Curious

"Apathy plus ice filled the void of motivation." By: Jonathan Tan, my friend.

This verse always makes me curious. I sorta understand it but kinda don't understand it too...

All of a sudden, I've got this feelings that I'd wanted to share

I found some of my photos of my past few days ago... Kinda funny and it reminds me of what/how I used to be..... Fat...useless...lecherous...scum...trash...can't think of anymore negative way to describe how much I hated myself back then... I'd even used to punch myself in the face and in the stomach...haha...so funny now that I thought of that...
But now...things changed 360 degrees, no longer the useless, faithless me, cause the Lord shower me with His grace... Sometimes I feel kinda strange a person like me can be saved. No matter how many times I die or how many things I do I can't redeem myself from my sins... But Jesus Christ...He saved me...He saved all of us...people who are much worse than me...He shown His grace to all of us and chose to die for us on the cross... Lord, let me know and remember Your grace eternally and not forget them. Thank you Lord...

Faint

Linkin Park's [Faint] - This is for my dance crew~

I am a little bit of loneliness, a little bit of disregard
Handful of complaints but I can't help the fact
That everyone can see these scars

I am what I want you to want, what I want you to feel
But it's like no matter what I do
I can't convince you to just believe this is real

So, I let go watchin' you, turn your back
Like you always do, face away and pretend that I'm not
But I'll be here 'cause you are all that I've got

I can't feel the way I did before, don't turn your back on me
I won't be ignored, time won't heal this damage anymore
Don't turn your back on me, I won't be ignored

I am a little bit insecure, a little unconfident
'Cause you don't understand, I do what I can
But sometimes I don't make sense

I am what you never want to say but I've never
Had a doubt, it's like no matter what I do
I can't convince you for once just to hear me out

So, I let go watchin' you, turn your back
Like you always do, face away and pretend that I'm not
But I'll be here 'cause you are all that I've got

I can't feel the way I did before, don't turn your back on me
I won't be ignored, time won't heal this damage anymore
Don't turn your back on me, I won't be ignored

No, hear me out now, you're gonna listen to me
Like it or not, right now, hear me out now
You're gonna listen to me like it or not, right now

I can't feel the way I did before
Don't turn your back on me, I won't be ignored

I can't feel the way I did before, don't turn your back on me
I won't be ignored, time won't heal this damage anymore
Don't turn your back on me, I won't be ignored

I can't feel, I won't be ignored, time won't heal
Don't turn your back on me, I won't be ignored

What I've Done

Linkin Park: What I've Done - Nice lyrics, feels like it is describing the me of the past. Note: I didn't edit anything this time. :)

In this farewell
There’s no blood
There’s no Alibi
‘Cause I’ve Drawn Regret
From the truth
Of a Thousand Lies

[Pre-Chorus:]
So let Mercy Come
And Wash Away
What I’ve Done

[Chorus:]
I'll face myself
To Cross out what I’ve Become
Erase Myself
And let Go of What I’ve done

Put to rest
What you Thought of Me
While I clean this Slate
With the Hands of Uncertainty

[Pre-Chorus]

[Chorus]
For What I’ve Done
I start again
And whatever pain may come
Today this ends
I’m Forgiving What I’ve Done!!!
[Chorus]
What I’ve Done
Forgiving What I’ve Done

The Chronicle of Pound-Star Nat

Once upon a time, theres a boy named, "Nat" who done something wrong and was scolded by the citizen in 'Blur-Society'.At first, he tried to feed a slice of poisonous cake to a girl named, 'WL'. But she refused, cause she remembered her friend says: "Don't ever take or eat anything Nat give to you!"

Later on, he tried to force it into the mouth of a boy named, "Wen.J", and thought he would fall for it.
But Wen.J is so smart and strong that he knew it all along that the cake is poisonous, and so he rebuked Nat and made him eat the cake himself.

After that, Nat went into a crazy mode and went around wanting to hug people. He tried to hug 2 girls named, "CL" and "SC" but they snatch away the cake and repelled him. Because actually the 'poisonous cake' is not poison at all but just that it will make you go crazy after eating it.

