Healing for help

Psalms 30:2 ~

O LORD my God, I cried to you for help,

and you have healed me.

 This is a Psalm of a cry for help and an experience of being saved from mortal danger. Perhaps it refers to a sickness, hence the healing. But mortal danger and the threat to life can come in many forms.

 Whatever form it takes though, our one desire is to be rid of it quickly and painlessly.

 I am wrecking my brain for a story in the bible where God airlifts the person out of his troubles. The only ones i know are the ones on their way home namely, Enoch & Elijah.

In fact, this imagery came vividly to me once when I was so sick and tired of some ongoing troubles I had: I saw a huge 'X' over a common rescue scene - a helicopter with a lifeline lowered! The message to me was,"no,not this way". It was reinforced by another impression I had perhaps a year earlier when I felt God say to me, "you need to walk though this"- and immediately I recall the famous line from Psalm  23, 'the valley of the shadow of death..'.

We want help; we get healing.

God takes us through the tunnel, the dark, the death, and makes us more well, more complete, more whole. The help God gives is not a short-term relief but an eternity-set goodness ... We know honestly that we don't have the patience for ourselves; the way we keep making those same silly mistakes and horrendous self-centred ways we inflict others and ourselves with pain. God alone has the distance of patience, goodness, forgiveness, and gentle enabling we need to unlearn, and to relearn about... life and love.

Thing is when we deny or ignore the dark, it doesn't go away. God's way is to vanquish it; to strip it of its power over us. He does this by taking us by the hand and walking with us into those dark places so that His Light may illumine and take away the dread- as we discover that these 'monsters under our bed' are really   not.so.powerful.

Cry to God for help - and get ready to be healed.

the loving and gay thing to do?

i sent this into our national paper, The Straits Times after one correspondent wrote about how his lesbain friends were to him 'model citizens' and suggested that if singapore wants to be a global city, she must be more tolerant and accept gays.

Subject: the loving thing to do

I am married and have kids; a girl and a boy. Both marriage and raising children are hard work.

The funny thing is Devan’s friends seem to have it all. What a sweet picture he has painted of his lesbian friends. Interestingly, they are high achievers with, I would suspect, quite a bit of money on their side. Artificial insemination is no polyclinic deal. I am not sure what bases Devan uses to hold up his friends (they sure sound impressive) as model citizens either. If having a partner, a job and kids; paying taxes, and being religious is it; Singapore is full of model citizens really.

While the verdict is not yet out on the genetic basis for homosexual tendencies; there is ample evidence that gender differences have genetic foundations that began in utero. I have a daughter and a son. My method of child-raising is not gender based; but voila, they are simply different. Just watch my girl pat the cat and my son (er..) pat the cat!

The argument for love is always so winsome. In our world so torn by conflict, violence and violation; we all long for love. Unfortunately, love is interpreted as being tolerant. The question is who gets to determine what is considered tolerant? Will we be more liberal if we tolerated incest, under-age marriages, cohabitation, blended families and so on? Tolerance is a poor substitute for love and peace. True love and peace is not no-holds-barred. No parent in the right mind can raise children, no society can run and persist, no great ideas can blossom – if all we have is free rein.

Yes there is much that is wrong in our world. But the loving thing to do is to embrace the broken-ness and work for the healing. I believe that the broken-ness of our world has its origins within each one of us. Perhaps if we can embrace ourselves – not just as egos; but as belonging to something larger; that in our interdependent world, our choices impact others, we can think deeper and harder about life and our choices. Perhaps if we can embrace ourselves – and see that from alcoholism, to violence to sexual tendencies – we are all spots on a huge continuum – and yet each one of us has much to offer the world. Perhaps if we can embrace ourselves – and see our lives as gifts to each other; and not get fixated in the game of tit-for-tat; limiting ourselves to only a certain vision of life….perhaps…