Selah to Hagah

As usual, I got this from del.icio.us/popular (social bookmarking) site. At first, I just did my regular trigger-happy clicking when later this post got me stunned. Furthermore, after reading one of the comments, I realized it’s somehow related to/inspired by Hurricane Katrina:

“Being poor is people wondering why you didn’t leave.”

I then googled some news and got another shock reading one of them:
Rapes, killings hit Katrina refugees in New Orleans

Please read John Scalzi’s writing below and open the link to read more thought provoking comments, e.g:

“Why is is so hard to remember poverty once you get past it, if you get past it? Why is it so hard to empathize with poverty if you have never had it? What the hell is wrong with us?”

This post makes me ponder really hard and difficult to hold my tears. Life’s full of ‘inconvenience’ (an understatement, I know) and surprises. I really think people do need God - sometime obvious, often too subtle.

Being Poor
John Scalzi - September 3, 2005

Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.

Being poor is getting angry at your kids for asking for all the crap they see on TV.

Being poor is having to keep buying $800 cars because they’re what you can afford, and then having the cars break down on you, because there’s not an $800 car in America that’s worth a damn.

Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away.

Being poor is knowing your kid goes to friends’ houses but never has friends over to yours.

Being poor is going to the restroom before you get in the school lunch line so your friends will be ahead of you and won’t hear you say “I get free lunch” when you get to the cashier.

Being poor is living next to the freeway.

Being poor is coming back to the car with your children in the back seat, clutching that box of Raisin Bran you just bought and trying to think of a way to make the kids understand that the box has to last.

Being poor is wondering if your well-off sibling is lying when he says he doesn’t mind when you ask for help.

Being poor is off-brand toys.

Being poor is a heater in only one room of the house.

Being poor is knowing you can’t leave $5 on the coffee table when your friends are around.

Being poor is hoping your kids don’t have a growth spurt.

Being poor is stealing meat from the store, frying it up before your mom gets home and then telling her she doesn’t have make dinner tonight because you’re not hungry anyway.

Being poor is Goodwill underwear.

Being poor is not enough space for everyone who lives with you.

Being poor is feeling the glued soles tear off your supermarket shoes when you run around the playground.

Being poor is your kid’s school being the one with the 15-year-old textbooks and no air conditioning.

Being poor is thinking $8 an hour is a really good deal.

Being poor is relying on people who don’t give a damn about you.

Being poor is an overnight shift under florescent lights.

Being poor is finding the letter your mom wrote to your dad, begging him for the child support.

Being poor is a bathtub you have to empty into the toilet.

Being poor is stopping the car to take a lamp from a stranger’s trash.

Being poor is making lunch for your kid when a cockroach skitters over the bread, and you looking over to see if your kid saw.

Being poor is believing a GED actually makes a goddamned difference.

Being poor is people angry at you just for walking around in the mall.

Being poor is not taking the job because you can’t find someone you trust to watch your kids.

Being poor is the police busting into the apartment right next to yours.

Being poor is not talking to that girl because she’ll probably just laugh at your clothes.

Being poor is hoping you’ll be invited for dinner.

Being poor is a sidewalk with lots of brown glass on it.

Being poor is people thinking they know something about you by the way you talk.

Being poor is needing that 35-cent raise.

Being poor is your kid’s teacher assuming you don’t have any books in your home.

Being poor is six dollars short on the utility bill and no way to close the gap.

Being poor is crying when you drop the mac and cheese on the floor.

Being poor is knowing you work as hard as anyone, anywhere.

Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually stupid.

Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually lazy.

Being poor is a six-hour wait in an emergency room with a sick child asleep on your lap.

Being poor is never buying anything someone else hasn’t bought first.

Being poor is picking the 10 cent ramen instead of the 12 cent ramen because that’s two extra packages for every dollar.

Being poor is having to live with choices you didn’t know you made when you were 14 years old.

Being poor is getting tired of people wanting you to be grateful.

Being poor is knowing you’re being judged.

Being poor is a box of crayons and a $1 coloring book from a community center Santa.

Being poor is checking the coin return slot of every soda machine you go by.

