SPIRITUAL CONTRADICTION AND EDUCATION
When I discovered that I must die someday, I began hating God. But there was somehow a spiritual contradiction in my soul. Many times during my childhood, I experienced this phenomenon. I know, no matter how hard I try to explain this, nobody would know exactly what it was like.
There were times, for no rhyme or reason, I would say to myself, "I am I." And a very strange feeling would come over me. All at once, flashes came into my soul and I could feel that I was special to God – the God that I did not trust. However, at that moment, when these flashes came all over me, I felt so loved by God. And this contradiction baffled me for many years.
The other phenomenon that I experienced was the vision of countless of colorful balls floating down and bringing joy to my heart each night before I fell asleep. Again, during those moments, I felt specially loved of God. I believe that God was trying to break through into my confused heart that He truly loved me.
Having no other entertainment, I used to hang around the womenfolk in the evening as they narrated ghost stories. As a child, I was scared to death when I heard those chilling stories.
Then came bedtime. And it was very difficult for me to obey my mom to go to bed alone without her. They were still chitchatting. My problem was that between where we were and where the room was, there seemed to be a space of many miles in between, and that many demons were lined up along the long corridor I had to pass through. As usual, it was not until my mom threatened to thrash me that I then took off in a dash.
That’s when I would play a silly game in my head. As I ran from where I was to the bedroom, I kept telling the ghosts, not out loud but in my head, "Not yet, not yet, not yet ..."
Then I would jump into bed, covered myself with a blanket right up to my neck and finally said, "Okay, you can come." I played that stupid game for years, all through my adolescence.
When I became a pastor, I shared this incident with a friend one day and surprisingly, he exclaimed, "I also played the same game when I was young!"
When I was in Pearl’s Hill Primary School, I was a very timid and defeated boy. At the end of each term, under the conduct column of my report book, the teacher would invariably write, "A very good and quiet boy."
With all the build-up of negatives in my life, I hardly spoke in school. I started to read a lot and I didn’t mix around too much. When I was in primary five and primary six, preparing for the entrance examination (it is now known as PSLE), we had very strict teachers.
Hardly a week went by that we did not have a test in all the subjects we took. For history and geography tests, we were only allowed to make three mistakes out of 30 questions. For the fourth mistake, the penalty was a stroke of cane on the buttocks; then every stroke for each additional mistake.
Our answers would be in a word or a phrase. For instance, the teacher would ask, "What is that invisible line that goes from the North Pole to the South Pole?" Our one-word answer should be "axis".
After the 30 questions, the teacher would instruct us to exchange our exercise books with the students sitting next to us. Then he would give us the correct answers and we would mark our fellow students’ tests.
Finally, the nerve-wracking part of the session would arrive. Our exercise books were returned to us with our final scores. The number of strokes was worked out. We would then reluctantly line up to receive our punishment. It was a painful time.
Very often, before our test, we would hear the cries of students receiving punishment from the class next door, and that teacher was about to come over to our class for his next whacking session. It was very fearful and depressing.
We were all trained to accurately draw a 1/4-inch margin for all the pages of our exercise books. It should be exactly a 1/4-inch, no more and no less. It seemed like the teacher had a measuring tape in his eyes. If a margin was not exactly a 1/4-inch, punishment by caning would ensue.
The cane was used so often that it split. Whenever a new cane was introduced, we had to stretch our hands to get a sample of it. In my heart I rebelled silently against that practice.
Very soon my classmate and I had to learn to cheat in our tests in order to survive (that’s what we thought). He imitated my handwriting and I imitated his. For questions we couldn’t answer, we agreed to leave the lines blank.
When we exchanged our exercise books, we made sure that we also exchanged our pens. Then as we marked each other’s answers, we began filling the right answers in all the blank spaces. Even then we could not escape caning all the time. We still had to study very hard, or else there would be too many answers to fill in and that would be very dangerous. But we did reduce the number of strokes on our buttocks quite substantially.
I hated the severe strictness of the school. It made me so fearful and depressed. But finally, in the entrance examination, nobody in my school had failed. After countless stripes on our buttocks, it was a 100% success for the school.
Being a pessimist, I wasn’t looking forward to my secondary school education. I presumed that life would be tougher, but little did I know that I was totally wrong. Something was about to fill my emptiness and give me self-confidence.
In my days, Gan Eng Seng School did not have the reputation it has today. There were ruffians and gangsters who wanted to be Hollywood rebels like James Dean and Elvis Presley.
The first time I heard the singing voice of Elvis Presley was from a portable battery-operated turntable a classmate brought to school after the term-end examination. I liked what I heard and I knew instinctively that I could sing like that.
My schoolmates were amazed at my hidden talent. Later, I sang at the school concert. Almost overnight, from a very dull and unsure teenager, I became one of the popular guys in the school.
My self-confidence was boosted and I desired to be a pop singer more than anything else in the world. Now I had a reason for living. So wrapped up was I in the world of pop songs that I forgot about the quest for the meaning of life, at least for the time being.
It took me sometime to learn that when your reason for being is not anchored in eternity, it would fizzle off sooner or later. This is because human beings are God’s highest creation and eternity has been placed within our souls. That’s the reason why no matter where we are and what we are doing, there is this instinctive knowing that we are meant for something more.