I have also been thinking about Bane's line from the final movie: "So you came back to die with your city..." [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR5VA-VorZQ] I have to admit, initially when I moved back here, I might have felt like that quite a bit. My spiritual director had told me perhaps it would be a good opportunity for me to practice missions within a household context, but sometimes like Bane and Raz-Algoh, a part of me allows the enemy to doubt if 'this city' can ever be saved. I particularly liked how the in the follow up message, how B kind of followed perhaps in 'Dr B's' (she said this was her nickname) mentality of 'making things more personal' when she said: "I don't like how the bible refers to her as 'the Samaritan woman' [John 4], let's make it more personal, let's give her a name... let's call her Samantha the Samaritan." *3* Questions were also posed at the end of the teaching which I feel a strong conviction to address for myself personally and somewhat publicly though this blog here:
1. What "group think" have you allowed to shape you?
2. Are you willing to stand up for what is right -- and pay the price?
3. Are you willing to leave the "city" if it cannot be changed?
Because of the unwritten 'anonymity rules' I have with this blog, I will opt not to name the city I reside in, nor provide a link to the sermon I am referencing.
1. What "group think" have you allowed to shape you?
Due to various experiences I have had to contend with over the years, including firsthand experiences or witnesses of violence, a part of me has compromised into thinking that this current city I reside in is a sort of 'Gotham' or 'Sodom and Gomorrah' [Genesis ##:#]....On numerous occasions I have personally firsthand witness the aftermath of some sort of violence or theft, in some cases theft valued at under $2 (MSRP). But seriously.... $2? Is that how much a person's conscience is worth nowadays? Assuming that something like theft will bother that person committing the theft in the first place.
On a more individual level, I have also perhaps allowed my biological mother's 'group think' after my dad's passing that ministry isn't God's long term plan for me to lead to a lot of chaos in both my personal and spiritual life over the last few years.
Perhaps with this (and perhaps more) upcoming job interviews I have coming, it is God's way of providing me an Exodus [Exodus] out of this slavery and bondage I am under and 'Exodus' is still the correct theme and thinking after all.
2. Are you willing to stand up for what is right -- and pay the price?
There are several ways I feel I can answer/respond to the first dilemma present above, potentially I can try to Balance out more the jobs I applied to that are ‘clearly far from “Gotham”’ with the ones within as currently there is a higher skew towards jobs within at the moment and in the interim give greatest consideration to ‘what is the plan’ during my present stay in “Gotham”. Yes it has been unfortunate that people have at times either stolen or attempted to steal my bicycle as well as mom pointed out, perhaps our HP vehicle was likewise damaged from a theft attempt when we initially got it as we never had a check engine light come on when we drove it home from Markham afte changing the ownership over to my mom. Regardless of whether that is true or not, I find respect and tolerance for one’s ‘fellow man’ on a steady decline here in “Gotham”.
Upon reflection on how I might 'stand up for what is right' in my life or what that might look like, I feel there are several dimensions in what shape that can take depending on the context. One, when it comes to this city being like 'Gotham' for example, there are several approaches to be considered here. When I go back to the example narratives from movies, there is what Alfred said in The Dark Knight Rises about 'moving on'. I feel the worse thing to would perhaps be doing what Peter Parker did in Spider-Man 2 and simply turn a blind eye to the crime and other things that 'should not be happening' that are happening around him in his city. On the other hand, as I felt the Spirit had reminded me of lately, kind of yet another quote twist of that quote I often like to quote from The Hunger Games Catching Fire, 'Remember who the Real Radioactive Spider Is...' That is, Jesus is that spider. What I mean by this, is that only Jesus can be the proper catalyst for any seemingly miraculous, but positive change. I also feel that I too initially in the first few years upon my return to Gotham that I have allowed ‘me first’ or ‘self-centric’ mentality that is our society or prevalent in American culture perhaps into the core of my being too much and have too much influence over my mindset. Fortunately, perhaps you can consider it a blessing that sometime in the fall of last year God allowed me to have somewhat of a TDKR or Luke 15 type of experience where I was down to a spiritual low point eventually in that aspect of my life and the metaphorical equivalent is when Bruce or Bat_an had a broken leg and no longer really wanted to ‘continue in the good fight to save Gotham’ and just sat very idle. Basically he was not contributing to making “Gotham” a better place and content to just live away from the spotlight in all aspects of his life during TDKR. Ok, so you might be asking the logical question, ‘how is this a blessing?’; similar to the contrasting mentality in Romans 7, I would not have known what it means to be in a spiritually ‘higher’ state and how different life can be without also knowing what it is to be in a spiritually lower state as well. Not that I wasn’t perhaps already in that kind of position before I knew my Heavenly Father, but perhaps it was a good reminder for me what that kind of mentality feels like from a first person perspective. Unfortunately, this may have had an unexpected repercussion in my relationship with “Rachel” because I have now discerned that maybe getting back to a better place spiritually may have lead to a lot of sudden and unexpected changes for her.
