brokenhearted

I prayed in my car this morning that God fill my heart with love and hope. But this has been almost the worst day ever. I worked hard. My clothes got wet, dirty and filthy. My thumb was smashed and there is still pain whenever I tried to use it. Yet it was for nothing.

My heart was filled with doublts for God. I felt that I was all alone again. No one could really help me and no one really cared about how I was doing. All kinds of bad feelings were biting my heart.

I hope I can climb back to the place where I feel joyful and peaceful again just because of the fact I know that God is with me and he loves me. It has been hard.

take the step?

This evening I was one foot away from a severe car accident. The other car apparently kept turning left after their red light. Thanks to the ABS in my new car, I didn't hit straight into it. Even if I did so, the worst case for me would be the airbag popping out, but I think the person on the passenger seat in the other car would be badly injured.

Although it's not my fault, technically, it would not have happened that way if my mind had been more focused. I do feel it has been wondering away these days. The spirit I gained in God for the last few weeks is descending due to all kinds of trivia. I am afraid I was like those mentioned in Matthew 13:22: "The one who received the seed that fell among the thorns is the man who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke it, making it unfruitful. "

Regarding the relationship with God, I don't know what to do next. I was distracted by this question so much that I lost the connection with him. Sometimes I really wish he could just come over and work on me without my permission. But he asked for my love based on the free will. Now that he knows I love him, he is asking for more.

Alright, let's talk. Take it, here is my heart.

troubles come and go

Corinthians 4:16-18 (NIV): "Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal."

These have been the words that I repeated to myself over and over again recently. It gave me strength and lifted me up when things went rough.

Strangely, for the first time I felt depressed after the lifegroup. The reason might be that we talked about heaven in details. Like Brian said, "The only thing that a detailed picture of heaven could do would be to keep people out of it. "

And when I told my closest friend that I just bought 6 books today about christianity, she looked at me in a weird way and said "I should probably keep a distance from you". I knew she was joking, but my heart still sank for a few minutes.

I know it won't be easy. God probably never promised it will.

time to say goodbye

Today I was making this "you-broke-our-hearts" cd for the French girl we are working with, who will leave us in a week. I suddenly felt sad.

The truth is that one of my dearest friends is leaving soon too. Tonight I hung out with her for a few hours and probably we won't be able to do that for the next few years. When I left her apartment, she asked if we should have a hug.

Both of us are the kind of persons who pretend to be strong and try not to show strong feelings in front of others. So my first instinct was to play cool again. Then I stopped and hugged her. I know if I didn't do that, I was going to regret it.

But, why can't we stay with our beloved ones? Why is it so hard to say goodbye?

God wants us to love with our hearts. It seemed all the loves would bring pains. Sometimes I just want to hold back my feelings so that I won't get hurt again. Because even if we are lucky enough to spend a lifetime with the ones we love, death will set us apart. There will be great grief.

Brian was wishing that the airplane he was going to take would crash so that he could go home. I often felt the same way too. Only in heaven, we will be able to experience the love with God with the absolute security. So what am I doing here? Please take me with you, God.

However, I wonder if it's because I truly want to be with God, or it's because I want to escape from all the responsibilities and trivial things I have to deal with everyday and in the future. Possibly both.

the journey of desire

I have a complex feeling toward this book "the journey of desire" by John Eldredge.

When I started to read it, I did not like it. At some point, I even hated the fact that it stirred some of my memories and emotions buried deeply long time ago.

Now that I finished the whole book, I would say that it is worth reading and has some very inspiring ideas in it. Although I don't agree on everything John Eldredge proposed there, what he wrote has got me to think quite a bit about desires, life and God. It also forced me to be honest with myself and God, which is a good thing, I suppose.

So, what do I want? This is the key question in the book. Without knowing our true desires, we can't fully delight in what God has been offering us. Consequently, we might lose the hope for what God promised us in the eternal life, because you can only hope for what you desire.

For most of my life I have been rather clueless. If God was standing in front of me and aske me the question, I would probably stare blankly at him. And it's not that sort of test question which has some standard answer and I have been pretty good at.

What you say should be directly from your heart. It will totally make no sense to try to give God an answer to satisfy him, because he is asking "what do you want?" instead of "guess what I want you to have?" Apparently he knows everything. The problem is whether or not we are aware of the desire in our hearts.

Currently I am in the stage of job-hunting. There are a lot of opportunities in front of me. God is waiting for me to make a decision. He is going to grant me what I desire to do, which remains unclear to me. Every direction has its cons and pros. How do I know which path is the right one to take?

