The Confessions of A Hedonese

Love Is Never Wasted

2026-05-16T17:51:02.527-07:00

Good morning brothers, sisters and friends. Thanks for having me here today. It’s a real privilege that I don't take lightly.

As a church family, we’re standing at a bit of a threshold, aren't we? Looking around this sanctuary, you can almost see the layers of life that have happened here over the last 50-odd years—the baptisms, the weddings, the hard farewells. It’s a place full of sacred moments, acts of service and generosity to the wider community and deep friendships shared.

I know for many of us, it’s a bit of a gut-punch to sit down together, crunch the numbers and realize our tank is running low. It feels heavy to acknowledge that our time in this specific building may be coming to a head. There are 'what-ifs', questions swirling around the room and that’s fair enough. It’s okay not to have the answers sorted yet.

In today’s Scripture, we see Jesus sitting in the Temple, and he’s looking at things through a completely different lens than the rest of the world. He watches wealthy folks dropping in these massive, noisy sums of money. Then He spots a widow. She drops in just two tiny copper coins.

And yet Jesus stops everything.

He calls His disciples over and says:
“Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others.”

That statement should make us uncomfortable—because Jesus is not doing math the way institutions do math.

He isn’t denying that large sums exist.
He isn’t spiritualising poverty.
What He is doing is relocating significance.

To anyone else, her action didn’t amount to much. It’s just a rounding error. It didn’t fix the Temple budget. It didn’t 'save' the institution.

But Jesus stops and tells us that her act was actually the most significant thing happening in the room.

He’s showing us that no act of love is ever wasted.

What gives those two coins their weight isn't the amount, but the 'upside-down', inside out logic that Jesus uses to calculate meaning.

He moves significance away from anything you can measure on a spreadsheet. He’s suggesting that the most important stuff in life happens 'under the radar'.

This goes totally against the grain of our world, doesn't it? We live in a culture that says if it didn't get 'likes' or 'shares,' or if there’s no public recognition, then it didn't really happen.

But Jesus says the actions God cares about most are often the ones we can’t quantify at all.

I think of my own mum back in Malaysia. She’s 87 this year. She’s doing alright generally, but she’s navigating the early stages of dementia. We try to get back to see her every Christmas, and one year we even made the trip for Lunar New Year in February. I’ll tell you what—those flight tickets during peak season burn a massive hole through the wallet!

But as her memory starts to get a bit fuzzy, my family and I have felt this real urgency to 'capture' our time together. If you walked into her living room today, it would look like an art gallery. The walls are covered in framed photos of trips we’ve taken, her wedding, my graduation, birthday celebrations, the grandkids' faces as they grow over the years.

We’re basically trying to build a monument against the 'impermanence' that comes when memories start to dissolve. We want something solid that will last.

But memories, as many of us know, have a way of coming and going. The photos stay put on the wall, but her connection to them slips away. She’ll ask, 'When did we do this?' or 'Who’s that in the photo?' or 'When are you coming back again?'"

Caring for loved ones with dementia is a real test of whether we can love without asking for anything to be recognized or remembered. It requires accepting that no act of love is ever wasted. Any act of kindness puts love out into the world. It doesn’t need to be captured on camera or photo framed. We don’t need to be thanked for our love to be helpful. We love, not for our own satisfaction but for the pure act of pouring out love lavishly on our loved one.

Even if our love doesn’t have visible results, that doesn’t matter. Love has gone out into the universe. And that’s enough.

Most of us have been trained to organize our lives around a feedback loop. We track results, we look for outcomes, we want to see that our effort is actually landing somewhere.

Without that, it’s easy to get discouraged. To lose heart.

We start to wonder: 'Is any of this actually doing anything?'

But Jesus’ perspective clears all that away.

The widow in the story was never even named. Jesus didn't pull her aside to tell her, “You know what, you’d be famous for the next 2,000 years for giving those few cents”.

She wasn't acting for the history books.

She’s not trying to make a point.

She was just living out of her inner conviction. Her faithfulness to what matters inside.

Her contribution didn't produce 'tangible outcomes'—in fact, that whole Temple wouldn't even be standing forty years later.

Her actions disappeared into the fabric of life.

And yet, Jesus says that kind of life matters more than the 'show-and-tell' religious leaders of her day.

That raises a real and searching question for us:
Can we live—can we move forward—without needing our actions to be validated from the outside?

