my days have been filled with smiles and joys, great books and apolegetics, prayer and praise, facebook and adium, photos and memories, struggles and peace.

think that i have learnt a lot over these past few days. so much more than i'll ever learn reading the cases of chng suan tze and benjamin koh (cos those cases merely present to you the obvious).

if you asked me to sum up all that ive learnt in the past few months, i could do it in two words-PRAYER WORKS. (sorry chong, didnt mean to steal your line.)

CS Lewis, writing a correspondence of a worldly-wise old devil to his nephew Wormwood, a novice demon in charge of securing the damnation of an ordinary young man in 'the screwtape letters' summed up the essence of the Christian faith in these few words-
'our cause is never more in danger when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.'

this is one of the best books ive read in a very very very long time. it discusses everything from politics to materialism to fashion and love. with every turn of the page, a look of recognition registers on my face. with every turn of the page i see a sin ive been struggling with or used to struggle with. i see questions that have been posed to me by my friends. i see how insidious sin is. its no longer black and white. sin is no longer identifiable in its true form, for the evil one employs seemingly innocent activities to weaken the Christian in his walk. to attack his vulnerabilities. to make him ineffective as a servant of the Lord.

"whatever weakens your reason,impairs the tenderness of your conscience,obscures your sense of God,or takes off your relish of spiritual things;in short,whatever increases the strength and authority of your body over your mind,that thing is sin to you,however innocent it may be in itself." -from zhihui's blog

that is sin. this book made me realize what sin is to me.

at the end of this book, on the death of Wormwood's ward, CS Lewis as Screwtape writes
"all the delights of sense or heart, or intellect, with which you could once have tempted him, even the delights of virtue itself, now seem to him in comparison but as the half nauseous attractions of a raddled harlot would seem to a man who hears that his true beloved whom he has loved all his life and whom he had believed to be dead is alive and even now at his door."

and that is what i must look towards, all my life. (: