Category: Family

This question is one of the first questions I set out to answer PRIOR to starting to work. Heck, I addressed this question when I was still in high school.  Yeah, I am a bit oddball of sorts.  😉

When I was senior in high school, our English teacher wanted us to write what our ideal dream life in the future would be. While most wrote houses and $100K+ salary, I wrote (what I thought as) modest $50K salary living in the country side. I wanted to just have a good and happy family life, raising kids who will grow up joyful enjoying life God gave them fully.

When I was in college, I swore to myself that I’d choose a family over work.  If I had to choose between $80K job that required too much relocation and/or
traveling, and one that offered $50k job that would let me leave work at work and rarely any traveling, I’d choose the latter.  To this day, I’m glad to say
that I’ve stayed true to myself.  I didn’t even bother applying to jobs that would either ask more of my time or traveling.  Some of you may just say I’m not developing my full potential in my career.  While that may be true, and having grown up with my parents (esp. my dad) being so busy with work that they rarely spent any time with us, I do not wish that upon my two children nor esp. on my wife.

I like coming home without beggage from work.  I like not having to go into work at wee hours of the night (or the morning). I enjoy being able to flex my time at work AROUND my family.  I am so glad that I don’t have to think about the job-related things while I spend it with the family. So what if I make less money?  When I am up on my death bed, there are only two things I want to be sure of.

1. Did I live fully for Christ?
2. Is my family happy with the way I have lived with them and for them?

I just pray that I’d never get swept up in that workaholic mentality… ever.
So… do you work to live or live to work?

The word “opposite” has such a huge implication in meaning.  And it can’t add any more than to the differences between a man and a woman.

For the past 5 years of our marriage, we have fought countless number of times.  Mainly, that to Soojin, telling me of something again and again isn’t the same.  Confused?  It has only begun.  To her, even slight change of the content of the conversation implies it is a new conversation.  Example 1.  If yesterday, she told me “We ate rice today” and then today, she says “we ate barley yesterday” (to be more specific), those two statemens are entirely different whereas to me, rice and barley are cereal that we eat on daily basis and thus the same.  Example 2 (for the men!).  If she said “AAAAAAAA” yesterday and she says “AAAAAABA” today, these two statements are
entirely different.  So in her case, even the slightest of change in content implicates difference in conversation where as to me, it’s “close enough” that I take it as repeating, and thus, [the hated word of the ladies] nagging.

This is important esp. as we go through Purpose Driven Life together.  As we accept more and more of how God has created each of us differently, it’s even more important to realize that we can’t change the way the other person thinks.  What we have come to agree now is that instead of trying to get the other person to see the differences or understand, it’s more imperative that we try very hard to remind ourselves that the other person takes to understand (or as I like to say, translate) “A” as “Z” because of our fundamental differences in the thinking mentality.

To her, she likes to be reminded, even if I’ve told her before, whereas I take it as being ignored because she doesn’t think that I listened to her.  Now, we both realize that putting our own selves in each other’s shoes is that much more important.