relief and rest

this week was absolutely great.

1. got my scholarship offer from nus. woohoo!
2. cleared ippt once and for all. pretty well done too, considering that i haven't done much training since bmt...
3. had lots of fun during unit cohesion. running 4.2km, playing soccer and prawn fishing at east coast park are things i don't do too often haha.
4. attended my first two driving lessons. i've only done daytona once or twice, so driving a car was quite the exhilarating experience.
5. got a new phone to replace my second-hand five-year-old phone which was becoming very uncooperative.
6. cleared my final theory trial test which makes me eligible for the actual one.
7. had a good talk with my parents about family time, and it yielded results.
8. churchwide bible study was very relevant to me and allowed me to get my bearings right again.

i'm sure it's certainly enough to make anyone leap for joy twice over. but it wasn't easy for me the past many weeks. i was on the verge of giving up on my faith and on everything else. i couldn't even feel my soul and spirit anymore, as though it had simply disappeared. a walking zombie, bitter and resentful, i was for quite a while. and worse still, i couldn't (or at least i thought so) find anyone to talk to in detail about it. i tried to handle everything on my own and i felt like dying. i mean if you've been a christian all your life, your parents are devout and you're always looked upon as someone steady in the faith, who do you go to talk about such issues? you would think that your parents would be appalled and threaten to disown you; you consider the possibility that spiritual leaders would start the preaching you've heard a thousand times before and obviously would not work in such situations; you guess that church members would just give you the "huh why oh okay" and probably not understand a thing after you've tried your best to explain what a nothingness is. and it's not failure to see logic or struggles with real-life problems you can talk about. it's simply spontaneous emotional and spiritual self-destruction. thoughts like "screw it, i just want to get away from all of this" kind-of-thing when nothing is actually happening on the surface.

i can tell you that it is far easier to pull through the toughest physical trainings or hectic days with a strong and positive spirit than to lead a seemingly worry-free lifestyle with a dead soul. it was plain torture for me for the past weeks. i didn't realise that my soul was getting killed bit by bit with every day i was too lazy to seek God and every time i was sharply challenged by my army mates, until it was too late and nothing just seemed to matter anymore. i didn't want to serve in ministry, i hated my parents' prayer meetings at home, i thought of every possible reason why my beliefs were so worthless and the list of !#$%^ can go on. simply put, i thought everyone thought i sucked, and i thought everything else sucked too.

by the grace of God, i managed to rediscover the 'initial love' for God which pastor kong was sharing during churchwide bible study. that started happening before this week, so it wasn't this series of fortunate events (haha.) that made me think "oooh God i suddenly love you so much just because you've been nice to me". it's something that came straight out of my heart and took me over, dismissed the negativity building up within me and scrubbed me clean of all the dirt and muck i allowed to accumulate onto my spirit. i don't know how it happened but maybe God thought that He'd stretched me enough for now and pulled me out of this horrible mess just as quickly as i fell into it.

so i went back to God and i tried to see things in a different light. i cried out and attempted to love a God i couldn't relate to anymore. i told Him i had enough of this walking on my own, and sure enough He came to my side and picked my tired, weary self up on His back. i really did set my heart on rediscovering my relationship with God, not because someone told me to or it was the right thing to do, but because i simply had to do it. and in those kind of situations, meekness, dedication and humility are at their best because now you're so desperate for anything to hold on to. He then swiftly cut all the binding chains that were slowly pulling me apart and nursed my bruises. i realised that life must really be walked with God. and somehow, all things did indeed work together for good to those that love Him, to those that are the called according to His purpose.

well we've all heard before that what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger. and in future i'd better tend my vineyards properly first, before anything else.