Being poor is deciding that it’s all right to base a relationship on shelter.

Being poor is knowing you really shouldn’t spend that buck on a Lotto ticket.

Being poor is hoping the register lady will spot you the dime.

Being poor is feeling helpless when your child makes the same mistakes you did, and won’t listen to you beg them against doing so.

Being poor is a cough that doesn’t go away.

Being poor is making sure you don’t spill on the couch, just in case you have to give it back before the lease is up.

Being poor is a $200 paycheck advance from a company that takes $250 when the paycheck comes in.

Being poor is four years of night classes for an Associates of Art degree.

Being poor is a lumpy futon bed.

Being poor is knowing where the shelter is.

Being poor is people who have never been poor wondering why you choose to be so.

Being poor is knowing how hard it is to stop being poor.

Being poor is seeing how few options you have.

Being poor is running in place.

Being poor is people wondering why you didn’t leave.

Church Marketing Sucks posted a story about a struggle that happenned in a church due to baseball caps that were worn during church services.

Having read the actual article from Christianity Today Library, this sounds a strong resonance in my heart:

“I will admit that I did not like seeing caps in church. But you are our leader, and I was willing to follow your call. You had the right to talk to the boys alone, because you are their pastor, like a coach has the right to talk to his ball players. You have made the call, and we need to stand by it. I agree with what you have done, I respect you for taking a stand. I’m with you.”

However, apparently some CMS commenters chose to only stop at discussing the attire issue per se. But again, as Kevin has said, “Sometimes something as simple as a hat isn’t so simple.”

Still I think, the most important is to choose to do God’s will. Unfortunately (or fortunately - depend on how you think of it ), we don’t always know the 100% perfect cut of God’s will ourselves. That’s why He puts mentors in our life, I believe.

Read the actual article: War of the Baseball Caps

Last Monday I was given the turn to share in YABS (Young Adults Bethany Singapore) prayer meeting. Below is the note I prepared before the session and tidied a little afterwards.

One of the struggles I overcame recently was gaming. Video games. It’s been 25+ days since the last time I touched my PlayStation 2 console. “Yeah, right. 25 days.” Well, we’ll have to see longer, of course. In any case, it was a great deal, no, huge deal to me. Why? Let me share a little background about my former hobby.

When I was 8, my dad bought an Apple ][ PC . Of course, being a primary 2 schooler, I only used it to play games. Two years later we had our IBM PC/XT compatible. More gaming was done, in intensity and number. Not long after that, we had a Nintendo Famicom. Well, I’d never really liked video game consoles too much, so PC/XT was still my primary gaming machine. In this machine I played my first serious game (game requires more than 2 hours each time played). After that, not many progress happenned, i.e. my dad stopped buying new toys for some reason. So while my friends got their PC/AT 286, I was stuck with my PC/XT. Still, games back then supported both platforms although more and more left PC/XT. Until one day we had a 386. Wow. This machine was simply the one that built my addiction and passion for gaming. This and the later Pentium 100 - I was simply sucked into gaming. Literally hours was burned during those time including one time I missed one mid-term exam due to a soccer game. Then for some reason, I got stuck again with this Pentium while the rest of my friends played with Pentium II and 3D graphic cards. But it didn’t reduce my passion for gaming, it’s just piled up until one day I touched multiplayer-networked gaming, I spent a lot of my after-hours in office playing Counter Strike and Unreal Tournament. My wife could share some of her thoughts back then when I used to fetch her from office - sometimes grudgingly

My latest addiction was a game series called Winning Eleven, another soccer game, started about a year before our wedding, ended just recently. This game was so captivating that I never got bored playing. It’s simply the only serious game I played for the last 2-3 years. Again, my wife would definitely be able to share her thoughts about this This was my “game of the century, decade, whatever”. I literally burned most of my evenings for hours in playing more than 50 total league seasons (each season consists of 50+ matches, each match takes 12-15 actual minutes). I can roughly average it to about 2 hours per day, continuously. Mind you, I was (and am) married. I played when I was in good mood, I played when I felt ‘blue’, I played anytime, anywhere, with anyone.

