Ding Dong

(Source: yousaidokay)

All these things are against me (Gen. 42:36)

All things work together for good to them that love God (Rom. 8:28)

                Many people are wanting power. Now how is power produced? The other day we passed the great works where the trolley engines are supplied with electricity. We heard the hum and roar of the countless wheels, and we asked our friend, “How do they make the power?”

                “Why,” he said, “just by the revolution of those wheels and the friction they produce. The rubbing creates the electrical current.”

                And so, when God wants to bring more power into your life, He brings more pressure. He is generating spiritual force by hard rubbing. Some do not like it and try to run away from the pressure, instead getting the power and using it to rise above the painful causes.

                Opposition is essential to a true equilibrium of forces. The centripetal and centrifugal forces acting in opposition to each other keep our plant in her orbit. The one propelling, and the other repelling, so act and react, that instead of sweeping off into space in a pathway of desolation, she pursues her even orbit around her solar center.

                So God guides our lives. It is not enough to have an impelling force – we need just as much a repelling force, and so He holds us back by the testing ordeals of life, by the pressure of temptation and trial, by the things that seem against us, but really are furthering our way and establishing our goings.

                Let us thank Him for both, let us take the weights as well as the wings, and thus divinely impelled, let us press on with faith and patience in our high and heavenly calling.

-A.B Simpson

There are a million things to be said or written about struggle and suffering but I suppose I just wanted to relay some encouraging words I recently heard from a dear, close brother of mine. Whether this post is for me writing to myself or to my “followers” (the dilemma that every tumblr writer faces when posting something), I just want to ensure that I can look back at what I wrote in the future so I won’t forget these words.

“Prepare for the worst, hope for the best” – English Proverb

I want to preface this with my interpretation of this seemingly wise proverb.

When a difficult situation arises, I believe there are generally two outcomes:

• an outcome to your desire that will encourage you in a positive way

OR

• an outcome to your fear that will create a struggle that will serve as a sharp and difficult tool of refinement. 

Moreover, in those times of struggle, to make it seemingly more bearable/less painful, one must take appropriate action to prepare for it

No doubt everyone is going to encounter adversities in their lives but I think what distinguishes people who we admire/respect from the norm is how extensively they grow and overcome those hardships. I thought this motto would help me to become one of those people who can seemingly address fully and completely that struggle and ultimately conquer it. Initially, I saw no flaw to this saying for living by this idea readied me for the good and bad times in life. I thought of how each situation can develop in both the worst and in best/ideal outcomes and would take actions to be ready for each respective result. I started thinking in ultimatums, and unfortunately during the hard times, the fear of the “worst” situation became an unhealthy fixation.

But what happens when either situation doesn’t come immediately? What happens when you’re stuck in this position of ambivalence for months or perhaps years? What happens when you’ve exhausted yourself in preparing for every situation and a definitive outcome still hasn’t come?

This is where I realized a huge flaw in this way of thinking. Yes, we can prepare for the “worst” situation and ready ourselves in a spirit of acceptance – there’s some sense of clarity and we can take steps to achieve closure relatively immediately. But, the flaw arose because living a life of ultimatums fails to address the waiting and I think I can say with some confidence that the waiting is the hardest part. And as a result, it created a huge lack of discipline in my heart. Yes, I was disciplined in my preparation but I wasn’t nearly disciplined enough for the waiting. Perhaps I’ve become too conditioned by the desire of the instantaneous in our generation’s culture but nevertheless, the period of uncertainty absolutely tore me apart.

[14] Wait for the LORD;

                                be strong, and let your heart take courage;

                                wait for the LORD!                                                                                           (Psalm 27:14 ESV)

[3] More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, [4] and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, [5] and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

(Romans 5:3-5 ESV)

I think that I, along with I believe many of us, seriously are lacking in the production of endurance that Paul writes about in verse 3. This endurance is what gets us through the waiting, what allows our hearts to take that courage and use that period to become stronger.

Because I kept thinking and waiting for those definitive outcomes, I became impatient, apathetic and bitter. But the results that ultimately frightened me the most is that I stopped looking to Christ, clinging to the Gospel and walking with the God that was/is faithful to me. I became so discouraged by the lack of response or “signs” that I simply stopped walking with Him.

This is when God spoke to me through my friend into my life and smacked me in the face with the Gospel.

“I understand that your struggles are hard and I can’t imagine what you’re going through right now but I do empathize with you deeply. However, there’s something deeply wrong with the way you’re approaching the situation. 

We hear and repeat the phrase, ‘Christianity is not a religion but a relationship’, hundreds of times right? So when we encounter God, we understand and learn more about His character, yes? Now, think of this, when you stop being in contact with a person, both you and that person are indubitably going to change. And if you lose contact for a long period of time, you’re going to forget that person’s subtle mannerisms.

