A Bible-Induced Migraine

For a while, I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. My vision had wavered a bit and it gradually dawned upon me that the impact of those words was inducing a migraine.

For the third time in my life, I got a migraine from reading the Bible.

I was perhaps just overwhelmed by the rebuke that God presented to me in those words. I had been reading something from my devotional that totally challenged the status quo in my life at the moment.

Earlier this week, at the University Dedication Service on Thursday, I had come away from UDS sensing that God had somewhat validated the desires on my heart - to study His word, not just on a peripheral basis, but in its entirety and context.

"Your student days are the best to study the Word of God, because once you go into the work force, the long work days will make things very difficult for you," said Associate Professor Benny Tan in his 45-minute sermon.

Cliche, but something I totally understood, especially since it came so soon after my two-month internship with The Straits Times when I hardly had any energy to do anything else except to sleep and eat on my off days.

Prof Tan's sermon was how the whole duty of man is to fear God. While the conventional connotation of fear is of a negative one, in the Christian realm, it has got to do with the contrary.

Fearing God, Prof Tan said, involves four parts. Turning the word FEAR into an acronym, fearing God is a four-fold approach. Fearing God involves putting God F-IRST, to E-XALT Him, to A-DORE Him and to R-ESPECT and show Him reverence.

Said Prof Tan:"To fear God is thus to experience the knowledge of Him through obeying, loving, worshipping and honouring Him in a reverential relationship."

He went on to list a whole host of verses from Psalms and Proverbs detailing the blessings that come with fearing God and suggested three ways we could do to do to cultivate our fear of God, of which studying His word was the first.

All in all, Thursday's UDS was akin to what I needed to hear about the mess in my life that went over the edge when I broke down after worship at cluster last Sunday.

But on Friday afternoon, everything I read seemed to confirm my suspicions that the things I heard on Thursday were more the thing I needed to hear to justify what was upon my heart and mind, rather than, in the words of Oswald Chambers, "the Master's hard word."

The August 17th entry in My Utmost for His Utmost begins with the rhetoric - "Have you ever heard the Master say a hard word?"

"If you have not, I question whether you have heard Him say anything, Jesus Christ says a great deal that we listen to, but do not hear; (but) when we do hear, His words are amazingly hard."

The fundamental thing that was tearing me to bits was whether which of the following two was my "difficult word" - whether leaving Heartbeat would be one borne out of frustration with my current cell-leading situation or just a matter of me moving on to a new season of my life.

Then the August 18th entry that used the example of the rich young ruler in Luke 18:22-23 hit me like a lightning stroke - it immediately occurred to me that my situation had uncanny parallels.

"Has God's word come to you about something you are very rich in - temperament, personal affinity, relationships of heart and mind? Then you have often been expressionless with sorrow. The Lord will not go after you, He will not plead, but every time He meets you on that point, He will simply repeat - if you mean what you say, those are the conditions."

It did not immediately occur to me that my difficult word was the latter option. At that point in time, I was gripped by the conclusion of the August 18th entry.

"What Jesus says is hard, it is only easy when it is heard by those who have His disposition."

And finally the line that knocked me off.

"(When you don't), this is where discouragement comes in. Discouragement is disenchanted self-love, and self-love may be love of my devotion of Jesus."

I was utterly bewildered.

I am discouraged. You mean this discouragement is my disenchanted self-love of my devotion to God? Which essentially means that I made a mountain out of a molehill?

What about the genuine frustration when they just stared blankly into my face each and every time during cell group?

Then what about the increasing desire to really investigate and study the Bible like how I am studying Sociology, Politics and Literature in school? It cannot be wrong...right?

Pressing on, I flipped the pages onto the August 19th and 20th entries.

Matthew 11:28 was perhaps God's way of explaining the earlier exposition - "Come unto Me, and I will give you rest."

"Self consciousness is the first thing that will upset the completeness of life in God and self-consciousness continually produces wrestling...It is never in God's will that we should be anything less than absolutely complete in Him.

Anything that disturbs rest in Him must be cured at once, and it is not cured by being ignored, but by coming to Jesus Christ. If we come to Him and ask Him to produce Christ-consciousness, He will always do it until we learn to abide in Him.

