God Hears Our Cries

Birthday Breakfast

                 Happy Breakfast Birthday!               

It was one of my sons' birthday and Marie had planned a zoo trip because it was also a school holiday. Not knowing about the school holiday until too late, I didn't manage to take leave from work. I was feeling somewhat guilty about it and managed to shift things around my calendar so that we could have a birthday breakfast celebration together.

The breakfast was going fine until the end when we looked up and noticed that the sky had turned dark. Even before I finished saying, "Don't know if it will ...", it started to thunder and rain. For this particular son of mine, birthdays were the paramount social event of the year. His expectation for this to be the perfect day had soared to a crescendo when it was brought crashing down into a bottomless pit; and he began to cry.

Crying Children

The rain that derailed the Zoo plans

Now I hope you will not judge Marie and I harshly. As parents of four boys, we have very little patience for children who fuss or cry. What is worse than having one child cry is having two children cry at the same time (not to mention three) - and they don't always cry about the same things. While dealing with the crying ones, the others who are not crying still need to be tended to. We very quickly move into the "zip it" or face the consequences mode. I think for me at least, my patience with their crying got less as they grew up. So in this instance, statements like "You're a teenager now ...", "You need to learn that there will be disappointments in life ..." and so forth came out from our mouths very quickly. Unfortunately the clouds were also not helping that day - they just got darker and darker, like the mood at the table.

How God Would Respond to Crying?

After the incident I reflected upon my response to my son's crying. Did it mirror how I thought God would respond to me whenever I came to Him with life's disappointments and regrets? Would He tell me to "zip it" or that "Life is tough and what doesn't kill you will make you stronger?". 

In response, God brought me back to the story of Hannah in the Bible (in 1 Samuel Chapter 1 - 2). Here was a woman who, at the start of the story, was unremarkable. She was one of two wives of a man. She was stuck in an unenviable situation of having no children while her counterpart had a brood. Therefore she had to endure constant taunts at home. Even though her husband loved her tenderly, it could not fill the deep emptiness her barrenness had left in her heart. 

Every year, the family when to Jerusalem for the annual rituals. In one of those years when her torment had been particularly difficult, as the Bible recorded, " In her deep anguish, Hannah prayed to the Lord, weeping bitterly." The priest in the temple thought she was drunk as he watched her pray (why are we always so judgemental of people who express their grief in public?). As Hannah explained to him: “Not so, my lord, I am a woman who is deeply troubled. I have not been drinking wine or beer; I was pouring out my soul to the Lord. Do not take your servant for a wicked woman; I have been praying here out of my great anguish and grief.” (1 Samuel 1: 15 - 16)

Sometimes Blue Skies are just round the corner

To cut to the chase, God heard Hannah's desperate cry to Him. Shortly after, she conceived and bore a son who would have a significant role in Israel's history; and thereafter she bore more children. No wonder in 1 Samuel 2: 1-2, Hannah sang a song of praise to God:

“The Lord has filled my heart with joy;

    how happy I am because of what he has done!

I laugh at my enemies;

    how joyful I am because God has helped me!

“No one is holy like the Lord;

    there is none like him,

    no protector like our God."

Never too small for God

For all intents and purposes, Hannah was not considered to have been of any significance in her society during the culture of her time; and her prayers to have a child to shed her shame was not exactly world changing. It would have been fair to wonder why God should even listen to her much less answer her prayer? But He did. I think the point is this - whether it is the deep desires of a woman for a child or the wish of a birthday teen to have a zoo outing, God hears us. Sometimes we are wrongly led to believe that either we are of no significance or our prayers are overly parochial and self-centred for God to hear us. 

