One element of Christianity which I have always drawn encouragement from is the humanity and humility of Jesus Christ.  That God had decided to interact with mankind personally by taking the form of a human being, with all of the accompanying inconveniences and restrictions of a human body, including temptation to sin, and the suffering of pain and death.  That God who, having decided to take the form of a human, chose to be born into a poor family instead of the comforts of rich royalty. 

In other words, a God who identifies with us, the man in the street.  Hebrews 2 : 18 reads -

Because He (ie. Jesus) Himself suffered when He was tempted, He is able to help those who are being tempted.

(See my previous thoughts on "The Ignoble Ancestry of Christ").

So on reading the first chapter of Matthew - which gives an account of the birth of Christ - again, I thought that it was unusual that Jesus chose not to identify Himself with the struggles and dysfunction of single-parent families.  Verses 19 to 25 tell us that when Joseph (the adopted father of Jesus) discovered that Mary, his wife-to-be, was pregnant with Jesus, he wanted to quiety divorce her.  However, God sent an angel to tell him not to do so.

To me this can only mean one thing - that the husband-wife family setup is so important to God that Jesus was to be raised in one, instead of by His mother (Mary) alone.  There are other heroes in the Bible who had to struggle as single parents or with single-parent family issues (for example see Jephthah, Judges 10 and 11), but Jesus was not to be raised in one.  While this does not mean that God does not care about the struggles of single parents or single-parent families, it does tell us what the ideal is in God’s eyes.

I think certain parts of (Singapore) society are increasingly open to the idea that alternative family setups, whether involving single parents or otherwise, are as acceptable and no less ideal the traditional husband-wife setup.  However, the fact that God had arranged for Jesus to be born and raised in a traditional family setup tells us what the true ideal is.

A server upgrade on Monday night nearly killed this blog (and all 673 posts - amazing ! - which I’ve lovingly written in the past 3 years).  I had to spend the whole of yesterday night and tonight resuscitating it.  Sigh.

My unblemished driving record was ruined when I was involved in a three-car pile up on the ECP.  Well at least I can say that I wan’t at fault — I was the first vehicle and had braked in time to avoid hitting the car in front of me.  Not so the red car behind me and the taxi after that.

The damage, thankfully, does not look too severe.  Joyce even mistook it as part of the natural contours of the bumper.

"Leaving 99" by Audio Adrenaline has been sitting in my car CD for the longest time, and for the longest time I’ve not paid attention to the lyrics, considering the track nothing more than a blend of pleasant noises.  Then, on the drive to work yesterday, I had one of those epiphany moments when the lyrics suddenly started to make sense. 

The words are beautiful.  A reminder that Jesus is the Shepherd of all ninety-nine plus one sheep.  Thank God for music and gifted musicians.  (And I’m not thinking about Madonna).

I’d leave ninety-nine
Leave them all behind
To find you
(For you alone) I’d leave ninety-nine
Leave them all behind
To find you

You’re never too far down
I promise you’ll be found,
I’ll reach into the mud,
the miry clay
pursue you to the end,
like a faithful friend,
nothing in this world,
can keep Me away …

Today’s (11 May 2008) Sunday Times carried an article on the possible economic worth of a stay-at-home mother.  $22,538 was some HR practitioner’s estimate.

This article provoked some really hilarious responses from readers on the Straits Times discussion board.  Dinosaurs are supposed to be extinct, but apparently male chauvinists still exist.  Like this one : 

Is there still a lot of women who are full time housewives?

How many young mothers took care of their babies, or do horse chores? How many of these women are spoilt themselves to pick up that piece of rag to do chores?

Put it another way, men work, longer than 12 hours a day, back home, instead of resting, continues of house chores, babysitting, and listening to the stupid naps from the woman (having barrage from clients and bosses are already enough). And before his mind gets settled down to sleep, He either became insomnia or day has break for the next day. So how much does that cost?

Then there was a feminist who just had to take the article too seriously :

This is nonsense, yet another manoeuvre by patriarchal culture to underpay women! Obviously, the calculations of the worth of a stay-at-home mum are vastly inflated, for the purpose of ridiculing the notion that stay-at-home mums should be paid in the first place. With such exorbitant calculations of her worth, how likely is it that society is going to rush to champion the cause of paid housework? As this article shows, everyone is laughing (the aim of the project in the first place)!

