i want to live

"Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare. Give ear and come to me; listen, that you may live. I will make an everlasting covenant with you, my faithful love promised to David."
- Isaiah 55:1-3

homework was fun today

I got to read an interesting little book with a lot of little nuggets:

"Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?

First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God's delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and snowflake."

"Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination."

"Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men."

"Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it. Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program."

"The dependence upon others has a particular case that is especially painful for the system programmer. He depends upon other people's programs. These are often maldesigned, poorly implemented, incompletely delivered (no source code or test cases), and poorly documented. So he must spend hours studying and fixing things that in an ideal world would be complete, available, and usable."

- The Mythical Man-Month, Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.

one-liner

Man, I really liked this statement someone made at LIFE group today.

I felt like... it was the essence of Christian community:

Enjoying others enjoying God.

true joy

I love studying; I love being in class. I love Michigan football. I love video games. I love competition. I love sports. It's stuff I'm wired to do. I came in freshman year, wide-eyed, longing to explore these things and make the most of the opportunities at this school.

What ended up happening as I started gradually getting more and more "religious," though, was that I ended up suppressing my passions. As twisted as I think, I say... if my love for God is a 4/10, and my love for football is a 7/10, something must be wrong.

But instead of depending on God and trusting in the victory of Christ, I depended on myself. Do you know what I did? I knocked down my passion for football to a 3, instead of praying for God's grace to love Him more.

It's funny, how religious people are. I went Colossians 2:23:

Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.

Which reminds me that I really want to study Colossians this year. But in any case, I'm having a buttload of fun in my classes this year because I don't have to be someone else to receive God's approval. God made me who I am and God will work in me to know Him more in spite of who I am.

testimony

I sat down at the Fishbowl last week and just started writing... and somehow what flowed out was my life story, what I struggled to get out all summer, and it ended up exploding onto a 5 page Word document. Just wanted to paste it here.

So... here it is:

I grew up in a nominally Catholic home, as a good, sheltered, and innocent kid. The type of person you would think was good enough to make it to heaven if it existed. I started attending a private Christian school at age 5.

Despite being a “good kid” I wasn’t very honest with myself, though. My pride, self-centeredness and cowardice kept me from ever being able to see myself for who I really was. I received so much praise from people for being cute, for being smart, for being popular and all these things. I got so preoccupied with that praise and the fear of not living up to peoples’ expectations made me hide into the shell and begin living my life in such a way where I could mask my failures and make only my good come out. I took exams and could pass them without understanding the material – I figured out how to “cheat the system,” so it were.

“This is the verdict: life has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.” (John 3:19-20)

I was acutely aware of not being “good enough.” God’s standard is perfection, and that standard was the one I set for myself, also.

“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48)

The first time that I accepted that fact, admitted I was sinful and received Jesus as my Savior was in 2005, when my sister shared about Jesus with me. Even after that moment, though, I knew that being a Christian demands my life, my all – and I was unwilling to let God be the Lord of my life. I told God, “Leave me alone – let me do my own thing. I’ll start going to church in college. You’re too much of a bother to live for right now.”

Today, I’m thankful that God made me live up to what I said. Halfway through senior year, one of my friends invited me out to hang out with him at youth group, and it was there that God started to drill in me the conviction that I needed to find a church in college. In addition, tasting a bit of that community when I visited my sister at her church in Virginia made me realize that that’s what I wanted college to be like.

“Please do not go away until I come back and bring my offering and set it before you. And the LORD said, ‘I will wait until you return.’” (Judges 6:18)

So I came to college, thinking myself a grand and dandy Christian who could argue his way and prove his faith pretty well. I was in for a ride…

Freshman year, I started imitating the things that church people did. I think I really wanted to fit in, and be part of this community, and like I mentioned earlier, I still knew how to mask the bad and dwell in the good. I was so excited and did everything churchy possible – it was so new to me. One thing I discovered, though, is that faith wasn’t about what I could prove.

Sometime in second semester, a friend from back home questioned me about God and why He didn’t physically show up and talk to us like He did in the Bible. The question shook me, and many other questions arose: “Does God exist? Is He really in control of what happens to me?” It ended up getting me pretty down, especially with the gray skies in Michigan. I went to church every other day, sat and stared at the ceiling because I couldn’t believe in a God I didn’t feel I really believed in. I felt like life without God had no meaning, so if God didn’t exist, then life wasn’t worth living. (But I wasn’t like… suicidal. Just really hopeless.)