I do not want to make God out to be just a Santa Claus up there in the sky who is there to make our every wish come true. I believe neither are we spoilt kids who throw tantrums when we don't get exactly what we want. Growing up my parents would say whenever I was in the toy shop "You can see but you cannot ask to buy." Not every desire is wrong and we often bury these deep because we've been taught from young it's wrong to want. What we really long for is that someone, no less the God of the universe, to hear us and acknowledge our deepest cries, our keenest needs as valid and worthy. Knowing that we have been heard is what we really want. We can also trust that after hearing He will take the best course of action on our behalf. As the Christian author Josh McDowell said "He who knows you best, loves you most".

Happily ...

As a happy ending, while the skies didn't clear quick enough for my son to have his birthday zoo trip, they spent a terrific few hours at a shopping mall and capped off the day with a ride in a cable car when the sun and blue skies returned several hours later. He didn't get exactly what he wanted but he agreed that in the end it was a terrific day after all.

As I learnt, God always hears us when we cry and has compassion on us. I pray that He will also give me that compassion the next time my children cry in front of me.

Happy Ending to a wonderful Birthday Outing!

All Bible Verses NIV unless otherwise stated and viewed from BibleGateway.com

After the storm ... What's Next?

Winter Comes Upon Us

The winter of 2013 - 14 will be remembered for being particularly bad - frigid temperatures and unexpected snow storms that brought many cities to their knees. It was apparently caused by something called the Arctic Vortex. This was the first time I have ever heard of such a thing.

I had an opportunity to experience this for myself when I landed in New York right smack in the middle of a sudden snow storm that shut down the airport. My connecting flight to Boston was canceled. As I traveled into New York City to spend the night in a hotel, the entire city was gridlocked. A trip from the airport to the hotel that should have taken just half an hour, took two and a half hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic. When I finally got out of the airport van, the cold air that smacked me in my face was shocking to my tropical sensibilities. Frankly, my admiration for people who live in winter climates grew by leaps and bounds. It took mental and physical resilience to live here. Those of us living in balmy climates who wished for picture perfect snow white scenes on Christmas Cards do not know half of what we're asking for. By the way, snow gets blackish and dirty quite quickly. It's not pretty at all.

Marie and I will remember this period of our lives as being particularly challenging for other reasons as well. Other than the craziness of running a family of 4 kids (the last few months without domestic help again), guiding another son through the major PSLE exam (see: School Results (PSLE no. 2) - what I'm learning about school grades), busy work schedules, finishing my course assignments, early morning online discussions and lectures, we also engaged a designer to renovate a new home last June. We capped it off with a monumental move into our new abode in January 2014, two weeks before I traveled to the U.S. for the very last module of my course (which was when I landed into this unexpected snowstorm).

Challenging Times

Dartmouth College, a great place of learning

We had known in advance of these events, had planned for them and had survived with a whole gamut of emotions from elation to frustration. It is hard to do justice to our experiences in the past year with a few succinct words. Marie said it was more more like desperation than frustration - she had to endure more of it when I was away in the States; leaving her alone with the kids and the new house. It felt like juggling a thousand balls in the air all the time, none of which could drop. It felt like a constant stream of questions, decisions and incidents to handle. We couldn't let our guard down for even a moment. We hadn't intended for it all to converge into a crescendo at this one point in time. So perhaps it was no surprise that on 30th January 2014, 4:30 pm, U.S. Eastern Standard Time (EST), when the last lecture of my 18 months course was delivered, I felt both a sense of relief and let down that I had a completed a most challenging period of my life; and yet without any fanfare. Shouldn't there have been fireworks, champagne popping and inspiring Disney music? We only had our rather reticent professor thank us for the last one and a half years (of course later on I had the pomp and pageantry of a college commencement; but that was later on).

After the Storm 

Family happy in the new home ... finally

Now almost two months later I thought I was supposed to have more time after these major events. The time that I had set aside for my course work was like a hole that you dug in the sand. The tide came in and you didn't know where the hole went. My instincts told me, wait, slow down, take stock before deciding on the next steps but life seemed to hunt me down with more 'important' things that needed attention urgently.

