Mushy goodbye

Nawt really la, am not thaaaat sentimental a person.

Actually I meant to post much earlier, seeing the dearth of entries on this blog, but somehow, I forgot both my user name and my password, and several attempts to get Blogger.com to email me the details failed (boo, Blogger!).

May I add that I lurrve the monicker Skinnypastor, or SkinnyP, as it has been abbreviated.

It seems like I spent a lot of my Christian life moaning about the dire shortage of good, like-minded Christian companionship. For years, it was like whine, whine, whine to God, when it was also the lack of trying on my part and the simple fact that double-minded me wanted to have my cake and eat it: church-going Sundays and playing and working hard miles away from Him the rest of the week. I needed my space, plus I was a liberal intellectual, dammit :)

I am starting to realise, in my very slow, 迟钝-fashion, that true freedom really is to be found in seeking a life in Christ. And that this freedom is neither "anything goes", nor is it complex like rocket science. It is based ultimately on trust, the basis of all great relationships anyway. In his dictums, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind" and, "Love your neighbour as yourself", Jesus set humanly impossible standards precisely because they could only be lived out with the help of his holy spirit: throwing ourselves at his feet and hanging on for dear life like so many of the broken men and women in the Bible.

And I glimpsed this, not just from listening to sermons or even pondering and dissecting His word, but through friendships in church, through ministry and seeing people put others first and most of all praying through my needs and warts and black holes with faithful women (awwww, hugs).

In this DG and with other DG-affiliates (haha, you know who you are) I found some kind of a resting place where I could also be me -- pig out, name-drop big words and strange bands, unleash our inner-American Idols in karaoke lounges, argue over movies and generally not pretend that we are perfect Christians.

So after all the whining, I guess God -- who has a magisterial sense of humour -- said See! Lookity! He led me to the water side, and then several months later packed me off on a plane to China.

Do keep me in your prayers because goodness knows I am fallible (especially where manga-jawed men are concerned) and do write because I will write back (I am quite a good writer, ahem). Better yet, come to town for jiaozi and smelly Chinese beer.

Will keep y'all in my prayers.