It is just gone. We’re in 2025 already, half a month has actually even passed!

If I can say quickly one thing I learnt or observed, experienced and understood, it is that today’s instant noodle + instant everything culture fuelled by the social media mass of triviality and overload of information we don’t need to know have made us stupid, unable to hold a thought and let our thinking goes any deeper than when the next feed refreshes. Mind you, I use social media rarely, yet I can still feel that effect. So, I shudder to think what idiocy I will nurture myself into if I let myself drift with the modern flow.

Having said that, am I not also too busy to sit down and think? Well, at least too busy to write my thoughts for the past half a year! That’s something I should hopefully change this year? 😬🤞 Meanwhile, here’s me stealing some time out to pen down a few thoughts reflecting on the year gone.

A perspective to start with

Not my perspective, or rather, it’s what I have learnt about God’s perspective.

I see that He’s not interested in what we are interested in—such as, we don’t want to appear stupid, but He wants to humble us.  So, He makes us feel unable. 

He get us working on things He wants us to work on.  He has a different agenda altogether.  Even in what appears to be answers to our petitions, the provision from God often turns out not as expected nor imagined. He provides in His own way, whether you are open to it or not, or trust Him or not.  That’s what happened, He has truly blessed me through people and in ways not as I had asked or expected. I learnt we need to be open to His ways, and we’ll receive blessings beyond what we can imagine. In the surprises He sends our way, He changes the way we value what is important, beautiful and worthwhile. He corrects them.

We don’t understand His love, that kind of love. He is interested in turning us to be like Christ—to see, think and feel like Christ—which is the best thing for us. But we don’t have such concepts in ourselves.

You learn most in secret places🧎‍♀️

Because His school is mostly in unseen places. Have you been taught most in the most secret chambers of your heart that noone sees, in quiet ways that you don’t expect?

I do. Certainly didn’t expect to learn anything from some situations (because I almost think nothing of them): it could be a passing conversation, an offhand detail of something I found out by accident, could be a misunderstanding, or just another train of thought, or just something that’s as an appendix. But the biggest change is through accidental events no one thinks of or expect to get anything from. Yet God ordains it. So we know for certain it is His work.

More than that, I feel that the most effective way to teach us is unseen, because it is in revealing what’s in us we didn’t expect to be there. Especially those things we didn’t think or were even sure not there before. For example, discovering how the human heart can change so rapidly. Say, think of a time where you once find yourself wanting something so badly, and so sure that will be your dream job or that it will fulfil your longing. And then over time, something shifts and you no longer want it as much.  You are okay to not have it, you are okay to let it go. You even think it’s a good—or better—idea to not have it. It drops off your desire list, just like that. For various reason or no reason, quietly, gradually, and often times instantly. Strange, isn’t it? I’m sure it’s not just me.

The fickleness of the human heart, if we know ourselves, why do you want to follow your heart so eagerly? Be careful when you are too eager for something as the heart is deceitful indeed.

How long it takes for you to learn a lesson? ⏱️⏱️⏱️

If you have a student like me, you gotta patient like God. That much I know.

One thing I have been learning, or be made to learn repeatedly is: to think kindly of others, and to be kind, because it is always better to be kind.

It is better to be kind, no matter what.

How hard is it to learn the lesson?

Very hard.

For we are dull, and forgetful. We are revengeful, and selfish, short-sighted and just plain stupid. Stiff-necked people is the right way to describe it.

Thank God I do learn and can certainly see growth in this area, still could be better yet. And thank God He’s patient with me still.

There’s no shortcuts in baking a good cake 🍰

As I said right at the beginning, the instant noodle culture we are in makes us stupid. Not only so, it plays a big part in also making us flippant, impatient and non-resilient, just a package of all the bad things to produce a rubbish outcome.

I think that’s because it discourages deep thinking as it affords little if any quietness at all. It is like: an instant vs a long thought-out process.  Of course you get a different output. Try shortcuting your cooking, or baking. Beat the egg half way and do away with it, dump everything all at once against the recipe and take it out of the oven just 3 mins into it. What can you expect but a half (if that) baked goods? Likewise, half baked mushy products are produced by the constant entertainment and instant connecting and disconnecting and incessant displaying and endless stimulation we immerse ourselves in today.  

I see a lot of restlessless, people are fidgety. Instead of sharing insights after duly processing it like an adult, we live streamed our crisis like little children. A little annoyance, a little disturbance, just a common interruption that nudges past any normal person’s day is enough to dislodge people from their quiet, and they instantly whinge to their friends or publish it to the wider world. How is that helpful?

