Head looking for the Heart

its been rough journey involving HEART & HEAD. Somehow I find that our head and heart are on separate journeys, and neither feels like life. when i lost one, the other couldnt function normally. was really hard getting it al syncronized again. trying hard, but will try harder. i've definately learnt things the hard way this time. towards the end, as I pleaded in hopelessness, God did let me in on the details of what in the world was happening to me. He is allllwaaaays faithful. to meee =)

this week was a good time of recuberating for me. being out there in Uni with Godsent people who have helped me get through things was a great sense of relief.. phewww im thinking of mentioning names but..then again.. people who have been around me in Uni these pass week, you know who you are la.. Wanna thank you all for just appearing around me. Means a lot.

a Question asked 4 years ago, was just answered

Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me..
I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see!

Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved
How precious did that grace appear, the hour I first believed

My chains are gone, I've been set free
My God my Saviour has ransomed me
And like a flood His mercy rains
Unending love! Amazing grace!

The Lord has promised good to me, His Word my hope secures
He will my shield and portion be, as long as life endures..

The earth shall soon dissolve like snow, the sun forbears to shine
But God who called me here below, will be forever mine..
YOU are forever mine :)

I looked back to the title of my blog... it reads "when grace goes deep in a ransomed heart"
i had no idea that learning and living in especially in GRACE, will be the highlight of my pass few months and i believe..many long months to come.

The first title for this blog 4 years ago, back in 2004 when i was 18, was "whats so amazing about grace". some may know that its actually a title of a book written by Phillip Yancey, Meiling's favourite author. I was curious about the subject matter itself. really, whats so amazing about grace. i mean, i know what is grace and have experienced it saving me before.

Little did I know, that over these long 4 years, God has been answering my question- "whats so amazing about grace?" in more than a 100 ways

This different version is a new one by Chris Tomlin called- Amazing Grace (My chains are gone). Theres and additional chorus and 2 different verses to it.

Every word, every line in this song, is what I want to say to every person reading this posting of my blog. really.. This.. is my testimony, how Grace saved me.

Through all that has happened, bad, ugly, dreadful things that have happened, it was that amazing grace that saved a skilless, sometimes brainless, blurrhead wretch like me. It was grace that taught my heart to fear, to know the things that I know now, to refrain from the stupid things that I would have done and put God back in His place, where He should be, the highest place in my life. And grace relieved all my fears. The fear of dark situations, fear of being alone, fear of loosing my closest loved ones, fear or being small, fear of facing the unknown. How precioud did that grace appear, it was there ever since I welcomed Jesus into my life.

My chains are gone.. chains of anxiety, of fear, doubt, confusion, inferiority, hopelessness, loss of my heart, zero levels of compassion, lack of patience and emptiness... are gone. gone gone gone far far away. I've been set free! My God my Saviour has ransomed me! as I give it all to Him, Jesus the faithful intercessor bore it and carried it away. He payed the ransom to get me and my heart back from the devil. and like a flood His mercy rains. God doesnt drip, sprinkle, or wipes a bit of it on you, He prefers exaggeration... He POURS it, RAINS and FLOODS you with His mercy. I wonder if I could drown and die getting flooded by mercy. But that sounds quite impossible. back to the basics, its still that Unending love, that AMAZING grace!

not stopping yet =P

The Lord has promised good to me.. He is a good God and wants the best for me. In His word my hope is definately secure. He will be my shield and my portion as long as I live. Try beating that! HAHA The earth will fail, the sun will fail.. like I Am Legend..the fame, fortune, glamour, pride will fail, but because its God who called me here to live, He had already planned to take care of me. He will forever be mine.

