16. Regret

Surely the feeling of regret is one that most of us are very familiar with, although we may not always be talking about it. Generally, we feel some sort of grief or sorrow at the way a particular incident plays out, based on a decision that we made to influence it, or an action that we undertook. I reckon we all feel some sort of regret for nearly any situation we face in life, it’s just that we might not always feel the same “amount” of regret for each situation.

 

Let me share a now light-hearted story of regret from my high school days. Back in year 10, I was one of those typical guys who wasn’t good with BGR (boy-girl relationships) and had a sudden urge to find a date for the year 10, since it was the first such event most of us would’ve encountered in high school. Anyhow, so there was that girl I wanted to ask out, and then there were my friends, who wanted to know who I wanted to ask out. One day I had succumbed to peer pressure and decided to tell one of my closer friends who I wanted to ask out; I thought that if I had to tell someone, it would be that friend. And my hopes were that he’d keep my secret, as friends should. I told him at the start of lunch time that day; and within the span of 30 minutes before lunch ended, the rest of my friendship group knew, along with others who had overheard. Obviously there was no need to wonder how they all found out. Clearly my friend had betrayed my trust.

 

And so I felt a fair amount of regret at having told my friend what he had so deviously pestered me about. At the time I suppose it felt like I was in a really dangerous situation. In hindsight today it feels like a very comical situation. So the regret I feel about that situation today is actually far less than the regret I felt at the time. Either way, there was some sort of regret due to my decision to place my trust in him.

 

The one thing that can be noted from any situation where we feel regret is that there’s nothing we can do to change what has happened. Once you realize something is wrong, there’s no going back and undo-ing your “mistake”; there is no way to change the situation such that you won’t have to feel that regret. But that’s okay. I feel regret is never about contemplating “how” you could’ve changed the situation (it’s quite pointless; we can’t go back in time). However, feeling regret is a stimulus for us to think of what we can do “in response” to the bad consequence. Sometimes, broken things can be repaired. For my situation, I simply chose not to ever ask that girl to the formal. Like sure, I didn’t get my way exactly, but I at least managed to avoid any sort of future pressure from confirming the “rumour”. And consequently I now don’t tell my friend anything personal in regards to BGR. Problem mitigated, not solved.

 

There are some very simple patterns that we observe in life that confirm this. When we make a mistake, we feel regret over it, and then we work hard to not make that same mistake again because we know it’ll make us feel bad. I suppose this generally applies more for the common mistakes we make everyday, and also the ones where we don’t feel too much regret. For the more serious incidents such as making a decision that resulted in someone getting hurt in some way (I’d rather not name any specific incidents), we work towards not making that mistake again and we also work towards trying to help the other person recover from the hurt that our decision “caused”. And by that, I don’t think the phrase “no regrets” holds true, because nothing that happens, happens perfectly in the way we want it to. Have a think about it next time something good happen; did anything happen (even the slightest) which was bad?

 

One other thing I want to deal with in regards to regret is that I think it’s something that gives us strength in something we have to move forward in, but cannot avoid. I would not hesitate to say that in important things to me such as my ministry at church and all, I have felt much regret (made up of many events, each feeling a small amount of regret). And when I say regret I’m not thinking: “Oh, I wish I never did it at all.” My thoughts are more like: “I feel sad because bad things happened along the way.” But despite recognising the bad things (for me) that have resulted from the way I’ve done ministry all these years, I’m still resolved to continue forward in the things I do for church, knowing that there is more good to be gained than bad. We may always choose to run from the things we feel regret about because we want to avoid that feeling; but regret is our strength when we choose to push onwards despite such negative feelings. For something that we know is good at the end of the day, regret helps us persevere in that good task because we choose not be deterred by all the bad things which may result.

 

Genesis 6

We don’t see the word “regret” in the Bible much (depending on the translation we read). I don’t do Greek but I suppose if we cross-referenced the Bible for all accounts of the word “regret”, we’d also have to look for synonyms such as “grief”, “sorrow” and other words. One verse I found recently from Genesis 6 goes like this:

 

When the LORD saw that man’s wickedness was widespread on the earth and that every scheme his mind thought of was nothing but evil all the time, the LORD regretted that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart. Then the LORD said, “I will wipe off from the face of the earth mankind, whom I created, together with the animals, creatures that crawl, and birds of the sky—for I regret that I made them.” – Genesis 6:5-7 (HCSB)

 

Funnily we always missed this passage in our NIV Bibles because the word used in those verses is “grieved”, which I suppose carries enough of the same feeling.

