Jehovah Jireh

Being in social services hasn't been quite what I expected to be. Heck, every job has it's "unexpectancy". Maybe I had too rosy a picture of what I thought social services to be.

I'm not even dealing directly with the beneficiaries.

What I really wanted to do was to hear the youths who are hurting inside themselves. Though in the past I couldn't really understand and get along with people like J and C from the previous company, somehow getting to know people like them, which are out of my usual circle of friends and comfort zone, made a little more interested towards this group of young hurting girls.

Although I cannot say I completely understand how they feel because I have never experienced what they each went through, I can imagine the immense pain they went through. To put myself in their shoes, I would feel terrible.

I think I would prefer to do groundwork actually. Honestly I don't 100% buy the "mobilising more people would effect greater change than just me one person doing it" thing. I absolutely agree that this is true but perhaps ... I'm not convicted of it.

I have always preferred direct service, which is why I did web design and development in the past. Because I needed to see the fruit of my labour, which you can't really get when you're just editing 100 over lines out of 1000 lines of code on a black screen called MSDOS.

I think I have the desire to be a social worker to a certain extent (though I remember telling Hao before that I would NEVER want to be one - oops), but I don't have the courage to do so, because I'm afraid to be wrong accessing my own desires and capabilities. I look at the youths from our youth centre and I know I cannot 'reach out' to them. Maybe I'm having a limited mentality, but let's just say that well, if you know yourself well enough, you should know what kind of people you can get along with and what kind you might not. Nobody is perfect.

In the end I realised that all I wanted is to take an interest in somebody's life and change the person - but you know what, everybody wants to be the hero and nobody wants to do the work.

Got this from a Chinese period drama (Legend of the Twin Dragons), something like "Every soldier must die. But when you die, it must be for a worthy cause." I view having a career in a similar way. I may not be able to escape having to work hard for finances (unless I marry a rich guy), I may not be able to escape working overtime; but at least if I have to work so hard, it must be for a worthy cause, so to speak. In other words, the sacrifice (be it in terms of lesser finances or other tangibles or intangibles) must be worth it.

Right now, I am being told to stop being self-righteous and let go of what I think is a fair and just way of administering things. I find myself losing my enthusiasm and becoming somewhat jaded. It's like what's the point of doing social services if I'm supposed to just sit and not question, not fight, and just surrender. I might as well go back to doing web. (Ok, this entry is worded rather loosely so I bet you can find some loophole in what I just wrote because I am not proof-reading the content to make sure it sufficiently expresses what I feel to the point.)

This is exactly the very thing social services staff are being warned against, and yet so many falter into. I don't even do direct service and I feel this way. I feel a bit burned out, or on the verge of being so.

It's that kind of feeling like you just want to drop everything.

If I could choose, I would quit everything and go for a real long holiday. Like a month or so.

I wish I can do freelance but the responsibilities of real-world finances forbid that horribly. It makes me feel entrapped, though even in the midst of this I strive to remember that I have an even bigger God who is Jehovah Jireh.