Category: Personal

Posted on

“There Is No Me Without You” – A look into tragic reality in Ethiopia, poverty, and orphans

Our required reading is a book by the title of “There is no me without you” by Melissa Fay Greene.  I’ve been putting off the reading for some time now… It’s not that I’m just lazy.  This book scares me.    Why?  The author tells of her travels and stories of her accounting of Ethiopia and she captures the reality of the country’s situation so well, it should scare any normal person!

I had very difficult time getting through the first chapter.  It’s not that it’s boring.  It is just that it’s sooo tragic!  If there is any decency in the reader, he/she shouldn’t be able to get past the first chapter without tears, trying to hold back how tough life is for so many people.  It’s just mind boggling how poor so many are around the world, and especially in a country called Ethiopia.

If anyone complains of being “poor” or anything close in resemblance, read the book!  Then you will realize that you are richer than 70% of the world’s population!    I don’t know what little person like me can do.  I can only pray that God would use a person like me to show compassion to such people.  In the end, I pray that this mission trip will only be a beginning, a reconnaissance trip to see how we can be of help over long term.

Haregewoin is true hero.  I dare say that she is “bigger” than Mother Teresa.    Read this book!  Please!!!  And get involved most of all…

Posted on

In reflection of the VT tragedy…

Since the VT tragedy, it’s been hard… and reflective. And with Pastor Shawn’s message on the “Good Samaritan”, I felt encouraged to share…

What can we do? In the end, all humans want to be accepted for who we are. Not judged. Even if we have “evolved” to be less “racial”, we as humans will always find things to be prejudiced about, be it social status, intellect, outsider etc…

Well, I wanted to share that though I may not have been a loner, I still identify better with being an outsider. I was never a part of the popular crowd in high school of mainly white population (and no, I’m not being racist in calling Caucasians as white, so don’t get off on it please) in northern New Joisey. I was a nerd back then… Math Team member, chess team member, I didn’t hang out with popular crowd. It wasn’t till college that I discovered that it’s ok to be who God designed me to be, and to accept myself for who I am, and not try to be something that I am not. It was more important in being a child of God first and foremost.

Since then, I have been comfortable in being a nerd or a geek, rarely shriveling from it or trying to deny/hide from it. Instead, as some of you know about it, I have made it a calling and life-long mission to accept people for who they are… and esp. trying to be friend to the friendless and leaving the judgment to God.

I feel no different today than before the VT tragedy. Sure Cho was an extreme case, but who isn’t when people continue to shun others out for one reason or another. If Jesus hadn’t been my friend to an oddball like me, who knows where I would be today?! So I challenge you… no, I beseech you to go past your first impressions of people… and to make that extra effort to be a friend to the friendless…

The last thing I want the church to be is some kind of “social elite club” that Jesus so condemned against.

Posted on

Learning to adapt

In my world of occupation as an engineer, it’s not enough to just know your field.  Knowing maths and physics is not going to guarantee your job in the future.  Everybody knows that in this ever evolving job market, one needs to continuously learn new things.

Exactly what does that entail?  Just take a look at the programs I had to learn over the years…

CFD related:  DPLR, Overflow, FieldView 10 and 11
Programming language:  C, Fortran 77/90, Pascal, Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)
Scripting:  Perl, C-shell script, FieldView script
OS:  Windows, Unix, Linux
CAD Experience:  MSC/NASTRAN, CADKEY, EDS VisView 4.1
Web:  HTML, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX, Cold Fusion, Microsoft Access Database
Publishing:  Adobe FrameMaker 5.5, Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat 4.0/5.0/6.0
Other:  Microsoft Project, Microsoft Visio, Computer hardware & software

So what does that all mean?  Just as I have to keep learning and adapt to the working world as it continuously seems to expand, so must our spiritual lives.  Always finding and seeking ways to see God in different light, learning of Him in new ways, placing Him outside the box…  Why?  Because God is infinite and to think/believe that after certain amount of time, that we know Him well enough, is to fool and deceive ourselves.  I must continuosly look for Him in this world, seeing His big and small miracles working in people’s lives.

