Fit.

Sooner or later I knew I had to write about this.

A few days ago, as part of a celebration for Christmas, someone had to conduct a games session. From a basket of seven eggs, seven people had to pick an egg each, of which they had to smash on their foreheads. Six of the eggs, being hardboiled, would merely crack open, while the one uncooked would leave quite a sight behind on the unfortunate and guileless egg-picker. Another game involved carrots.

A friend observing me across the room came up to me after the session, “I could see you were very uncomfortable. Don’t mind them, they went a little overboard this time.” While she was referring to the sexual innuendo that some of the games were heavily tainted with, what she didn’t realize, was how affected I was with the sight of eggs being smashed on the ground, tables and people’s faces.

Two years ago on a three-week stay in Mozambique, Africa, we had one egg a week. That was all. Breakfast was a dry bread roll with no spread, lunch was typically boiled beans, while dinner was matarpas, a local dish made of potato leaves boiled to death with ground peanuts. It was my favorite dish of all.

This Christmas, as Cliff and I wrestle with the affluence of our current lives and start to grapple with the realities that the world faces, there is a deep longing in our hearts for something more to life than the comforts of going to work, doing chores and worrying about bank accounts. As the wedding buzz dies down and we settle in as a newlywed couple into the routine of life, we have been challenged to rethink our place in our communities, and our future ahead.

It is easy to carry on this way. Life this way, is distressingly comfortable. Finally, I understand how and why people find difficulty to “fit in” the poor and needy into their lives.

We have our own schedules. We have our own leisure activities. We have our own fixed routines, tenaciously tied down and drilled eighteen feet down under. These things make us feel safe. These established rules and laws of our day-to-day give us security not only with ourselves, but with people around us. Shake these things around, and our fragile relationships, which seem precariously tied to our flimsy routines become threatened. It’s no wonder we struggle to “fit in” time for helping others into our lives.

Surely there is a better way.

Recently, I’ve been challenged to adopt a new paradigm shift: Instead of fitting them into our lives, can we fit ourselves into theirs?

Last week, we decided to have dinner with Grandpa Zhou. Instead of bringing him to a fancy restaurant, he came to our living room instead with a friend, and we talked over nothing more than a simple meal of packed rice with Chinese stir-fried vegetables, steamed egg and beancurd, food that he is used to and enjoys eating. There were options to take him to a fancy restaurant and places still well within our budget, there were options to order chicken, pork and other oriental delights but somehow, that idea reminded me of the lessons I had learnt from a movie Cliff introduced to me recently. “The Soloist”, a beautiful movie based on a true story of a journalist helping a man on the street. It subtly tells of a simple message that to help somebody, it very often means entering their world, and not fitting them into yours. Taking Grandpa Zhou to a fancy place, somehow seemed to score high on an individual feel-good scale, but I also saw how even during our wedding in the grand auditorium and cosy dinner venue, that he felt amiss among the well-dressed crowd. “Wei Jia, there’s nothing here for me to eat,” he had said, before we reassured him that the heavily disguised fish and yellowed rice really was just simple fish and rice.

Could it be that perhaps, to truly help and to truly love, we really need to renew our minds and change our positions, to enter in, instead of try to “fit in” something into our existing lives that would naturally be incongruent with our current state of life?

I want to go to the Soup Kitchen to help prepare food for the needy, but there is a Sunday service I am teaching at; a man with a disability whom we made friends with gave us his number to have dinner, but after having to reschedule because of a bible study meeting, must have felt rejected and told us to delete him from our contact list forever. Our lives seem to run on perfectly-oiled precision, with hardly room for interruption.

Could it be the same for Christmas? That so many of us try to fit in a church service on this season of shopping and holidaying and frivolous games, instead of grounding ourselves on what’s important, and scheduling the other things around it? Could it be that so many of us try to fit God into our lives, when He in fact is the very gravity that makes our life existent?

Could it be, that the very things we try to fit into our lives, is what we should fit our lives into?

Perhaps.

Because after all, I was reminded today, at our church’s Christmas play which Cliff was a part of,  that God, for all his might and power, didn’t try to fit us into His schedule either. Instead, he came to walk, talk, eat and breathe amongst us, fitting Himself and weaving Himself intricately into our lives and permanently into history… and perhaps, that is just a glimpse of what truly “fitting in” looks like.

 

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”

 – John 1:14a