Being a Neighbour

I attended a conference today called "Next Change!" organised by LoveSingapore regarding social justice and our response. The keynote speaker was Mike Servello, pastor of Mount Zion Ministries in Utica, New York. His testimonies of God's faithfulness in his ministry are nothing short of amazing, with stories of people donating buildings, food and medical supplies to him out of the blue, as well as God literally multiplying what is donated. Anyhow, I'm pretty psyched up right now, so I thought I'd better note down some of the key learning points before I forget.

Learning to Love

One of the most critical things I've learnt over the past couple of days is that social work needs to start with love and we need to learn to shift the focus from ourselves to others. In the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), the expert of the law had asked Jesus "who is my neighbour", but after Jesus tells the parable, His question to the expert is "who was the neighbour to the man?" Very often, our desire to help others springs from our own guilt or self-interest. This is apparent when we pray and ask God "So, what's your plan for my life?" Henry Blackaby argues that the appropriate prayer should be "God, show me where you are working that I may join you in that work."

Much in the same way, our ministry has to begin with love and not spring out of obligation. Be it with kids, the poor, the marginalised, your colleagues, etc. you first need to love for your subsequent actions to be genuine. People don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care. Any ministry borne out of obligation is unlikely to have the legs to run very far. As William James said, "The great use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts it." Without the firm foundation of love, it's unlikely that our ministry will outlast our feeble efforts.

Noticing Other People's Pain

Another thing that was impressed upon me was that caring for the poor and marginalised is not a suggestion, but a command. There are numerous verses in the Bible that speak of our required response to poverty...

"If a man shuts his ears to the cry of the poor, he too will cry out and not be answered."

(Proverbs 21:13)

We often read such verses and think "How interesting... I'll go home and ponder about it." If we took the Bible seriously, we would be stirred into action! If we have two tunics, we should be out there sharing the other one with someone else, and them same goes if we have food (Luke 13:11). God is serious about helping the poor, and we should be too if we're serious about God.

Placing Reliance on God

Once we are able to hear the cry of the needy, we need to believe that God can do amazing things through us. As above, we have read countless verses of how God protects His people.

"Blessed is he who has regard for the weak; the Lord delivers him in times of trouble. The Lord will protect him and preserve his life; he will bless him in the land and not surrender him to the desires of his foes. The Lord will sustain him on his sickbed and restore him from his bed of illness"

Psalm 41:1-3

Sometimes we wonder whether God will actually deliver on what He says. I found myself thinking that if I pursued a full-time career in social work, the pay is probably not going to be enough for me to send my kids overseas to study for example, but then the Lord reminded me that "Hey, don't you trust that I will provide for those needs when the time comes?" So again, if we take God seriously, why do we worry about the outcome so long as we're sure that we are acting according to His direction?

Widespread Effects of Sin

The last thing that learnt today was that the effect of sin in my life has an an influence that goes beyond me. Previously, I thought that if I sin, it hurts my relationship with God, and so I lead a less fulfilling life (which sucks, but the bad stuff stops with me). The reality is that when I sin, I feel ashamed, and so I shy away from God's work. Coupled with the fact that my spiritual ears would probably be impaired as a result, I would not be blessing as many people as I should be. The result is that my sin prevents others from receiving God's blessing, which sucks big time! So there's no such thing as a private sin. [For more on the effect of individual sin on the community, see Joshua 7]

So that's it. Hopefully, as I've said many times, these principles will spur me to take action on my own part :P

Vision Driven Life

Here's a quick summary of my small group's study of Matthew 16:21-17:27 last Thursday.

This passage comes immediately after Peter correctly identified that Jesus was the Christ. From this point, Jesus begins to explain to His disciples about his impending death and resurrection, but they don't seem to get it, especially Peter, who just 1 chapter ago was given the "keys of the kingdom of heaven". Now, all of a sudden Jesus calls him "Satan". That's quite a fall from grace.

Some of the key takeaways for us is not to be complacent about our faith. We may know some of the key themes and principles, but it takes alot more effort to actually internalise those concepts such that they are then reflected in our word and deed. This requires constant meditation on the Word, as well as active application through the exercise of our faith in obedience to God.