After awhile the 'suddenly-wanna-hug' feeling disappear, and CL and SC was glad for him. As you can see CL's face is rejoicing proudly.

Even though the hugging feeling is gone, Nat is still on the crazy mode, he is in a 'choosing-a-girlfriend' mode now. And so he is making his choices.

And so, he decided to make SC his girlfriend.

But SC felt that it was too funny for her and so she left laughing away leaving Nat behind.

After that Nat was calling everyone to come back as everyone is leaving him to let him cure his own craziness.
And so, CL came back thinking of giving a hard knock on his head to wake him up from his craziness. But Nat was good at self-defending.

After nine-hundred and ninety nine rounds of fights, she still fail to get a single hit on Nat and so Nat was laughing at her real hard and she is very angry that she bit her teeth furiously.

Few days later, after all the crazy event, Nat met a girl named, "Char.Squid".

While Char.Squid and Nat was communicating, they realise that they were of the same "Super-blurblurzin" family and so they begin to use their "Super-blurzin" language to communicate.

Soon, they realise that they were sooooo stupid with that communicating style, they stood there bashfully.

But they decided to do that again... the 'Super-blurzin' expressing style...

After that Nat is caught doing the 'Anti-Super-blurzin' move to Char.Squid and so he got scolded by the 'Blur-Society' like what you've seen on the first picture.

~The-End~


Brought to you by Vic. Hetrot and his group of friends during the birthday of the main charater, "Nat".

Right here Waiting (edited)

Never meant to hurt You but I know I did knocking on my ‘door’ Jesus wanted to forgive enjoying all these sinning that's how we human lives I know I did a lot of sins but you still forgive I was so weak when I should’ve been strong I was disobeying. And wanted to be left alone and at the back of my mind that I knew that it was all wrong I've repented and changed just love for You from now on.

I’ve never been faithful before in my life didn't understand the words that the prophets write every time I ‘cheated’ on you cut you like a knife I’m so ashamed I could take my own life trying to keep my image up I had denied you had to be a rebel couldn’t be seen with You use to be real crazy cause I’ve abandoned You I didn’t even bother cause I was out sinning stealing and lusting, lied on bed ‘half dead’ another day to waste so many big mistakes every sins I’ve done is driving me away from the ‘gate’ but I’m now ‘reborn’ because of Your precious Grace

Never meant to hurt You but I know I did knocking on my ‘door’ Jesus wanted to forgive enjoying all these sinning that's how we human lives I know I did a lot of sins but you still forgive I was so weak when I should’ve been strong I was disobeying. And wanted to be left alone and at the back of my mind that I knew that it was all wrong I've repented and changed just love for You from now on.

Jesus: Where ever you go whatever you do I will be right here waiting for you whatever it takes or how my heart breaks I will be right here waiting for you

so many times I took you for granted so much pain I know you can’t stand it disappointed You in so many ways the way I acted I shouldn’t worth Your forgiveness we're a million pieces I forsaken You apart You gave me all Your trust and I broke your heart trying to be a bad guy acting all rough but then I’m beaten cause I’m not tough I’ll do anything if You can take me back but then I realize the Gifts that I already had You died on the cross how could I ever forget took it all for granted everything that I had

Never meant to hurt You but I know I did
knocking on my ‘door’ Jesus wanted to forgive
enjoying all these sinning that's how we human lives
I know I did a lot of sins but you still forgive
I was so weak when I should’ve been strong
I was disobeying. And wanted to be left alone
and at the back of my mind that I knew that it was all wrong
I've repented and changed just love for You from now on.

2x Jesus: Where ever you go whatever you do I will be right here waiting for you whatever it takes or how my heart breaks I will be right here waiting for you

3x
Never meant to hurt You but I know I did
knocking on my ‘door’ Jesus wanted to forgive
enjoying all these sinning that's how we human lives
I know I did a lot of sins but you still forgive
I was so weak when I should’ve been strong
I was disobeying. And wanted to be left alone
and at the back of my mind that I knew that it was all wrong
I've repented and changed just love for You from now on.

