I love Lifesong Memoirs like my own - I did write it after all ... And yet, it is time for a fresh start.

I am still in the process of figuring this all out, but I will now be doing that here: snippets of solitude.
.

It has been a long wait, but I guess now is a good time as any to write another post. It has been almost a year-and-a-half since I first wrote in "Lifesong Memoirs" and I thought it would be nice to take time to reflect on the journey thus far.

It should come as no surprise that my original intent in undertaking this blog was to document the milestones and personal changes that occurred after my decision to move from my hometown, Perth. My loyal readers (whoever you are) have been witness to numerous personal changes on my part. There are too many to list here, but it goes without saying that I am a pale reflection of the man I was two years ago. I would even go so far to say that I am more of a man than I was two years ago. The journey has been long, hard and difficult but I would do it all again in the blink of an eye. I have come to accept many of the changes that have been going on inside me and the direction which I may (or may not) be heading towards.

My life journey is far from over and my personality and character are continually being shaped and molded. That being said, I have come to the conclusion that I have, in some ineffable way, fulfilled the original intent for starting this blog.

And so it is time... This post signals the final chapter of Lifesong Memoirs. I thank you, whoever you are, for bothering to take the time to read this blog. I know that it can be quite a chore to read sometimes, especially given my affinity to write metaphorically. Nonetheless, I hope you have found some enjoyment or insight from it along the way.

Goodbye dear reader. I bid thee farewell for the second time round.

~Fin? (The End?)

.

Greetings dedicated reader.

First off, I'd like to apologise for the lack of blog updates during the past month. Wayyyyy too much has been happening. As you already know, I am in the midst of intern-ing for the World Health Organization in Geneva. In a two-word nutshell it has been FRIKKIN AWESOME!!! I haven't got much time, so I'll try to update you on my time here in Geneva/Europe within the space of 12 realisations.

...

1. Fulfilling life goals, like "working for the WHO", can be a whole lot of fun. I'd highly recommend it.

2. Walking along the streets of Geneva at midnight is like walking along the streets of a dark, scary Film Noir city - such as Sin City or Gotham City. I'd highly un-recommend that.

3. Residing in Apartment 44 on the 4th floor of the address, 4 Route des Acacias, isn't as unlucky as some Cantonese people would lead you to believe.

4. Working for the WHO is (almost) like working for any other large, government bureaucracy.

5. Australians are apparently the only English-speaking people in the world who use the term "heaps of" when alluding to large quantities of stuff.

6. Whoever knew that sledding down the Alps - at high speeds, along poorly lit slopes, near the edge of a cliff, in the middle of the night - could actually be fun?

7. Watching snow fall from the sky in real-life is just as pretty as it looks in Christmas movies.

8. Consuming copious amounts of paella, tapas and sangria in three consecutive days is a very, very bad idea.

9. I want to learn Spanish and live in Barcelona. Nuff said.

10. Eating macarons with a chocolate ganache filling is pure delectable decadence ... ME WANT MORE!!! OM NOM NOM NOM NOM!!!

11. I am perfectly capable of cooking an excellent Thai green curry for other people to enjoy.

12. At the risk of sounding cliché - I still call Australia home.

The young man gets into his car after a harrowing series of catch-ups filled with smiles, crying, hugs, finger-pointing, happy moments and sorrow. It's a strange mix to behold and emotionally draining for the man at the centre of it all. As difficult as it is, he is doing his best to be impartial with respect to the rift that has developed between a number of his closest friends. A lot can happen in a single year. Not only did he miss out on all the engagements, newborn babies and marriages - he also missed out on a massive falling out.

The whole fiasco brings to mind a chorus from an old Dishwalla song he used to listen to: "When we collide we lose ourselves / When we collide we break in two / And as we push and we shove and we hurt the ones we love / It's a hard mistake / When we collide / We break".

All-in-all it is a poignant reminder that 2009 wasn't such a good year for everyone else.

The young man utters a sigh and a "C'est la vie" before shifting into gear and driving off. He's not ready to go home yet - there's just too much on his mind. So he takes the car and drives off to nowhere in particular.

Round midnight he finds himself at Trigg Beach - one of his favourite late night haunts in Perth. To him there is something rejuvenating about going to a desolate beach in the middle of the night. The solitude, the moonlight, the crashing of the waves and the starry night sky. It is just the young man, his thoughts and his Saviour.

After a long period of solitary rumination and prayer, he lifts his eyes to survey the bright coloured lights in the distance. It is then and there that he makes an important realisation.

"Perth is dead to me".

That is not to say that his family and friends are dead to him. No, they are very much alive and loved. But his passion for Perth as a city and everything that it represents has been dulled after his year-long absence. Other than his family and friends, there is nothing for him in Perth, and try as he may, he repeatedly fails to envisage a future for himself involving his own beloved hometown.

It is then and there that he finally understands the true meaning of the phrase: "Familiarity breeds contempt".

I am writing this while on a plane from Brisbane to Perth. This is the first time that I will be visiting Perth since my departure in mid-February earlier this year. Seeing as I haven’t got much else to do on this flight, I decided that it would be appropriate to sit down and reflect on the year that has been.