It is only through such active engagement that we can even hope to catch hold of the vision of God and serve Him accordingly. While an initial reading of Peter's response to Jesus' words may suggest concern or righteous indignation, I believe that it was a statement driven out of fear. In the same way, how much of what we do today springs from our fear of loneliness, ridicule, loss of status, etc. We strive to please the people around us because we want acceptance. We work hard to earn tonnes of cash to gain the admiration of (or at least not lose out to) our peers. Arguably our lives would be much more fulfilling if we aligned it right from the onset with God's purposes and vision. We would waste less time chasing things that don't actually make us any happier in the long run.

Let's set our sights on pouring our lives into something built to last, a vision that is so much bigger than our little agendas that our fears and insecurities would simply fade away!

One a lighter note, here's a short vid to show what would happen if we don't have a proper concept of Christ...

You're a Number 4!

Today my small group went through the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13:1-23). In summary, the parable talks about 4 types of seeds:

1. Those that fall on the path and were eaten by birds
2. Those that fall on rocky ground and were scorched by the sun
3. Those that fall among the thorns which choked the plant as it grew
4. Those that fell on good soil and produced a crop

I shall not go into the interpretations of each one coz you can read it on your own. Previously when I read this passage, I always thought of myself as probably a Number 3, choked by "the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth". Tonight, I felt that God was saying that we are all Number 4.

We probably think of Number 2 or Number 3 as a position of humility, recognising our weakness and striving to be the elusive Number 4. I think that rather than being humble, we short-change ourselves and God by having such an attitude because we are in effect saying, "Look, let's be realistic... there's no way I can be a Number 4. How can I possibly produce a crop 'a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown'?"

When we say that, we negate the power of the Holy Spirit and fall into the trap of thinking that we can buy our way into heaven. Jesus has already made us Number 4 by dying on the cross for our sins and freeing us from sin and death. And by the Holy Spirit we are empowered to be God's agents in this world. And if the God of the universe is backing us, the sky's the limit!

This doesn't mean we all chill out coz "it is finished." Instead, it opens our eyes to the huge potential of what is possible. Yes, you could be the next Billy Graham. Yes, you could be the C.S. Lewis. "Why?" you may ask. But why not? If we become truly conscious of what is possible with God when we surrender our lives into His hands, we would probably stop wasting our time and energy indulging in sin and thus jeopardise the most important relationship we will ever have.

To quote from a book entitled "The Salvation Equation" written by a friend of mine, Adriel Loh:

"For the starting point of freedom, we return to the Cross. In faith appropriation, we affirm that through the Cross, the dominion of sin in our lives has been broken (Romans 6:6,7). This is a past even that has already taken place. We no longer need to pray for God to break the power of sin and bondage in our lives because it has been done. We have been set free. The prison door has been unlocked. All that remains is for us to stand up in faith, push the door open, and step out into the light of the reality of freedom. We therefore pray daily for the Holy Spirit to convict us of the reality of this freedom. We then confess with our mouths that we are dead to sin and alive to God in Jesus Christ (Romans 6:11).

To confess and claim is only the first step of faith. This of itself is insufficient for lasting freedom. Many Christians make the mistake of claiming and confessing, and do little else. While our victory over sin took place once for all when Christ died on the Cross, to translate this into our human experience requires a continuous process of faith to appropriate it in our lives."

It's kind've like the Matrix, only that you've got to remind yourself daily that you've been set free and are more than a conqueror in Christ. As the dude who tells stories on FM 93.8 in the morning says, " change your perspective, and you could change your life." So what are you waiting for, you're a Number 4! :D

The Perennial Question

This evening, I watched an "inspired by true events" movie entitled Lord of War, which stars Nicholas Cage as a gun runner smuggling weapons into war torn countries. On particularly memorable scene in the movie was when Nicholas Cage's brother persuaded him to abort an ongoing arms deal in order to postpone (if not prevent) the massacre of an entire village.

This scene reminded me of a line from The Constant Gardener, where the aid worker played by Rachel Weisz tells her love interest to slow down their vehicle, wanting to drive a woman, her baby, and her brother who are walking 40 kilometers back to his home. The boyfriend protests, "Be reasonable. There are millions of people, they all need help. It's what the agencies are here for," to which she replies, "Yeah, but these are three people that we can help."

