Tan Soo Inn on Counting the Years

Those who passed the the 50 years mark will begin to be aware that their bodies are not so strong and agile as they once was, their memories so sharp and there will be a general deterioration of health. When he reaches 55 my friend Soo Inn reflects on the counting of the years. Heel the wisdom of a wise man.


Commentary: Counting the Years

"It was in the year King Uzziah died that I saw the Lord. He was sitting on a lofty throne, and the train of his robe filled the Temple." (Isaiah 6:1 NLT)
By Soo-Inn Tan
February 26, 2010 Edition.
(Grace@Work Mail is a ministry of Graceworks: www.graceworks.com.sg). Reposted with permission.

On the first Sunday of the year, my friend Mark preached on Psalm 90. When he reached verse 10, he asked us to do a little arithmetic. If the verse were to be taken literally, how many years do we have left? I will be 55 this year, so 80 - 55 = 25. Still some time left, but not all the time in the world. The exercise was a good reminder of our mortality. Maybe there is something to be said for how Isaiah marks the years, by identifying a year with the death of a prominent person.

1963, the year that John F Kennedy died. 1997, the year that Mother Theresa died. 2009 was a difficult year for many of us. For many it was the year that Michael Jackson died. But for many of my friends, it was the year that Yasmin Ahmad died, the year that Anthony Yeo died. Some of us are still recovering from the many friends that we lost last year. When will it be our year? How do we confront the fact of our mortality? Isaiah gives us two suggestions.

First, root your life in God. Isaiah 6 finds Isaiah in the temple, worshipping the Lord. We are mortal. God is immortal. And God has made us this offer:

[Jesus told her, "I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even after dying. Everyone who lives in me and believes in me will never ever die. Do you believe this . . .?" (John 11:25-26 NLT)]

I believe. I have believed for some time now. The passing of the years reminds me that the central reality of my life is my relationship with the Almighty, "Immortal, Invisible, God only wise. (Walter C. Smith)" Indeed I know this God as Abba. My life is in His safe hands. I need not fret about my departure from this life. Dad knows best. And nothing in this life or the life to come can separate me from His love (Romans 8: 35-39). In the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah is in the temple. May 2010 find us similarly rooted in our Lord.

To be rooted in the Lord brings us to the other thing that Isaiah teaches us about how we can face the passing of the years --- be faithful to your vocation. Isaiah 6: 1-8 is the record of Isaiah's call to his prophetic ministry. It reminds us of the vocational nature of life. If my time on earth is limited, I do not want to waste my days. I want to invest my life in what God has called me to do. Frederick Buechner puts it nicely:

[ . . in the year that King Uzziah died, or in the year that John F. Kennedy died, or in the year that somebody you loved died, you go into the temple if that is your taste, or you hide your face in the little padded temple of your hands, and a voice says, "Whom shall I send into the pain of a world where people die?" and if you are not careful, you may find yourself answering, "Send me."

. . . a man's vocation is a man's calling. It is the work that he is called to in this world, the thing that he is summoned to spend his life doing. (The Hungering Dark, San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1969, 27.)]

What is my vocation? For some time now I have believed that my calling is to teach God's Word with "relevance, accuracy, and passion" so that lives are transformed for Christ. In more recent times, there has been a further fine-tuning of that mission. I seem to be tasked to teach about the importance of relational transformation, how God's primary way of changing lives is through relationships. This year, I will be teaching on Spiritual Mentoring in two seminaries in Singapore, and leading workshops on the same subject in Malaysia and Canada. And we are receiving many invitations to teach on the subject from churches and Christian organizations. My 2010 planner is filling up fast.

There are many things I can do and many things I would like to do, but with the passing of the years, I must be focused on what I must do --- what God has called me to do. What has God called you to do?

Will I have 25 more years to live? More? Less? God knows. But in the year that _____ died, may I be found rooted in the Lord, faithful to my vocation.

At the Movies

My friend and dear brother Soo Inn shares with me the love of the Lord, mentoring younger people, teaching, preaching, movies and comics. Here is his take on movies. Reproduced with permission, of course.
__________________________________


GRACE@WORK MAIL 10/07 [March 9, 2007 Edition]
"Meaningless! Meaningless!"
says the Teacher.
"Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless."
(Ecclesiastes 1:2)

[Note: If you haven't watched the movies Ghost Rider and Protege and intend to do so you may want to skip today's column.]

