A Decade of Blogging

I have been blogging for ten years! The unsettling events of 2015 and the beginning of 2016 had so distracted me that that I almost let such an important anniversary slipped my mind! I started this blog on 21 January 2006. I posted my 1000th post on 20 July 2008, 2001st post on 1 Jan 2010, and 3000th post on 11 Feb 2015. One of the features I like about blog is that I can easily retrieve previous posts, unlike Facebook or twitters. Blogging is part of my digital Great Commission activities.

My very first post Why I begin blogging in 2006 states the reasons why I started the blog.

• With the numerous viewpoints available, I want to add a distinctive Christian one
• I support the open access of knowledge that the Internet offers
• Use Web 2.0 as a platform to sharing our learning experiences
• Be part of an online community

In time, my blogging activities expanded and so did my number of blogs. Aside from this blog, I also administer the following blogs, reflecting my diverse interests.

• Random Writing from a Doctor’s Chair
• Random Sermon from a Doctor’s Chair
• Random Spirituality from a Doctor’s Chair
• Random Photos from a Doctor’s Chair

My postings in the blogs have lessen in the last few years because of my increased involvement in Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Google Plus and Youtube. This does not mean that I think that the importance of blogs has decreased. In fact, I believe that blogging has settled into the distinctive niche it was meant to be. Where Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest and Google Plus deal with the daily, social online interactions, blogs offers a place for longer, more reflective and reasoned articles to be posted.

I will continue to blog 

•  Spiritual discipline. Blogging is a spiritual discipline as I try to write at least 1,000 words daily. Not all of what I have written will be posted. Some will be published elsewhere. I find writing helps me to think and understand myself. It also helps me to experience God and engage with his creation.

• Teaching. The Internet has grown tremendously in the last two decades. It has become the largest depository of knowledge mankind has ever created. It is also the largest collection of hubris. I will continue to present a Christian viewpoint from as far as I understand it. I do not pretend to know it all but I see the need for Christian counterpoint especially from an Asian perspective.

• Recommending. I will continue to recommend good books, blog postings and websites. I find open sharing is very useful as others may also come across articles or post I am not aware of.

• Interaction. I value interactions on my blogs and other social media. I value open minds and fellow seekers. However, I will not waste my time with biased, opinionated, rude bigots. We learn more in our interactions. 

• Community. My readers and friends are my online tribe and community. I value every one of them. Their comments and likes are much appreciated. I love the friendships we have formed online and in some cases in the physical world. It is always a pleasure to meet someone in the flesh whom we have met online. I am slowly going down the list and praying for each of my Facebook friends.

Dear friends, thank you for reading this far and being part of my life. God bless you all. 

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The False Shalom

Wandering monkey mind,

fleeting flighty thoughts,

rapid shallow breathing,

racing stressed heartbeats,

ever restless moving body,

the ‘shalom’ of stress.

Mindfulness of the moment,

reflection of consciousness,

deep breaths of life,

slower drumbeats of mortality,

body still, relaxed at rest,

the shalom of eternity.

Why do we live with the false shalom?

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Inner Wellspring

You can never love another person unless you are equally involved in the beautiful but difficult spiritual work of learning to love yourself. There is within each of us, at the soul level, an enriching fountain of love. In other words, you do not have to go outside yourself to know what love is. This is not selfishness, and it is not narcissism; they are negative obsessions with the need to be loved. Rather this is a wellspring of love within the heart. . . .

If you find that your heart has hardened, one of the gifts that you should give yourself is the gift of the inner wellspring. You should invite this inner fountain to free itself. You can work on yourself in order to unsilt this, so that gradually the nourishing waters begin in a lovely osmosis to infuse and pervade the hardened clay of your heart. Then the miracle of love happens within you. Where before there was hard, bleak, unyielding, dead ground, now there is growth, color, enrichment, and life flowing from the lovely wellspring of love. This is one of the most creative approaches to transfiguring what is negative within us.

