Our Good Father

"Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!"
- Matthew 7:9-11


After I dropped off my cousin at her school this morning, I was stopped on a red signal. The sun was SO bright that I had to look away and began to stare at each car that was making a turn into the school parking lot. Almost 90% of the cars had a parent driving and a child sitting in the passenger's seat. I mean, it saddened me a little to see that most people looked so dead and conversation-less, but that's not the point for today.

In Korea, kids do NOT get rides from their parents to go to school. They either walk or take the bus. If you get dropped off, you are known as the rich kid (at least back when I was in Korea, ionno how it is now). And to see all these students getting dropped off every single morning by their parents. Dude, it is some dedication and love. I only give rides to my cousin if I feel like being nice to my mom in the morning, but these parents must give their children rides without fail. And who of them will complain that they have to do this for 12 (plus) freaken years? Okay, I'm sure there are some that do complain, but most of them would agree that it's just what they do as parents, doing what's best for their children by sending them to school (according to their own knowledge).

During the sermon on the mount, Jesus talked to the people who are EVIL that know how to give good gifts to their children. Seriously if that is so, how much more our PERFECTLY GOOD FATHER IN HEAVEN will give us good gifts? He will not be like earthly parents who may make mistakes, hurt your feelings, disappoint and fail you at times, and even complain about you. Our Father in heaven is NOT like that! He will give only good gifts!! He was and is and always will be good to His children. Do we really trust in our hearts that He ONLY gives good gifts and not bad? How about the mess in your life now? Do you truly believe that in all things, including the mess in your life now, God will work out all things for GOOD of those who LOVE HIM, who are called according to His purpose (Romans 8:28)?

May we all pray, "Lord, I believe! Help my unbelief!"

Depression

So if you have been known me for a bit, you probably know of my self-diagnosed "seasonal affective disorder." So with this S.A.D., one becomes hyperactive/manic during summer time and depressed during winter time, and that's what has been happening to me these past few years.

I didn't even know such a disorder existed until senior year of college. I think the first onset was my sophomore year. Well, I can't say I have the disorder for sure because I never got it officially diagnosed but I have pretty much all the symptoms.

Going through mania during summer (well, mine is milder than really manic episodes) I am filled with energy and joy in everything I do. I'm so filled with purpose and plans. This is when I'm spiritually high and I want to do and actually do everything: meeting up with everyone, planning things, working out, etc.

But when the season of depression comes around, it definitely is not the most pleasant experience. Depression is not just being depressed due to circumstances; it's not even feeling sad but actually being numb to everything, losing purpose and all hope in everything. Everyone feels depressed at some point in life when certain things happen, but real depression occurs when nothing changes around you yet you become apathetic and energy-less. Especially after the extreme hyperactivity and joy of summer, the depression that follows can be detrimental to many as it had been to me.

At this very moment, I am very content where I am. I can say I'm walking very closely with my Lord and He has been the most satisfying. And now that I am aware of what I usually go through, I feel as though I am ready to face depression. But what I have been desperately praying to God is healing. That I would not go through such time as previous winters... But God did teach me so much through depression. If it weren't for it, I would be the most prideful (still am pretty prideful) person ever. God really brought me low to see what a wretched and nasty sinner I am. And really it was only through depression I learned the mercy of God in saving my life literally and eternally. If I didn't have God, I would've had no reason to stop myself from taking my life, but somehow in my mind, it made sense that if I don't live for God, my life is meaningless (and I am NOT a logical person!). So I know it is only by Him that I am living, that I am breathing this breath right now. Apart from Him, I cannot live... There is so much more gratitude living this life knowing that it can be so easily taken away, yet God shows mercy upon me to let me live. And it was through these times of depression when I really found my need for the community of believers. My brothers and sisters who will keep me in check, accountable, and in their prayers so the power of God would bring me back to life.

I've come to a conclusion that I will desperately ask God to heal me, but even if He doesn't, I think I'll be okay. I just need to daily seek God and ask Him for His mercy to draw me to Him, to His cross every single day, every single moment! It's been soooo good to be in His presence, but I realize the moment I stray from Him, I fall and sin. What a wretched sinner I am! By grace of God, I live, so my deepest desire is to live this life for Him who gives me this life.

Come, Lord Jesus!

These days random things like:

• this Korean movie that I just watched called 아저씨
  very gory and disturbing (it's still disturbing my mind!!)
  
• keep seeing car accidents (pretty bad ones) everywhere
  
• Romans 7:19-20

They remind me that I really want Jesus to come back soon.

*Edit: Some more things came into my mind

• Depression (will blog about this soon, Lord willing)
  
• "Yes, I can see a light that is coming for the heart that holds on. And there will be an end to these troubles. But until that day comes, still I will praise You, still I will praise You"
  - from You Never Let Go by Matt Redman
  
• Bible study on Revelation and Daniel
  
• How could I have not listed this?! I want to be in His presence fully and completely, face-to-face, seeing and beholding His eternal glory more and more, living in eternity to praise Him without sin!

