Solomon's Journal of a Desperate Journey

Today, Insight for Living: Broadcast - Today's Broadcast features a link that leads to an interactive journal summarizing "Solomon's journey from Vanity Valley to the Ultimate Peak" in the Book of Ecclesiastes. I've always liked reading the book and hope you can take a few minutes to revisit Solomon's view on our lives under the sun.

Extend our love

Our fellowship is not that big. Aside Friday night during weekly meeting, we also hang out on Sat, Sun, and for some of us, even Mon, Tue, and Thu. We know each other reasonably well. We are comfortable with everyone's around. We accept them to our daily life. Are we close to each other because of age, interests, and affections? If so, how are we different from the non-believers? Or are we close to each other because we're all brothers and sisters in Christ and we care for each other?

By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. -- John 13:35

Looking at church members in other fellowhsips or the English congregation, have we done anything to get close to them and showed them our care?

Jobless man

On my way to church at Friday nights, I often stopped at the traffic light outside the freeway exit and there would be a seemingly healthy man standing on the side, holding up a sign that asked for support. Sometimes a driver ahead of me gave him some change. There could be many reasons that he couldn't find a job. I avoided drawing any hypothesis on the matter. But here're some thoughts that came to me:

1. I am glad that God gave me a job. Only through hard work I can truly enjoy the abundance of my life.
2. With my job, I don't have to stand on the side walk to ask for change. No matter why one has to do it, s/he can't avoid feeling ashamed. For that I am sorry for him.
3. It's written in the scripture that God allows us to work hard for our living, so that we can enjoy the abundance He provides. The man on the street may not be told of this. And even more he may not have received Jesus. I am so lucky there were Christians around me and told me such Good News.

Christian's unique function

Yesterday at NMCAC Paster Hung spoke of a message of grave importance regarding our church. Stats showed that congregation and leaders alike in the researched Christian churches had low participation in evangelical missions. He attributed the lack of local evangelical missions for the youth to be a important cause to the recent shutdown of several English-speaking churches. Often we consider evangelic mission as something that should take place in distant countries. Seldom we notice the need to sow the seeds in our local community. Whereas taking care of our society is something good to do, he was afraid that we've spent too much resources on that and neglected the unique function of our church and that of us as Christians in the society: to evangelize the gospel.

Colossians:28-29 says: Whom we preach, warning every man, and teaching every man in all wisdom; that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus: Whereunto I also labo(u)r, striving according to his working, which worketh in me mightily. The paster referred to two kinds of people that fit into the meaning of "every man":

1. Those who relate to you: your parents, your siblings, your extended family, and other relatives. You have become a Christian not b/c of coincidence. Rather, you are in the unique position to bring the Good News to those who relate to you.
2. Those whom you run into in any day. Paul delibrately went to the marketplace every day to argue with others about Jesus and his resurrection. Paster Hung recommended each of us to carry at least a pamphet that summarizes our belief so that we can explain to another perons when the chance arises. We all run into many unrelated people every day. We should carry the burden to spread the gospel in a bus or shopping mall, in a line-up, at work, in your neighbo(u)rhood. We should proactively seek the opportunities to tell people about the Good News. At our workplace, we can place some pamphets at an obvious place of our desks. Whenever anyone gets curious and asks about it, we can give one to the person and/or explain our belief.

And Paster Hung pointed out that it takes labo(u)r to spread the Good News. Don't expect your parents, siblings, and relatives to be interested in what you want to say the first time you try. When we fail to draw their attention, we must neither despair nor tell ourselves that our job is already done. More often than not, it takes many attempts to draw the attention of a person before s/he may want to listen to the gospel. Just think about what it has taken for you to believe in Jesus.

'Yin' improvement

The sport I brought into my fellowship almost three years ago -- 'Yin' is gaining more popularity than ever. And more have become good at it. Who used to be scared of it eagerly asked for a game today. And Mr. TT had some nice moves. Even a teenager stayed close to watch the game. Maybe it is more appropriately called the year of 'Yin'!

