trip to northern california

I went off to Northern California the other weekend with my wife for her Taipei 1st Girls High School reunion in the Bay Area. Not that I fancied seeing many other just-turned-50 young ladies ("Celebrating Our 50th Birthdays" is the theme of their reunion) like my wife, but I wanted to take the opportunity to visit some old high school and college friends of mine (another just-turned-50 bunch of the opposite sex) who live in the Bay Area.

The drive north went swiftly. I almost got a speeding ticket, though: I was driving over 85 mph when I saw a highway patrol car lying in wait on the flat central plain I-5 side. Luckily, a young Mustang driver that I precautiously let passing ahead just a moment ago got caught by that patrol car. Ain't I older and wiser or what :)

Paul is a very good friend of mine in college, and we stayed at his home for the night. He's got a lovely wife, a cool kid, and a fun dog named Oreo. I had my first dog walking exercise with it and Paul. Watching the dogs play in green field, chatting with friendly neighbors, under a balmy autumn sunset.. life is picturesquely beautiful here. Paul invited a couple other college friends to his home and we all had a wonderful dinner together, chatting and laughing all the way till late night.

Saturday is a dayful of events: visit to a neat farmer's market at the piers, cruise in the San Francisco Bay with lunch buffet, sight seeing at Golden Gate Bridge and Lombard Street, while listening to these young old gals passing microphone on the bus telling fun times of the old and their careers and families after graduating from the high school. Seems everyone has a good, satisfactory life so far and will continue to have for many years to come..

Saturday night featured a dinner party at the hotel where all reunion goers stayed. However, my wife didn't buy the party ticket for me as I was planning on meeting some high school friends of mine that evening. Something disrupted that plan, though: my left foot's Achilles tendon had been bothering me since the night before, all after I took a vigorous work-out on Paul's sleek exercise machine at his home--an unwise move by a not so wise young old man after all :). I ended up staying in the hotel room watching Dodgers sweep the Cubs, USC Trojans trounce their football opponents as they usually do. Sweet!

I did have a great reunion with some high school pals Sunday, at Joseph's home, where we stayed for our last night of the trip. Joseph was my best friend in high school, and the one who got me in touch with Christianity, and tolerated and tried to answer every weird question I had about God and faith and life when we were both just 15,16,17 years old. I always appreciate and admire his patience and the loving kindness he shows me and everyone, 35 years ago and today, the same, good, old Joe. We exchanged thoughts and stories of our recent lives all night long until 1:30 in the morning. 

Michael is both my high school and college pal and I met him twice on this trip, at Paul's home and at Joseph's. He has an autistic son Jefferson that we knew since he was a kid, and now he's 17 years old. He's autistic but plays great piano, and Michael and his wife take him to a nursing home every Sunday afternoon to play piano entertaining those old people. We went there that Sunday afternoon just to hear him play. Michael's other kid, Carol, a 14 year old teen age girl who excels on ice skating herself, was there too. She sits next to Jefferson when he plays, announcing the song titles, turning pages for him, while Jefferson peers at her from time to time to get hint from her so he won't play like a run-away train (according to Michael). It was such a beautiful, moving little-sister-helping-big-brother sight that my eyes begin to moisten when the piano plays..

book of love

Here's one fine piece from our own brother Ken Hsu some time ago:

We often heard or used the phrases "authority of the scripture" or "based on the scripture." So, what exactly is this "authority" we talked about? Most of us have preconceived ideas on what authority is. As such, we start with authority and then we try to fit Scripture into that mold.

Take driving, for example. We have a rule book that "authoritatively" tells us what we can do and what we cannot do in any given situation. At any moment, we can thumb through this rule book and find answers to our questions regarding driving on the road. Take the charter for any organization, and we find, again, rules on what to do and what not to do for membership in the organization.

Is this our Bible? Do we read Scriptures to get out of it a list of rules to follow? Do we read Scriptures looking for answers the way we look for traffic law questions? How does the Scriptures "authoritatively" guide and lead us?

Think of this analogy (from N.T. Wright). Let's say we have, in our hand, a play from Shakespeare. The play consists of 5 acts. However, we only have the first 4 acts. The fifth act has been lost. Then, after watching the first 4 acts, the audience clamor for the fifth and final act. What to do? We gather up scholars who are familiar with Shakespeare's work and who are familiar with that period of time in our history. Together with the actors, we come up with a story for act 5 that is consistent with the stories from the first 4 acts and bring the play to its closure.

