Come on and celebrate!

I realize it's probably quite a jump from my last entry... not in time but in mood... but today's two words from my time with God is "come" and "celebrate". A bit odd considering that I've been feeling like I'm up over my head in a super swamped season. Looked at the 3 instances in Matthew when Jesus said "Come" (as an imperative verb) and thought about His invitation & the invitees' responses, thought about how my own response should be in a super swamped season, and found my way into remembering how Jesus Himself "did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many."

Anyway, before I goh on and on and feel panicked that I spent too much time writing this blog & not wading out of my swamp, today's entry will be to celebrate the completion of another semester of COMM208 at Life College. My 12 photography students mounted images and presented their made-into-movie-montages for their final course project yesterday. Ordered yummy finger food (tuna & egg sandwiches, sausage quiche pies and melt-in-the-mouth brownies) from Juen which somehow multiplied as different Life College staff and students dropped by to join us for an "open gallery" time. Sau Mun brought some non-alcoholic bubbly. Grace, Kenneth and Joseph came to give their insightful critiques and encouraging cheer! =) Oh and I must remember to mention Marilyn and Melissa, two of my students who stayed back to help clean up - an integral oft-forgotten part of every celebration! Check out some of their shots from our field trip to Pulau Ketam.

It has really been a joy to have served these kids. Felt really proud to see their work and their excitement and simply being a teensy part of their journey of discovering and learning and living. My appreciation to them for adding much value to my own life! In the excitement of everything, felt greatly inclined to take up another 14 weeks of Photography next year even though I'd told Sau Mun that Film App is all I can manage. Hhahha... after getting more than half an hour of sleep (which was what I was running on yesterday), I think I should pay better heed to the wisdom of my saner self. ;)

When evening falls so hard

*****
When your own words can't seem to express the tangled web you feel inside, a friend calls... a text comes through... a song plays....

Is there hope for every man
A solid place where we can stand
In this dry and weary land
Is there hope for every man

Is there love that never dies
Is there peace in troubled times
Someone help me understand
Is there hope for every man

Seems there's just so many roads to travel
It's hard to tell where they will lead
My life scarred and my dreams unraveled
Now I'm scared to take a leap

If I could find someone to follow
who knows my pain and feels the weight
The uncertainty of my tomorrow
the guilt and pain of yesterday

There is hope for every man, a solid place where we can stand
In this dry and weary land, there is hope for every man
There is Love that never dies, there is Peace in troubled times....

-- Casting Crowns

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer. And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort. (2 Corinthians 1:3-7)

Teach them well...

As I was driving back from Penang to Taiping this evening, I caught sight of a little Indian kid waving from the back of a car that was about 50m in front of mine. It looked like he was waving for no reason in particular and I decided to wave back. Heh... this started a waving conversation between him, his slightly older brother who immediately joined in enthusiatically, and me. I tried different styles of waving, even doing the rap wave I had mastered from my cousin in the 80's during the breakdance breakout. All were returned with excited, similar gestures by the two kids. They even started experimenting new waves of their own! I had to overtake their car after a while and as I passed them and saw how they moved with big smiles on their faces to the side window to exchange a final series of goodbye waves, I wondered with a big smile in my heart about that 5 minutes of word-less yet verbal-full connection.

...and let them lead the way.

A visual tribute to the kids (& their parents) whom I had the privilege of spending extended time with in June.

The Kohs visiting PJ...

The Wans in Singapore... (didn't have a chance to catch mummy & papa on camera - too fast for my shutter, Singapore life!)

The Kams in Yong Peng...

This Is Living

By the end of today which is also the end of the first half of the year, I would have, within the sixth month of 2007:

• Laid my head down at 6 different homes, including 1 in Singapore and the rest in 4 different states in Malaysia.

• Attended services in 5 different churches over the 4 Sundays in June.

• Had 3 what I'd call properly-called-for media leaders' meetings.