This is how deep this song has gone in me. God literally answered my "whats sooooo amazing about grace question" by making me listen to this song. its like He's saying, "haha, now you know whats soo amazing about grace..I've been here all along my dear dear child. I never left. Even when things were going bad, actually i had allowed it. To make you grow. My grace is more than enough for you, and my strength is perfect when you feel you have none. The bad times were not made to last forever, so don't worry. I wont guarantee that it will be the last lesson on Grace, but I can tell that you've got it correctly. a few more edges to polish and you're set for now."

ummmmmm~~ bumpy ride it was. happened for the best it did ~ =P

My chains are gone

we were once more than we are now

Why does a woman long to be beautiful? Why does a man hope to be found brave? Because we remember, if only faintly, that we were once more than we are now. The reason you doubt there could be a glory to your life is because that glory has been the object of a long and brutal war.

(Waking the Dead, 13-14) by John Eldridge

whaaat a walk and whaaat a week it has been. i guess the saying "you never really know what you've got till you loose it" is rather true.. hahah funny la.. i feel that im contradicting myself =P

i better quote what i wanna say..

Quote John Eldridge again:

Just as we have lost our wonder at the world around us, we have forgotten what a treasure he human heart is. All of the hapiness we have ever known and all of the hapiness we hope to find is unreachable without a heart. You could not live or love or laug or cry had God not given you a heart.

aisehh i thought i got it back.. but i think i lost it somewhere sometime.. geramnyerr

good, deep, faithful memories

for a few weeks i felt like a donut.. round and with a hole in the middle.

The truth about First Love.. and loosing it

The waves of first love ebbed away in the whirlwind of Christian service and activity, and we began to lose the Romance. Our faith began to feel more like a series of problems that needed to be solved or principles that had to be mastered before we could finally enter into the abundant life promised us by Christ. We moved our spiritual life into the outer world of activity, and internally we drifted.

We sensed that something was wrong, and we perhaps tried to fix it—by tinkering with our outer life. We tried the latest spiritual fad, or a new church, or simply redoubled our commitment to make faith work. Still, we found ourselves weary, jaded, or simply bored. Others of us immersed ourselves in busyness without really asking where all the activity was headed. At one point in my own spiritual pilgrimage, I stopped to ask myself this question: “What is it that I am supposed to be doing to live the spiritual life in any way that is both truthful and passionately alive?”

in the end,its still about the heart

In the end, it doesn’t matter how well we have performed or what we have accomplished—a life without heart is not worth living.

For out of this wellspring of our soul flow all true caring and all meaningful work, all real worship and all sacrifice. Our faith, hope, and love issue from this fount, as well. Because it is in our heart that we first hear the voice of God and it is in the heart that we come to know him and learn to live in his love.

So you can see that to lose heart is to lose everything. And a “loss of heart” best describes most men and women in our day. It isn’t just the addictions and affairs and depression and heartaches, though, God knows, there are enough of these to cause even the best of us to lose heart. But there is the busyness, the drivenness, the fact that most of us are living merely to survive. Beneath it we feel restless, weary, and vulnerable.

Indeed, the many forces driving modern life have not only assaulted the life of our heart, they have also dismantled the heart’s habitat—that geography of mystery and transcendence we knew so well as children. All of us have had that experience at one time or another, whether it be as we walked away from our teachers, our parents, a church service, or sexual intimacy; the sense that something important, perhaps the only thing important, had been explained away or tarnished and lost to us forever.

Sometimes little by little, sometimes in large chunks, life has appropriated the terrain meant to sustain and nourish the wilder life of the heart, forcing it to retreat as an endangered species into smaller, more secluded, and often darker geographies for its survival . As this has happened, something has been lost, something vital.

(The Sacred Romance, 3-5)

chun fotos

some fotos taken on Prakash's then new apple 'dunno how many inches screen' monitor.. now we know what he does when he's bored in the office.. He's the Mr. Macho Man with the super Macho hands bigger than his head in the 1st pic.. was all taken last sem.. and stilll making me laff +P

hah! found it

The Bible sees the heart as the source of all creativity, courage, and conviction. It is the source of our faith, our hope, and of course, our love.
It can be steadfast, true, upright, stout, valiant.

It can also be frightened, faint, cowardly, melt like wax.