I don’t know what it will look like if or when this building stops operating as it has. But that doesn’t mean we stop being God’s church, His called‑out people. The Church was never made of bricks anyway.

We carry with us the seeds of God’s love and truth wherever we go—into homes, congregations and neighbourhoods.

Wherever we go, Jesus shows it is possible to live with integrity when there is no guarantee that anything will come of it.

For 50-plus years, this church has loved God, loved each other and loved the wider community – often without applause or fanfare.

But that is exactly where faith becomes real, where faithfulness becomes uncluttered and clean — when it stops being a performance and starts being about ‘a way of being’.

In the Lord of the Rings, there’s a moment toward the very end, when the hobbits Sam and Frodo are deep in the heart of Mordor, the enemy’s stronghold. They are exhausted, starving, and surrounded by total darkness. They are just two small hobbits against an army of orcs.

In that darkness, Sam looks up and sees a single star twinkling through the thick, poisonous clouds. Tolkien writes that the beauty of that star 'struck his heart,' and a sudden hope returned to him.

Here is the key: Sam realized that the shadow of Mordor was actually 'a small and passing thing,' and that there was light and higher beauty for ever beyond its reach. In that moment, Sam didn't decide to keep going just because he wanted to be a hero celebrated in song.

He kept going simply because his heart was aligned to the Light.

Just a life of inward integrity. Even when it offers no external validation.

I know some of us here are tired yet quietly plodding on. Selflessly giving to keep the lights on in this congregation without expecting anything in return. Yet we continue to love without anyone noticing… but Jesus.

Any act of kindness we put out into the world is for the love of God and our neighbour. And that’s enough.

Your love has gone out into the universe.

No act of love is ever wasted.

And in God’s economy, that is more significant than all the world’s recognition.

Everything is Connected --Tom Chi

2025-04-05T14:12:00.000-07:00

The Future of Humanity

2023-08-03T17:08:00.004-07:00

Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we love. We have now organized what are modestly described as super-powers, which include groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together — surely a humanizing and character building experience. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. Many of those who run the nations will find this idea unpleasant. They will fear the loss of power. We will hear much about treason and disloyalty. Rich nation-states will have to share their wealth with poor ones. But the choice, as H. G. Wells once said in a different context, is clearly the universe or nothing. ~Carl Sagan

(Book: Cosmos )

Top 10 Design Flaws in the Human Body (By Chip Rowe)

2023-01-06T20:19:00.005-08:00

The Greeks were obsessed with the mathematically perfect body. But unfortunately for anyone chasing that ideal, we were designed not by Pygmalion, the mythical sculptor who carved a flawless woman, but by MacGyver. Evolution constructed our bodies with the biological equivalent of duct tape and lumber scraps. And the only way to refine the form (short of an asteroid strike or nuclear detonation to wipe clean the slate) is to jerry-rig the current model. “Evolution doesn’t produce perfection,” explains Alan Mann, a physical anthropologist at Princeton University. “It produces function.”

With that in mind, I surveyed anatomists and biologists to compile a punch list for the human body, just as you’d do before buying a house. Get out your checkbook. This one’s a fixer-upper.

1. An unsound spine

Problem: Our spines are a mess. It’s a wonder we can even walk, says Bruce Latimer, director of the Center for Human Origins at Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland. When our ancestors walked on all fours, their spines arched, like a bow, to withstand the weight of the organs suspended below. But then we stood up. That threw the system out of whack by 90 degrees, and the spine was forced to become a column. Next, to allow for bipedalism, it curved forward at the lower back. And to keep the head in balance—so that we didn’t all walk around as if doing the limbo—the upper spine curved in the opposite direction. This change put tremendous pressure on the lower vertebrae, sticking about 80 percent of adults, according to one estimate, with lower back pain.

Fix: Go back to the arch. “Think of your dog,” Latimer says. “From the sacrum to the neck, it’s a single bow curve. That’s a great system.” Simple. Strong. Pain-free. There’s only one catch: To keep the weight of our heads from pitching us forward, we’d need to return to all fours.

2. An inflexible knee

Problem: As Latimer says, “You take the most complex joint in the body and put it between two huge levers—the femur and the tibia—and you’re looking for trouble.” The upshot is your knee only rotates in two directions: forward and back. “That’s why every major sport, except maybe rugby, makes it illegal to clip, or hit an opponent’s knee from the side.”