The great solution is the simple one - Come unto Me. The depth of our reality, intellectually, morally and spiritually, is tested by these words. In every degree in which we are not real, we will dispute, rather than come."

It was only later, after prayer and then talking to Adrian Ng that I fully realised the full extent of these words.

I think fundamentally there are two separate issues that I am struggling to reconcile.

The first has got to be my increasing desire to do something for myself and my relationship with God. Ever since I rededicated myself at Festival of Praise in 1999, I have been in a service position.

There was the enforced absence while I was in OCS between 2002 and 2003, but even that was an absence that was necessary and did not involved a break to do something about my relationship with God.

Another thing I took away from UDS on Thursday was what somebody from Navigators said about serving God.

"In a work-oriented society like Singapore, we equate service with doing more and more. But service is not about doing, but about loving God,"said Beverly, a fourth-year Philosophy major.

She talked about breaking strongholds like these inflicted by the prevalent culture of the place we live in. I was sure this was something I needed to do as well. After all, the theme for my new academic year is to do less so that I can do more.

So therefore, doing less in work terms would mean withdrawing from active, front-line ministry so to speak and retreat. Hence, my desire to enrol in some kind of a class that will take me through the Bible from cover to cover.

But therein lies my dilemma - can this be done in tandem with ministry?

At the top of my head, heart, soul and mind right now, I am inclined to disagree with that. I am pretty much a spent force right now. I want to go equip myself with the Word of God for maybe a year or two first, and then maybe after that, come back in a better state and frame of mind to serve Him.

But is that just the frustration speaking?

After all, there are bound to be push and pull factors. What about the push factor?

That time when I reprimanded the guys for taking baptism and confirmation lightly, telling them not to bother about cell if they really did not see the point - only to see them all back the following week with the same black, disinterested faces.

What about their apathy?

"Clement, you only have 15 minutes to tell us what you have prepared for cell word today..."

Can I honestly say that this is not a factor in my desire to leave?

Because otherwise, if I cannot reconcile this, leaving now would be akin to running away and escaping from problems - which is something I do not want to do and probably never would do.

So what now after two days of wrestling with God about what happened in the last fortnight?

Honestly I do not think I am any closer to a conclusion that I was before I embarked on this time of taking things back to God. But I am certain that at least after spending the much needed time with God, I am clearer about the things I have got to be doing.

I need for one, to get to the root cause of my frustration - my unrealistic expectations of the cell people being key. I mean, other than maybe Daryl, I did not know any of them before the cell was formed.

And maybe start getting my relationship with God in order first. The breakdown last Sunday was as much an outward projection about my frustration with my non-existent relationship with God as much as it was about my frustration with how things were going with my cell.

I think all I need to do to get back to fearing God again. I need to go back to the basics, because I have unconsciously become overly self-conscious instead of God-conscious.

And on hindsight, I have not taken time out to really rest in God during the holidays. I jumped from one reason to be busy (journalism) to another (school), without having much time to just rest.

The one week that I had in between was quite simply not enough. Maybe I shouldn't have gone to Bangkok at all - it was not only bad for my spiritual and mental state of mind, but also my pocket as well.

On hindsight, the last fortnight has been a spill over from the holiday that I was supposed to have taken that I did not. As a result, my first two weeks of school had been a massive blur of rushing from one welcome tea to another and being late for all my first classes of the day.

And also, getting physically sick - not just the migraine, but my upper respiratory tract infection that has been the rage since Tuesday's Sunset Prayer and Temasek Hall welcome supper.

I still need and want to get started on studying the Bible for all its worth - not just sporadic book studies of Romans, Proverbs and Psalms but how they measure up in the context of the whole Bible.

But I guess that will happen when I sort out my frustration by correcting what I have not been doing for my walk with God.

Let me put it another way - if cell leading was not half as bad an experience as the last few months and its subsequent frustration was not a factor, then it would have been a much easier decision to make if I want to leave Heartbeat for this season, because I would genuinely know that I am moving on to a new season of my life and not running away.

Right now, however, it is about pressing on and praying that some semblence of that situation come about at the end of this year. Or whatever else that God has in store for me.

The migraine was just symptomatic of the spiritual pains I had accumulated over the months. And it will go away just as I let God and obey.