John Leow.com

What else in this world is better than listening to our Beloved’s voice?

Nothing else beats it when you hear Father God whispering to you when you wake up with His sweet, lovely words: “You are my mighty man of valour!” Indeed, it’s only God alone who calls things forth that have yet to be  into existence, even if right at that very moment, we may not feel like it.

Gideon!

One of my all time favorite stories in the Bible. The first mention of him in the book of Judges is when the Angel of the Lord calls him “Mighty man of Valour!”, and gives him the task of liberating the oppressed Israelites from the Philistines. Yet, this  Gideon, the very same man who would later rule Israel as one of it’s foremost judges, came from a family background of the weakest of weakest of all tribes in Israel; the tribe of Manasseh.  In fact, he was the least in his household! In modern day context, we would label him as a ‘nothing’,  a nobody, a grain of sand in the midst of the ocean.

But I thank my Father God that He uses the foolish things of this world to confound the wise of this world, and how I thank Him even more that He does not see as man sees. Rather, God sees beyond the outside of a person, and He looks straight into the very heart instead. How many times has it been that I myself have been so  impartial in treatment towards brother or sister so-and-so, because they look like they are called of God..”Zai” people in Singlish terms, while when sister X who isn’t so socially well received walks past and strikes a conversation, I  just try to hurry through and end the conversation. But God does not play favorites! From the wisest, richest men in this world, to the  specially challenged souls that suffer from Cerebral Palsy, God made them all in His image.  And get this, He calls what He created: BEAUTIFUL!To disdain someone by his outward appearance is to mock God and call His creation “stupid!”, and that is a terrible sin.

Just last sunday, I concluded a university orientation camp, that really transformed my outlook towards people of less strata in the society. It was a freshman orientation camp with Community Involvement Program(CIP) at it’s central focus. You see, my uni (SMU) requires all students to complete 80 hours of CIP in order to graduate. Now, no other uni in Singapore poses such a unique demand upon its students but SMU! And so when i went for that camp, my original intention was: “Heck! Get through this camp asap, and clear 60 hours, and move on. Don’t mix around too much with those friends in uni lest they pull you into the spirit of this world!”

Pretty religious mindset I had.Yes I had volunteered at old folk’s homes before, so i roughly knew what was CIP all about. But when I set foot at the Spastic Children’s Association Of Singapore(SCAS), I was shocked stiff the first time I interacted with them! Because they are people from another world;they cannot do even the basic things like eating on their own we take for granted each day. Most are wheelchair bound all their lives. And they spend 20,30,40 years of their lives doing the same things each day at the centre, just passing the days, not having the ability to interact with the outside world because they lack those faculties.

Beautiful? Is this  a picture of  the creation Father God calls beautiful?

In our connive and blinded eyes, we may think:”God, did you fudge on your creation?Maybe you accidentally snapped a brain nerve while brother X who has cerebral palsy was being created.”

But can i share that I walked away from that visit, with the revelation that these friends of ours who have special needs are no different from us? They have a soul, and what I realised as I interacted with my beneficiary was that he understood what I was talking to him!even though he could only respond with murmurs and actions. We are talking to human beings just like you and me!

I hate the term that’s so often labelled upon these friends,because we tend to refer them with degrading terms such as ‘handicapped’,”disabled’. That is the fault of Singapore’s society at large. A story that a SCAS volunteer shared with me was that once when they brought these friends on an outing to a shopping mall, a pregnant lady who happened to be passed by them shrieked at this volunteer, and screamed:”Why do you let this handicapped people pass by me!”According to Chinese superstition, they regard it as a curse on the pregnant lady’s child if a handicapped person passes her way during her pregnancy.

Now, point here is this. So if all  people who wear spectacles were told to remove them and try see, and they can’t see clearly.That in itself makes them disabled or handicapped too by definition of those words. I’ll totally agree! So moral the story is: What makes us think we are any ‘higher up there’ than these friends of ours who have special needs? Everyone has special needs too, whether disabled or not, smart or stupid. Which is why I love it when God says His creation is BEAUTIFUL!

God sees things so differently from our fickle minds see. People have labelled me not very nice names in the past, like “Blur King”,”Ah Kow”,”Calamity John”,”Golfer”,”Jinx”, but I thank my God that He overwrites every human label, and calls me His champion, the apple of His eye! And the same truth applies to you who reads this. We are what we believe we are. How do you think that most of the greatest sports athletes in history always attributed their success to someone who positively believed in them, even when they couldn’t see it! Whether it be their wives, their coaches, their fans, someone dared to believe and hope for the best in them, and the same goes for everyone else. We all deep down want somebody who never fails to believe in our potential, our goals, never gives up on us.

That is why in these last days, it is so important to learn to discern the voice of our Lord when He’s knocking on the door of our hearts, as Rev 3:20 says. Most of the time, when we hear knocks on our doors, we do not check who is standing behind the door and blindly open. Did you know that even the world and the devil knocks on our doors?and if we aren’t careful, we may believe its God and be brought under strong delusion from the devil. Let’s learn to ask the name of the entity behind that door, before we open it. If it’s the Lord’s voice, we will recognise it, for ‘My sheep know My voice”. Far too often we use “I feel God say this, I feel God say that”, but really it was not God, but our own voice..Let’s not use His name in vain yea.

And lastly, the only guaranteed way to hear the Lord’s still small voice is by spending time with Him.No other way. Why do lovebirds eventually get married?Because  it’s through countless hours spent together talking, understanding one another,those precious moments just loving one another, that they recognise each other’s voice. Same thing goes for children, and they can recognise their mum’s voice instantly when their names are called.

Listen to Your Beloved’s voice today.