Seriously need a breakthrough in my life right now. A revolution, or some sort of cleansing fire to purge me from inside out.

Lord, You know me best
This faltering soul needs a rest
To the end, it is You whom I’d follow
To fill this dark, lifeless empty hollow

I need Your living water, Your joy, Your fire
To please You is my heart’s true desire
Let me not run towards earthly evils
Nor stumble in my quest to best the devil

Father, Your holy strength is all I seek
Help me, Lord, for I am weak
A broken heart is all I have
Heal me, Abba, in You I’m safe

I really cannot do this alone.. I am tired of being mediocre, tired of being bound to senseless thoughts, I really want to shine for Your glory.

I know only You can fill the hole in my heart, O God..

Dry is the soul which does not seek the Maker to fill its vase;

I yearn for the Lord, crying out for Him to help me stand straight and keep going on, when my spirit is so tired and every sinew and bone within me is thirsty for the rejuvenating power of God’s grace and love..

These few days have been really tiring for me – physically and emotionally. When there are too many things to think about, it is easy to lose track and lose focus on the most important things.  And so I always ask God to help me prioritise, to focus on the truly important stuff in my life..

It is difficult to let God take control, when you want to be in control of your life.. but I realised some things are really out of my control.. So I surrender willingly, trusting Him, looking forward to His plans for me.. Because without complete surrendering, I would have been driven mad thinking about all the senseless, pointless stuff..

It is really not easy to direct attention at things that command more importance when there are other matters that keep biting at your heart.. when thoughts go astray at times and when emotions drive one to despair and hopelessness – that is when the spirit dries up and the soul is lost, confused, crumbling down like a house of cards.. empty, foolish, vain.

All too often I find myself like a child, confused and lost without direction, losing sight of God to help me go on.

So I pray, and pray, and pray.. and God slowly restores my spirit to go on, fills me up from the fountain of life to spur me on.. Even if I stumble and fall, I shall get up and tread on slowly, one step at a time, because I now have an awesome wonderful Creator in heaven who watches over me.

Oh, how my heart longs for Him and yearns for His love! What will I do, who will I be without my God?

Wonderful, awesome, amazing God..

Pardon the total randomness. Just needed to vent.. from the bottom of a heart that seeks God’s loving warmth..

Sometimes, I just wonder why I cannot go all out and do my best. In the past, I have always wanted to beat people I know I am capable of beating academically. When I cannot be better than them, I still am happy because I know where I stand and I know I did my best.

Now, the feeling of always wanting to be the best is not there anymore – I think it went away during secondary school. When I went to KTT, the feeling of being inferior is so overpowering that not to be the worst person in class is good enough for me. So I scrape by whatever results I get.

Since I came to know God, I know that I should honour Him no matter what results I get. I know that if I get good results, then it is His blessing and not my own work (of course I have to work for it, but hard work does not guarantee good results eh?). The problem is, how much do I want to honour Him through my achievements? Sometimes I look deep down in my heart and ask myself the real reason I want to be the best and beat the rest.

Is it to honour God? I get the feeling that it is not honouring Him if I always want to compete. I do not want to compete now; rather, I just want to give my best. In a sense, I am competing against myself. Whenever I get a less-than-ideal result, I will always get upset with myself because I know I can do better. Then I feel guilty because I could not honour God.

Then came the nagging feeling of the reason I want to be better. Somehow I feel that I am missing the whole point. Someone dear to me once said that in good times or bad, we must praise God. Yet I realise how difficult it is to praise God when I do not get a good grade. Can people REALLY honour God when they are in a bad or difficult situation?

If they can, then I know I have so much to learn, so much more to pray for, and so much more to strive for. In the past, whenever I get bad grades, I always say: God, why can’t I be better? Now, I just say: God, help me do my best.

So from now on, I will settle for whatever grade I get, because at least I know I did my best. Now my only issue is with me not doing my best, not pushing myself hard enough and not really going all out, straining every muscle and ounce of strength and Newton of force in my body, mind and soul to keep going.

Others can do it, why can I not? I always ask God this; to help me go further, one step more, one minute longer, to be my best.

I did not get the bursary or reward for the winter semester. My grades were not high enough to qualify. Money is not the issue – it has always been part of me to want to be able to prove something. Now, I just want to prove that with Christ, nothing is impossible, so I can take pride in Him.

So I want to go all out and do my best, start being someone with a real purpose, direction and integrity and stop settling for whatever I feel is enough. Because enough is never enough, not when God has blessed us with so much abundance that to give our best for Him is like taking a pail of water out of the sea.

Gotta go – need to study for Friday’s test..

