11:11.

"When I feel afraid, Your Love, it covers me"
- Enter In, Planet Shakers

Singapore perplexes me. Or maybe, I'm just perplexed.

I felt like blogging the last few days but when I sat down, could not write, so this is going to be a composite picture of sorts.

Queued up two and a half hours outside the indoor stadium on Saturday, to get into the Benny Hinn Crusade. As with all queues, in humid weather and a queue 12-people wide and hundreds upon hundreds deep, people grump and are not in the best of spirits. Heard some people saying they wouldn't have come if they knew it would be like this ("this" referring to the queue and wait). Heard others saying how the organisation could be way better and how to better it. They gave suggestions ("Open all doors") and so on. There was an entire family - two girls, one six and the other in her early teens, their parents and I presume, an aunty, just in front of me. They got my attention when the girl suddenly swung back and snapped at the mom, next to me, "I want to go home. I don't want to wait any more". The Mom placated her, the Dad - carrying the little girl, apparently the cause of this excursion 'cause she "goes in and out of the hospital"- looked passively frustrated, the Mom visibly flustered, the teenager annoyed in a very "caught" manner, a manner I remembered feeling before often so I could relate.

Folks from Indonesian, Sri Lankan, China, Malaysia, Korea were around us.

A Singaporean girl near to the back of me on the right said in Chinese to her friend, "The Indian man next to me keeps pushing me!"

Then later, as the crowd shuffles and some shoved forward once the queue started moving, the flustered mom told her husband, in Chinese, of another dark-skinned compatriot who "can really push".

Mind you, I understand how our colloquial language sounds rude at times or potentially rude when no such meaning is meant.

I also understand our multi racial make up and some of its dynamics.

But I didn't know what to think or how to feel. Every thing felt so us to me. So Singaporean.

The two day rally with three services - one a last minute add-on to accomodate the crowd - was filled to the brim every service with people left outside. So that's 10,000 people inside the venue every time. And the first service had 5,000 people left outside.

Numbers do speak.

But I was... confused. When Ps Hinn said on stage that this is a nation hungering for Jesus, when the friend I went with remarked the same, I was in dissonance.

Are we hungry?

Are we really hungry?

I don't know and I am sorry to even raise such pointed doubts. But numbers... I don't know. Singapore, my loved country, we get great speakers, we have many blessings, but do people go to such events as part of the sub-culture, do they go to witness spectacles, what is the condition of our heart, Singapore? What??

What.

Oh, what....

We all went through the queue. We all waited to get in. How many waited all the way 'cause it would seem a waste to leave halfway? How many left their hearts in the rush and shove of the classic push in?

I am perplexed.

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Planet Shakers would be here Thurs to Sat, at an AOG annual youth event. I've been trying to find info about the Planet Shakers conf for a while now and always came up empty. Last night, I realised when I checked out the AG website that ah, it is an AOG youth conf with Planet Shakers playing and Pastor Russell as main speaker alongside a number of local pastoral staff.

I was immediately hesitant, God help me. And to be truthful and perhaps to sound rather prissy, the fact that the night programme with the band is sold as "concert", that makes me apprehensive. 'cause you go into a concert and into worship with different attitudes. City Church and Planet Shakers have always been worship, not concert, from the time I attended. Before I was a regular attendee, the "concert" and "performance" connotations - since they are a recording band - played a part in me staying away but every week I attended, I had entered to worship and found it to be worship, not concert.

God help me. The local church youth sub-culture rouses ambivalent feelings in me. Here, I always been in a congregation where youth is minority, not majority and in a way, this arrangement sort of allowed me to stay away from a sub culture even as I am youth.

Back in Melb, I was deep in the youth ministry and identified with it completely. So what's this, girl? A kneejerk reaction? Maybe. Double standards? Possibly. Plain illogical stupidity? Very possible.

Here's a girl who feels for the international student ministry in Melb and who always felt drawn and still feels drawn to try to "look after" the young Asian foreigners here for work and study and yet she's so very hesistant here in her own backyard about her own countrymen.

Here's a girl who pray for her own nation with a real sense of ownership, and who yet, is so perplexed about her people.

What's up, girl? What's up.

Why does it seem that I am always less confusing when I am not in Sg?

Hypocrisy, double mindedness, fickle, weak, insincere, self-centeredness... I've run the whole gamut of description through in my head and still can't explain myself.

Maybe when somewhere else, we are all different and out of our home countries and can relate. And maybe when I am here, while I always felt and feel different, no one else share the same distinct unsettledness. Everyone is home.

I really don't know. It's so perplexing.

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I am wearing my U2 tee and Giordano shorts, the same get-up that were my home clothes too in Melb. These shorts have never felt so big. I don't know why. I think Mom ironed it. And as a sidenote, you know, I miss doing my own laundry at my own time, cooking when I want to, and ironing if I have to.

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During the rally, Hinn called out a young man from the crowd and prophesied over him a great calling and an "explosion within within one year" if the man would let go of a person standing between that anointing and him. Hinn asked the teenager - standing there with a shell shocked expression - if there is someone praying over him, he said his parents are pastors, Hinn called the parents on stage and the whole stadium reached out our hands and prayed for that young man.

I was tearing away. I always do when people get called out. And I know why.

On Sunday, while having ramen with a friend at Funan, lo and behold, that same family sat a table away from us. I glanced at them once, twice to ascertain their identity, thrice to observe and toyed with the idea of going over and talking to them, just asking questions, just me being curious, just me wanting to know what leads up to something so wow and what transpires after.

They seemed like such a normal family.

Sometimes, I wonder for so many of us, our default tone of voice is this flat, bored, potentially whiny, disinterested with the world, tone.

They spoke some Cantonese. The mom sounds like every other Singaporean mom, they talked about some people they know, I presume from church, he sounds like another teenager speaking to his parents non-excitedly and quite, dully.

You know what I mean. We all done it now and then, or always.

It made me more curious. I wanted to grill these people. I wanted to follow them about. See how they live. I wanted to know how often the parents pray for this son. I wanted to know does this young man love God with all his heart. I wanted to know, more.

The friend with me just started going to church and I didn't want to freak her out so I abstained. But I am perplexed. I am. I am. I am. Argh.

Yesterday, on my way back home while on the train, a lady sat at the seat right in front of me looked up at me with the same bored, disinterested stare so many people have.

I wanted to scream.

Despite knowing that many of them are possibly very happy, and I have no doubt, are interesting people, and I know they are all precious, that stare... so common and vacant and lifeless. It scared and still scares me and I was flustered - brow furrowed and caught up thinking - of the possibility that I will join their ranks come Monday when I become a working girl again.

I have nothing against work. In fact, I enjoy it.

What scares me beyond any thing you can conceive is the idea that that working life lot, trying to find meaning, not having time to do the things that matter, not having time to just spend an unplanned day in without the press of knowing a work day is coming and I have got to "make use" of a weekend to do the chores and every thing, spending time at work every day with half a heart not there and half a mind always looking forward to after-work or weekend before the cycle again begins.

I can do all that. I can.

And I can even be happy and keep against the vacant stare syndrome.

I can.

But I would like something else, Lord.

One day.

Please.