Recap on an issue: Excommunication for divorcing?!

So I got to see an old friend of mine… I had heard and then confirmed that another friend of mine was getting divorced.  🙁  So I wanted to show up and see him to give him support…

What made me madder than anything was how his church, of all places and people, excommunicated him for it!   😡  WTF?!  Excuse my language but I am mad as hell… church was made to be a place for people who are broken to come and be healed and made whole again before God!  So Christians can forgive murderers but not dirvorced?!  There’s a bit more to the story but that should not change the fact that it is especially for these times that the church should embrace both of the broken parties and work to heal the family…

Erg… I’m so freakin’ mad!   We as church need to realize that just because we make a mistake should not end in being cut off from the body of Christ!  For goodness’ sake…  I’m just glad that my friend was taking it better… not hating these clueless people… or God.  In fact, all things considered, he was doing well… but just couldn’t attend a church (physically) for now.  Really.  I hope we all strive to be more forgiving and receiving…

/Rant

God’s Sense of Timing

So in light of finding my lost friend, there’s a rather funny and amazing story attached to it. You see, before having found my friend, I had offered my sister-in-law that I would pick up her friend from the train station at 9 pm since my brother was out of town due to his church’s youth group retreat.

Then, I had found Won Suk Lee by the miracle of God that same day and due to being out of town that weekend, and busy work schedule next week, that same day was the only day he was available to come out and see me. This was 7 pm when we spoke. By the time we would meet, it would be 8 pm and so we would only have an hour, especially since he wanted to be home by no later than 10:30 pm.

We met up in Fort Lee/Palisades Park area since he needed to eat anyway. So we catch up and eat and it was raining. However, a good bit before 9 pm, my in-law calls me apologizing that her friend would be coming later now more likely at 10 pm. Well, that was a God-given gift for us to catch up more.

So we chatted till about 9:45 pm at which point, he left for home and I went to pick up my in-law’s friend. Turns out she couldn’t get on due to overflow in the previous bus ride, and so the funny(?) point is that her being delayed was a “welcome” gift for me to catch up with my friend. It was funny to me… 😛

A Friend Lost, A Friend Found

So there’s a friend of mine who I’ve lost touch with for several years now.  His name is Won Lee, who now goes by Jacob.  O_o  He was… eccentric, at best.  He is a very good at being a job pusher as he was KUSA president in the year of ’95 thru ’96, while I was at UT Austin.

He was very efficient at what he did.  Perhaps too well, and burned lots of bridges in the process.  To find him again, I started a Facebook group by the name of “Do you know Won Suk Lee”.  😀  There are so far 9 people in it but I was doing it as a semi-experiment to see if I could find him through it.  ‘Lo and behold, Yuri came to the rescue, as she happened to know Won’s younger brother, John’s phone number!  How weird is that?  So I call him up though I’ve never met him before, and got the dork, I mean, Won 😛 and called him up.

We had good dinner to catch up.  He’s now working at GE Finance making the big bucks.  Why am I writing all this up?  You see, he is a bit anti-social and proud of not having much (in fact, any) presence on the web.  So there you go, Won!  LOL…  Many people asked me why I wanted to “bother finding a guy like him” again?  Sure he has his difficult moments.  But to me, everyone has his/her faults.  I, reminded by the words of Jun Kang, another eccentric saved for another time and entry, have very bad short-term memory and it ends up irritating a lot of people.  But that’s who I am and can’t really help it … much.  Since we are all “incomplete by nature”, I believe that we all should be embracing others no matter how odd and strange and difficult that other person may be.

After all, we all want to be simply accepted for who we are… just as Christ received us.  Unconditionally.

On the Lookout: James Choung’s Upcoming Book

I’ve met some great people in my college years… and one of them is James Choung, an MIT grad class of ’95. I’ve lost touch with everyone from those years but thanks to Facebook, I’ve found so many friends again, including him!

He’s now a regional director for InterVarsity in southern California! 😀 Not only that, I found out today that he’s coming out with TWO books!  First book is entitled True Story: A Christianity Worth Believing In and the upcoming booket is entitled Based on a True Story and will be published under IV Press. (Duh!)

So if you know him, go represent and buy his book(let) in early 2008!! Awesome!

Simmered Bacon & Tomatoes: An Awesome & Easy Recipe

Well, someone had mentioned that bacon simmered with tomatoes and garlic is great… so yesterday, given the chance, I took a stab at it! 

I first cooked the bacon on George Foreman grille!  Reduce the fat as much as possible… in the meanwhile, I put some olive oil and chopped garlic and started to grill that.  I just love the smell of garlic roasting!  And then I threw in chopped tomatoes into the mix, and eventually the bacon cut into pieces.

The end result was just magnifique!!  Even Anna loved it!!  It was sooo good… I wanna eat some more!!  And it went very well with rice to boot!  Yummy… so many thanks to whoever mentioned that recipe idea!!