actually.

not that bad.

she's a wonderful girl and it feels good being around her. with no odd feelings in the way, it'll be great to enjoy her company when the chances come up.

yup. :)

perhaps it's

another awkward poem.

perhaps it’s just
that I’m a dreamer;
that sometimes
I see things that are not there,
hope for things that have no
starting place
to start hoping from.

but this seems
too incandescent for me;
I don’t know what
lenses
my own personality and
my heart
tend to put into place
but the brightness of my hopes
seems to burn me.

simple things cut me deep;
the sound of a voice and the words it would speak –
a smile that I could make appear,
it beckons unforgivingly to me,
this idea;
that perhaps my pursuit could be sweet to who I seek;

that it could be part of what makes her eyes shine brightly.

i approach God again;
for in the end it is
He that yet allows the ache to flourish;
and it is the only place I can find
a helping hand in this tightly personal regard;
power and love, enough.

My prayers
are simple enough;
to find the strength
to chase what the heart hurts for -
or wise enough to let go
of what is sought
if it is not meant to be.

but at the end of the day
it is not itself that the heart desires to see happy –
although it seems more a matter of life and death than simplified feeling.
a man lives to take wounds,
our lot in life.
rather, what is
truly unacceptable
is to have to watch her eyes shine less than brightly.

.

L.S.

sick to the heart again.

it doesn't ring right with me, Lord;
why the desires are there so strongly
to be with someone in particular.

It cuts me up inside, God;
that I cannot be what
she is to me.

tis racking to me
stretching my heart over the flames
desiring what I cannot reach

not the first time Lord;
but I can't remember what the past times were -
it feels like a novel pain.

she smiles and my heart aches
she speaks and my heart breaks.

she walks away and she takes my heart with her.

does my heart idolize, Lord?
what can I do
to cut my heart loose.

but I don't know how, God;
please save me Lord,
for I cannot save myself.

reach Your hand to me
give me comfort again.
teach me anew that the answers I seek
lie with You.

it feels like I'm dying
not me, my heart;
dying from the inability to be with who it wants to be
speak to who it wants to speak to
love who it wants to love;

my heartache is like
a sword cutting into my chest;
how long can it be, before i break.

Lord, release me from the longings
or tell me where my sin is
or break the spell over me
before I really die inside;

because these pains will dry me out
and make me turn to stone again;
Lord, save me.

writing

My writing's raw and unrefined; it needs more polish and practice. There's some substance to it, but it still tends towards cliches and rhetoric. It's difficult to read more than a little of it, unless someone really has a more than ordinary interest in the subject.

Jesus, I look to you for opportunities to improve my writing skills, and to use what I love to do for your purposes and your glory. Please bless me with the outflowing of your power from where you are in me into my life.

dear adrian.

Dear Adrian:

Your past is filled with wounds. Your past is filled with memories of fear and of losing. You spent a long time in the darkness. You were unable to remember who you are.

You became a Christian early in life, but it did not change the things that were broken down inside. You had no father in your life, and no one to tell you of being brave or fighting for something more than yourself.

You lost yourself fighting to stay afloat, fighting to think clearly. You were fighting to claw your way to someone better than your memories said you were. Some of your peers fought to have a purpose by fighting for themselves. You saw the futility, perhaps, or perhaps you never had the confidence to take that road. It doesn't matter; that was not the road to salvation and glory.

You found yourself abandoned amongst your peers, unable to stand upright. You were lost in the pains of what others had told you you were; they did so in no uncertain terms. You were hamstrung, crippled, shot in the heart where your strength was supposed to be.

When you were young, the enemy feared what you would become. So they attacked what you were and what you were made to become.

As you grew without a purpose, your heart ached for that which your compatriots did not. You looked for something more in the wrong places.

Your heart desired to fight for your Father and your Lord, but fear reigned in your heart. Pain spoke the loudest in your mind, and you doubted what your worth could possibly be. Your spirit laid crushed and withered under the lies.

You grew more layers of pain and doubt while in the Singapore army; the Enemy did not relent and did not cease their assault. They attack what they feared. It was not what God had made you that caused your failures. It was what the lies made you, when they bolstered up each other and buried you six feet under.

You saw no way out in university. You could not stay on the Way. No one can, with all the burdens that you did not know how to put down. It was that the lies kept you from using the strength of the Spirit to find freedom. That strength that could toss aside those burdens like the lion shaking its prey.

You tried to set your feet on the Path, and found yourself crumpled and dying. You found yourself following the temptation to seek purpose in an Eve, and it broke your heart and your back again and again. It piled more lies upon those you were drowning in.

And all the time the enemy whispered.

The enemy whispered that a son of Christ that has failed for so long is no son of Christ at all.

But you always knew inside you what the strength you had was. You always knew inside you what the glory you wanted was. But no one had told you what the Enemy was doing, until now.

You are a son of the Lion of Judah, the Lord of warriors and of warrior kings. Made in the image of His fury, of His strength.

Your birth-name is Brave. And you have yet another name from the Father. The name whose myth God made you in. The name that is the one that will be written on the white stone at the end of days. The fiercest of all names, as fierce as God desired you to be.

You were wounded greatly so that your strength will be great. You had brokenness so that your strength would be humble. While you were in the darkness you could see nothing. Now you see clearly that the fights you lost, you lost because you were crippled by a great enemy.

You saw the glory God made you for occasionally, but you fell to the lies and drowned again. There were times you held the sword and the shield and cut and bled for your brother and your sister. But often the traitor in yourself robbed your feet away from under you.

