Two Years

It's a cold and snowy November day. The day isn't any different than usual. I park at the same level of the same parking lot like any other day. I get to the office, turn on the lights, brew some coffee, open my email, and go about the routine. My supervisor comes at her usual time, and then the rest of the office trickles in. I don't remember what I was working on at the time. It's probably some travel/hosting report or something to that effect. My supervisor comes out of her office at around 12:30pm, asking when I'm taking lunch. I tell her, soon. I had no lunch plans that day. I was just going to go to one of the restaurants I usually take out from in days like that. I don't exactly remember why I didn't just go and get something earlier. I probably was gchatting with people. That probably is it.

Then, at 12:34pm, I get an email from my lead pastor. The subject headline says, "Important Information." And being on the leadership at the church, I am accustomed to receiving emails with such subjects. Nonchalantly, I open the email thinking it has something to do with one of our upcoming gatherings. But instead, I read the first line, and I feel like I've been punched in the stomach really hard. Blood drains from my face as I stare blankly at the monitor in front of me. My supervisor walks in and immediately senses something is not right. She asks if I'm okay. I tell her everything is fine. She doesn't buy it, but she walks back into her office. I re-read the short little email. A close friend ims me. He's read the email too. He asks if I'm alright. No, I say. Me neither, he says. We decide to meet up for lunch at Charleys in 15 minutes. In the meantime, I im some others. No one can believe it. This can't be, we tell ourselves. And then none of us can say much after that.

I tell my supervisor that I'm going to lunch. I zipper my jacket, put my hood on, place my hands inside my pockets and head downstairs. I see my friend at the corner of South U and East U. We walk silently towards Charleys. Silence has never been that loud before. We get inside, shake off the snow, take off our jackets, and sit in a booth. We take a look at the menu. Our appetite's gone, but our stomachs tell us to order. I'll have the swiss mushroom burger with fries, I tell the waiter. My friend orders something too. The waiter leaves. I look out the window overlooking the wintry Ann Arbor landscape. The snow is falling thicker and faster than before. None of us say much for the first few minutes. He breaks the tension. His voice cracks. He's cried before we met up. He starts sharing the last thing he remembers. Something at small group. I can't really remember the details. We smile. The food comes. I pick at the fries until he says he'll pray for the food. He prays. He sobs. He whimpers. He barely finishes with the traditional, amen. Little do I realize, tears are raining down on my cheeks as well. Two grown men crying in a public restaurant. Who gives a damn what people think.

I take a bite of my burger. I taste nothing. I chew a little bit, and then I offer a story. The first time I met the kid. Five, maybe six years ago. In a summer small group. When undergrads studied the Word and fellowshipped with high school students and graduate students. A quiet kid, but genuinely good-natured. He had a unique laugh. So did I. We connected. He reminded me of my own brother. I liked him. We got along well. He accepted Christ. Got involved with the church. Then off to college he went. Only to return a year later with plans to transfer. He began serving the church. Small group. Ministry team. His class. And then, out of nowhere one day, he tells me he's enlisting. USMC. I didn't know how to respond. What do you say to that? I thought he was joking. He wasn't. He went off to boot camp. He came back different. The same, but very different. He awaited deployment. Iraq. The Bush administration's flawed war. The search for WMD yielded nothing but an all-out civil war and anarchy. Good men were sent to bring peace. Many saw death. I prayed for a miracle. Somehow his company would not ship to Iraq. Maybe Korea. Japan. Somewhere far away from harm's reach. For awhile, my prayers seemed to be working. He kept getting delayed. Until September. He was finally being deployed. I got a chance to meet up with him. Again, what do you say in that situation? He laughed in his usual goofy form. This time, I only smiled. I could not laugh. I prayed for him. He asked me to. What do you want me to pray for, I asked. He said he wanted to be a witness to his company and to the people of Iraq. Anything else? No. I looked at him. I saw someone vastly different from the one I first met in that random small group. I just nodded my head. And I prayed. The day before he was to deploy, people at church gathered around him and said their good lucks. No goodbyes. He'll come back to us. I give him a hug. Come back safe, I whisper in his ear. He just nods. That's the last I saw of him.

to be continued...

Inadequacies

This is a confession from the heart. This is more so for me than anyone else, but I'm going public to be honest and vulnerable. Perhaps it'll be of help and encouragement to others who share similar stories.

