Musings

This post isn’t about what one of my friends calls ‘Toronto Bashing’, or quibbling with fellow Christians, but a very personal reflection on something that continues to unsettle me.

A month ago I wrote a friend from Salmon Run many years ago to catch up. She left Wesley several years before the turn of the century and went to New Creation Church, a church that media today calls a megachurch. We remained in semi-contact throughout the subsequent years nonetheless, as for a period of time after I first left Salmon Run 13 years ago, she was one of the few friends I could share with. I think she was pretty impressed with the services and ministries at NCC; enough for her to have sent me some of her new church’s publicity and media materials over the years in what I assumed to see if I was going to be interested in joining her to attend NCC services then.

Anyway; in one of her recent emails last month she said again that she was seeing several friends formerly from Wesley there now at NCC, and ventured to ask if I was still at Wesley. I replied in the affirmative, and also that I had no intention of worshipping at NCC as I had serious reservations about megachurches.

That was the last I heard from her, and it’s been more than a month.

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Now that I reflect on it… while I like to think that the friendship she and I had is in sufficient standing for me to had been candid, I can’t help to think that the absence of communication now had something to do with what I said. Simply put, I don’t know if she was offended.

If recent interview snippets with current members of megachurches published on media are of any indication, there seems to be great member confidence in their own activities – and that if their membership numbers are skyrocketing and the wealth resources for them to do get things done increasing so fast that it’s now reported in national media, surely they must be doing something right in these churches. Just 2 days ago for instance, The Straits Times reported the following (formatted slightly to save space).

Aug 30, 2010
Church raises $21m in 24 hours
Mammoth collection breaks New Creation’s own previous record
By Yen Feng

MEGACHURCH New Creation has broken its own record by collecting $21 million in donations in just 24 hours, proving again its ability to pull in the big money.  Church founder Joseph Prince announced the news yesterday during services at the church’s Suntec location. The money was collected over one day last week on Sunday.

‘You people, you are amazing,’ he told the packed auditorium. ‘Twenty-one million in 24 hours. Amazing.’  The funds were collected by the independent church to raise money for its new home in Buona Vista.

But the kind of impression that the general public is left with continues to unsettle me. If public discussion rooms are any indication, the impression is increasingly one of distrust. Somehow, the Christian embodiment of humility, servitude and modesty seems to have got lost in the public image and it’s replaced with financial success, big resources and money for us to get into big property investments even.

It’s not my intention to get into a debate about Christian prosperity, that argument on where exactly in the bible does it deny believers personal successes and better living, or that argument that media is only selectively reporting on certain aspects of megachurch success and not on their other ministries and social outreach.

But – and I’m aware I’m threading on thin ice between an honest opinion and causing the inadvertent offence in our public blog – the more I read about big property investments on the part of churches, million dollar collections to build bigger church premises, flash bang services with laser lights… the more I’m convicted that those places are just not for me. Those testimonies of new found personal successes at work and living, charismatic preaching, emotion-driven and powerful healing at these churches might be attracting some worshippers to migrate away from their old churches, but it’s having the opposite effect on me.

Or maybe it’s just me.

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Sigh. It’s difficult to write posts like these, and it’s only on the rare occasion when I stick my neck out and say something here that isn’t about films, Hannah, photography or traveling.

And I really do hope that the friend of mine stopped writing only because she’s busy.

Something strange has been happening of late: I’ve become increasingly forgetful – and not of things that I did a week ago, but just barely seconds ago!

The typical scenario goes like this. I’ll lock the car door, and walk off. Barely 5 seconds later, I won’t for my life remember for certain if I’d just locked the door – and I’ll have to walk back to double-check. And the funny thing is that at least 19 out of 20 times, the door would be indeed locked still.

I’m thinking it has to do with the fact that lots of little routine things we do are mechanically wired in our brains, so that when we actually perform the action, it doesn’t actually register into our memory imprint. So, when we’re uncertain if we just did something – whether it’s if we switched off the water heater, locked the front gate, or the car door – it typically comes down to whether we trust our mechanical routine behavior, or the absence of a visual memory imprint of us performing that action.