This line has stuck in my head ever since I watched the film and ties in quite well with the whole "Acts of Random Kindness" preached in Evan Almighty. [I'm starting to sound like I get my theology from movies...] I guess it really does challenge us to think about what are we doing about the social injustice we see around us. When we open the papers and read about war and genocide, do we care, or do we think of it as some far removed problem in some remote place that we cannot influence. I've said this before, and I regret that I have to keep saying it to remind myself not to be apathetic.

Some pundits would advise us to not look so far, but to turn instead to our immediate community and help those who we can. But is that a cop out answer meant to help us avoid having to think about murder and starvation that happen on a daily basis in parts of the world that we have the luxury to ignore?

One of the passages which will be used for the Sec 2 curriculum at church next quarter is taken from Exodus 2:11-25 and describes Moses' initial attempt at pursuing 'social justice' by murdering an Egyptian who was abusing one of his people. Certainly, that was a rash act and Moses then had to spend the next 40 years in the desert for God to mould him into a man fit to lead the Isrealites out of Egypt. In this regard, it appears that what may be the most obvious thing to do at first may not be the best thing after all. In the book The Anti-Politics Machine, James Ferguson documents how Western attempts to develop Lesotho through the construction of roads ended up making things worse for the people as the government then used the roads to extract more taxes from them. So before we jump onto the next crusade to help our the world's marginalised, we also need to take time to really think about our motivations and whether we even can presume to know what's best for them.

I know this all sounds really disjointed, but thus was the nature of the conversation I had with my brother following the movie for it's not immediately apparent what our next step should be: "prayerful consideration" or "less talk, more action". I doubt this conundrum will be solved easily, but I guess as a first step, we need to be able to extract meaning from whatever it is we are doing, be it at work or at school, for if we labour purely to earn the extra buck, it seems like we labour in vain.

The following is the 1976 version of a poem entitled "First they came..." attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) about the apathy of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

How to die rich

During my quiet time yesterday, I read the Parable of the Rich Young Ruler which got me thinking on a number of issues...

A certain ruler asked him, "Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?"

"Why do you call me good?" Jesus answered. "No one is good—except God alone. You know the commandments: 'Do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honor your father and mother.'"

"All these I have kept since I was a boy," he said.

When Jesus heard this, he said to him, "You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."

When he heard this, he became very sad, because he was a man of great wealth. Jesus looked at him and said, "How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

Those who heard this asked, "Who then can be saved?"

Jesus replied, "What is impossible with men is possible with God."

-- Luke 18:18-27

If you ask any professional about financial planning, the first thing they are likely to ask you is to do is determine the type of lifestyle you desire and figure out how much that is going to cost you per year. From there, you look at how much you're currently earning, and what kind of investment returns are necessary to help you achieve those financial goals.

Most of us would probably not mind if we retire with money coming out of ears and not have to think twice about buying a new car/house/boat or going on an exotic holiday every other week. Yet the law of diminishing utility tells us that the more we have, the more it will take to make us happy. Just look at all the celebrities with money up to their eyeballs, but have to visit therapists to get over their latest bout of depression. When we earn $2000 a month, we need a $20 tie to make us happy. When we earn $10,000 a month, we need a $100 tie to make us happy. Our standard of living has improved, and so has our cost of living, but our "happiness level" (i.e. utility) doesn't really go up all that much in relation to our new-found lifestyle.

So the thing is, we spent much of our lives trying to earn more money so that we can buy more stuff, so that we can be more happy. Yet when we finally earn more money and buy more stuff, we find that we're not actually more happy. The bar has been raised and now we're no longer happy with the Toyota coz all your friends have the latest BMW.

Bringing all this back to context of the Rich Young Ruler, as we chase the next big pay check and shoot for the 10 month bonus, are we not digging ourselves into a deeper hole such that when God says, "Ok, drop this and follow me!" it's going to be so much more difficult for us to climb out?

Think about it... chasing money is a losing proposition: you work harder, to earn more, to save more, to invest more, so that you can continue spending more, but you're not proportionately more happy, and at the same time, your making it all the more difficult for yourself to follow Christ, which in turn could cost you eternal life! Sounds like a pretty crummy deal to me.

That doesn't mean that all rich people are stupid, but rather if you are chasing money as an ends in itself, then you're likely to be in for a huge disappointment. As John Wesley said, "Earn all you can, save all you can, and give all you can." I can only hope to live up to that mantra.

