*+[[UnDeNiED eNtRy]]*++

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Thank you Brother Greg for showing this video today!!

I cried watching this today!!
I just teared especially when that guy wrote the word "Father I forgive you".
How many a times we bore grievances and store up hurts in our hearts when others just inflict pain on us through just mere strings of words?
Well, these are kind of ant issues compared to the guy in the video being abandoned by the dearest person in his life.
He confronted his dad and said I forgive you.
That is so difficult, even to go to prison to visit his dad.

I was really touched by his willingness to forgive and decisiveness in action to show such grace and mercy towards his dad.
It speaks a lot about attitude doesn't it.
Often we think we are hurt the most, but there are in fact many out there who are hurt more.
Often we think its normal to be angry with somebody.
Its starts with a misunderstanding, and later further evolving into becoming enemies.
And we don't really know why we hate the person so much, but we just get so tensed and uptight when we see that person when the person may not have done anything wrong.
See, when this happens, we have by our own actions drove the wedge between ourselves.

The picture of forgiving paints a much inspiring and maturity of a person compared to the ruin picture of hatred and scorn.
No matter how hurtful one feels towards another, it is advisable to forgive.
To forgive not because you demand forgiveness from that person, but to forgive so that the hurts in our hearts will be free.
We will then be free of these negativity in our lives.
With forgiveness, we will not allow the hurts we bore to eat our lives away.

Reconciliation or raging war?
I rather choose the picture where tears comes out and you see people hugging each other and saying sorry to each other. The picture where you know the future will be brighter and happier. The picture where you know you have added another genuine friend into your social circle.

"When deep injury happens to us, we never recover until we forgive.
Forgiveness does not change the past, BUT it does enlarge the future."
(:

Saturday, August 08, 2009

THE SUMMONS

1. Will you come and follow me
If I but call your name?
Will you go where you don’t know
And never be the same?
Will you let my love be shown,
Will you let my name be known,
Will you let my life be grown
In you and you in me?

2. Will you leave yourself behind
If I but call your name?
Will you care for cruel and kind
And never be the same?
Will you risk the hostile stare
Should your life attract or scare?
Will you let me answer prayer
In you and you in me?

3. Will you let the blinded see
If I but call your name?
Will you set the pris’ners free
And never be the same?
Will you kiss the leper clean,
And do such as this unseen,
And admit to what I mean
In you and you in me?

4. Will you love the ‘you’ you hide
If I but call your name?
Will you quell the fear inside
And never be the same?
Will you use the faith you’ve found
To reshape the world around,
Through my sight and touch and sound
In you and you in me?

5. Lord, your summons echoes true
When you but call my name.
Let me turn and follow you
And never be the same.
In your company I’ll go
Where your love and footsteps show.
Thus I’ll move and live and grow
In you and you in me.

Sunday, July 26, 2009

jodi picoult
-vanishing act

"It took me a lifetime to realised things don't get lost if they do not have a value"

Thursday, July 23, 2009

"...i can almost see your holiness, as i look around this place..."

In the midst of the craziest week so far in the year 2009, i am greatly consoled by the fact that my mind just played this song spirit of God, Lift me up. It went on and on for 4 hrs, and it was really the source of strength for me.

I never expect myself to have understood much. I'm totally amazed and awe by how God challenges me to rely in His strength each and everyday. And i am equally amazed by how He has blessed me each and everyday as He enlightens my mind to see the greater picture of the situation I am facing each day.

Well, it is hard balancing school, church and leisure. And this time round, I am really determined to find something i like to do as leisure. I have made up my mind to step out of the sheltered time schedule, and try to source time to grow in leisure and passion. Well, church and stuff. Been praying and will continue to pray about them.

Friends, on this side of the story, I guess to say, I am pretty blessed by Him. He has given me His blessings through the people i encounter everyday. Building closer relationship, motivating people, trying to grow in holiness, I am grateful.

Praise Him for the wonders of His hands which He uses to protect me day and night. I really hope to journey with Him in faith, strong and unshaken faith. Thank you for granting me a whole new perspective of life through my course, through my family, and through the friends you have brought to me.

love you loads.

Saturday, July 18, 2009

I just want to share this article with you.

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

Stanford Report, June 14, 2005
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Monday, June 29, 2009

MESSAGE OF THE DAY
Saints Peter and Paul, Apostles
Courage! You... can! Don't you see what God's grace did with sleepy-headed Peter, the coward who had denied him..., and with Paul, his fierce and relentless persecutor? (The Way, 483)

It is Peter who speaks: Lord, do You wash my feet? Jesus answers: You do not understand what I am doing now; you will understand it later. Peter insists: You will never wash my feet. And Jesus explains: If I do not wash your feet, you will have no part with me. Simon Peter surrenders: Lord, not only my feet, but also my hands and my head. Faced by the call to total self-giving, complete and without any hesitation, we often oppose it with false modesty like Peter's ... May we also be men with a heart like the Apostle's! Peter allows no one to love Jesus more than he does. That love leads us to reply thus: Here I am! Wash me, head, hands and feet! Purify me completely, for I want to give myself to You without holding anything back. (Furrow, 266)

"And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure upon me of my anxiety for all the churches'', Saint Paul wrote. This sigh of the Apostle is a reminder for all Christians ‑‑ for you, too ‑‑ of our duty to place at the feet of the Spouse of Christ, of the Holy Church, all that we are and all that we can be; loving her faithfully, even at the cost of livelihood, of honor, of life itself. (The Forge, 584)