One day, I was reading a book (Searching for God Knows What – Donald Miller), and it talked about a guy who had trouble believing in God so he went out in the street and yelled out to God – “You don’t exist!” After returning home, he discovered the irony of telling a non-existent entity that the non-existent entity didn’t exist. I tried that.

“God, I don’t know if You exist, but if You do, make me believe in You. If you don’t exist, forget it, obviously.”

A week later, I literally just… started believing. No one answered any questions, no one told me anything. I just believed (at least in the existence of God). Here’s when I realized… even faith cannot be formed by man – it is God’s work.

“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9)

The journey continued, and I participated in missions my freshman year summer with our church. It made me really proud because I was able to emulate what it was supposed to be about. I was nice to people, I shared the gospel, I did all the things… with absolutely no heart, but with sheer willpower. Sometimes, I amaze myself.

That led into sophomore year, which was one long year of living in that pride of being a good Christian. The whole year was filled with questions about God, and a full-of-myself attitude. It concluded at the end in one of my LIFE group (what our church calls our small group ministry) gatherings, where I was super challenged – people were sharing their deepest darkest most shameful things, and I could only share that I had a hard time reading the Bible. I started discovering how closed I was.

Break into the summer of that year, and our church chooses who’s going to be part of the leadership team. A few of my classmates were chosen, and I got really jealous. It was partly my holy attitude that thought I was the bomb, partly the fact that all who were chosen were the ones who participated in missions with me the previous summer, and only I was left out. I was left wondering what I was missing and what people were seeing… but more than anything, I saw my sinful nature. I discovered how proud I was and how much I cared about titles and reputation. It was so hard to share this with anyone, but I shared this with an older brother, and he just laughed and showed me God’s grace. And it was the beginning of the opening of a closed heart.

That summer, I started reading a book (Waking the Dead – John Eldredge) and honestly, it’s a little controversial because it talks about the human heart being good, but nevertheless, it challenged me to think about what the word heart meant. At the same time, an older brother invited me to lunch, and shared about how he was discovering that our hearts need to change and how we need God for that. He shared a promise from the Bible with me:

“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” (Ezekiel 36:26)

That was my prayer all summer. A few weeks before heading back to Ann Arbor, I was in Colorado at my sister’s place. I spent two out of my three weeks there playing Wii and watching Netflix all day. A week before returning, I received an e-mail from one of our church leaders asking us to pray for the upcoming new student outreach time.

And for some inexplicable reason, though I was never one to spend time with God except to just read my Bible and pray to say I did, I got on my knees and started praying all week and just spending time with God. God started giving me a heart, and he gave me a verse:

“The thief comes only to kill and steal and destroy; but I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” (John 10:10)

That was the verse describing my junior year. Life to the full is found in God’s presence and with Him alone. Things that seemed bland and dry the year previous came alive for me. Bible studies, prayer time, all of it started coming more alive to me.

One of the crazy experiences I had was in November, when a guy named Jaeson Ma visited our church. We had a movie screening about missions and then spent some time in prayer and worship, and that time was like no other I’ve ever had. I personally met God powerfully and I felt so free – being able to worship in His presence without having to look to my left or my right – and He was just showing me my sinfulness and unwillingness to trust in Him, because of my pride and boasting in myself, my doubt that He was faithful, and my fear that He would let me go. I think I like to describe that night as the night I was really filled with the Holy Spirit… which is a little different from just walking in the Spirit.

“All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.” (Acts 2:4)

The time after that, for a few months, was just spent basking in God’s presence. I felt like I went to class, came back, worshipped God, prayed, spent time with people, came back, worshipped God and prayed, went to church, came back, worshipped God, prayed, etc… It was just awesome.

I visited my sister again during winter break for a week or so, and on my way back she wrote me a letter which I read on the plane. It said something along the lines of: “Chris, I am so thankful that you are so willing to listen whenever we want to sit down and speak of God.” And I read it, and I broke down in tears on the plane. I’m so thankful, so grateful that God loves me enough to plant something in me that I had no control over. There was never a day that I said, “God I’m going to love You and listen to everything You say,” never a day I decided to follow Him, but He was always drawing me near.

“…being confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 1:6)

During our Easter service in April, God allowed me to see what He was like. My whole life, I believed in my heart (even if I didn’t say it out loud), that if I screwed up, if I took one wrong step, that He was waiting to kick me out of His presence, to send me to hell. But the experiences of the year, and one song that was played in a slideshow at the service (‘Til I Got to Know You – Sanctus Real) made me understand that God is not capricious – He is loving, and His will is to draw me nearer.

