ggpwn3d #3- Michael Hosea

My mind is in such a jumble trying to figure out where to start writing.

• During UR '09, Stephanie Chung told me about a book called, Redeeming Love, and went on & on about how wonderful the story was and how I have to read it. She told me it was based on the book of Hosea and how a man married a prostitute. That is all I remembered. It went in through on ear and went out there other because I am not a big fan of fiction novels, especially romance.
  
  
• I left for Spain. I forgot about this book until another friend, Estar, told me about it. She said I had to read it and that she would send me a copy. It would be too heavy and I would have not read it, so good thing she did not.
  
  
• If you read my older post from Spain, I mention that the book of Hosea was the premise of my experience abroad. God really really spoke to me during my months of isolation and intimacy with Him through this book. I remembered about Redeeming Love.
  
  
• I came back to L.A. and then in 6 weeks, I came here to New York. While I have been struggling to regain that intimacy with the Lord and finding myself at a place too comfortable, I remembered about the book again.
  
  
• I live right across a Barnes & Noble so I decided to walk over one evening and I purchased the book. It was strange because I could not remember the last time I read a fiction novel. I dove right into the 400+ paged love story. I read it any chance I got; at nighttime or in the subway or elsewhere.
  
  
• Last week, I was at David's apartment near Columbia, finishing up the last couple chapters. A part of me did not want to finish the book because I wanted it to continue on forever. The last time I cried in a fiction novel was in the 6th grade; Where the Red Fern Grows.
  
  
• Wait- if the book is based on Hosea, then it is a non-fiction novel. Oh man oh man oh man!
  
  
• Michael Hosea romanced after Sarah's broken heart. He went after her with God's heart and revealed her worth in Christ. She ran away countless times even after experiencing the only love she had ever encountered and could not embrace the perfection of God's love and grace.
  
  
• Michael Hosea is the man. His patience, his struggles, his desires all endured through obeying God.
  
  
• I cannot explain the ggpwn3d-ness that I experienced.
  
  
• We can all learn a thing or two from God-fearing people.
  
  
• Love more.

Sorry. That was a horrible bullet list. I am still not sure where I wanted to go with this. I just know that God wanted me to read this book, at this time, for a reason. I believe in His timing. Srsly. Far too many times I have gone on carelessly without looking back and realizing where I came from; at what expense it took for God to show me these things. Yet as soon as I was redeemed, I quickly turned away and went about my life.

I want to be living now with everything He showed me then. 

On the fence..

I feel guilty for not having updated my blogspot.
Does anyone else get this feeling?

In some form of confessing & reminding myself of God in my life, blogspot has been an outlet in that strange way. If I am not updating, does that mean something is lacking?

Maybe?

Sure.

But today is the first time I logged onto blogger in 3+ months.

I think I am bizack. Almost.

ggpwn3d #2- Life Planning

My time in Spain, as well as the greater Europe, is coming to an end! I leave Valencia this Friday to Madrid, where then I will do my solo traveling to the Canary Islands to debrief on my own and then I will meet my best friend in Sicily, Italy to travel through 6 countries in 14 days! I am a planner. I love organizing these sorts of things from flights to hostels to itineraries. I love Google-ing. I love weather-checking months ahead. I love excel sheets. I love color-coding. I love checking things off.

This is just a reflection of the grander scheme of my life. I can give you an endless list of things that I have planned out in my life that will "get checked off" as time passes (i.e. color of my wedding, number of children/dogs I will have, my future house décor, events for reunions, etc.). It gets really far into my life, as well as, very detailed.

This is bad. Muy muy mal. (translation: Very very bad) Why?

Reason #1
Because I spend my time obsessing over things that in reality, might not ever happen. Who knows how many days are left of me on this earth? What if God wants me with him tomorrow? All these things that I planned for the next 50 years of life will mean what to whom? Emily, my accountability in Spain, and I share this quality. Last week, we started sharing our list of "Count Down's" in our life agenda. We saw the sin in all of this and knew that it was a form of denying God's sovereignty. It is one thing to be able to recognize this (thank God), but I had a hard time finding a way to stop.