Fix: Replace this hinge with a ball and socket, like in your shoulders and hips. We never developed this type of joint at the knee “because we didn’t need it,” Latimer says. “We didn’t know about football.”

3. A too-narrow pelvis

Problem: Childbirth hurts. And to add insult to injury, the width of a woman’s pelvis hasn’t changed for some 200,000 years, keeping our brains from growing larger.

Fix: Sure, you could stretch out the pelvis, Latimer says, but technologists may already be onto a better solution. “I would bet that in 10,000 years, or even in 1,000 years, no woman in the developed world will deliver naturally. A clinic will combine the sperm and egg, and you’ll come by and pick up the kid.”

4. Exposed testicles

Problem: A man’s life-giving organs hang vulnerably outside the body.

Fix: Moving the testicles indoors would save men the pain of getting hit in the nuts. To accomplish this, first you’d need to tweak the sperm, says Gordon Gallup, an evolutionary psychologist at the State University of New York at Albany. Apparently the testicles (unlike the ovaries) get thrown out in the cold because sperm must be kept at 2.5 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit below the body’s internal temperature. Gallup hypothesizes that these lower temperatures keep sperm relatively inactive until they enter the warm confines of a vagina, at which point they go racing off to fertilize the egg.1 This evolutionary hack prevents sperm from wearing themselves out too early. So change the algorithm, Gallup says. Keep the sperm at body temperature and make the vagina hotter. (And, by the way, there’s no need to draw up new blueprints: Elephants offer a pretty good prototype.)

5. Crowded teeth

Problem: Humans typically have three molars on each side of the upper and lower jaws near the back of the mouth. When our brain drastically expanded in size, the jaw grew wider and shorter, leaving no room for the third, farthest back molars. These cusped grinders may have been useful before we learned to cook and process food. But now the “wisdom teeth” mostly just get painfully impacted in the gums.

Fix: Get rid of them. At one point, they appeared to be on their way out—about 25 percent of people today (most commonly Eskimos) are born without some or all of their third molars. In the meantime, we’ve figured out how to safely extract these teeth with dental tools, which, Mann notes, we probably wouldn’t have invented without the bigger brains. So you could call it a wash.

6. Meandering arteries

Problem: Blood flows into each of your arms and legs via one main artery, which enters the limb on the front side of the body, by the biceps or hip flexors. To supply blood to tissues at a limb’s back side, such as the triceps and hamstrings, the artery branches out, taking circuitous routes around bones and bundling itself with nerves. This roundabout plumbing can make for some rather annoying glitches. At the elbow, for instance, an artery branch meets up with the ulnar nerve, which animates your little finger, just under the skin. That’s why your arm goes numb when the lower tip of your upper arm bone, called the humerus or “funny bone,” takes a sharp blow.

The Fix: Feed a second artery into the back side of each arm and leg, by the shoulder blades or buttock, says Rui Diogo, an assistant professor of anatomy at Howard University, in Washington, DC, who studies the evolution of primate muscles. This extra pipe would provide a more direct route from the shoulder to the back of the hand, preventing vessels and nerves from wandering too close to the skin.

7. A backward retina

Problem: The photoreceptor cells in the retina of the eye are like microphones facing backward, writes Nathan Lents, an associate professor of molecular biology at the City University of New York. This design forces light to travel the length of each cell, as well as through blood and tissue, to reach the equivalent of a receiver on the cell’s backside. The setup may encourage the retina to detach from its supporting tissue—a leading cause of blindness. It also creates a blind spot where cell fibers, akin to microphone cables, converge at the optic nerve—making the brain refill the hole.

Fix: Poach the obvious solution from the octopus or the squid: Just flip the retina.

8. A misrouted nerve

Problem: The recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN) plays a vital role in our ability to speak and swallow. It feeds instructions from the brain to the muscles of the voice box, or larynx, below the vocal cords. Theoretically, the trip should be a quick one. But during fetal development, the RLN gets entwined in a tiny lump of tissue in the neck, which descends to become blood vessels near the heart. That drop causes the nerve to loop around the aorta before traveling back up the larynx. Having this nerve in your chest makes it vulnerable during surgery—or a fist fight.

Fix: “This one’s easy,” says Rebecca Z. German, a professor of anatomy and neurobiology at Northeast Ohio Medical University, in Rootstown. While a baby is in utero, develop the RCN after sending that irksome neck lump of vessel tissue to the chest. That way, the nerve won’t get dragged down with it.