I’ve had a recent realisation – one that only came to me a few days ago. In a nutshell, 2009 has been one of the best years that I have had in a very, very long time.

Those of you who have been reading this blog since its inception would know that it was birthed from a degree of dissatisfaction with the way my life was headed back in Perth. Please don’t take this the wrong way. I don’t mean to say that I was dissatisfied with all my friends and family back in Perth (whom I miss dearly). Nor do I mean to say that I hate Perth, which will always be my hometown.

Fundamentally, I believe that my dissatisfaction stemmed from two main reasons. Firstly, opportunities in Perth were extremely limited in terms of the career path that I was aspiring towards. Secondly, and more importantly, I was becoming more and more uneasy with the various expressions of faith that I had cultivated as a Christian in the last eight or so years. Since then, both of these issues, along with various others, have been resolved.

I am confident of where I am heading personally (at this point in time anyway). I have also found an excellent fit to my personal and corporate expressions of faith. Yes, there have been many changes in the past year. Yes, it was a tough process. And yes, it was worth it.

I have much to be thankful for and little to complain about. Ironically, my standard of living in Brisbane was not as good as it was in Perth. I didn’t have a car, I couldn’t afford to eat out much, I didn’t have numerous flocks of friends, and I spent a lot of my spare time at home (rather than going out and about). Nonetheless, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

If you don’t know, I will be heading to Geneva, Switzerland for two months for an internship with an international organisation. I don’t mean to boast in my own achievements, but rather I would like to thank God for demonstrating His grace and favour towards me personally – which is undeserved on my part. I could’ve easily been looked over for the many opportunities that inevitably came my way this past year. And yet, God chose to bless me. He also placed in my life a multitude of people who have kept me sane and/or true to the faith during my time in Brisbane. In my heart of hearts, I know that I was where I was supposed to be in 2009.

I have met so many wonderful people in Brisbane and I have established myself here in a new church family whom I love dearly. And yet, I suspect that as much as I would like to resist it, I very well may be moving again. Potentially it will be somewhere new, somewhere different, somewhere foreign, but ultimately somewhere where I am supposed to be.

Said A Sheet Of Snow-White Paper
By Khalil Gibran

Said a sheet of snow-white paper, Pure was I created, and pure will I remain for ever. I would rather be burnt and turn to white ashes than suffer darkness to touch me or the unclean to come near me.

The ink-bottle heard what the paper was saying, and it laughed in its dark heart; but it never dared to approach her. And the multicoloured pencils heard her also, and they too never came near her.

And the snow-white sheet of paper did remain pure and chaste for ever, pure and chaste -- and empty.

Not too long ago, I finished reading 'A Million Miles in a Thousand Years' by Donald Miller. This is quite possibly the most inspiring book that I've read all year.

One of the chapters that stuck in my head was entitled "Why God Hasn't Fixed You Yet". At first I found it a bit controversial, but the more I considered it personally and in the context of the Bible, the more I felt the chapter's message resonate within me. I've provided a (very large) excerpt of the chapter in this blog post. It is just that good! I know it's a long read, but if you persist, I'm sure you'll feel a little more inspired to keep your feet on the ground too.

