You're out of luck / And the reason that you had to care / The traffic is stuck / And you're not moving anywhere -- Beautiful Day, U2
Here I am, minding my own business, when all of a sudden I look up and I haven't posted in a week.
Not only that, but a third of 2005 is already over. I feel somewhat blindsided. What the heck happened?
That concisely sums up the overall feeling of ennui that I've been experiencing these last few weeks. I've been somewhat disconnected from life... from people, from goals, from seeking direction, and most damaging of all, from God. Jesus uses a well-known metaphor saying that God's people, as branches, need to stay connected to Christ, the vine, in order to receive constant nourishment in order to grow. Anyone who has ever had to take care of a plant (particularly guys like me who have the touch of death rather than a green thumb) know that without proper and constant care, the plant eventually transforms from green and thriving into brown, dry, and withered. After just a few weeks of neglect, I'm already parched for spiritual and personal growth.
Seems that when we're younger, we give ourselves more of a free pass with regards to slacking off - the "I'm still young and can afford to waste time" excuse. However, with my official entry into the "late twenties" stage barrelling towards me like a train down a tunnel, I am much less inclined to simply let the weeks and months go by without giving it my all to redeem them. I know what I need to do, at least in the short term. I just need to do it. The bigger picture things will come with time.
Some quick memories and thoughts from the week gone by...
- Good part of being NBA playoff season: at least 2 games on every day of the sport I love the most. Bad part of it being that time of year: it's so easy to blow off things that are more important to gorge myself on watching TV. Gotta find a balance.
- Last Saturday, I woke up bright and early (6 am!) and participated in the LiveRIGHT 5K fundraiser, running through Golden Gate Park in SF for raising money and awareness of hepatitis B and liver cancer, particularly for Asians. Check out the website - there's some good and relevant info for Asians in particular, since they are much more likely to contract the disease, and I've known some people who have been personally affected. The run itself was a little over 3 miles, which wasn't that bad, even though I haven't run a "long distance" (like, over a mile) for a long time - in hoops, you're basically doing a lot of start-stop-sprint-jump-cut movement, which also allows you to pace yourself. I made it through in about 28 minutes without stopping, but it resurrected some knee tendonitis I first developed a few years ago playing football, so I ended up skipping out on hoops on Sunday. My mom actually had the fastest time for females age 55 and up, which was kind of cool.
- Over the past year, God has been granting Canaan the opportunity to host and minister to several international students who are currently attending De Anza College. Most of them happen to be in my cell group. It's quite refreshing to talk to them and hear their stories from week to week, since they've grown up in different cultures and are more intentionally open than other people might be about spiritual matters. I also have a healthy dose of respect for their ability to communicate in English well - whenever they talk at length, I hear their words and attempt to translate them in my head into Spanish or Chinese, two languages that I have just a little knowledge of, to get a feel for what it must be like to communicate in a second language all the time. Regaining my high school proficiency in Spanish and learning Chinese have been two items on my to-do list for a long time.
Oh, this past week's cell group topic was actually quite insightful and timely for me - I'll write about it in another post.
- Watched "The House of Flying Daggers" on Sunday and "Dodgeball" tonight. The former started out okay, with the dazzling cinematography that Zhang Yimou is known for in "Hero", but then degenerates into an unintentional parody of a Shakespearean tragedy. The good thing is that it provided ample fodder for verbal skewering and wisecracks from everyone watching.
Dodgeball was okay, but not out-and-out hilarious. Definitely wasn't as funny as "Zoolander", which I was highly amused by. As a matter of fact, playing dodgeball at JKuo's bachelor party was probably more fun than the movie. The main problem, IMO, was that things got stale very quickly, particularly from the sports side of things. There's only so many ways you can show a guy getting hit by a ball. It would have been more interesting if each player had a particular characteristic that made them good at a skill - throwing curves, bending in unnatural ways to dodge, etc. See "Shaolin Soccer" for a great example of taking what can be a boring spectator sport and making it interesting visually and character-wise.
- CD of the week: Arriving by Chris Tomlin. Some solid congregational worship songs on here - Tomlin has a real gift for melody. Even though I wouldn't say his lyrics necessarily approach the theological depth of the great hymns, sometimes the melody can be more important to make a Biblical principle stick in our mind and heart. For Canaan folks reading this, "Holy is the Lord" and "How Great is Our God" have already entered our rotation, and expect to hear "Indescribable", "Your Grace is Enough" and "You Do All Things Well" at some point in the future.
