I visited my grandma just now in hospital, it really made me sad to see her so bloated and unhealthy, looking so ill. I just pray that God will heal her, and turn her heart to him.

I talked to Dean last night, over supper at my place. Through all our musings, we decided that Singaporeans should really learn to sit down and chill and talk about life. But amidst everything I sensed that we were very similar, pilgrims on the same voyage, seeking to make sense of life and God and coming to terms with our intellect and questions. And this life has not been easy for us, with his problems and mine. Yesterday mine involved grace, the girl that I had not been able to get over after over 5 months of officially ending everything. There’s the song “Trust His Heart”, which basically repeats Romans 8:28, that all things work for the good of those who love God.

God is too wise to be mistaken
God is too good to be unkind
So when you can’t see His plan
When you can’t trace His hand
Trust His heart

Such simple words, so hard to live out. But yet there was in both of us, I sensed, a striving to trust God, to make Him our vision and motive for our lives. Many times over the past few months I have had hunger and a sense of lost-ness and serious doubts about the validity of my faith that I had declared for so many years. But in both me and Dean I sensed a hope, an optimism, that there was more to life than this, that somehow God still provides the meaning and fulfillment that our hearts yearn for.

I had seen people live the Christian life out, and a self-centered hedonistic life without God seemed to lead to sadness, disappointment, anger, selfishness, despair, emptiness, hopelessness. It just seemed to me that the pleasure-pursuing life that seems so sweet cannot possibly promise much at all at the end of the day, just a mess of emptiness and broken dreams and strife and longings that are yet to be fulfilled.

But it appears to me that the life of peace, contentment, fulfillment, satisfaction, and true joy, comes with living with Jesus as the centre. It is the life that promises a hope greater than the world, a seeking for something bigger, something that the failings of the world would not be able to touch. It appears to me that much of my emptiness and meaninglessness would be satisfied by making Jesus my vision.

Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart
Naught be all else to be save that Thou art
Thou my best thought, by day or by night
Waking or sleeping Thy presence my light

At the end of the chit chat session we agreed to pray for each other. But I do not deny that I have doubt, and fear, that I would be let down, that somehow my desire to put my hopes in this Jesus would somehow lead to naught. It would, of course, lead to cynicism and hopelessness and chasing after pleasures and things of this world – again. But the beauty of what is promised captures me: everlasting unquenchable joy and peace, unshakable assurance, a rock to build my life on, a life that can never be shaken, a confidence despite the storms of life, a love that surpasses all understanding, a promise of eternity in paradise, and a beauty that I would give everything I own to catch a glimpse of.

The beauty of what is promised captures me, like it has captured the hearts of so many over the centuries. O, what I would give to have that for myself, day after day.