My name is Gladys and I’m 23 years old. I’ve just unofficially completed my education in NUS. I come from the Church of St. Bernadette and I’m a part of a community called Alife!
My community’s ministry is primarily to reach out to young people at the secondary level through church camps. In those church camps, one of main images that kept recurring was that of God as the loving Father. In theory, I could accept that. But in my heart, I really struggled to grasp the fatherly love of God. I did not have any struggles with my own dad, but God the Father seemed very distant and angry compared to His son, Jesus. I always felt hypocritical trying to reassure the young people that God was loving without being fully convinced myself.
Not accepting God as my loving father had consequences in the way I behaved in community. I saw sessions and my service in camps as a duty out of obligation rather than acts of love. Receiving affirmations felt burdensome to me because I felt even more obliged to serve. This warped mentality was not so obvious until I took a break from a relationship with my boyfriend at that time. Since both of us were active members in community, that break also destabilized my community in a significant way. I felt very guilty and tried to work even harder, making funnier jokes and trying to be better so as to “absolve” myself of the guilt of having become the cause of the struggle my community was facing. But even as I tried to make things better, I was filled with bitterness and sadness that I was loved only for what I could give but not for who I truly was.
I have had 2 retreats in my life – Awaken and the School of Christian Leadership (SOCL). At Awaken, I was like the younger son in the parable of the prodigal son just returning to the father sorrowful and contrite. After Awaken and serving for about 3 years, I gradually lost the initial fire and became like the elder son in the parable. I forgot my own sinfulness and became self-righteous and I was filled with resentment towards God at having to serve him without tangible reward. So I approached SOCL 2014 with that elder son mentality- thinking that God was someone I had to serve wholeheartedly but not someone who could give me the love I was searching for. I came into the school loud, bubbly and on the surface, quite happy but with many deep cracks within me that I was not fully aware of at that time.
Gladys pictured here (first row, second from left)
In SOCL, I initially struggled to do nothing and simply be. I tried to be thick-skinned and more open to receiving, and I did receive so much because of that. There was good food prepared with so much love, great sessions, truly vulnerable sharings, worship and sports that I was terrible in (every team that had me was bound to lose). The fact that I was terrible at sports turned out to be a blessing in disguise because I realised that I did not have to do anything or be good at anything to be loved.
One of the things that struck me most during SOCL was worship. I was very used to the guilt-tripping, Jesus-died-for-you-so-you-better-be grateful kind of worship. To me, God was an angry and punishing person whom I was always trying to make amends to for my sins. However in SOCL, we were invited to come to God like a child. And so I whined, complained and told God how angry I was with Him and how unfatherly I thought He was. Then I realised that it was not that God was an angry God, but that I was angry. It was not that I could not accept God as Father but that I could not accept being His child – I could not accept the truth that I was good, loveable and beautiful as I had been believing myself to be good and loveable only for what I could achieve, and my achievements were never enough.
Every praise and worship session was so full of messages of joy, freedom, empowerment and love. And the honesty during worship allowed me to worship with child-like excitement and spontaneity. I laughed randomly during worship because I was so truly happy. Without realizing it, I stopped wrestling with God at some point but began to claim my identity as His child and not his slave, and so shatter the barriers I had placed between God and myself.
The biggest breakthrough during the school was when Father Jude brought the Blessed Sacrament around. Without understanding why, I burst into tears when I was brought face to face with the living body of Jesus. On retrospect, I think it was a realisation of how wounded I was and a realisation of how much I needed God. It was a bit like how children do not immediately cry after falling down. They only start crying when their parents run up to them, coddle them and make sympathetic noises. At that moment they realise their pain and their need for their parents. I think those tears were a confession of my need for God and a recognition that I could not keep trying to do good and holy things without the help of God.
SOCL is by no means the end of my spiritual journey. It has however awakened in me an awareness of God’s enduring love which frees me from the false illusion that love must be earned. I can stop trying to gain love by doing more because I already have the fullness of love. I rejoice at the awareness that I am God’s child, not his slave. I continue to struggle today to allow God to touch me where it hurts the most and sometimes I still push him away and busy myself with other things. But God, as the poem by Francis Thompson writes, is “The Hound of Heaven”. He relentlessly pursues me and sometimes I just need to be still & know he is God – that is to say, to be still and receive the Father’s freely given love. And all other acts of love will issue from this abundance of love.