So, it was a big deal when all of a sudden the urge to play was not there anymore. After YABS retreat last May, God dealt with me for a lot of things, including this area of weakness of mine. I thank God for this.

At first, I thought I was going to endure for a couple of weeks and then lost it back to square one. After all, it’s my passion, and I have a not-so-good track record in conquering bad habits. And this “passion” things, without my knowledge, had been rooted deep in my thought. If I can recall correctly, it was my former boss who coined this term inside my head. Back then, my boss noticed that I was not too ‘happy’ doing my daily jobs (as a web developer) compared to when I talked about gaming scene. “You should pursue your passion. If gaming is your passion, you should go for it.” In the sentence itself, it doesn’t have anything wrong. It’s just when thrown to my addictiveness, it started to root and bore its fruit greater than I thought. It’s not that I disregard my former boss, on the contrary I myself still hold my utmost respect for my him, a lot of good things learned from him although he may have a different belief.

But still an impact it was to me. I was never really be able to let go gaming, even though I know it often did me harm rather than good. “It’s my passion.” I can’t give up my passion. Christ is my passion, I can’t give up Christ for whatever sake. And so it was always in my mind for sometime.

Fast forward to recently, before the retreat, I was in the car with my cellgroup leader, Bambang, driving me and my wife home. He’s quite a busy man, being posted in a fairly high position in a well known MNC, it’s not that often he could attend the cellgroup and share a car with me. One of the very short topics we chatted about that night was my “passion” for gaming. One thing that came out of his mouth was “Tsk, tsk, GT.. being this ‘old’ and you still like to play game! ” That’s all. Nothing religious or spiritual about that. All were said in chatty and joking mood. I simply grinned and replied “Yeaah.. what to do, it’s my passion after all.” And that night and the following nights I still continued my league season in my PlayStation.

Now, in retrospect, one thing that comes up into my mind is these 2 sentences from these 2 different guys. The first ‘planted’ a risky thought in my head, much without my awareness: “It’s my passion. You must maintain your passion.” The second one, also without much of my consciousness, pulled the trigger to take away the thought: “It’s nothing. You can live perfectly well without it.” This is another thing I’d like to share about: submission, authority, and annointing.

I am by no means a bible scholar, there are a lot of books, articles, studies that have already covered these topics very well. In here, I’m just sharing this as a typical working guy, doing his daily secular business while at the same time also pursue excellence to know and love God more.

I have always been a strong believer that in order to achieve a certain degree of success, one must be in a submission and authority. Although Paul described it more clearly in Ephesians 5-6 using real life examples, somehow I experienced and applied it more in the spiritual contexts.

When I first became a Christian, I immediately submitted myself under a mentorship (under an ‘authority’ if you could call that is) of my spiritual brother who led me in my sinner’s prayer - which was also happened to be my best buddy in highschool. He’s not even a year older than me, in fact just he’s just about 7 months older. In everything else we talk quite in the same level (we’re in the same age after all). Spiritually speaking, however, I will ‘ensure’ that I position him as my mentor and me as his ‘mentoree’. That’s a state or position I consciously choose. All this happenned quite naturally in me. After all, I also saw the same thing was applied in his life to his mentor, and his mentor to his, and so on.

On the other hand, I also saw several other ‘incidents’ where ones tried to ’step out’ of their areas of submission. I’m here far from any intention to form any judgement or anything else, but to simply put it, they seemed to be ‘out of radar’ from the whole corporative vision and movement in general. Of course there are processes and many other things which are out of the scope from what I’m sharing here.

Back to topic, continue to my years in Singapore. God rekindled the fire in my heart to serve and pursue Him ‘again’, I was put to join Bukit Merah cellgroup under Bro. Chandra’s stewardship. Again, naturally he and his wife became my and Siska’s mentors. A lot of priceless lessons had blessed us in various aspects through our act of submission. The same thing also happenned in YABS, Bro. Erwin immediately become our mentor, also quite naturally. A little bit different experience was when we’re told to join our homogenous cellgroups and thus were to be separated from our current ones. A that time, I and Siska were not too close to Bambang and Helen. But out of submission, we did our first cellgroup sessions with only the three of us (Helen was away) and indeed it felt a bit ‘awkward’. But we fervently continue to meet. Today, we’re minimum 10 persons each meeting and has splitted into new cellgroups.