Yes, true story. My Facebook status just a couple weeks ago was a list of count downs. 

Lo and behold, God spoke to me that night through a devotional email from Pastor Sung of Downey First Church. If you have read my previous posts, this is just another example of how assertively and quickly God has been speaking to me in my time here. You can read the email for yourself, below.

Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit." Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.   - James 4:13-14

We are in a midst of a major dilemma and I wonder how many of us realize it. With our world becoming ever more sophisticated and complicated, technology is advancing exponentially to help us manage it all. But as more complicated our lives become, have you realized that time is passing proportionately? The days, the weeks, the months, the years just pass us by too quickly. Our lives are passing by way to quickly... I never imagined that I would be forty years old and I'm not... I am forty two!

The problem can be blamed due to just one reason- days pass us by so fast because we are anxiously looking forward to tomorrow. We are never content where we are in life, kids want to teenagers, teenagers want to be adults, adults are so consumed with getting head to the point that they reminisce about being a kid again just to escape being drowned in sea of responsibility.

I recently heard a weather man say that "summer is just around the corner." Well, it's not. The first day of summer is June 21- that is still fifty three days away! What's the rush? I am still trying to just take a break so that I can enjoy the spring.

Planning for the future is the culprit. Making plans a month in advance does appear to make the current month pass that much quicker doesn't it? I am looking forward to May because I like May but by looking forward to May, I didn't realize that April is already over! The days that seem to last a while are the days where we haven't plan anything. Those are the days we need more of so that we can just live in the moment. That is the lesson James is teaching- why are you planning for tomorrow, "yet you do not know what tomorrow brings. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away."  

I guess there is no way around our planning, but may we just slow down. The less complicated your life becomes you will begin to realize how much longer your days will be. Slow down, smile a little more, commit to a random act of kindness, hug your kids and kiss your spouse and savor each day before the vapor of our lives disappears. Savoring each day is how we can give thanks to the Lord for each day is a blessing from our gracious Lord.  God bless.

 g-g-p-w-n-3-d.

Reason #2
Man! Get a piece of THAT. Not only was I committing the sin of being OCD and not trusting in God, I was failing to enjoy God's presence in my life now. I might not live to see my wedding, have children of my own or ever afford a Lakers season box.

In the depths of my sinful heart, I found myself caught up in what I expected to happen, really believing that it would, in hopes that God's plan would align my needs and come in his (my) time.

And then to top this all off, I read Haggai the next day and got blasted, again.

"You expected much, but see it turned out to be little. What you brought home, I blew away. Why?" declares the LORD Almighty. "Because of my house, which remains a ruin, while each of you is busy with his own house." Haggai 1:9

 Reason #3
This life that I have, I committed to Christ. While his Kingdom is yet to come and his people are still lost, I am here exerting my time/energy/love to myself and claiming my needs/wants as king of my heart. Selfish selfish selfish me. God is LORD. I am no one. This process is daily; this realization of what grace really is and being owned by the Word every time I read it.

Sighahh....There you go. I share my sins, hoping that it will be a reminder to myself because as soon as I am done writing this, I know I will forget.

ggpwn3d #1- Oldies, but Goodies

I have been reading through the end of Old Testament with my accountability partner in Spain, Emily. We started during the end of February by divine intervention. (He answered my prayers!) It is our last week in Spain and we are finishing up the last two books of Zechariah & Malachi. God has been blessing us so much with our reading and our time of sharing. We get so amazed that God would even align our personal struggles from home to be alike so we can really be accountable to one another. We get even more amazed at how much our readings have been revealing our sins and relating so clearly to our lives. I love the feeling of being defeated by the Word.

