Happy Chinese New Year?

Well, not that I'm unhappy this Chinese New Year.. bored, more likely.

What happened? When I was young, CNY was the most highly-anticipated festival, the one I looked forward to the most. The building up of the excitement weeks before was already guaranteed to turn me into a highly-wound up, bouncy gummybear-wannabe the very first day of the new year.

It's not so much the festival that's changed.. it's I who have changed. Nowadays, I don't much care about the delicacies we can nosh on during this day - after all, it's easy enough to get thee down to Cold Storage Heartland Mall and snap up jars of pineapple tarts, any time of the year; the renumeration (via gleefully-accepted Angpows) aren't nearly as much as what I get in a month... and most of the time, I get a splitting headache when I'm around my relatives.

Yup, it IS true. I can be highly anti-social, with an almost border-line autistic behaviour, and this manifests itself most when I'm around my relatives. I simply have nothing in common with them, and their ways of life, and their interests, and etc etc.. the only time today that I brightened up was when I met their dog (a fat hyperactive little West Highland Terrier - yup, the dog on the Cesar pack), and also Jessie, a sweet doggie that belongs to Uncle Raymond from church. The rest of the time I sat around silently, letting the conversation float past my head.

There was this period of time in my life when I really disliked my relatives, even gossiped about them almost daily. Well, nowadays, thankfully some verses from Ephesians 5 just come to mind when I feel the temptation. But I do admit, it IS a struggle to keep on an acceptable behaviour and bite back my tongue, especially when I have so many things to say. And of course, it's hard to keep from smirking whenever my sister makes cutting comments about them.. but this is something I really feel ashamed about, and want to change. Instead I just keep silent whenever such things happen, even though deep within me there're various struggles.. to keep from sniggering, to speak up against her obvious prejudices, to keep from voicing out MY own deeply rooted prejudices...

This brings to mind something that Hansel posted on his DG blog yesterday. David was strong enough and had the will and courage to stand up for HIS GOD! When will I have this courage too? Courage does not equate a lack of fear; instead, it is one's defeat of his sense of fear! For me, it is terribly easy to go out there and tell perfect strangers about my God, to defend my faith when I am amidst friends or acquaintances, to just do Street E.. it is when I am among my family members that courage fails me. When will I become a David, and be able to slay this Goliath that is looming in my mind - that of telling my family about my God, of defending Him to them?

I want to be a David.

(Note that I had a very nice, self-created image of David and Goliath - as Rimtimtim knows - that I'd wanted to post on this entry. But alas, my computer does not have bluetooth. Heh-heh. Well well, so anyways, more reason for everyone else to add their newly-minted CNY cash to the "Get-KL-a-new-laptop-fund", eh?)

Love
Kailuo