Walking On Water....

Fighting for me!!

2011-08-08T07:48:00.000-07:00

Well, Recently been feeling down, couldn't really point it out. But few days ago, I had a conversion with a close friend of mine. It was an eye opener.
The conversion pointed out that sometime when we get close to someone our expectation of affirmation changes. Meaning that we turn away of who we really are and see ourselves through the eyes of that person. Let me give you an example. Situation A: You communicate all the time, very expressive. Yet, the other person sees that as demanding. The problem does not stop there. yet, it progress that person continue to stating that you are demanding until you doubt yourself and despite explain your point of view, the answer will not change. At this point you end up at a fork, either continue living as you. Or believing of the other view of yourself. Got that?? I know it is confusing me too.

Well, that is very tricky thing to do. Why, you asked: Because there is a thin line between knowing self, and living in denial, thinking that you are all that.

For one reason I am writing what my friend listed as my qualities saw in me. It is because when you doubt yourself sometime, we need affirmation of who are we. Sometimes we need to hear it and read it.

Loving, caring, eager to help. communicator.

The last advice given to me by my friend is: smile, because smiling is healthy... smiling can change the whole perspective of life and the way we look at ourselves.

Now, stop don't get me wrong. many my question me and wonder if my purpose of this post to not to question ourselves and examine ourselves. That isn't the attention at all. My attention is trust in who we are, and not allow anyone close or far to make your be someone else due to their view of you.

I am trying to gain my confidence back and remember who am I.

Be Silent and Listen

2009-02-24T12:14:00.001-08:00

I needed to prepre last Sat. for the Sunday school class I am teaching. I had to watch a Nooma video # 5 called Noise by Rob Bell. It is my first Nooma video.

Here is the video to watch for yourselves.

I had to watch it three times before I actually start teaching it. The fact that it presents is so deep. Just to record one hour of total silence required 2000 hours of record time.

The fact came to mind that we try to fill our time, our schedule our daily life with so many things. See, today I have to plan my day and before the end the day, I have to plan tomorrow and if I don’t have any thing to do, I would have to find any thing to fill my day with. We view unfilled schedule as boredom time.

If we are on the highway, we turn on the radio and we may even have the radio on while talking on the phone. If we can’t find something better to do, we watch the billboard on the highway and if there isn’t much to see, we may complain of not having any thing to look at and consumes our time.

Here is reality, we don’t have the attitude of thinking of this spare time as quality time that is an opportunity that is given to us to allow God to speak.
See, we go to church once or twice a week and during that time we speak a lot (praising and worshiping) then we listen to 30 min sermon for speaker of the day. But the video wants us to wander around trying to listen to what God have to say to us.

Do you ever wonder what He wants to say to you today? Do you want him in your life, leading it and inspiring it? So why don’t you allow him to talk and allow your self to listen?

See, if you yearn to have a close relationship with someone, you have to engage with that person in conversions and allow him to speak as much as you speak as well. When we are in love with someone, we look forward to their calls and can’t wait to get home to see them. We can't wait to have them call us and speak with us just for the sake yearning to listen to their voice on the other end of the call.

I believe that while I was teaching those kids in my Sunday school class about allowing God to speak. I have learned that I need to be silent and not only that, but also have the attitude to enjoy my silent time with him trying to listen to what He got to say in Silence.

P.S. Silent/Listen have the same letters. In order to Listen, you must be Silent. In order to be Silent, you must not talk and Listen.

Permission to Hope

2009-02-20T05:31:00.000-08:00

Hudson Russell Davis writes:

Unless the cold of winter has moved beyond our bones and into our hearts, unless we have allowed the bumps and bruises of life to numb us--the New Year holds hope.

Despite all that has passed up till now, the New Year holds the promise of something better, the promise of a new tomorrow. It is true that winter has only just begun and that the spring of our youth is not ahead--but behind. There is hope, but it has been trampled and mishandled so that we dare not believe this year will be any different from last year. Last year's hopes lie crumpled by the curb. The voices whisper, "Perhaps it is better to give up hope than face yet another year of disappointment." Never!

