lalala

Banyak orang di dunia ini bertanya apa arti hidupnya. Ada yang mengukur arti hidupnya dengan uang. Orang lain mengukurnya dengan kesuksesan. Tapi kalau itu artinya hidup, apakah orang yang miskin dan papa tidak memiliki arti hidup? Orang kaya bisa jatuh miskin. Orang sehat bisa jatuh sakit. Orang terpandang bisa jadi hina. Saya juga bisa begitu. Anda juga bisa begitu. Apa yang sebenarnya menjadi arti hidup bagi manusia?

Mengundang teman2 sekalian untuk boleh hadir pada acara :

Tidak ada makan gratis. Tidak ada band gratis. Tidak ada es krim gratis. Tapi kami menjamin akan ada Firman Tuhan yang diberitakan =)

Cya there!

Organized by : Gereja Reformed Injili Indonesia di Singapura
http://www.grii-singapore.org/

Cream :

Green :

Instruction : click on the thumbnails for larger images (opens in a new window)

how’s life everyone?

this blog looks so dead

so many things have occured for the past few weeks and being the lazy pat, i will have a hard time describing everything. So in summary, I’m back from Jakarta and I’m off to Thailand and Malaysia!

somehow I didn’t feel as if I’m going Thailand for choir competition, it felt like a trip

oh ya, maybe i should update that my tummy is getting bigger too.
I ate so much nice Indonesian food

soto betawi
bakso
gado-gado
sate blora
kerupuk ikan ( it goes with everything )
sate padang
martabak
the nice bubur sukabumi with salty sauce and krupuk
….

and I have to come back to Singapore to face eating places, which happen to be the same everywhere…. Yong Tau Foo, chicken rice, dumpling noodle, nasi padang, …. enough already.

I watched harpot just now. I felt like doing a mission impossible scene just now when I had to rush from home to NUS, to comp cen, to forum, to chem eng department office, to bus stop, sweaty-sweaty, and in the end I got to rest inside the cinema. I think I look like orang gila just now.

Well, in the end I got to eat sushi (which I craved for so long already…). I’m happy

By the way, I found some old photos (well, not so old), which reminded me of MARITA! I wonder how she’s doing right now back in Indo. I miss making fun of Sherly with her. MAROOOOOOOOO!!!

in front of Dunman High Hostel, after school, erlin with her awfully pink bag, both of them with ugly brown guitar bag… and I’m wondering whether we felt MALU doing that in front of the security guard.

Another ga tau malu pose, and hey, my uniforms are inherited from senior’s one..

Smiling from ear to ear, inside a cab.. reminds me of how we always like to use our “magic hand” and waste our money by taking cabs

another sweet pose…

proof that we were so BOROS last time..

ah, I kinda miss the old times, but to think about it, time were spent rather carelessly, irresponsibly, and well, selfishly.

It’s time to learn and move on.

We are pleased to inform you that your accommodation application has been SELECTED.

You are offered to stay in:

PRINCE GEORGE’S PARK

Your room is:

BLK 7 #5-B
Unit Mailing Address #05-12-B

In other words, type A room!
Hurrah hurrah!
Aircon and attached bathroom!
Celebration!

I just hope I don’t rot inside the room

Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, let the earth hear His voice!
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, let the people rejoice!

Watch or Regret!
Hahaha…
I think I really DO like little kids
I was touched by her innocent voice, and I cried :p
(I even cried when I was watching Finding Nemo, so yes I’m weird)

I found some cute photos in my phone. Ahh. how I miss the kids in Pulau Kubung!
Being a kindergarten teacher there was indeed very difficult, very demanding, requiring a great deal of patience. I remember many fights, not just normal hit you here pinch you there but really the violent hostile pulling of hair, smack down, punch, kampung style! and also remember myself getting hit very hardly on my hand while trying to protect one kid from being beaten up by another kid. I remember teaching 11 kids and only 2 are listening. I remember all the crying to get attention and I have to carry more than 5 kids one by one, swinging them around like a plane to stop them from crying too much. Yusita even told me that I am strong :p. Well, this and that. However, their cuteness will just melt all the annoying and irritating side of them. This reminds me of what Pak Tong said about why there is so little love left in this world : because human beings just love to focus on the weaknesses of their counterparts, making it so difficult for them to love others. I love the kids (maybe because of their cuteness :p) and therefore continue to teach for 9 days! though the last day I almost died of exhaustion :p