Write this on your heart: God is not beside you just as a friend or a comforter. He is beside you as an ally. The Lion of Judah and the Lord of the angels of death stands by your side. His Spirit that breaks the proud, heals the lost and sets the captives free lives within you. What you really are in Him is a brave and deadly lion - if only you would shun your condemnations and embrace your courage.

You see the lion in your heart from time to time. You read a story, hear a prayer, understand something that your mind cannot comprehend. You find a little freedom but the world rolls in again. And with it, all the desires and all the things designed to keep your heart from following Him.

You looked for your name.

You are good. You are good. You are good. Simple words that mean so much if you could build your heart on them. The Word says you are circumcised in the heart by the Spirit. God has put His law in your mind and written it on your heart.

Stand on Scripture. Pray to your Father to speak personally to you, breaking the power of the lies that came with your wounds.

He knows your name.

Everything you do wrong is your flesh and your sin. Like Paul, what you are delights in God, but your flesh delights in the sin. But that is not your true heart. That is not the heart God gave you anew. That is not the heart that He replaced your old heart of stone with, the heart He wrote His law on Himself.

Now stand firm against everything that will rob your strength. Cut yourself off from sin not to just be moral or to be safe, but because it saps your strength and your fierceness. Cut yourself off so that you might fight hard and fight like a savage lion in this War you long to deliver your blows in.

Be your name.

Stand firm, unafraid of dying, unafraid of shame amongst men, unafraid of the thousand little deaths you have died before for the most selfish of reasons.

Beware of being seduced. The temptress is not God; where God will satisfy with His beauty, the temptress will drain of your strength, of conviction, of your heart that is God's gift to you.

Beware of the rat race. The rat race is not God; where God will fill you with fire to fight, the world will break you under its whip and leave you empty as you fight your false battles.

Most of all, stand firm against your memories. What you remember is not what happened. You remember being a failure, but what happened was you being crushed under the enemy's blows. You remember always losing, but what happened was an enemy landing the fiercest attacks it could make. Those attacks were made out of the fear of what God has made you to be and wants you to become. Your faith is what you are. The Lion's promises have already been delivered.

The road of faith goes to glory; the road made of those memories leads to nothing.

The war inside you is a civil war. You fight a traitor. Cut his legs off and kill him swiftly. Let not sexual temptation, or the easy way out, or the arena of fear raise him up. Do not ever again let him eat you alive. Kill him brutally. Take the hardest path. Speak when speaking kills you before men but raises you before God. Cut your temptations off at the roots. Carve any condemning guilt from your heart with a sharp sword.

He is the eye that fills you with darkness, the hand that dips itself in filth, the liar and the deceiver that castrates and emasculates and takes away your strength. Give him no mercy.

Do not sabotage yourself. When angry, speak out in firm control of your tongue. Do not let your anger steal your control of your strength. Neither crush it under your fears.

When the iron is needed to burn out your sin, be the one holding the handle.

When sexual sin comes calling, remember what it is you want - God's beauty, and His beauty embodied in the one He will bring you. Not the one on the screen, or in the magazine, who devours men alive by abusing the beauty of infinity God has given to Eve. She makes you share in the pot of delicious poison with the thousands of others she has ensnared.

You must strive. Strive long and mightily. What does not kill you makes you stronger - this is no tired cliche. That fire that those words cause to burn in your heart is the fire that lights when you recognise what God made you to be.

But never strive for yourself. Never be the mercenary, the one whose road only goes to the empty heart and the hollow spirit. Fight only and always only for Him. Hold nothing back for yourself. Do this so that for Him and in Him you might become everything - more than you could have ever dreamed of.

You have many wounds now. You will have many wounds to come. Enter into every wound that you have now, when they ache. Enter into every wound as it comes. Jesus will bring you in, and through, and out again - in this you will gain the strength of the broken heart. Remember this: you cannot ask Christ to heal your wound and stand back and watch. You must go in there with Him, and die again in that wound, and come out truly alive.

Always remember that the strength flows from your Father to you, and then into the battles you fight and the war you wage. Give yourself up. Not just your gifts or your talents or your time. Give yourself up. Do the admitting of things that feels like killing yourself. Say to Jesus the confessions to Him that feel like cutting your own throat. Find your true heart in that marvellous pain that heals the broken and sets the captives free.

See the future. See how bright it is. See your brothers and sisters free with you. See your Father there, their Father as well. See your friends there, saved and free and with you. See your Saviour and your Friend, your Father and your Shepherd there with you and all the people you ever loved, you ever bled in your heart for.

See Him beside you, and know how He was beside you all the time.

See God's joy there; see Him glorified.

These hopes will not fit in your heart. Force it inside anyway. You will lose it sometimes; fight your way to it again and grasp it with both hands. This is what you are fighting for. This is what you are losing your life for every day, and in doing so gaining more than you could have ever dreamed. Fight for it, because this is the Life that you need more than food or water. This is the Life that you put to death your old life in exchange for.

Remember that nothing that cuts up ministries and brotherhoods and unions of the servants of God is ever purely because of the true desires of the members. What there is of our true selves, for us reborn in Christ, can sacrifice everything in the world to see God glorified. Thus everything else is of the flesh and the world and the enemy. Always turn and seek His face when a ministry has broken or a fellowship has lost its way. Seek healing, seek reconciliation, seek without rest for the restoration of what you know is good.

Be steadfast always. Never stand your ground on your own. Stand your ground with God's word, the sword of the Spirit, and with prayer. Stand; stand; stand. Satan will cut you hard and to the quick in the times where you stand the strongest. He will call you poser, loser, faker, make you tired and weary, turn you back from doing that same good you lit on fire with not too long ago. Stand, and take up Scripture, and fight back, and press on upwards towards the goal of following that fire you took up.