English 'Yin' links from Google:
http://www.topics-mag.com/edition6/remember-shuttle.htm
http://www.thingsasian.com/goto_article/article.627.html
http://www.east2east.com/ (commerical site but has interesting info and video)
http://www.chcp.org/games.html#Shuttlecock

German 'Yin' links from Google:
http://www.federfussballbund.de/

Chinese 'Yin' links from Google:
http://www.geocities.com/signori2000hk/index.html (must read!)
http://ihome.coms.hkbu.edu.hk/00ytma/shuttlecock/home.htm (must read!)

Enough about 'Yin' (by this time you should know it's also called shuttlecock), here's some useful personal financial tips regarding credit rating from detnews.com:
http://www.detnews.com/2005/business/0504/07/B04-142290.htm

Genocide

Only ten years after the 100-day genocide in Rwanda, have I begun to notice that dark leaf in Africa's history and the lasting conflicts between Hutus and Tutsis. That revealed how ignorant I have been about the world. Thanks to the Internet, I can learn about the distant parts of the world at my fingertip.

On a similar note, I was linked to some highly disturbing photos of aborted babies. It really broke my heart seeing their fragile bodies torn apart. (Sob) I am not sure if I can finish any meal without recalling the images for the next few days. May God comfort the poor souls.

Highschool friends

I got a hold of the blog URL of an old buddy on the other side of the globe. It's just great to read about the thoughts and encounters in his daily life. I got together with his family when I visited there last year. But only when I read his words I found that I really missed all of them. And there was a bonus: his website led to that of his sister's and some of my other schoolmates. Most of them are doing fine in today's dog-eat-dog society. There's one who's particularly struggling. I'll try to pray for him. Though they are thousands of miles away from where I am, and many of them haven't been contacted since I left, once again I feel connected with those I played with and studied with. They have all grown into sophisticated indiviuals. Time to reflect upon myself.

Homeworks

I haven't needed to do any homework for the last few years until these couple of months. For choir practice, I need to memorize the lyrics of the songs before Thursday. For evangelic class, I need to look up some verses and to revise my salvation testimony before Saturday.

I spent some time looking up some interesting/useful websites. Here they are:

Scientists Create Remote-Controlled Flies

• Never thought of something like this. Gross.

100 Most Often Mispronounced Words and Phrases in English

• Useful.

How the brain creates the experience of God: An easy to read explanation of a controversial hypothesis. The god effect.

• I haven't got the time to read through this. Appeared interesting at my first glance.

The Rick A. Ross Institute

• Found much useful information about cults. You've got to read this!

Wake up, sleepyhead!

My 12-week evangelic training started yesterday. I set the alarm at 6:30am on Friday night and had a hard time getting up in that morning, just like on any other day. I struggled 15 minutes on my bed having had the alarm snozzed thrice and was on my way by 7:33. I really didn't use to drive this early. Many times I had to pull myself out from the dozing state. Frankly, it wasn't the safest trip I had, because my eyes were stressed out. Thank God that I didn't run into anything bad along the way. The training would start at 10 but I already got there before 9:30am. That gave me enough time to head to McDonald's and finished off breakfast and get back on time.
As we will be going places to evangelize as a team, being punctual is going to be important. So our instructor imposed a rule that fines late-comers a dollar a minute. And for herself, the fine would be double. However my circumstances are different so she would be more lenient on me. Still for myself, I'll need to make sure that I get up and be there on time for the next 10/11 weeks.
And guess what? I was just so tired yesterday and didn't get up this morning until 11am. There went my Sunday service! Wake up, sleepyhead. WAKE UP!!!!!!!

"Antivirus Man" -- infected

In the last two weeks, I spent hours helping out two buddies cleaning viruses and malware from their notebook computers. One of them was pretty obvious as the malicious software plainly showed up in the Manged Addons... screen in the Internet Options applet. The other case was much more complicated. There was this malware called WinTools running in multiple ways on the computer and re-registering itself every few seconds. SpyBot - S&D did a job spotting it but this thing was simply too evil to be removed. I had to beat the malware to change the permission settings in various registry locations in order to block it from re-establishing itself. I essentially became an on-call antivirus technician.

And over the weekend, I picked up the flu bug and became infected myself. It's been getting worse. Now I have all the symptons (running nose, coughs, headache, soar throat). Maybe viruses win at last. :(