Elijah: Baal Buster

I just spent the past hour or so trying to reconcile how we're supposed to reconcile Elijah's showdown with the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18:16-40) and Matthew 4:7 where Jesus answered Satan, "It is also written: `Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'"

Since it's late and I've got work tomorrow, in summary, I think it's helpful to consider if it was Elijah who was testing God, or rather God testing whether Elijah had the faith to stand people everyone to issue a seemingly ridiculous challenge considering the physical odds stacked against him.

European Banking Congress

I came back recently from a trip to London and Germany, staffing my boss who was invited to speak at the European Banking Congress in Frankfurt. Along the way, I was also lucky enough to meet up with my cousins in London, which was pretty cool too! This was my first trip out of the country on work and it was pretty exciting stuff! As she was a speaker, we also got VIP treatment with a car service that came right onto the airport runway, and tickets to probably the most extravagant black tie dinner I will attend in the foreseeable future. Perhaps the more amazing thing was being able to meet with all these important people and even have breakfast across from Sir Callum McCarthy, Chairman of the FSA in London! That was probably the single most mind-blowing thing for me over the course of the 3 days overseas...

If you're interested, the speech which I helped to draft can be found here.

Mormons Get Owned

Starlight Star Bright

As cheesy as the poster looks, and as flaky as the title sounds, this is actually a pretty good movie. In fact, I have yet to meet someone who has given it a bad review. Based on a novel by Neil Gaiman (the Sandman dude), Stardust is about this guy who unwittingly crosses from the real world into a fantasy realm when he promises to retrieve a fallen start for this girl he wants to marry. For those of you who are familiar with the Xanth series (which I read in Primary school), the idea is quite similar to the Mundania-Xanth divide. And unlike the last awesome film I watched (300), girls will enjoy this movie too!

Anyhow, long story short, go watch this film :)

Vlad the Impaler

Haven't put anything up in a while partly due to a faulty computer, and partly due to laziness. However, I could not resist putting this up. My mom decided to give my brother's stuff toys a bath, after which she proceeded to unleash the Spanish Inquisition on them. Alas, we live in terrifying times, with much weeping and gnashing of teeth...

Dinner & Dance 2007

The culmination of my first year at MAS as a Trainee Officer, the annual Dinner and Dance is the trial by fire (i.e. sai gang) that most newbies have to help organize, and by the grace of God, we survived :)

United 300

Nokia N93

A video my brother made...

The Game: Casino Royale

Last weekend, I participated in a treasure hunt/wild goose chase that stretched from 5pm on Saturday to 12 noon on Sunday. That was the longest stretch of consciousness I've experienced since my days in green :P

The game basically starts with a mighty difficult puzzle which you solve for a location in Singapore where (surprise!) you get to pick up another mighty difficult puzzle, and so on.... This game originated in the Bay area and was thoughtfully organized by a bunch of crazy Stanford folk who are trying to spread the gospel here.

You can try your hand at some of the puzzles from the Stanford game by clicking here.

God and the Stock Market

While this may sound somewhat sacrilegious, I think the stock market is a pretty good analogy for one's walk with God. Let us take the Sraits Times Index (STI) as our case in point and assume that how well our life is going is equivalent to the closing price of the STI each day.

For anyone just starting out at trading equities, or the more risky warrants, you know that emotions play a big part in determining where prices will be each day. Stock market guidebooks and gurus often talk about the 2 biggest hurdles that every investor needs to keep in check, namely fear and greed. But often times one cannot help but feel the pinch when a one-day correction wipes out over 5% of your investment (as on 28 Feb 2007).

In the same way, we occasionally face obstacles in life that appear so big that we just feel like throwing in the towel. Whether it's our relationships, or our work, or our spiritual walk, we get coaxed into thinking that all is lost. So we give up, cut our losses and swear never to use our hard-earned money to buy the STI ETF ever again.

However, had we taken a longer term view of the STI over the past 5 years, we see that the upward trend is undeniable, and Feb 07 was just a drop in the ocean. That's comforting for long-term investors, though not very useful info for the short-term punters. But our relationship with God is not meant to be a hit and run. When we said the Sinner's Prayer, we were signing up for the long-term.

The problem is that we don't have the benefit of nice on-line charts to remind us of God's plan for our lives. And that's where journalling comes in. I will be the first to admit that it requires quite a bit of discipline to do, but the benefits are well worth it. As you recall the times when you thought all was lost, we see the hand of God reaching down and plucking you out from the depths of despair.

