CNY Day 2
There is old me and then this is me alive in Christ today. Shuffling between the two used to make me wonder if I was living the Christian lie. God used my wondering to teach me more about the realness of Himself, but I also now know its not a lie. I am simply one of His still struggling saints, and this must be if I am to move more fully into the identity I was intended for.
CNY this year, in a perspectival sense, has been somewhat a pendulum--a constant back and forth between the past and present, the old and the new. Old faces, new wrinkles. Old houses, old memories, new personalities, new developments, new jobs, new things for your mother to compare you with. The discouraging tradition continues, (which makes it little wonder why young Singaporeans lament the endless rounds of relative-visiting.) I am $500 bucks richer, but it won't take me back to the place before all this started to engrave itself into my memory.
I visited my godgrandma, a very dear old lady from church who used to care for me when I was in primary school. She lived in the same HDB block as I did, and she loved me very much, although neither of us communicated very well since she spoke mainly hokkien and I didn't. But seeing her in her new Sengkang home made me remember our old homes in Hougang, and reawakened a deep yearning to see home again. Remembering these things in her presence seemed to make everything about the house so much more real. The whiteness of the tiled floor, the roughness of the walls, every corner of my old flat echoing with the ephemeral voices that spoke into their cracks and crevices twenty years ago. There's the toilet I both loved to sing in, and was terrified of. There's the sunny living room with the piano--another of my joys. There's my bed in the corner where the walls would witness in the soft velvet of night horror after horror. There's the balcony whose windows and resident bird I told my grief.
Yes, Grief.
That's the word I've been looking for. It is almost ten years since I have left that house, but there has never been a moment all this while, where I have not longed to return. I cannot explain the longing to go back again-- But for all its terrors, this house knew me. Have you ever felt so close to the walls in your bedroom you crouched up to one, huddled up against it, and talked and cried into a corner like it had ears? One day I was simply made to walk out of it, go to school, and forever feel like a wanderer. I never got to say bye. The walls, tiles, window grills, is the last standing thing that has seen, heard, and knows my pain across the landscape of changing realities and perceptions. It knows me intimately. I can imagine what it would be like to be back. To let my fingers run and feel the roughness of the walls would bring to the heart a familiar painful stinging sensation. To put my ear on the coolness of floor tiles and hear the empty rushing sounds of concrete singing like a sea shell, would bring tears to my eyes to remember how its song reminded me how it felt to have cried myself numb and dry at ten years old. If it were night, there would be harsh white lights that cast dark shadows permamently, associating you with a black spot that showed up strongly in an otherwise pristine, blinding environment, a black spot that you never seemed to be able to erase or run from, no matter how you danced. The desire to return, is closely tied to a longing to remember again innocence. I want to say goodbye properly and stop grieving.
There is a hope and a future for me, I have tasted some of it already, and I have to move on towards the joy and victory in Christ awaiting me. I have not yet lived in the fullness of these, and so it is with faith that I speak in the certainty of these things. Through some way, and in some means, this heart has to stop aching from loss, and it is time to let go of my past to heal. My ultimate healing will lie in Christ. The old man is everything I am where Christ isn't realised in me, even innocence that I entered my existence with is part of him. He must die, but this time he will be gently laid to rest and sleep peacefully, with blessing upon his repose. I want to look upon and remember the little girl, everything that was once pure about her, with a gentle eye and fondness. I want to do this without feeling the pain of her unique, delicate, and untainted world being cruelly and most unwillingly being wrenched from her. Those things happened. Let it be as God should allow, but I must accept them and learn to make my peace if they are to be turned around for His glory.
Tonight, I shall spend some time with Jesus. I hope He'll help me finish grieving, I don't know how long it'll take. I've never had any idea how to do this until now. But I know, as He helps me with this, I'll get better at letting Him deal with it. Dear friends, please keep me in prayer. And ISD, if you’re reading this, I'm not whacked or a religious fanatic. I'm just a human thoroughly aware of my need for God. If you are following this blog, I hope over time, through all sorts of circumstances that only He can bring about, He will come to be more real in person (as opposed to an ideology) to you too. God bless.
| e.s.t.h.e.r in the arms of Jesus @
1/30/2006 04:32:00 pm |
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