Tag: grace

on Lieutenant Dan

I share a name with Lieutenant Dan, a character from the film Forrest Gump. My mother has always teased me that we share a few more things than that: a soldier’s spirit, a love of glory, and a dangerous stubbornness. Lieutenant Dan is a soldier from a long line of soldiers. It makes him do his job well, but as events in the film unfold, you see that it haunts and crushes him. Now I’ve always thought that one of the best qualities of Forrest Gump is the way you see something new each time you watch; when I was younger I never quite saw anything of myself in Lieutenant Dan; he was a tragic but comical man who ain’t got no legs, but in the end makes his peace with God and moves on.

But watching the film again recently, I was haunted too by something he said after confronting Forrest Gump about his new disability: “What am I gonna do now?” Continue reading “on Lieutenant Dan” →

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on grace

The story of Mephibosheth recently came up in a morning talk. King David was given supernatural grace to love his rival, the speaker pointed out, and this is something we should pray for too.

Now when I heard this I flew into a self-righteous rage (more on this later) over the seemingly man-centric conclusion, because I reckoned there’s a better way to look at it: we are Mephibosheth, standing before the King. By all rights we are dead men, not (it seems to us) by any virtue of what we’ve done, but simply because of who we are, the blood that runs in our veins. But someone before us has earned the King’s favour on or behalf, and because the King honours promises, he not only calls us friend, but brings us into his family, gives us a home, a future, and his own riches (2 Sam 9:6-7). Continue reading “on grace” →

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on the Passover

The anger passed over us.

For all these years we’d held the Passover festival. What was it for?, we’d ask. The Lord had taught us long before, that his anger had come on to sin-soaked Egypt. The only way his people there had escaped the anger was to smear the blood of lambs onto their doorposts – the only way the anger would pass over them. Because though the anger kills, it could be satisfied by innocent blood. Continue reading “on the Passover” →

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on being nice

Recently I watched a Chinese soap opera portraying a spoiled little imperial prince. He treated all the servants like dirt and had no respect for his elders’ authority. I was thinking how different he is from kids in our era, who are expected to be nice and multicultural and polite. But then I thought it must’ve been because these princes were raised for a specific purpose: their education consisted in how to rule the kingdom and stay alive. Their education had nothing to do with getting along with other people. They literally had no reason to be nice.

Which made me think back to my niceness vs kindness debate, which I’ve briefly touched on before. Why are we nice? Is niceness for its own sake worth it? Often we are nice because, let’s face it, you won’t get far in life if everyone hates you. Continue reading “on being nice” →

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