To give you an example of how funnily perfect God is and how unperfect we are.. Emily & I decided to read the OT and I suggested we go through the minor prophets, since we had limited time. Emily mentioned that she loved the name Ezekiel and how she wanted to name her son that, but had never read the book (haha). So we decided to just start from Ezekiel then and go through Daniel and then to the minor prophets. You know.. just for the heck of it. After finishing Ezekiel and Daniel, Emily got an email from her campus ministry (Cornerstone Fellowship) for their upcoming leadership training. In it, they gave a schedule of the material they will be covering before the year starts with a weekly reading.

Guess what books they were going through...?? Take a WILD guess...

(Yeaup. Unbelievably true..) Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. From the beginning to the end of our reading for the semester. Now... waiiiiit a minute... Godddddd~!!! Hahahahahaha.. you are so silly! Man, my mouth dropped when she told me.. we felt so ggpwn3d. We literally chose to do that because of Emily's future baby named, Ezekiel. HAHA. But he still came through and confirmed that HE MAKES ALL THINGS GOOD. How is it that we are also perfectly ending the semester in this last week with Malachi...

Even in our imperfections, he is God.

Why God brought me to Spain..

So, ever since I got back from Nicaragua.. (I feel like Nicaragua is now a measurement of my time) I have been waiting to write my testimony. Not sure of what exactly. I was so overwhelmed with the entirety of my experience that I did not know where to begin. Not just the trip itself, but the events that led me there and those that followed after. I felt like the story was just beginning and I cannot (understatement) even begin to describe in words the PERFECTION of God. Sighahh. One by one, things were happening that would confirm that perfection in my life.. that I would continually be left speechless. Each time, I would reconnect it back to the previous chain of events that had led me to that very moment. So in ways, my testimony from Nicaragua has been ongoing...

Now, I ended up in Spain for the past 3 months and of course, that story has continued as God has been unconditionally the same "yesterday, today and forever" Hebrews 13:8. I have not shared this experience during my stay here and for that, I suck. I now have about 40 days until I am back in the states! In some form of regret, I want to begin to share to praise Him while it is not too late. (Without just writing posts of the ambiguous "God is perfect" to me.)

Can I tell you that I have never felt God's love as much as I have felt it here in the past few months? That is not saying that he has never loved me the same, but it shows how much I have been seeking that love elsewhere in my life. As my readers (the very few, but faithful) have read, I came to Spain thinking that it would be an experience where I share God's love and where I can be the light in the darkness to live out the conviction I got from Nicaragua that missions is not a part of my life, but it is my life (which I still hold to). I thought that the Hispanic church I found with my Mexican co-workers before Spain was a form of practice and such. I had my plans and my interpretations of God's work since it was my life. See that? It almost screams like a spoiled attention-whore of a brat who just says "ME, ME, ME!"

Well, the first sin(s) I dealt with in my first month in Spain was this horrible, ugly thing called mr. pride. It is still something I struggle with so much, but God really broke me down and taught me to deal with it through a train of confrontations. (I have received a grade-F in this field my whole life.) 6 of them, in total. The amount of cloudiness in my heart caused by these relationships was definitely a reflection of mr. pride, yuck. Because of it, I was constantly battling within me. Once God led me through those, I felt a million times lighter (not physically, though I wish) and my heart was no longer weighing me down.

From there, I realized that my "mission" in Spain was exactly that.. my mission. ggpwn3d? Yes. What God had planned for me was súper fácil (translation: super easy).

Ready?

God brought me allllllll the way to Spain, half-way across from home, for my last quarter of my college years, with no one/thing around me, to tell me how much he has been loving me and how much he has been waiting on me to see that and to return it. I was so... touched? in awe? amazed? overwhelmed by how blind I had been... so broken by my ugly heart... and constantly complaining to God in my guilt, "Why...? How can you keep loving me so much?? Why is your grace so hard to grasp?? Why do you never stop pursuing after this ugly ugly ugly heart..." and then I would cry in sorrowful joy because His grace really is that good.