But, it also can be wandering, forgetful, dull, stubborn, proud, hardened.

It is the “wellspring of life” within us (Prov. 4:23), the very essence of our existence, the center of our being, the fount of our life.

There is no escaping the centrality of the heart. God knows that; it’s why he made it the central theme of the Bible, just as he placed the physical heart in the center of the human body.

and, YES!

i found it.back.

few days ago, i was almost quite lost. and as the passages says that the heart does grow 'dull', 'wandering', 'stubborn', and 'hardened'. but it is also the 'very essence of our existence'. this way, it can be assumed that: if our hearts are wandering and far away, then at those moments, we were not fully present in our lives. Wherever we are, with whomever we may be with, our bodies are there buy 'we'- the essence, were not there.

creepy? but thats true.

after sometime drawing back closer to Jesus, i got my heart back. Jesus said that i am human and that it was ok. He was the right person i went to.

now i have my VALIANT heart back! wooohooo im here now. im back! and it feels gooood!

p.s. pics below are frm Jon's bday on 1Jan at MdmKwans.. some weird but memorable photos..

something's missing

hah! i knew it! these few days opening up the new year has been nothing but weird. weird in the sense that i feel totally lost in transition or something.. something is missing but i just couldnt figure out what. im currently in the kind of sesat mode, where i have no idea if its someting wrong with me, or the things around me. most probably is me. i was not well the pass 3days and down with flu, fever, headache, body ache- the common combo.

now i'm suddenly awake at 4am, turning around, cant sleep. grabbed my computer and decided to check my email. and unsurprizingly, there it is. the daily e-mail from Ransomed Heart.com.

for today 4/1/08 the title is A Passionate Voice Within. here goes..

Some years into our spiritual journey, after the waves of anticipation that mark the beginning of any pilgrimage have begun to ebb into life’s middle years of service and busyness, a voice speaks to us in the midst of all we are doing. There is something missing in all of this, it suggests. There is something more.

The voice often comes in the middle of the night or the early hours of morning, when our hearts are most unedited and vulnerable. At first, we mistake the source of this voice and assume it is just our imagination. We fluff up our pillow, roll over, and go back to sleep. Days, weeks, even months go by and the voice speaks to us again: Aren’t you thirsty? Listen to your heart. There is something missing.

We listen and we are aware of . . . a sigh. And under the sigh is something dangerous, something that feels adulterous and disloyal to the religion we are serving. We sense a passion deep within; it feels reckless, wild.

We tell ourselves that this small, passionate voice is an intruder who has gained entry because we have not been diligent enough in practicing our religion. Our pastor seems to agree with this assessment and exhorts us from the pulpit to be more faithful. We try to silence the voice with outward activity, redoubling our efforts at Christian service. We join a small group and read a book on establishing a more effective prayer life. We train to be part of a church evangelism team. We tell ourselves that the malaise of spirit we feel even as we step up our religious activity is a sign of spiritual immaturity, and we scold our heart for its lack of fervor.

Sometime later, the voice in our heart dares to speak to us again, more insistently this time. Listen to me—there is something missing in all this. You long to be in a love affair, an adventure. You were made for something more. You know it.

- The Sacred Romance, ransomedheart.com

i think its the most ma fan thing, when it is the issue of the heart. We scold our heart for its lack of passion, for not being good enough and not measuring up to the standards that are set. Iv accomplished many things, yet I feel lousy about myself now. i wonder: how come others look like they're are measuring up, and doing so effortlessly? serving God has been joyful this pass Christmas season. Even while working through the night, minor conflicts with people groups and all, it was still joyful. After all this, a voice deep down comes and outrightly tells you, "Listen to me, there is something missing in all this. You were made for something more, you know it!"

yes ok. i know it. but what is it? what is that 'something more'?

all the answers to all these Qs are in the bible. now, this is the time i think i need to go into fasting and prayer. learn to see things from God's perspective. Worship is all about Him.

Yes God, i am thirsty. I'm listening now, and yes, there is something missing indeed.