True friend

Four days ago, one of my best friends Jeremy Boy came over to hand me some running gear that i purchased from the US. He stayed for  dinner and we ended up chatting till midnight.

It's so important to have true friends in life. Jeremy Boy - a friend i have known for almost 10 years, has been with me through many trials and challenges. At many low points of my life, he was there. His insight into life, and more specifically my life, allows me to share my thoughts freely with him without any fear of rejection. I was able to share with him what i have suppressed or hidden in my life for so long. Thoughts and attitude which i didn't even know existed in me, were all articulated and vented during our sharing.

I realised that all these years of living and working in Australia, my heart has turned cold. People's life stories no longer interest me anymore. He told me of two people he met in Darwin, one is a Iraqi doctor whose father was murdered by Sadam Hussein, and the other was 76 year old man who used to sell sex to other man when he was a 8 year old boy just to earn a living. He was trying to convince me that everyone has a story to tell, if we were to listen. And whilst that's a belief that i held firmly to when i was younger, now my hardened heart no longer subscribes to it. I insisted that no, not everyone has an interesting story like that. Some people have incredibly boring or selfish story, where their life's greatest achievement is posting selfie on Facebook to get as many likes, or acquiring the latest Apple gadgets in the market, or decorating their 8 weeks-old baby to be like a super model. There is nothing interesting about such self-centred achievements.

This is truly a far cry to the person that i was before. I was shocked to hear these words coming from my mouth. But i could not deny, that these words have been residing in my heart for a long time, slowly growing in force, infecting and infiltrating into other areas of my thought life. I remembered listening to an elderly Christian couple sharing about their little 'miracle' of gathering supplies and donation to send to Fiji a few months ago. The sense of excitement was evident on the man's face as he recounted God's faithfulness in arranging the circumstances. As i listened, i was nodding in agreement and and saying Amen on the outside. A small part of me was genuinely happy for them. But at the same time, my 'old cynical self' just refused to rejoice. It went like: ya ya ya, another of those Christian stories of God-helped-me-so-i-succeed.

All these years of not tending to my soul, or burying myself in work and running, have finally had its toll on me. My heart has become cold toward God and people. It's not that i dislike being with people or talking to them. It's just that I find it hard to derive a sense of joy and curiosity in knowing people, and because of my pride, arrogance and pre-occupation with my own problems, I find it hard to place myself in their shoes to understand them. The Bible says: rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep (Romans 12:15). But I have lost this heart of compassion.

So everyday I put on a facade, pretending to be nice to people when i really don't care about them.

It's easy to go for a good run in some exotic place, achieve some results, post a nice photo with a big smile on Facebook, and still pass off as being a nice guy. It's easy to make people believe that we are better than what we really are, show off nice photos of our babies as if parenting is such a bliss and our babies could sleep well and eat well and never cry.

But when rubber meets the road, when our friends call us at 2am needing a listening ear, that's when our hearts are revealed. I pray that as I seek God this year,  He will give me a new heart and a new spirit. He will take out my heart of stone and give me a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26).