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Last night, Pastor Scott, some members of the Boon Church servants team, and I had the wonderful opportunity of having dinner with Reverend Wayland Wong at Pastor Don’s house. A seasoned minister, Wayland is one of the most respected Chinese-American pastors in the country. Based out of Orange County, CA, he has been working with Chinese churches and is incredibly knowledgeable in the area of Chinese ministry and the unique cultural challenges with running a one in America. He has more decades of ministry experience than I have years (even including my years in HS as a youth leader). I was really excited to meet him and drill him with questions because Chinese-American ministry happens to be my passion. I had been reading articles from a newsletter called FACE (Fellowship of American Chinese Evangelicals) that he started in the 70s. In addition, I had spent the last summer interning with ISAAC (Institute for the Study of Asian American Christianity) and was all ready to pick his brain ...

Last week, my brother Andrew shared that he has been trying to read through the gospels and is having a hard time focusing. While I don't doubt for many of us, a big reason we have difficulty reading the Bible consistently is a mixture of heart and discipline issues, I think for people who have been Christians for a long time, reading the gospels pose a different problem. I've gone to church since the second grade, and between that time and now I've probably heard, read, or encountered in some way every story in every gospel at least a dozen times. I suspect this is true of many people reading this note. So when we decide to read Matthew or Mark or Luke again, we get bored. What am I supposed to get out of this? I know these stories backwards and forwards! The truth is, familiarity breeds negligence. As soon as our eyes graze the heading, "The Calling of the First Disciples", "Jesus Calms a Storm", "The Parable of the Lost Son", we recall all w...

Greek mythology used to be called Greek religion. We forget oftentimes, but the characters of lore that we love so much, mighty Zeus, evil Hera, regal Apollo, beautiful Aphrodite, at one point they were gods. These gods were anthropomorphic, which means that they were modeled after humans. They ate and drank heavenly nectar, they slept, they fought each other, they bled when they were cut, they felt fear and jealousy, they exercised deceit. In short, they did all things humans did. And yet the humans, the real humans venerated them, prayed to them for prosperity, and offered sacrifices to them in fear. The Greek gods were not all-powerful. They were not all-knowing. They were certainly not ever-present. They did not create the world. They all had weaknesses, they all suffered just like the people who invented their image. They lied to each other, kept secrets from each other, forgot things about the world and themselves. They left Mt. Olympus to visit earth. They utilized the absen...

feel the rain on your skin no one else can feel it for you no one else, no one else can speak the words on your lips drench yourself with words unspoken live your life with arms wide open today is, today is where your book begins the rest is still unwritten People who are familiar with my random, short-lived obsessions for certain artists or songs might recall that around the time that I discovered the name of the song in that Pantene Pro-V commercial a while back, I developed an infatuation with Natasha Bedingfield. I've since cooled down a little, but another reason why I loved her hit single "Unwritten" was because the lyrics were philosophically enticing. There's a surface similarity between the free-spirit, "carpe diem" lifestyle that the song espouses and one of the foundational tenets of Existentialist philosophy. Existentialism is a branch of thinking that arose in the mid-19th century as a reaction against Modernism, the Spirit of the Age. Existenti...

Today I completed a bike tour from Bear Mountain, NY to 103rd St. Manhattan. Forty miles of pedaling in silence offered me lots of time to reflect deeply. Here are a few of my thoughts: There are some people whose greatest fear imaginable is to try their hardest at something and still fail. So they don't try. And there are some people who relish the opportunity to meet their limits and create new ones. They aren't satisfied with not failing; they must hit the wall and then push the wall farther back. Which kind of person am I? After five and a half hours of biking I still don't really know. I just know there are uncomfortable hints in my life that point more towards one than the other. For one thing, my greatest fear isn't that I try my hardest and still fail; it's that I didn't try my hardest and that's why I fail. There was never a defeat in my life that I didn't attribute to my laziness or apathy or lack of discipline. Everywhere I am, intellectually,...

I'm taking my blog in a new direction and pledging regular updates. From now on, instead of ambitiously large posts that no one cares about, I will use this space for short little theological, philosophical, or homiletic reflections. They'll be easier to read and less time consuming to prepare. Proverbs 10.16 "The wages of the righteous bring them life, but the income of the wicked brings them punishment." Pastor Don preached on Pr. 10 this past Sunday. In light of this chapter, I've been wrestling a lot with coming to terms with the American economy and Capitalism. The American economy (very broadly speaking) is run on the assumption that if you are rich, it's because you worked hard for your money and if you are poor, it's because you didn't try enough and you deserved your poverty. In short, "everyone gets a fair chance". But today no one can look at the folly of our economic system and turn a blind eye to the people that fall through...