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Speaking of works-based righteousness : I think our congregation still struggles with this deeply. It’s part of our set Asian-American, bi-cultural neuroses. It’s packaged in with the things we’ve been taught at home, by our parents, by the performance-driven culture around us. My parents are the best parents in the world; they give me more than I ever deserved and support me more, so much more than the parents of a lot of my friends. They never pressure me except not to waste my potential. Yet I still feel it because I grew up saturated in it. That constant guilt during my waking hours, like the feeling of coldness during sleeping hours (if you’ve ever tried to sleep without adequate blankets, you know what I mean) is always there, pushing me onwards to perform. I’ve talked about the difference between chasing after something and going after something because you are being chased from behind. Works-based guilt is a cause for the latter. The thinking I am speaking of exists by the pres...

“I’m a war of head verses heart, it’s always this way My head is weak, my heart always speaks before I know what it will say” - Crooked Teeth, Death Cab for Cutie Talking about the distinction between soul and body is dangerous. It’s facetious. There is NO clear line between soul and body, mind and matter, reason and emotion. They are heuristic categories. We human beings love to multiply distinctions. We do it because it makes the world simpler, easier to understand, and more manageable. We love to categorize, to dissect, and to label. And it’s not wrong. We can’t have it any other way. But to do so is to risk losing sight of the fact that we are WHOLE. There is a human being. There is no digestive system, circulatory system. There isn’t a sex drive and an appetite. There is a human being. You were wrong, Clive Staples Lewis, when you said “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body”. What we are is a human being. What you are doing is creating all sort of religious, phil...

Draper sent me this link: http://melindataub.com/god-twitters-creation/ and it reminded me of a lofty thought I had while I was taking a physics class over the summer. It is called: How to create the universe in infinity easy steps 1) Create light. 2) Back up a second, you have to invent the concept of creation. 3) You can't back up without first explaining the concept of progress and sequence 4) But you can't have sequence without first setting in place the skeleton of sequence, which is time! 5) Okay, okay, it's clear what we need to do first is invent time. 6) Wait, what do you mean by "first"? 7) First is like, what takes place all the way on one end of the timeline; the end marked "beginning" 8) Alright, seriously, we're getting nowhere with this. If we want to invent time, let's just start by inventing numbers. 9) One.... 10) Two... 11) Three... 12) Quick question, if we haven't got sequence yet, is this happening all at once? 13) Yes, ...