The Forerunner Times

"A life journal by Nathan J. Elias, called under God's grace to be His forerunner and restorer for His glory."

Click here to read the first part

As the first part has gone unfinished for such a long time, I decided that it’s time to wrap everything up and write the second part for this article before everyone want to be immortals.

Today, let’s take a look at Ecclesiastes written by none other than Solomon. It’s sometimes dubbed by people as the “Vanity Book” because he examines all things and found out that everything is vanity (1:14) and there is nothing new under the sun (1:9). This also includes works that we think might be useful for humanity and mankind, but actually it is not worth anything in the long run.

Think about this, maybe you’ll spend years of your life trying to make that social organization for humanity and let’s say you achieve it by the time you’re 30 or 35. You’ll be running it for 40 years or 50 years if your life permits. After that? The control will go to someone else, maybe your children or something else, and it might fail then. There can also be disasters, economic breakdowns and many things that will render this useless. What you build in years might be going down crashing in one day.

So what will we do then? Entrust it to Jesus.

You’re thinking that you’ll doing something big, but maybe what you’ll do is only making a small picture. As in a puzzle, maybe you’re thinking big but in the end you’ll just end up being a 3x3 or 4x4 puzzle, because you did it in your own. God knows what He’s doing and He has the masterplan for thousands of years into the future, heck, even into eternity He knows all. So what are we compared to Him?

In all our life maybe what we’ll do is just a 40 years service to humanity and even so it only reaches a limited number of people. But with God’s masterplan, even though you feel you’re small and you’re not doing much and nothing big, actually God might be using you as a part of His 1,000,000 pieces puzzle. Even though you feel you’re only one puzzle piece while you see others and they seem like they are a 4x4 puzzle pieces, rest assured that no matter how small you are, you are a part of God’s wonderful and magnificent plan. You might not see the results straight away, maybe not even in your lifetime. Ruth and Rahab seemed to be just no-ones in the long story of the Bible, but in the end, they actually have some significant part in the long upcoming of Jesus and the big picture of God’s plans.

So what will you do? Be an immortal without God or be a mere mortal with an immortal, vast, unlimited God?

I think the answer is clear now.

Click here to read the propechy.

This is an old propechy by a Dr. Samuel Doctorian back there in 1998. At that time, no one believed this was true and I was even skeptical as most people giving propechies nowadays are usually just making things up and nothing of them would really happened. But as I look back during the recent years, strangely things from this propechy are starting to happen. Let’s take a look at what is happening, shall we?

First Angel (Asia)
Earthquakes. The Earth will fall into the sea. Isn’t this what is happening in Indonesia right now? There are also stories of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in Phillipines according to a friend of mine. I don’t know if this directly coincides with the current developments in Indonesia or not, some of you might be aware that Indonesia is slowly turning into an Islamic country with the even-moslems-hate-them FPI and FBR rampaging all over the place acting like they’re the law of the nation - and even the new laws and rules made by the government seems to be more in favor of the moslems and opposing the Christian. Is the end time coming near with the trumpet call?

And I don’t know what will happen in Australia, as this nation is regarded with a specific mention in this part, saying that it will be divided and some parts will sink to the ocean. Might this be happening soon? If yes, maybe this is the reason why God sent a friend of mine back from Melbourne to Jakarta? Let us pray together for Asia.

Second Angel (Middle East)
Remember that this propechy was made in 1998. In these 8 years many things have happened and blood has been shed there. US invaded Iraq. The tension between Israel and Palestine escalated and lately we have the Israeli invasion to Libanon. Middle East crisis… this is coming true too. Though I do not know why the Israeli would need to do this.

Third Angel (Europe)
No news of flooding, no part of Germany has been destroyed and no hunger in Spain and Portugal. But although the Eiffel Tower is still there, there was a problem with riots in France a while back before the World Cup, if you remember. And there were also bombings happening in London. I don’t know if the others will happen, but if it does, it will be very sad.

Fourth Angel (Africa)
I haven’t been following news from Africa, so please fill me in.

