Shiney.

Sunday, January 07, 2007

My chapter in Montreal is closed and in the blink of an eye, I'm starting a new semester back in (good old) NUS. I need a sense of closure. That's reason enough to blog.

In retrospect, God has been faithful. He has been gracious to me. I am so thankful for the new friends He has brought into my life as well as the old friends who have kept in touch and stayed the course with me through the years and across the distance, very literally across time and space.

I am thankful for my family - ever and always just a phone call away.

I am thankful for the Christian mentors He has surrounded me with - people with big hearts for people. Through them, I am inspired to grow deeper and be more surely grounded in my faith.

I am thankful for Khim and Kent, for welcoming me to Montreal, showing me the sights and being my Canadian family.

I am thankful for People's Church, which God placed so strategically opposite the main gates of McGill's campus. It's a small church with a BIG heart for international students.

I am thankful for the Sing-Malaysia gang and the strange, unexpectedly tight bonds we forged between our otherwise incongruent selves under even stranger circumstances.

I am thankful for the pseudo-international gang for making my social circle almost(if not quite) funkily international.

I am thankful for the mild winter, despite my complaints about the lack of snow over Christmas time. You know I really was thankful for Your grace with the weather. I smile every time I think of the morning the day before I left Montreal. I sat up in bed, looked out the window and saw the world outside covered in a soft blanket of fresh, white snow. And it was still snowing. You know how I smiled and smiled.

I am thankful for the sum of experiences that consitute the image of Montreal in my mind. They are photos, snapshots of moments past. Still-life.

Montreal Time for me has passed and is now gone, but thankfully, the people I hold dear are still around and still very much alive. They are living right now in Montreal, in a parallel world.

Every now and then I intend to reconnect with that world.

I guess I'm infinitely thankful for those undersea cables that snake across vast distances, those electrical and optical signals that run round-the-clock relays, effortlessly skipping across time zones the way no human traveller ever could.

Emails, phonecalls and msn. Every now and then.

But for now, I need closure.

planted @ 4:35 PM