Lord, I offer my Life to You

Yesterday, I was musing on my Holy Communion Day, and how we used sign language to convey this song. I gotta say, this has been my one and only favorite song in SFX. The words bear meaning for me and touched me deeply. Funny, how I remembered it 10 years on, in a somber night. Perhaps, God is trying to tell me something?

(Verse 1)
All that I am, all that I have
I lay them down before you, oh Lord
All my regrets, all my acclaims
The joy and the pain, I’m making them yours

(Chorus)
Lord, I offer my life to you
Everything I’ve been through
Use it for your glory
Lord I offer my days to you
Lifting my praise to you
As a pleasing sacrifice
Lord I offer you my life

(Verse 2)
Things in the past, things yet unseen
Wishes and dreams that are yet to come true
All of my heart, alll of my praise
My heart and my hands are lifted to you

(Chorus)
Lord, I offer my life to you
Everything I’ve been through
Use it for your glory
Lord I offer my days to you
Lifting my praise to you
As a pleasing sacrifice
Lord I offer you my life

(Bridge)
What can we give
That you have not given?
And what do we have
That is not already yours?
All we possess
Are these lives we’re living
That’s what we give to you, Lord

(Chorus)
Lord, I offer my life to you
Everything I’ve been through
Use it for your glory
Lord I offer my days to you
Lifting my praise to you
As a pleasing sacrifice
Lord I offer you my life

(Chorus)
Lord, I offer my life to you
Everything I’ve been through
Use it for your glory
Lord I offer my days to you
Lifting my praise to you
As a pleasing sacrifice
Lord I offer you my life
Lord I offer you my life

 

Faith & God

It is so true what Mohandas Gandhi said, that faith transcends reason, we believe without proof, without our earthly knowledge and senses.

Faith is something completely separate from science as science is a process proof of this world, but not faith. God is above what we can prove, but instead, we believe.

Not God is Truth but Truth is God

Gandhi’s Views On Truth
Truth Is God

God Is
THERE IS an indefinable mysterious Power that pervades everything. I feel it, though I do not see it. It is this unseen Power which makes itself felt and yet defies all proof, because it is so unlike all that I perceive through my senses. It transcends the senses. But it is possible to reason out the existence of God to a limited extent.
I do dimly perceive that whilst everything around me is ever changing, ever-dying, there is underlying all that change a Living Power that is changeless, that holds all together, that creates, dissolves, and re-creates. That informing Power or Spirit is God. And since nothing else I see merely through the senses can or will persist, He alone is.
And is this Power benevolent or malevolent? I see it as purely benevolent. For I can see, that in the midst of death life persists, in the midst of untruth truth persists, in the midst of darkness light persists. Hence I gather that God is Life, Truth, Light. He is Love. He is the Supreme Good.
I confess… that I have no argument to convince… through reason. Faith transcends reason. All I can advise… is not to attempt the impossible. I cannot account for the existence of evil by any rational method. To want to do so is to be co-equal with God. I am, therefore, humble enough to recognize evil as such; and I call God long-suffering and patient precisely because He permits evil in the world. I know that He has no evil in Him and yet if there is evil, He is the author of it and yet untouched by it.
I know, too, that I shall never know God if I do not wrestle with and against evil even at the cost of life itself. I am fortified in the belief by my own humble and limited experience. The purer I try to become the nearer to God I feel myself to be. How much more should I be near to Him when my faith is not a mere apology, as it is today, but has become as immovable as the Himalayas and as white and bright as the snows on their peaks?

My Faith
I can easily put up with the denial of the world, but any denial by me of God is unthinkable.
I know that I can do nothing. God can do everything. O God, make me Thy fit instrument and use as thou wilt!
I have not seen Him, neither have I known Him. I have made the world’s faith in God my own and as my faith is ineffaceable, I regard that faith as amounting to experience. However, as it may be said that to describe faith, as experience is to tamper with truth, it may perhaps be more correct to say that I have no word for characterizing my belief in God.
I am surer of His existence than of the fact that you and I are sitting in this room. Then I can also testify that I may live without air and water but not without Him. You may pluck out my eyes, but that cannot kill me. You may chop off my nose, but that will not kill me. But blast my belief in God, and I am dead.
You may call this a superstition, but I confess it is a superstition that I hug, even as I used to hug the name of Rama in my childhood when there was any cause of danger or alarm. That was what an old nurse had taught me.
I believe that we can all become messengers of God, if we cease to fear man and seek only God’s Truth. I do believe I am seeking only God’s Truth and have lost all fear of man.
…I have no special revelation of God’s will. My firm belief is that He reveals Himself daily to every human being, but we shut our ears to the ’still small voice’. We shut our eyes to the Pillar of Fire in front of us. I realize His omnipresence.
Some of my correspondents seem to think that I can work wonders. Let me say as a devotee of truth that I have no such gift. All the power I may have comes from God. But He does not work directly. He works through His numberless agencies.