And this other reader who sadly subscribes to the notion that newspapers should be the mouthpiece of the Government :

… This article also runs counter to galmen effort to get more housewives to rejoin the work force. Imagine if a Mrs Tan is worth of salary of $23k, would she be willing to accept $800 to clean toilets?

Moving on to the point of this posting, I know (because my mother helps out in a maid agency) of some families which expect their maids to be like stay-at-home mothers.  Just the other day a school teacher walked into the agency looking for a maid that could cook, clean and coach her primary school son — all for under $350.  Joyce and I asked if that woman could even perform half the tasks that she expected her maid to do.

I think Singaporeans could treat their foreign domestic helpers a whole lot better.  For a meagre $350 or less a month, many Singaporeans (to our shame) demand a lot, if not the impossible — a maid who can understand complex instructions in a language which she is unfamiliar with (ie. English, or possibly one of our other official languages or dialects), who can cope with daily cooking, cleaning and coaching of the kids, who doesn’t make the occassional mistake (like break a dish), who doesn’t mind being yelled at or ordered around, who doesn’t need time off or to sleep, and who runs on solar power (ie. gets only instant noodles to eat for lunch and dinner).

Is this how we treat our mothers ?  Well maybe but if not, why the wide chasm which distinguishes how we treat our maids and our mothers ?  I’m not saying that we should treat maids as well as our mothers — certainly we wouldn’t accord them the same respect as we do our mothers — but if maids are expected to do the same work as mothers, if not more and better, surely they deserve to live with more dignity than the near servitude that we consign them to now ?

A final anecdote.  My mother said the agency received a call yesterday from a client who wanted the agency to watch over her maid as she was going on holiday for a week, ie. she didn’t trust her maid enough to leave the maid home alone for a week.  My mother told her that this service was no longer free because of rising costs, and that the fee for 7 days was $50 (that’s less than $10 a day, which I’m not sure even recovers the cost of food, lodging and utilities).  Quite unbelievably, the client replied by offering to buy a sack of rice in lieu of this fee.  Well, that just betrays how little we think of, and how poorly we treat, our maids.

On Thursday last week I worked till the wee hours of morning to rush out a piece of work.  And was rather peeved to get this reply in the evening the following day :

Sorry for this delayed response … We’re not too sure if this draft in its current form should be sent to [ the Supreme leader for review ].  [ Great leader ] has also not have (sic) view of this draft.

I was sorely tempted to say something rude, and send in a resignation letter.

I compromised by sending a rather curt but (I think) mild reply which I hope conveyed that I was (at least) irritated. 

As you like it.  Wouldn’t have rushed it out if I had known.

I’m rather tired of being taken for granted.  Yes, my services are "free" - the organisation pays a flat fee no matter how much or little work I get from its clients.  But they are not cheap, because I have to pay the price of inconsiderate clients who send in their requests today and ask for an urgent reply tomorrow (or yesterday), lazy clients who repeatedly request for advice on the issues which they have been advised on before, cowardly clients who ask me to make decisions which I cannot make for them, and indecisive clients who keep changing their mind. 

The price I pay is my time.  Wasted time.  More specifically, time wasted outside of regular office hours.  Time which I should spend with family, time reading, time blogging, time with friends, time engaged in ministry, time sleeping.

As we are frequently reminded by the beloved Government, freebies and inappropriate subsidies (somewhat ironically, particularly in relation to healthcare) distorts resource allocation by the market and encourages overconsumption. 

I think if I could charge market rates (anything between $300 to $500 per hour) for my services, work might well be reduced to a quarter of its current load.  Or I could be earning up to $100,000 or more a month.

When I first started on this job I would save replies which I had worked on the night before, and send them out only from office the next morning — I didn’t want clients to think that it was necessary for work to be done overtime to meet their ridiculous deadlines.  Working overtime has become so much of a norm that I have abandoned this exercise in, I guess, false humility.  If I have to work late to get the job done, they’d better know the price which I’m paying for their inconsideration, laziness, cowardliness or indecisiveness.  (Not that this appears to have any positive effect.  Somewhat perversely it seems that the reward of efficiency is not a bigger bonus, but more work from clients !  I recall there was this e-mail from a client which started with "X told me to e-mail you because you are very fast".)

We were playing playdough with Jed on Sunday.  Jed created a "dough man", and I showed him how to use a pencil to dot the eyes.  "Eyes", I said.

Following which Jed took the pencil from me, made two dots at the chest area and, with a mischevious grin, proudly proclaimed "nee-ple".