'Tis the Season

‘Tis the season for God to show his children love; it’s also the occasion for us to show one another love. It’s a beautiful thing for people to publicly express love to their loved ones, however they do it. Giving gifts during the Christmas season is a form of PDA that isn’t tawdry.

People with great means give greater gifts than the ones who have fewer resources. I enjoy watching the commercial of a guy who got a Big Wheel when he was a boy and considered it great until years later his wife gave him a Lexus. I enjoy watching the photo session in the morning when the couple are in the PJ’s, walking around the car and taking pictures. Isn’t it a thing of beauty that brings us the kind of joy that has the resonance of eternity?

We should not envy the guy that got a Lexus; what ought to cause us envy is that his wife, or girl friend, loved him so much that she exhausted her means to buy him the best possible gift to express the depth of her love for him. That was indeed a good and beautiful thing.

In our household Kathy is the one who makes everyone’s Christmas. What is lacking in quality she tries to make it up in quantity in her gift purchasing for her four men. Our boys are grown yet they don’t seem to have grown out of their yearning for good gifts during Christmas. We are people of little means but we are pretty resourceful in showing love to one another. Kathy started gathering gifts for this Christmas well over a month ago and has visited “Dollar Tree” many times to increase the volume of gifts under the shiny tree. We started opening the gifts at about nine and didn’t end until three in the afternoon. Rob the “mailman” did a good job and prolonged the joy of our gift-opening until we were a little exhausted.

I put away the gifts that I received in a drawer and some of them may stay there for a long time, but I will have great difficulty shelving away the love that I have received from my loved ones, for I will need that when times are hard and my days become a little dreary during the coming year.


The cardigan that I ordered for Kathy was about a size too big and the jumper that she asked for turned out to be a size too small, and the poem I tried to write for her was only half-done, but all was forgiven. A Chinese man was giving his friend a goose, but it got away on the way there and he only had a feather to show for it when he got to his friend’s house, but his friend comforted him by saying: “You traveled many mile to delivered this goose feather; the gift is light, but your love for me is very heavy.” (千里送鵝毛, 禮輕情意重) I guess my love for my wife was weighty enough for her not to mock my awkwardness in gift-giving.

Holiday Blues

We have holiday blues because we have too much hope for life, too lofty of an expectation for joy and, instinctively, we know that this coming holiday season will bring more disappointment than excitement, like all the other ones in the past. Yet we continue to wait eagerly for the coming of Christmas and the New Year, thinking this season will be entirely different.

Things that cause us to have great hope and never fail to disappoint us in the end are not the best things in life. They are secondary at best. Therefore we continue to wait for the best thing to arrive in our life, and many of us will die waiting.

The key to our happiness in life is not to have such great expectations. Well, to be more exact, not to stake our happiness on secondary things and learn to explore the best things that brings us true joy. We need to cultivate our talent for happiness by searching for joy among the common things during ordinary days. If we wait until a holiday to be happy we probably won’t find it.

When I was a child, it was such a depressing feeling after I spent the last dime that I had received in my Chinese New Year “red envelope” It made me wonder whether it was worth it, because the feeling of disappointment seemed to outweigh the excitement of receiving the money. Yet I continued to wait for the coming of Chinese New Year, year after year, believing things would be different every year, though they remained the same.

I have since found a good solution. I have tried to make everyday a Christmas, a Chinese new year, and a red-letter day. If life is a gift from above, we don’t have to set aside a special day during the year to have a great celebration, do we? It’s akin to opening up a gift when I look at the sparrows feeding in the birdfeeder outside of our dining room window and the joy it brings may be one of the best things in life. Our life will be filled with unspeakable joy if we consider each day of our life God’s gift, loaded with colorful packages of goodies waiting to be opened. How can we not be overcome with euphoria when we unwrap the glorious gift of the sunrise every morning? The only reason that we don’t is because we don’t think it is a gift from God. Without realizing this, your life will become “always winter, but never Christmas.”

Birthday Lamentation

I think it was Confucius who made a cruel statement that if a man hasn’t accomplished anything significant at age fifty, it would be pretty hopeless for him to ever achieve anything with his life. It’s depressing to be reminded of this on my birthday. I turned fifty-six a few days ago.

I spent the entire time waiting for something great to happen during my birthday, but nothing occurred except a phone call from Rob and by the time Kathy came home from work, I was getting a little depressed. I always knew that I wasn’t all that important of a person to other people, and the truth was again confirmed. Nobody thought about me during the day except my loved ones, which wasn’t quite enough for me, I suppose.

Why wasn’t it enough? I asked. I guess there is indeed a great discrepancy between how I perceive myself and how other people perceive me, and the key to my mental well-being and personal happiness is to narrow that gap as much as possible. If I considered myself unimportant, I probably wouldn’t mind as much how insignificant other people deem me to be. Our self-perception does determine the way we react to people’s perception of us.

Why did it matter, really? After a hearty meal at River Smith’s I was golden again, and a couple of presents from my wife gave my morale a big boost. We tend to become dejected if we focus too much on ourselves. The key for us, it appears to me, to become helpful to others is to become forgetful of ourselves. As I age, I have become more and more aware of my limitations as a man and my inability to achieve greatness in life. But there are still a lot of small things that I can still do to achieve smallness – true greatness. Emily Dickinson was on target when she wrote:

“If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

May this sentimental little poem serve as a reminder for all of us - We can still achieve true greatness by doing small things for other people, as my father-in-law used to do: He went through his church directory everyday and sang “happy birthday” to the ones who might have been forgotten by the entire world except one.