9. A misplaced voice box

Problem: The trachea (windpipe) and esophagus (food pipe) open into the same space, the pharynx, which extends from the nose and mouth to the larynx (voice box). To keep food out of the trachea, a leaf-shaped flap called the epiglottis reflexively covers the opening to the larynx whenever you swallow. But sometimes, the epiglottis isn’t fast enough. If you’re talking and laughing while eating, food may slip down and get lodged in your airway, causing you to choke.

Fix: Take a cue from whales, whose larynx is located in their blowholes. If we moved the larynx into our nose, says German, we could have two independent tubes. Sure, we’d lose the ability to talk. But we could still communicate in song, as whales do, through vibrations in our nostrils.

10. A klugey brain

Problem: The human brain evolved in stages. As new additions were being built, older parts had to remain online to keep us up and running, explains psychologist Gary Marcus in his book Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Mind.2 And that live-in construction project led to slapdash workarounds. It’s as if the brain were a dysfunctional workplace, where young employees (the forebrain) handled newfangled technologies like language while the old guard (the midbrain and hindbrain) oversaw the institutional memory—and the fuse box in the basement. A few outcomes: depression, madness, unreliable memories, and confirmation bias.

Fix: We’re screwed.

Chip Rowe is a writer based in New York.

References

1. Gallup, G.G., Finn, M.M., & Sammis, B. On the origin of descended scrotal testicles: The activation hypothesis. Evolutionary Psychology 7, 517-526 (2009).

2. Marcus, G. Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA (2008).

Primary School Year Zero

2022-12-13T18:37:00.004-08:00

Timothy has been in two New Entrants classes and transitioned very quickly between them. From my point of view, Timothy is a sensible, quiet boy who said he likes to have lots of friends. He certainly seems to be very popular and many children chose to be with him for a recent activity. Timothy thoroughly enjoys the sports sessions with the Kelly Sports coaches and all the different skills and exercises that they do as a group. Timothy feels very proud of himself when he feels he has completed a good piece of learning evidence. This is great as he is getting self-satisfaction, and that will stand him in good stead for the years ahead. He is very good at coming to the teaching table and seeking clarification if he is ever uncertain, and enjoys working alongside others there too. Timothy has enjoyed the Geometry Shapes Unit learning about 3D shapes. He is very pleased with his project book and will love to show interested people when he takes it home. When asked what he likes best about school, Timothy said, “reading the big books and all the learning things we do in class.” Well done Timothy.

Does God Exist? Tom Chi and MindValley

2022-09-04T02:01:00.007-07:00

Does God Exist? (Tom Chi and Mindvalley)

5 Questions: What Matters In The End

2021-11-15T11:13:00.001-08:00

Questions That Matter

It needs to be normal to ask these questions, especially when someone is faced with a serious illness, and especially when we know that we’re aging and becoming frail.

We need to know:

What is your understanding of where you are and of your illness?
Your fears or worries for the future
Your goals and priorities
What outcomes are unacceptable to you? What are you willing to sacrifice and not?
And later, what would a good day look like?

Asking these allows everybody to understand what the goal really is — what are you really fighting for? It’s for a life that contains certain things.

6 Years Ago

2021-10-24T00:33:00.005-07:00

A Summary Overview of Peter Enns’ “The Evolution of Adam”

2021-10-24T00:23:00.000-07:00

Written by Rachel Miller | Monday, February 13, 2012

In looking at the various ways people have attempted to handle the differences between Christianity and evolution, Dr. Enns lays out four options:

1. Accept evolution and reject Christianity.
2. Accept Paul’s view of Adam as binding and reject evolution.
3. Reconcile evolution and Christianity by positing a first human pair (or group) at some point in the evolutionary process.
4. Rethink Genesis and Paul (18).

He then begins to explain why he believes that only the last option is a viable one. He believes that it is important to: “reevaluate what we have the right to expect from Genesis and Paul” (18) because “[u]nless one simply rejects scientific evidence (as some continue to do), adjustments to the biblical story are always necessary. The only question is what sorts of adjustments best account for the data” (15). Dr. Enns explains that “[d]eep Christian commitments lead one to read Paul and Genesis with utmost seriousness, but scientific sensibilities do not allow one to dismiss evolution” (17).

