ggpwn3d #7- Then, Now & Forevermore

I looked at me-self in the mirror tonight and said:

 What is going on?

                                Gruesome monster                                                                               

                                   of a cold sore on ze mouth,                                                                     

                                             colorfully-bruised arms

                                                   from failed true blood tests,

 creepily

growing

 eczema

below 

neck,

and oh-                                           

 refilled bottles of curing pills for

GERD & ulcer; best of friends .

But He said to me:                                                             

Estefania Belen Cho

Do my words mean nothing

to you?

Have I not expressed enough of my love

to you?

When will you see that I always know what is best

for you?

Did you not confess that I am the strength of your heart & your portion

forever?

My beautiful, precious gem -

I AM WHO I AM .

Haiku #1- Cold Soaring

Body keeps breaking;



from whom does my help come from-

help make me trust in You.

ggpwn3d #6- Surrender

A few nights ago, I visited Irvine to see my beauti-fol. daughters (f.o.l. = small group, which needs to be a post of its own). After KCM, we had a sleep(fol)-ver and stayed up talking and laughing throughout the night. I had a long and good talk with one of my girls, as she opened up about her past 3+ years at UCI and her faith. It was a really good, refreshing hour of deep emotions and our struggles.

Earlier that day, I met up with Saehoon for coffee and we were reflecting on our gnomie-ship.. how God brought us together with the same conviction of being Hungry for Daily Bread, our Facebook bible-reading accountability group.

Those two conversations tied in together that night when my sg girl and I reflected on how our relationship with God should be.. the reason why we ask God for our daily bread, when he is a God who can give us in abundance if he wanted.. why we must live our life day by day, with new mercies that wash our filthy sins.. why we must surrender every morning we wake up, knowing that we will not be able to fulfill anything by our own strength because that is how He has made us.

Sighahh, thanks God for doing it to me every time. White flag, I surrender my all, to you.

ggpwn3d #5- Freedom

"Freedom comes from slavery to Christ." -Mark Driscoll

I wish I could draw you a diagram of that statement, but I think you get the ownage regardless.

ggpwn3d #4- Letters from Nicaragua

Just over a month ago, my good friend, Leo (lheaom) sent me stack of 3 envelopes to my temp home in New York. You know you become a true local when you start getting snail mail... (hehe)

Anyway, the 3 letters were from 3 friends in Nicaragua... Rene, Miguel & Edinson. Leo led the Nicaragua team this summer and they had given him the letters to deliver to me. You see, every day since I came back from Nica last summer, I have not stopped thinking, dreaming, remembering about this faraway land that I fell in love with. But even so, these letters reminded me of things that I forgot; about our ministry, about the people, about why I fell in love in the first place.

Our team had an unintentional ministry... during our month-stay, we built a relationship with the older youth group kids. Even when we stopped doing the VBS and English programs in the first half of the month, they would come see us in the late-afternoons, just to become friends and hang out. We ended up teaching them body worships and skits during these hours of free time.

Free time. People think that when you go on missions you should not have "free time" because we should be actively finding ways to serve the missionary and work ourselves as hard as possible. But in Nicaragua, we were the first KCM team there and a lot of things were unorganized at times and unfortunately, we had plenty of free time.

But this GOD, he is funny. Because during those free times is when our team built a deep relationship with this group of 10 kids. It is also when I found myself lying on the tree house with open ears and an open heart; it is when I fell in love with Him.

Now I forgot about this... the idea of having free time for God. When I get too busy and there is a set schedule of activities in my day, it leaves little or no time frame for God to squeeze into my life.

Rene, a 14 year old, was a smart and hardworking boy in my English class. When I taught him to make sentences, he wrote, "I am sad. Why do tears come down my face?" It broke my heart.

But here is something he wrote in his letter, a whole year after we met him:

"...me acuerdo cuando nos enseñaron los dramas que nosotros no entendiamos muy bien pero como ustedes estaban todo el tiempo con nosotros para motivarlos y salir adelante. por eso nosotros nos esforzamos y aprendimos algunos dramas. pero lo mas importante es que ustedes nunca nos dijeron no. siempre nos decian que sí. esta carta la escribo con mucho amor y cariño. como cuando esta alegre un niño que le han dado un regalo muy especial y es que eso son ustedes para mi son un regalo muy especial que Dios me ha dado..."

Translation:
I remember when you guys taught us the skits that none of us understood very well, but you guys were there the entire time with us to motivate us and to do it in front of us. Because of this, we were able to go on and learn those skits. But the most important thing was that you guys never said 'no', but always said we could do it. I write this letter with a lot of love. That joy in the boy is a very special gift that you guys gave to him. That is why, to me, you guys are a very special gift that God gave to me.

There you go. Who knew that NK9 was capable of loving someone? We were the underdog team that had little confidence because we were not drilling our days dedicated to any super ministry v. 10. We felt guilty when we did not have a crazy schedule and felt discouraged that we were not on "missions".

But friends, God´s plan is not always a list of things. He directs his time in our steps and does things that are far greater than what we are able to see. Sometimes, you just have to take time to make time for His time.

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.