My Reelity

“So which church are you attending now”, J asked, over an ex-cellgroup member’s wedding dinner last night.

And as I told her that I’m not attending one currently, it dawned upon me that I have been “churchless” for over a year now. She asked me to come back to my former church and I declined. After all, I did not leave after ten years without serious consideration and conviction. Terz‘s post a few days had also echoed my thoughts and feelings, and I guess I’m still disappointed with His PR and HR departments (yeah I think I did mentioned it before).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no saint either. And being “churchless” have definitely affected my walk, in terms of doing less quiet time and prayer, and its not something that I’m proud of. But at this moment, I doubt going back will change anything for me.

Its not the first time I’ve been “churchless”. Ever since I’ve believed, there have been long pockets of me being “churchless”. But I guess this is the first time that I have been “churchless” by choice rather than by circumstance.

Anyhoo, recently, I’ve been attending a course entitled “Calvin’s Theology”, which is actually an examination of John Calvin‘s seminal work, Institutes of the Christian Religion. Its conducted by my brother’s church and at his prompting I figured I might as well go and see what I can learn from it.

Its been five weeks, and I’m enjoying the course so far. What I’ve found pretty interesting so far is how some of my course mates struggle to identify with their “overtly zealous” friends from the charismastic movement, and judging from the questions they asked, I think their struggle sometimes make them question their own walk as well.

What I have also found interesting was how “Calvinism” is very much mistaken today to be all that John Calvin advocates, when in the first place, its only a small part in his “Institutes of the Christian Religion”. To me, its just another sign how most people just take certain things as the gospel truth without question. And ironically, this all boils down to that one human failing that John Calvin himself observed to be the most prevalent – laziness. Because you are lazy, you can’t be bothered, and so you just accept what people say. After all, can’t be that so many people are wrong right? Right.

The course was conducted by a pastor of the church, and it is his personal anecdotes and observations that helped made the course interesting. And I was surprised that he too, kinda shared my same disappointment when he told the class one day that he felt the church in Singapore in general is losing its “salt of the earth, light of the world” role.

Glad to know that I’m not the only one with this view, hehehe. 😛

And yesterday, he quoted something interesting from a Saint Bernard, which I thought its worth noting down. He said according to the Saint, we first love ourselves for our own sake. And because we so love ourselves, we realise that there are certain things that we want that we can’t get it on our own. So we turn to God, and thus we love God for our own sake. But as we get to know God and his personality, we fall in love with God. And that is when we start to love God for God’s sake. And when we love God for God’s sake, we realise that who God loves most is us. And because we are in love with God for who God is, we will also want to love whatever God loves most.

Which, in this case, is us. And so ultimately, we love ourselves for God’s sake. Food for thought eh?