In a similar way the Scriptures tell us a story, a story of a loving God reaching out to His wayward children, to redeem them, and to bring them back to His glory. Does the Scriptures tell us the entire story? Not yet! We have a glimpse from the book of Revelation how it's all going to end. However, we are "continuing" the story right now. We are bridging the gap between now and the end day when God renews His creation.

How are we to bridge the gap and continue the story? In a consistent manner with what the Scriptures have "authoritatively" told us how God had dealt with His people in Scripture's stories. Going back to the analogy of a play. The first few acts in the Scriptures consist of God, prophets/judges, Christ, and apostles. Now it's church's turn to be on the stage. How are we, the body of Christ -- church, to continue the storyline of the play?

First we recognize our mandate from God. He is sending us out into the world to proclaim the Good News. The word "apostle" comes from the Greek word "apostellein" and means one sent with a message. This is where the authority lies. The authority of the Scriptures comes from God. Our authority comes from God. God is ultimately the authority on everything we do as He sends us out and we are His messengers.

What did God send us out with? A rule book to follow? Pharisees tried that approach and failed. A question and answer book? A quick glance of our Bible tells us that's not it either. What then? Sotries. God sends us out with stories and parables.

Rules and doctrines are used to control people. They put people in a box from which they cannot grow. In the end, the box becomes their coffin. Stories, on the other hand, speak to people's worldview. In hearing the stories, the hearers get to situate themselves in the framework and settings of the stories, from which they can come to a new paradigm to set their worldview with God's view.

That's what Scriptures should do for us, to turn our worldview into "God-view." Let us live out the stories, let us continue the stories that God had started long ago, that many saints throughout the centuries had faithfuly continued, and let us read our Scriptures with that in mind. They are not just ancient stories written in ancient languages that are remote to us. They are stories, God's stories, from which we come to understand how God wants us to face this fallen world, from which we are to continue to act in a consistent manner to complete the story, God's story!! A-men.

Peace,

Ken

pride gets in the way

Back in my "salad days" when I was going in and out of campus crusade groups in college "looking for God," one day a girl Christian a couple years senior asked me: "Tell me, what's the real reason that's stopping you from believing?" I was a bit surprised by such direct question, but I gave her my honest answer: "I am looking for the Truth, and I will accept it when I find it." (Now that I am recalling it, it brings to mind the part of the New Testament where the Roman Governor Pilate murmured "what is Truth" when he questioned Jesus if he is a Jewish king and Jesus answered "I came into the world to testify to the truth"... )

Anyway, back to that episode, two key words there are "surprised" and "honest": I was surprised by such question because I honestly didn't think there could be any other way than to accept it if you find the Truth--Kudos to the idealistic and pure heart of my youth!

Now if you ask me the same question: "What is really hindering you from completely accepting God as your savior, supreme commander, Lord of all facets of your life?" I would say "Most likely, pride."

Pride can be in many forms. Thinking I know better is certainly one form of pride. Knowing I am no better yet still wanting to hold on to my own way, is another form of pride--foolish pride, in that case. 

Truth can be of many forms too. But one truth I think we can all recognize by now is that all things in life are not under our control; there must be something or someone greater out there in charge. Recognizing that, if I still refuse to believe in that superior being, what else could it be but my stubborn sense of self that wants to hold on to be the "master of my own destiny," sad and lonely as it might be? Or as Ernest Hemingway once said in his defiant statement: "A man can be destroyed, but he cannot be defeated." Pride is so tragic.

I have read a couple of interviews/debates Rick Warren had with journalists and atheists. At some points, I would see Warren went out of the thought track of the arguments and asked questions such as "if I said so and so, would you not like me any more?" half jokingly, or "so you just don't want a boss over your life so you don't have to change the way you live, right?" Critics gave negative points to such statements and decided they are indications that Warren is losing the debate intellectually. But I sympathize with Warren because I know he's really trying to hit the heart of the debater's problem there ("the heart of the problem is the heart"), rather than trying to win the arguments intellectually (no one gets won over through intellectual arguments, anyways). "People don't believe because they don't want to believe", we all heard this before, but now it rings so true to me.