'Right here Waiting' in Christian version. Credits goes to God and CL a.k.a (Chen Ling) cause she inspired me to edit this song and suggested to change some lyrics. Correct my english or my lyrics if you would. Thanks~

CHRISTIANIY IS A STRAITJACKET

'Christians believe that they have the absolute truth that everyone else has to believe - or else,' said Keith, a young artist living in Brooklyn. 'That attitude endangers everyone's freedom.'

'Yes,' agreed Chloe, another young artist. 'A "one-Truth-fits all" approach is just too confining. The Christians I know don't seem to have the freedom to think for themselves. I believe each individual must determine truth for him- or herself.'

Is belief in absolute truth the enemy of freedom? Most people I've (the author of this book 'Timothy Keller') met in New York City believe that it is. Christianity names some beliefs 'heresy' and some practices 'immoral'. It bars from its community those who transgress its doctrinal and moral boundaries. This seems to contemporary observers to endanger civic freedom, because it divides rather than unites our population. It also appears to be culturally narrow, failing to recognise that various cultures have different perspectives on reality. Finally, it seems to enslave or at least infantilise its members, determining what they must believe and practise in every particular. M. Scott Peck told of counselling a woman named Charlene who said about Christianity: 'There's no room for me in that. That would be my death! . . . I don't want to live for God. I will not. I want to live for . . . my own sake.' Charlene believed Christianity would stifle her creativity and growth. So did early-twentieth-century social activist Emma Goldman, who called Christianity 'the leveler of the human race, the breaker of man's will to dare and to do . . .an iron net, a straitjacket which does not let him expand or grow'.
At the end of the movie, I, Robot (2004), the robot named Sonny has fulfilled the objectives in his design program. But now he realises he no longer has a purpose. The movie concludes with a dialogue between Sonny and the other main character, Detective Spooner.

Sonny: Now that I have fulfilled my purpose, I don't know what to do.
Detective Spooner: I guess you'll have to find your way like the rest of us, Sonny . . . That's what it means to be free.

In this view, 'freedom' means that there is no overrarching purpose for which we were created. If there were, we would be obligated to conform to it and to fulfil it, and that is limiting. True freedom is freedom to create your own meaning and purpose. The Supreme Court has enshrined this view in law when it opined 'the heart of liberty' is to 'define one's own concept of existence, of the meaning of the universe'. Stephen Jay Gould concurs:

We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrail creatures; because comets struck the earth and wiped out dinosaurs, thereby giving mammals a chance not otherwise available. . . . We may yearn for a 'higher' answer - but none exists. This explanation, though superficially troubling, if not terrifying, is ultimately liberating and exhilarating. We cannot read the meaning of life passively in the facts of nature. We must construct these answers for ourselves. . .

Christianity looks like an enemy of social cohesion, cultural adaptability and even authentic personhood. However, this objection is based on mistakes about the nature of truth, community, Christianity, and of liberty itself.

Truth Is Unavoidable

The French philosopher Foucault writes: 'Truth is a thing of this world. It is produced only by multiple forms of constraint and that includes the regular effects of power.' Inspired by Foucault, many say that all truth-claims are power plays. When you claim to have the truth, you are trying to get power and control over other people. Foucault was a disciple of Nietzsche, and to their credit they used this analysis on both the Left and the Right. If you claimed 'everyone should do justice to the poor' in front of Nietzsche, he would question whether you said that because you really loved justice and the poor or because you wanted to start a revolution that would give you control and power.
However, the objection that all truth is a power play falls prey to the same problem as the objection that all truth is culturally conditioned. If you try to explain away all assertions of truth as one or the other or something else you find yourself in an untenable position. C. S. Lewis writes in The Abolition of Man:

But you cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? . . . a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.

If you say all truth-claims are power plays, then so is your statement. If you say (like Freud) that all truth-claims about religion and God are just psychological projections to deal with your guilt and insecurity, then so is your statement. To see through everything is not to see.
Foucault was pressing the truth of his analysis on others even as he denied the very category of truth. Some kind of truth-claim, then, seems unavoidable. The inconsistency of working against oppression when you refuse to admit there is such a thing as truth is the reason that postmodern 'theory' and 'deconstruction' is perhaps on the wane. G. K. Chesterton made this very same point nearly a hundred years ago:

The new rebel is a sceptic, and will not trust anything. . .[but] therefore he can never be really a revolutionary. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind. . . . Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purpose of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything. . . . There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.