What I like from Nodame (from Nodame Cantabile) is that eventhough she was pursuing music degree in university, her ambition is to be a kindergarten teacher, dedicating her time composing music for the kids. Seriously, I admire her. Rarely do kindergarten teachers get appreciation, acknowledgment from the kids (they just wanna play) or the parents (all the credits should go to them). Maybe instead they get all the blame when things go wrong.

Riko, the son of one of the teachers there
I think he is the cutest, but he likes to cry the most
He’s kinda flirting with the photographer :p

The yellow stuff is railroad combined together.
The other stuff is Wesley, the guy who likes to fight
oh ya, he even asked me to be his girlfriend on the first day :p

This kid is forced to wear the railroad hat by the photographer :p

This is a kid gone crazy :p
Indra being “punished” after a game
he was asked to dance, and there you go
now people should understand why he is called “kakak angsa”

I was rather irritated when I saw swearing words appearing on people’s msn nicks. “Trying to act holy”, “Stop being childish”, “Embrace freedom” or whatever it is people might reason, I remain irritated with sympathy. I was once there too. I thought saying or writing the f word in my blog sounds very cool and mature. Well, who doesn’t considering this post-modern world where everything that is unique, things that people are afraid of saying are things that are cool. COOL.

Who am I to write about all these when I was once the one who taught my friends how to pose for pictures with middlefingers on our hand, and saying the f word whenever a little anger surfaces in our head. Frankly, I know how it felt. I was once into pop/punk music : Blink182, good charlotte, sum41, etc etc. Doing what they do looked cool. Especially for a teenage girl like me who wished to be different from the rest. The opportunity to swear using our mouths seemed like wonderful chance for liberty and freedom of words. How cool? I say how stupid that is.

I was wrong to think that being able to swear equal to freedom of whatever I want to say. I failed to see that by saying or thinking that, I lost the freedom to use my mouth for what it is originally created for, the freedom to not curse, the freedom to stay pure in my mouth. I was then trapped inside the prison of swearing words and impolite acts, those things that I once thought were part of my “freedom”.

Well, so is freedom very relative then? To some people some things can be part of their freedom, but not to some others. As a Christian, I would say no. I would judge freedom from the point of view of my Creator. I would first consider what my mouth is created for, or even my whole body is created for. It is solely to reflect His glory. Then does using our mouths to swear reflect His glory? If my body parts cannot carry out and reach their goals, I’ll say that they are limited, they lost the freedom. When body parts are used to sin, it is the slave for sin. And slave just doesn’t have freedom, slaves can’t go against their master. To me then, freedom is the ability to enjoy God to the fullest.

I could still remember, a few years ago, when I reasoned with God to allow me to swear and live “wildly” by still being a Christian and keeping my spirituality intact : still going to church, still praying when I have time, still owning a bible, still asking God for help, not denying His presence. I didn’t consider the fact that God does not want lukewarm Christian. We have to choose whether we want to be on His side, or against Him. He said, “No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.” Being a christian means devoting our lives for His purpose, making Him our Master.

Lastly, I guess without realizing that evil is present and not just another illusion (like what it would want all of us to believe), it’s just too easy for men to fall. All we can see is that the world’s technology has advanced in an extremely rapid rate without realizing that the techniques the evil powers used have in the same way advanced too. Making us serve evil yet still leaving us feeling not guilty, providing us with excuses from this new-age and post-modern world, the power is ever increasing, not only the visible ones like violence all over the world, but more importantly corrupting the minds of people. How do we fight it, if not by the highest authority of all, the standard of all standards, His word?

This is just some thoughts of mine that I wish to write down before I forgot.