— John O'Donohue in Anam Cara

Befriending Our Inner Enemies

Befriending Our Inner Enemies

How do we befriend our inner enemies lust and anger? By listening to what they are saying. They say, "I have some unfulfilled needs" and "Who really loves me?" Instead of pushing our lust and anger away as unwelcome guests, we can recognize that our anxious, driven hearts need some healing. Our restlessness calls us to look for the true inner rest where lust and anger can be converted into a deeper way of loving.

There is a lot of unruly energy in lust and anger! When that energy can be directed toward loving well, we can transform not only ourselves but even those who might otherwise become the victims of our anger and lust. This takes patience, but it is possible.

The God Seekers

Richard H. Schmidt (2008), God Seekers: Twenty Centuries of Christian Spiritualities , Grand Rapids, MI:Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. / Hardcover


This is an interesting book to read because it gives an overview of Christian spirituality by focusing on the biography of a certain person as representative of that spirituality. It is appropriate that the book should be entitled Christian spiritualities as each of the person mentioned represent a type of Christian spirituality. I am beginning to recognise and appreciate that there is not one Christian spirituality but many Christian spiritualities.

Schmidt offers the definition of Christian spirituality as "any spirituality which sees God in Jesus Christ." That's a great definition but it does not mention the role of the Holy Spirit and the telos of Christian spirituality.

There are 32 short biographies followed by a few quotations from each of the the person mentioned. Each forms a chapter and a type of spiritualities. The first biography is of Irenaues (early Christian spirituality) and ends with Rosemary Radford Ruether (Feminist spirituality). These make interesting reading but is just too brief. What make the chapters come alive is the beautiful line portraits of the persons mentioned drawn by Dean Mosher of Fairhope, Alabama where he drew from imagination, many of the the early spiritual writers who did not have any surviving portraits.

A good book for a general introduction to Christian spiritualities.

Longing for God

Richard Foster & Gayle D. Beebe (2009), Longing for God: Seven Paths of Christian Devotions, Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press.

Richard Foster is the founder of Renovare in Denver, Colorado. Gayle Beebe is president of Westmont Colleg in Santa Barbara, California.

This book reminds me of the approach taken by Richard Foster (2001) in his book, Streams of Living Water. While in Streams, Foster divided the Christian traditions, here they try to divide the spiritual life as seven paths of Christian devotion. These paths are
(1) The right ordering of our love for God
(2) The spiritual life as journey
(3) The recovery of knowledge of God lost in the Fall
(4) Intimacy with Jesus
(5) The right ordering of our experiences with God
(6) Action and contemplation
(7) Divine ascent

The authors have selected a few Christian spiritual saints from the past to support each one of these path. For example in the path of action and contemplation, John Cassian, Benedict of Nursia and Gregory the Great were chosen as examples and a small sample of their wrings were quoted.

As a student of Christian spirituality, I welcome the revival of interest in the leaders of the spirituality tradition. The Desert Fathers and Mothers, Christian mystics, spiritual directors and spiritual writers are enjoying a revival of sorts. Their works are being taken down from dusty shelves and their writings are being reprinted. These saints are very complex people and they lived in a time and space very remote to our time and space. Therefore I fear when they and their works are used to support certain views of spiritualities without reference to the context in which their works were produced. Oops. Sorry about the rant.

This is a well written book by two scholars of Christian spirituality. The seven paths mentioned are well defined but somehow felt too 'neat.' I hope now that Christian devotion is categorized, it will not be systematized and formulatized. In his book, Streams, Foster identifies six dimensions of the Christian life. After the publication the the book, Renovare organises spiritual formation groups which meet regularly. During each group meeting, they make sure they study or conduct activities that touches upon these six dimensions. While this sounds like a balanced Christian life, somehow it is too artificial and again, neat. Christian life is more complex than that. It is not a formula but a way of life.

After saying all that, this is a good book to read about Christian spirituality.