Reflections
These numbers were taken from the Straits Times Special Report on 23 Dec 2006. I saved it and would like to take some time to process it now.

Strife: 3.6 million people killed in war since 1980
Poverty: 1.1 billion people living on less than $1.50 a day
Disaster: 91 million people affected by 267 natural disasters in first eight months of 2006
Child Victims: 8.4 million children working as forced labourers or sex workers
Disease: 39.5 million people infected with HIV in the world
Battered women: 1 billion women who have been beaten, coerced into sex or abused

How do I make sense of this world I live in?
The truth is....I've had a very blessed life and I can't relate to all those numbers. I gloss over them and there's not much empathy. I'm just a tiny little carbon unit living on a small red dot of an island in the backwaters of a blue planet - one of a multitude in the vast universe.
Most of the time, I'm pretty obsessed about my life and the lives of people close to me. It takes intentional effort to think beyond that.

ST interviewed several religious leaders and I like Father Simon Pereira's quote the best. He said:
I'm a great believer in the One Person theory. Change begins with the individual. It just takes one person to reach out, bring it forward.

In a nutshell, I believe the one person that makes all the difference in this mess of a world we live in is God the Son, aka Jesus Christ. The human race was rescued some 2000 years ago, and there is reason to hope in better things to come.