The Blessing Of An Unsimple Mind

(Reproduced from an earlier blog entry written on April 10, 2006)

When I was much younger, I would sometimes wish that I were somebody else. I wished to be like those people who didn't seem to notice, think, or bother much about anything other than their own simplistic view and way of living. I wished I could just get on with life without too much awareness or perception of the intricacies of the human condition. I wish I could be blissfully oblivious to all the hurtful things that happened around me and TO me. In short, I wish I could fail to notice or recognize human flaws so that I would be a simpler, happier person.

The thing is, most people seem to appreciate me exactly because I'm NOT simple. They like the fact that I can often see through the delicacies of matters or the complexities of human follies. They like the way I bring them a sense of order or direction when they feel caught up in a morass of confused thoughts or emotions. Or simply, they like the feeling of relief in unloading their miseries or frustrations on me.

I will honestly say that it pains me to see people wallow in emotional suffering just because they fail to grasp (or rather, acknowledge) what the real issue with them is. It pains me even more when the way they choose to deal with the issue does not seem to be making them any happier, but they would still stick with that way, because for reason not quite comprehensible to others, they just feel so self-assured about it that any other alternative simply appears irrelevant.

It is at a time like this that my "childish" wish of being somebody else would pop up in my mind again. If only I had a simplistic mind that could see no further than the plainly and painfully obvious! If only I wouldn't know that people oftentimes bring on their own sorrow and agony! But then we are told as Christ's followers to "carry each other's burdens" in order to "fulfill the law of Christ" (Gal 6:2). As such, having the perceptiveness and sensitivity to bear another person's burden -- even if that burden is in a way self-afflicted -- is in fact a special gift from God to help me fulfil the command of Christ with much greater ease and sophistication. What is important then is not whether I have succeeded in helping someone the way I want him to be helped, but that I HAVE TRIED helping him at all. It is our faithfulness in doing the necessary, however insignificant its impact might be, that would find favor in the eyes of our Lord.

Heart Or Mind

(Reproduced from an earlier blog entry written on February 27, 2006)

We know we should love our Lord with all our heart, all our mind, and all the rest -- but given a choice, do you think God would prefer to be loved with a heart or with a mind?

You might remember that Jesus loved children. And I suppose he loved them because they are ruled by their heart, with no calculating pretense but simply a pure authenticity that reaches directly into another person's soul. They do what they have a genuine feeling for, not what they think they ought to.

As adults, we often do things our mind tells us to do, and oftentimes it's good, assuming we have a decent level of common sense. But in interpersonal relationship, people don't always like things done out of the mind, because things done out of the mind are meant to please, whereas things done out of the heart are evident of love. Of course when someone thinks about doing something to please you, there's already enough reason to be happy -- after all, how many people would bother to make that effort? And why should anyone bother to make that effort at all? But if people like that are so hard to come by, how much more so are people who genuinely DESIRE to do things not so much to please you, as to value you as someone who have literally become an integral part of their existence as inseparable as their very own heart?

In a world of rampant individualism and self-centeredness, doing things with our heart is gradually becoming a rarity. What could be even more chilling though, perhaps, is to expect to be treated with heart when others seem hardly bothered to even think much about you with their mind. But that's exactly what the distinction between the mind and the heart is all about: the former can be manipulated, the latter cannot. You might be able to change what you THINK about a person, but you can hardly change how you FEEL about him. Love cannot be enforced. Even God Himself doesn't force us to love Him, because He knows more than anyone else that love that comes out of coercion is not love at all. To make ourselves more capable of love, therefore, the best way to go really is to pray to God and ask Him to transform our heart into a receptacle that overflows with His love ...

Although a balance between the mind and the heart is important, we must constantly remind ourselves of the risk of turning "heartless." It's most unfortunate that the word "thoughtful" -- a very beautiful word in itself -- emphasizes only the "thinking" aspect of an action and not its "affect." But next time when someone does something thoughtful to you, remember it's just as likely to have come out of his heart as of his mind. And you can be sure that either way, you have good reason to congratulate yourself.

Seminary Life Series -- Journal 3: A Beautiful Saturday

(Reproduced from an earlier blog entry written on January 22, 2006)

The sun was just too glorious to be wasted this morning, so I decided to drag my lethargic body outdoor and do something physically healthy.