Truth Uncovered

“I was popular with girls when I was your age,” I often said to my boys, thus making fun of their lack of sugar & spice in their otherwise pretty colorful lives. Albeit they had great difficulty believing the validity of my claim, they had greater difficulty thinking that their honest father was a liar; therefore they continued to accept my statement begrudgingly until one day I slipped a little bit and the truth was revealed.

“I had a couple of dates with a beautiful bus conductor when I was in the service, but she dumped me after that,” I said to William.

“O yeah, she dumped you?” William sensed an opportunity to uncover the truthfulness of my boast in the past.

“No big deal. She left because her brother didn’t like me.” I tried to patch up the hole that I had poked with an alibi.

“Her brother? I can’t believe that,” he continued to taunt and I became speechless. I guess I really wasn’t all that popular with the opposite sex. I was fortunate to have a few dates in my twenties, not because I was that eligible, I was merely not all that selective.

I didn’t mean to insult my children or make fun of them for not having girlfriends. As a matter of fact, I admire them for not chasing whomever happens to come along. I was mentally unhealthy as a young man and the feeling of inferiority caused me to search for someone to compensate for my dreadful inadequacy. I felt so incomplete then that I seemed to always need a girl to complete my being. That was the sole reason that I always needed someone by my side. To a certain extent, I was a fearful little boy and the few girlfriends I have had were my security blankets.

We need to be happy with ourselves before we can make other people happy. Those who seek a significant other to make their lives more fulfilled or joyful will be sorely disappointed, and the relationship that they end up having will eventually become too suffocating to bear. The ones who are miserable being single will become doubly miserable being coupled. “Two are better than one,” says Ecclesiastes, but the sum total of two people’s problems are obviously greater than just one person’s difficulties and are much tougher to handle. We should be more prepared to be someone’s spouse so that we will bring less baggage into our marital relationship, and not having random dates and casual relationships is a good start.

Phoenix and Dragon

“The phoenix and the dragon are a perfect match,” goes a Chinese saying, meaning people should marry to someone of their own sociological, intellectual, and cultural rank to guarantee a happy marriage. I don’t think I totally agree with this notion. Opposites attract, so we have an inclination to find someone completely different from us. In my case, I honestly did not have a clear picture concerning my future mate when I was young and foolish. I had no idea what I wanted in a mate, but I surely knew the ones to whom I didn’t want. My chauvinistic idea wouldn’t allow me to marry someone better than me, so it was never a part of my plan to marry someone who was taller or smarter than me, let alone to a woman who was not of my own race. Before I met my future wife I didn’t have to worry about that because I was relatively tall as an Asian and intelligence wise, I wasn’t too shabby either.

As you can see, Kathy is “slightly” taller than me and her IQ is probably 20 points above mine. I barely beat the curve in my testing but she is inching toward the genius level. I was greatly intimidated by her queenly status and dwarfed by her intellectual ability the first time we met and it took me three plus years to ask her out and, up to this day, I still wonder how in the world I mustered enough courage to ask for the hand of someone who was in all ways superior to me. Was I trying to prove the old Chinese saying wrong? I was more of a lizard than a dragon, but Kathy was unquestionably a phoenix. Twenty-eighty years of blessed marriage later, I still look at myself in the mirror with amazement and ask: “What have you done to deserve such good fortune?”

I have done nothing, really. I did have a perfect Matchmaker who made all the difference. With his intervention and supernatural maneuvering the impossible became possible and the unthinkable happened during a midsummer night when a beautiful fairy fell in love with a man with a mule’s head. I guess you know the rest of the story. What has happened to me merely affirms the idea that I hold to be true: a wife of noble character is given to us by God. Now you know what to do if you are still in the process of finding the right one. Worldly ideas and traditional beliefs concerning dating and courtship may or may not be applicable in your romantic pursuit. It matters very little whether you are a dragon or a lizard in people’s eyes; the thing for you to do is to go before the throne of grace and ask for advice and a helping hand from the One who really knows and has the power to assist you in your grandiose enterprise.

Romantic Love

I wonder when exactly was the first time my mother and father saw each other. Was it their wedding day? That would have been pretty awkward, wouldn’t it? They weren’t prepared to be married at such young age, yet, as far I could tell, their marriage worked out just fine. It lasted close to sixty years, until my dad passed away about two years ago. Was there romance in their marriage? I believe so. Did they ever consider splitting up when things weren’t going so well? I doubt it ever happened. “Sharing a bed together for one night should last for one hundred generations.” What does this Chinese saying mean? Who knows? People in the old days might not have known what true love was, but they sure did take romantic love a lot more seriously than we do. Consequently, their relationships lasted a lot longer than most of ours.

It takes both powerful emotion and strong will to love. The former involves our feelings and the latter our commitment. Romantic love will always have its ups and downs and the feelings lovers have toward each other often go through ebbs and flows, but there should be one constant that doesn’t change - commitment. Not only do we commit to the one we love, we also commit to the One who makes love possible. I can assure you that your love will last if you commit to both of the above.

