Don't Waste Your Life

I hereby announce, I am damn disgusted by church.

Yes. You got it, a Christian young man is telling you he is disgusted with the church.

This morning, during the sermon, the church pastor quoted this:

If you woke up this morning
with more health than illness,
you are more blessed than the
million who won't survive the week.

If you have never experienced
the danger of battle,
the loneliness of imprisonment,
the agony of torture or
the pangs of starvation,
you are ahead of 20 million people
around the world.

If you attend a church meeting
without fear of harassment,
arrest, torture, or death,
you are more blessed than almost
three billion people in the world.

If you have food in your refrigerator,
clothes on your back, a roof over
your head and a place to sleep,
you are richer than 75% of this world.

If you have money in the bank,
in your wallet, and spare change
in a dish someplace, you are among
the top 8% of the world's wealthy.

If your parents are still married and alive,
you are very rare,
especially in the United States.

If you hold up your head with a smile
on your face and are truly thankful,
you are blessed because the majority can,
but most do not.

If you can hold someone's hand, hug them
or even touch them on the shoulder,
you are blessed because you can
offer God's healing touch.

If you can read this message,
you are more blessed than over
two billion people in the world
that cannot read anything at all.

Granted, he's quite a funny preacher. But he's funny in a very sarcastic, ironic sense. I couldn't believe it, that with every little paragraph that he quoted, the congregation roared with laughter. I have no idea why. I couldn't understand how anybody could laugh at something like that.

It's grotesque. It shows that we are so fucking caught up in our little world that we have no fucking idea what suffering is like in this world. I am so disappointed and disgusted.

This is not merely imperfect, as I replied to a friend who commented on my previous post when I mentioned 'church sucks, God rocks'. This is messed up.

And I keep wondering, am I just lacking a sense of humour? Or have I just been so overwhelmed by darkness that I am especially sensitive to these things and my brain is programmed to feel certain feelings? Is it me who is the problem?
__________________________________

And so with that, I left church after the service. Feeling my upper back and shoulders very tight, I decided to go for a massage at Toa Payoh. Wah I didn't know these foot reflexology places are so packed nowadays man. I went in and asked for a full body massage, $45 for 45 mins.

It was a very interesting massage with my male masseuse. About 10 mins into the massage, he asked 'so. life must be busy? Your body and back is very stiff, you must work a lot with a computer. so what do you do for a living?'

And that started our very deep deep conversation. Discussing the interactions between emotional health and physical health, how frequently he would recommend customers to go for a massage, how a lack of rest affects how the body feels like when he massages it, and then he started discussing things with me like how humans operate at 3 levels, the most basic level of sex and food, the 2nd level of loving and being loved and the most optimum level of 'self-actualisation.' Yes. He used those exact words.

I was like omg. This feels like a conversation that would take place in the office or with my social work or psychology friends. Not in a massage shop with a random masseuse.

We talked about my work, the clients I see, the countries I've been to on volunteer expeditions etc. I complimented him and said 'You are a man with wisdom.' And he said 'I have knowledge, but I don't always know how to apply the knowledge. And without applying, it is not wisdom.'

Amazing stuff. I wonder why someone who can hold a conversation like that for an hour is a masseuse. And he said he has not self-actualised doing massage, even though he has been doing it for about 7 years and quite enjoys it because he gets to talk to different people.

The massage ended with me passing him my namecard and telling him a bit more about the volunteer programmes in my centre. He wants to volunteer and sometimes thinks about giving free massages to elderly who need them, just that he does not have the contacts to start.

Cool right?

It was delightful. Such a contrast to what had happened just a couple of hours before.

Thanks for the massage! :)