So let me ask you this: how will you know when that person is trying to show you something?

How will you be able to see the subtleties in His character when you stop talking to him?

God is reaching out to you dude, He’s always there. You need to keep walking with Him to notice and understand the small signs that He’s throwing your way. The Gospel isn’t something you cling to just when you need answers or divine intervention, but it’s something you cling to so that you can live.”

My lacking discipline showed itself painfully too well in the midst of my struggles.

I thought that Christ has turned a deaf ear onto me when I became deaf to His cries to me.

I thought that praying for a definitive outcome was enough when prayer is absolutely essential for me to live.

I thought that these things were to keep me away from Him when Christ wanted me to use these things to get closer to Him.

For those of you skimming through this post, I ask you to really start reading here:

The importance of discipline is that it allows us to maximize our growth in times of adversities. When we know Christ and are disciplined in our efforts to keep in contact with Him, we can catch the beautiful details of His character and understand His love that much deeper in the midst of the dreadful waiting period of our struggling. As David admonishes us to Wait for the Lord, I am doing my best to receive that invitation to be strong and develop courage rooted in the Lord. 

I always wondered why it’s “Walk with the Lord”… Why couldn’t it be “Arrive with the Lord”?

It’s not just about the end but rather it’s about the journey that we take with Christ daily so that we can fall in love with Christ and the beautiful complexities of His character in the fullest extent.

In the event of Easter, the resurrection, the very pinnacle of the entire belief system of Christianity, I found myself uninspired. The optimist in me wants to say that it’s because I believe that everyday should be Easter and the “level of inspiration/revelation/renewal” is constant. The pessimist in me wants to say that it’s because I am so complacent that (as hard as it is to say it) the thought of the resurrection brings no spike in the “level of inspiration/revelation/renewal”.

Yet I have the confidence that Christ knows what’s inside my heart better than I can articulate. As much as my heart is cluttered, confused and crowded at the moment, meditating on the cross seems what is needed for me to first decipher and organize what’s in my heart and most importantly, place things into the right (Gospel) perspective. If I am to take anything from Easter this year, I think it has to be a renewal of placing my life into a Gospel perspective. Instead of a boost of religious fervor, I think I’m satisfied in the betterment of my understanding in living a Gospel-centered life. It’s so easy to say because it’s so abstract and we frequently encourage each other to do it but I think I’m beginning to understand the gravity of the reality in living the Gospel.

Perspective —> View —> Perception

Human perception is so hard to grasp at times and even with the knowledge I gained about the endeavors of numerous psychologists who try to define, quantify and explain human perception. However, I feel that when placed in the perspective of the Gospel, and the actual nature of God, all these explanations mean absolutely nothing.

How do you explain

How do you describe

A love that goes from east to west

And runs as deep as it is wide

So listen to our hearts

As inarticulate and inadequate the voice of my heart is right now in its current state, I know one thing is clear: I am truly grateful and in awe of the cross and all that it pertains. My heart, in the midst of all this confusion, is yearning to place Christ in the heart of my heart. I am glad that God is placing something in my life that I need to wrestle with for I know, later in hindsight, my personal growth and His divine purpose will become clearer. Whether it is optimism or pessimism, it doesn’t matter because it’s not a matter of a state of mind but in the end it is all irrelevant because it’s simply an understanding of the truth that is the Gospel. 

I wanted to write this amazing post where I would eloquently write paragraphs upon paragraphs sharing my experience from One Love at La Villa, Texas but as much as I love the tumblr culture and how it allows me to express my thoughts, experiences, revelations and frustrations, I think that if I share the entirety of my experience here, I wouldn’t be able to build a one-on-one relationship with those who read it, which I believe that tumblr is flawed. 

So, if you’d like to find out about my experience about One Love and how I blessed I was, call me up, shoot me an email, or grab a meal with me, because I really learned the value of relational ministry and whoever you are, I want to personally tell YOU. I’m legitimately excited to talking with you and sharing stories about the people I met, the memories I created with them and my team members and most importantly, having fellowship with you.

It has been a while since I last updated and I’m pretty sure that this entry is going to be verrryyy long…

Massachusetts General Hospital

I suppose I’ll start with when I went to Massachusetts General Hospital a few weeks back with a good friend of mine. He just received surgery to realign his bone fracture in his ankle and he wanted me to come to keep his family updated during the operation. The operation went smoothly and he’s recovering very well. I hate to make this experience about me but I can’t contain the revelation that God showed me.