In this time of longing, and waiting, this unique place of suffering our "perseverance" should produce "character" and character should produce hope, but it is not automatic (Rom. 5:4). Paul tells us "hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us" (Rom. 5:5). This time of longing should be characterized by hope, but it is not always so.

As for me I cannot and will not, live without hope. I cannot and will not pretend that my refusal to ask and hope "in" the Lord is faith. I do not perceive it as faith but stoicism: a noble idea that to suffer and endure lack without word is more spiritual. It is the false idea that to ask of God is weakness. It is also the very human idea that to hope is to risk disappointment. To hope IS to risk disappointment. Hope anyway! Risk anyway!

Insecurity caused me to live by fear, and the fear would not allow me to risk. I had no boldness in relationships because I lived in fear and the fear of disappointment constricted hope. Then Love whispered, "No matter how far you fall I will catch you." Ah! That is what I longed to hear. For then no risk was fatal. In the midst of Love's fair garden hope sprung up. Its scent was sweet and its blossom beautiful, and I swooned at its touch. If you want permission to hope this year for a husband or wife--hope! Hope that the Lord of heaven will grace you this year with marriage and if He does not--trust His kindness to keep you.

I nurture hope because I am safe and secure in His hands. Once, when I was terrified of failure (now I am just afraid) I risked little and buried hope beneath pragmatic words such as "realistic." "Be realistic!" "Be real!" Which was my subtle way of saying, "Don't dream!" But tell me, who hopes for what is? Who dreams of the way things are! Why bother? What a miserable world to dream in to existence--the world that is. No one would dream if all things were as they should be. All is not as it should be. Hope is an honest confession that all is not well and that we are not home yet. Hope for a relationship is the confession that, "It is not good..." He is good! But all is not well with the world and we have a personal longing we wish fulfilled.

Some of us have at some point turned from hope to obsession, from hope to fixation, and passed on to stubbornness. This is not hope and has little relation to true hope. It is self-will at best and desperation at worst. If the person is not in the Lord, if you are ill matched, if you are in sin, get out! Leave off hope! Instead of hoping in this person, take a step back and--through purity and obedience--hope in God. There is a hope that is not hope but wishfulness, a hope called foolishness and delusion. I do not mean this form of self-deception falsely called hope.

But neither can I encourage hopelessness. Our life in Christ is a hope for what we do not yet have, a desire to be what we are not--holy. So we hope always to be more like Christ this coming year than we were last year. We long to be more like Him tomorrow than we are today. We hope to be closer to Him in an hour than we are in this minute. And we can hope to be married this year if we are not today. It is okay to nurture this hope within the safety of His grace.

Here is my caution. Here is how I see hope in service of the believer. It is a prepositional distinction--the distinction between in and for.

Our faith in every way bleeds hope. Hope is evidenced even in the darkness of the cross. But if we hope, we hope not just for a husband or wife. We hope in a God who loves us and desires to bless us. We hope in God for the gift of a husband or wife. We can therefore hope for a husband or wife but never place our hope in a husband or wife. This is true before we are married and true if we get married.

The truth is husbands or wives can disappoint. We make our requests with open hands and hope that we will have what we desire because "God is love" and "love never fails" (1Cor 13:8). What we dare not do is place our hope in a person or thing, husband or wife, for then we become as the foolish builder who built on sand. What will be our condition when the storms come--and the storms will come.

I meet person after person who have deep struggles in their walks with Christ due to failed human relationships. How can this be? It cannot be otherwise if hope is placed in the object, and that object becomes the source of hope itself. Then the failure of the relationship means that hope itself has failed us. It means that God has failed to obey our dreams, failed to conform to our hope--though misplaced.

But this is not hope, and it was never a good idea. No! Hope is placed in God for whatever He will bring to us. We confess this because we know He loves us. The object of our hope is merely a function of our desire. It is proper, but must keep its place. Nothing but God is our right. He is our inheritance. We hope for a relationship with the understanding that it is through His grace that we shall be blessed. I don't deserve a wife, but hope that grace will provide. We will speak another time of my part in the play. What I know is that short of grace no relationship is truly a blessing.