Enjoy! =)

~~~

The Reason Why God Hasn’t Fixed You Yet

I’m convinced the most fantastical moment in [a] story, the point when all the tension is finally relieved, doesn’t actually happen in real life. And I mean that seriously. I’ve thought about it fifty different ways, but I can’t figure out how a human life actually climaxes so that everything on the other side of a particular moment is made to be okay. It happens all the time in movies and books, but it won’t happen to me – and I’m sorry to say, it won’t happen to you either.

Maybe the reason we like stories so much is because they deliver wish fulfilment. Maybe we sit in the dark and shovel sugar into our mouths because in so many stories everything is made right, and we secretly long for that ourselves ... There’s just something in the DNA of a human that responds to the idea of an event, a moment in which the upheaval we’ve all been working around is finally laid to rest.

But regardless how passionate the utopianists are, I simply don’t believe utopia is going to happen. I don’t believe we are going to be rescued. I don’t believe an act of man will make things on earth perfect, and I don’t believe God will intervene before I die, or for that matter before you die. I believe, instead, we will go on longing for a resolution that will not come, not within life as we know it, anyway.

If you think about it, an enormous amount of damage is created by the myth of utopia. There is an intrinsic feeling in nearly every person that your life could be perfect if you only had such-and-such a car or such-and-such a spouse or such-and-such a job. We believe we will be made whole by our accomplishments, our possessions, or our social status. It’s written in the fabric of our DNA that life used to be beautiful and now it isn’t, and if only this and if only that, it would be beautiful again.

I saw a story on 60 Minutes a few months ago about the happiest country in the world. It was Denmark. A study done by a British university ranked the happiest countries, and America was far down the list, but Denmark was on top. Morley Safer explored why. Ruling out financial status, physical health, and even social freedom, he landed on a single characteristic of the Danes that allowed them such contentment. The reason Danes are so happy was this: they had low expectations.

I’m not making that up. There is something in Denmark’s culture that allows them to look at life realistically. They don’t expect products to fulfil them or relationships to end all their problems. In fact, in the final interview of the segment, Safer was sitting across from a Danish man and remarked to him that when Americans find out the happiest place on earth is Denmark, they are going to want to move there. Without missing a beat, the Danish man looked at Morley and said, “Well, honestly, they will probably be let down.”

I don’t mean to insinuate there are no minor climaxes to human stories. There are. A kid can try to make the football team and in a moment of climax see his name on the coach’s list. A girl can want to get married and feel euphoric when the man of her dreams slides a ring on her finger. But these aren’t the stories I’m talking about. These are substories. When that kid makes the football team, he is going to find out that playing football is hard, and he’s going to find himself in the middle of yet another story. And the girl is going to wake up three months into her marriage and realise she is, in fact, still lonely, and so many of her issues haven’t gone away. And if both of these people aren’t careful, they’re going to get depressed because they thought the climax to their substory was actually a climax to the human story, and it wasn’t. The human story goes on.

Growing up in church, we were taught that Jesus was the answer to all our problems. We were taught that there was a circle-shaped hole in our heart and that we had tried to fill it with the square pegs of sex, drugs, and rock and roll; but only the circle peg of Jesus could fill our hole. I became a Christian based, in part, on this promise, but the hole never really went away. To be sure, I like Jesus, and I still follow him, but the idea that Jesus will make everything better is a lie. It’s basically biblical theology translated into the language of infomercials. The truth is, the apostles never really promise Jesus is going to make everything better here on earth. Can you imagine an infomercial with Paul, testifying to the amazing product of Jesus, saying that he once had power and authority, and since he tried Jesus he’s been moved from prison to prison, beaten, and routinely bitten by snakes? I don’t think many people would be buying that product. Peter couldn’t do any better. He was crucified upside down, by some reports. Stephen was stoned outside the city gates. John, supposedly, was boiled in oil. It’s hard to imagine how a religion steeped in so much pain and sacrifice turned into a promise for earthly euphoria. I think Jesus can make things better, but I don’t think he is going to make things perfect. Not here, and not now.

What I love about the true gospel of Jesus, though, is that it offers hope. Paul has hope our souls will be made complete. It will happen in heaven, where there will be a wedding and a feast. I wonder if that’s why so many happy stories end in weddings and feasts. Paul says Jesus is the hope that will not disappoint. I find that comforting. That helps me get through the day, to be honest. It even makes me content somehow. Maybe that’s what Paul meant when he said he’d learned the secret of contentment.

After the girl I’d dated had been in Switzerland for a while, and as I continued to see a counsellor, I realised that for years I’d thought of love as something that would complete me, make all my troubles go away. I worshipped at the altar of romantic completion. And it had cost me, plenty of times. And it had cost most of the girls I’d dated, too, because I wanted them to be something they couldn’t be. It’s too much pressure to put on a person. I think that’s why so many couples fight, because they want their partners to validate them and affirm them, and if they don’t get that, they feel as though they’re going to die. And so they lash out. But it’s a terrible thing to wake up and realise the person you just finished crucifying didn’t turn out to be Jesus.

I was interviewing my friend Susan Isaacs after her book Angry Conversations with God came out. We were in front of a live audience, and I was reading questions to her off of index cards submitted by the audience. Because so much of her book talks about relational needs, relational fulfilment and unfulfillment, one of the questions asked was whether she believed there was one true love for every person.

Susan essentially said no. And she said that with her husband sitting right there in the audience. She said she and her husband believed they were a cherished prize for each other, and they would probably drive any other people mad. But then she said something I thought was wise. She said she had married a guy, and he was just a guy. He wasn’t going to make all her problems go away, because he was just a guy. And that freed her to really love him as a guy, not as an ultimate problem solver. And because her husband believed she was just a girl, he was free to really love her too. Neither needed the other to make everything okay. They were simply content to have good company through life’s conflicts. I thought that was beautiful.

There is a lot of money and power to be had in convincing people we can create an Eden here on earth. Cults are formed when leaders make such absurd promises. Products are sold convincing people that they are missing out on the perfect life. And political groups tend to scare people by convincing them we are losing Eden, or inspire people by telling them we can rebuild what God has destroyed. We all get worked into a frenzy over things that will not happen until Jesus returns. The truth is, we can make things a little better or a little worse, but utopia doesn’t hang in the balance of our vote or of what products we buy.

All of this may sound depressing to you, but I don’t mean it to be. I’ve lived some good stories now, and those stories have improved the quality of my life. But I’ve also let go of the idea things will ever be made perfect, at least while I’m walking around on this planet. I’ve let go of the idea that this life has a climax. I’m trying to be more Danish, I guess. And the thing is, it works. When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are. And when you stop expecting material possessions to complete you, you’d be surprised at how much pleasure you get in material possessions. And when you stop expecting God to end all your troubles, you’d be surprised how much you like spending time with God.

Do I still think there will be a day when all wrongs are made right, when our souls find the completion they are looking for? I do. But when all things are made right, it won’t be because of some preacher or snake-oil salesman or politician or writer making promises in his book. I think, instead, this will be done by Jesus. And it will be at a wedding. And there will be a feast.