To love is the easiest thing to do; yet it can also be the hardest. It does give us unimaginable joy, but it may also demand the sacrifice of our whole being. It’s rewarding as well as demanding. Do not rush into a relationship, for the essence of romantic love is its inevitability and all you need is one true love. You will know it for sure when it occurs, but your love probably won’t last beyond your erotic feeling for each other if you merely fall in love with love, or with something else.

By the way, the romantic love between my parents seemed to start out with an unyielding commitment to each other and ended with powerful feelings of affection, which goes to show that dating as we know it may not be necessary. In fact, I am often tempted to take matters into my own hands and do a little match-making for my boys. It may work out just fine like it did with my parents.

Turkey Bowl

At least one of my readers was curious about the result of the Sea Family Annual Turkey Bowl. Well, being a humble man, I wasn’t going to post the outcome of our glorious conquest over the mighty Michael & William, but being a caring man, I really hated to disappoint the insatiable desire that some of you have for information. Therefore I decided to publish the score of our highly contested two-on-two non-tackle football game held before our Thanksgiving feast, consisting of a sixteen-pound turkey with all the trimmings provided by the world- renowned chef, Mother Sea. Well, without further ado, let me just unveil the results: Robert & Rob defeated William & Michael soundly and snapped a five-year losing streak by the score of seven to five. To my great surprise Michael, being a fierce competitor, was a gracious loser who didn’t make a big fuss after the game, but William kept saying that he wasn’t one hundred percent and, for some odd reason, he developed some sort of “throw pock” during the game, making his passes less than perfect. We did have a ref and a cheerleader who called the game and made a holding call in our favor and awarded us fifteen yards. The problem was when the score was six to five she wanted to call the game, but we insisted on playing to seven. She then threw down the whistle and walked to the car and refused to call the rest of the game. I guess she was in the tank for her elderly husband and was worrying about Rob’s well being, since he was so out of shape that he had to rest for a few seconds after every play. Well, being old and out of shape didn’t really affect our performance at all, and youth and vitality didn’t guarantee victory for the other team either. All in all, it was a good day for the geezers. By the way, Rob still defeated Michael in the post-game sprint by a nose and, business as usual, I came in last, even with a sizeable head start. I dug real hard, but still didn’t go that fast. Such is the curse of aging, I guess.

P.S. The Guru will have something about romantic love in his next post. Wait and see what he has to say about this hot topic

Jealousy

“Why did you go to fight the Ammonites without calling us to go with you?” Judges 12:1

The Ephraimites wouldn’t have gone to Jephthah with a complaint had the Israelites lost the battle to the Ammonites. Surely they wouldn’t have wanted to be a part of a losing campaign, but this was a different story, for the Gileadites had scored a great victory against their foes and the Ephraimites became angry because they were kept from joining the battle. The fact was, however, Jephthah did urge them to join him in the struggle against the Ammonites, but for some reason they declined.

The Ephraimites greatly desired to enjoy the glory and benefits of victory but were unwilling to participate in the fight toward the success of the battle when they were called upon to do so. Yet their hearts were filled with jealousy when they realized that the battle had been won and they weren’t part of the success.

There was no reason for the Ephraimites to celebrate, because they did not shed a single drop of blood for the victory. The victory over the Ammonites did not mean a whole lot to them, since they were outsiders in that particular campaign.

Why couldn’t they just be happy and enjoy for a while the peace and tranquility that victory had brought. They might not have earned the glory of victory for themselves, but they should have been thrilled for those who did, since the mortal threat from the Ammonites had been eliminated.

“It’s truly miserable to be rooting for someone else’s defeat,” I said to my son, who was bemoaning the possibility of his rival school’s football team being on the verge of winning big. “Just be happy for them,” I added.

Had the elder son continued to stand in the dark outside of his house feeling sorry for himself, he would never have had the opportunity to rejoice with his father and all his neighbors over the safe return of his prodigal brother. We may have great difficulty rejoicing with those who rejoice if we consider other people’s triumph our defeat and our neighbors’ joy our sorrow.

“If you can’t beat them, join them,” I said to my son jokingly.

It was almost midnight when streams of cars drove by our house, honking their horns. I could hardly feel their euphoria over the victory over their rivals, for I was trying to get some sleep. I might have been feeling a little sorry for myself because I wasn’t a part of the great post-game celebration. How wonderful it would have been had I decided to become a “T-shirt” fan and claimed the university as my own.

The Ephraimites could have easily joined the Gileadites in their celebration party and rejoiced with the rest of the Israelites, but out of their jealousy they determined to raise a big fuss and consequently another war broke out and many lives perished.

Aging

“…did not remember the Lord their God, who had rescued them from the hands of all their enemies…” Judges 8:34

Unusual things become commonplace after they take place, and they become mundane if they happen routinely. Not many of us are overwhelmed by the beauty of a sunrise or the glorious scene of a sunset. How much energy does it take to make the earth turn? How much power is needed to make our heart pump some seventy times a minute? We don’t often ponder about the miraculous operation of our body or how hard it has to work to keep us alive, do we? We only pay attention to it when it’s not working properly and cry foul when it finally quits working.

“We have sinned and grown old and our Father is younger than we,” wrote G.K. Chesterton. Children don’t seem to get tired of doing or seeing the same thing over and over again. “Do it again, do it again, “ they cry. They are so eager to see or do the same thing because it feels like the first time every time they experience it. O how thrilling it would be if we could duplicate the first time feeling for the things that we do routinely.