Along the way, I recognized the importance of how I need to be submissive, even when I barely known how or who my appointed leader was, especially when I learned that among his busy schedule, he allocates quite some time in his mornings to pray. Although not said, I know for sure I and Siska are in his intercessory list. This alone worths reciprocal prayer from us and in fact, not much to my awareness, I began to revere him more and eventually I consciously placed him as a mentor where I’m in the area of submission to his stewardship.

I believe, when I choose the act to be in a submission under a specific authority/mentorship, God’s annointing really flows smoothly from top to bottom. That’s how a simple-chatty sentence like “this old and yet still play game” has a great impact that God could use to transform me. I mean, it could be a different story if I didn’t really choose to place him above me as mentor and place myself under submission; or, if it was from my other friend whom I didn’t consciously choose to submit under his ‘authority’.

So, what I can conclude tonight are:

• We need to be under a submission of some authority/mentorship
• We need to choose to be under that submission
• We need to act and choose (consciously and continuously) to place our mentors above us spiritually
• When we choose to do that, God’s annointing will flow smoothly from top to bottom
• We need to pray for our mentors, especially so that they will do the same

The problem with diamonds isn’t their scarcity, but their abundance.

A friend of my wife was asking for some articles about diamonds and its overly priced facts. I myself has known the ‘truth’ since 2003, which was about 6 months after I bought my first (and last ) diamond ring for my fiancée back then. But I don’t have any regret. After all, this was for a lady I will share the rest of my entire life with. Still, I’d consider myself lucky because she shares similar opinion since I revealed the ‘truth’ to her.. (or maybe not that similar )

Here are some articles from my ‘research’ (googling around):

• A Perception of Rarity (part of “How Diamonds Work”)
  Some diamonds, like the Hope Diamond, are extremely rare. However, most diamonds are much more abundant than we are led to believe.
• Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?
  While those who attempt to sell diamonds often experience disappointment at the low price they are offered, stories in gossip columns suggest that diamonds are resold at enormous profits.
• Ten Reasons Why You Should Never Accept a Diamond Ring
  from Anyone, Under Any Circumstances, Even If They Really Want to Give You One
• The Diamond Invention
  A whole book about the subject, long but very comprehensive.
• The New Diamond Con (August 3, 2000)
  The problem with diamonds isn’t their scarcity, but their abundance.
• Is a diamond’s price a true measure of its value?
  (contains a little note about Epstein above)
  … but I bet if your wife knew the real story she’d prefer her next gift to be a nice socket-wrench set. Diamonds are a con, pure and simple.
• Africa’s Diamond Wars
  Across vast stretches of Africa, diamonds fuel war.
• The New Diamond Age
  Armed with inexpensive, mass-produced gems, two startups are launching an assault on the De Beers cartel.
  “It’s too perfect to be natural. Things in nature, they have flaws. The growth structure of this diamond is flawless.”
• The cartel isn’t for ever
  With its near monopoly as a trader of rough stones, De Beers has been able to maintain and increase the prices of diamonds by regulating their supply.
  … Consumers believe diamonds are valuable largely because of decades of clever marketing by De Beers and its clients.
• Diamonds Aren’t Forever
  This one has nothing to do with De Beers et al… but still a good read.

Dave Child (ILoveJackDaniels.com) made another neat cheat sheet, this time is for CSS. Unfortunately, still with the same case as his PHP cheat sheet, he doesn’t provide PDF or other format for hi-res printing. Therefore, I made an attempt to rewrite the sheet in MS Word format, exported it to PDF and XML for your perusal.

Click here to download CSS Cheat Sheet (Rewritten)

PS: I rarely blog so I wonder how popular this post will be ^_^ If you’re happened from Indonesia, please drop a note. Furthermore, if you’re from Bina Nusantara University, a big HI from me. Ultimately, if you know me personally, hehe yes you don’t know I’m blogging :p