It really is amazing how the Almighty God can bring changes and can work wonders in people’s lives. Before coming to believing in Christ, I always thought Christians are some other species, with different ways of thinking and different attitude. There always seemed to be some kind of barrier between me and them. Somehow their seemingly undiminished enthusiasm, boundless joy and at times annoying behaviors made me think that Christians are overrated.

Now that I am part of ‘them’, it feels strangely exciting, like a little boy that got his birthday present early. As I start to walk with Christ in my life, and as I learn more, I came to realise that the joy is genuine, and now I know why people want to spread the word about Jesus so much to other people.

Lately, something is different with me. I know that prayer works, but never had any idea that God actually listens and gives us more than we asked for. I wanted to change – to be a better man, what God intended me to be. In the past, I tried, yes. Tried to read the Bible and tried to devote more time to prayers. Then the enthusiasm died. It came and went like embers in a haystack under a windy dark sky.

I was afraid to be the seed that fell on stony ground – sprouting roots quickly but dying quickly too. I wanted to be different. So I said to God: “Hey, I wanna be what You want me to be. So please help me change.”

My pastor at the church I go to then told me about the upcoming baptism, which I decided to take part in. Strangely, it just feels right. Today, at the baptism class, I finally had a revelation – it was all coming together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. God did want me to change, and He made that possible by blessing me with an unexplained, sudden ability to concentrate a lot more compared to the past. He gave me the desire to learn, to study. I remembered how hard it was to make myself revise.

A verse in Colossians 3 struck me – it was as if God was telling me what He wanted me to do exactly:

Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. Because of these, the wrath of God is coming. You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. But now you must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.

Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.

Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

I stumbled across this on Facebook’s viral group – “We support the use of the name Allah by all Malaysians” – which I did not join, of course. (My principle – when in doubt, be passive.)

But the posts in the blogs are really enlightening. I did not even know that there is a Charter of Rights between St. Catherine’s monastery and Prophet Muhammad. The church has been under Muslim’s protection for ages, which is really amazing and makes me gush with gratitude.

In 628 AD, a delegation from St. Catherine’s Monastery came to Prophet Muhammed and requested his protection. He responded by granting them a charter of rights, which I reproduce below in its entirety. St. Catherine’s Monastery is located at the foot of Mt. Sinai and is the world’s oldest monastery. It possesses a huge collection of Christian manuscripts, second only to the Vatican, and is a world heritage site. It also boasts the oldest collection of Christian icons. It is a treasure house of Christian history that has remained safe for 1400 years under Muslim protection.

The Promise to St. Catherine:

“This is a message from Muhammad ibn Abdullah, as a covenant to those who adopt Christianity, near and far, we are with them.

Verily I, the servants, the helpers, and my followers defend them, because Christians are my citizens; and by God! I hold out against anything that displeases them.

No compulsion is to be on them. Neither are their judges to be removed from their jobs nor their monks from their monasteries. No one is to destroy a house of their religion, to damage it, or to carry anything from it to the Muslims’ houses.

Should anyone take any of these, he would spoil God’s covenant and disobey His Prophet. Verily, they are my allies and have my secure charter against all that they hate.

No one is to force them to travel or to oblige them to fight. The Muslims are to fight for them. If a female Christian is married to a Muslim, it is not to take place without her approval. She is not to be prevented from visiting her church to pray. Their churches are to be respected. They are neither to be prevented from repairing them nor the sacredness of their covenants.

No one of the nation (Muslims) is to disobey the covenant till the Last Day (end of the world).”

The first and the final sentence of the charter are critical. They make the promise eternal and universal. Muhammed asserts that Muslims are with Christians near and far straight away rejecting any future attempts to limit the promise to St. Catherine alone. By ordering Muslims to obey it until the Day of Judgment the charter again undermines any future attempts to revoke the privileges. These rights are inalienable. Muhammed declared Christians, all of them, as his allies and he equated ill treatment of Christians with violating God’s covenant.

A remarkable aspect of the charter is that it imposes no conditions on Christians for enjoying its privileges. It is enough that they are Christians. They are not required to alter their beliefs, they do not have to make any payments and they do not have any obligations. This is a charter of rights without any duties!

The document is not a modern human rights treaty but even thought it was penned in 628 A.D. it clearly protects the right to property, freedom of religion, freedom of work, and security of the person.

Go to this link to read the entire article: http://pahlawanvolunteers.wordpress.com/2010/01/03/prophet-muhammad’s-promise-to-christians/

It really is encouraging to read a different view on the controversial issue of church attacks recently in Malaysia. And Marina Mahathir has a post in her blog that sums up the conflicts in a very modern, compassionate way that encompasses the real spirit that true Malaysians really WANT in 1Malaysia.

http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com/2010/01/confident-people-do-not-get-confused.html

I have hope, still.