So we derive our confidence in God from past experience (historical trends) as well as good fundamental knowledge. Looking at the chart below, the STI looks a lot less friendly if we take a super long-term view. So it's ok to sell, but we need to do so for the right reasons.


How do we get insight into the fundamentals? With shares, we look at all the wonderful ratios out there, like P/E, ROE, ROA, P/B, etc. With our spiritual lives, it's all about prayer and reading the Bible, i.e. getting in touch with the most important insider of them all.

Claiming to be a Christian and not praying regularly is kind've like buying a stock and not reading the company's annual report -- you don't really know what's going on and are just hoping for the best. It's no wonder that when 28 Feb 07 hits, you panic and liquidate your holdings, only to regret just 2 months later.

I think some of the ideas may not map very well to the STI analogy, but I hope you get the point :) For avoidance of doubt, this is not an inducement to buy the STI :P

The Economics of Gifts (A Guide for Guys)

A while back, it was brought to my attention that girls may view gifts differently from the guy who's giving the gifts. For guys, our perception of the gifts we give can be presented as follows:

U = A(t1)C1 + A(t2)C2 + ... + A(tn)Cn

Where

• U = utility derived by the girl (i.e. number of brownie points scored by the guy)
• Cn = monetary/time cost of "n-th" gift; Cn <1
• A(tn) is a function (different for every girl) that is dependant on the timing of the "n-th" gift (e.g. Valentines Day, Birthday, Anniversary, random day, etc.)

In reality, the U perceived by the girl may be more:

U = A(t1)(B+0.1C1) + A(t2)(B+0.1C2) + ... + A(tn)(B+0.1Cn),

where B>1.

With reference to the first equation, guys usually think that they can give 01 x gigantic present (high C) to leverage on the A(tn) and get the biggest bang for their buck/time. They also assume that A(tn) is diminishing in n and hence try not to give too many presents due to the diminishing marginal utility.

However, if the second equation is true, then we guys really need to re-work the strategy and skew it more towards quantity since gifts with a high C will not be able to affect U that much in the long run if n is pitifully small.

Apologies for the lack of proper subscripts. I'm having trouble formatting on blogger.

Singapore Boleh!

I spent my Saturday morning at work listening to a talk by Nicky Tan about his lessons learnt during his investigation into the collapse of Barings Bank back in 1995. For those of you who can't remember, Barings Bank was the oldest private bank in England at the time, but it was brought down "single-handedly" by a rogue trader, Nick Leeson, who was based in Singapore. Leeson made an astounding number of bad bets on futures contracts, and in so doing lost $1.4 billion on behalf of the bank, even though he was actually not allowed to do any prop trading. Meanwhile, the bank's management was supposedly oblivious to what was happening and kept on borrowing money to fund Leeson's trades, thinking that the trades were being done on behalf of their clients.

While some of the risk management lessons that Nicky Tan pointed out were certainly pertinent to the work that MAS does, probably my #1 take-home of the day was his advice to us as Singaporeans not to think too lowly of ourselves. At the time, the Bank of England was all out to drag Singapore's name through the mud and place the blame for Barings' collapse entirely on the shoulders of the Singapore regulators. Nicky Tan and his partner, Sundaresh Menon, both who were only in their early thirties at the time, managed to produce a report that was internationally recognised to be of better quality than that produced by the Bank of England's investigators and effectively helped to keep Singapore's reputation intact.

He went on to tell us about how he managed to beat Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse in carrying out a $15b restructuring all on the strength of a team of Singaporeans. While there may be an element of bragging in there, the point still stands that we really have to curb our 妄自菲薄 attitude and start believing in our God-given talents and abilities. We often get intimidated by people who speak better or dress better than us, but by adopting the typical Asian attitude of keeping quiet in class for example, half the battle is already lost.

The Underrated Investment

All working Singaporeans should know that our CPF account is split into "ordinary" and "special". The ordinary accounts (OA) pays 2.5% interest p.a., while the special account (SA) pays 4%. For both accounts, you can only start drawing down on them when you hit 55 years old.

Why does the SA pay you 4%? Because the government is trying to encourage long term savings. While the savings in the OA can be used to buy a home, pay for CPF insurance or for investment and education, the savings in the SA are for old age, contingency purposes and investment in retirement-related financial products. In other words, once you put money in the SA, it's pretty much stuck there till you're 55 (Note that the transfer from OA to SA is irreversible).

