just minishorts.

Sometimes Christians are so intent on holding on to their mini kancils that when the opportunity comes in the form of a first class jet ticket they refuse to board the jet because they’re insistent that the kancil is the only way to travel.

I can use that same metaphor, really, to describe how we tend to be stuck to our high horses when it comes to making a choice on how to achieve our goals. That God said it’s going to look like A,B,C, and when it appears in form X,Y,Z blatantly in our faces, we’re not going to move at all, because according to us, God said its going to look like A,B,C so X,Y,Z, won’t hold water.

Its little wonder that most of the world think we’re a bunch of weird, judgemental and prideful beings.

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THe concept of being fixed about everything just stops us from Growing. You know I can put this into all stages of our lives. At age 5, many of us would have looked at a friend of the opposite gender and we’d go ‘yuck’ and nomatter what mummy says ‘its ok to sit with Joey Joey is a nice friend,’ Lisa will pprobably still go, ‘Boys are dirty and I don’t want to hold the boy’s hand.’.

Fast forward 10 years later, at age 15, is it actually natural to stay stuck with the mindset of a 5 year old in treating relationships with the opposite gender? Conditioning in human communities has sort of taught us that relationships are healthy, that being with a boy and attracted to a boy enough to want to know what its like to hold a boy’s hand, is very natural, and we grow naturally into it.

Challenges to the fixed perception of ‘rights’ and ‘wrong’s are natural, and it is natural to mold ourselves and shift our mindsets while sticking to the very basis of ‘right’ and ‘wrongs’ by limiting them to pure principles. This is why, Going back to the Christian principles outlined within the ‘ten commandments’, we are given principles that are general and specific enough to tell us how it is that we can treat people, and how we should live. DOn’t kill, don’t murder, don’t covet other people’s belongings, love each other, your neighbour, as your own.

God being transcendant, is beyond us. Loving God with all our being, doesn’t mean we have to be fixed about concepts of God. The moment we do that, and focus on just commandments no 1,2, and 3, and we start arguing about the how-tos, we get confused and begin to argue and fight for all the wrong reasons, resulting in a haphazard breaking of most of the rules nos 4 to 10. When we start to fight for the right to be right, we begin to get stuck in mini prisons of our own making, and in the process we break the rest of the commandments to not kill not steal not fight (God said to love each other, right?)

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So what i’m saying is, all this witch hunting towards the new age beliefs is really quite ridiculous, because if we were actually willing to look closer at the concept of ‘new age’ (heck just check out the term itself). What on earth is new age?

It is nothing. NOTHING at all.

So why the heck are we so uptight about righting Christianity and putting it up against nothing?

And what if, what if, we were willing to look beyond the religiousity that surrounds what we know as today’s Christianity, and we were willing to strip away all the ‘human’ understanding that has cling-wrapped the stories and the testaments in the bible to tell us the contexts of living by Christ and for Christ in the 2000 years before, what if, the entire teaching is actually ‘new age’ by our standards.

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So back to the kancil stuck Christian with the opportunity to sit in a jet plane to the land of finding our purpose? What’s the whole big deal about leaving a kancil to go on the Boeing 767? Or what if there’s a train, a bullet train, a steam train, a choo-choo train? Or if its only a bus…

Why are we so fixed on how-tos when the idea is getting to the destination… regardless of the method?