I remember when we first walked in, I said jokingly to him, saying, “maybe after this whole experience, I’ll blog about how eye-opening the hospital atmosphere really is”. I kind of regret joking about it because I truly was blown away with the lessons God showed me that day. After my friend went into pre-op, I was instructed to go down to the Gray Surgical Family Waiting Room where nurses would keep me updated minute to minute on my friend’s operation. When I walked in, I was greeted by the nicest two elderly women dressed in the pinkest of scrubs and informed me of how my friend was, what the operation is exactly going to entail, and basically anything and everything I needed to know so that I could keep my friend’s parents properly updated.

It was the beginning of midterm season and I brought a lot of work to do and was determined to get a lot of work done during my time there. But before I started studying, I sat down for a moment to kinda engage the environment I was in and I suppose I was expecting for my preconception (my representative heuristics or schemas for my fellow psych majors out there) of what a waiting room was really like due to the countless episodes of Scrubs, Grey’s Anatomy, and E.R. I watched in my life to be fulfilled but the real thing is always different. In the waiting room, there are two small separate rooms in the back left corner where either the doctors themselves would come down to inform families the outcome of their respective operations (good and unfortunately bad) or the doctors would call and the families would talk to them through an small, antiquated red phone.

The people walking into the room would always walk in with the same look of this heavy burden on their shoulders and some families would walk with a sense of lightness, and some families don’t… After watching some people, I decided to move to a table where I could some work done and the only table with enough space in the entire waiting was half-occupied by a women in her sixties, doing her crossword puzzle. I sat down, unpacked quietly, plugged in my iPod and blasted “Half of My Heart” by John Mayer and started working. I had no intention of talking with anyone because I really needed to study but that wasn’t what God had in mind for me that day.

About an hour into studying, the women on the other half of the table asked me what I was studying so intently. We then exchanged some basic things about ourselves to keep the conversation friendly but we both hesitated into reallyhaving a conversation. I finally worked up the nerve to ask her why she’s here and who she’s waiting for. She then shared with me that she was waiting for her husband for the past six hours (it was about 11 am at the time) due to the complex surgery he was having. I then told her I was waiting for a friend but I wasn’t nearly as worried about him as she was about her husband. She shared a little about her husband’s condition but she struggled to hold back tears with each word of description. She kept saying, “well that’s life is, and you just got to deal with it, you know?”

I honestly had no idea what to say at this point because I’ve never been in this situation before but I wanted to console her in any way I could but the words that I thought to say seemed so cliche and empty that I felt like it would hurt her more than help. Nevertheless, I did my best to keep the conversation going because when it got quiet, she would just keep thinking about her husband and just close herself off. Eventually, the doctor finally came down and had a talk with her in that small waiting room in the back and I remember giving her a “thumbs up” before she went in as a sign of encouragement. She chuckled and her eyes seemed to reply to me, saying “oh what a naive child he is”, which I admittedly am.

She came back looking the same as she was before she left but when she sat down, she just kept staring into the table, absorbing every word that the doctor had said to her. I gently asked her how’d the operation go with her husband and after working up the courage to speak, she said that they had remove one of his lungs because they found cancer there and the thing about lung cancer is that it could spread to five other organs in the body (heart, liver, brain, i forgot the other two) but he survived the surgery. After telling me this, she broke into tears and was told me she was embarrassed that she was breaking down in front of a complete stranger. I could tell that she was such a strong women and she didn’t want any other family or friends to be with her in this time of weakness but she couldn’t help feel so alone and broken.

I still no idea what exactly to say but I remember telling myself to stop thinking about the words and as cliche as it sounds, I spoke from my heart. I told her about my family and how we struggled with a cancer scare earlier this year as well. It started from there and I just poured out my heart to her because at that moment, my heart felt so heavy for her because I remembered the suffocating and drowning feeling that you get when you find out someone close to you could even have the slightest possibility to die. To my surprise, she started to share everything very openly as well and for the next couple of hours + lunch, we talked about everything, and I mean everything.

She had said that she grew up in the Catholic Church but had a bitter feeling towards religion because of her situation and I don’t think anyone can blame her for feeling that way. In our conversation though, I felt as if she never really got to say things so freely and perhaps in her lifetime, she didn’t have many opportunities to share her story. She had so many things to say and so many burdens to let go of. I’m really glad to have interacted with her that day because I really saw that just the action of sharing life stories and struggles with people is just an amazing way to really build relationships with people, even people you’ve never met. I think people today just lack the initiative and willingness to become so vulnerable to another individual because of the heavy concern on maintaining a certain self-image.

Like Pastor Eugene said a couple weeks back, share your stories, and don’t be afraid to say the things that make you who you are.