This made me see that I had another huge flaw. This sin of idols: People; being a person who is so relational and loves people, making constant efforts to show it and being satisfied and comforted by the return of their love. God has been dealing with this, especially in college. family, kcm, roommates, WaSa, f.o.l., david, UR, nk9 to mention the few. Even though my love for God grew throughout the years, my conception of loving him back was exerted through these relationships. I only had so many hours in a day to tend to all of them, right? So why not kill two birds with one stone and love God by loving his people? Wrong. I failed to love God first. MAJOR FALI. (yes, I meant to write 'fali').

So what does God do? He takes me right out of my self-made world of comfort and puts me in a location of solitude & strangers. It was a sense of loneliness that I had never felt before. Strangely, it gave me a sense of relief. I felt like I was able to breathe in relaxation for the first time since I can remember, without having to deal with all these responsibilities in my life. I did not have a family to drive home to every weekend, no work to wake up to, no one to make care packages for, no one to catch/meet up with, no meetings to attend, nothing! I even went through a month without Facebook. Imagine how that felt! This was all so new to me, even newer than the fact that I was living in Spain with a completely new culture & lifestyle.

This feeling of being pursued after by God... has made me find self-worth in Him. I have been meditating on a chapter of Psalm each week and this Sunday was Psalm 8.

"When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have in place... What [am I] that you are mindful of [me]..." Psalm 8:3, 4

That is how my experience has been in Spain. I have finally found a love that is flawless, that leaves me in awe every waking moment. God brought me here because he wanted me all to himself for once, where he wanted me to pursue him likewise. He went to great extents to make this known to me. Whatever my heart held onto for my own will, he took away. In that time, instead of growing bitter or confused toward him like I normally would have, I was humbled and broken by the intimacy in his love. Amazing, no? Who am I...

As I have been reading through the Old Testament while in Spain.. Every book has been speaking to me directly, in one way or another. From those, Hosea has been a reflection of my experience.. I will end it with this..

"She will chase after her lovers but not catch them; she will look for them but not find them... Therefore I am going to allure her; I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her." Hosea 2: 7,14

 I, like Israel and Hosea's wife, found myself chasing after my own conditional heart. God brought me here, to my desert, to do just the same as he did with them. That is the God that I live for and love. He never fails me, but always satisfies me. He is my entirety and my portion. Saehoon, you told me during the early stage of my Spain experience that it seemed like I was in a desert? After reading this book, and it further confirmed God's awesome-ness. I am ready to go back home...

Google Search(es) #1

 For those who do not know, I am slightly obsessed with Google... in every day situations, I always turn to the good ol' Google search bar for answers. I will begin a thread of posts to share with you, bits and pieces of my random wonders. Do not judge me.

• My stomach has a heartbeat.
  This was a recent symptom I have had. Apparently, a lot of people online have had felt this too. I should also mention that I have a really bad tendency to Google my symptoms and self-diagnose my sickness. I only take it half seriously.
• Healthy ways to lose weight in a month.
  Hahahaha... I am guilty of that, as well as many variations of the diet world wonders.
• Is it possible to surgically lower your belly button?
  ..... Yeah, the answer was hard to find.
• Earthquake 2010 
  With Haiti, Chile, Japan, Turkey, Mexico, California, Spain.. just in the past 3 months.. I have been checking every so often to see the world status. Birth pains, indeed.

Confuse Me #2

World of a Difference

•  In Spain, the only Asian race the people seem to know (or acknowledge) is Chinese. To everyone here, I am Chinese or should I say Chinita. This brought back memories of my childhood in Argentina when kids would slant their eyes and repeatedly chant those words to me, "Chinita, Chinita!" I mean, I know China is the most populated country in the world, but... is it wrong for me to want to be recognized for being a Coreana? It is more amusing than offensive. I laugh when they just say ni-hao to me and take the opportunity to educate them with the existence of Korea.

