The apostle Paul said in one of his letters to the early churches, and I paraphrase "Why is it that i do not do what I want to do and do what I do not want to do?"

Why do I keep sinning?
Is it not that I have received the Freedom of Christ? Is it not now that I have been freed from the chains of sin and death? Is it not now that I stand before God clothed in righteousness in His sight?

Why do I keep on willfully sinning?
"I do what I do not want to do, yet I do not do what I want to do..."

1 John 1:9 NIV "If we confess our sins He (God) is faithful and just and will forgive us of all our sins and cleanse us of all unrighteousness" - bears me no meaning when I know that I am going to commit that same sin again.

Why does it seem that I am still chained by sin when I know i should be free from it?
Why do I still sin knowing full well that it is wrong?
Why does it seem others live such a close walk with God yet I cannot say with conviction that I feel God's presence anywhere?
Why does it seem that I struggle to deal with sins I commit while others seem not to be sinning?

My prayers are meaningless when I know that I have sinned and will do so again when I ask for forgiveness. All I do is repeat the sin, thus putting him back on the cross (metaphorically), and repenting, going in that endless cycle...I CANNOT TAKE IT!

I know full well deep down in my heart that the devil has to control over me because of Jesus' blood...yet I still feel I am mired deep in sin. Why?

The only evidence of any shred of the Holy Spirit in me is that I am still able to confess and repent. But what point is there in repenting when you know you're just going to do it again and again?

Is there no escape from this spiral? Will I never be rescued? I know my life is Christ's, yet how can He accept someone as filthy as me?
I sin yet I do not want to sin, while I want to live a life that is holy yet it is far from it.

The fact that I am a sinner in and out has never rang more true in my life than this very moment...

...Cry out for their mistakes, repent of their ways again
I'm sorry I didnt see Your Ways
Your beautiful ways...

The time has come to be healed
Let your wounded hearts cry out to Him
Be healed of your past pains
He's taken them away
Believe this...

Oh Father,
By your blood we're restored
Our lives forever changed

Lord, I believe in you
You've FREED me from sin
Every time that they scarred your skin
Every moment of your painful death WAS FOR ME
WHY for ME?
Never should I look away...forget of what you did for us...

You are God, You rose again... ~from Lord I Believe- Phanin Souer, 2006


Lord Jesus, Abba Father, please remove this part of me. I want to be able to respect myself, and not be ashamed of what I do. I want to live a life free of sin, to be free in You, to know full well that I'm forever in Your arms... To see your Glory, to experience it, and come back and never be the same ever again. I ask you back into my heart once more, and I pray that you will never leave, that you will always dwell in me. Make me a worthy vessel for your Spirit. Give me the strength and the instinct to turn straight to you when things go even slightly awry and not rely on what I consider my strength sufficient. I pray that there will be many more days where I can experience Your love firsthand in your embrace, and where I can share Your love with others...

Amen

"Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is FREEDOM." Where there's God's freedom, "there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ."

Blast from the Past Part III: Old Ties

The third installment of my blast from the past (read the other two entries if from here on out you have ABSOLUTELY no idea what i am talking about), after a long time of nothing happening brings you:

OLD TIES

okay, my creativity on how to title stuff just went out of the window. So here's what happened:

A couple of days back after a stint of playing FLYFF, i noticed that i had new mail courtesy of the gmail notifier running in my system tray. one of the few new items in my inbox was (yet) another notification of a friend adding me on Facebook. This friend's an old high school friend from Brentwood, so no worries in wondering who it was. So without hesitation i logged onto my personal Facebook profile to confirm that Jess Choong was indeed someone i knew. Just out of curiousity i clicked on a link that indicated that she and I had 5 friends in common.

Of the 5 faces displayed there i recognised all of them, no mistake there. However only 2 of the 5 caused me even more surprise. Care to guess? Bah... i'll just say. It happened to be Lim Pi Xie and Susan Chia! Honestly, I don't know what to make of this except to say, it's not even 6 degrees of seperation any more. The world isn't as big as I thought it was. What's more is that a portion of my past has been brought to the present, much like the Time Spiral theme from Magic the Gathering series (if you don't get the reference, then dont try. it's a geek / nerd thing)...

lastly all i have to say is.... WOW. I never thought this sort of thing would ever happen in my life, but clearly, a couple of days ago-heck- even from two months ago i was proven wrong. People you've met at some stage of your life that you haven't seen for what seemed like a lifetime to come back.