 

It should come as no surprise to us that God himself can feel regret. After all, we, who are made in His image can feel regret. Then surely the one who created us can feel the same thing. In this passage of the Bible, God is feeling regret that he created mankind because of how nearly everyone in the world was wicked and that evil had pretty much consumed the world.

 

What does God do? He could’ve turned back time and un-did everything such that mankind would not result in all this evil (we might not be able to time travel, but God surely can). But God doesn’t do that. Instead He moves forward and chooses the harsh option of destroying the whole world with a flood. Yes that does sound quite drastic; God seems to be overreacting at what the world became. Surely we see a lot of evil today as well, but perhaps none of us would think of wanting to destroy the whole world because of that. Has God lost His mind?

 

Or perhaps, His decision to destroy the world highlights just how horrible sin is to Him (even if we may not feel the same way towards sin). His way of wanting to “cleanse” the world of evil makes a lot more sense if we understand His perspective on sin. An example: Suppose you have a bucket of dirty water, how would you make it clean? Aside from trying to use chemical reactions to remove all the dirt and substances from the water, the simplest solution is simply to pour out that bucket of water, and get some more (hoping that the next bucket of water will be clean). I suppose that’s what God did. It’s not easy to understand why God chose to rid the world of evil in the way He chose, but if we did a similar thing with a bucket of water, who are we to judge God?

 

My point from this passage is simply to show that God feels regret too; surely we can relate to Him and learn from the way He dealt with regret. He took steps to fix the problem; but even more so, the problem He was so eager to fix (that He would go to such desperate measures) is that of sin.

 

For all of us, we may simply feel regret about small incidents here and there. Sometimes, we may feel regret at the way we’ve lived our whole lives. But I think that regardless of how long, or how great our regret is, the problem at the core of all that is sin – our desire to turn away from God and to live our lives the way we want to, making decisions on what we believe is the right way to live, on what is fair and not fair for us and the people around us; simply being our own God.

 

Feeling regret for sin is a good thing; first and foremost because you recognise that it is bad. But more so, in order to correctly respond to that regret, we need to change the way we live and move forward, away from that sin. And doing so means coming to Jesus Christ for forgiveness, and accepting Him as your lord and saviour. My purpose here is not to give a reason “why” it should be done or why it’s this way (perhaps I’ve done a bit of that elsewhere), but I wanted to show how the idea of “regret” fits into the Christian message of salvation.

 

Lastly I want to share this verse:

 

Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death. – 2 Corinthians 7:10

 

If we ever feel regret about the things we do in life, the proper regret we should feel (here it’s being described as “godly”) should be one that motivates us to want to change, by repenting and turning to Jesus. Read the verse carefully here, our decision to turn to Jesus is the thing that leaves no regret. Turning to Jesus will be by far the best decision anyone can make in their life, in that nothing bad will result of it – we are all destined to receive eternal life as a result. As a bit of a technicality issue, I don’t think Christian suffering is something that can be linked to our decision to come to Jesus, because technically suffering is common for both Christians and non-Christians. The worldly sorrow mentioned here I reckon is one where we try to live our lives better through our own sheer effort, and not relying on Jesus to sanctify us; yes, that will lead to death for we will never be able to become perfect by ourselves.

 

So if you do find yourself feeling a lot of regret in your life, may I suggest giving your life to Jesus? You certainly won’t regret that.

Semester 2, 2011 (Preview)

I couldn’t think of a better title, the timetable below is pretty self-explanatory:

 

Wait, what am I on about? The timetable above is NOT self-explanatory, which is why I’ve also provided a Q&A. But before that, let me point out some straightforward facts and implications.

1. I’ll finally have one day off (Monday) a week, instead of my packed 5 days a week this semester.
2. CBS is heavily impacted in that I will not be able to attend ANY of the “required” weekly events, aside from Bible Study.
3. I have 18 hours in total, and am not sure how many hours (if there are any) are skippable.
4. Yes, “skippable” is a word. I don’t care if there’s a red squiggly line under it.

 

Q1. Was this really the best timetable you could come up with?

Sadly yes. This is pretty much the most optimal timetable (for me) that I could make. A reason for this is that all my courses are small, so there aren’t many (or any) classes to choose from. All 12 hours of lectures you see above were already set; there was no possible way to move them. As for the remaining 6 hours of tutorials/labs, some only had two choices, others had more but many of those clashed with a lecture time of another course.

 

Q2. Could you have done other courses instead?