Taking a walk around campus is something I have long wanted but never had the time to do. When I was really doing it, the feeling was just indescribably relaxing. I had no particular thing urgent pressing on my mind. I could walk as long as I wanted, and the solitude brought a silence that induced flashes of memories both joyful and sentimental. I found myself thanking God not only for the joyful but also for the sentimental, because it's a blessing that I can have some things or people to feel sentimental about in the first place. I looked up at the bright blue sky, and for what seemed to be a truly enlightening moment I realized that life was indeed beautiful and that I was endearingly blessed as a child of God.

After walking two laps around campus, I popped into the gym and tried playing around with the workout equipment. It was quiet in there, with only a couple of people, so I could take all the time I wanted with any machine -- even though I hardly had the energy to take too much time on any one of them. But it was fun, learning how to play with those things without the pressure of someone disdainful gawking at you. In fact, the people there were delightfully nice. A brother who was milling around working on different machines smiled at me every time our eyes met. When I was trying out a machine that exercised my oblique waist muscles, a blond sister beamed at me and offered to demonstrate: "You know you could turn that thing around?" Her smile was angelic, and for a second there I really felt not only life but also she was beautiful.

You might not believe I spent a whole hour playing with the machines in the gym, but that's what I did. When I walked out, my Korean brother Joonsuk saw me and called me over. He was waiting for the weekly grocery-giveaway (which for some reason takes place at the gym -- the least likely of all places to give away food). Radiant with a smile, he reminded me that next Saturday he was making lunch for me at his place, followed by a game of tennis. Now it's not as if he has a whole lot of time himself: he's married, with two boys, taking 10 credit hours, working four days a week from 6-10 p.m. as a custodial worker. And this isn't the first time he's expressed such thoughtful hospitality to a single brother ...

Sometimes, God's love for us is just so subtle yet replete. When we learn to appreciate the beauty that we find in things and people, we simply have no reasons to whine. We might not feel our present circumstances are the happiest, but God never fails to remind us that His grace is sufficient for us -- if we bother to notice.

The Answer To Pain

I bought the book The Case For Faith (Lee Strobel, 2000) a long time ago but never got round to reading it. Recently, I began discipling new believers, and thinking that the book could be a good review of the basics in apologetics, I decided to make a stab at it. The book hasn't been disappointing so far, and particularly stirring are some of the quotes so magnificently worded that you would wish they had been written by you:

"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world." C. S. Lewis

"Since God is the highest good, he would not allow any evil to exist in his works unless his omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil." Augustine

"In light of heaven, the worst suffering on earth, a life full of the most atrocious tortures on earth, will be seen to be no more serious than one night in an inconvenient hotel." Saint Teresa

"It's a self-contradiction -- a meaningless nothing -- to have a world where there's real choice while at the same time no possibility of choosing evil. To ask why God didn't create such a world is like asking why God didn't create colorless color or round squares." Peter Kreeft

"The answer to suffering is not an answer at all; it's the Answerer. It's Jesus himself. It's not a bunch of words, it's the Word. It's not a tightly woven philosophical argument; it's a person. The person ... " Peter Kreeft

So here goes a mini-message on theodicy ...

Seminary Life Series -- Journal 2: Compassion Training

(Reproduced from an earlier blog entry written on November 16, 2005)

Every day a professor will ask for prayer requests from students before he starts the class, and such a ritual often turns out to be a highly sobering moment to me. When I hear my classmates voice their prayer requests, I will realize again and again how much pain is going on in the fallenness of this world. Every two or three days there'll be someone diagnosed with or going through treatment of cancer. Or someone simply died a sudden death. Or a family was fighting about divorce, or rebellious teens ... you name it. But what made my heart really ache was this one incident which has kind of become a landmark in my seminary life.

One day, a classmate of mine handed over her prayer request in a note to the professor before the class started. Apparently she didn't say much in the note, so the professor asked her, in front of the whole class, if she could say a bit more about her request. A silence set in. Everybody was waiting for her to speak. She heaved a heavy sign, as if to help pull herself together. Then she said in a voice just loud enough for everyone to hear, "My young daughter was molested." You could literally feel the pain contained in those five words.

No further detail was necessary, and the classroom was suddenly filled with another deadly silence. The strange thing is that the silence also embodied a sense of great empathy -- a kind of understanding of what that mother must be going through, and a compassion for the mother and child that would move us to pray for them with all our heart. That day, I prayed for the mother and child several times, and this, I must say, is rather untypical of me, considering I seldom pray that earnestly for strangers. But for some reason I find myself slowly changing. Now I'll pay more attention to the prayer requests of my classmates, and if they're going through something really traumatic I'll make a note of it and pray for them as much as I remember to. And when I see that unfortunate mother in class I'll also immediately say a quick prayer for her and her daughter, even though I never really know how things have been going with them.