Attached are some of the pics from my mission “exposure” trip to pulau Kubung, Riau. It’s fun and much are learnt. Bathing not-warm-water for 10 days are a huge achievement for me!
Not to mention we went there wanting to teach them to live a healthy life but ended up following them disposing rubbish to the sea through the holes on the floor :p

I could think of so many things to write here, what I like, what I loathe, what I learn, what irritates me, what makes me happy, what makes me proud, what makes me tired (the kids… ), and well what makes me closer to God. One thing for sure is that through this trip, I learnt to think even more, struggle even harder to know His will, to be more like Christ and of course to pray more. I guess everyone of us who went there have many stories to tell, and I hope we all can be blessings not only to the people in Kubung, but also to the people we met in our everyday lives from what we learnt through our opportunity to experience 10 days in Pulau Kubung.

the female youths and us. yusita acts like “monkey king”. some ppl look wrongly pun.
the night sky there is REALLY awesome. no light pollution at all, plain dark, all stars.
Anak mude ni.. tak tau malu la..

everyone is red and white except one uninvited girl
L-R : osbert, novi, kak niwal, pat, wichers

teaching the kindergarten kids.
FYI : only 3 are listening, 2 play on their own, 1 act blur, the rest cry cry.
kindergarten teaching is not easy, especially when you have more than 10 kids, and 33% likes to cry, 33% likes to box each other and another 33% act as if they listen but they just wanna show that they are smart and not forgetting the 1% who comes only to have milk.

the team and the kids.

swimming in the sea, in which one of the kids (the one im forcing to stay) have peed.

the first time bathing beside the well, indra looked so evil
L-R : hartanto, johni, osbert, indra, pat, yusita, erlin, sandra

the legendary sleep pose :p

and lastly, videos of one of the kids singing. erlin claims to like him the best. his name is wesley. woooo, what a name! very very naughty though that i have to threaten to throw him to the sea, and he even seemed to be enjoying it.
first, wesley singing kingkong badannya besar
and second, him singing kasih ibu, note that the s becomes c, the r becomes y, and many more.

*Listening to mahjong tiles being mixed around downstairs*
on a normal sunday night, a girl was packing her bag for some trip when she suddenly decided to blog…

pat doesn’t grow lazy to blog. she just stops blogging here because she doesn’t know what to blog anymore. she grew more and more in love with hymns and loved analyzing the lyrics and the music and somehow blogs it elsewhere. her life seems uninteresting compared to all those. by the way, you can find that blog of hers here

tomorrow she will leave singapore for mission trip to pulau kubung, that is her first mission trip. she hopes to learn more and at the same time understand things that are out of her comfort zone more. she’s quite scared to be frank, from the small things like cockroaches to bigger ones like security, the boat, bla bla bla (tempted to say monster tho). but she believes that if God has put her in any situation, He will protect and give her strength to go through it. Thanks be to God.

today is mother’s day. she’s very touched by part of the sermon she heard today about love between husbands and wives. ian says it’s nonsensical when someone claims to love without any reason. pak tong says there are love between couples which come from two sources, the man’s love and the woman’s love (or in some other specific cases, man and man or woman and woman, that’s not the point tho) probably with different reasons and love between couples which comes from one source, the love of God above. How wonderful it is, she thought to her self.

she once thought that she could not leave the pat who likes to party, who likes to play a little bit too much, spend money like water, whose motto in life is “do it as long as you enjoy it”. The thought of leaving that pat really kills her. she wanted to be a Christian but she just couldn’t leave that life. but who knows what when knows how, it is anyhoo not hers but God’s initiative. she starts leaving that “pat” behind, and surprisingly, she does it without any pain, or regret when she looks back. at times she hates her past self, but recently, she is thankful for the past. she is enjoying her life, not satisfying her own needs, not full of “pleasures” but really, joyfully walking with the Lord. and hopefully whatever ups whatever downs, readily saying “it is well with my soul”.

she just came back from a camp, and she really did learn a lot. A LOT. though maybe out of the camp theme, but still, whatever happened, whatever faced her, she kept asking God, what is Your will? what do You want me to learn?

she’s glad that she’s 21 and living a fearing-God life.

she hopes to grow more like Christ and hopes that everyone can see the Joy, the Hope, the Love.

ps : i still love watching friends… i will miss them !

Do not deceive yourselves. If any one of you thinks he is wise by the standards of this age, he should become a “fool” so that he may become wise.1 corinthians 3:18