Community Can't Be Completely Inclusive

Christianity requires particular beliefs in order to be a member of its community. It is not open to all. This is socially divisive, crities argue. Human communities should instead be completely inclusive, open to all on the basis of our common humanity. Proponents of this view point out that many urban neighbourhoods contain residents of different races and religious beliefs who nonetheless live and work together as a community. All that is required for such community life is that each person respects the privacy and rights of others and works for equal access to education, jobs and political decision-making for all. Common moral beliefs are not necessary, it is said, in a 'liberal democracy'.
Unfortunately, the view just espressed is a vast oversimplification. Liberal democracy is based on an extensive list of assumptions - a preference of individual to community rights, a division between private and public morality, and the sancity of personal choice. All of these beliefs are foreign to many other cultures. A liberal democracy is based then (as is every community) on a shared set of very particular beliefs. Western society is based on shared commitments to reason, rights and justice, even though there is no universally recognised definition of any of these. Every account of justice and reason is embedded in a set of some particular beliefs about the meaning of human life that is not shared with everyone. The idea of a totally inclusive community is, therefore, an illusion. Every human community holds in common some beliefs that necessarily create boundaries, including some people and excluding others from its circle.
Consider an illustration. Imagine that one of the board members of the local Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Community Centre announces, 'I've had a religious experience and now I believe homosexuality is a sin.' As the weeks go by, he persists in making that assertion. Imagine that a board member of the Alliance Against Same-Sex Marriage announces, 'I discovered that my son is gay and I think he has the right to marry his partner.' No matter how personally gracious and flexible the members of each group are, the day will come when each group will have to say, 'You must step off the board because you don't share a common commitment with us.' The first of these communities has the reputation for being inclusive and the second for being exclusive, but, in practice, both of them operate in almost the very same way. Each is based on common beliefs that act as boundaries, including some and excluding others. Neither community is being 'narrow' - they are just being communities.
Any community that did not hold its members accountable for specific beliefs and practices would have no corporate identity and would not really be a community at all. We cannot consider a group exclusive simply because it has standards for its members. Is there then no way to judge whether a community is open and caring rather than narrow and oppressive? Yes, there is. Here is a far better set of tests: which community has beliefs that lead its members to treat people in other communities with love and respect - to serve them and meet their needs? Which community's beliefs lead it to demonise and attack those who violate their boundaries rather than treating them with kindness, humility and winsomeness? We should criticise Christians when they are condemning and ungracious to unbelievers. But we should not criticise churches when they maintain standards for membership in accord with their beliefs. Every community must do the same.

Christianity Isn't Culturally Rigid

Christianity is also reputed to be a cultural straitjacket. It allegedly forces people from diverse cultures into a single iron mould. It is seen as an enemy of pluralism and multiculturalism. In reality, Christianity has been more adaptive (and maybe less destrutive) of diverse cultures than secularism and many other worldviews.
The pattern of Christian expansion differs from that of every other world religion. The centre and majority of Islam's population is still place of its origin - the Middle East. The orginal lands that have been the demograhic centres of Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism have remained so. By contrast, Christianity was first dominated by Jews and centred in Jerusalem. Later it was dominated by Hellenists and centred in the Mediterranean. Later the faith was received by the barbarians of Northern Europe and Christianity came to be dominated by western Europeans and then North Americans. Today most Christians in the world live in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Christianity soon will be centred in the southern and eastern hemispheres.
Two case studies instructive. In 1990, Christians comprised 9 per cent of the African population and were outnumbered by Muslims four to one. Today, Christians comprise 44 per cent of the population, and in the 1960s passed Muslims in number.
This explosive growth is now beginning in China. Christianity is growing not only among the peasantry, but also among the social and cultural establishment, including the Communist party. At the current rate of growth, within thirty years Christians will constitute 30 per cent of the Chinese population of 1.5 billion.
Why has Christianity grown so explosively in these places? African scholar Lamin Sanneh gives a most intriguing answer. Africans, he said, had a long tradition of belief in a supernatural world of good and evil spirits. When Africans began to read the Bible in their own languages many began to see in Christ the final solution to their own historic longings and aspirations as Africans. Sanneh writes:

Christianity answered this historical challenge by a reorientation of the worldview. . . . People sensed in their hearts that Jesus did not mock their respect for the sacred nor their clamor for an invincible Saviour, and so they beat their sacred drums for him until the stars skipped and danced in the skies. After that dance the stars weren't little anymore. Christianity helped Africans to become renewed Africans, not re-made Europeans.

Sanneh argues that secularism with its anti-supernaturalism and individualism is much more destructive of local cultures and 'African-ness' than Christianity is. In the Bible, Africans read of Jesus' power over supernatural and spiritual evil and of his triumph over it on the cross. When Africans become Christians, their African-ness is converted, completed and resolved, not replace with European-ness or something else. Through Christianity, Africans get distance enough to critique their traditions yet still inhabit them.
An interesting example of cultural adaptation is my own congregation, Redeemer Presbyterian Church of Manhattan. Its growth in this environment has surprised, even shocked observers. I am repeatedly asked, 'How are you reaching thousands of young adults in such a secular place?' The answer is that Christianity has done in New York City what it has done in all the other places that it has grown. It has adapted significantly and positively to the surrounding culture without compromising its main tenets.
Redeemer's basic doctrines - the deity of Christ, the infallibility of the Bible, the necessity of spiritual rebirth through faith in Christ's atoning death - are in unity with the orthodox, supernaturalist beliefs of the evangelical and Pentecostal churches of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the US South and Midwest. These beliefs often put us in conflict with views and practices of many people in the city. At the same time, we have been delighted to embrace many other aspects of urban, pluralistic culture. We emphasise the arts, value racial diversity, stress the importance of working for justice in the city for all its inhabitants, and communicate in the language and with the sensibility if our city-centre culture. Most of all we stress the grace of a Saviour who ate with people the establishment called 'sinners' and loved those who opposed him. All of these things are important to Manhattan residents.
As a result, Redeemer attracts and reaches a very diverse, urban congregation. At one Redeemer Sunday service my wife, Kathy, was introduced to a man sitting in front of her, brought to church by John DeLorean. He was a speechwriter for conservative Republican presidential candidate. Shortly thereafter she was tapped on the shoulder by a woman sitting behind her who wanted to introduce another guest. She had brought to church a man who was Madonna's chief songwriter at the time. Kathy was delighted they were both there, but she hoped they wouldn't meet each other before they had heard the sermon!
Some years ago a man from a southern US state visited Redeemer. He had heard that though we held to orthodox Christian doctrine, we had grown large in the midst of a sceptical, secular city. He expected to find that we were attracting people with avantgarde music, video monitors and clips, dramatic sketches, exceptionally hip settings and other kinds of eye-catching spectacle. To his surprise he found a simple and traditional service that, on the surface, seemed identical to those in his more conservative part of the world. Yet he could also see that the congregation contained many people who wouldn't have ever attended the churches he knew. After the service he met me and then said, 'This is a complete mystery to me. Where are the dancing bears? Where are the gimmicks? Why are these people here?'
I directed him to some 'downtown art-types' who had been coming to Redeemer for some time. They suggested that he look beneath the surface. One person said that the difference between Redeemer and other churches was profound, and lay in 'irony, charity and humility'. They said Redeemer lacked the pompous and highly sentimental language they found emotionally manipulative in other churches. Instead, Redeemer people addressed others with gentle, self-deprecating irony. Not only that, but beliefs were held here in charity and with humility, making Manhattanites feel included and welcomed, even if they disagreed with some of Redeemer's beliefs. Most of all, they said, teaching and communication at Redeemer was intelligent and nuanced, showing sensitivity where they were sensitive.
All of these emphases meet with approval in Manhattan, but each one is grounded in historic Christian doctrine. For example, the emphasis on racial diversity comes right out of St Paul's letter to the Ephesians, chapter 2, in which Paul claims that the racial diversity of the church is an important withness to the truth of the Christian message. To take another example, Reinhold Niebuhr has pointed out that irony, amusement at seeing human beings try but fail to be Godlike, is a very Christian way of looking at things. Bacause all these adaptive emphases have deep roots in historic Christian teaching, they are not simply marketing techniques.
Why has Christianity, more than any other major religion of the world, been able to infiltrate so many radically different cultures? There is, of course, a core of teachings (the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments) to which all forms of Christianity are commited. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of freedom in how these absolutes are expressed and take form within a particular culture. For example, the Bible directs Christians to unite in acts of musical praise, but it doesn't prescribe the metre, rhythm, level of emotional expressiveness, or instrumentation - all this is left to be culturally expressed in a variety of ways. Historian Andrew Walls writes:

Cultural diversity was built into the Christian faith . . . in Acts 15, which declared that the new gentile Christians didn't have to enter Jewish culture. . . . The converts had to work out. . . a Hellenistic way of being a Christian. [So] no one owns the Christian faith. There is no 'Christian culture' the way there is an 'Islamic culture' which you can recognize from Pakistan to Tunisia to Morocco. . . . .

Biblical texts such as Isaiah 60 and Revelation 21-22 depict a renewed, perfect, future world in which we retain our cultural differences ('every tongue, tribe, people, nation'). This means every human culture has (from God) distinct goods and strengths for the enrichment of the human race. As Walls indicates, while every culture has distortions and elements that will be critiqued and revised by the Christian message, each culture will also have good and unique elements to which Christianity connects and adapts.
Contrary to popular opinion, then, Christianity is not a Western religion that destroys local cultures. Rather, Christianity has take more culturally diverse forms than other faith. It has deep layers of insight form the Hebrew, Greek and European cultures, and over the next hundred years will be further shaped by Africa, Latin America and Asia. Christianity may become the most truly 'catholic vision of the world', having opened its leadership over the centuries to people from every tongue, tribe, people and nation.

Freedom Isn't Simple

Christianity is supposedly a limit to personal growth and potential because it constrains our freedom to choose our own beliefs and practices. Immanuel Kant defined an enlightened human being as one who trusts in his or her own power of thinking, rather than in authority or tradition. This resistance to authority in moral matters is now a deep current in our culture. Freedom to determine our own standards is considered a neccessity for being fully human.
This oversimplifies, however. Freedom cannot be defined in strictly negative tearms, as the absence of confinement and constraint. In fact, in many cases, confinement and constraint is actually a means to liberation.
If you have musical aptitude, you may give yourself to practise, practise, practise the piano for years. This is a restriction, a limit on your freedom. There are many other things you won't be able to do with the time you invest in practising. If you have the talent, however, the discipline and limitation will unleash your ability that would otherwise go untapped. What have you done? You've deliberately lost your freedom to engage in some things in order to release yourself to a richer kind of freedom to accomplish other things.
This does not mean that restriction, discipline and constraint are intrinsically, automatically liberating. For example, a five-foot-four, 9-stone young adult male should not set his heart on becoming a top American footballer. All the discipline and effort in the world will only frustrate and crush him (literally). He is banging his head against a physical reality - he simply does not have the potential. In our society many people have worked extremely hard to pursue careers that pay well rather than fit their talents and interests. Such careers are straitjackets that in the long run stifle and dehumanise us.
Disciplines and constraints, then, liberate us only when they fit with the reality of our nature and capacities. A fish, because it absorbs oxygen from water rather than air, is only free if it is restricted and limited to water. If we put it out on the grass, its freedom to move and even live is not enhanced, but destroyed. The fish dies if we do not honour the reality of its nature.
In many areas of life, freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, the liberating restrictions. Those that fit with the reality of our nature and the world produce greater power and scope for our abilities and a deeper joy and fulfilment. Experimentation, risk and making mistakes bring growth only if, over time, they show us our limits as well as our abilities. If we only grow intellectually, vocationally and physically through judicious constraints - why would it not also be true for spiritual and moral growth? Instead of insisting on freedom to create spiritual reality, shouldn't we be seeking do discover it and disciplining ourselves to live according to it?
The popular concept - that we should each determine our own morality - is based on the belief that the spiritual realm is nothing at all like the rest of the world. Does anyone really believe that? For many years after each of the morning and evening Sunday services I remained in the church for another hour to field questions. Hundreds of people stayed for the give-and-take discussions. One of the most frequent statements I heard was that 'Every person has to define right and wrong for him- or herself.' I always responded to the speakers by asking, 'Is there anyone in the world right now doing things you believe they should stop doing no matter what they personally believe about the correctness of their behaviour?' They would invariably say, 'Yes, of course.' Then I would ask, 'Doesn't that mean that you do believe there is some kind of moral reality that is "there" that is not defined by us, that must be abided by regardless of what a person feels or thinks?' Almost always, the response to that question was a silence, either a thoughtful or a grumpy one.

