Last fall for one of my counselling courses, we had an assignment where we had to write out a "wound poem" expressing our life-long emotional wounds and their healing. I decided to make a rap song out of it.
Later on, my friend produced a video for it. Big thanks to Huntley Lue for taking the time and effort to visually animate the lyrics!
(There's some psychotherapy references that some may be unfamiliar with. But Google can be of help =o)
*note: I truly love my parents. I'm fully convinced that they loved me the best way they knew how. They're just not perfect, like all parents, and hence couldn't have protected their child from the inevitable wounds in this lifetime*
It is actually unsafe to secretly assume that anyone who disagrees with anything in anyone's lifestyle is automatically unsafe and will make others feel unsafe. Such an unsafe attitude towards safety actually leads anyone who disagrees to feel unsafe and ends up creating an unsafe environment for those who are completely safe but disagree.
On the other hand, the truly safe disagreer always offers unconditional safety even to conditionally safe people who secretly and unfairly judge the truly safe disagreer to be an unsafe person.
Oh Lord, the biggest planets in the universe that overload and fry out our imaginations are like microscopic atoms to you.
As Dallas Willard has said, the universe is hardly the beginning of God. Lord, the whole universe is hardly a trailer clip to the actual feature presentation of your breathtaking immensity.
In the beginning you created the universe. In your creation party of Genesis 1:1 you sprinkled the galaxies in space like cosmic confetti. You decorated the intergalactic wallpaper with a whole constellation of ornaments. Clusters of planets, stars, asteroids, and galaxies.
All the planets you've created keep rotating like children twirling out of non-stop joy to the glory of your limitless genius and creative power. Shooting stars can't contain themselves when they encounter you and sprint with worshipful adrenaline across the sky you gave them.
Yet you, the Creator of the entire universe, decided to become a small little baby. Oh my Lord, you became human. Oh my Word, you became flesh. You chose to become like one of us. You chose to humble yourself and become like the size of a subatomic particle yourself so that your subatomic creation, which became lonely and sinfully separated from you, would not remain alone and without you forever.
Our God, although you always hold the human race in your hands, you allowed yourself to be held by the hands of the human race in that Bethlehem manger.
Ever since we sinfully separated ourselves from you in the Garden of Eden, your heart has always cried tears over us for our salvation, redemption, and restoration with you. By giftwrapping yourself in human form, we could finally see your divine tears physically stream down the literal face of God as you wept. The face of God was no longer just a metaphor for your Jewish people when they saw it take physical form. Your divine heart finally had a set of facial muscles to express itself with. Those divine facial muscles thrillingly smiled at us pitiful, broken sinners with furious selfless affection during your 30 years on Earth.
The truth is that the only physical gift that can ever satisfy the supernatural void in the human heart is the physical body of Christ, given and broken for us 2000 years ago. Your Christmas presence never expired, costed no money, and can satisfy the human heart everyday from now until eternity.
Lord. I know I'll be tested. Just like the others beside me. I've seen the others beside me bow down left, right, and center. Peer pressure causes their mental knees to nervously shake and descend with pity. Their stance is compromised due to cowardice of conviction. With people-pleasing postures, they curtsy towards the shifting trends and whimsical opinions of the world.
Not me Lord.
Lord, I will not cave in from pressure. I choose to be one of the remaining few who refuse to bow my knee down to falsehood, even if threatened. I cannot, and will not bow down. Something in me refuses to give in. Something beyond my mind that I do not fully understand causes me to stand firm for reasons that I do not fully know. And so I refuse to bow to the world's idolatrous ideologies and instead choose to be an intellectually daring rebel. My freethinking is too preciously free to pay the price of worldly imprisonment. In every age, freethinking needs to adapt its attitude to test and possibly challenge the background assumptions that are taken in by the masses without testing and scrutiny. So, in our modern day intellectual world in 2017, I will be a Neo-freethinker who will not get his thinking enslaved by the Matrix. I dare to keep Michael Scholfielding myself out of the world's imprisoning ideas.
Lord, be with me.