“I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven,” said the Lord Jesus.

Rick, my brother-in-law, is a collector or novel things, be they toys, video games, theological books, or most importantly, experiences of various kinds. He has a child’s heart when it comes to any novelty and is eager to experience the thrill of either playing a new game, watching a good movie, reading a new book, or doing things for the first time. He is about my age, but he is a lot younger than I am in many ways. I have become cynical because of my age and the things that I have experienced in life. Nothing seems to excite me anymore, but Rick is still charging against the world with gusto and enthusiasm, like a child who is just learning to ride a bicycle or a teenage who is sitting behind the wheel for the very first time.

Rick’s passion for life is indeed to be envied and my lack thereof is greatly to be pitied. May the Lord have mercy on me by imparting in me the first time feeling when I do things for the second or third time. The sure sign of aging is our lack of interest in seeing and learning new things.

We must change the way we look at things to cultivate our gratitude to God. We deem the thing that occurs only one time miraculous, not knowing that things that take place all the time are far more miraculous, for it takes a lot more strength to do things regularly than to just do it once. Lazarus’ coming back to life was a great miracle, but wasn’t not any less miraculous for him to live for so many years before he died, was it?

Everything that happens in the world is magical in a child’s eyes; but it is monotonous and tedious if it is view from an adult’s perspective. How we see the world determines who we really are.

Ordinary Life

“Jerub-Baal son of Josh went back home to live.”
Judges 8:29

Like anything else out of the ordinary, war is a diversion from the usual life that most of us are accustomed to. Gideon went to battle for a season, but the clash didn’t last forever. People kill and are killed during war, but eventually things go back to normal and those who manage to remain alive go back to their ordinary lives.

We are created for peace, not for war. People may engage in warfare for a short period of time, but it takes an entire lifetime to recover from it, and many never do. We may play war-games as entertainment, but real war isn’t a thing of amusement. When it is finally over, all we want to do is to return home and be an ordinary person, with ordinary pleasures of life.

Gideon could have reaped a lot of benefits from his triumph over the Midianites, but all he desired to do was to go home to live. Only those who are bored with the monotony of daily life need diversions; the ones who are content with doing little things daily need no recreation to make their life more tolerable or joyful.

We all have a strange yearning for significance; the problem is that we only have a very vague idea of what true significance is. If we get it wrong and spend our lives perusing what we deem worthy, I am afraid we will take our regrets and remorse to our graves. It’s usually too late when we realize that we have made a serious mistake and have wasted our lives chasing worthless things.

Being significant is to do the little things that the Lord calls you to do faithfully and without grumbling. It was probably a matter of months that Gideon spent in fighting the battle, which was indeed a significant thing, but his life didn’t end after the pivotal event occurred. “Jerub-Baal son of Josh went back home to live.” We read. What did the hero do for the remainder of his life? Just a bunch of little things, I suppose.

“I am a failure,” I said to my son William jokingly.

“At least you raised three sons,” he responded with a straight face.

Such a feat isn’t anything out of the ordinary, I thought, but that’s what millions of people did before me and millions more will do after me. With only a few exceptions, raising a family is the main thing that people do with their lives, isn’t it?

The greatest gifts of God are often found in small packages. We don’t appreciate the gifts we have received because we either don’t know or have no affection for the Giver. The most precious gifts that God gives to us are available to all people and in great quantity. The things we can absolutely not do without in life are so abundantly given to us by God, yet we are hardly grateful for them. The ordinary things that we do routinely are tonics to our soul, like fresh water and clean air to our bodies. Blessed are the ones who find joy and fulfillment in their ordinariness.

Philosophy

A moody person like me should avoid following presidential politics as much as I can. It makes me depressed, for the one I consider good seems to be losing ground and, being an insignificant citizen, I only have one vote and my voice isn’t loud enough to rise above all the cacophony of liberalism spewed out by mainstream media and pompous Hollywood types.

“People will vote with their pocketbook,” my wife told me. She is right. When the economy is bad, voters will always choose a person who they think can safely guide the nation out of recession and the preconceived notion is that one party’s nominee is better in doing so than the other. The polling data seems to indicate that. How do we choose a leader for this great nation? Should we base our choice on pragmatic matters such as economic issues or other practical concerns? Perhaps we should turn to one of the most intelligent persons in the previous century for an answer concerning this. G.K. Chesterton wrote in one of his essays from Heretic: “But there are some people, nevertheless - and I am one of them - who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy.”

Shouldn’t we pay more attention to a presidential candidate’s world and life view than his ability to boost the economy or national security?

The Question

“If the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us?”
Judges 6:13

Gideon asked the angel of the Lord this probing question, which is a question that most of us have asked as well, and the answer that we have received may have been less than satisfactory. We believe God should be the protector of his children; therefore, when bad things happen to us, we can only conclude that either God is incapable of performing his job, or he simply doesn’t care. If both are negative, the third possibility seems to be more plausible. Since God is all-powerful and all loving, he can certainly do both of the above if he is with us. The only other possibility is that he is not really with us to keep calamities from happening in our lives. But there is a problem in this viewpoint: God is omnipresent therefore he is always with us. As a matter of fact, he cannot not to be with us at all times and all places.

For the sake of argument, let us pose another question: what will happen to us if God is not with us?

