are liken to cannon balls which weigh us down as we move on in life.
  
  Indeed, bearing grudges will never change the past and sometimes, the person who we hold a grudge against might not even know we have a grudge. In the end, we ourselves are hurt, not the other person. By holding grudges, we are also opening ourselves to others to control our emotional state.
  
  Ephesians 4:31-32 (NIV) says:
  31 Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. 32 Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.
  
  Job 18:4 (GN) says:
  You are only hurting yourself with your anger.
  
  
• Second, give up our grief. Grief is a part of life and is a process which helps us to move forward. God uses pain and sorrow to help us to grow. Just as how David responded to the death of his child, we can cope with grief by:
  
  
  • Accepting what cannot be changed (2 Samuel 12:20-23)
  • Play it down and pray it up (2 Samuel 12:20b) - This reminds me a SMS I had once received which says "When faced with difficulties, don't say God we have a big problem but problem, we have a big God"
  • Focus on what's left and not what's lost (2 Samuel 12:24)
  
  
• Third, give up our guilt. We have a forgiving and gracious God and rather than condemn ourselves, confess unto God, don't be a humpty dumpty; broken and all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put humpty together again.
  

Heavy learning for the morning and I went home soon to have a long sleep but not after a steamboat dinner at a friend's chalet nearby.