Fifth Angel (America)
The large scale destruction haven’t happened and no flood as of yet. But with the skyscrapers tumbling, suddenly I remember the World Trade Centre 911 incident, maybe it is what is meant by the propechy?

Conclusion and Promise
“All glory to the Lord of heaven and earth. Now the time has come and He will glorify His Son. The earth shall be burned and destroyed. All things shall pass away. The new Heaven and New Earth shall come. God shall destroy the works of the devil forever. I shall show My power - how I will protect My children in the midst of all this destruction.”

Well that is His promise, so I think… we shall not fear. Let’s keep in prayer and faith though, as these things might be happening sooner than expected, if it turns out that this whole propechy is true. To be honest, I am still not convinced that this is 100% too, but nevertheless, we should place our lives in the hands of our loving God.

Hello people.

Sorry for the lack of posts since I returned to Indonesia on 14th July, there was no decent Internet connection over there. I was busy with exams even before that and in Indonesia I was also busy with my friend’s marriage and some activities, but I’ll leave that for later. Today, I will talk about Brian Littrell.

You may not be familiar with the name, but if I tell you that he is the Brian from the Backstreet Boys, you’ll know right away who he is. Just this year (or maybe near the end of last year), he turned back to his roots, singing Christian music. He was raised in a Christian environment and was a prominent member of his church’s choir and he was on his way to university (seemingly a Christian one) before he made a turning point in his life when he joined the Backstreet Boys and gained fame and popularity all over the world. But it seems that God has a plan for all of us His children, and in the age of 31, there he is, back singing for the LORD.

The single he recorded before his first Christian solo album “Welcome Home” , “In Christ Alone” (an old song actually from 1993-1994), won the 2006 GMA Awards for the Inspirational Song of the Year and also ranked #1 in Christian charts in the U.S. He later moved on to create this “Welcome Home” album, and this album told his life story with Christ.

The album is nice to hear, though it still have some Backstreet Boys-music influence. The single, “Welcome Home” is basically the story of the Prodigal Son from the Bible we all know, but it also reflects the story of Littrell’s own, when he went away from the Father’s home to “be who he is”, the Father is never far, and He promised if he return, He will greet him with open arms - thus the beautiful story of the song. There are also songs like “My Answer Is YOU”, where he told that the answer of all his life is in God and that’s why he placed this song in the first track of the album - because it’s the answer to the questions to him, like why he changed from Backstreet Boys to Christian Music etc.

This is the video where he explains his change to Christian music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0vdC6rGylE

And this is Brian Littrell’s “Welcome Home (You)” Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUifQ2nzO1I

In this day and age where more and more Christian artists turned secular, it’s always nice to see a famous artist like Brian willing to step down from fame and sing again for the LORD. Welcome home, Brian. We missed you.

The Road That Ends Here will tell you the summary about two months of my life in this Merlion country. It will have six chapters, corresponding to the six terms that I will endure in this one year. The idea about the title comes from a journey to hike a mountain. I imagine that getting my master degree is like enduring a long mountain path. Between the summit and the peak, there will be five stopping points to rest and regain strength (this is Chapter I through Chapter V). After the five stopping points, if I still endure, then I will reach the peak and reach my final destination (Chapter VI). Enjoy these stories and may the tales bring you new strength and encouragement to reach your goal.

Chapter II

Disastrous.

There’s no word that can better describe what is happening in this term, it was pure two months of crazyness. Both in terms of assignments and quality of lecturer, the latter being so far worse that what we received in the first term. Both of the classes simply lacked interest, which led to many of us skipping classes and sleeping at home (especially for morning classes) because these classes were simply downright useless and not meaningful at all. Heck, with the material given we can just study it at home ourselves and get through them.

Take the Entrepreneurship class for example. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but it feels like he’s just doing a book review or summary of Peter Drucker’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship. It’s like every second he’s referring to that book - Drucker this, Drucker that - that we couldn’t help but start to think that rather than paying S$2,000 for this class, it would have been better just to buy the damn book for $50 (which is really boring anyhow) and study it ourselves. If you have a chance to look at the Drucker book and the material book I got from my campus, you’ll see what I mean right away.