I could. But because my peers are also doing these courses, I did not want to disadvantage myself by doing courses that I didn’t have contacts in; that would just be plain stupid. Having said that, there was one math course which completely clashed with my actuarial course, but the times for that math course were never fixed so I can’t really enrol in that one still.

 

Q3. What about Monday?

Even if I did decide to come in on Monday, and it;d be really hard to bring myself to do such a thing considering how this semester is playing out, I can only have a maximum of two tutorials there. So coming in on Monday for a maximum of two hours of class, I would rather put those two hours elsewhere and get Mondays off. The only serious trade off is that I cannot attend the CBS meeting, and since I have Monday off, I don’t think I’ll come in on Monday just for that meeting.

 

Q4. Why are you doing 5 courses?

Two of them are worth 3 Units of Credit each, and so I still have a total of 24 Units of Credit for next semester. I have 18 hours of class because these are science courses, and not just commerce (otherwise I would get a carefree 12 hours a week). If I do not do these courses now, it will disadvantage me (for the reasons listed in Q2) and it will probably stuff up my degree in one way or another.

 

Q5. What are your plans for CBS next semester?

Seeing as my timetable is completely anti-CBS (semester 1 of last year was the same actually), I am most likely going to wisely step down from my leadership roles there. The only thing I can really help with (or at least attend) is just a Bible Study weekly. I can still lead one if need be, but considering that I won’t be able to attend any other CBS activity, it would probably be wise for me not to lead a Bible Study next semester. We will have to see what my MTSer has to say. But with about 4 hours of break a week, I should still be able to attend a Bible Study group.

 

For those of you who aren’t familiar with my weekly routine, I cannot attend Core Theology on Tuesday nights because it clashes with my youth group leaders’ meeting. Somehow, my timetable managed to cater for my Tuesday night meeting once again (thank God). I think it will be wise for me to take a step back from CBS activities (only because the circumstances have made it so), so that I can get more time and energy to focus on church activities. My focus and energy has been greatly divided this semester between many things, and it’s felt like I haven’t done anything to as good a degree as I would like. I already mentioned about me being given more responsibilities at church, and so I should be wise about my responsibilities and give more time to that. Plus, uni studies have just plummeted because of all these weekly activities happening. Consequently, church will be my primary focus for next semester.

 

There won’t be many lectures I can skip, I anticipate. But the only ones worth skipping would be the ones that take place at critical time slots throughout the week, namely anything that happens at 1pm. There is a chance I will get Thursday 1pm free, and that will save my “The Bible Talks” hour.

 

Q6. Is there anything we can do for you?

If you’re a CBS person reading this, do pray for me. It really does make me feel bad that I pretty much can’t go to any CBS event without killing myself over my studies and my energy (5 days seriously is painful), but I hope I can still be an encouragement to people in my faculty. I think I’ll still be involved in any faculty planning stuff (unofficially though) and I’ll be happy to offer my opinions and advice if they’re needed. I’ll be keeping tabs on how our faculty is going but I probably won’t be taking any upfront roles.

 

For church people, you are more than welcome to judge me more harshly next semester as a leader since I should have more energy (due to my free Monday) and my somewhat undivided attention for just church activities (since CBS won’t be on my mind as much next semester – but I’ll still be thinking about it of course). It’s not good to not be able to do campus ministry, but in any circumstance that God throws at you, it really comes down to how well you deal with the situation. And so for myself, I would rather get something done right, than to be able to do everything there is.

 

Still have more questions? Shoot me an e-mail or something.

15. Hearts vs Hands

This post will deal with something I’ve discussed recently, regarding what us Christians should have when it comes to leading and serving; perhaps for leading more, since serving can be done by anyone. The simple intro to this topic goes like this: When we pick our leaders, what do we consider to be more important, the hearts or the hands? That is, do we regard their attitudes (heart) or their skills (hands) to be more significant as a criteria for choosing leaders?

 

To explain a little further, when we refer to attitudes, I guess we’re thinking about whether that person has a heart that is willing to serve and put their all into loving and serving those under their care. Actually, now that I think about it, a good way to think about all of this is a meter (eg: a fuel meter) that measures your ability. Your attitude determines how much percentage of your ability you will use (note that it’s “percentage”). Whereas, skills would measure how large your ability meter is. Translating this into numbers to give an example, suppose person A had an attitude rating of 50% (they’re half-hearted) and has a skill rating of 200 (units of skills). Then their output of ability would be 200 x 50% = 100 units of skills. And then you could have person B who has an attitude rating of 100% (they really want to serve with their all) but only has a skill rating of 75. Then their output is 75 x 100% = 75 units of skills.