Nature of God
To me God is Truth and Love; God is ethics and morality; God is fearlessness. God is the source of Light and Life and yet He is above and beyond all these. God is conscience. He is even the atheism of the atheist. For in His boundless love God permits the atheist to live. He is the searcher of hearts. He transcends speech and reason. He knows us and our hearts better than we do ourselves. He does not take us at our word, for He knows that we often do not mean it, some knowingly and others unknowingly.
He is a personal God to those who need His personal presence. He is embodied to those who need His touch. He is the purest essence. He simply is to those who have faith. He is all things to all men. He is in us and yet above and beyond us…
He cannot cease to be because hideous immoralities or inhuman brutalities are committed in His name. He is long-suffering. He is patient but He is also terrible. He is the most exacting personage in the world and the world to come. He metes out the same measure to us that we mete out to our neighbors-men and brutes.
With Him ignorance is no excuse. And withal He is ever forgiving, for He always gives us the chance to repent.
He is the greatest democrat the world knows, for He leaves us ‘unfettered’ to make our own choice between evil and good. He is the greatest tyrant ever know, for He often dashes the cup from our lips and under cove of free will leaves us a margin so wholly inadequate as to provide only mirth for Himself at our expense.
Therefore it is that Hinduism calls it all His sport-lila, or calls it all an illusion-maya. We are not, He alone Is. And if we will be, we must eternally sing His praise and do His will. Let us dance to the tune of His bansi-lute, and all would be well.
God is the hardest taskmaster I have known on this earth, and He tries you through and through. And when you find that your faith is failing or your body is failing you and you are sinking, He comes to your assistance somehow or other and proves to you that you must not lose your faith and that He is always at your beck and call, but on His terms, not on your terms. So I have found. I cannot really recall a single instance when, at the eleventh hour, He has forsaken me.
In my early youth I was taught to repeat what in Hindu scriptures are known as one thousand names of God. But these one thousand names of God were by no means exhaustive. We believe–and I think it is the truth–that God has as many names as there are creatures and, therefore, we also say that God is nameless and, since God has many forms, we also consider Him formless, and since He speaks to us through many tongues, we consider Him to be speechless and so on. And so when I came to study Islam, I found that Islam too had many names for God.
I would say with those who say God is Love, God is Love. But deep down in me I used to say that though God may be Love, God is Truth, above all. If it is possible for the human tongue to give the fullest description of God, I have come to the conclusion that, for myself, God is Truth.
But two years ago I went a step further and said that Truth is God. You will see the fine distinction between the two statements, viz., that God is Truth and Truth is God. And I came to the conclusion after a continuous and relentless search after Truth, which began nearly fifty years ago.
I then found that the nearest approach to Truth was through love. But I also found that love has many meanings in the English language at least and that human love in the sense of passion could become a degrading thing also. I found too that love in the sense of ahimsa had only a limited number of votaries in the world. But I never found a double meaning in connection with truth and not even atheist had demurred to the necessity or power of truth.
But, in their passion for discovering truth, the atheists have not hesitated to deny the very existence of God–from their own point of view, rightly. And it was because of this reasoning that I saw that, rather than say that God is Truth, I should say that Truth is God.
God is Truth, but God is many other things also. That is why I say Truth is God…. Only remember that Truth is not one of the many qualities that we name. It is the living embodiments of God, it is the only Life, and I identify Truth with the fullest life, and that is how it becomes a concrete thing, for God is His whole creation, the whole Existence, and service of all that exists-Truth-is service of God.
Perfection is the attribute of the Almighty, and yet what a great democrat He is! What an amount of wrong and humbug He suffers on our part! He even suffers us insignificant creatures of His to question His very existence, though He is in every atom about us, around us and within us. But He has reserved to Himself the right of becoming manifest to whomsoever He chooses. He is a Being without hands and feet and other organs, yet he can see Him to whom He chooses to reveal Himself.