The benefit of hope is the benefit of faith. It is the peace of knowing that while we are not always the people we are called to be, He is always a faithful Father who will not give a snake when we ask for bread. The benefit is a tempered approach that avoids desperation and thus--poor choices. It is tragic when the "ideal of marriage" is shattered and the real "relationship," the real "person," becomes too real. Hope then, rests in our God for His gracious blessings--whatever they may be. For it is He who calls us to "ask" and we ask according to His will (Matthew 7:7).

Attitude and Choices

2008-12-19T13:30:00.000-08:00

What is your Attitude? Who is in control of it?
The last seven days working in Central Mass and New Hampshire impacted me a lot.
Gardner Ma. The town was totally in dark and under few inches of ice for five days until we slowly restored power.

Even with such bad circumstances and freezing temperature, people were in a high spirit. Nothing had change for them and smiles were still there despite the hardship. The stores, hotels, restaurants were all closed. No traffic signals, no schools were open, not even gas stations to fuel from.
Working with the residents made my job much easier since their smiles never departed from their faces.
.
So, what is important to me? That was the question came to mind after such experience.
Let me ask you as well, what are the important things to you? I think, I may have versed the question wrong. I should ask, what is your Attitude? What is your focus on?
How strong your eternal joy is? How easily you are impacted by the circumstances?
Does a cloudy day changes your attitude? How about snowy day?

When we center our thinking on the martial things that makes us feel good about our lives or the things that makes us happy, then once these things or circumstances change, our happiness disappears. But, our joy should be much deeper than this and not easly scratched.
When you find your joy is disapearing, remember to take the focus of ourselves and keep it on God.

Joy is a choice just like anything else that you need to choose. So, where do you decide to find your joy is your choice. Is it in a Sunny day which God provided us with or in a snowy day that also God provided us with? Where your cores believes in finding joy? I believe, that I need to examine my core joy reasons and my choices that I make. God has given me life not only to deliver on his purpose for my life, but also to be happy and joyful in it, but it all depends on the decisions that I and you make and that choice and the attitude you and I want to see it. Sunny or snowy outside the window, it does not matter any longer, if you see the circumstance through God’s window, you and I will be joyful no matter what.

Standing on Rock

2008-12-10T12:58:00.000-08:00

Jesus is my Rock, also Jesus rocks.

It is funny how thin our life is. It is funny how fragile is it. Today I thought of the nights and days I spent away from God. Well, let me explain first. Yes,I am follower, But sometimes you get all busy with life and its problem or sometimes with it's good side as well. Anyhow, sometimes, I chose to walk away from him, maybe out being spoiled of merciful grace.

Now, back to my first thought, I wanted to write about that feeling when you first feel that you are standing on the rock. That feeling that you get when you know God stood with me in that situation. The feeling that I can't describe, it is like that I have someone whom got my back and therefore I CAN take on the whole world.

Looking back to many situations in the past, I remember some of those situations that knowing myself and who I am, I should be fleeing away, running away, scared. But, God came with such different feelings, he came and pump me up in away makes me stand tall on the rock. He said, wait, I got this,d don't be scared. He got my back, therefore I can stand on the rock.

So, yes our lives could be thin and fragile. However, It shouldn't have to feel this way, because we have a rock to fall back on. And if you ever feel like falling, smile, remember those times when you trusted him and he pulled you closer and whispered in your ears saying "I got your back" remember that feeling. It is amazing feelings.

I always CAN depend on you and always can count on you, what I would be without your love and grace.

Do you relate? If some, write your comments.

Celebrating the Small Stuff.