 

Of course, the above is just a simplification of the issue. At the end of the day, we want our leaders to be proficient in both (to have a strong desire to serve, and a lot of ability to do so). The last time I’ve looked into this issue, the general consensus of the people around me thought that having a heart to serve was most important, and more important than the skills that they have. And that’s fair; using my mathematical metaphor from above, having either a strong heart or a strong skill wouldn’t make a difference in the output and so using that we can still accept that the heart is more important.

 

However, I think we only try to make this choice between hearts and hands only when the people we have to choose from only have one or the other. That is, they either are very keen as Christians to serve but don’t know how to do anything, or they’re very skilled but don’t really have any motivation to serve as Christians. I somehow think that we need to reverse the order of what’s important in picking leaders when we’re picking from people who have both hearts and hands (not perfect in either field of course, but relatively high). I won’t use my mathematical method for this because it obviously won’t apply well in real life. So let me try to give my view through words.

 

Although today we’re encouraging every Christian to develop a heart to lead and serve, sometimes it seems the people we pick to do things are not well trained in terms of their skills. I haven’t said it but we already know the consequences of such choices: the thing we’ve assigned them to do fails to an extent because they don’t have the necessary skills to bring their task up to standard. I’d like to explore the consequences more in detail.

 

One large example that hits very close to home goes like this: in general picking “lesser-skilled” people to do certain things leads them to doing it at the very last minute because they’re forced to produce something; I guess we call this a last minute adrenaline rush. The first thing to note here is that people who are “rushed” for time in doing something would be considered as “very busy” to the point of stressing out. And what happens with that? The people around that “lesser-skilled” person will feel sympathy for that person and be gracious and kind to that person for that period of time while they’re stressing. However, in hind sight, if that person knew what they were doing, they would not be stressing in the first place. Normally we expect people to get things done comfortably on time, we don’t want people stressing out hard otherwise no-one would want to do it. And so really, this “sympathy” we give to that person really is considered to be “grace”. They clearly don’t deserve it because they didn’t have the skill to do their task, though we had expected them to be able to, as should themselves when they first agreed to do it.

 

I tend to feel that this becomes a publicity stunt (though not intentional), where you’re simply getting sympathy from others because of your own failings. But yes, you’d be right in saying that it’s the kind and helpful thing to do because things outside our control often happen to people that cause them to become stressed, that’s a part of life I know. However, I think we also have an alternative reaction to these people; and that is to rebuke them and I guess give them advice on what they can do better in the future. It’s like this: you have a friend who failed a test because they hadn’t studied enough. And so you feel sorry for that person and try to comfort them, etc. But then you learn that the reason they didn’t study enough was not because they didn’t have enough time (from something out of their control) but that they were simply too addicted to playing games or Facebook. Do you still feel sorry for that person? Of course not. You’d rebuke them and tell them not to play games when they should be studying. I guess this scenario closely mirrors people who leaves things to the last minute (because of their lack of skill in knowing what to do or actually doing it) and so really they foolishly wasted time when they could’ve tried to do it, or ask people for help.

 

I’m not saying that we don’t feel sorry for the people who have purposely placed themselves in a bad position, knowing that it is entirely their fault (as harsh as that sounds). However I feel that we should be indifferent in whether we’re graceful or not as sometimes in order to encourage others we need to be a bit firm and strict with our words, since clearly rebuking others (if done in a mild manner) will teach them what to better do in the future. So the above couple of paragraphs dealt with the consequence of the “sympathy” thing.

 

Another consequence of lesser skilled people leaving things to the last minute is that it hooks the skilled people into helping those who are in need. Yes of course helping others is a good thing but if it’s done at the last minute sometimes it bring stress to other people. Remember how I talked about random emergencies out of our control that cause us to become stressed, well this would be an example of one of those emergencies which makes the skilled helpers stressed because of the time constraint. The skilled helpers are obliged to help because the task would be a common goal that us Christians want to reach (eg: organising a camp or retreat). This simply causes more trouble for more people because now more people are involved in the problem.

