My Friend, whose life bears an uncanny similarity to mine, fell out with his boss today.

My Friend doesn’t have an excellent working relationship with his boss, to say the least.  Not because he goes out of his way to irritate his boss.  Rather, it seems that his boss is somewhat neurotic on his better days, but generally paranoid.  (My Friend suspects that he has an insecurity complex).

Anyway, it is typical of my Friend’s boss to make cryptic comments about his staff’s work, which makes it very difficult for his staff to correct their reports – they have to second guess what he’s unhappy with and they’ve discovered (not surprisingly) that they’re not psychics.  It is also the habit of my Friend’s boss – probably to emphasise his seniority – to pencil his cryptic comments in red ink – reminiscent of exam scripts except that, in my Friend’s case, his rejected “scripts” often had more red corrections than his Mandarin essays after being marked by his JC Chinese tutor (and his Mandarin sucks).

My Friend’s mechanism for coping with this rather depressing state of affairs was to try and laugh off his boss’ sarcastic comments (admittedly some are quite funny, though the sarcasm stings).

Today, my Friend and his boss had another e-mail conversation (another idiosyncrasy – his boss almost never communicates verbally even though their offices are less than ten metres apart).  The subject was the completion of my Friend’s annual performance report, and the cryptic comment in reply to my Friend’s question of whether he (my Friend) needed to do anything else to complete the report was :

“is there any additional step for you to do? please advise”

For some inexplicable reason, my Friend decided that day to forward this reply to a colleague with a comment that :

“Yes, it is quite funny, and quite typical of our boss.  Except that maybe I’m that butt of his comment ?  =P”

His boo-boo was to accidentally forward this e-mail to his boss.  Not very long afterwards, my Friend received an ominous reply from his boss via e-mail :

“I take it my query in your view "is quite funny, and quite typical of our boss." This sounds rather insubordinate to me.”

Immediately my Friend went to his boss’ room to clarify that he did not intend to be insubordinate.  My Friend was told that he had a “negative mental model” and that, in the circumstances, my Friend would not get to work under his boss again.

Thus ended my Friend’s two-and-a-half year working relationship with his Boss.

When I related this incident to Joyce, she said that any of her bosses if caught in such a situation would be too embarrassed to raise the matter with their subordinates; they would either pretend that nothing happened, or try to effect some reconciliation

I’ve been in spiritual depression for about three months now. It started during a Salvation Army Don Moen concert at the Singapore Indoor Stadium about three months ago. Thousands of Christians were singing, clapping and worshipping God (actually not all were, the conservatives in our midst were glued to their seats) when suddenly I realised that I couldn’t do that anymore. I didn’t feel like singing, or clapping, or worshipping God. I was unhappy with my Christian life. Singing along would just be a lie.

For the next few weeks I struggled with the emptiness within me. I would run to the East Coast every weekend and sit at the breakwater, asking God what was wrong. And I would hear only the lapping of the waves and apart from that, silence.

Over the weeks I eventually distilled that my unhappiness lay in my subconscious feeling of being betrayed by God. I became a Christian at a pretty young age and, as would most children I suppose, looked up to adult Christians as perfect. Maybe not completely perfect – no one is and I wasn’t totally deluded – but pretty much perfect. And so I grew up thinking that I would want to be like them, wishing that I had the same conviction and sense of purpose, trusting in their leadership but slowly realising that these people were not always right and sometimes completely wrong.

When the fullness of this hit me at the Don Moen concert, I felt totally betrayed by God.

“Look at God, not at people” – that’s what more mature Christians usually advice. They know that Christians are after all human, and therefore imperfect. If we place our faith on Christians, our faith will stumble when they stumble. But God never stumbles. He is perfect. So we are asked to place our faith in Him.

“Look at God, not at people” wasn’t a satisfactory answer to my grief however. I could see that humans were imperfect so I wasn’t (as) angry at my Christian leaders and seniors. But I was angry with God – because He allowed me to follow the lead of these Christians even though He knew that they weren’t perfect. He allowed me to expend all my time and effort and energy in ministry together with people whom He knew would disappoint me in the end.

Anyway, about today.  I was asked by the preacher for 15 December together with several others to share about a sad incident in life. I went to church prepared to share about this spiritual depression, but didn’t expect to lose my composure. I think the congregation was stunned that the usually cheerful or at least stoic me was actually so broken within.

I haven’t found a way out of my spiritual depression. I’ve been reading Philip Yancy’s “Reaching for an Invisible God” – a book I bought because I feel pretty much at this time that I’m reaching for an unseen, invisible, distant God – and Yancy seems to suggest that maybe there aren’t any simple answers or solutions to difficulties that God allows in our lives, but there is God’s grace to live with and through it. Perhaps over the next few months or years, as the pain subsides, and as I grow in wisdom and experience, I will better understand what Yancy means by this.

Anyway, I think I concluded my sharing in church, or at least in mind I had concluded, with Jeremiah 20, which for me holds that hope that although I am wounded, the power and passion of God will compel me to walk on in faith and ministry.

[7] O Lord You decide me, and I was deceived. You overpowered me and prevailed. I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me. [8] Whenever I speak, I cry out proclaiming violence and destruction. So the word of the Lord has brought me insult and reproach all day long. [9] But if I say, “I will not mention Him or speak any more in His Name”, His word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed I cannot.

His word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed I cannot