Rivers

1 Peter 3:3-4 and NLD

A gentle and quiet spirit is not the same as a gentle and quiet personality. There are some women in whom I see this spirit very clearly, whether or not there is a stereotypical personality to match - a spirit such as this is hard to miss and quite impossible to merely imitate - and it's really really so beautiful. I remember telling Vaneh once early in our BCEC days how I thought one of the women there was downright the most beautiful woman I'd ever met; I had absolutely no solid reason to point to in order to back this, yet this feeling that I'd just encountered true beauty was totally unshakable. I think, still, this was because of the godly character that just overflowed and completely poured from her.. Of course, there is nobody out there who is perfect. But her beauty was and is so evident.

Some time ago I think we had a sermon about rivers and undertows - the surface of a river may seem serene, but its undercurrent may be crazily harsh and turbulent. And, the surface of the river may seem tossed and churned by the winds and waves, yet its undertow may be steady and controlled. Essentially, outward appearance and circumstance do not determine one's spirit; but one's spirit will reveal itself a midst the circumstances.. At Highrock the other night we talked about this as well through NLD's message. Is the river of my life calm right now? Unfortunately I would have to say that it's probably not.. I think I feel more often the turbulence of storms that I often dream about rather than the quietness that should come from an utter dependence on God. Seasons will come and go... Let this not weigh you down, oh heart.. Sit at the Lord's feet and lay your burdens down, remember who is your sustenance, strength, and source of life and renewal.

Cleaning Day

It's cleaning day! Because today is Yoojin-comes-to-stay-over-day and tomorrow is retreat and it's rainy which means it's perfect for laundry-vacuuming-dusting-packing-reorganizing.

There's a little trick I've learned recently to controlling clutter::: take a picture of the space, and you'll be able to more easily identify what should and should not be there. Our brains are wonderfully adept and can quickly skim over things that it's grown accustomed to -- i.e. patterns (this is a really poor and cut down explanation of why we can read things like this). Patterns can be in text, concepts, or spaces. I have no research-based scientific backing for this, but I think that based on our brains' ability to chunk things into patterns and store them into long term memory as "habits", we can similarly chunk our cluttered spaces into patterns. So unless you are very intentional about looking for clutter, it's easy to ignore it because it's "just always there anyway" (patterns!).

Cameras don't do that. When we look at a picture, we're looking at a frozen instance of space. Yes, inanimate objects are still inanimate objects (unless you live in Harry Potter world and every picture is alive), but the finality and distinct boundaries of a picture force our eyes and brains to explore the finite space, to actually process those patterns that we otherwise overlook (literally). Sometimes, we need to be slowed down by a physical picture (or digital, whatever) so that we can really process what's going on in that space.

I think the same goes for life in general. There is a lovely article on the Harvard Business Review about prioritization, with one quote that I really like:

"Many of us have become addicted, unwittingly, to the speed of our lives — the adrenalin high of constant busyness. We mistake activity for productivity, more for better, and we ask ourselves "What's next?" far more often than we do "Why this?""

I would say that's very true, and generally descriptive of what I do with myself. Activity most definitely != productivity, and more != better, yet somehow we convinced ourselves otherwise (or just me).

From the article,

"It's only when we pause — when we say no to the next urgent demand or seductive source of instant gratification — that we give ourselves the space to reflect on, metabolize, assess, and make sense of what we've just experienced. 

Taking time also allows us to collect ourselves, refuel and renew, and make conscious course corrections that ultimately save us time when we plunge back into the fray."

It's been a theme in my life for a while now, I'm such a slow learner... but I think that I've been internalizing and exerting this more. Hopefully.

Welps, happy cleaning day! And also I can't wait to eat my lunch!

Label Request - A Desire Unspoken [a summary of summer, a preparation for fall - i.e. a very long post]

You know how Google automatically lists a bunch of search options for you when you start typing? And how sometimes when you start typing in a text field somewhere else there will be an automatic list too? Somehow, "Label Request" is on my title's list. I think that it came from Magic Hour - a title of a page at one point was Label Request.

I spent last last Friday with Cattoma and Keima for Keima's birthday :) We started off taking pictures at Cat's place, and then we went to a pizza place (Italian Pie?), Cafe Latte, and then Quince (which is filled with lots of expensive trinkets and vintage-ish clothing) -- it was so much fun! I miss my skipos... I also went camping last weekend for the 4th and last time this year - it was really warm! Except at night when my mattress deflated.