COME, LORD JESUS!

My God Changes HEARTS!

These are my beloved brothers and sisters of Cerritos Mission Church English Ministry. Some people left early and others couldn't join us =( But aww, we are family =D



These people I love. God has graciously provided me with these people with whom not only can I laugh and have good times, but also, we can share our lives together and grow in Christ as the body of Christ.


My church, Cerritos Mission Church just came back from our EM retreat this weekend. It was short, just Friday night to Sunday morning, but God definitely showed me how He has placed these very people in my life and for them, I am so grateful.

So the story actually begins quite awhile ago. CMC is the first and the only church I attended. While attending here, I was saved by the grace of God around 10th, 11th grade in high school. After I started going out to English Ministry after high school, I've been always contemplating whether I should leave my church or not. Our English Ministry has been struggling ever since I entered EM, with several changes in pastors and with people continually leaving the ministry. Discouraged, I still struggled through it in thinking that it won't be any different if I had gone to another church. And it also was my pride speaking that I will not leave, unlike some others, until our ministry gets better.

Last summer, I was really going to leave the church, but I ended up serving in children's ministry for another year. It felt as if the ministry would crumble if I didn't serve (which was totally wrong of me to think like that!). Pressured into serving, I was there half-heartedly, thinking that I will leave once this year of commitment in serving is over in June of 2010. Such a mindset was hurting not only my own faith but also hurting those I was serving with and the children I was serving. Sad to admit to this but when I had finished this one year commitment, I felt so liberated. Having planned on leaving, I started distancing myself from the church and started to check out different churches with my friend. My plan was to look until I found the "right" church while I attend CMCEM service and then move once I had found the one.

Honestly, I loved every church I went to. I even loved non-Korean churches! I loved EVERYWHERE but CMC. I honestly hated CMC. Talking with few of my friends from CMC, I told them about the problems I had with the ministry and was so sure that I could not stand it any longer. But "in my care for the people at CMC," I told myself that I should talk to the JDSN (intern pastor) about these problems at CMC before leaving so they can work on it.

What a prideful hypocrite I was!! My friend had been inviting me to come to her church's Bible study for many many times, but for some reason, I had not been able to go. Finally I got myself to go, and it was pretty amazing. I could tell from his teaching that the pastor was very Spirit-filled. After the Bible study, we were sharing prayer requests, and I shared that mine was "smooth transition" out of CMC. The pastor asked me why I wanted to leave and I gave the "there is no community at this church," however, for some reason, I confessed that I wasn't sure if God wants me to leave because I had been asking God to "okay" my leaving but I was still uneasy with the decision to leave. I had no peace with it. Then the pastor asked me if I wanted him to pray for me about that because he hears from God. Honestly to hear that from someone I met for the first time, I would think that he's weird, but after Bible study, I could trust in his words. So I told him that I would love to, and as the pastor was writing down my prayer request he said "I think I already know... But just in case, I'll pray more and email you or something." Haha

After everything, the pastor actually asked me if I wanted to know, and OF COURSE I wanted to know! And he told me that he thought that God wanted me to stay CMC for now. And honestly, I had expected that answer and was utterly disappointed. Thought to myself, 'Why?! I hate this church!!' I asked the pastor what would happen if I just went to another church. He said that it's not the word of God that is telling me to stay at CMC, and that God will work with me wherever I go.

I believe it was then when my prayer changed from "let me go" to "what do You want me to do?" I asked God to change my heart if that is really what He desired for me to do.

And guess what? God changed my heart. COMPLETELY. And this is all God's doing so I definitely cannot boast in anything that I had done but all glory be to Him!

As I started praying to stay, I had this sense of peace in my heart I did not have before. And slowly, God showed me that all the problems I had with CMC, all the fingerpointing I did at the church eventually came back towards me: I was the problem. God did much humbling of my heart before I met up with my JDSN. The timing was so funny because I wanted to meet up with him for awhile but due to retreats, trips, etc. I wasn't able to meet up for like 2 weeks. During those two weeks, God really changed and humbled my heart that by the time I met up with my JDSN, I was no longer meeting up with him to point fingers but to really share and to work together to build this community.

What was more amazing was that every time my JDSN would speak, he would preach on the same topic that I had just learned that week. First for-sure confirmation was his sermon on "community," the very reason I was leaving CMC for. God showed me that we both and many others at CMC desire the same thing and that He desires for us to work together. During my whole time at CMC, I had been serving but serving alone without working with others!!

Talking to many brothers and sisters in our ministry opened up my eyes to the sin that I had been in and opened the doors for me to really share my struggles and ask them for prayer and accountability. More and more I spend time with these brothers and sisters, the more I love them and the more I want to spend time with them. These were the very people I had judged, that I had disliked, but God is doing some amazing things in my heart!

I had never been THIS joyful in going to church. It so often became a ritual, an obligation, but God in His abundant grace is filling me with this joy in true fellowship. Really, NOTHING changed at my church except my heart and the joy one can have in obedience (this was what I was talking about when I had previously blogged about joy in obedience).

