Safety, Peace and Happiness

There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared, it is itself the great venture and can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to want to protect oneself. Peace means giving oneself completely to God’s commandment, wanting no security, but in faith and obedience laying the destiny of the nations in the hand of Almighty God, not trying to direct it for selfish purposes. Battles are won, not with weapons, but with God. They are won when the way leads to the cross.


Metaxas, Eric; Timothy J. Keller (2010-04-20). Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (p. 241). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

And there is no happiness without peace. Fortunately happiness, peace and safety do come quantized. We would be very miserable.

If we aren't happy, fewer children would be born. Foreigners who become PRs or citizens having successfully adapted themselves to our way of life would naturally be like us producing a dearth of babies.

We are obsessed with finding "safe pair of hands". What does it mean down the road? Unless we change our paradigm, we are sitting on a social and political time bomb in Singapore.

There is more to safety that Bonhoeffer did to elaborate. It is boring and predictable, a real struggle for the next generation to do better living within a box as it is unsafe outside it. We can try to enlarge that box, but it will always be a box. Just another way to explain LKY's 'Hard Truths'. We can slowly die from meaningless boredom. We find it hard to imagine how our children can do better than us. To close our wombs is to a society committing suicide without staring into the face of death which is too dreadful.

The truth must set you free. If it fails to do that, it is a lie dressed up as truth.

If we we cannot find reasons to be hungry and we keep our society hungry by importing hungry people that just doesn't sound right isn't it? We are giving them so much opportunities. What are they offering us in return?

By all means stay safe, but not at the cost of life's infinite possibilities.