I've grown up in a culture that demands perfection. Being the oldest son of Korean immigrants, there has always been an exceeding pressure to become "successful." Ever since I can remember, I've been taught that anything less than perfection is simply not enough, whether academically, athletically, artistically, etc. I consider myself a little bit more fortunate than some of my other peers whose parents were even more demanding than mine. All in all, as I look back, I realize that the environment in which I grew up fed a growing sense of insecurity and low self-esteem that has carried over to the present day. But with that being said, I refuse to play the blame game. Playing the victim and blaming my parents and the culture in which I grew up in would be the easy way out.

This has been something that's been on my heart for some time now. I've battled such feelings of inadequacies and insecurities for as long as I can remember. Why am I not smart enough? Why am I so shy and afraid of so many things? Why can't I do certain things? And the list could go on.

It's been a struggle that keeps coming up in different ways. Recently, graduate studies has been a source of much of this struggle. With every week and every class, I come out feeling like I've barely survived a ten-round boxing match. There are times when I genuinely have no idea what I've signed up for, considering every waking moment is spent on some school-related activity, mostly reading and writing papers. I feel like I'm barely staying afloat while it seems some of my peers are breezing by.

But God has been faithful beyond belief. Last week, I somehow endured my hell week where I had two papers, a presentation, and an exam all due on the same day. After that day, in all honesty without exaggeration, I thought I had failed everything. I was totally unprepared for my presentation, both my papers were pulled out of my butt, and the exam was questionable. I left for New York last weekend feeling dejected and needing a break. I didn't have a nervous or emotional breakdown or anything of that sort, but deep inside, I was battling the doubts that were ever so rapidly filling my heart and my mind. I began to believe the lies that I wasn't good enough, that I'd never become successful, that I will always be a failure.

After coming back to DC, I got my grades back for all of the things I had submitted, and once again, I was floored. Again, God was gently rebuking me that I was focusing too much on my circumstances rather than on God. As I was coming home from classes on Wednesday, I felt God was speaking to me through the words of Paul. God's grace is sufficient for me. His power is made perfect in weakness. Feelings of inadequacy and insecurity has kept me humble throughout these past few months. I could easily boast about my grades and my abilities in school. But God is reminding me that I'm not so good, that I don't deserve the grades that I've been getting.

This is a hard lesson for me. Overcoming feelings of inadequacies and insecurities will be a tough challenge for me, but I know that God is faithful. I'm just thankful to God for all that He's shown me, and all the more, I wish to say that He is able when I am not.

God's Sovereignty

It is the wee hours of the morning, and I have just completed my last piece of work as part of my first of presumably many hell weeks during grad school. In the past 24 hours, I have had 2 critical analysis papers to write, 1 presentation to do in class, and an econ exam. I have yet to touch my Chinese homework, but all I can think about is going home this weekend and relaxing.

Having loaded up on sugar and caffeine to stay awake, I decided to blog about something that's been on my mind recently: God's sovereignty. It is a term widely circulated in the Christian community. I've been wrestling with it for awhile now, an oft-repeated lingo in my prayers and discussions with other believers. What does that mean? Why do I keep saying it?

A few months ago, though I did not physically attend the conference, I listened to some of the sermons preached during AMI Revolution. The sermons that Dr. Steve Lee gave remarkably centered on the concept of sovereignty in the work of God as seen through the life of Esther. A familiar story: Esther, an orphaned Jewish girl, is chosen by a drunk Persian king, Xerxes, to be his queen. Xerxes is persuaded to issue an edict to kill all Jews. Mordecai, who had adopted Esther before, tells Esther that she must go and tell the king to annul the edict to which Esther replies that if she approaches the king without being summoned, she would surely die and that she cannot go. Mordecai responds and says, "For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father's family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?" And Esther responds by ordering Mordecai to gather all the Jews and fast for her. "When this is done, I will go to the king, even though it is against the law. And if I perish, I perish."

God's sovereignty rests in the knowledge that God's plan will prevail regardless of human participation. "Relief and deliverance will arise from another place..." Too often, I think to myself that my actions will ultimately dictate what happens in life. From important decisions like "what am I going to study", "where am I going to live" or "who am I going to marry" to little ones like "what am I going to eat for dinner", "how many hours of sleep will I get tonight?", I think that those decisions will forever alter my life and possibly lead me on a path that's different from where God intends me to be. But I'm learning this concept of God's sovereignty over and over again. God's plan is independent to my actions. God's plan will be done; He just invites me along for the ride.