Most importantly, Dr. Enns maintains that:

[Paul’s] use of the Adam story, however, cannot and should not be the determining factor in whether biblically faithful Christians can accept evolution as the scientific account of human origins – and the gospel does not hang in the balance (20).

The Evolution of Adam is divided into two parts. Part one focuses on Genesis and part two on Paul. In part one, Dr. Enns makes three main points. First, the majority of the Old Testament was written after the Babylonian exile. Second, Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch were not written as history, but instead as a polemic against the surrounding cultures in an act of self-definition by the postexilic Israelites. Third, the story of Adam is therefore best understood as proto-Israel and was not meant in any way to be a story of universal origins.

According to Dr. Enns, most believers have a faulty understanding of Genesis and why it was written. As a result, they look to Genesis to answer questions that “it will not answer” (53). The first point that people need to understand is that Genesis was not written by Moses in the early days of the Israel’s national history. Instead:

[M]odern scholarship understands the Old Testament as a whole, and Genesis and the Pentateuch in particular, to be Israel’s statement of national self-definition in the wake of Babylonian captivity (586-539 BC) (19).

As a result:

The final form of the creation story in Genesis (along with the rest of the Pentateuch) reflects the concerns of the community that produced it: postexilic Israelites who had experienced God’s rejection in Babylon. … These stories were not written to speak of “origins” as we might think of them today (in a natural-science sense). They were written to say something of God and Israel’s place in the world as God’s chosen people. (24).

Because of this, “Christians today misread Genesis when they try to engage it, even minimally, in the scientific arena” (51). Dr. Enns believes that if we understand the correct genre of Genesis, then we will “hear Genesis in its ancient voice, not impose upon it questions it will not answer or burden it will not bear” (53). The proper category for Genesis is a polemic against the Mesopotamian stories of creation.

The discovery of creation and flood stories from the ancient Near East in the last couple of centuries have presented a challenge to biblical scholars in how to understand Genesis. Some have suggested that Genesis and the Mesopotamian stories have so much in common because of a shared cultural history, i.e., the events described in Genesis are actual history and the Mesopotamian stories are therefore non-inspired distortions of the actual history. According to Dr. Enns, the similarities between the creation and flood accounts in Genesis and other ANE literature are due to the biblical authors drawing on the Mesopotamian stories, such as Atrahasis and Enuma Elish, to define themselves and their God.

Dr. Enns is quick to point out that the Mesopotamian stories must be much older than Genesis because “[t]he polemical function of Gen. 1 requires that the Mesopotamian stories, whether written or oral, be older – otherwise there is nothing against which to polemicize” (172). He does not accept the idea that Genesis represents accurate history as opposed to the myths of their neighbors:

[A]ny thought of Genesis 1 providing a scientifically or historically accurate account of cosmic origins, and therefore being wholly distinct from the “fanciful” story in Enuma Elish, cannot be seriously entertained (58).

Quest For Historical Adam

2021-10-02T18:24:00.007-07:00

Expecting Armageddon: What Does The Book of Revelation Reveal?

2021-09-30T17:13:00.001-07:00

The Philosophy of The Fountain – Escaping Our Mental Prisons

2021-09-25T02:02:00.001-07:00

Coco: How to Live Forever | Video Essay

2021-09-25T01:11:00.001-07:00

The HERO'S JOURNEY - Joseph Campbell

2021-09-25T01:02:00.001-07:00

Hugh Jackman on God and Spirituality

2021-09-25T00:54:00.002-07:00

The Past We Can Never Return To – The Anthropocene Reviewed

2021-09-24T22:07:00.004-07:00

Steve Stewart-Williams: The Ape That Understood The Universe

2021-09-24T22:07:00.002-07:00

Irving Finkel | The Ark Before Noah: A Great Adventure

2021-09-24T22:05:00.001-07:00

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow with Yuval Noah Harari

2021-09-24T22:04:00.001-07:00

Albert Camus - The Plague

2021-09-24T21:55:00.001-07:00

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

2021-09-24T21:46:00.001-07:00

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End | Atul Gawande

2021-09-24T21:43:00.002-07:00

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

2021-09-24T21:42:00.002-07:00

Elaine Pagels, "Why Religion?"

2021-09-24T21:31:00.001-07:00

Infancy Gospels

2021-05-30T03:48:00.004-07:00

If you have not read the entertaining proto-orthodox Infancy Gospels and Protoevangelium of James, you are missing out on heaps of Twilight Zone moments and a good laugh!