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| (after Bible Study)
Thought-sparker: 1 Thessalonians 2:8 “. . . we were ready to share with you . . . but also our own selves.”
And then we were talking about how to “share our own selves” and be more involved in people’s lives in such a big church like College Church.
Got some really inspiring discussions and reminders tonight. What I’m trying to say is just what I didn’t get to say. (As Dr. Dickerson said, introverts plan their conversations before a gathering, and this was not part of the plan. *wink*)
I have been attending College Church regularly since late September, 2008. For various reasons I was always going to church on my own, knowing few besides a classmate who usually went to a different service. It was not until early January, when I joined the choir, that I really started getting to know people from the church that I have settled in for three months (and of course, getting to know one particular person that turned my world upside down!).
I think it was the second Sunday singing with the choir, after Pastor Moody’s installation service. I was suddenly tired of being another church-comer, coming and leaving as I please but feeling so unrelated, as my then new - and only - friends have their own friends to catch up with.
So I came home, said a prayer, and made up my mind that from now on, every time I came to church, I would learn at least one name of someone I have never met or talked to before.
The following couple of weeks I consciously and deliberately made an effort to know people, and by God’s grace I was able to make some new friends. But after those few weeks, even after I stopped paying particular attention, God continued to bring new friends into my life. Through David, in choir, in College Group, and through participating in the evening service. Before I knew, I was not only learning names, but also enjoying wonderful friendships and having a real church life again.
I am not sure how much this can be associated with “sharing one’s own self.” At least I have learned its meaning through that prayer and action to know people and be more involved, and through the unwillingness to come and go as if I don’t belong at all. (Although the memory is still fresh, when I was annoyed and tired of having to cut a conversation because my pastor dad wanted to introduce me to his friends. :)
And perhaps the big thing about this is never how much I have shared my own self, but belonging to a loving community, and being able to see God’s work in the lives of many. | | |
| I met the composer of my favorite song today.
He asked me if I was going to the theology conference. I told him I had choir rehearsal tonight.
“Well, Easter is over. You don’t have to go to choir rehearsal anymore!”
I frowned and smiled. Told him I really like choir rehearsals, especially last week when Pastor King told us how my favorite song came about.
“You know,” the composer said, “I wish I had written that song. It made the composer rich and famous!”
I was so confused. Who was he talking about? But it didn't take long when both of us cracked up and had a good laugh.
“It just came to me,” he said. “I was on the plane with the text before me. And it just came. It must be from God. I could never have written something so beautiful.”
“You’ve let God work through you,” I said.
Then I told him my “liveliest” Good Friday memory when I was in fourth grade. I watched the scourging and crucifixion of Jesus in a Jesus film the night before Easter. I couldn’t fall asleep, and ever since Good Friday was almost synonymous with that sleepless night. Until this year I sang my favorite song (did I tell you it was about Good Friday?), and it redeemed me from the long-fought fear and soothed the throbbing pain.
The composer smiled, too. We said goodbye and went our ways. "I really wish I were the composer of that song!" he said again before I left.
I hope I've expressed myself well. It was more than singing my favorite song. Meeting the composer himself just gave my new Good Friday story a perfect ending — or maybe a perfect beginning.
And it made me — more than ever — look forward to meeting the real Composer someday.
Here might I stay and sing of him my soul adores;
never was love, dear King,
never was grief like yours!
This is my friend in whose sweet praise
I all my days could gladly spend.
... my song is Love. | | |
| I wrote this back in 2005...
What Makes Me Feel Like Christmas
1. Creme Brulee Latte~
The moment I had the first sip of Starbucks' Creme Brulee Latte in late November... it totally made my day bright. I even felt happy and sweet in Greek class! Later on after class was over I was like... fell into winter memories back in the old days, kinda melancholic... But it made me feel so much like winter... and Christmas...
2. Ice-skating!
My last ice-skating memory happened last year... and in August... But we were celebrating Christmas anyway. Everything was white-- and skating to Christmas carols with everybody was such a wonderful memory. And I'm going ice-skating with VOICE people this weekend!
3. Strawberry Chocolate
This one is weird. I don't really know why. Since my "school sister" from high school gave me a strawberry chocolate she bought, I started to fall in love with the taste... Perhaps it has a lot to do with who gave me the sweets... My happiest Christmas took place in high school, where my friends all prepared a little bit of something for each of her friends, usually along with a handful of candies... It is my favorite kind of Christmas. Friends make good use of every minute to let others feel the warmth in winter time, though candies and sweets are admittedly a girlish thing... But who cares! (Oh I didn't tell you I graduated from a girls' high school, did I?)
I wonder if this explains why I don't feel like Christmas at all this year since I've got none of the three above..  I know, I know. I am just making excuses...
I did (and still do) have a great time, though. I am just still in the re-thinking process of what Christmas really is, both in terms of truth and for me. This is my first Christmas in many years having no ministries to participate in and no post-Christmas finals to struggle with...  In other words, I am finally a stranger in a strange land, left with me and myself and not really knowing what to do with it.
So it's basically a mess, as I am still in the re-thinking process. I hope I will ultimately get out of that mess and find my way back to Christmas. For now, I bid thee farewell. May your Christmas and New Year be merry and well. | | |
| I'll explain the terms later, if I will do it at all. 
First, a little introduction of myself: I am collectivistic in quoting my parents and family almost all the time, but individualistic in happily making new friends; I have a low uncertainty avoidance which is tremendously helping in developing new relationships, but an extremely high power distance over my personal space. Also worth mentioning is that I scored high on avoiding and accommodating in methods for resolving conflict (and I am yet single.)