Glory be to God who is able to change hearts!!

I actually wrote this over a year ago. It was actually one of my first blog entries that I never published for some reason. But I actually had to translate it into Korean to publish it on my internship's magazine (and had to take out the "God" part =T) so I thought I would post this up on my blog too. Looking back on it is bringing me back the passion that God put inside of me to become an occupational therapist!


This summer I started volunteering at this hospital called Rancho Los Amigos Rehabilitation Center. And NO, it's not a rehab center for alcoholics (just like how I have to explain how occupational therapists don't help you with your JOBS haha) but rehabilitation here is referring to recovery. It's supposedly one of the top 10 rehab hospitals in the nation, and really God has given me the privilege to have this opportunity to volunteer there, providing for me in every way.. from finding out about the place, going through the long and worrisome process of orientation, being placed in the stroke rehabilitation dept to work with seriously awesome staff!

So on our floor, there are inpatients with strokes as well as outpatients who continue after their discharge to receive therapies and other medical care. These patients, especially ones that are hospitalized, have had strokes that usually affect one side of their brains, causing malfunctioning the other side of their bodies. It also comes with aphasia, a condition in which one cannot produce words some even despite having the ability to understand them. Working there, I got to talk to many therapists and the patients about strokes. One of the patients, who had recently been recovering from his stroke, described the experience as being "stuck in a body" that you have no control over. You're a prisoner of your own body. I don't think ANYONE will ever know how that feels like unless you experience it first-hand yourself. So with the stroke comes frustration from inability to express oneself, anger, hopelessness from having no control, depression, etc.

One day last week, I was walking with my supervisor to post some posters and we saw one of our patients, surrounded by about 6 therapists, doctors, nurses, and staff. He was expressing pain on one of his arm, through the only word he knows how to say: "hi." I had always seen him on his wheelchair, smiling and showing his thumb up and saying "hi" to everyone who passes by, but this time, the "hi" was different. Repeating utterances of "Hi, hi, hi, hi..."and trying to lift up his arm did not do its job to communicate to those around him what had happened, where and how it exactly hurt. My supervisor kept on prompting him with questions to find out what had happened, but couldn't find out about anything. After about 10 minutes, the patient broke into tears, crying out loud... This.. broke my heart because I could clearly see that more than the physical pain itself, it was the frustration that caused him so much more pain. They couldn't find why even by the time I was leaving...

Today, I was inside a room typing up some stuff and I heard that patient's voice, but amazingly, it wasn't a "hi" but he was saying his own name!! He said his name and others were saying marco polo because it rhymed with his name, so he soon picked up how to say those words too. Later he was going around saying different therapists' names even though he couldn't quite get everyone's name. Deng, I couldn't stop smiling hearing his voice because that was the first time I've ever heart him speak words other than hi, and with such enthusiasm. How precious it was just to be able to hear him say such a SIMPLE thing as people's names...

The stroke patients I met so far... They had once been a writer, a diamond setter, an independence film financer, a doctor. All considered "successful" in this world's point of view, until a stroke hit them out of nowhere and now they have such a hard time doing the very trivial, ordinary things that we take for granted. How fleeting this success is!! And I come to the conclusion that the only answer to all this is Jesus and Him alone.

I can't wait for that day when there will be no more frustrations, no more anger, no more diseases, no more pain, no more death.. and no more sin.


Maybe I'll add my Korean translated version later. The ending is... very different. Haha

Mercy of God

"What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! For he says to Moses, 'For he says to Moses, 'I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion." It does not, therefore, depend on man's desire or effort, but on God's mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh: 'I raised you up for this very purpose, that I might display my power in you and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.' Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden." - Romans 9:14-18

I honestly didn't understand the mercy of God. Still a bit of a foreign concept but I'm slowly learning to ask God to have mercy upon me, a wicked sinner.

Mercy does not mean forgiveness nor does it mean grace.
Mercy means pity, feeling sorry, like how we may feel when we see a starving child from Africa. Boy, am I at the mercy of God in living each day! I never understood what it meant when the blinds begged Jesus for mercy. We must beg God to look upon us with mercy because we are so helpless and because we are so well-deserving of condemnation. (*this part was edited. I just came back from a Bible study and we re-learned about mercy and how foolish I was to depend on the worldly dictionary to give definiton of what mercy, what God has for us!)

But God shows clearly that He is a merciful God through sending His Son. He had mercy upon us that He made a way for us through Christ. He knew that we were pitiful beings that had no power but subject to the wrath of Him who created us. Have mercy on us, Lord!

Even when Jonah was angry at the fact that Ninevah was saved from calamity of the Lord. God teaches Jonah about His mercy through the divine appointment of a rising and a falling of a plant. At its withering, Jonah was "angry enough to die" (dramatic much?) and God says this in response to Jonah's anger.

"But the LORD said, 'You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?'" - Jonah 4:10-11

God loves those whom He created, has mercy on them, and desires that everyone be saved (1 Timothy 2:4). Today is the day of salvation. Believe Him and be saved.