Human life is not self-sustainable, so when the power that makes life possible vanishes, our lives too will evaporate into thin air. God is the one who creates and sustains life. It’s a great irony that we are able to question his existence, for it is because of him that we are endowed with the ability to question. We exist because he exists. If we were mere products of evolution, such a question would never be raised. It would be absurd to lay the blame on some sort of mechanical and impersonal process that has been taking place for millions of years. What has the first single cell in the primordial pond done to deserve blame for the imperfection of human life?

We would never question God if God were not with us. An atheist questions nothing about God.

Every question that we have ever raised is based on a set of presuppositions. Without them our questions become meaningless. People who pose a question about something being right or wrong must be assuming that there is an absolute standard of rightness upon which we all agree. Gideon asked such a question because he and most Israelites agreed that God was merciful and loving. His question would have been absurd if God’s people all believed that God was cruel and vindictive. We continue to be puzzled by the injustice of men because we continue to hold onto the unchangeable idea that God is just, and we question his love because he seems to have failed to deliver what he is supposed to deliver.

Gideon’s question for the angel of the Lord is nonetheless a good one to ask. His question was also an affirmation of God’s attributes of love and mercy. He did not cast doubt on God’s existence or his love for the Israelites by asking such a question; he merely had great difficulty comprehending the reason why God had seemingly temporally suspended his mercy and love toward his people. It’s a good thing that we are still asking questions. The ones who are no longer asking questions are resigned to the cruel reality that there are really no questions to be asked.

Why?

“Why do they stay among the campfires to hear the whistling for the flocks?” Judges 5:16

That was the life that they knew the best and had come to love. They were simple people with a simple lifestyle and derived simple joy from the simple things that they did daily. What more could others ask of them? They had no great ambition or lofty aspiration except the simple desire to shepherd their own flocks and to raise their own families. Some of them might have been highly intelligent and others very creative, but it made very little difference to their lives. Intelligence and creativity didn’t set them apart from the masses. What they did to make a living required no such attributes, therefore rendering whatever they were endowed with worthless.

“Did you know yesterday was the two-year anniversary of your father’s passing away?” my mother asked me over the phone this morning.

“I forgot,” I said to my mom, feeling a little sad about it. My dad’s untimely death two years ago isn’t something that I enjoy thinking about, yet his presence seems to be ever-present in my life. My father was a simple man who tended his ducks and his children the best he could and took his love and concern for his loved ones with him when his time came.

“What difference did it make for my father to grace the earth for seventy-some years?” I ask. Was raising a family the sole purpose of his fleeting existence? Perhaps. What else can we ask from man with a lowly family background and no formal education except to till the land and raise a few children? Such are the things that most people on earth have done and will continue doing before the world comes to an end. So why was a question such as this even raised? “Why do they stay among the campfires to hear the whistling for the flocks?”

There was something soothing about the whistling for the flocks, wasn’t there? It was the end of a long day of roaming the fields searching for green grass and still waters and their reward was a hearty meal and a sweet sleep. I used to follow my dad behind a flock of ducks at sunset after a long day of work, rejoicing at the fact that I would get to eat and play into the night. I remember the twenty-minute cow cart ride home on the narrow dirt road when the sunset was behind our backs and the village ahead of us, bathed in the warmth of an autumn dusk, and there was nothing in my mind but a warm meal and evening rest. I stayed beside the campfire and watched the flocks, for that was the only life I knew, the only life my father and my father’s father knew, a life they had come to enjoy.

Why was this question even asked at all? What else could they have done except the simple things that they did to make a hard living, to keep their children from starving, to make life a little more tolerable that what it was? Perhaps this question would have been moot unless there was threat coming from the north, coming to rob the shepherds of their simple life and simple joy. Perhaps that was exactly what happened that took Deborah from husband and children, and forced many shepherds from their loving wives and glowing hearths.

Change

It’s almost like grasping at straws when I listen to Rush on the radio. I am just trying to glean a straw of hope in a seemingly hopeless situation. The polls don’t look good for the Republicans and the “Messiah” seems to have gotten all the momentum by going on a whirlwind “tour of duty” overseas with an entourage of foreign policy advisers in tow and three anchor men (women) ready to sing his praises. All he has to do is avoid making any blunders in his disjointed speeches and he will be home free. I have tasted a Bush victory twice, but I am afraid a McCain’s defeat appears to be inevitable. We are tempted to blame the President for the impending possible demise of the Republicans in the general election, but I believe history will be kinder to him than most of us. I will take a statesman who is philosophically, ethically, morally, and spiritually grounded than a man of change who appears to be willing to change directions every which way in order to get himself elected. It’s anybody’s guess what drastic changes he will take us through when he assumes power. Isn’t this the perfect time for the second coming when all things will be renewed and all filth purged by the true Messiah?

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Don’t these lines by Yeats sound all too familiar when you look around at the world?

Creativity

“They recited the righteous acts of the Lord.”
Judges 5:11

Originality is very important for those people who are in the business of creativity. We strive to see something that has never been seen before and create something that has never been discovered by anyone.

“There is no new thing under the sun,” wrote the author of Ecclesiastes. What we are trying to do is an impossible task, and those of us who claim to have succeeded in their endeavor of finding something entirely new merely deceive themselves. We can only claim that we have create something relatively novel, but not entirely new.

