Losses?

(Michael, don't take this loss too hard. Another Turkey Bowl race in seven months)



“Old man Sai lost his horse. Who is to say that it wasn’t a blessing?” (塞翁失馬焉知非福) goes a Chinese saying. I have lost many horses in my life, and many of these incidents turned out to be good things. Let me list a couple of them to illustrate my point.

Some romances that I had in my reckless youth did not work out, but it was good. Had I married one of those girls, divorce could easily have been the result and, more seriously, I would have missed out on the opportunity to marry the lovely Cornelia, which would have been tragic indeed.

Another horse that I lost was that I absolutely could not do math. All our boys’ math genes are from their mother. Because of this serious academic flaw, I became an outcast in the world of academia and was turned down by many credible colleges on both continents. In fact, the greatest failure of my academic pursuit at age 18 caused me to enroll in a non-government-accredited Christian college (a “wild chicken college,” it was called). Here I heard the gospel for the very first time, and subsequently met my future wife. What a great loss? No, what a great success!

I had great trouble passing my GRE during the beginning of my Doctorial studies at Ole Miss and had greater trouble passing my comprehensive exams toward the end. This forced me to leave the university and become a pastor, first in LA and then in Lubbock. After fifteen years of pastoral work, I have begun to realize that being a servant of God is more rewarding than being a professor in a college teaching English literature. It wasn’t that much of a loss after all.

Don’t be heartbroken about your losses. Many of them may just turn out to be - forgive the cliché - blessings in disguise. Praise the Lord for them and move on. Your future is filled with thousands of possibilities of joy, so don’t waste your time mourning about your past losses. Remember, the guru has spoken and he is always right.

Joy and Peace

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him…” Ro 15:13

Hope, joy, and peace are something that we seek; yet we often try to find them in the wrong places. Many times we think we have found the right things, but they all have turned out to be mere counterfeits that teased us with their glamour and, without a single exception, they all disappointed us in the end.

All of us will get to a point in our lives when we become deluded in our desperate search for true joy and will resign ourselves to the fact that we will never find it. How many times did we think that we had found the right thing, yet it turned out to be a mere shadow of what we were seeking?

“Is this the soul mate whom I spent years pursuing?” How many of you have secretly asked yourselves this question as you looked at the woman who lay next to you with hair unkempt and all her physical flaws exposed in the dim daylight? Of the fifty percent of married couples who get a divorce I believe all of them had great aspirations for their marriages once and the dream of living “happily ever after” was still pretty intact before they walked down the aisle. Not many people speak or write about “post-honeymoon blues,” but I believe it is a real issue that we are afraid to touch.

“Post-victory blues” is something we rarely mention. After you have won a highly contested game and with a beating heart you clutched the trophy tightly with your trembling hands, the nagging question of “is this all there is to it?” probably didn’t surface in your mind, but it would surely come the morning after when you woke up from your drunken stupor and found out that the hang-over from taking in a big gulp of victory was a lot longer than any drunkenness that you have ever experienced.

All things, no matter how great they are, are vanities if we leave Jesus out of them; all things, no matter how insignificant they are, are felicities if Jesus is in them. If we do all things out of our trust in Jesus with an intention to glorify him, peace and joy will follow; if we do all things out of confidence in our own flesh with a selfish goal to glorify ourselves, our hearts will be overcome by dissension and sorrow in the end.

I learned somewhere that there are more people buried under the glamorous city of Paris than those who live above her, yet very few people even bother to look underneath and learn a valuable lesson from the dead. Life is a gift from God; how are we going to use it? Are we going to use it purely for our own enjoyment, or use it in such a way that the gift-Giver is honored and highly exalted.

Starting another career at my age is becoming increasingly difficult. Shall I be thinking about retirement as my next move? It is indeed depressing if I keep on pondering on this issue. We have a bad habit of evaluating our lives by career and accomplishments, not knowing that life should be measured by the little things we have done which don’t seem to mean a whole lot. People who do small things well are great people, but the ones who focus solely on doing big things are small people. I don’t think the ones who leave dirty dishes in the kitchen for their wives to clean and rarely pick their crying babes up at midnight to console them and put them back to sleep or to change their diapers when needed, amount to much in God’s kingdom, no matter how accomplished and worldly-wise they are.

The Fall

The boy is the father of a man
Whose desire has never waned
After years of reaching up,
Forgetting the fall that he once took.
Grasping the next bar in the ladder tight
He reaches up toward the sky.
Was it the ladder that the dreamer witnessed
In the desert of Bethel long ago,
And by climbing toward blue heavens
Perchance will he meet the One
Who came down to Bethlehem to be born?


* Michael fell from a water tower when he was about three years old and, by God’s mercy, he survived the big tumble. I guess he forgot about the fall.

Well, this was what happened. I took Michael out on the college campus where I taught. As many of you know, watching kids can be pretty boring sometimes, so I went to pick up a current copy of Readers’ Digest from the library and started reading. After becoming immersed in one of those lowbrow true stories for a while, I looked up to check where my boy was and the sight I witnessed nearly petrified me. Michael was half way up the school water tower! Instinctively, I cried out “Michael!” not knowing that was a serious mistake. My shout startled the boy and he fell straight down. He flipped in the air once and landed squarely on a small rock and blood gushed out from his head. Michael was screaming at the top of his lungs and I ran straight back to our apartment to Kathy, for I simply didn’t know what to do. Amazingly, Kathy was pretty calm and we took the boy to the ER and had him fixed up. The incident probably shortened my lifespan a few years and, from then on, I dared not read any book when I was watching him. Even with my extra vigilance, he still managed to have a few more accidents and visits to the ER. He knocked out five baby teeth and acquired scores of stitches. One time he ran on the sidewalk with eyes closed, ran into his brother, and lost one tooth. Another time he jumped from one bed to the other in a motel room, knocked heads with his brother, and another tooth was lost. I guess it’s no accident that he wants to be an ER doctor to save himself, as well as other accident-prone people like him.