Road Trips

I love travelling. Give me a whiff of a map and I'll beat a path out the front door before anyone can think of saying,"Pack yer bags and gas up the car!". Of all forms of travel, roadtrips beat 'em all, especially when the mode of transportation is a mean machine with a roaring turbo and steady handling (and neat cupholders).

From our little sunny island of Singapore, the only direction for a roadtrip is north up the Malaysian peninsula. Armed with valid passports, a wad of ringgit and the Bible and a change of underwear in the backseat, the wide open country is but a border away where empty highways reach beckoningly into the horizon; where you can rev past sweeping fields and oil palm plantations and forests of rubber trees, collecting splats of bugkill on the windscreen; where you can brave thick fog, go off-roading on dirt tracks and cross rickety wooden bridges of dubious stability.

There is no timetable, no itinerary to follow. Anytime you want, you can pick a town to stop in, chow down, wander around and discover new places, new foods, new cultures and get to know new people.

It's been a lifelong dream to do a Jim Rogers or just an epic roadtrip up the Malaysian peninsula, into Thailand, hop over to Beijing and then bounce overland across Russia, past some of those little 'stans, through Western Europe and across the Channel to England. Hopefully, when the time comes to do it, technology would have advanced enough to allow us to "kick the oil habit" and run on some environmentally-friendly clean-burning fuel (we might even be able to convince a carmaker to sponsor our ride. No, not quite "What Would Jesus Drive?".). Perhaps there'll even be some help from a local version of Road Trip Nation by then!

Compared to that dreamy odyssey, last weekend's trip was a mere babe: we whizzed up the North-South Highway to Simpang Pulai in Perak and then across the peninsula on the Second East-West Highway from Simpang Pulai to Gua Musang in Kelantan and then down again through dusty trunk roads skirting Fraser's Hill, Kuala Lumpur and Genting Highlands. But boy was it a fun one. The speed demons (who were on 2-3 hour feeds to keep them happy) had great fun chasing each other round exhilarating hairpin corners on mountain roads with thousand metre drops. There were stops for plates of mee rebus, bags of fresh hot Dunkin' Donuts and coffee, a hearty steamboat dinner accompanied by cover versions of Michael Jackson/Bryan Adams/All-4-One/Debbie Gibson, smoky sticks of satay seranaded by an old jukebox in a corner (yes, the satay was seranaded), sukiyaki fit for alcoholics, a huge bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and stacks of scones lathered with cream and strawberry jam and washed down with innumerable pots of tea.

For thousands of miles, we sped past the huge billboards and glittering steelwork of cities and the wooden houses on stilts with chickens resting on their corrugated iron roofs of shanty towns. We passed people crammed in dirty hovels and crowded graveyards on the sides of hills. We passed old mining towns with vehicles rusting in abandoned buildings, devoid of life. We passed people in their colourful best, streaming into a white Malay wedding tent, gold thread embroidered into its sides. We passed homes and trees and corners where lives were lived and dreams were dreamt and loves were consummated and babies were bounced on laps and deaths were mourned. Intimate spaces inhabited by generations which passing strangers would never be able to penetrate.

At times, we were dwarfed by magnificent limestone cliffs dotted with enticing caves, and at other times, by hills of black cold hard slate. There were lakes covered with water hyacinth, spectacular waterfalls, hundreds of tomatoes ripening on vines, eagles riding the wind drafts, scavaging goats and giant squirrels scampering across the roads. And when we reached a place where the sun shone so beautifully in the blue sky and the lush green hills were laid out so gloriously, everyone burst out in spontaneous praise:

All Heaven Declares
All heaven declares
The glory of the risen Lord
Who can compare
With the beauty of the Lord

Forever He will be
The Lamb upon the throne
I gladly bow my knee
And worship Him alone

I will proclaim
The glory of the risen Lord
Who once was slain
To reconcile man to God

Forever You will be
The Lamb upon the throne
I gladly bow my knee
And worship You alone
Noel Richards, Tricia Richards © 1987 Kingsway’s Thankyou Music

For God's invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So man everywhere is without excuse (Romans 1:20). So, inevitably, what followed was the Psalms set to music and then err...Christmas carols... How brilliant it was to roadtrip with likeminded friends. :-)