I had no boundaries for my writing when I was a young poet and for me, like most of my peers, composing was a form of searching for something more permanent in a changeable world. I was free to roam in a world of unbridled imagination but often came out empty, for I wasn’t at all certain about the certainty of all the things that I had created through writing.

Nothing makes sense unless we have found an absolute we can use to measure all the discoveries of our senses. “Is he a man; is man he?” This was the beginning line of one of the poems I wrote at age seventeen. I was searching for something as a young man, yet I had no idea that I was searching; I was completely lost, yet thoroughly enjoyed my lostness.

I enjoyed being in a stage of perpetual fluidity because it gave me the thrill of freedom and adventure. There are surprises in every corner when one is lost and the yearning to be found pales compared to the excitement of being lost. There is nothing to be hoped for if hope is finally realized, is there?

“I once was lost, but now am found.” John Newton’s search for home ceased when he was found and, humanly speaking, his life seemed to go downhill, for the slave-trader’s days of thrill-seeking were over. The winding river has left the valleys and hills behind and comes home to the ocean and becomes a mere droplet in an immense sea. There are quickening pulsations in the steady rhythm of the sea that keep us guessing and the thrill of its unpredicted predictability far surpasses the swelling river that breaks all the boundaries and floods the whole fruited plains.

I was becoming a man then, but had no earthly idea into what I was turning. I could have become many things, just like some of my friends. Some became alcoholics and drank themselves to death and others have become scholars who continue to seek something new in a giant pile of ancient documents and data and warm themselves with the dying heat of yesteryear. As for me, I will be content to be a small seashell that year after year keeps on riding the giant waves to the shore and will recite the old stories that I have heard to the ones who place the shell to their listening ears.

Village Life

“Village life in Israel ceased, ceased until I, Deborah arose, arose a mother in Israel.” Judges 4:7

What did the “mother of Israel” care about the most? What was Deborah trying to achieve when she marched against the ferocious Canaanites? She merely wanted to have the “village life” in Israel restored. That was all.

O how peaceful it once was when the village people went out to work in their vineyard early in the morning, when the dew was yet to dry, and to rest in the shade of the olive trees when the sun rose above the distant hills. How pleasant it was when they rested from their labor and watched their children at play, weaving in and out of the olive groves, singing and laughing, not having the slightest care in the world. How comforting it was when they saw smoke rising from the chimneys of their homes at a distance and they hastened along when they smelled a warm meal at their kitchen table waiting for them.

That wasn’t all that much for a man to ask from life, was it? Just a little life with a little joy in a little village. Why was it even considered a luxury at all and why did insolent people constantly try to rob them of their little village life? they wondered.

“Village life in Israel ceased, ceased until I, Deborah arose, arose a mother in Israel.” Mediating on this verse brought tears in my eyes, for I was once a little boy who lived in a little village and enjoyed the little joy that she generously offered, but the dream of living large in a big city took me away from the simple joys of life, and my village life was forever lost.

“Weeds are about to take over your field; why don’t you return?” an ancient Chinese poet asked himself when he was about to resign from his government post and return home to reclaim his field and his old way of life. “I looked at the southern hills with ease while I was picking chrysanthemums underneath the eastern fence.” Doing simple thing such as this was what made Tao give up what most people considered the route to prosperity and fame and become a farmer.

Being a wife and a mother, Deborah had never asked to be a judge over her people or a prophetess with beatific visions and strange dreams, and going to war was the last thing she would choose to do in life. Yet the simple way of life in the village that she loved had been taken away and, against all odds, she was called by the Almighty to do something about it. Brave men of old fought wars out of selfish ambition and aspiration for fame, but common people fought to preserve their simple way of life. Surely such was a small desire that didn’t take much to fulfill or to preserve, but the lifestyle common folks came to love was often disrupted and disturbed by forces out of their control. People often had to fight great wars to preserve their little lives and little joys and, in most cases, lose their little lives to keep their dreams alive.

Even at the moment of peace, the rising tide of this world is drawing nearer and nearer to my village home and my glowing hearth and I am growing weary of trying to stem the rushing current to keep my little village life and myself from getting swamped. How long will I remain standing?

Progression

“I am progressive,” proudly proclaimed Obama in a rally. What does he mean? I ask. All the good things that involve progression, I suppose.

Progression signifies an onward movement from the past to the future, from imperfection to perfection. The basic assumption is the past is bad and the future is good. But I see a problem here. The things of the past are a mixture of good and bad, imperfection and perfection, and what will take place in the future will likely be a mixed bag, just like the past; therefore, progression may also be digression. Besides, as a pragmatist and opportunist who adheres to the philosophy of relativism, it’s absurd to assume that there is a definite perfect destination toward which he is advancing. His primary goal of making such a claim, like most politicians, is to gain power so that he can advance his personal agenda of progression, which, I am afraid, is a misnomer at best. There is no progression without absolutes.

Self-loathing

Future football star!->

None of us likes ourselves entirely. There is always something that we dislike about ourselves. I am not all that comfortable under my own skin. I don’t even like my skin color all that much. I get too dark if I am exposed to the sun just a little bit. William thought I was black when he was a little boy. It’s odd that dark-skinned people would like to be fairer and fair-skinned people would like to be darker. We seem to have difficulty accepting ourselves as who we are and desire to be someone else if we can. The problem is that the someone we would like to be most likely doesn’t like herself either. A lot of movie stars are not that pleased with their looks and have problems with self-esteem and many great athletes seem to feel that they repeatedly need to prove themselves.