What’s worse is that the assignments are heavy duty AND we are just thrown at it right away. Sure, it’s an Entrepreneurship class. Sure, entrepreneurs have to know how to make a Business Plan. But how the heck can you just expect someone to make a good 30-pages Business Plan without explaining anything at all to the class? It was very hard for us to do that when we didn’t understand anything about financials (break even analysis, cost volume profit analysis, budgeting and so on), contingency planning, control, strategic management etc. This was only our second term, hello? It makes sense if you ask us to make this in the last term, but hello? There must be something wrong with the way our classes were arranged. So in the end, got so-so grade for these assignments and what’s worse was the exam, because what he said would come out and what finally came out were so different it shocked many students. He’s a man who can’t seem to keep his own words, apparently. Maybe we can sue him or something.

The Data Management class’ problem was that it was too technical for business student’s standards, coupled with a strange “hand-gesture all around lecturer” which can’t seem to catch our interest and make us understand, it was very very boring, even for me who was an IT graduate it felt very boring and dragged out. The only interesting day during this class was in the presentation day where groups of student present on topics of new technologies they’ve been assigned on. I certainly feel that most of the groups presented way better than the lecturer, in that they managed to spark interest and had some really interesting material after all. That should say much about the quality of the lecturer. It strengthens the beliefs that IT guys can’t teach, because they can’t communicate well with human. But at least the exam for this subject is not that hard because he told us exactly what and which parts will come out in the exam.

Glad this term is over…

Thank goodness for the World Cup in this term which helped to relieve my stress (as you can see from my posts during the cup). And it was also the reason why I skipped so many morning classes. Better watch a good match and skip a boring class rather than skip the good match and attend the boring class eh?

Related Links:
The Road That Ends Here, Chapter I (May 2006)
The Road That Ends Here, Chapter III (September 2006)
The Road That Ends Here, Chapter IV (November 2006)

Some matches I think I’d highlight…

Italy vs France
Well, there won’t be much to say on this day except that Zizou headbutting incident, but personally I think Materazzi should have kept his mouth shut. It was an unfortunate turn of events for the French side, maybe if Nesta wasn’t injured and was playing, things would have been very different. Materazzi was the one to give away the penalty, which Zidane scored, but a few minutes later he made amends when he scored that header from the corner. Really, there can’t be a worse way to end a career here and I feel bad for Zizou. But that’s it, the maestro will take his leave from football and hopefully when we remember him, it is not this that we remember. At least he got the Golden Ball to take home…

England vs Portugal
www.ihateronaldo.com, enough said.

Really, someone should smack that Ronaldo kid for butting in to other people’s affairs and for his divings. What the heck was that wink for? Rooney should go smack him, and I don’t think he would dare to return to Manchester United, else he might be killed by the hooligans. If David Beckham - an Englishman himself - can receive that kind of treatment in 1998 for getting a red card and crushing England’s hopes, how much worse can Ronaldo get, when he’s not an Englishman and he got an Englishman red-carded and seems happy even about that? This kid should be taught some manners, rather than crying, he should be smacked down off the pitch sometimes.

Germany vs Portugal
Serves ‘em right, cheaters! Go cry boy! Cry! If you wanna cry don’t play, go home to momma!

The Bastian kid really wreak havoc here, all three German goals came from him. The first and third goal was superb screamers, and the second goal was an own goal from Petit, which resulted from a Schweinsteiger free kick. I wonder why they didn’t play him against Italy, else things might have turned out very differently for them. With Ballack and several other key players out, it really became Bastian’s one-man show and he really sparked that night, even putting Figo out of the limelights, though he managed to lay a perfect cross for Nuno Gomes to put that header in. Yeah… I also wonder why they didn’t play Nuno Gomes more often, he is a good player.

Oh well, the World Cup is over, gotta tend to my exams then. Sleepless nights continue…