Thus tension was high when one of my new friends, a Chinese neighbor who grew up in a Chinese community, walked directly into my room upon returning the vacuum cleaner she borrowed late the night before, sat, without asking, into my comfy chair, and declared that she was tired from her studies and wanted to sleep there. I was in despair after she left. She did not sleep in my room, after all. But I can imagine myself preventing my next-door neighbor from coming into my apartment for the rest of my life. After finishing my interrupted devotion and some prayer, I wrote on her Facebook to ask for pardon the offensiveness I showed during her visit, and explained my nearly non-existent benevolence when it comes to personal space. She immediately apologized and accounted in return that growing up with numerous members in the family, she did not have the concept of personal space. She thanked me for telling her so that we will know better how to be friends in the future. It was bittersweet for me to realize that I get along better with the more American people than those who lean towards Chinese-ness on the scale. Yet this was also my first time to resolve a potential conflict almost immediately without avoiding and accommodating, though it was still my first attempt. It takes much wisdom to handle a minor situation like this. It is genuinely God’s grace to bring workers into cross-cultural ministry -- and to survive the differences in praise of God’s doing. | | |
| (I owe this title to the fact that I wrote this at Starbucks.. though I was not having my normal double tall caramel latte -- I ordered a grande which naturally contains double shots!!)
“I make these promises to you not in the belief of my own virtue, but that love is only true when God is in it, for God is love.”
-- from a friend’s marriage vow (OK... from Luke to Karen, admitting that I have watched your wedding video approximately 10 times..)
We were talking about singleness and married life, how both have their pros and cons, and how both have influenced our lives. One of my classmates shared in tears about her life story. I have always felt that I am too happy and fortunate to share a word of comfort whenever it comes to the topic of family relationship. But the Lord reminded me of the journey that brought me to the appreciation of what God has put in my life. So if you will, let me share with you a story of my life.
I was born a pastor’s daughter, which means my parents have been ministers all my life, in addition two-thirds of it so far has been lived in the same building with the church facility. I guess I can say being a pastor’s daughter is part of my identity, though it has not always been a pleasant memory. Like what many PKs have shared, there are few moments which my family, especially my minister parents, can be vulnerable in front of people. It seems like they (sometimes me included) have saved all the ugliness for the off-stage moments at home. All their dissatisfaction, worry and bossiness are often times directed towards, acted upon, and manifested on each other and their only child -- me.
The few months before I entered college were remembered as the pinnacle of that negative side in a pastor’s family for me. I was extremely disappointed with my dad. For me the pastor who preached to his congregation to cast all their burdens to God should have at least lived up to what he said himself. But from what I saw and felt my dad’s little faith was driving him to “pave the way” for the future he intended for me, and which I would not enjoy a bit. My bitterness of my dad’s “failure” to meet my expectation of a “godly man” was worsened by the situation that I had no one to share that heaviness of disappointment. My mom, who was the only person “in-grouped” enough to withstand my complaints, just underwent surgery and was mentally distressed by her physical disability. I guess I could say at that time my family has failed in nurturing my spiritual growth. I never wanted to walk away from my Christian faith. But inside there was an attempt to leave this church which has been inseparable from my family, and go somewhere that I could simply be a believer, without the duty of a pastor’s daughter.
The high tension rode deep into summer. No able help appeared from the outside. Now in retrospect I could say light-heartedly that God decided it was best for the change to come from within, though at that time there was no joke for all three of us. In a conference I heard about the principle of God’s design, which included the ten unchangeables in one’s life, parents being one among the ten. I have never thought about exchanging parents with someone (who knows? It could turn out even worse!) But it is also true that talking about the unchangeable usually comes with a sense of helplessness (external locus of control here). So you can imagine how I felt when I took my family as the fixed reality of life.
Soon after that, however, the healing came with accepting -- and thanking God for -- the unchangeables in my life. My parents are still my parents with their vulnerable moments. But I started to feel great joy in giving thanks for who my parents are and seeing them with God’s eyes. Yes, they are both full-time ministers in church. But they are also human, and as human they will never be perfect, no matter what wild imaginations one would have about a pastor and his family, and I confess the imaginative party once included me. Though busy in ministry, they are doing their best to provide me a blissful life, and showing me what it means to live a life for Christ. How they show their love may not always be pleasant, God has graciously taught me that they are able to love because He has first loved them. In the following years of college I continued to experience God’s work in my family, turning the heart of the parents to the child, and the heart of the child to the parents (Malachi 4:6, my paraphrase).
Being the pastor’s family there are still limited people we can share our weaknesses with. But God has made it work that we can serve Him as a family, in cheer or in sorrow. There are times when we “roflol (roll on floor laugh out loud)” about the fun things in church. There are also moments when our home turn into a Gethsemane, where burden and sadness cumulate, and where comfort is found in coming together in God’s presence. I get to untangle a lot of doubts and discomforts with the help of my parents, and I never left my home and church until I came to Wheaton. My dad is still nosy and nagging (oh well, he’s a dad as well as a pastor, now I understand..) and my mom sometimes too smart to empathize with my stupid questions. But as I am writing, I am ready to testify that through God’s love and by God’s grace we are put together as a family to serve Him. I am sure my parents would say it is God's grace to make them God's servants. I will add for them that God has given them a double shot of grace to make them a great pastor, an outstanding Bible teacher and great parents at the same time. It works for me the same. It is God's grace to make me a PK, and God has added an awfully huge extra shot to it to make me a loved PK -- and to let all the love make sense and work together well.
To Mom and Dad: Today (the 11th) marks exactly three months since we said goodbye at the airport. I’ve often boasted that I am not very homesick -- but that's really because your love for me is so heartfelt that I knew I have carried part of you both with and within me wherever I go. Thank you for following God's call and at the same time staying involved in my life. Love and miss you both.
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