Pride is actually a bondage too. Since I made my surrender to God, gradually I see it's really a great relief I get in return, as I don't have to carry the yoke of life all by myself, as I can look things with greater ease and perspective, knowing that I am no longer the center of the universe any more. How funny!

tony blair

Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister for 10 years until last June, is a well known person around the world. But probably less well known is that he is a deeply religious person who just converted to Catholicism last December, and had recently launched a "Tony Blair Faith Foundation" of which Rick Warren is an advisory board member aiming to "show how faith is a powerful force for good in the modern world". The following is an excerpt from a recent Time Magazine report I read: (http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1810020,00.html)

Blair's parents were not churchgoers. But Blair's faith had been noted by those around him since he was a small child. Blair "rediscovered" his Christianity while a student at Oxford in the 1970s. He was part of an informal late-night wine-and-cigarettes discussion group led by Peter Thompson, a charismatic Australian student and Anglican priest then in his 30s. Thompson, according to Blair, was "an amazing guy—the first person really to give me a sense that the faith I intuitively felt was something that could be reconciled with being a fun-loving, interesting, open person." In 1974 Blair was received into the Church of England at his college chapel. 

Blair's faith took on an extra dimension when he met and married Cherie Booth—like him, a young lawyer—after graduating. Blair's wife is a devout Catholic; not a posh Catholic, but a Liverpool-Irish, working-class, convent-educated girl with cousins who became priests. In her recent memoir, Cherie makes plain the centrality of religion to their relationship. Of the young Blair, she says, "Religion was more important to him than anyone I had ever met outside the priesthood." She and Blair would spend hours "talking about God and what we were here for. I don't think it would be too strong to say it was this that brought us together."

Their four children have been brought up as Catholics, and Blair has worshiped at Catholic churches for more than 20 years. But Britain, for all its secularism, is still nominally a Protestant nation with an established Protestant church; when Princess Anne's son Peter Phillips—11th in succession to the throne—married on May 17, his Canadian wife had to renounce her Catholicism. It was not until Blair left office that his long spiritual journey reached a destination that many had long anticipated, and he was received into the Catholic Church. 

Blair says he converted to catholicism to fully share his family's faith. But he plainly enjoys being part of a worldwide community with shared values, traditions and rituals. Blair now wants to tap into the global links that have been built between development activists and people of faith. His foundation will seek to partner with organizations to advance the U.N.'s eight Millennium Development Goals adopted in 2000. Blair's first target is malaria, which kills around 850,000 children each year; many of these deaths could be easily avoided by prophylactic bedding. "If you got churches and mosques and those of the Jewish faith working together to provide the bed nets that are necessary to eliminate malaria," says Blair, "what a fantastic thing that would be. That would show faith in action, it would show the importance of cooperation between faiths, and it would show what faith can do for progress." 

In its work in support of the Millennium Development Goals, the foundation will use its funds—it aims to build up a war chest of several hundred million dollars—to work with others active in the developing world. Rick Warren's Saddleback Church, for example, uses church-based clinics to provide basic health care in Africa. (Warren will serve on the foundation's advisory board.)

Blair says his foundation will try to ensure that faiths encounter one another "through action as much as dialogue." But the dialogue is important. In our conversations, Blair kept harking back to the idea that people of different faiths need to learn more about one another and understand where they can work in common. The alternative, he thinks, is that religious people will be tempted to define themselves in exclusion to others rather than in cooperation with them—with potentially disastrous results. 

One senses, however, that it is not just relations among faiths that Blair wants to influence. It is also the relationship between those who rejoice in their faith and those who think religion is something quaint, the stuff of history books. And here Blair's religious agenda intersects another of his concerns: the growing distance between U.S. and European attitudes toward the world.

Blair has enough old-fashioned British reserve to have his doubts about the way religion is used in the American public square. Whenever Blair was on a foreign trip, says a close aide, his staff had to find him a church in which to worship each Sunday—and then try to make sure that the press didn't learn of it. By contrast, says this aide, "Bush and Clinton are always photographed coming out of church holding a Bible." But at the same time, Blair insists that Europeans need to understand the importance faith has in American life—and recognize that in its all-pervasive secularism, it is Western Europe, not the U.S., that is out of step with much of the rest of the world. "Europe," says Blair, "is more exceptional than sometimes it likes to think of itself."

