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Showing posts from November, 2014

A Purposeful Life

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Last Saturday, I attended a Thanksgiving Service to honour the work of my college mate, the Rev Dr. Kang Ho Soon. After serving continuously as a pastor for 42 years, he is due for retirement. The sanctuary was filled with more than a thousand family members, colleagues and friends, including members of the Inter-Religious Organization in their religious garbs. It speaks volumes for the man who was all things to all people who, moving forward, seeks only to be there for all and sundry who need a pair of listening ears. In sharing his vision for life, he quoted Robert Byrne, who reputed to have said, “The purpose of life is a life of purpose.” The idea that life should or ought to have a purpose resonates with many. In 2002, Pastor Rick Warren wrote a devotional book The Purpose Driven Life . The book resonated with so many that it stayed on the New York Times Best Seller list a very long time. It also topped the Wall Street Journal and the Publishers Weekly be

Lessons from Ants

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“And real talk, like, seeing these ants and studying them and respecting them, it’s like, man, they’re in their own community too. They’re trying to survive. They love. They fight. They’re telling themselves something. We can’t understand, but one day we will.” Brandon McCartney  “Go to the ants, you sluggard, learn how to be wise.” A Proverb. A well-known proverb commends the ants for their prudence, cooperation and industry. These social characteristics of ants are often used in fables and children’s stories as in Aesop’s The Ant and the Grasshopper. No less than Mark Twain wrote about them in his A Tramp Abroad.  The social nature of ants has also led other famous literati to use them as a commentary on the relationship between society and the individual. Among this genre are American poet Robert Frost’s Departmental and novelist T H White’s The Once and Future King. More recently, computer-animated cartoons and 3D movies feature these fascinating insects in very enterta