A case in point is graduate school. I keep beating this over and over again, but I believe this is a lesson that is so fundamental that I wish to share. My first two years of undergrad were marked with constant failures and disillusionment. I had never seen grades that low in my life, so low that the probabilities of me being put on academic probation were high. Until the day I left Ann Arbor, I wore those two years as a sign of failure around my neck. After graduation, amazingly on time, I had trouble conceptualizing how God could use me with a transcript that was not at all attractive to employers and graduate schools. And even after years out of college, I still saw my academic failures as a tremendous source of insecurity and I kept delaying graduate school plans. During the summer or 2007, while in China, I felt that God was speaking to me on one of the many train rides we took. It was almost a calming voice that said, "Be still and know that I am God. Trust in me that I will make your paths straight." It was around this time when I was thinking about my future considerably, and later in that trip, God, once again, spoke words of confirmation. "This is why I brought you to China, to give you a glimpse of what I have called you to. Now do not fear and go." And I felt that command to go was a confirmation that God wanted me to pursue the convictions he had placed on my heart for awhile. And upon returning, I took my GREs and applied to several schools. I felt that if God really wanted me to go to graduate school and pursue this path, that only He could make it happen. My competitive standing alone would not get me in, and again, my insecurities came up and I began to listen to the lies of Satan, that I wasn't smart enough, wasn't good enough, etc. But when I got my acceptance letter to one of the top schools in my field, I knew that God is sovereign. If it is His will, He will make it possible. All He asks is for obedience and faith.

I'm learning that over and over again, each week of graduate school. In different experiences in class, in finding a church, in friendships, in other aspects of life, God is orchestrating things that I simply could not have done on my own. I'm learning to have more faith and worry less because God is in control. His will is going to prevail one way or another. It is up to me to respond in faith like Esther, "If I perish, I perish." I will do what I need to do because God is in control. And even if I make mistakes, God is in control. God is sovereign.

Ramblings

A disclaimer: This is not a cohesive entry with a main point. This is not how my papers for classes look like. This is just a collection of various thoughts I've had lately that by themselves would not have been worth posting an entry.

A few days ago, I was watching college football. More specifically, I was watching the Michigan-Wisconsin game. I almost turned the television off after halftime because that game was ugly. Good thing I didn't. Aside from watching such a crazy comeback, one of the announcers said something that stayed with me. He was commenting on the reluctance of the Wisconsin quarterback in stepping up in the pocket and delivering passes and instead being sacked and hurried to make bad throws. He said something like, "You can't wait forever to throw that ball. You gotta pull the trigger earlier." Life lessons from a college football analyst, wouldn't you say? Can't wait forever...you gotta pull the trigger. Watching football has its perks.

The economy is going crazy. And House Republicans are playing the partisan game when they rejected the $700billion government bailout bill. Sure that amount of money is staggering, considering our generation will take the hit and need to pay it off somehow. But to blame Nancy Pelosi (I mean I'm not a big fan of her either but...) and her partisan speech before the vote as the reason why you vote against the bill? Come on! That's such bull. I expect more from my congressmen. Americans should kick everyone of them (not just the Republicans) out of the House this Nov. We need a fresh start.

Speaking about the bailout, all those people who were contacting their congressmen to vote no on the bill are not intelligent. Sure, the taxpayer shouldn't be called up on to bailout financial institutions for the mistakes that greedy corporate execs made in the first place. We shouldn't be asked to throw a lifesaver to these corporations that are giving those execs tens of millions of dollars in severance packages for the crappy job they did. But that's just one side of the story. This financial crisis also affects the so-called Main Street people, the average Americans when there is a credit freeze and banks are collapsing. Banks are refusing to lend to anyone out of fear at a time when small and medium businesses rely on short-term loans for their payroll and costs of operations. This can only mean a staggering number of job losses and economic shutdown if this prolongs. So if the average American wants to punish corporate execs, they must be willing to punish themselves. But perhaps that may not be such a bad thing, given that we are a society that has become slaves to the credit market, a generation that is burdened with reckless debt.

Learning a new language is hard. Learning Chinese is even harder. God have mercy on me. I'm learning to be patient and take things one step at a time. But it's hard. I should have learned a language when I was younger and my brain was more impressionable. This class is definitely taking up a lot more of my time than I had expected. But I have no regrets. I'm determined to learn it and be good at it (and it's not because of a girl as some have suspected). It's a critical language in the world today, and I think it'll be a good asset to have in whatever I end up doing after grad school. Also, it reminds me of my experience in China. It'd be cool to go back and talk to the natives in their tongue instead of having to rely on translators. Maybe one day...