This time it really hurts.

The human spirit can endure in sickness,

but a crushed spirit who can bear?

Proverbs 18:14

How do I forgive you?

Apples

Apple.

Sweetness akin to honey,

only when ripe and ready.

Apple.

If it isn't bought,

it's sold to someone else.

Rot it will,

if left on shelf.

Dear Darius,

Be joyful. Grow to maturity. Encourage each other. Live in harmony and peace. Then the God of love and peace will be with you.

Love,

Apostle Paul.

How To Climb Your Way Up The Ranks!

Step 1: Lick the dirt of your superior's shoes everyday!

Step 2: Badmouth, badmouth and badmouth.

Step 3: Learn to CC and BCC emails to the "appropriate" channels so that you are heard.

Step 4: Angkat Bolah!

And...... viola, before you know it you've been promoted.

Do I have the capacity to be selfless, to see beyond my own desires?

Indecision?

^{PROVERBS 2:13-17}

Blessed is the man who finds wisdom,

the man who gains understanding,

for she is more profitable than silver

and yields better returns than gold.

She is more precious than rubies;

nothing you desire can compare with her.

Long life is in her right hand;

in her left hand are riches and honor.

Her ways are pleasant ways,

and all her paths are peace.

Wisdom and understanding - their ways are pleasant and peaceful. Discretion will protect me and understanding will guard my heart. Such are the promises of my Father.

Darius.

Demanding, domineering, determined, driven, dogmatic.

I'm the sort that would become a potential dictator given a different set of circumstances. My natural reaction in most situations is to take charge, devise a plan and a course of action and aggressively put it into motion. Probably a good bunch of people find it hard to say no to me because I'm intimidating.

Because I believe strongly in my set of beliefs and principles, and am not afraid to express them, I've found that there are times when I don't value other people's inputs or opinions.

The tendency to apply logic and reason to situations that require more emotional sensitivity is high and often rubs people the wrong way. Being blunt and extremely forthright doesn't help in that department either.

In short, I could have very well been a Napolean/Hitler/Mao/Caesar.

Oh God I do hope you work out on the bad stuff.

20100905 @ 0800hrs

Love the people, hate the uniform.

He trains my hands for battle; my arms can bend a bow of bronze.

Psalm 18:34

^{Proverbs 2:1-6}

1 My son, if you accept my words
and store up my commands within you,

² turning your ear to wisdom
and applying your heart to understanding,

³ and if you call out for insight
and cry aloud for understanding,

⁴ and if you look for it as for silver
and search for it as for hidden treasure,

⁵ then you will understand the fear of the LORD
and find the knowledge of God.

⁶ For the LORD gives wisdom,
and from his mouth come knowledge and understanding.

I've been doing that for quite some time now.

When you're feeling down and out there's always theoatmeal.com =)

This Is Worth A Look (it's not what you think it is)

Lady Gaga

Christina Aguilera

K-pop

"If"

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,

Or being hated, don't give way to hating,

And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master,

If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breath a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,

And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

Praise God!

For the first time in 80-something years, Grandma stepped into church :)

Making a mountain out of a molehill?

Tonight was a humbling reminder that there are some things I don't have control over and things I don't have a say in. It is in these matters that God calls me to trust in Him and lean not on my own understanding. Maybe God has to (repeatedly) remind me of this because I haven't quite learnt my lesson after all; to trust in His sovereignty.

Wish I had Moses-faith.

weee M R Tng and his fiancé is coming back soon =)

Isaiah 43:2-5 (New International Version)

² When you pass through the waters,
I will be with you;
and when you pass through the rivers,
they will not sweep over you.
When you walk through the fire,
you will not be burned;
the flames will not set you ablaze.

³ For I am the LORD, your God,
the Holy One of Israel, your Savior;
I give Egypt for your ransom,
Cush and Seba in your stead.

⁴ Since you are precious and honored in my sight,
and because I love you,
I will give men in exchange for you,
and people in exchange for your life.

⁵ Do not be afraid, for I am with you;
I will bring your children from the east
and gather you from the west.

http://ps-luke.blogspot.com/2010/06/reflection-of-darius-tng.html

Sin

Our problem is that our attitude toward sin is more self-centred than God-centred. We are more concerned with our own "victory" over sin than we are about the fact that sins grieve the heart of God. We cannot tolerate failure in our struggle with sin chiefly because we are success-oriented, not because we know it is offensive to God.

God wants us to walk in obedience. Obedience is oriented toward God; victory is oriented toward self.

Romans 6:14

For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law but under grace.