There is a sense of beauty when you see a score of Chinese parents gathered around a campfire (started with the luxury of lighting fluid and coals, rather than with desperately scrounged for wet tinder and painstakingly handmade sawdust) and singing praise songs together... A glimpse of an ethereal beauty when I see myself with my sisters (babies/ma's/spouzy) laughing together, pigging out together, paparazzi-ing together, simply enjoying the warmth of each other's presence. This beauty I have tried to write of many times before - this sense of what I've called "nostalgia", a sweet bitterness that cannot be properly contained in the meager words I've produced. But it is so beautifully descibed by C.S. Lewis in "The Weight of Glory" ~

"In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you - the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. ... The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust in them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things - the beauty, the memory of our own past - are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. ...

...We usually notice it just as the moment of vision dies away, as the music ends, or as the landscape loses the celestial light. What we feel then has been well described by Keats as 'the journey homeward to habitual self.' You know what I mean. For a few moments we have had the illusion of belonging to the world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance. We may go when we please, we may stay if we can: "Nobody marks us." ...

...Ah, but we want so much more - something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and the mythologies know all about it. We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words - to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves - that, though we cannot, yet these projections can enjoy in themselves that beauty, grace, and power of which Nature is the image. ..."

So that is the description of the ever present yet ever elusive beauty that we seek - that we search desperately for but cannot be a part of. Yet Lewis also writes this:

"Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday by the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

We must not be troubled by unbelievers when they say that this promise of reward makes the Christian life a mercenary affair. There are different kinds of rewards. There is the reward which has no natural connection with the things you do to earn it and is quite foreign to the desires that ought to accompany those things. Money is not the natural reward of love; that is why we call a man mercenary if he marries a woman for the sake of her money. But marriage is the proper reward for a real lover, and he is not mercenary for desiring it. ...

[In the same way] those who have attained everlasting life in the vision of God doubtless know very well that it is no mere bribe, but the very consummation of their earthly discipleship. ...

...The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory means good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last."

How many of us are desperately crying out in the deepest crevices of our beings for a Label? Yet we obstinately refuse the ones we deem to be "slapped on us by society", and wildly squander away our life strength trying instead to don the ones which we have set upon our golden pedestals, hoping that our last breathes will be ample glue to cling it to us forever. A desire unspoken and unfulfillable, yet painfully clear in the way we live our lives.

How far is Heaven? The beauties that we see now with our dimmed eyes are only blurred and faded reflections of the Beauty that awaits us - in the glory of Him all other things will fade... Then we shall see the true Narnia, of which our previous Narnia was only a hazy vision. Indeed, better is one day in Your courts than thousands elsewhere. I can only imagine what it will be like...

This post concludes the summer of 2009, first in Virginia in the company of my wonderful fellow computer science nerds, and then at home in the company of my beloved family, both biological and not. I witnessed my own weakness and patheticness as I tumbled from a haven of spiritual comfort in Boston - where I was surrounded by sisters and brothers in ATD, TWIGS, BCEC - into a pool of complacency in beautiful Virginia. It gradually became a pool of self pity, then one of choking self loathing and disgust, and ultimately would have drowned me in its seemingly sourceless hopelessness if my Lord had not pulled me from the depths of its waters. Oh the richness and joy of being held in His arms, and oh the sweetness of Christian fellowship, how it fills and nourishes one's heart through it's channeling of God's love, and oh how I had taken it for granted until I realized that I had lost it...

These moments at home - filled also with dearly cherished memories - they've brought me to see how much I love and treasure my family - in a sense, God's first gift after we enter the world... My sister is now a teenager (and sharing my room) and my brother is 7, the age I was when my sister was born. He's no longer the little toddler I had seen in my mind, and she is no longer the 7-year old that I had always thought her to be... While I struggled with figuring out how to treat them properly, how to best show them love and be an example to them, I also struggled (and still do) with the wrenching realization that they are growing up. I will not be able to witness it all, but they will continue to grow taller, older, wiser, more mature as God has planned for them, as I too will grow as God has planned for me. I may not be able to see my sister much in her high school years, to share fully in her pains and joys, nor see my brother enter his years of middle school and reach adolescence. One day, he will be taller than me just as my sister shot above me, and she will blossom into a woman before I know it. Will I know their likes and dislikes as I do now? Will they still turn to me as they do now? I wonder if that's how a parent feels - though with infinitely more I'm sure. And as for my parents - I realize more and more that age spares no one. They are no longer as supple or energetic as they once were, the contrast made even more stark in the presence of the younger families in our fellowship. Youth visits each of us for a short while before it flits away and leaves an older, more weary body. This same body holds within it so much more wisdom though, and a grace that cannot be replicated even in the bodies of the most elegant dancers. In many ways, I feel as if I have failed my family - in my not quite met goals to mentor my siblings, to help and encourage my parents, to be not the perfect daughter but to be an expression of love to them, as they have shown me love, and more so as God has shown me love. How can I serve and love them enough? Yet I know too, the Accuser stops at nothing - I am thankful for the time I've had and indeed look forward to when I can come back to them.