• Spent quality time with 6 old friends from MSCF days in Austin, TX; 7 media leaders froma variety of churches; my 3 cluster leaders in the Sunseekers Subzone; 3 old friends from DUMC not in PJ anymore; and 2 new friends not in Malaysia... hahaha... among others of course.

• Helped play with, look after and absolutely enjoyed 3 sets of kids (5 in total) spanning the ages of 8 months to 5 years old for a rough total of 240 hours, and also their parents, of course - 3 pairs of good couple friends of mine who are also mentioned in the previous bullet.
  

• Received 2 overseas calls from 2 people I've never met before with exciting news about the potential of what the Lord can do through media.

• Taken countless images of Joyce & David's 3 & 4-year-old kindy students in Yong Peng including their "official" class photographs.
  

• Spent 15 official hours lecturing part-time in Life College, and about 24 hours reading and marking through 48 different essay assignments.

• Painfully selected and bought 8 original movies on DVD and 16 China-produced classic movies, also on DVD. (They are considered cover but legal versions, i think! Hey, I bought them in Singapore, okay... for SGD5 each!)

• Played through to check through the Nepal Video both long & short plays about 10 times each.
  

Okay, that's enough stats from my fullest month ever! Hahha... take a wild guess at my primary personality profile & my main love language!

Sometimes I just forget

Standing behind a shop counter right now... er, long story into which I'm actively deciding not to goh into! Anyway, the strains of 80's songs playing over the speakers kinda triggered me into blog-tion. Funny how I often forget the amount of time I had spent as a teenager just memorizing and belting out songs. Then suddenly you hear a song and the lyrics just come gliding out. Always surprises me how all those lyrics are filed inside my memory somewhere, just waiting for the right musical cues to be released. That just happened again in McD's. A cover version of an old love song came on and yes, if you know me well enough, you'd know that I just couldn't help but sing along.

The strange thing was when I walked into the next place that I'm in now, the original version of that same song came on! Heh! Part of the strange poetry of life that I like musing about. How there's so much wonderful rhythmic detail woven into our daily living. Yesterday for another instance, two major things I've been working on came to their respective closing stanzas - the final exam paper (and an extra re-sit paper) for a course I'm lecturing at Life College and... the Nepal Video! Praise God! Finally, after so many months and 10 hours with Grace yesterday doing the final polishing... we actually have both long and short versions on a DVD!! Went home with that elated feeling one gets after the climax of a great symphony.

This morning as I spent some time with God and even now as I stand here behind this strangely obscure counter, I think about how He orchestrates so many things in life to marvel at... and I wonder why sometimes I just forget.

"Great are the works of the LORD; they are pondered by all who delight in them." (Psalm 111:2)

I hate to leave you but I really must say...

...goodbye wi-fi... goodbye!

I've really appreciated the time in KK. Especially my bare minimum room with maximum wi-fi!



It's been quite an eventful 3 days. Will only mention significant things that happened, otherwise it'll take too long to finish this posting.

Sunday:

First, I found the DVD that I pulled out from Alex & Grace's mailbox BROKEN! After all the trouble of bringing it over! The only reason why I didn't freak out completely about it was that the 9-hour journey here had kinda numbed my emotions to any subsequent surprises. Also Eric had warned me (post-boot incident) that a lot of obstacles had been popping up prior to the Fresh Fire rally, which is why I'm here in KK, by the way. One girl from Skyline even had a piece of flesh from her finger accidently sliced off while trimming name tags for the rally!



So anyway, I send an S.O.S. out to solve the broken DVD problem, and since then Kee Sitt has sent me a scrounged-down version of the video while Poh Sim has made and pos-laju-ed a copy of the DVD. Thank God for wonderful media buddies and mailing capabilities, virtual and physical!

Er... we're still on Sunday... Alice picks me up, listens to me wail a bit about my broken DVD and we have a fish noodle breakfast with Eric, Tracy and Mak.