I believe this is part of the compassion training that God's giving me. It's easy to be really concerned about the people I care for, but how about those who simply rub shoulders with me? Am I willing to take the time to pray about their suffering consistently? If not, why? Do they not matter to me? Do they, to God?

One aspect of spiritual maturity is to understand, accept, and act on the fact that things matter to you as long as they matter to God. And that takes compassion.

Seminary Life Series -- Journal 1: To Live Or Die

(Reproduced from an earlier blog entry written on October 11, 2005)

I don't know about you, but at various points in my life I've found myself reflecting on this question, "Would I be willing to die for Christ?"

Today in chapel the speaker made a very intriguing point about this when he spoke on "offering our bodies as living sacrifices" in Roman 12:1-2. He said people often ask themselves (or others) if they would be willing to die for Christ. But a more profound and pertinent question to ask, in fact, is whether we would be willing to LIVE for Christ. When I first heard it, I felt it to be a bit counter-intuitive and I caught myself thinking, "Of course I would rather live than die!" But on second thought I realized the answer to that question wasn't as straightforward as I had imagined.

Certainly the notion of "dying" is frightening, but there are times when I feel so down and frustrated with things, people, or/and myself that I REALLY would rather die than live. Out of a sense of bitter devastation, I would think about asking God to simply take me away from this world so that I won't have to see and experience all the hurts and conflicts and pain that have been going on. I would imagine that if there were an occasion where I could sacrifice myself and die for Christ, I would jump at that opportunity and "get it over with", once and for all. What makes me stop this kind of negative, almost eerie thinking is the always inevitable question I must confront if I were to die at all: "Would I not feel shameful when I see Jesus?" And of course, the answer is certainly going to be "I'm pretty sure I would." That's why dying for Christ never really seems to be a viable option to me.

Yet living for Christ seems an even more daunting challenge. While to die for Christ -- on the right occasion -- could be accomplished on the spur of the moment, in a burst of courage, to live for Christ demands a life-long commitment that takes far more than just impulsive valour. It demands determination, perseverance, and discipline, among many other things. Most importantly perhaps, it demands that we deny ourselves -- our inclination to please ourselves or others rather than the Lord. When you think about it seriously, it isn't really that much easier than DYING for Christ.

But the speaker put everything in perspective with a very neat remark, "If you're not willing to live for Christ, there's no point in your dying for Christ, because your death wouldn't mean much to Christ anyway." And that's just so true. If we're not following Christ when we're alive, why even think about dying for Him?

How Far Do We Go?

"When you find something in a human face that calls out to you, not just for help but in some sense for yourself, how far do you go in answering that call, how far can you go, seeing that you have your own life to get on with as much as he has his?" (Frederick Buechner, Now and Then, 1983).

This is exactly what I felt when I was in practicum counseling clients from the under-privileged sectors, and in a way this is also what I feel most of the time in Christian communities. In fact, I suspect this is the very question that every serious believer should ask, since following Christ is, fundamentally, about giving oneself the way Christ did, and yet understandably there should be limits to the extent we give ourselves when bonding with others, not so much because Christ himself had set such limits as an example, but because in the present fallen world there will always be a need to give more, and to give unceasingly without discretion is bound to burn anybody out.

What makes it even harder, as Buechner so aptly observes, is that not only do I have a life different from yours, but we both are more than likely to be too tied up with our own lives to even try figuring out how to be of devoted profitable service to each other. Indeed, meeting the needs in someone is more than a casual inquiry after his health or the occasional offer of a helping hand; it is an intense investment of one's material, emotional, and spiritual resources. It requires us to become part of somebody's life, just as Christ became God Incarnate and dwelt among us to become part of OUR lives. As such, we literally have to turn ourselves into Christ-incarnates to the people who call out to us in need.

This is certainly a tall order. And like it or not, there will always be more people looking to have their needs met than those looking to meet the needs in others -- hence the very shrewd question posed by Buechner: How far do we go? How far can we go? This is probably something I'll need to tussle with for the rest of my life, especially when I encounter more and more peculiar cases where people barely connected with me are looking to me to have some of their deep personal needs met, oftentimes quite inappropriately or unreasonably so. At times like these, I really need to know where and how to draw the boundaries, while still being the Christ-incarnate that I am supposed to be.