I find this message really cool. Like it really spoke the lauguage of my heart for the readings today (13th ordinary sunday of the year)

MESSAGE OF THE DAY
“Learn how to do good”
When you are with someone, you have to see a soul: a soul who has to be helped, who has to be understood, with whom you have to live in harmony, and who has to be saved. (The Forge, 573)

I like to repeat what the Holy Spirit tells us through the prophet Isaiah, discite benefacere, learn how to do good…

Charity towards our neighbor is an expression of our love of God. Accordingly, when we strive to grow in this virtue, we cannot fix any limits to our growth. The only possible measure for the love of God is to love without measure; on the one hand, because we will never be able to thank him enough for what he has done for us; and on the other, because this is exactly what God’s own love for us, his creatures, is like: it overflows without calculation or limit.

Mercy is more than simply being compassionate. Mercy is the overflow of charity, which brings with it also an overflow of justice. Mercy means keeping one’s heart totally alive, throbbing in a way that is both human and divine, with a love that is strong, self‑sacrificing and generous. (Friends of God, 232)

Saturday, June 06, 2009

“Your work too must become a personal prayer”
Before you start working, place a crucifix on your desk or beside the tools you work with. From time to time glance at it... When tiredness creeps in, your eyes will go towards Jesus, and you will find new strength to continue with your task. For that crucifix is more than a picture of someone you love —parents, children, wife, sweetheart... He is everything: your Father, your Brother, your Friend, your God, the very Love of your loves. (The Way of the Cross, Eleventh Station, 5)

November 24, 2000

I have often said that we must not allow these periods of conversation with Jesus, who sees us and hears us from the Tabernacle, to degenerate into an impersonal type of prayer. If we want our meditation to develop right away into a personal dialogue with Our Lord (for which the sound of words is not necessary), we must shed the cloak of anonymity and put ourselves in his presence, just as we are. We must avoid hiding ourselves in the crowd that fills the church, or diluting our prayer into a meaningless patter that does not come from the heart and is little better than a reflex habit, empty of any real content.

To this I now add that your work too must become a personal prayer, that it must become a real conversation with Our Father in heaven. If you seek sanctity in and through your work, you will necessarily have to strive to turn it into personal prayer. You cannot allow your cares and concerns to become impersonal and routine, because if you were to do so, the divine incentive that inspires your daily tasks will straightaway wither and die. (Friends of God, 64)

Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Kutless-Promise Of A Lifetime

I have fallen to my knees
As I sing a lullaby of pain
I'm feeling broken in my melody
As I sing to help the tears go away

Then I remember the pledge you made to me

[CHORUS:]
I know you're always there
To hear my every prayer inside
I'm clinging to the promise of a lifetime
I hear the words you say
To never walk away from me and leave behind
The promise of a lifetime

Will you help me, I'm falling apart
Pick me up, take me in your arms
Find my way back from the storm
And you show me how to grow
Through the change

I still remember the pledge you made to me

[BRIDGE:]
I am holding on to the hope I have inside
With you I will stay through every day
Putting my understanding aside

And I am comforted

MESSAGE OF THE DAY
“There are poor who are really rich”

Don't forget it: he has most who needs least. Don't create needs for yourself. (The Way, 630)

Detach yourself from the goods of the world. Love and practise poverty of spirit: be content with what enables you to live a simple and sober life. Otherwise, you will never be an apostle. (The Way, 631)

Rather than in not having, true poverty consists in being detached, in voluntarily renouncing one's dominion over things. That is why there are poor who are really rich. And vice-versa. (The Way, 632)

You haven't got the spirit of poverty if, when you are able to choose in such a way that your choice is not noticed, you do not select for yourself what is worst. (The Way, 635)
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Is this the way to part?
Seeing two sides of the stories
Teach me to find security in you Lord

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

http://www.rosary-center.org/fatimams.htm

Monday, May 25, 2009

From Opus Dei

MESSAGE OF THE DAY
“Jesus has gone to the Father”

What an extraordinary lesson each one of the teachings of the New Testament contains. The Master, before ascending to the right hand of the Father, told the disciples: ``Go and preach to all nations'', and they had remained full of peace. But they still had doubts: they did not know what to do, and they gathered around Mary, Queen of Apostles, so as to become zealous preachers of the Truth which will save the world. (Furrow, 232)

Now the Master is teaching His disciples: He has enlightened their minds that they may know the Scriptures, and He takes them as witnesses of His life and His miracles, of His passion and death, and of the glory of His resurrection (Luke 24:45 and 48).

Then, He leads them out along the road to Bethany, He lifts up His hands and blesses them. —And, as He does so, He slowly departs from them and ascends to heaven (Luke 24:51) until a cloud receives Him out of their sight (Acts 1:9).

Jesus has gone to the Father. —Two Angels in white garments approach us and say: Men of Galilee, why stand you looking up to heaven? (Acts 1:11)

Peter and the others go back to Jerusalem —cum gaudio magno— with great joy (Luke 24:52). —It is fitting that the Sacred Humanity of Christ should receive the homage, the praise and adoration of all the hierarchies of the Angels and of all the legions of the blessed in Heaven.

But, you and I feel like orphans: we are sad, and we go to Mary for consolation. (Holy Rosary, Second Glorious Mystery)