At times like this, people ask for signs from God. However, at a second thought, what exactly do I mean by "the right path"? So in my heart I already know what I want from life. Making the "right" decision probably means by going this way I should be able to make the most of what I want out of my life. Is it Money? Health? Happiness? Or all of them?

For certain period of my life happiness used to be all I want. I tried so hard that my being happy almost seemed fake. Or sometimes it felt more like a numbness than real joy.

(to be completed)

time brings change, and change takes time

Today I was driving my car back home and listening to the CD Brian burnt for me, which has his favorite Christian songs. Then this lyric stood out of the song "River God".

"Time brings change, and change takes time." How true.

An old friend of mine called yesterday. We have been pretty close since we first met each other five years ago. She used to know almost everything that had happened to my life here. Now that we are both very busy, we don't talk that often any more.

We talked for half hour about what has been going on with our lives recently. I told her there might be a chance that I will become a Christian. Her response was "are you kidding me? That's terrible." I am afraid this is not a single case. Two years ago, I probably would think it was totally ridiculous if one of my friend told me that she or he believed in God.

In our lifegourp last night, we talked about that sometimes we really desired something but instead God gave us what we didn't want. Strangely everything turned out better that way.

For me, I thought I could graduate sometime last year. If I did, I wouldn't have had such a great friendship with Brian. I wouldn't have got to know so many wonderful people and seen how God has done an amazing job to their lives. Most of all, I wouldn't have learned this much(though still very little) about God and started to love him.

This was a huge change to my life. I felt so blessed by having the chance to know that God is with me. He has shown me in different ways that he loves me and he is anxious to fill my needs. By loving him back I opened my heart and finally found something that could possibly quench my thirst.

Still there is a long way to go before I can tell God that I will follow him no matter where he wants me to and no matter what happens, simply because change takes time. But I hope this day will come to me pretty soon.

seek and find

Last night I was pretty bothered by some personal issue and felt that there was no hope again. I tried to talk to God. However, I didn't feel there was any connection between us. It's possible that I was too busy listening to my own voice. It happens often.

How do we know it's God that is speaking to us? Brian said following God's words brought peace to his heart. I found it very true. Sometimes it seemed so difficult to do what He told me to, but the rewards afterwards made it all worthy.

Actually ever since my parents left I have had some trouble with falling into sleep. Usually I would stay up to at least 2 am.

I didn't want to pray for small things like good sleep. One reason is that I am afraid it won't be answered. Since I can't figure out a reason why God would ignore small requests like this, I felt it's better not to ask.

It sounds silly, I know.

Matthew 7:7 says:"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you."So I really need to be honest with God, ask for his help and let him decide.

If I can't understand why he doesn't answer my prayers sometimes, I don't have to. Faith is a moral, not reasoning. And God knows what is the best for me. Even though I fail him sometimes, he knows how to turn the situation to do me good.

Right now I don't know if he is trying to build my character or he already gave me the sign but I didn't get it. Maybe I should be patient and keep looking for the solution.

Heaven

I didn't take any serious interest in heaven until recently.

It started with one day in Vegas. I was in the hotel, having all kinds of stuff going on in mind and feeling somewhat depressed by the reality. Then I was thinking: if I desire something better than this life, what would it be?

Some christians talked about heaven as if it is some privilege or benefit for being a christian and sometimes use this to attract non-christians. I won't say what they are doing is totally wrong, if they do know what heaven is really about. After all, it is a way to get people to take interest in christianity in the first place.

However, as C.S.Lewis said, "the moment we attempt to use our faith in the other world for this purpose, that faith weakens." By saying "this purpose", he only meant the hope of being with the earthly beloved in heaven. Not to mention some material desire I heard from people when they talked about heaven.

God promised our life to the fullness in heaven, but having a full life can only be the result not the reason, according to my understanding.

To be honest, if heaven is where every so-called christian will be, I am not sure that I want to be there. Although I dare not to judge whether or not a christian has real faith, I respect those who have shown me that and from them I see the reflection of God's glory.

After coming back from my trip, I kept shooting questions about heaven at Brian. Basically, I asked him what his vision of heaven is. Also, will we be able to be with our loved ones in heaven? He gave very clear answers in his entry about heaven.

Since none of my family members is christian, I am having difficulties with the second question. I can bear being apart from them for eternity although I don't want to, but I can't bear even the slightest possiblity that they would be suffering in hell. It breaks my heart each time I think of this.

The comfort can only come from the absolute faith in God. I need to accept that God is just and he loves me this much. All the goodness, love, wisdom and beauty we see in our beloved ones is all coming from God and revealed by him. Lewis said, "when we see the face of God we shall know that we have always known it......by loving him more than them(earthly beloved) we shall love them more than we now do."