Finally, I had a rare Saturday morning when I didn't have to rush a kid to a school activity and could sit down to breakfast and the papers. I'm sure it was God who arranged the time and the two articles in the papers that give me a one, two punch when I read them (I attach the links to the electronic versions here).



The first: "The Folly of Thinking We Know" (The New York Times)
The second: "Why being too busy makes us feel so good" (The Washington Post)

The first article talks about the fallacy of thinking it is possible to know everything that we want to know. The second article describes the absurd badge of honour that many of us display these days of busyness to the point of being overworked and exhausted because it drives our sense of self-worth. We think we are important and of value to society just because we have no time for anything but work.

Mr. Know-it-all

The reason why these two articles read together really hit home was because my business at the workplace is much about finding information and making information known; and of course a large part of my daily life is spent at work. I started work at this current work place fours years ago on 18th March 2010. Maybe if my boss knew how little I knew about the work then, he would not have offered me the job. But from day one I gave myself this personal motto: "I will only not know something once." The first 90 days was filled with asking, questioning and diligently studying any piece of information I could lay my hands on about the organisation.

With time, when people in the organisation noticed that if they posed me a question I would find them the answer, a line began to form. It struck me that this need in the organisation was something that I could build the core purpose of my team upon. I trained my team to "Either provide the right answer; or link the seeker to the person with the right answer". I made sure my team never gave the answer "I don't know" or "My department is not in charge of this" - "No Wrong Door" Policy as they say. One of the staff on my team said recently "Wow, are we supposed to be the Google of this organisation or what?"

Life in a snow storm

While it felt good to be the source of information for many in the organisation, it was true that I couldn't know everything, especially information that specialists spent years training for. It was also an enormously heavy burden to bear. I learnt that more important than providing information was teaching others how to find information for themselves - not fishing for them but teaching them how to fish.

Slow Down ...

The temptation for me now has been to run out to fill my newly 'free' hours with more of the same work. These two articles are like speed bumps telling me to slow it down, to consider filling my life with the important stuff, not merely more activities. They remind me of the writings of a wise man, purportedly the wisest in the world. A man named King Solomon whose musings were captured in the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible. In his own words "I applied my mind to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the heavens" (Eccl. 1: 13) and he found that "this, too, is a chasing after the wind" (Eccl. 1:17).

A Wiser Guy

Even in a snow storm,
there is beauty

If we only gave this book a superficial, cursory read, we would think the author was a guy who was clinically depressed and in need of therapy. Everything was "meaningless" or "folly". This time as I applied the reading to my situation, I realised that the words of the book was a warning to those of us who pursue only what can be seen with our visible eyes - work, riches, success, pleasure. He does not deny that there are good things here on earth - "Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart ..." (Eccl. 9:7a); "Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love ..." (Eccl. 9:9a); "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might ..." (Eccl 9:10a). However, he warns us that the pursuit of these to the exclusion of an awareness and a respect for the God of the universe is folly. "Remember your Creator", he exhorts all of us. Otherwise, even with the full extent of his unrivaled wisdom, he could not make any sense of this world - bad things do happen to good people, good things do happen to bad people; and if there was no precious eternal afterlife with God, then what was the point of this short and painful, present one?

Start and Stop with God ... the best bet in any Storm

The passage of the past 18 months for me could be likened to a Tsunami. The gale force magnitude of the events drove Marie and myself to action with little time to ponder the consequences. Yet, now that the events were over, I realised that there was a greater danger - like a person paddling just to keep afloat in a storm, I did not know to stop paddling even though the storm had passed. Marie feels that God is telling her this is a winter period of our lives. Winter is the time to hibernate, to slow down ...

Someone asked me recently how I planned my career. The honest answer is that I have never planned my career. At every point of my work I have only tried my best to do what I understood to be God's calling for me. The rest has been God's doing. God seems to be calling me now to stop, to listen to what He has to say and to be sensitive to His promptings to choices ahead of me. Unless I want to end up with a life of "folly" and "meaninglessness", I think I better obey.