The reflecting theologian

To those who know what happened, the past months since the start of 2016 had been very stressful to me. In the preparation to my impending wedding this coming October, my future father-in-law decided to throw a few spanners into the wedding preparation by declaring that he was not comfortable with me as a life partner to his daughter because I am a full time Christian worker and more importantly because I come from a different family background from her.  The latter means that there are certain practices in my own family which are unthinkable in his worldview on how a family should function. This led to intense tensions between Angelina and myself. To compound the stress, NT Exegesis class was not that easy also and the stress of meeting the deadlines mean that I sometimes did not have the time to reflect deeper into the situations I was facing in my relationship.  However, studying the text of Philemon 15-20 reminded me of the way we should conduct our relationship ...

Recently I read this very interesting article on BBC magazine: China's 'leftover women', unmarried at 27 The story wrote that women above the age of 27 will be labelled as "leftover" in China. In more layman terminology, it is called "nobody wants" or 没人要. The phenomenon is consistent with my observations during my trips in China. I learned over there that people normally marry young, by the age of 25 or even younger. Local customs and practices make it easier for the couples to get married, primarily because the parents will pay for the expenses pertaining to the ceremony, pertaining to the housing and even pertaining to the car.  One side of the story is that people will then be pressurised to marry early, at the expense of thinking and working thru their relationship and building the foundation of marriage. This is after all not the days of their forefathers where marriages are arranged and fixed. In those cases, it gets easier because the c...