Even so, it is still hard for me to imagine how I can feel complete joy and peace when the day comes. There is really nothing I can do besides learning about God and trying to love and trust him.

I wondered if there is a timeline for going to heaven. If people are judged by God face to face after they die, do they get another chance to stay with him? Like those who never had chance to know him, will he allow people to fall in love with him during the final judgement?

Do people who commit suicide must go to hell? What if they ask for forgiveness right before their last breath, assuming that they are not taking advantage of God's forgiveness?

I guess I will probably never know the answer until the day I stand before him.

It might be just my illusion, ,but I was talking to God the other day and through a half-opened door he let me catch a glimpse at where I would be after I die. I saw light, garden and people. And there was joy. I felt God was telling me that I should put more faith in him and there is nothing to worry about.

To me, heaven should be the place where I am with the people I deeply love. Nothing else matters. I desire to go to heaven only if I fall in love with God.

I believe this is also what he wants.

Lord's Prayer

Matthew 5:9-13 (NIV)
"Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one."

The first time I heard of the words "Lord's prayer" was from Brian's talk about slice of his life. I am pretty sure I have read this part in the Bible before, but I didn't know that there was a specific name for this prayer.

C.S.Lewis pointed out in "mere Christianity" that by saying "our Father in heaven", we actually put us in the place of Jesus Christ. If we start with pretending to be the son of God, it is very likely that the pretendence will be turned into a reality by the help from God.

But how is it different from what those hypocrites do? It sounded like doing good deeds will lead you to the right path. However, I am sure it's not what Lewis meant. It is the heart that should be dressed up like Christ.

During one of our lunches, Brian explained to me the meaning of each sentence in Lord's prayer, which did solve one of my puzzles. I was quite confused by "your will be done" because I didn't realize "will" here is a noun.

To me, "Give us today our daily bread" delivers the message that we should not worry too much about the future. As said in Matthew 25-34, God is taking care of our daily needs. We only do what we ought to do today, which is quite ironic, because I really should write the paper right now, while I prefer spending time on talking about God.

"Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors" is very important to Christianity. It can also be presented as "love our neighbor", or even "love our enemy". If we fail to do that, we will not be forgiven by God either.

I used to think that God's forgiveness to us is unconditional. Well, it's still unconditional if "unconditional" means that God will forgive us no matter what kind of sins we commit. However, we need to forgive others' sins first.

How exactly do we forgive? In his chapter "forgiveness", C.S.Lewis talked about how we should love people who have nothing lovable about them. Like we love ourselves. Like God loves us. I have read that chapter at least twice. I understand what it was said there, but I don't know if anyone would ever be able to do that besides Christ.

As I am reading "the journey of desire", it is quite interesting to me the relationship between the desires, the hope and the temptation. Apparently the last one is a bad thing, since it says "lead us not into temptation". Deisres could be good, which are put into our heart by God. As said in that book, we should only hope for what we desired. But there are also disowned desires, possibly caused by temptation.

Currently I clearly know that I desire to learn about God. I wish I had more time to read those books and talk about him with friends, though sometimes I doubt if it's one of my desires to procrastinate from my research. Anyway, I count it as a good one.

For most of my other desires, I asked God to work on me so that they can be removed. And he answered. Although this will be a winding road and my mind will become restless again, I feel much more comfortable now because I know I am not by myself and He loves me.

am I ready

Last night God made fun of me again.

I was lying in my bed with some pain in my stomache, and also feeling tired by working on the paper the whole day. Well, precisely, most of day, because I spent the whole morning playing with msn.catoon.com.

So I said my everyday prayer. In addition, I asked God to release the physical pain I had. Immediately the pain was gone.

Although it happened to me once before when I was in Vegas, it still impressed and humbled me by how ready God is listening to me and how fast my prayer is answered.

I told God that I loved him and I was grateful for everything he had done for me. And that I wanna be with him.

Really?

Yes. I can't wait to be with you.

Suddenly the whole world was sinking into the enormous darkness. I couldn't feel any part of my body anymore, though my mind was perfectly clear. I could still hear the cars passing by my apartment on the highway.

I didn't know what was going to happen next. And I was scared.

Brian told me that he had similar experience, but my case was different. At that moment, I knew if I wanted to, I still could go back and move my body anytime.

So I chose to be honest. God, I am afraid that I am not ready yet.

Then every sense of my body came back. I moved my fingers. Turned my body. And smiled.

God, you surely know me better than I do.