Commentary: At The Movies
Caught two movies over the Lunar New Year holidays.
Ghost Rider was fun. Directed by Mark Steven Johnson, it worked while his previous efforts (Daredevil, Elektra) failed because Ghost Rider doesn't take itself too seriously. (Catch the Nicolas Cage character trying to sterilize a needle with hell fire.) I left the theatre feeling like I had read a comic on the screen. Cultural soda pop on a hot afternoon.


As is often the case in movies that feature the supernatural, God doesn't make a direct appearance. And as is often the case, Christianity is portrayed as ineffectual and weak. Check out the priest, well meaning but helpless in the face of evil. I believe in a God who says that it is possible to move mountains even if you have faith the size of a mustard seed.

Still the plot presupposes a battle between good and evil with evil losing in the end. Here is the perennial human hope. The real contours of this battle are recorded in the bible not in popular celluloid and when we reach the book of Revelation we know the good guys do win in the end. But salvation comes not from heroism or romanticism but through the conquering love of Christ on the Cross.

Christians see this movie? Depends. If you are particularly vulnerable to images of supernatural evil then seeing them may give real evil a foothold to trouble you. You should give Ghost Rider and other movies that feature the demonic a miss. But if your faith is strong enough then go if you want to. But go with others if possible. And always go with discernment.

The other movie I saw recently was the Hong Kong production, Protege. Now here is a parade of images of real horror as the movie deals with the destructive power of heroin addiction. Directed by Tung-Shing Yee, Protege has promise but is let down by the unnecessary gore and slapstick that we sometimes find in movies from Hong Kong. (Did we really need to see the Customs officer's hand bludgeoned off?) And at times the movie felt like a National Geographic documentary, documenting the decline of the heroin trade.
But the primary question raised by Protege is profound. Why do people take drugs to begin with? The answer could have come from the book of Ecclesiastes. People take drugs to escape the emptiness of life. The root problem is not drugs. The root problem is that life has no meaning. This was portrayed well by the two protagonists in the movie.

The drug lord, played by Andy Lau, has worked hard all his life in the drug trade. The onset of kidney failure causes him to realize that he ought to retire so that he can have time to tend to his health needs and to enjoy life. So he chooses a protege to take over his business. But his protege turns out to be an undercover narcotics agent who betrays him. The drug lord is caught before he can leave the country. He ends up taking his own life. All is meaningless.

The narcotics agent played by Daniel Wu, succeeds in what he set out to do. He gets to bring down the drug lord. But success is hollow. He gets a perfunctory clap on the back by the powers that be. He loses a girl he has come to care for. He is no longer capable of living a normal life. And he has to live with the guilt of having betrayed a man who had come to love him and trust him. All is meaningless.

As a movie Protege is uneven. Nevertheless it portrays well the central question of life. Does life have meaning? And if it does not why shouldn't I lose myself in drugs? Or take my own life? What a great starting point for some good conversations with friends Christian and non-Christian.

I minister to many young adults and college students and I have long come to realize that the movies are a key feature of their lives. They are a key feature of my life. Therefore I hear Peter Fraser and Vernon Edwin Neal when they tell us in their book ReViewing the Movies that "...the time is at hand for Christians to engage our movie-made culture courageously, and this means we have to struggle with real issues and tell the truth." (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2000, p. 20)

They go on to remind us:
"For too long we Christians have feared the corrosive influence of film and so avoided approaching it thoughtfully. We need to shift to the offensive and intentionally discuss film as a way to illustrate and apply the truth. And we need to appreciate film for its artistry and praise our Creator who gives such gifts to men.

It may be useful to recall that Jesus never reduced life to simple platitudes, and He never chose the safe, sanitized road. He embraced each person uniquely, and He got his sandals dirty. If films had existed in first-century Israel, it just might be that His tastes would have surprised people. His tastes in people seemed to surprise people, after all." (p.22)

Fraser and Neal end their book with some guidelines for Christians and the movies. They include:

*Christians must get involved in all aspects of the film industry and find ways to use that medium to honor God and advance the Gospel.
*Individual Christians who watch film should find the means to educate themselves and their children about film.
*Films need to be evaluated according to the twin standards of artistic excellence and truthfulness.
*The popularity of certain kinds of film reveal as much about the longings of the human heart in general, as well as particular cultural and historical moments.
*The wide range of films produced in the past hundred years offers manifold opportunity for Christians to enter into dialogue with the larger culture.
(pp. 178 - 179)

If you haven't seen Ghost Rider or Protege, well I think you can give Ghost Rider a miss unless you are an old time Marvel comic fan like me. You may want to see Protege but be warned. The true to life horror in Protege blows the cgi horror of Ghost Rider away any day.


Your brother,
Soo-Inn Tan
Email: sooinn@graceatwork.org