Does God condemn a person for rejecting Him ?  Or does an already damned person remain condemned when he rejects God ?

I believe it is the latter.  Unfortunately, the partly inaccurate and truncated message that people often hear is that they will go to hell for rejecting God.

This is what John 3 : 17 - 18 actually says –

For God did not send His Son [ Jesus ] to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him.  Whoever believes in Him [ ie. Jesus ] is not condemned, but whoever does not believe already stands condemned because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.

Paraphrased –

A drug is invented not to kill a patient, but to cure him.  A patient who takes his medicine gets better, but a patient who refuses to take his medicine is as good as dead, because he has not taken the only thing which can cure his otherwise terminal illness.

Josh has reached an age where he can play with his older brother, Jed.  Unfortunately, boys are hardly gentle at play and they still require quite a bit of supervision to make sure they don’t inadvertantly maul each other.

I haven’t been writing lately because (i) the PC is out of order and we’re waiting for PCs to start shipping with Windows 7 before buying a new one (but we’re getting tired of waiting) and (ii) I’ve been awfully, awfully busy trying to seal a deal which I’m negotiating on at work.

The deal which I’m working on was intended to be closed months ago.  Unfortunately, new issues arise every other week resulting in the parties having to get fresh approvals from their management and signing postponed.  More recently, we thought we might be able to ink the agreement last Saturday, which was postponed to Sunday, then Monday — all over the Hari Raya long weekend — then Tuesday and, well, I don’t know whether we’ll sign today. 

I’m told my colleagues that this process is like going into labour but being unable to give birth.  Or less elegantly, going to the toilet and being unable to discharge.

And I feel like the toilet bowl.  Or more elegantly, the grass which gets trampled on between the two fighting elephants negotiating the deal.

Although I’m (sort of) complaining, there has been good in all this.  To begin with, if the parties did manage to reach agreement in July or August as originally planned, it would be almost impossible for me to find the time to do the work.  Especially August when I was out of the country for about three quarters of the time.

In the past few days, I’ve also managed to help the parties reach agreement on issues which were potential dealbreakers, without any particularly clever drafting on my part.  There were also several instances when the lead negotiater requested that I meet up with my counterpart over the long weekend — something that neither of us were particuarly keen on; as it was I felt bad for interrupting his meals on several ocassions by calling him on the phone — when I received his e-mail agreement to my proposal.  I imagine the chief negotiator must have been impressed, though I did nothing much.

So while I have been pretty miserable these couple of months / days, I see the hand of God intervening at critical moments to help me work through difficult situations, and to appear better than I actually am at work.

"The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance." (Psalms 16:6)

On the same day that the media reports that Iran intends to Islamise the humanities in Iran, because it is too "Western", also comes news that an Iranian couple was fined by the Thai police for having sex on a beach in Pattaya.

In all of India and I’ve noticed in particular Mumbai, there is a tremendous gap between the rich and poor.  The latter live in the most squalid conditions imaginable.  Or to put it another way, it is quite unimaginable that anyone could live like this.  But it is there, in your face, on almost every other street, in Mumbai.

On the second last day of my recent trip to India, a local colleague was kind enough to take me around Mumbai and out for dinner.

Over dinner she told me that when she first brought her son to Singapore for a visit, he asked her "Mummy, are there no poor people in Singapore ?".

Nothing, I told her, like in Mumbai.

Jed went pony-riding and surprisingly, loved it !

Feeding the giraffes

Family photo

If the recent photos I’ve uploaded onto the blog have been looking a little spiffier, it’s thanks to a new toy which I acquired not so recently, courtesy of a colleague who took advantage of some exchange rate differences to get himself and me a new SLR at a rather handsome discount while in Seoul.  (I heard that prices have since been adjusted and no, the camera wasn’t a gift I had to pay him).

Other than taking pictures of Jed and Josh, I haven’t really had the time to put the 50D, or the lens which my former colleagues gave me on leaving my previous job, to good use.

Until we left for our Chiang Mai family holiday last week.  Pictures of those should be coming up next.