Still… it’s an inescapable feeling of resignation that I’m getting old. Gah.:(

The play yard we picked up several months ago has been experiencing minimal use recently, since Hannah doesn’t react very well anymore to roaming about with plastic partitions. We routinely let her walk around the living room and study these days, and she’s learned to sit by herself at the entrance of the kitchen and not enter unless one of us asks her to. Wonderfully learned behavior of the part of our little girl.:)

That said, our favorite spot – as in for Daddy and Daughter – still remains our bed in the master bedroom. She’ll climb all over the mattress and linen, play hide and seek with the little red clock, and – of late also – sprawl herself on the bed, giggle and on the occasion stone too. All under my watchful eyes though. While she’s learned to recognize the danger areas, e.g. where the edge of the bed mattress is, there still is always the possibility of her accidentally falling and hitting herself on the bed’s wooden frame.

Plenty of photo opportunities when she’s at play with the little red clock, though it no longer works very well anymore since she’s been pulling at its knobs and dials.:)

This one’s probably an old one! During the counseling class last week, there were jokes aplenty with the very lively and animated instructor we were having. One of those jokes that came up was as follows. Apologies to those of us who’re not Chinese as the humor might be lost in translation.:)

A bao (包, steam filled bun) and a mantou (馒头, steamed bun without fillings) went to see a sad show.

During the show, the bao ended up crying but the mantou didn’t. Why not?

Answer: because the mantou had no feelings.

Ok; lame joke! I thought I’ll jot it down on our blog because I haven’t heard of this one before until the class.:)

There’s a very useful facility at church: a cry room for worshippers with infants and toddlers! It adjourns to one side of the sanctuary, and reasonably sound proof so that whatever goes on in that room won’t bother the Sunday services too much. Ling has made use of the little room before but not for myself. So, this Sunday morning I decided to join Ling and Hannah in it.

The room’s pretty cozy with wood parquet flooring, toys and baby books. Hannah seemed to like the room a lot, and interacted also with the other toddlers in the room. The first three pictures here were taken just after service ended and before leaving, and the last three at NTUC Hougang Mall where we’d just had morning brunch. I passed her a box of Earl Grey tea bags I was picking up to keep her occupied.:)

Playing the Frontierville Facebook game has been a bit of a bonding activity for me and Hannah at home. I’m quite certain that she doesn’t understand what the game’s about, but she’s attracted to its colorful visuals and folksy and rhythmic music for sure.:)

Hannah learning how to harvest crops on Daddy’s homestead.:)

But in reality, I’m just lucky if she doesn’t delete any of my neighbors, the way she goes about banging the keyboard!

I finally completed the last day of the certification course on basic practical counseling this afternoon, and boy – has it been utterly draining! Not in the physical sense, but learning the procedures for counseling and suicide assessment intervention, the underlining principles involved and also of the many case incidents shared has on one hand been really illuminating, has also been at times both shocking and sobering to the point that you start feeling pretty inadequate with what your meager skills can offer.

I’ll be reflecting on the lessons learned and experiences shared in the coming days and maybe writing a post or two more of my experiences in the course – but not at the moment as the mind’s pretty much saturated.

The one comfort each evening has still been getting home and or going out with dinner as a small family. Hannah was in a pretty chirpy mood when I met her and Ling for dinner at Hougang Mall. We didn’t bring along a camera, so the Samsung Galaxy S phone camera had to do:

Yeah – decent pictures of Hannah and Daddy for a change.:)

The Expendables (2010) – AMK Hub; last Saturday morning. Back in the late 80’s, the three ‘big’ action-film stars that were churning out box office hits were Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Bruce Willis. There was frequent talk about attempts to get these three – or heck, even just two of them – into the same film. Sort of like a made in heaven pairing along the lines of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro.

Time has long gone and past. Arnold’s now a Governor, Willis never lost steam, and Stallone was low-key for a while with just a couple of personal projects running before coming back to the forefront with new films wrapping up two key characters he was most closely identified with: Rocky and Rambo.

So, hats off to Stallone for pulling it altogether for this new film that sees the three of them together and as a tidy bonus also starring more recent action-film actors. He’s assembled quite a cast for his new film that he directed, wrote and starred in – and the list of actors include the threesome, former Olympic swimmer turned actor Jason Statham from the Transporter series, Jet Li, and Mickey Rourke. Even Stallone’s old nemesis from Rocky IV, Dolph Lundgren shows up.

The Expendables is the name of a band of mercenaries who take on jobs that the government routinely can’t. Sort of like the A-Team. The lot are led by Ross (Stallone), his knife thrower Christmas (no kidding, and that’s Statham), his vertically challenged but very kungfu expert Yang (Li), and the violent lunatic Jensen (Lundgren). The lot take on a job in a fictitious Latin American drug producing country that’s now taken over by a former CIA operative in cahoots with its banana dictator.