Blair is always careful to downplay the role his faith played in complex matters of life and death, such as the invasion of Iraq. "You don't put a hotline up to God and get the answers," he says. At the same time, he plainly thinks his faith has helped him make tough decisions. "The worst thing in politics," he says, "is when you're so scared of losing support that you don't do what you think is the right thing. What faith can do is not tell you what is right but give you the strength to do it." But in a nation like Britain, where cynicism is a way of life, that distinction—between faith as a guide to action and faith as an aid to decision—is almost bound to be lost.

In sum, Blair is convinced that religion matters—that it shapes what people believe and how they behave, that it is vital to understanding our world, that it can be used to improve the lot of humankind. But if not engaged seriously, Blair thinks, faith can be used to induce ignorance, fear and a withdrawal of communities into mutually antagonistic spheres at just the time that globalization is breaking down barriers between peoples and nations. "Faith is part of our future," Blair says, "and faith and the values it brings with it are an essential part of making globalization work." 

"You can't hope to understand what's happening in the world if you don't know that religion is a very important force in people's lives," says Ruth Turner, 37, formerly a top aide to Blair in 10 Downing Street, who will head the foundation. "You can't make the world work properly unless you understand that, while not everyone will believe in God or have a spiritual life, a lot of people will." Blair, she says, has been thinking about these issues "for decades and decades and decades." Over time, says Blair of the foundation's work, "this is how I want to spend the rest of my life."

God bless the man and his work!

no beers served here

This is a reminder of another sort:

Beer contains female hormones

Last month, National University of Lesotho scientists released the results of a recent analysis that revealed the presence of female hormones in beer.

Men should take a concerned look at their beer consumption.

The theory is that beer contains female hormones (hops contain phytoestrogens) and that by drinking enough beer, men turn into women  .

  
To test the theory, 100 men drank 8 pints of beer each within a 1 hour period.

It was then observed that 100% of the test subjects :

1) Argued over nothing.
2) Refused to apologize when obviously wrong.
 3) Gained weight.
4) Talked excessively without making sense.
5) Became overly emotional.
6) Couldn't drive.
7) Failed to think rationally.
8) Had to sit down while urinating.

 

  No further testing was considered necessary.

  
Send this to the men you know to warn them about drinking too much beer!

That's why we don't serve beers during our men's group meetings!!

See you Saturday,

pray without ceasing II

How does one "pray without ceasing"? Here's another perspective:

A number of ministers were met together for the discussion of some difficult questions; one, how the command, "Pray without ceasing," could be complied with. One of the men was asked to write an essay to be read at the next meeting.

Their conversation was overheard by a maid servant. "What," she exclaimed to her master when the guests had departed, "wait a whole month for the meaning! Why, that is one of the easiest and best in the Bible."

"Well," said the minister, "and what can you say about it, Mary? When you have so many things to do, can you pray all the time?"

"Why, yes sir," said Mary, "the more things I have to do the more I can pray."

"Let me hear how you do this," said the minister.

"Well," replied the girl, "when I open my eyes in the morning I pray, 'Lord, open the yes of my understanding;' while I am dressing, I pray that I may be clothed with righteousness. When I am washing myself, I ask for the washing of regeneration. When I begin to work, I pray that I may have strength equal to the day. When I kindle the fire, I pray that God will revive my soul. When I begin to sweep out the house, I pray that my heart be cleansed of all impurities. When I am preparing the breakfast, I desire to be fed with the manna of heaven and the sincere milk of the Word. As I am busy with the children, I look to God as my Father and pray for the spirit of adoption that I may be His child, -- and so on through the day. All I do furnishes me with a thought for prayer."

"Enough," said the minister, "These things are revealed to babes and often hid from the wise and prudent. Go on, Mary, pray without ceasing."

pray without ceasing

How does one "pray without ceasing" (Thessalonians 5:17)? Here's one "hard way" by a "modern mystic" (Excerpts from letters written at Dansalan, Lake Lano, Philippine Islands to his father by Frank C. Laubach, Ph.D.):

Although I have been a minister and a missionary for fifteen years, I have not lived the entire day of every day in minute by minute effort to follow the will of God.