Tomorrow is Good Friday… Thank you God for your gift of sacrifice.  Amen.

Posted on

Another reminder from “Purpose Driven Life”

As we are going through Purpose Driven Life again for the 2nd time, I came across a rather shocking reminder… It’s from the end of the Chapter 10: The Heart of Worship.

“There is a moment of surrender, and there is the practice of surrender, which is moment-by-moment and lifelong. The problem with a living sacrifice is that it can crawl off the altar, so you may have to resurrender your life fifty times a day.”

Being a habitual creature, I found this to be too true. But it hurts so much each time… it’s like being shattered like the jar of clay each time… totally broken. The only thing I can do is to ask God to help me get up again and again…

Posted on

Soojin’s Naturalization & The Longest Day

So today was THE DAY for Soojin… she is now an American! 
Please send her your regards… she can now moan and complain about the politicians like we do!! 
So what made today one of the Longest Day for me?
Here’s the recap…

1. Get up at 5:30 am to drive the family to Cyfair area in this horrid cold rain!
2. Traffic near the area is horrendous as nearly 2000 naturalized citizens and family showed up!
3. We left at 11…
4. Caught lunch at Pappadeaux near Gessner… way too salty dirty rice & blackened catfish! 
5. Drove to Social Security Services branch in Pasadena and waited two hours in the car while she was waiting.
6. Got back home to Clear Lake and dropped the family off.
7. Took my ol’ Honda to Nick’s place for oil change & state inspection.
8. Went to Verizon store ’cause my i730 PDA phone touchscreen decided to go AWOL on me.
9. Got home at 6:30 pm.
10. Went to Bible study at Formosan Church in west side
11. Got back home at 10:30 pm

Whew!  I’m exhausted… and the phone not wanting to work with me didn’t help either…  Good night…

Posted on

Abraham and his faith (Genesis 22:5)

So I started to do daily reading and one of the readings was Genesis 22. No big deal… I’ve heard the story before… Abraham, the forefather of Israel and us, was promised a son and received him at the age of 100, only to be challenged by God to sacrifice his own son! The killer is that knowing that he had to sacrifice his very own son back to God. If that wasn’t painful enough of a sacrifice, I don’t know what is… But I’ve known this part of his faith all my life. However, God was gracious enough to point out a new part of Abraham. I point to verse 5. Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you.” The words that stuck out to me were the last few… “… then we will come back to you.” I boldfaced the keyword ‘we’. Why? In knowing God asked for his own son, Abraham still went up believing in God that provided Isaac to begin with, and though God had asked him to give up the very dear life of himself, Abraham trusted and knew that God would somehow make all things right. To be able to say that “we will come back to you” required amount of faith only a true Christian could have. Having faith and trust in the one God, I now see another side of Abraham that I had failed to see all this time. I can only dare to pray and ask for such faith.

Posted on

Making the most out of… the lemons…

So Soojin got the flu… 
She called me at work from home after 1 pm. Work has been getting very busy as of late but she has to get rest…. So I headed home and she had fever just over 100 F.  So after dishes and such, I decided to take the kids outside since that would be the best way for Soojin to get rest.  So I decided to make the most out of it by taking them to Bay Area Park and pick up a pizza from Papa John’s on the way back.

I was partially(?) sick but I wanted to make the most out of this “situation” and the kids had a blast at the playground… and after about an hour and half of running around, swinging, and chasing, we headed to the lake… and just… watched.  Sat by the “shore” on a bench and watched the birds… counted how many were sitting on a tree…

We walked back holding hands… and then tried to race together… WHILE holding hands!    And then picked up the pizza but since JJ was falling asleep in the car, I offered him a deal .. “blue juice” aka. Gatorade Frost!   Anna and JJ also discovered how much they love Papa John’s (good-for-nothing) garlic butter.  At least, despite our being sick, they had a blast.  Soojin is now on the good ol’ TheraFlu.