That’s basically the film in a nutshell. There’s no substantive character development, no subtlety, just lots of bullets flying about, mayhem and explosions. The film is quite a throwback to the loud and noisy action films of the 80s with larger than life characters, and film settings that would get panned today for their lack of realism. All explosions in this film seem to be napalm-driven, guns rarely run out of ammunition, and the a good bulk of the faceless bad guys don’t even get screen time to show they get wounded first when they’re shot. Every bullet fired by one of the Expendables is a kill shot in short.

The Expendables and their ridiculous berets.

But hey, it’s a Stallone film and if nothing else, the film isn’t pretentious. The film is enjoyable, if at a superficial level without leaving lasting impressions once you walk out of the theatre.

That said, there are still missed opportunities. The much anticipated scene between the Three Action Film Gods of ‘80s was a bit of a let down. For starters, if you watch carefully, you might notice that the three of them aren’t really seen in the same frame apart from the last bit of it. There’re plenty of camera angle switches as the three talk to each other in antagonist fashion – Arnold and Stallone are the competing and rival mercenary leaders, Willis is the job offerer – but a good part of the scene centers on Stallone and Willis together only. You start wondering if the Arnold was actually filming his scenes separately from the other two.

The information I’m gathering online says that’s untrue – but if so, the film then did not leverage on the presence of the three greats. It would had been a real hoot to see Stallone, Arnold and Willis eyeballing each other in the same scene and in the same frame.

The violence in the film might bother some too. Granted Stallone’s Rambo films have always taken gore right to the acceptable limit when they were each released in their time. If you think about the second, third and fourth Rambo films for instance, the amount of blood splatter and limb explosions and amputations got increasingly ramped.

Bad guy about to get perforated.

In The Expendables though, the film’s has reached a new high level in this regard, and some of it feels gratuitous. Like bad guys getting their hands chopped off, heads chopped off, bodies exploding midriff sort of thing. There’s also a torture scene involving a woman victim that’s a little disturbing to watch too.

It sure gave me mixed feelings. On the one hand, the film is clearly a homage to all the old action films and its highlight is supposed to be the ensemble cast of action actors doing what they are best at. The film has stuff that the audience is supposed to take tongue in cheek. But on the other hand, the very high degree of realistic gore and violence seems to counteract that underlining none-too-serious tone. So, one minute you’ll be chuckling as Christmas mouths off a funny line to Ross, but in the next minute, when some enemy soldiers get blown into pieces in very visceral ways, you might not be smiling anymore. Or maybe that was just me.

Still, Ling liked the film and I thought it was still Ok. The best line in the film? Something about Arnold’s political ambitions. That was a hoot.:)

Now that Hannah’s happily seconded during day hours at the nanny’s, our weekday morning hours have become pretty routine. On Wednesdays though, Ling starts in school a little later, and that’s given us a weekly opportunity for us to get prepped a little more leisurely, and also for some pictures in the new morning light coming into the house.:)

She’s become quite attached to Mommy, and will always gravitate towards her when she has a choice between Ling or myself. Not unexpected since Ling’s still the primary caregiver between the two of us.

That said, this morning there was a really lovely bonding moment between Hannah and Daddy. She was happily contended to rest herself while hugging me as I sung to her.:)

Hannah now loves to pinch things from around the living room, study and her own room, and walk around the house with them. She’s a little less attached to the sheep doll these days too, an item she could not tear herself away from earlier this year.

These days, her repertoire of toys include memory card boxes, talcum powder bottles, her baby books, dinner mats, coasters etc. At the end of each day just after we set her down to bed, we’ll have to scour the entire house to pick up all the ‘litter’ on the floor.:)

Our baby girl has been grumbling quite a bit at home. She’s become increasingly assertive, and will become quite vocal if the adults around her aren’t doing things that make sense to her. E.g. if you take a toy away from her, or if you try passing her from one person to the next.

In view of this, I was remarking to Ling just now that I can’t wait for Hannah to grow up quicker. But Ling rejoined that we’d just be trading one set of challenges for another haha.:)

Anyway; here’s a small selection of pictures taken at a family event: the first month baby bash for cousin Ying Jia’s daughter. The event was at Peach Garden @ Novena. Greatest impression of the lunch: the wasabi prawns were marvelous.:)

Outside Revenue House. Parking on Sundays just $1 per entry. Cheap.

With Mommy. Hannah was pretty cranky for a good part of the event.

Auntie Jasmine to the rescue. Thrilled Hannah’s not an iPhone fan.:)

Completely knocked out in the car on the way back.