The year drew to a close, and in my LIFE group for the year, I experienced the power of worship – and what it was like to have God’s presence draw near when we sang songs about Him and declared His praises. Speaking about Him on our last day, and speaking about His love displayed through people made me physically feel His love, and that was an amazing experience and amazing year.

“I led them with cords of human kindness, with ties of love; I lifted the yoke from their neck and bent down to feed them.” (Hosea 11:4)

I signed up to do missions again the summer after junior year. I was simply convicted during a retreat earlier in the year that I could do research and pave my way to grad school, which I was planning on doing, or I could have faith and believe that what God was speaking – to do missions again – was what He wanted and what I needed. Literally, it was a whisper in my ear that morning that God challenged me to do missions. And I had no real tangible reason, but I listened.

The missions project was tough on me. It was so different from the build-up of pride I had experienced my freshman year. God started showing me my heart condition. My supposed selfless acts were all out of a self-feeding nature. It was more about what I wanted from God and people than wanting to contribute and help the people I was supposed to be serving. At certain points, I was so overwhelmed with my obvious pride and selfishness that I just sat and cried during our worship times. I had nothing to offer.

Yet the people we visited, the people I was serving with constantly told me that I was a huge blessing. And this was bizarre. Either they were lying, or something that I didn’t understand was happening behind the scenes, because I knew my heart wasn’t in the right place. I choose to believe the latter – in God’s grace.

“But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.” (2 Corinthians 12:9)

My conviction coming out of missions was to love and serve the people around me. A sermon I heard the week before returning home to visit my family was simply about obeying my parents, apologizing to them, and loving them, so that’s how I headed home.

Through discussions with my parents about my future, all I can say is that I wasn’t very loving. I was pretty self-centered about the whole ordeal. It was more about me, about what God “wanted for me,” than loving and building a relationship with my parents. It was about making the right choice for me, not getting to know God and people. And this painted the picture of my life. All my life, I have been changing the way I act, trying to do the right thing, trying to make the right choice. But when things get hard and everything seems wrong, I blame it on the fact that I am doing something wrong.

For example, I had always been about doing things, planning events and programs and thinking God would do something because of the events. And I love doing tasks, and I knew that God wanted me to be more about people. My solution to this problem was to intentionally be irresponsible and stink at doing tasks and spend more time with people, thinking that this was what God wanted. But like someone expressed in a Youtube video, it’s like spraying cologne on a corpse. It still stinks.

“Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.” (Matthew 23:26)

All the problems I saw in myself were only a symptom of the bigger problem. I didn’t love God. He wasn’t my Treasure. He wasn’t my friend. He was my Savior, sure. He was even my Lord. Reading just two chapters into Desiring God by John Piper made me see that I was missing the big picture. It wasn’t about my performance, about being perfect. It was about loving God simply for God - the greatest commandment.

“Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” (Deuteronomy 6:5)

"Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.” (Psalm 37:4)

“However, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” (Luke 10:20)

“But seek first his kingdom and righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” (Matthew 6:33)

I’m discovering that I need Jesus every day to love God. For my heart does not naturally drift to love God and live for Him day and night, it drifts to the self and what I want. I need the Holy Spirit to guide me and enable me to love God and delight in His presence. Right now, I am pleased to say that the last week has been awesome just spending time with God. I feel like I’m just discovering what it means to have a relationship with God, not just be religious. This is salvation – to know God and enjoy Him and glorify Him.

This coming semester, I’m excited to learn. In the past, I’ve avoided criticism, sought the praise of man, hidden my weaknesses, etc. But what I’m excited to see is that in my shortcomings and failures, I find the grace of God and the dependence upon Jesus as I am able to repent and receive forgiveness for my sinfulness; I find that I am able to learn as I admit that I don’t have it all put together. My whole life I’ve gotten A’s in school without actually understanding the concepts, because I knew how to take exams. But now, I don’t just want to take the exam and do well and convince people I am well, I want to be well on the inside and truly love God with everything I’ve got. And this is the hope I have in Christ Jesus.

“But in your hearts, set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have…” (1 Peter 3:15a)

“Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, ‘The LORD is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.” (Lamentations 3:22-24)

“On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” (Matthew 9:12)

God the Redeemer

"You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives."
- Genesis 50:20

People screw up, but God redeems. He is sovereign.