2008-12-09T16:47:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, I read this by Emily, encouraging us to celebrate "what is while anticipating what is to come." I am so guilty sometimes of not paying attention to the small stuff that my life is filled with. My beautiful wife name is Joicy and brought Joy to my life. Just by looking back six month ago, I may find myself with multiable arrows pointing in every direction. But between the many busy thing that married new life brings on me, Looking at the cardboard sign that I took from Old Navy to hang on our Christmas tree, with the words JOY printed on it. I have to say that in many situation that I have been focus on the things that made me lose my joy, that cardboard is a good reminder of the JOY that came to my heart the moment I saw her walking down the aiel.
I am learning that relationship does not have to be prefect to be beautiful.

Another thing, that we, or I most lost track of the people who are around us. The people and friend that God blessed me with. In the every day moment I would come across many situation where I find someone who said an encouraging word or spoke blessing to my heart. The people we meet in every single day shape our lives in many different way and we owe it to ourselves to stop and pay attentions to them and notice their influnce on us and relize that power of these relationship we make.

Today out of no where, a co-worker got me a gift :) and it was Christmas origami kit box. What a sweet surprise. She saw the Japanese flower I made for Joicy and figured out that I love making things out of papers and and she was right on the money.

One last thing, I am blessed with is the change of season. Living in New England in winter isn't an easy task. But when I take a closer look, I see that I am blessed with the change, I am really blessed. God has giving me the eyes to see his beauty in whatever happens around me. It is a blessing to recognize that beauty in the change of season and give the credit all the God instead on the complains that I may carry on once a while.

And now, since we should be writing about small things,here is a small thing, but huge on the other hand. I just read those words by Jen - Balancing beauty and bedlam

"How frequently do you stop to relish in the simplistic beauty that surrounds you?
'Stop and smell the roses," isn't just a catch phrase...it's a way of life. A choice to make.It's about intentionally nurturing our soul, not only through beauty, and building relationships, but through the celebration of the specialness of the moment. This moment.Right now, take some time and choose to "smell the roses"..."

Those words are so true and very inspiring to be motivated and take the initiative to enjoy every day life that God had given us and realizing that all is GIVEN by him and for him.

Is your love encouraging?

2008-12-08T17:48:00.000-08:00

Once again, reading other blogs online it a blessing, here is some great article about practical love that I want to share with you. The post titled: Is your love encouraging? and wrttien by author Shonnie Lavender & Bruce Mulkey.

Recently we happened upon the television broadcast of a sermon from a local church. The preacher was a skilled orator with a compelling message about love. One of the comments he made particularly caught my attention as it relates to our love relationships. He spoke of loving someone so deeply–as he said God loves us–that we fully encourage them to achieve their vision for their lives. Do you love your spouse that much?
I got to test my love back in late July when a special opportunity came Bruce’s way. He was offered a job working with Barack Obama’s campaign as a field organizer. In principle I supported him 100% in saying “yes” to the offer. In practice, getting to 100% encouragment was more difficult because saying “yes” for him meant sacrifices for us and me. But get there I did and he left for his assignment in early August.
Below are some of my learnings about offering my love and support at 100%. I hope they’ll be helpful to you as you seek to be the most loving and supportive mate you can be.
Lessons about offering your love and support at 100%
“Giving up” something (time with a loved one, for instance) helps you have a fuller appreciation of the gift that the thing is in your life. For me, pondering our 3-month separation left me feeling incredibly sad. In anticipation of the time apart, we made great efforts to savor each present moment and enjoy the time we did have together.
It’s enlivening to know that your gift of 100% encouragement can give another person “permission” to go after their big dreams. It seems that many of us defer our dreams and even put off seemingly minor adventures because we don’t want our partner to sacrifice for us. By saying “yes” to Bruce’s leaving, he wasn’t weighted down with any guilt or sense of obligation.
When you give 100%, the return is always with interest (very few other “investments” can produce this return). While it might seem long in coming, or it might even come in some unexpected form, the rewards for selfless giving are more than you can ever fully anticipate. My experience is that even during our separation (which isn’t easy emotionally) I’m being “paid back” with wisdom, adventures, and gifts I didn’t know would be headed my way.
Imagined fear is usually what stops us from offering 100% love. While there are challenges to overcome when we sacrifice or do without, there generally are more fears in our imaginations than what we actually experience. There are downsides for both of us with being apart for 3 months, but the gifts actually outweigh the trials and many of my imagined hardships simply weren’t even close to reality.
Though your spouse may not be lining up to work for a presidential campaign or planning to jet off on some foreign medical mission, chances are the two of you have everyday occasions to give your 100% love and encouragement to one another. If you’ve been giving at less than your full potential, take the opportunity to go full out the next chance you get. It might feel scary and it may even seem a bit crazy…but I’m confident that you’ll be a great giver and the results will be better than you think they will be.