Then Alice goes, "Hey, you're gonna be guest-video-mixing today at GCC!" Hahhaa - so I goh and guest-mix! It was fun! And a privilege to get to serve with the most active (if not the only) multicam crew in KK and also get re-acquainted with the first ever Videonics Mixer that DUMC acquired in 1998 before swapping it for a Videonics MXPro, which then got hooked to a MXPro DV, both of which got replaced by two linked Edirol V4s, which finally got switched out for our current Videotek Prodigy! Sorry - sudden gush of tech flashback - just had to release it!




Guest Photographer for the 2 images above: Alice Chong

Oop! Gotta goh work on something - continue this later!

It's been a long road... getting from there to here.

That's the first line from the theme song of Star Trek Enterprise series, originally written for the movie Patch Adams. And it aptly entitles this entry - first about blogging again after 3 years, then about yesterday's 9-hour journey from PJ to KK.

The first long journey... well... I got a Blogger account while I was visiting my brother in Cambridge in 2004 and had a single "test" entry which was left there all this while. It felt too daunting a task to figure out how to blog then and I resorted to sending out my travelogues in Word instead. Later that same year, I started another blog account in xanga. I wrote a grand total of 5 entries before my self-predicted writer's block came to pass. Being the sentimental archival buff that I am, I decided the other day to merge those 5 entries with that lone one as I renew my Blogger account which I must say is sooo much easier to use now. So yeah - all 6 postings now sit happily in their new home under the Blog Archive of 2004, minus the comments from the original postings. You can't take it all sometimes. Oh, and if you dare venture into another piece of my ancient history, go to http://www.mrdata.com/~gce for the website I put together before I came back from the States in 1997. Er... I must warn you though that it'll throw you into a realm of possibly intolerable outdatedness! Still, I praise God for it as it did bring me quite a number of job offers then! I've actually been kinda reluctant to update it to a more contemporary look - did I mention I'm a sentimental archival buff?

Ok - the second long journey...

Left my house to the Low Cost Carrier Terminal (LCCT) at about 3:15pm yesterday. Oh - and on the way swung by Alex & Grace's to pick up a DVD that I needed to take with me to do some work. Alex had actually taken the trouble to go all the way back from a Rendezvous event to rig up a way for me to pull out the DVD from their postbox. TQ!

Er... where was I? Oh - so my parents drove me to the LCCT to catch my 5:10pm flight to KK. When we got there at about 4:15, I jumped out the car and tried to open the boot. Ok - now have to cut the long "THIS CAN'T BE HAPPENING, THE BOOT'S NOT OPENING!" story short. I tried, my mum tried, my dad tried, a policemen and three other LCCT male personnel tried and well, you know... they really made those old volvos super safe and secure lor! We even tried frantically pulling at the back seats to no avail. I did manage a frustrated peek at my luggage through that pull-down arm-rest thing though. After a bit, tension in my family was running really high. One of the men timidly asked me what time my flight was. I told him, and he timidly told me that he didn't think I'd be making it.

SO... I walked in to the check-in counter to be told that indeed I had missed the flight. I then walked out to... well... actually, I don't quite know what I walked out to do. Anyway, I walked back in again to queue up to buy a ticket for the 9:15 flight. Then I walked out to goh back into the volvo. My mum was really tired by then so I took over the wheel and drove all the way back to PJ to catch their regular mechanic next to DUMC SEA Park just before they closed for the day. The guy took 5 minutes to open the boot. I got my luggage out and put it in the back seat. Then we went to SS2 for a pre-Mother's Day dinner and coffee at Secret Recipe - hahahah, praise God for the bonus time I had bought for a RM325 one-way ticket to KK! One roasted chicken later, I drove back to LCCT, caught my breath and my plane, reached KK and got picked up by Eric who took me to a backpacker's hostel called Velvet where I checked-in at about 12:15am.

9 hours. Doorstep to doorstep. PJ to KK.