 

The inefficiency of the whole ordeal is that it’s a problem that can be avoided if only better skilled people were chosen to do the task. I guess if you were given the choice of being to avoid a problem and the stress that comes with it, you’d choose to avoid it rather than to take on the problem; it’s more common sense from a broader perspective. Of course from a Christian perspective, sometimes we’d want to pick lesser skilled people to do the task because we want to train up their skills to do it better in the future. In that case, would it then not be wiser to choose those lesser skilled people and then put the better skilled people as like supervisors. Yes that takes up more resources but now there’s this additional goal called “training” and to the people resources are well spent. But even if this is not the case, the lesser skilled people who realise that they can’t get something done comfortably should at least ask people for help. Again why face problems when you can avoid them in a safe manner; it’s not wrong to ask for help. Sometimes it’s actually considered to be strength to admit your weaknesses.

 

My answer to this last point about why lesser skilled people don’t ask for help is that it might be to do with pride. Prideful people are not going to ask anyone for help, even if they are going to face a large pile of problems; that’s just the way humans work. But then in some sense that’s also an attitude thing; people who are keen in serving and being a leader should also learn to be humble and admit their weaknesses. So I guess somehow right here I’ve provided a bit more evidence that shows that the heart is quite important. But I hope after this I’ve given some fair points to show that our hands in Christian ministry are also something we need to consider carefully.

Fears of a Youth Group Leader #3

Trying to keep myself sane by blogging, amidst all the things that are happening these holidays. Today’s post deals with the concept of “follow up”. To put things into context, “follow up” is the action of contacting someone in regards to a previous event that has occurred. In a general Christian context, this is when we contact non-Christians who have recently attended church (for the first time) or another evangelistic event, and we want to see if they were interested in coming again, or having someone keep in contact with them. The goal of “follow up” varies from context to context.

 

In a youth group setting, I suppose its where the youth group leaders contact a new kid who came to see what they thought about youth group, and whether there is anything we can help in for the future; for example, giving them a lift to church, getting them a Bible, or answering any questions that they have. While it’s clear that the goals are pretty much identical to those of the general Christian context, the main factor which changes the whole situation is age.

 

Youth are youth, they are not adults, and sometimes nowhere near adulthood. As such, getting into contact with them isn’t as straightforward as it is when compared to way it’s done in the work environment. To contact someone, one must first obtain their contact details. But how exactly are we to do that in today’s society, where we all try to be cautious with our personal information? Particularly for youth, they surely aren’t the ones who would freely throw away their personal information in public (except on Facebook).

 

The main issue isn’t really with obtaining a youth’s contact information; it’s quite easy to stalk people down on Facebook these days and most people are comfortable with giving an e-mail address, and also maybe a mobile number. With that information in hand, it now seems that “follow up” can easily be conducted with someone new who came to youth group. With all these avenues of communication – Facebook, e-mail, MSN, phone, text – shouldn’t it just come down to a preference thing?

 

Unfortunately, it’s an undeniable fact that the most effective form of communication is in person, closely followed by a phone call, where at least you can hear each other’s voices. So out of the short list from above, “follow up” is best conducted through the phone/mobile. And clearly that’s the observation we make of people who follow up on us; they give us a call to ask about work, or about an assignment, etc.

 

But considering the age that youth are at, my fear is that it’s a bit awkward to talk to them on the phone. There are many conflicting issues in my head that stop me from following up on a youth via phone:

 

1. Don’t really know them (since it would be their first time coming).
2. If mobile number was not obtained in a direct way, a phone call would constitute as “stalking”. And it makes sense for the reason that it’s not easy to ask a new person for their number when you’ve only just met them.
3. There are other forms of communication that kids these days prefer, with Facebook being the clear no. 1.
4. General fear of saying something weird that will freak them out.
5. At face value, it is an adult/young adult calling up a kid, creating slight annotations of paedophilia.

 

Given the youth group context, there is a dire need to speak directly to youth when following them up. Leaders want to show that they care about the youth (in a godly way) by conversing and connecting with them in a caring way; showing them that extra bit of care above just normally contacting them through msn. Secondly, you really want to make a good impression on the newcomer, although of course this should’ve been achieved when they first came to church; but you still want to encourage them to come a second time and to make sure that you’re prepared better for them next time round, eg: not playing physical games if they aren’t the athletic type.

 

While there is this desire to show them God’s love in this particular way, I can see how people get the wrong message from godly love because of today’s society and the amount of deceit and paranoia that exists. Much harm can be done with people’s personal information and trust is much harder to develop. There is my dilemma, but I’m sure it’s frequent in other churches and other settings as well. I suppose my current attitude towards this is to respect the other person’s privacy, even if this means not being able to contact them in the most direct way possible. It does no good starting off on the wrong foot with someone, even if the there is a small chance for a “high payoff” – that is, being able to bond with that person. It’s probably safer to keep that distance from the new person and take what you can get through other methods of communication.