Here I am, minding my own business, when all of a sudden I look up and I haven't posted in a week.
Not only that, but a third of 2005 is already over. I feel somewhat blindsided. What the heck happened?
That concisely sums up the overall feeling of ennui that I've been experiencing these last few weeks. I've been somewhat disconnected from life... from people, from goals, from seeking direction, and most damaging of all, from God. Jesus uses a well-known metaphor saying that God's people, as branches, need to stay connected to Christ, the vine, in order to receive constant nourishment in order to grow. Anyone who has ever had to take care of a plant (particularly guys like me who have the touch of death rather than a green thumb) know that without proper and constant care, the plant eventually transforms from green and thriving into brown, dry, and withered. After just a few weeks of neglect, I'm already parched for spiritual and personal growth.
Seems that when we're younger, we give ourselves more of a free pass with regards to slacking off - the "I'm still young and can afford to waste time" excuse. However, with my official entry into the "late twenties" stage barrelling towards me like a train down a tunnel, I am much less inclined to simply let the weeks and months go by without giving it my all to redeem them. I know what I need to do, at least in the short term. I just need to do it. The bigger picture things will come with time.
Some quick memories and thoughts from the week gone by...
- Good part of being NBA playoff season: at least 2 games on every day of the sport I love the most. Bad part of it being that time of year: it's so easy to blow off things that are more important to gorge myself on watching TV. Gotta find a balance.
- Last Saturday, I woke up bright and early (6 am!) and participated in the LiveRIGHT 5K fundraiser, running through Golden Gate Park in SF for raising money and awareness of hepatitis B and liver cancer, particularly for Asians. Check out the website - there's some good and relevant info for Asians in particular, since they are much more likely to contract the disease, and I've known some people who have been personally affected. The run itself was a little over 3 miles, which wasn't that bad, even though I haven't run a "long distance" (like, over a mile) for a long time - in hoops, you're basically doing a lot of start-stop-sprint-jump-cut movement, which also allows you to pace yourself. I made it through in about 28 minutes without stopping, but it resurrected some knee tendonitis I first developed a few years ago playing football, so I ended up skipping out on hoops on Sunday. My mom actually had the fastest time for females age 55 and up, which was kind of cool.
- Over the past year, God has been granting Canaan the opportunity to host and minister to several international students who are currently attending De Anza College. Most of them happen to be in my cell group. It's quite refreshing to talk to them and hear their stories from week to week, since they've grown up in different cultures and are more intentionally open than other people might be about spiritual matters. I also have a healthy dose of respect for their ability to communicate in English well - whenever they talk at length, I hear their words and attempt to translate them in my head into Spanish or Chinese, two languages that I have just a little knowledge of, to get a feel for what it must be like to communicate in a second language all the time. Regaining my high school proficiency in Spanish and learning Chinese have been two items on my to-do list for a long time.
Oh, this past week's cell group topic was actually quite insightful and timely for me - I'll write about it in another post.
- Watched "The House of Flying Daggers" on Sunday and "Dodgeball" tonight. The former started out okay, with the dazzling cinematography that Zhang Yimou is known for in "Hero", but then degenerates into an unintentional parody of a Shakespearean tragedy. The good thing is that it provided ample fodder for verbal skewering and wisecracks from everyone watching.
Dodgeball was okay, but not out-and-out hilarious. Definitely wasn't as funny as "Zoolander", which I was highly amused by. As a matter of fact, playing dodgeball at JKuo's bachelor party was probably more fun than the movie. The main problem, IMO, was that things got stale very quickly, particularly from the sports side of things. There's only so many ways you can show a guy getting hit by a ball. It would have been more interesting if each player had a particular characteristic that made them good at a skill - throwing curves, bending in unnatural ways to dodge, etc. See "Shaolin Soccer" for a great example of taking what can be a boring spectator sport and making it interesting visually and character-wise.
- CD of the week: Arriving by Chris Tomlin. Some solid congregational worship songs on here - Tomlin has a real gift for melody. Even though I wouldn't say his lyrics necessarily approach the theological depth of the great hymns, sometimes the melody can be more important to make a Biblical principle stick in our mind and heart. For Canaan folks reading this, "Holy is the Lord" and "How Great is Our God" have already entered our rotation, and expect to hear "Indescribable", "Your Grace is Enough" and "You Do All Things Well" at some point in the future.
posted by Bob at
11:26 PM
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