Love, the Ultimate Freedom, Is More Constraining Than We Might Think

What then is the moral-spiritual reality we must acknowledge to thrive? What is the environment that liberates us if we confine ourselves to it, like water liberates the fish? Love. Love is the most liberating freedom-loss of all.
One of the principles of love - either love for a friend or romantic love - is that you have to lose independence to attain greater intimacy. If you want the 'freedoms' of love - the fulfilment, security, sense of worth that it brings - you must limit your freedom in many ways. You cannot enter a deep relationship and still make unilateral decisions or allow your friend or lover no say in how you live your life. To experience the joy and freedom of love, you must give up your personal autonomy. The French novelist Francoise Sagan expressed this well in an interview in Le Monde. She expressed that she was satisfied with the way she had lived her life and had no regrets:

Interviewer: Then you have had the freedom you wanted?
Sagan: Yes. . . I was obviously less free when I was in love with someone. . . . But one's not in love all the time. Apart from that. . . I'm free.

Sagan is right. A love relationship limits your personal options. Again we are confronted with the complexity of the concept of 'freedom'. Human beings are most free and alive in relationships of love. We only become ourselves in love, and yet healthy love relationships involve mutual, unselfish service, a matual loss of independence. C. S. Lewis put it eloquently:

Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and posibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket of coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.

Freedom, then, is not the absence of limitations and constraints but it is finding the right ones, those that fit our nature and liberate us.
For a love relationship to be healthy there must be a mutual loss of independence. It can't be just one way. Both sides must say to the other, 'I will adjust to you. I will change for you. I'll serve you even though it means a sacrifice for me.' If only one party does all the sacrificing and giving, and the other does all the ordering and taking, the relationship will be exploitative and will oppress and distort the lives of both people.
At first sight, then, a relationship with God seems inherently dehumanising. Surely it will have to be 'one way', God's way. God, the divine being, has all the power. I must adjust to God - there is no way that God could adjust to and serve me.
While this may be true in other forms of religion and belief in God, it is not true in Christianity. In the most radical way, God has adjusted to us - in his incarnation and atonement. In Jesus Christ he became a limited human being, vulnerable to suffering and death. On the cross, he submitted to our condition - as sinners - and died in our place to forgive us. In the most profound way, God has said to us, in Christ, 'I wil adjust to you. I will change for you. I'll serve you though it means a sacrifice for me.' If he has done this for us, we can and should say the same to God and others. St Paul writes, 'the love of Christ constrains us' (2 Corinthians 5:14).
A friend of C. S. Lewis's was once asked, 'Is it easy to love God?' and he replied, 'It is easy to those who do it.' That is not as paradoxical as it sounds. When you fall deeply in love, you want to please the beloved. You don't wait for the person to ask you to do something for her. You eagerly research and learn every little thing that brings her pleasure. Then you get it for her, even if it costs you money or great inconvenience. 'Your wish is my command,' you feel - and it doesn't feel oppressive at all. From the outside, bemused friends may think, 'She's leading him around by the nose,' but from the inside it feels like heaven.
For a Christian, it's the same with Jesus. The love of Christ constrains. Once you realise how Jesus changed for you and gave himself for you, you aren't afraid of giving up your freedom and therefore finding your freedom in him.