I’m not the most patriotic person around.

I don’t volunteer with the grassroots and I’m completely oblivious to any community events held in my constituency. Truth be told, I don’t really care.

And I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way. I scroll through Facebook every morning and resonate with my friends’ angry posts about yet another train breakdown.

I read news articles on our upcoming Presidential Election and I lol within.

Don’t even get me started on how the lift in my HDB block is faulty half the time. As I write this, the lights in my lift haven’t been working for a week already.

To be completely honest, my mind starts drifting whenever the next prayer item at any church event is “Singapore”.

This is how emotionally detached I can be when it comes to this country. My heart is always yearning to be somewhere else.

But then I walked the different lands, met the people, tasted the food … and realised there is no other country like the one we’ve been placed in.

Have you noticed? Singaporeans are a funny bunch — we tend to become so much more defensive over our country when we are overseas.

We get upset when people mistake our country as being somewhere else. I remember being continuously mistaken as a Mainland Chinese while overseas. When they realised I was of Chinese descent but spoke English natively, their next assumption was: Oh, Malaysian?

There are many things we can complain about our home. Yet there are also many things we can be thankful for.

Another time I was overseas at a busy traffic light where the locals just dashed across between cars and motorcycles. I stood at a safe distance and waited for the green man that never seemed to come. I stood out like a sore thumb in a jaywalking crowd. But suddenly I heard a familiar voice behind me.

“Eh, wait lah! The cars so fast, traffic light changing already.”

Singaporeans!

I can’t even describe to you the joy I felt in that moment.

There are many things we can complain about our home. Yet there are also many things we can be thankful for.
I recently came across an article on National Geographic documenting the homes of tens of thousands of Hong Kong people.

Just like us, these people lived normal, humble and hardworking lives.

But the difference – their homes were approximately the size of a coffin. Many can’t even stand up straight in their homes.

In Singapore, even the flats under our Public Rental Scheme are at least 10 times the size of those “coffin homes”. In comparison, our public housing system looks almost too good to be true.

Yet we complain.

My mother left behind her life in a neighbouring country as a young 20-something and arrived in Singapore about 30 years ago in hope of a better life. A brighter future.

You wouldn’t want to live back there, she told me.

True enough, on one occasion when we went back to visit some relatives, the local customs officers demanded for a bribe for us to pass. Their reason: Our bags were too big, despite them being completely within the airline’s regulations.

I feel very much relieved every time I return from overseas and pass through customs, knowing that I’m in good hands.

There’s much to be thankful for.

I have a house to return to. I have a roof over my head and a bed to sleep in every night – with air-conditioning as a bonus.

I go to church and I can speak publicly about my faith without worry.

We have easy access to our favourite social media platforms. We don’t have to consider migration to escape some poor provincial life. We don’t live in constant fear.

Singapore may not be the most perfect country, but I choose to be thankful for what we have.

As controversial as it may seem, I’m also thankful that we are a “democratic secular state“. In this I am talking about how our Government can’t and won’t use some claimed higher spiritual authority as an excuse for violence – as happens so easily and often in many other nations.

Timothy Keller writes in Making Sense of God that there is yet a truly secular state that exists with “a genuinely pluralistic society” and a “marketplace of ideas” in which people of all kinds of faith, including those with secular beliefs, could freely contribute, communicate, coexist, and cooperate in mutual respect and peace”.

I beg to differ. Singapore may not be the most perfect country, but I choose to be thankful for what we have. It sounds schmaltzy, but it’s taken a lot for me to reach this understanding.

Home is the place we’ve been called to love, to serve and to protect. It is the land that God has placed us in, to work it and take care of (Genesis 2:15). Our country has been blessed with much.

While there is always as much fault as we can find with this country, there will always be things to give thanks for (1 Thessalonians 5:18).

So while there might still be a long, long way to go for us in the “I ❤️ SG” department, I’m sure if we take a moment to think about it, we’ll easily find one thing we’re thankful for this National Day. And not just because it’s National Day.