There shouldn't be a need for specially-designed Christian road trips like those by Nieu Communities, Share Jesus International or Road Trip Mission to get Christians evangelising in foreign places, because the essential Christian-ness of a Christian should not be something that is turned off when the Christian is on holiday (but that is not to suggest that they are of no use whatsoever). Wandering about and meeting fellow travellers, buying each other drinks, exchanging road gossip, chatting with a diversity of locals, bartering life stories, it takes no special effort to talk about the gospel and about Jesus because these are so overwhelmingly present in the life of a Christian. "Making the most of every opportunity" (Colossians 4:5-6) should already be an intrinsic part of our lives. And stories like that of Alan Quigley and Chris Forbes of The Most Important Thing help to remind us that wherever we are, there are people to be saved. And sometimes, they are more amenable to hearing the gospel from a passing traveller than from their local Christian friends. Of course if you happen to be Stephen Baldwin, Livin' It extreme sports vids are tantalising bridges all on their own. ;-)

PS: No, it wasn't like this at all:

from xkcd

(But Casting Crowns does sound better when blasted at 160.)

Chinese New Year, Conversations, Malacca and the Struggle to Love Others

The festive season is full of conversations, a lot of them purely polite talk to fill the silence in a gathering of strangers tied only by blood: the Hong Kong branch murmuring about offspring being caught in the tabloids with movie star plebs, bringing shame to the family; the Indonesian clan chattering about chauffeurs, blachan and world domination. Boring, but opportunities to further some relationships and build new ones (however tenuous) for gospel and salvation.

Yet best of all, after fulfilling Chinese New Year duties, right on that back of Ismaël Ferroukhi's Le Grande Voyage and Hayao Miyazaki-produced Only Yesterday, taking a bit of a road trip up the peninsula, thinking, discussing (with private Jack Johnson, Rach 2-3, Domine Deus from Vivaldi's Gloria and Echo & the Bunnymen earworms) the recent Hamas victory in the Palestinian elections, present-day Israel's part in God's salvation plan, narrative in evangelism, narrative in weekly Bible studies, Islam and whether the call for moderate/liberal Islamic scholars and teachers to refute false teachers would backfire when it is discovered that True Islam may not be a religion of peace.

A short nap away, there were bowls of ais chendol dribbling with thick gula melaka, spicy sour nyona assam laksa, ayam rempah and mee siam, and icy honey-lime concoctions, sukiyaki virgins, Baskin-Robbins revisited, kaya toast, bubbly teh tarik, and alltoosoon boxes of good-bye dragon beard candy for the ride back.

But before that, the night was for sitting in the smoky air of sparklers, strings of red lanterns and bubbling pots of eggs in spices and tea-leaves, nursing cocktails, ears on a schizophrenic live act alternately crooning Louis Armstrong and screaming Bon Jovi, reading the Bible, John Chapman's "A Sinner's Guide to Holiness" and borrowed forgot-to-renew-my-subscription copies of The Briefing.

Then at one quiet moment in a foreign land, swatting mosquitoes at brekkie, love found me. For somewhere between the madness of bible studies and meeting-ups and crazy evangelistic parties, somewhere, love managed to get left behind. Not wilfully, nor hypocritically, nor purposefully. But inadvertently, by my sinfulness. But just as grace and love first found me, so grace ensured that I would be found by love again.

And the answer to that age-old struggle related (with a good bit of embarrassment) online by Christian bloggers and (with mumblings and red-facedness) offline within small prayer groups; that daily bloody battle to love those within our church family whom we cannot stand - those who lie and betray us, who hypocritically find favour with men and receive power and glory, who think themselves more "sorted" and godly and patronise us, who love themselves more than they love us, and those who just don't like us at all, people whose failures we snigger at (perhaps even with some guilt) inwardly and whose successes we grumble at vindictively and bitterly, became clear as day. And that sparkling answer (not in obiang neon-lights thankyou) was this:

For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised. (2 Corinthians 5:14-15)

It is the love of Christ for us, demonstrated by his sin-bearing death for us on the cross, that controls us (ESV) and compels us (NIV). Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all. Love so great, so abundant, so overflowing it cannot but spill into our lives and our other relationships.

So it is not that we force ourselves to become naïve, simple and credulous, nor that we ignore the facts of reality, but that we turn away from our navel-gazing attempts to love, look up to the cross, at the powerful blinding light of something so infinitely greater and better, such a glorious perfect love that overawes and overshadows all these incidents into petty inconsequential footnotes. It is not that these things don't happen, but it is that they just don't matter anymore.