Change.

2008-12-08T13:34:00.000-08:00

I have been following other blogs on the web lately. I recently found myself interested in what people have to say, I started to find joy and amusement of what people got to write about themselves. I guess reading people thought and writing gives me small side view of their lives like but importanlty, it gives a snap shots of who there are from the inside.
I recently read this blog and came across her post about change and made me wonder how our life goes by so fast and we don't stop to notice it.
I used to view change as how most of us see it, uncomfortable, and such inconvenience. The reason behind my thinkingwas that I had my own plan for my life and never thought of my creator plan for me. That post made me look back at my life and all of its seasons. How often it changes and how often it is pretty even in every season. But it was hard to see how pretty it is, because while I may living in one season, was dreaming of a different season which was the source behind an usease I felt but never noticed that I also made.
I guess, I had a misunderstanding, of what my creator thought to plan for me. I thought comfort and he thought peace. I Thought happiness and He thought Joy. I thought money and He thought contentment.
Now, I regret those moments, that I thought to seek what I want and not seek His desires of me. I regret wasting those times of my life enjoying those moments of joy that my creator brought to my season no matter what season. I am learning to live the moment to its fullest no matter what season I am in, because the change isn't in my hand but it is in my creator's.

Narrow Door, Narrow Road.

2008-12-08T12:06:00.000-08:00

New challenge raised last night, when Pastor Khade spoke yesterday in Sunday service. He spoke of the Narrow door that we enter from to heaven, but he also was taking about the Narrow road that we should walk to heaven.
He compared our life style and faith as cars on the free way, that only shows down when it comes to the tole road. He said that many of us live that way, and believes that since we slowed down and prayed for salvation and paid our tole then we are free like those cars on the free way.
I was challenged again and again, live my life and faith with that Narrow road mentality and not the free way mentality. I was challenged not to take God for granted and abuse his love, but instead work hard with God in a discipline living style that is fruitful and not free.

Challenges.

2008-12-08T11:06:00.000-08:00

Challenges are amazing to me, or at least it does amazing things to me. Some may avoid it for whatever reasons, not wanting to be challenge or laziness and wanting to be in there comfort zone all the time, or some other who don't want to even be bothered.

On the other hand challenges, brings the fear inside to light and I see that spake of desperation to evokes. Others may see it as a spake of frustration, but I live for those moments to be challenged.

The fears or not knowing what I am capable of are the fuel behind it all, other may view it as fears or being unable to do things and avoid to try. But in my view, the risk of trying new things even for the sake of trying it, would be like putting in box or can me in frozen can of food and waiting on me to serve the only single purpose I was made for.
But the question that I always ask myself, what if i have more than one purpose to serve, how i would know unless i seek to know or try.

I believe we are made to reach beyond our capabilities and seek what we can't not grasp, but also to challenge what most scare us. There is no potential for us else to reach outside our own limit and boundaries and try to break them. Yes, break them. There is no known capabilities defined for us unless we live the word potential.

So, as life throw challenges in my face, i smile and wait. I even look for them. I look forward to the Sparks of fear that ignite those boundaries with fire. Because once those boundaries are burned, i am free to reach beyond them. I am free to reach out to what my potentials are.

Things I want to write about.

2008-09-16T12:46:00.000-07:00

Here are a list of titles I am planning to write.

Does any one miss you if you disappear?
You got something to say?
The hard easy way.
Let Go, Let God.
Obligation
Listening to the word.