Lives intersect, no journey is made where a path doesn't cross with another. Divergent paths alwasy reconverge. Somewhere down the line, in each journey at different speeds...

...we meet again...

Love is... Montagues vs Capulets

I just recently finished the anime (Japanese animation) adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet. Released early in 2007, I only managed to get to watching it courtesy of a very busy and challenging year and of course, now the advent of the summer holidays. I'm glad i left this series to watch when I had nothing else on. And i have to say, it's THE BEST adaptation of Shakespeare's play I've seen. Every previous adaptation pales in comparison to this anime. While set in a semi-realistic world (with the exceptions a floating city, the existence of pegasi and some strange tree and its respective caretaker) with a real heavy dystopiatic (<-- is this even a word?) theme, the entire story doesn't detract too much from the original work of Shakespeare. Granted, it's still to some extent a tragic love story marred by familial fued (though not your garden variety familial fued)

IN ANY CASE, for all anime lovers out there who doesn't know the existence of this series, I SUGGEST YOU HUNT IT DOWN and watch it ASAP.

In Shakespeare's original work Romeo and Juliet both died by killing themselves which in my opinion, despite the context / circumstance in which they did it, was a really horrendously stupid way for a couple loving each other to die. While in Romeo x Juliet the ending is not dissimilar, it's at least a whole lot better. I've hinted too much about the ending already in my latter sentence so I'll shut up and let all of you watch and find out yourselves.

Personal enjoyment rating: 9/10

Yellow Christmas, Oven New Year, and callouses on my fingers

This post is just to bring readers up to speed on what's happened since i last posted an entry

As per the previous entry, i was waiting for my academic results. I now can say that i have passed and now this year, in 2008 i am finally progressing to the 3rd year of my course, which was meant to happen this time last year.

In any case since then there's been some hot days, notaby Christmas day and New Year's. Both were around the 40 degree (Celsius) mark and no real respite coming until a couple of weeks back when it was in the mid 20's.

I've also recently applied as a transcriber at www.animechords.com, a rather popular site dealing with transcribing, as in, putting chords to anime music. My "application" was picked out of "many with rather questionable ability to communicate effectively and ability to transcribe". I was pretty happy about that. the only downside of this job is that i won't get paid for it, but might just get picture of large cute animal plushies, or so says my "boss". In the process i've gotten to know a little about a guy who lives near the border of western Germany in a little town called Venlo that goes by the name of Jelmer bas Kosters.

I've managed to complete a couple of transcriptions thus far, but have more to do, hence the callouses on my fingers playing guitar for hours on end.

Countdown....

In less than 9 hours from the time of this post, two doors will open. Either one leads to a result, but neither result shall be the same.

One door will lead me to despair.
One door will lead me to a continuing journey of ups and downs.

Destiny awaits.

In less than 9 hours from this post, the enormity of either my academic failure or otherwise will become apparent.


In less than 9 hours...

DESTINY CALLS.

Self Destruct Sequence Initiated......

Distraction leads me to Carelessness which in turn causes Neglect to the point that Poor Organization sets in as a result of Immaturity which subsequently encourages Poor Risk Taking and results in the Unreliability in Creating a Good Future, consequently Sabotaging that potentially good future, creating a Co-dependency on those around, leading to Abuse of Privileges and ultimately NOT GOING ANYWHERE IN LIFE.

In light of the upcoming year, and with the help of a friend, this is what I have come to realize about myself. Just by being distracted from doing something starts the self destruct chain reaction that will ultimately land me in a point where I could call myself the ultimate victim of life itself.

How do I abort the Self Distruct Sequence? Enter the code to stop it.
What is the Abort Self Distruct Code? TO DO EVERYTHING I CAN TO NOT BE DISTRACTED.

Only time will tell...

Blast from the Past Part II: Meet Up?

While Pi Xie is in Canada, and Pearly in England, turns out that Susan is studying at Monash in Melbourne. Honestly i was pretty excited...

Hope to meet up with her soon. See how much each of us has changed...