Two years ago a profound dissatisfaction led me to begin trying to line up my actions with the will of God about every fifteen minutes or every half hour. Other people to whom I confessed this intention said it was impossible. I judge from what I have heard that few people are really trying even that. But this year I have started out trying to live all my waking moments in conscious listening to the inner voice, asking without ceasing, "What, Father, do you desire said? What, Father, do you desire done this minute?"

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It is a will act. I compel my mind to open straight out toward God. I wait and listen with determined sensitiveness. I fix my attention there, and sometimes it requires a long time early in the morning to attain that mental state. I determine not to get out of bed until that mind set, that concentration upon God, is settled. It also requires determination to keep it there, for I feel as though the words and thoughts of others near me were constantly exerting a drag backward or sidewise. But for the most part recently I have not lost sight of this purpose for long and have soon come back to it. After awhile, perhaps, it will become a habit, and the sense of effort will grow less.

Mind is a flowing something. It oscillates. Concentration is merely the continuous return to the same problem from a million angles. We do not think of one thing. We always think of the relationship of at least two things, and more often of three or more things simultaneously. So my problem is this: Can I bring God back in my mind-flow every few seconds so that God shall always be in my mind as an after image, shall always be one of the elements in every concept and precept?

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Oh, this thing of keeping in constant touch with God, of making him the object of my thought and the companion of my conversations, is the most amazing thing I ever ran across. It is working...Now I like God's presence so much that when for a half hour or so he slips out of mind - as he does many times a day - I feel as though I had deserted him, and as though I had lost something very precious in my life.

This concentration upon God is strenuous, but everything else has ceased to be so. I think more clearly, I forget less frequently. Things which I did with a strain before, I now do easily and with no effort whatever. I worry about nothing, and lose no sleep. I walk on air a good part of the time. Even the mirror reveals a new light in my eyes and face. I no longer feel in a hurry about anything. Everything goes right. Each minute I meet calmly as though it were not important. Nothing can go wrong excepting one thing. That is that God may slip from my mind if I do not keep on my guard. If He is there, the universe is with me. My task is simple and clear.

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The week with its failures and successes has taught me one new lesson. It is this: "I must talk about God, or I cannot keep him in my mind. I must give Him away in order to have Him." That is the law of the spirit world. What one gives one has, what one keeps to oneself one loses.

This experiment which I am trying is the most strenuous discipline which any man ever attempted. I am not succeeding in keeping God in my mind very many hours of the day, and from the point of view of experiment number one I should have to record a pretty high percentage of failure. But the other experiment - what happens when I do succeed - is so successful that it makes up for the failure of number one. God does work a change. The moment I turn to Him it is like turning on an electric current which I feel through my whole being. I find also that the effort to keep God in my mind does something to my mind which every mind needs to have done to it. I am given something difficult enough to keep my mind with a keen edge. The constant temptation of every man is to allow his mind to grow old and lose its edge. I feel that I am perhaps more lazy mentally than the average person, and I require the very mental discipline which this constant effort affords.

So my answer to my two questions to date would be
1. "Can it be done all the time?" Hardly.
2: "Does the effort help?" Tremendously. Nothing I have ever found proves such a tonic to mind and body.

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Worries have faded away like ugly clouds and my soul rests in the sunshine of perpetual peace. I can lie down anywhere in this universe bathed around by my own Father's Spirit. The very universe has come to seem so homey! I know only a little more about it than before, but that little is all! It is vibrant with the electric ecstasy of God! I know what it means to be "God-intoxicated."

When one has struck some wonderful blessing that all mankind has a right to know about, no custom or false modesty should prevent him from telling it, even though it may mean the unbarring of his soul to the public gaze. I have found such a way of life. I ask nobody else to live it, or even to try it. I only witness that it is wonderful, it is indeed heaven on earth. And it is very simple, so simple that any child could practice it: Just to pray inwardly for everybody one meets, and to keep on all day without stopping, even when doing other work of every kind. This simple practice requires only a gentle pressure of the will, not more than a person can exert easily. It grows easier as the habit becomes fixed. Yet it transforms life into heaven. Everybody takes on a new richness, and all the world seems tinted with glory. I do not of course know what others think of me, but the joy which I have within cannot be described. If there never were any other reward than that, it would more than justify the practice to me.