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God Through Service
If I did not fee the presence of God within me, I see so much of misery and disappointment every day that I would be a raving maniac and my destination would be the Hooghli.
If I am to identify myself with the grief of the least in India, aye, if I have the power, the least in the world, let me identify myself with the sins of the little ones who are under my care. And so doing in all humility, I hope some day to see God–Truth–face to face.
I am endeavoring to see God through service of humanity, for I know that God is neither in heaven, nor in down below, but in every one.
I am a part and parcel of the whole, and I cannot find Him apart from the rest of humanity. My countrymen are my nearest neighbors. They have become so helpless, so resourceless, so inert that I must concentrate on serving them. If I could persuade myself that I should find Him in a Himalayan cave, I would proceed there immediately. But I know that I cannot find Him apart from humanity.
I claim to know my millions. All the 24 hours of the day I am with them. They are my first care and last because I recognize no God except the God that is to be found in the hearts of the dumb millions. They do not recognize His presence; I do. And I worship the God that is Truth or Truth, which is God through the service of these millions.

Guide and Protector
I must go… with God as my only guide. He is a jealous Lord. He will allow no one to share His authority. One has, therefore, to appear before Him in all one’s weakness, empty-handed and in a spirit of full surrender, and then He enables you to stand before a whole world and protects you from all harm.
I have learned this one lesson–that what is impossible with man is child’s play with God and if we have faith in that Divinity which presides on the destiny of the meanest of His creation, I have no doubt that all things are possible; and in that final hope, I live and pass my time and endeavor to obey His will.
Even in darkest despair, where there seems to be no helper and no comfort in the wide, wide world, His Name inspires us with strength and puts all doubts and despairs to flight. The sky may be overcast today with clouds, but a fervent prayer to Him is enough to dispel them. It is because of prayer that I have known no disappointment.
…I have known no despair. Why then should you give way to it? Let us pray that He may cleanse our hearts of pettinesses, meannesses and deceit and He will surely answer our prayers. Many I know have always turned to that unfailing source of strength.
I have seen and believe that God never appears to you in person, but in action which can only account for your deliverance in your darkest hour.
Individual worship cannot be described in words. It goes on continuously and even unconsciously. There is not a moment when I do not feel the presence of a Witness whose eye misses nothing and with whom I strive to keep in tune.
I have never found Him lacking in response. I have found Him nearest at hand when the horizon seemed darkest in my ordeals in jails when it was not all-smooth sailing for me. I cannot recall a moment in my life when I had a sense of desertion by God.

Self-realization
I believe it to be possible for every human being to attain to that blessed and indescribable, sinless state in which he feels within himself the presence of God to the exclusion of everything else.
What I want to achieve, -what I have been striving and pining to achieve…,–is self-realization, to see God face to face, to attain moksha. I live and move and have my being in pursuit of this goal. All that I do by way of speaking and writing and all my ventures in the political field are directed to this same end.
For it is an unbroken torture to me that I am still so far from Him, who, as I fully know, governs every breath of my life, and whose offspring I am. I know that it is the evil passions within that keep me so far from Him, and yet I cannot get away from them.
This belief in God has to be based on faith, which transcends reasons. Indeed, even the so-called realization has at bottom an element of faith without which it cannot be sustained. In the very nature of things it must be so. Who can transgress the limitations of his being?
I hold that complete realization is impossible in this embodied life. Nor is it necessary. A living immovable faith is all that is required for reaching the full spiritual height attainable by human beings. God is not outside this earthly case of ours. Therefore, exterior proof is not of much avail, if any at all.
We must ever fail to perceive Him through the senses, because He is beyond them. We can feel Him if we will but withdraw ourselves from the senses. The divine music is incessantly going on within ourselves, but the loud senses drown the delicate music, which is unlike and infinitely superior to anything we can perceive or hear with our senses.

- M. K. Gandhi

 

Merry Christmas 2009

A short but meaningful poem by me.

Merry Christmas 2009

It is here!  It is here!

It is that time year!

My favourite holiday, an Almighty celebration.

Where we should seek more than just presents,

But of SALVATION.

Remember that the Christmas tree marks more

Than just ORNAMENTATION.

How happy we are, how grateful we should be on this day,

We must bow our heads to PRAY

“Our Heavenly Father,

Thank you for reminding us that,

Today You are born.

You are truly our Savior,

For believing and trusting in our humanity,

And forgiving our transgressions.

Thank you Lord for Your unwavering love and kindness.”

Merry Christmas I wish to all of you,

May you continue to strive for the Path that leads to Him.

(c) Keisha Petrus

I Love You

My favorite passage from the Holy Word. Nothing more rings such truth, I love you YL, this is for you.

1 Corinthians 13

Love

 ¹If I speak in the tongues^[a] of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. ²If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. ³If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames,^[b] but have not love, I gain nothing.

 ⁴Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

 ⁸Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. ⁹For we know in part and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. ¹¹When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. ¹²Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

 ¹³And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

A life lived easy, or a life lived hard?