And so, I am heading to London next Monday. Thus far, I have written up a packing list (far from comprehensive) and started assembling the various this-and-thats that I must bring. Still cleaning through my room which is still cluttered with all the things that I still have (even after many rounds of heartless throwing away). I am such a packrat. I must say that I am anxious, even afraid of what's to come... I feel physically, mentally, and emotionally unprepared... True, there is much excitement in going to this new place, and a wondrous expectation for the adventures that I'm sure lie ahead. Yet there is so much uncertainty, so much insecurity and unwarranted fear of a something that I don't even know how to pinpoint. At these times, I question whether it was even a good decision to make. Perhaps not - perhaps it was based too much on my rash yearning for adventure, on my hunger of hoarding opportunities, the packrat that I am... My heart is no longer at peace within me and I don't know what to do about it. It seems too late to back out now - school has already started in Boston and how would I be able to to withdraw my tickets, my housing, my tuition, and restart all my plans back at Wellesley within proper timing? This is like getting cold feet but not really.

God shows Himself in little ways though... For shame, I admit that I refused to clean up the cluttered paper bags of stuff on the floor until our dresser and the missing piece of our new bookshelf was delivered so that I could put the clothes currently on the half assembled bookshelf into the dresser and thus clear out the space on the bookshelf to place actual book-shelf items. *breathe in deeply* Last Friday I checked the progress of our bookshelf as it was to arrive earlier (it went from Canada to 4 places in New York before reaching the midwest) and it was literally 5 miles away! But unfortunately, in some mailing facility that we had no access to. I was impatient. And our dresser was not supposed to arrive until sometime between this upcoming weekend and 2 weeks later. I therefore anticipated subjecting my poor family to deal with a messy upstairs until sometime in early October. Lo and behold my surprise when earlier today, both bookshelf and dresser arrived... Not only that, but a few days earlier, we saw that our little apple tree blossomed again - an autumn flower garden! The one lonely apple that hung on its branch is now joined with 9 more baby siblings. Perhaps they will not survive the winter frost, but then, what kind of tree will flower in September? Surprising, and yes, convicting of my utter lack of trust. Does not God provide? If He can bring a dresser and bookshelf to one of His children's homes, can He not bring me safely from Minnesota to London? If He cares to take care of an apple tree, or the eggplants and tomatoes in our garden, if He can guard the vulnerable snow pea from a garden slug, cause plants to bear fruit and seasons to change, if He can hold a broken heart and make it whole, and cause a dry and poisoned pool to become a stream flowing with living, loving water, can I not trust and love Him?

Yesterday, Pastor Mike spoke about what he learned while he was on his sabbatical - about God's amazing and transforming love. Amidst the other words of wisdom that he shared with us, there was a particular quote from Hannah Hurnard in her earlier days (Hinds Feet in High Places) about how the waterfall was a representation of true love - in the way that it is humble and always seeks to go to the lowest position; in the way that it gives without holding back, because the more it gives, the more it fulfills itself; in the way that it serves the entire valley by giving up itself; in the way that it rejoices while doing so, fearlessly expressing pure and blissful joy as each spray of water soars toward the jagged rocks below. How can one love in such a way? Who will look out for you when you give yourself up with such fervor, and according to some, such recklessness? Who else but the one who demonstrated His love in this way and so many more?

Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me. By day the LORD directs his love, at night his song is with me — a prayer to the God of my life. Perfect love drives out fear.

Here's to a new year ahead.

Chiharu Shiota

My inspiration.









Her inspiration. Memories, Catastrophe, Dreams, Death

Synaesthesia is 7 times more common in artists, poets, and novelists. Strabismus also is quite common in all the above. Bevil said that artists sometimes benefit from seeing from just one eye - I wrote my common app about that (hahahahahahaaaa sigh)

People say that we have no depth perception. I guess I can use that as my excuse for being bad at sports/activities requiring depth perception. Like driving.