I typed "Chinese woman" and "Korean woman" on Google. These were the first photo results of each search.  Top- "Chinese woman", Bottom- "Korean woman"

• The richest man in the world of 2010 is Carlos Slim Helu. He is Mexican. Now, I am not being racist nor am I saying a Mexican man does not deserve to hold this title. Props to him for being a self-made billionaire and living his life to see this day. I love Mexico and I love my Mexican community. The one thing I miss most in Spain, besides friends and family, is a taco. Anyway, I guess the part that confuses me is the fact that he is Mexican and that Mexico is still a fairly newly developed country. In the Top 10 of the list, after Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, #4 & #5 are from India. The majority of the people in these countries live in poverty. They do not have the comforts of a cozy home or the consumption of sanitary water. This is not just a certain percentage of the people, this is a good majority of them. It sort of just upsets me. The fact that there is such a huge difference in living. With all those billions of dollars, man.... I bet they could feed those people... It makes me sad.

World of a difference...

Perfect Disaster

The weekend after I left La Cañada, the crazy thunderstorm season started in full blast.
It was strange to see my small town of 20,000 people, that has been unheard of to most of the people I have been around, become publicized in the past year due to natural disasters. Just back in September 2009, we had the station fire that basically stripped all the mountains. Relatives from Korea saw us on their local news channel and people called to check on us. Luckily, my house was not affected, but because of this disaster, the bare mountains became an almost too-perfect situation for the La Canadians fast forward 5 months. People who got evacuated back in September experienced a dejavu this past month when they were red-tagged to leave their unsafe homes. All back in September, we were praying for rain to stop the fire... and now the rain came a bit late and somewhat uninvited, seeing that the naked mountains had no substance to hold up.

...this all comes and goes


When I got to Spain, I thought about this ironic situation a lot. It was too perfect, no? How can this small small town (aka "LC Bubble") that has been so comfortable for all I can remember, be made famous and public for such a horrible catastrophe..?  It reminded me of a conversation I had with my dad a couple months ago, triggered by financial difficulties and disheartening situations. He shared his thoughts about the world and money saying that "money comes and goes..." and how unimportant it really was in our lives. He went from having a grand in his bank account to bringing my family to La Cañada within a few years. That is how unreliable this idol we call money really is. People who have nothing can have everything overnight while those who have lived with no worries can be stripped of everything. He also mentioned that this financial recession was a good humbling experience for America. We have become so engrossed into our financial values, making our possessions our gods and being obsessively dependent on it. When all this is taken away, what is left....? There is God. The less we have, the more we long for... and after longing for worldly things that will not satisfy us, we realize that God is our complete satisfaction.

..and then he sends us his beauty and confirmation

My dad wrote me an email a few days after I got to Valencia. Towards the end of it, he wrote:
앞으로의 삶은 주님과 동행하는 삶을 살려는 것이 나와 우리 온 가족의 꿈인것을 너에게 말한다
잘살던지 못살던지가 중요한 것이 아니라
주님과 같이 사는 삶이 참으로 중요한 삶인것이라는 것을 깨달았거든..

Basic translation: I want to say...From now on, my dream for our family is to live a life in relation to God. Being rich or poor is not the important part. Being with God and living by Him is the most important thing and it is something that I have realized.

Am I blessed..? I think so. To be able to experience God, knowing that He is in control and that all things are beyond this world, through a simple email from my dad. Times like this, fire, flood, earthquake, is when God becomes bigger to me. I am reading Matthews and couple nights ago, I read chapter 24 where it talks about the signs of the end of the age. 

"You will hear of wars and rumors of war... such things must happen but the end is still to come....there will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains... And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come" (Matthews 24: 6, 7b, 8, 14)

Come on, friends. Lets stop being the older brother from the prodigal son, who was so wretched in heart to rejoice at the lost being saved. At least for me, that has been the condition of my heart for most my life.. We need to share this thing called GOSPEL so that the end comes. I am dunzo with this place called earth. Until then, no stopping, guys!

*PLEASE KEEP PRAYING FOR ME!!* 

I need to find a church. My internet search has been very hard and I cannot find the right one.

Thank you, 13 followers. (I got 3 more since my last entry. Rock on!)