Saturday, October 28, 2017
Painting my soulful feelings is like figure skating when I figure there's a desire to skate away the deep impressions in my fibers that are yearning for expression. Dictionary definitions fail, but when I aesthetically skate and carve out new metaphors, you'll figure out what I'm deeply feeling. There's nothing like artfully skating figuratively speaking.
Professor Jesus. You are the most distinguishably adaptive person in the universe. I used to imagine you living in 21st century North America with a white robe and sandals. Now I know better. I see the way you and your Father have worked with people throughout the entirety of the Scriptures. A cross cultural sensei. Diplomatic genius. You are more adaptable than the most gifted Hollywood actors who can take polar opposite roles on different stages. You're better at this art than Russell Crowe. You are exceptionally malleable in genre yet unswervingly firm in content. You are remarkably flexible in cuisine style yet uncompromising in the meat of what you represent. You bend but don't break. Your capacity to blend in while sticking out simultaneously is of an unheard of calibre.
Professor Jesus. What would you be like if you were in North America walking, living, and breathing the air of the 21st century? You wouldn't behave and dress like a Middle Eastern man, that's for sure. You would not be inflexible, unchangeable, and rigidly dull in form. I'm not sure if you'd stay in a 5 star luxury hotel and use the Jaccuzi, but you'd drop the robe quickly either way. You'd dress differently, to the point where you wouldn't get out-of-style attention on the streets. You'd take on our slang, in a very organic and spontaneous way. The colloquial phrases we say here would be embedded into your soul so deeply that they would come out on knee-jerk reaction to things. You wouldn't say colloquial slang mechanically with an ESL delivery. Your socially conditioned body language would not make you awkward in the crowd, because it would be adjusted and calibrated to this environment. You'd do all this without being uncompromising in your embodied kingdom message. Your spirit and soul would powerfully capture the reality of the kingdom in a way that gets supernatural attention while not being unnecessarily weird in the natural realm. You'd capture the atmosphere's spotlight in terms of people's souls being violently pulled in towards a supernatural reality in you while your natural body language, speech, and fashion would remain blended in to the social context and hence remain invisible.
Professor Jesus. You are my master and my sensei. And one of the characteristics of you is that you are exceptionally adaptable. More than the planet's most gifted social chameleons. As I imagine you being so capably adaptable to all sorts of audiences, it's so magnetically attractive. You are so cool. Smooth yet pure. That's just purely smooth man.
Professor Jesus. How would you conduct yourself as a graduate student studying in a functionally secular university in the 21st century? In a classroom, how would you think? How would you feel? How would your body language be like in an atmosphere of academia? What flavour of consciousness would you season your mind with in order to fit in and blend in this environment? How would you adjust and cultivate your wavelength of thinking to perfectly adapt to the scholarly culture of western universities? How would you conduct yourself socially? How would you challenge your professors? How would you disagree with other students in a discussion in a way that makes everyone still feel unconditionally loved and valued? How would you not be dull? How would you mentally launch intellectual fireworks in a discussion to make it more engaging? How would you pour colour into colourless content that is being learned? How would you continually shift the framing of your questions and statements to accommodate to the texture of the ever evolving discussion? How would you intellectually bounce ideas off of others if a spontaneously engaging discussion emerged which surprisingly gained momentum? How would you do that while trying to simultaneously enhance and intertwine relational intimacy with intellectual intimacy with classmates through the discussion so that they can encounter God's love through the relational dimension of the intellectual discussion? How would you weave threads of kingdom thinking seamlessly into the fabric of a secular texture so that the thread would get attention without the needle getting any? How would you open yourself up to and count on the kingdom gently invading your thoughts suddenly with a wisdom that is beyond this world? When you detect such foreignly beautiful thoughts that are not yours and try to insert this kingdom thinking into the classroom, how would you give the supernaturally foreign thoughts a conversational visa to enter into the native homeland of the secular discussion? How would you stay mentally open to hop on and stay on spontaneously supernatural trains of thought that suddenly appear and take off from the train station of normal/natural human cognition? All without losing the direction that the class is moving? How would you allow yourself to be used by God to bring attention to the supernatural kingdom within you while not letting your natural human elements unnecessarily steal any attention due to them being invisibly blended in?
