Taste

If you talk to mothers who read up about infant care, you would know that babies are not supposed to eat any food with salt / sugar before they hit 1 year of age. Reason being their kidneys were still developing and it may cause their kidneys to overwork and lead to damage. Their tastebuds were also under-developed at that point.

From personal experience, as a young kid, there were many things I didn't understand why adults like to eat. For example, chilli, century egg, beer, and those belachan thingies that have a very strong pungent and intense taste. It almost killed me when i so much as tried to taste them. But strangely, as an adult now, somehow I'm able to take it.

Recently, I realised this change of ability to take stronger intensity of tastes, seemed to be the same with the Christian walk. Let me explain.

As a young baby Christian, it was all soft, cottony and fluffy. You're surrounded by pastel shades of blue and pink and everybody's nice to you cos you're young. (And probably because they know caning won't work on you). So really, all fun, minimal discipleship. Everything is rather smooth sailing, and everyone seems perfect.

As you progress on and mature, you begin to taste different things at different times at increasingly greater intensities. One day its sweet when all goes well, another day its sour because something went wrong. Some days its bitter because you got hurt.

Then comes an exciting point of time when everything and I mean EVERYTHING comes together, some sort of like that thai curry that Pst Mark Connor described on night #1. The Sweet, the Sour, the Bitter, the Hot, all individually strong and characteristic, but yet all come in at almost the same time. Until you're a little confused. What's this thing? I've never tasted it before and it's something really new! But all you can say at the end of it is that its kind of marvellous and it definitely blew you away.

When you're at this point of life tasting for the first time, all the strong flavours combined in one pot, it would really feel strange i guess. How can one person taste so many extremely different tastes at one time? Yet through it all, you can see the hand of God popping out so obviously like the veins under your skin when you grab your arm real tight. Its really rather marvellous, if you ask me.

And after these thoughts, I can't help but imagine life for PK and Sun. How much more intense are their sufferings, their joys, their sorrows, their victories? And how often do all these experiences collide at the same time? Album+fall sick, Bldg almost but not yet... And yet at the end of it all, when people look at their lives, they can't help but give all the glory to God. That's why until today, I really admire and greatly respect these two people. The road is indeed narrow and few can take what they took, but yet they did it and showed us that we can, indeed follow them as they followed after God.

After 14 years as a Christian and 20 years of CHC existing as CHC, they're still my heroes.