Who do you really want to be? Nicole Kidman or Bill Gates? It’s fun to fancy that, but it may not be all that pretty in reality. Kidman may be longing for true love that seems to have eluded her and Gates may have problems with insomnia and an anxiety disorder. I used to feel sorry for the guys who do manual labor for a living, not knowing that those people most likely have a better appetite for food and sleep a lot sounder than I do.

Instead of trying so hard to become someone else or to turn ourselves into a worldly success, we need to work on being the best that we can be. We have to build upon the foundation and structure that has been laid by the Builder. With a 5’ 9’ frame (a little stretched) I can never be a basketball star, but I can still practice my shooting and learn to enjoy the game just the same. Being illiterate in math, trying to become an engineer is going against the grain or swimming against a strong current. It’s better for me to cultivate my natural aptitude for writing and other artistic crafts.

“You cannot couch height.” This is quite a cruel statement, isn’t it? Well, there are plenty of couchable things in short people. In fact, we can surely use our shortness to our advantage and excel to great heights.

City of Palms

“…Eglon came and attacked Israel, and they took possession of the City of Palms.” Judges 3:13

Happy, Texas is just a small town some forty miles from Amarillo. There isn’t really anything to be happy about when one beholds the small town from I-27. There isn’t a whole lot to see except some tall grass and short scrubby trees scattered on the high plains. In fact, it makes me depressed looking at it from afar and I can’t help thinking that the first settlers gave the town that name because they were anything but happy at the sight of the bleak landscape.

At least the name of the place has one particular purpose. It serves as a reminder to the town’s people that they ought to be happy, even though they may have very little to be happy about. That’s the place they chose to sink their roots and make their homes, to raise their young and bury their dead. When there are homes and family, there is happiness.

There were only a few palm trees in the City of Palms.

There were some Canaanites there who had been there a long time before the Israelites arrived. They didn’t bother to give it a name, for many of them probably were nomads and it was just a place with fresh water and a few palm trees where they pitched their tent. It might just have been a piece of semi-barren land to them. Not so with the Israelites though. It was a land flowing with milk and honey, the land that was given to them by God. They named it the City of Palms and considered their new home extremely promising.

God’s chosen people were indeed quite industrious. They all rolled up their sleeves and started working as soon as they got there. They built their houses with bricks and sticks and erected their homes with love. They planted their olives on the hills and their vines in the valley. With cheerful hearts and unyielding spirits, they settled in the new land and proudly called the City of Palms their home.

Their aspiration was to settle on the land for good, for after years of wandering they had become weary of moving. So they scattered their seeds and planted their trees, waiting patently for the coming harvest, not realizing that even the city filled with palms wasn’t really their permanent home. When they became complaisant and forsook their God, the pagans would quickly emerge and drive them away from their vineyards and their hearths. The Promised Land would become less and less promising because of their lack of love for the Lord and their negligence in observing their promises to God.

We name our cities Fairfield and Greenville; we call our places Happy and City of Palms and believe that we will be there for the long haul. I have grown so attached to our little house that the thought of moving away may bring a tear to my eye. My house does have a classical style and a resounding name and it is surrounded by pecan trees and cemented by love. This is my fortress and my city of Palms, isn’t? Don’t we all have our City of Palms that we have been building and will not let go that easily?

Don’t we have any idea that perhaps underneath our towering walls and in the shadow of the slender palm trees, Eglon and his troops are laying siege? This will eventually take place if we continue to attempt to build an eternal city with streets of gold on the shifting sands of the City of Palms.

Purity Pays

The title is obviously a turn-off, but it will do you a lot of good if you suspend your dislike and continue reading. “Honest words are averse to the ears and good medicine is bitter to the taste,” (忠言逆耳，良藥苦口) goes a Chinese saying.

“Having a good laugh everyday will prolong your lifespan by over ten years,” says a TV commercial. “A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushing spirit dries up the bones,” we find in the Scriptures. Happiness is the key to good health and longevity, but what is the key to happiness?

Purity is the key to a happy and joyful life. Don’t believe this? Just put this to the test. I have found this to be true through my own experience. Find me a miserable person and I will find you a person who is addicted to sin of some sort. God created us to be instruments of righteousness and goodness and the more we fulfill this purpose, the more joyful our lives will become. This idea is hardly new, but it is time-tested and true.

Doing the right thing can be very exhilarating and life-redeeming. Succumbing to sin may bring fleeting pleasure to our flesh, yet the aftertaste is quite bitter. Some of us have experienced the feeling of emptiness and remorse the morning after whatever we did the previous night. Unnatural sweetness often has a bitter taste to it. A cup of water tastes good after we have had a piece of cake or an ice cream sundae, doesn’t it.

I may be oversimplifying it, but some forms of depression may be caused by our dissatisfaction with ourselves and our low-esteem, and one of the main causes of self-loathing is our inability to remain pure in our daily lives. I tend to get depressed if I don’t do what I should do and do what I ought not to do.

What is purity? You may ask this and not stay for an answer. “Love God and follow your heart,” suggested one theologian. Don’t do what your heart tells you not to do. That’s our conscience, the place where we hear the voice of God.