XXII

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered. Now you will have noticed that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him. It is the unexpected visitor, or the friend's talkative wife, (or NS), that throw him out of gear. Now he is not yet so uncharitable or slothful that these small demands on his courtesy are in themselves too much for it. They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it is being stolen. You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption "My time is my own". Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to his employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which he allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.

We teach them not to notice the different senses of the possessive pronoun - the finely graded differences that run from "my boots" through "my dog", "my master" and "my country", to "my God". They can be taught to reduce all these senses to that of "my boots", the "my" of ownership. Even in the nursery a child can be taught to mean by "my Teddy-bear" not the old imagined recipient of affection to whom it stands in a special relation (for that is what the Enemy will teach them if we are not careful) but "the bear I can pull to pieces if I like". And at the other end of the scale, we have taught men to say "My God" in a sense not really very different from "My boots", meaning "The God on whom I have a claim for my distinguished services and whom I exploit from the pulpit - the God I have done a corner in".

And all the time the joke is that the word "Mine" in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run either Our Father or the Enemy will say "Mine" of each thing that exists, and specially of each man. They will find out in the end, never fear, to whom their time, their souls, and their bodies really belong - certainly not to them , whatever happens. At present the Enemy says "Mine" of everything on the pendatic, legalistic ground that He made it: Our Father hopes in the end to say "Mine" of all things on the more realistic and dynamic ground of conquest.

Your affectionate uncle,

SCREWTAPE

son yo el intimidando?

I have joined the elite few that work on Easter Sunday. Oh what an honour...

When the storm's of life arise,
sleepless cries and desperate nights,
He's captured every tear,
assuring me that He hears.

Yes Darius, the answer's on the way.

Sure I said yes

and

I've got no right to say no,

I just feel uneasy.

Some things just don't subside.

XII

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

I am almost glad to hear that he is still a churchgoer and a communicant. I know there are dangers in this; but anything is better than that he should realise the break he has made with the first months of his Christian life. As long as he retains externally the habits of a Christian he can still be made to think of himself as one who has adopted a few new friends and amusements but whose spiritual state is much the same as it was six weeks ago. And while he thinks that, we do not have to contend with the explicit repentance of a definite, fully recognised, sin, but only with his vague. though uneasy, feeling that he hasn't been doing very well lately.

As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him.

You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought to do nor what I liked". The Christians describe the Enemy as one "without whom Nothing is strong". And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

You will say these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one-the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

Your affectionate uncle,

Screwtape

VII

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

Has no one ever told you about the law of Undulation?

Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. ( The Enemy's determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him. ) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to consistency, therefore, is undulation - the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched over your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life - his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. They dryness and dullness through which your patient is now going through are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.

To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use the Enemy wants to make of it, and then do the opposite. Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of self-hood at its expense. But the obedience the enemy demands is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not ( as one would gladly believe ) mere propoganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself-creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other things into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.

And that is where the troughs come in. You must have often wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to over-ride a human will ( as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do ) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them or assimilate them , will not serve.........

Your affectionate uncle,

SCREWTAPE

Idon'tliketroughs.

It's one of those days you sink so low,

you don't know what you're doing anymore.

Perth wasn't stuffed with shopping at jayjays or stuffing my face with chilli mussels, it was just time with family =)

It's

lonely

at

home.

So what has Darius been doing for the past 12 hours?

Sitting beside a female listening to her whine and complain about virtually everything she comes across

AND

being driven around by an extremely dangerous driver (the same woman) that has no regard for the safety of road users, pedestrians or vehicles alike.

I LOVE what I do.

I'm off to bed, my body is suffering from sleep depravation and my eyeballs are shriveled up like dried prunes.

I'm destined to have my struggles, sufferings and death transformed into blessings, joy and eternal life.

I know where i'm going.

Luke 18:29-30 (New Living Translation)

²⁹ “Yes,” Jesus replied, “and I assure you that everyone who has given up house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the Kingdom of God, ³⁰ will be repaid many times over in this life, and will have eternal life in the world to come.”

If only I could see into the future, into what God has in store for me.

Live in peace with each other. ¹⁴And we urge you, brothers, warn those who are idle, encourage the timid, help the weak, be patient with everyone. ¹⁵Make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always try to be kind to each other and to everyone else.

¹⁶Be joyful always; ¹⁷pray continually; ¹⁸give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.

1 Thessalonians 5:13-18 (New International Version)

Note to self:

Make a conscious decision to do God's will, you'll find it easier to be joyful and thankful.

Doing PETRA duty has opened my eyes to an ugly side of Singapore I've never seen before.