When you can only see with one eye, you have to create your own depth perception then huh? In that sense, you can also more easily represent aspects of the three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface: that's all you've ever known.

That same concept can be stretched over so many things - over the realm of spirituality, the realm of intellect, of emotion, physicality, musicality, and the list goes on.

I wonder, what color does she see?

I wish I could do tests on my brain. Maybe they would help me in my neuro exam. Chapter 14...

1.5 more hours to go!

I had half a jar of covered espresso beans - equivalent to about 4 cups of pure espresso... but I still managed to nod off while reading through my neuro notes. You have failed me, oh caffeine! Caffeine is a bitter tasting substance, reminiscent of the bitter tastes of many poisons in our world. Our gustatory and olfactory systems work together to take in all those sensations of smell and taste to provide feedback to our brains, telling us which substances may or may not be beneficial or harmful. There are over 10000 distinguishable (for humans) odors, yet we have less odor receptors in our noses than do mice. That's because (our perception of) odor is not only dependent on the molecules, but also on the concentration of those molecules. For example, the odor molecule for coffee is the same as that of feces - the latter just happens to be much more concentrated. So the next time you smell that coffee and think "mmmm", think again.

Back to studying... :(

I'm posting a lot

For one day. Maybe that's a sign of further emo-ness! Boooo being emo is never in style. That's ok. It may be because I'm thinking a lot too - which is both a good and bad thing.

I think God gave me a realization today - I've always said to myself and to others that God will never give us a situation that we can't handle, and I took that from 1 Corinthians 10:

"So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don't fall! No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it."(v12-13)

In context, Paul was writing to the Corinthian church about the sins that the Israelites had made in the past, as a reminder to not repeat the same things. He tells them here that God will never give us a temptation that we cannot bear... and that He is faithful and will always provide a way out. I applied that to other circumstances too, thinking that God would never give us a situation that we couldn't handle.

I may or may not be right about what I'm thinking now - but I now disagree. Just because Paul tells us that God will not give us temptation that we can't handle doesn't mean that He'll likewise not give us any other circumstance that we can't handle. And when I say "we can't handle", I do mean something that we ourselves cannot handle - I think that's an important distinction that I never clearly made before... I held before that we can only do anything we do through God - now I hold that we can only do anything because God does it through us. A slight change on words, but I think an entirely different meaning...

And also, taking from Enoch's sermons the last few weeks, we face adversity so that we will turn to God and give up our idols. On top of that, God makes our hard situations harder and even impossible so that we truly depend on Him. Gideon's 300 men versus men numbered as the sands of the shore = impossible situation. That was something that he obviously could never have been able to handle. Never! But God was the one working, so of course, numbers and strength and anything else we could place our bets on don't matter at all.

So... that brought me to think today - God does give us situations that we cannot handle. But it's not so He can stand there and watch us fail miserably and laugh - it's so we really learn to turn fully to Him, 100%. Because even though they are situations that we cannot handle, we're not the ones meant to handle them in the first place.

Well, I hope that I'll remember this when those impossible situations do come along... I have confidence in God though - more and more so as these times have moved on... YAY GOD!

On another note, blogger lets you decide what time to post it! So I'm arbitrarily setting this to be posted at 3:21AM :) I like those numbers. If only I could control the seconds too... then I'd say 3:21:07 - my 3 favorite numbers :D I'm such a nerd.

About Learning

Once again. I was just reminded of some of my frustrations. Mostly with myself. But also with others - though I should have no reason to be?

I wrote about this once in my xanga - I think that learning by crashing and burning can be super effective - but it's much wiser to learn through others' experiences.

Yes yes, we may remember things better when we actually experience things ourselves, and sometimes that experience is so necessary for other things... Learning by feeling and experiencing can mean that we learn and remember better. Yes. I agree. BUT, I still consider it foolish to dive into something you've seen others fail multiple times in.

I think wisdom in one form is being able to learn from others' mistakes. Being able to discern what should and should not be taken from others' experiences.

To say that it's better to crash and burn often shows a lack of maturity I think - not about the person saying it necessarily, but about the person it refers to. Sure, you'll end up with a lot of battle scars, but what does that really show? It shows you have a lot of experience, and a large history of many foolish actions.

This is not to say we should not ever take risks. But there is a difference to taking a risk and taking a plain old stupid risk. I guess that's up in the air too - of what is and isn't stupid. Fine fine, because everything is a disputable matter in that case. True. There are merits to both. But this is my stance - take it or leave it.