Many people view this as a bad thing, especially since many of us use CPF money to purchase property. However, let us consider the following:

1. It is probably not prudent to liquidate all your worldly possessions to pay for a house, hence it is likely that you're gonna have some savings left over even after purchasing a property
   
2. It is a good idea to start saving for retirement as early as possible so that you can experience the power of compound interest
3. Your bank account gives you a pretty crap interest on your savings
4. Stocks will give you 7-8% pa in the long run, but they are not without risks
5. The current yield on Singapore Government Bonds is around 3+% on the top end, but carries significantly lower risk compared to stocks.
   
6. A sensible asset allocation for your investment portfolio would have to involve some diversification across different asset classes, be they equities, bonds, commodities, etc.

So if we think of the CPF SA as a long term government bond with a practically risk-free 4% yield, that sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me. So instead of buying bonds, transfer more funds into your SA! A strong case can be made for starting these transfers early when one looks at the power of compounding in action.

Why we Pray

The question regarding what's the point of prayer was something I struggled with back in my 2nd year of college. That summer, I had embarked on a bid to pen my thoughts down but I kind've got stuck half way and my computer subsequently crashed anyway.

Recently, a friend of mine sent out an e-mail with a couple of questions on prayer and how to approach it. This was my reply, albeit some 2 years in the making...

I think the very basic question we have to tackle first is whether prayer changes the way things play out. For example, if we're planning a picnic, can we somehow ensure that it doesn't rain if we pray and fast for the whole week before that? Several passages in the Bible seem to support this concept that prayer can somehow influence God's decisions. Examples would include Jacob wrestling with God (Genesis 32), Abraham pleading of for Sodom (Genesis 18:16-33) and the Persistent Widow (Luke 18:1-8). Going along these lines, it would appear that "persistent prayer" would be equivalent to beating God into submission. So events like prayer retreats would be seen as concerted efforts to somehow change God's mind since we somehow know better than Him. To me, this does not paint a picture of a omnipotent and omniscient God. If we expected certain results every time we went through a series of rituals like prayer and fasting, we would be equating God to some kinds of scientific phenomenon where x + y = desired outcome. I believe that God is so much more than that.

Based on my understanding of the Bible, I believe that we can make the following statements about God:

1) God has our best interests at heart
2) God knows our desires and needs before we even utter a word

So how are we to understand prayer in that case? I believe that prayer is meant to change us rather than to change God. When we pray to God, we are essentially seeking to communicate with Him so as to build up our relationship. Why would we want to build up our relationship? So that we can be on the same page as God, discerning where He is at work and joining Him in that work. I believe prayer is more about aligning our interests and our direction with those of God, rather than trying to sway Him to see things our way. Why then do we say that "the prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective" (James 5:16b)? Because a righteous man's prayer would be in line with God's purposes and desires, and hence apparently more effective.

What I'm saying is not just "oh, it didn't happen coz God said no", but instead I'm taking it one step further to see prayer not as a vehicle for our desires to be fulfilled, but an opportunity to have them transformed into those of God.

So how does this play out when one is looking for a job or hoping for physical healing? I believe that we shouldn't box God in and expect Him to meet us the way we see fit. If we believe God is sovereign in all circumstances, even in the face of great uncertainty or adversity, then we shouldn't worry about not chalking up that 5 hrs of prayer a day coz God's going to be pissed off and therefore not answer our prayer positively. While we should certainly feel free to voice the desires of our heart, our focus should be on God and not ourselves. Easy to say, but hard to execute. Think about Paul who wrote a bunch of letters encouraging believers while he himself was in prison. If we take Colossians for example, Paul spends the bulk of the letter refuting Colossian heresy and trying to bring the church back on track. It is only at the end where he asks for the church to "pray for us too, that God may open a door for our message, so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ, for which I am in chains." (Colossians 4:3) This is very different from saying "please pray that I get out of prison 'coz I'm having a hard time here."

Hence I believe that in times of adversity, we should seek God's wisdom through prayer, so that we can have the peace that transcends all understanding in the face of trials. If we believe that God is sovereign and good, I see no reason for us to have to do a bunch of somersaults to catch his attention and have Him accede to our requests.

If any of the above is heresy, someone please let me know.