Our actions are impulse more than purpose driven. Why do you speak in the first place? To help your thought process or just to let out a fart you can’t keep within? Are we doing it for a thoughtful conversation or just a knee jerk reaction? If it is the latter, it happens and passes, and you learn nothing. You’re left as you were and just wasted a growth opportunity.

There are times when talking it out helps us think things through—I’ve certainly benefited greatly doing just that with some people, but after having thought through it myself—but many other times not only it doesn’t clarify for you, it confuses and muddles the air for others too.

There are some struggles which better not to be shared (not in the first instance anyway), but to go through in your own mind to know in the end it is okay not to unload it on to others, because you have seen things God wants you to see through the wrestling process.

Little kids scream at little things, grown-ups should do better. Wouldn’t it be better if we learn to take and swallow it in maturity? Wasn’t it said when you hit a hollow gong it gives a loud noise because it is empty inside? It calls for introspection if I am so noisy each time there is a little cross.  

“Affliction is a pill, which, being wrapt up in patience and quiet submission, may be easily swallowed; but discontent chews the pill, and so embitters the soul.”

– John Flavel

So don’t keep chewing your pills.

I was reading an organisational psychologist Amantha Imber who wrote about people pouring their hearts out at work:

Being professional doesn’t mean being a robot. But it does mean being intentional.

Some parts of ourselves belong at work. Others belong with a therapist or a friend over coffee.

Isn’t she right? That’s some wisdom from the world for you (or just common sense really).

Sometimes the kind of complaints I hear are jut odd. Say, such as women who whinge about their period pains and lament (more like whining) over the fact that women have their period while men don’t. What can I say? That I agree and I wish your husband will start having period too? The appropriate response is to ignore it altogether when you’re complaining about hard facts you should be thankful for. I certainly am thankful I have monthly period just like a normal woman, albeit the pain. It reminds me I’m created as a woman and my body is designed to carry and nurture. Although I may not bear children in this life, it reminds me He creates me as a woman with all that comes with it, and thank God my body is functioning as it should. It is simply not something to complain about.

He really is the One

I have been blessed with people who are true friends with whom I could share deeply at different times on different things.

It occurs to me recently what that’s like. Imagine a big house in chaos, and each person gets to see just part of it (e.g., one room), but there are many more unseen by anyone. I may have a true friend who knows a part of me with its warts and all, as it really is. Another friend knows yet a different ugly part. But only God knows all of them. Only God goes through with me all of them. No one else can because we humans have no such capacity.

I hear sometimes people say that their spouse sees and knows everything – I don’t actually believe that is a healthy way to go in a marriage relationship (not that you should hide something from them in fear or in shame—of course not). I guess it depends on the maturity of the spouse too, because it isn’t always helpful nor is it good for them or the marriage or their relationship with others for you to blurt out everything in your bowel all the time.

A friend of mine said to me, ‘We don’t lie, we tell them as much as they can handle.’ I think she’s right. She also reminded me that God doesn’t reveal everything to us, but only as much as we can handle, or need to know, or good for us. I remember decades ago when my Dad was still around, Mom once told me she never once told him the slanders people did behind his back, because it’s not helping him to know that. She carried that herself and help him in ways she can to make things better.

My friend was giving me in a little insight that married life isn’t and cannot be what the the world would like to idolise it to be. The right way to go through all of things in life is to go through them with God. Tendency to put the weight of your soul on someone or something isn’t limited to the married, so we all need to be careful. That’s just a natural tendency of being a human, or I can even say, in being a woman.  But remember, keep with God, don’t drift with the world. 

Only God take us as we are, everyone else has no capacity for that. Only God loves you for your good. People love you for their good, or your shared good, or always with traces of inevitable mixed motives. Noone is all of your life, and nothing else is, only God is.  All things pass in time.

Alright, I’ll paused here. If my writing in this post feels jumbled or cluttered and all over the place, that is because I am 😬 (sorry if it’s a painful read). But I gotta say, It is just quite amazing I can find time to write at all! For I have been chasing my tail, perhaps more due to chasing many people’s tails too in the lead up to the Engage Conference. It’s a worthwhile conference, glad to be a part of organising it, just lots to do in preparation. Yea, picture that: a chicken without the head chasing many tails 😆

Anyway, hope to write more (only after the Engage Conference I’m sure). For now, it’s only week 3 in 2025, and this is the most ridiculous thing I’ve seen this year so far: