A thing to be careful about

I spent quite a fair amount of time today just watching youtube clips on magic tricks.

I saw some professional magicians, I saw some amateur kids doing tricks. It was pretty amazing, ingenious how the come up with the tricks. As an engineering student, I tried hard to trace where the card went, where he hid the pigeon, how come the coin went into that closed bottle!

Yet, in all this, the videos remind me of a professional magician(Anslem Roy) I knew, some golden words I remember...

When we do magic, we are NOT trying to say
"Hey! look! I'm gonna prove you stooopid!"
"Now you see! Now you don't! I bet you couldn't catch that! Stooooopid!"

Then he went on to comment on how David Blaine spoiled the image of magicians. Anslem said magicians are performers and entertainers - it is a professional and honourable job, like a clown. It is the clowns job to make people happy, a profession like being a teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, a politician.

This whole lesson made me think about the principle of "Don't be a smart alec". Be humble and do a good job and serve for the good of others.

I have a tutor in university who comes in to class with an attitude - Myself ( and I think many others ) get the feeling that he is trying to show us how smart he is by writing down formulas quickly, telling us that we ought to know all the "first year stuff" already, doing many things the harder way to tell us how fantastic math is while critisizing the standard of math we are learning... while we are still struggling under the load.

I have seen speakers, teachers, magicians, and even pastors doing these sort of things.

I... have done these sort of things.

The truth is this - I am not impressed by that math tutor at all. It is a childish thing to think people are actually impressed. Well, sometimes we succeed at impressing people of low self esteem, just to make them feel smaller and weaker. The idiotic thing is that sometimes I actually feel glorified in the midst of the falling off of my lower self esteemed friends.

On the other hand, this feeling of glory reveals the sad state of a worthless dignity. Who on earth is dignified - not because they are truly winners, but because they are losers who found really lousy losers? There is just this feeling in me when I do such things -

"Joel, you are doing great, you are above the mean, you are above average - you know that you are really quite lousy, but ITS OKAY! the mean value is pathetic! Take comfort in that!"




After all have been said, I think that to think in such a way is really not constructive at all. What more, it is definitely not humble, it is a load of puffed up vain imaginations.

As I write this, though some sense of irritation burns within me, but I hope that you trust that I love you:

To the girls out there:

Just as much as the speaker, teacher, etc job is one of the many "performance based job"... I suppose that I learn from some of my girl friends that looking pretty is also a very time consuming job. But I do have some friends that try hard to be pretty and always feel that they are not pretty enough. Do you know that in perservering in your twisted principles (which I ought to repent of), you are really destroying their lives?

Of course, I'd be too sexist to just mention girls. It is the principle of the whole matter. And as humans, I bet we all face this problem. The thought that we are such lowly beings... should really humble us - whether or not we can change into better persons or not.

A note before Joel goes off:

Joel - fear God and fear nothing else. Respect God above all. If you continue on in your "seeking approval of men more than the approval of God", you will be moulded into a lifeless blob that patterns your life to the insecurities of this world - you will lose your dream spouse, dream family, dream ministry, dream character... you will lose your life. You are called to be a Christian, don't sink below a rational hedonist.

Jesus friends

Love one another. As I have loved you, you must love one another. - John 13:34

You are my friends if you do what I command - John 15:14

If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. - John 15:19



Its hard to try to be Jesus friend, and be the world's friend.

Jesus tells his friends that they have to love one another just as He has loved them - because if they remained Jesus friend, the world would hate them.

It is hard to live without love, if even Jesus' friends do not love one another, who then will love them?

Sometimes, I want friendship so bad, so bad that I learn that being somewhere in between is really being nowhere.

I'm not sure if it is somewhat right to blame Christians that we don't love one another. But I'm sure that I am not excused even if I were right to blame. Then again, how to live without friendship, even if I know what is right and what is wrong?

Is this what is also meant by "The righteous shall live by faith"?

Persevering through some known facts even though without the feeling of the love.

Shallowness

Its hard to speak against shallowness.

If you are speaking too "deep" audiences, there is no point in telling them the shallowness of those who are ignorant.

If you are speaking to a "shallow" audience, they would have to understand deep things to know what you are really meaning by being shallow.

Then you have to take into account that your idea of deep vs. shallow has an absolute basis, and not simply "a matter of perspective" - since the saying goes, one mans trash is another man's treasure... perhaps what you think is deep is only really a shallow thing.

For example perhaps to an engineering student, one might think that a certain set of analytical skill is really 'common sense' - but it isn't common sense to an arts student, not so much because they are stupid, but because they see things in a different way. In the same way, we might not be always right in thinking others as ignorant people.

Having said that, I am not dismissing that there is such a thing as being shallow and being deep since as much as there are many things in life that is just a matter of perspective - there is also loads of things which are not just a matter of perspective.

Having said all these, I think - at this point of time - should we want to educate another person because we think of them as shallow - is not so much to introduce the deep content that we cannot wait to share. As much as this is important, I think that we ought to provide the perspective of things we are looking at first, i.e. the context also. If we cannot convince the other person that the context or perspective is a worthy one, then we would not do well in talking about the content since they are not interested in the matter at all.

Convince the context first, then the contents will be meaningful