Matthew 7:13-14, Mew International Version

“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. ¹⁴But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

Matthew 7:13-14, King James Version

¹³Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:

 ¹⁴Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

Hebrews 11:1

Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. – Hebrews 11:1

If You Want Me To

Good song by Ginny Owens, covered by Jennifer Chung. Been following this gal for quite some time on YouTube, she’s very good. This song is simple, but yet conveyed multitudes for me! I’ll continue to walk STRONG in my Faith.

The pathway is broken
And The signs are unclear
And I don’t know the reason why You brought me here
But just because You love me the way that You do
I’m gonna walk through the valley
If You want me to

Chorus:
Cause I’m not who I was
When I took my first step
And I’m clinging to the promise You’re not through with me yet
so if all of these trials bring me closer to you
Then I will walk through the fire
If You want me to

It may not be the way I would have chosen
When you lead me through a world that’s not my home
But You never said it would be easy
You only said I’d never go alone

So when the whole world turns against me
And I’m all by myself
And I can’t hear You answer my cries for help
I’ll remember the suffering that Your love put You through
And I will walk through the darkness
If You want me to

Hell’s Island

“Hell’s Island” coined by TVsmith, so rightly describes the morbid mess in the neighboring island of Pulau Ketam. Although lots of us are not there, our ability to empathize knows no bounds. It breaks my heart to see all these pictures that he has taken.

You know I am more and more convinced everyday that the human species, contrary to popular belief, are far less superior to animals…My own two dogs show me that everyday…their ability to forgive, their ability to trust, their intelligence, their infinite capacity to love…No matter what we do to them, they are still loyal to us.. THAT, my friend,  is  evident enough to their superiority. How many of us carry the brunt of a grudge and in doing so, destroy our spirits entirely?

While I was reading TVsmith’s blog, I came across a quote by a renowned blogger, Antares: “The true measure of civilization is the way a community deals with social outcasts like immigrants (legal or otherwise), stray dogs, and the transgendered.” By this measure, “we remain classified an an Uncivilized Feudal State of Well-Dressed Primates.”

HA. How true indeed. I would say that 90% of Malaysians are apathetic morons who don’t give a (excuse my french) damn about the minorities of Malaysian society which include these poor, stray dogs.

As apathy is an attitude and a choice, I do not wish to remain the 90%.  I would jump at the opportunity to go to Hell’s Island but it is very unfortunate that my physical condition does not permit me to do so. So I decided to try and help in other ways, by buying kibble and shampoo, and donating them to Furry Friend’s Farm, a shelter for underprivileged stray dogs. TYL & I plan on going there this weekend (If only I could adopt a survivor but my two munchkins at home are driving my mommy crazy already!)

I would like to urge the Malaysian public to join forces and help these furry friends. It doesn’t matter whether you are rich or poor, young or old, disabled or not. Our collective actions, little or big, can drastically change the perilous situation those poor souls are in.

Lastly, I would like to close this entry with a prayer:

“Dear Lord, please forgive us for our transgressions. We do not deserve Your forgiveness but we are asking for it anyway. Please open our hearts to compassion and love so that we may change the dire situation of these beautiful creatures. Teach us Lord, that it is through generosity and kindness that we make this world a better place, Amen.”

Luke 6:38 (ESV) Give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use it will be measured back to you.”

2 Corinthians 9:6 (ESV) The point is this: whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.

Matthew 6:21 (New International Version)

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

The Strength

Found this on www.poemhunter.com…….. I love poetry, I have grown to admire and appreciate its beauty and over the years, I have honed my own skills in composing poetry. Where do I get my inspiration? For one, the Man up there and from simple people who DO NOT & I repeat, DO NOT embellish their poetry with redundant wording… The best and most heart-warming poetry are found in those that convey complex truths in pure simplicity. Such a composer is Anders Lim who has posted his poem, “The Strength” on poem hunter. ENJOY 

Philippians 4:13 (New International Version)

¹³I can do everything through him who gives me strength.

 

The Strength by Anders Lim

The strength to resist the night
The strength to endure the day
The strength to keep righteous paths in sight
The strength to take them without delay

The strength to find a purpose in life
The strength to find the truths it brings
The strength to kick away from strife
The strength to stabalize the rock it clings

The strength to light a friend’s day up
The strength to resist wrathful foes
The strength to fill a stranger’s dry cup
The strength to shun sin when it opposed

The strength to feel a injured man’s pain
The strength to hold a reject’s hand
The strength to act against any gain
The strength to love without demand

The strength to understand that our King
Has blessed us with more than we can contain
Therefore regardless what time may bring
The strength will continue to reign