Looking at this from a broader perspective that includes ‘Gotham’’s surrounding regions as well. I was told by a friend recently, the newly elected regional government is also screwing people by getting rid of tax rebates the previous government used to have like for environmental initiatives like buying Eco-friendly or primarily electric cars. My mother might be happy about the elimination of environmental initiatives though cause she is sick of my building’s management always hiring people to install new Eco-friendly fridges, lights, toilets, etc to try to utilize tax rebates. However, I feel this will hurt our nation in the long run as we rely a lot on our resources in our economy. Hence why I've heard if my degree was in a different type of Engineering ie Civil or Industrial there would still be plenty of jobs for me out in a different region if I were to move out to that region. Unfortunately, this also goes to show that perhaps Gotham and it's nation tends to look only at their own situation and don’t typically elect a government based on what might be best for our nation's present and future as a whole.
3. Are you willing to leave the "city" if it cannot be changed?
Regarding what I said earlier when I began on the topic of fuel conservation. Preserving the environment is one thing, but also conserving our resources is important. There has also been more destruction in "Gotham" lately, violence and severe vandalism. While it may seem super conservative and somewhat pessimistic to say that this city is potentially slowly becoming one of the worse cities in history in terms of courtesy and perhaps other's well being as well. I never really worked too many jobs that dealt with the general public on a more regular basis back in the day so apart from myself being out in public, I really don't have that angle of comparison to how the public treats public workers compared to back in the day. Some years back I had actually more seriously considered leaving "Gotham", but I never had the financial backing to do so. Applying to jobs through correspondence apparently isn't so easy in recent years. Recently a friend of mine who is also struggling to find contentment in life is also considering leaving “Gotham”, but he’s apprehensive whether things are really going to better for him elsewhere. This also leads me to believe that even if we use the Gotham metaphor here to indicate a ‘dump of a place’ that if we try hard enough, it is quite possible to see Gotham in pretty much anywhere. So hence I think my Pastor’s message was also making reference to the need to separate ourselves from the mentality and influences more so than perhaps the people or places that ‘lead us down that path’. “Enter through the narrow gate, because the gate is wide and the way is spacious that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. 14 How narrow is the gate and difficult the way that leads to life, and there are few who find it!” [Matthew 7:13-14]. Although I feel I am in a position spiritually that it isn’t necessarily to completely physically or emotionally separate myself from people who can potentially lead me to sin, I also can agree with the need to still ‘guard my heart’ and maintain spiritual boundaries in the way I relate to people in order to do His work without compromising myself [John 15, Romans 12]. However, I am not ascribing that there aren’t times where removing one self from physical places or people won’t actually be fruitful especially if God is opening the doorway to do so like when God is removing Lot and his daughters from Sodom and Gomorrah as per the example of my Pastor’s message.
Earlier today for whatever reason during some quiet reflection time I thought about the example of Coach Orion from the third Disney Mighty Ducks movie and how ‘he simply made a different choice...’ to sacrifice his potential hockey career for the sake of being able to stay to take care of his daughter. And it lead me to reflect upon my own life and I feel maybe one of the reasons why I feel I relate so much to the Nolan Batman character is my Faith and my circumstances surrounding how I am and could be serving Him amidst my circumstances. As anybody who might be following my blog knows, potentially even this medium can be used as a 'bible like' text that chronicle's my own life events and is one of the reasons why I also kind of identified myself with the biblical King David at times previously too. Given how many times God has Lead me to change employment, I feel that circumstances such as education and employment can be more classified as 'short term' where as other things like my singleness and living at home, I would classify as being 'long term'.
I would rather think that to go by what a lot of others to say that people who have the alleged ‘gift of singleness’ have the gift of time. Although some years I perhaps didn’t make use of the time as well as I could have, recently with my ‘spiritual revival’ I have tried to “But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word” [Acts 6:4] and tried to put more energy and time particularly into prayer for myself and others. So I’ve invented a new ‘super hero identity’ that sounds almost like a taboo Cantonese slang word 😂LOL, TPK, AKA The Prayer Knight. I would hope this is perhaps the real meaning behind why I felt some months ago God reminded or impressed upon me “because I can take it..” That He has a Reason behind Leading me to these circumstances. Aside from this one ambition that potentially can still happen one day, being a CEO with a huge company which I had seen as a potential future for myself since Grade 7, another thing I feel I am either, 'giving up' or perhaps the way to make it 'sound better' is to say 'giving over' to God right now is my continued singleness, small price to pay over not serving Him I suppose as after all, even this while 'longer term' is still not as long as eternity...
“...because people deserve to have their Faith rewarded...” -The Prayer Knight [and The Dark Knight]
1 comment:
"“...because people deserve to have their Faith rewarded...” -The Prayer Knight [and The Dark Knight]" You do deserve it Kayla, but just like Bruxy put it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH1Y7E5HYCc
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