I have been trying to be funny in my posts, albeit not very successfully, but I would do my young readers a great disservice if I didn’t get serious occasionally. I will come up with a more light-hearted one next time, if I don’t lose all my readers by posting this solemn blog.

On Friendship

Grandpa is quite a content person except he had one discontentment that he mentioned to me quite often in his younger days when I visited. “I wish I had friends.” I found it difficult to understand, for being a self-proclaimed Byronic hero and a loner who held disdain for the world, longing for male friendship was the last thing that entered my mind. I thought I didn’t need any friends because I didn’t have any close friends.

“Kathy is my best friend.” I derived great comfort from the fact that my wife and I are in many ways great friends. Romantic love must be built on the warm bed of friendship. I have found this to be true and have been telling my children so repeatedly. Romantic love will not last unless there is a strong friendship behind the relationship. “Married couple in youth, but companionship in old age,” goes a Chinese saying. When the fire of romantic love dies, old couples can still warm themselves with the embers of friendship. “Darling, we are growing old, silver threads among the gold…” I found myself singing this often to my best friend lying next to me.

Even so, a longing for male friendship seems to be rearing its ugly head as I grow older. I long to have someone with whom I can have a long walk and with whom I can share the secrets of who I am. The soul mate whom we have been passionately pursuing may be found in our male friends a lot more easily than among our girl friends. One of King David’s greatest loses in life was the loss of Jonathan. After his bosom friend died, David was deprived of a friend for the rest of his life. Bo Yia, a renowned musician in ancient times, broke his violin after his best friend Chung Tz Chi passed away, for from then on, no one would truly appreciate his music.

“I long to have a friend who can appreciate my Chinese poetry,” I said to Kathy the other day.

“Why don’t you contact your high school friend who is a now a literature professor,” Kathy suggested.

Kathy showed herself to be a true friend of mine, for this professor friend is a woman. Contrary to romantic love, true friendship is disinterested and un-possessive. I guess I should be content with having a true friend under my own roof and be thankful.

Saying Good-byes

None of us is all that good at saying good-byes, yet it’s such a big part of our lives and we can hardly avoid it. Keats wrote in a letter to a friend while he was trying to cure his consumption by absorbing the Roman sunshine,“I can hardly bid you good bye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow.”

Asians may all look alike and perhaps one can hardly tell them apart, but I am no Japanese who seems to bow at all occasions, especially bidding one another farewell. I only wave and walk away to reduce the pain of separating from my loved ones. I think my dad was the same way when he saw me off so many times while he was still alive. I think he said his good-byes to his elder son so abruptly to avoid becoming too emotional and making the separation so much more gut-wrenching. He came to the bus stop to say good-bye to us for a brief moment and then rode away in his bicycle when Kathy and I were visiting a couple of years ago. That was the last good-bye he said to me.

Saying long good byes merely prolongs the agony of separation. I prefer to wave and walk away. Shedding tears over good-byes only deepens the pain and makes us drown in our sorrows. So I choose to smile and start counting the days before we meet again.

As I anticipate bidding farewell to both my son and wife in the coming days with apprehension, I suppose I am merely trying to figure out the best strategy to say good-bye to them with the minimum amount of pain. I guess I will just give them an awkward hug and turn my back to them to hide the tears in my eyes and walk away. No matter how you slice it, there isn’t really a good way to say good-byes.

My Dog Katy

In Memoriam

It was hard for you to keep up
As the old legs failed
But, being an old friend
I always waited for you
And took an occasional backward glance,
Making sure you were still there
Dragging your weary body forward
For yet another day, another walk
And another roll and tumble in the park.

I traced the route back to the plot for another visit,
With grass freshly mowed,
Erasing the scent of old yeller
Who used to pounce and dance in the sun.
I went home alone slowly
As if you were still staggering behind
But the path behind me was empty.
Should I have waited for you a little longer, my friend,
When age finally caught up with you
And the luster of your eyes had all but vanished?


My Dog Katy

We must open our wounds to treat them and make them heal. If we don’t deal with them properly, they will remain fresh and they will hurt just as bad as the day we were afflicted every time we think about them. Speaking or writing about our hurts is actually quite therapeutic. So bear with me and listen to the hurt that I recently experienced.

I knew the day would come, but it was still way too soon when it happened. Katy had a couple of bouts with serious illnesses, but being a resilient dog, she pulled through both times. She had serious food poisoning one time and a stroke at another, but she lived to fight for another day. But the situation became irredeemable when she had trouble walking. I didn’t want to give up, so I still urged her on and took her to her favorite park twice a day, but she simply could not make it. I knew it was time for me to take action when she had difficulty getting up one morning and hadn’t been eating for several days. I knew I had to bid farewell to her for the last time. We had her for over thirteen years and her real age might have been over fifteen. Quite old for a large dog.

I managed to get her into my Buick and drove to the vet. There was nothing they could do and I had a choice to make. Katy could no longer be a dog and I was the one to bring her misery to an end. Katy lay on the floor in the waiting room while I was doing the paper work. I could not make myself look at her for the last time and rushed to my car and drove away with the profound sadness of losing her and thirteen years of happy memories with my English Golden Retriever who was so much beloved by her family and friends. She will be dearly missed.

Showing Affection

My dad never said he loved me or hugged me while he was alive. I know he loved me very much, but it was very difficult for him to express his sentiment verbally or physically. Being a traditional male, he was taught to keep his emotions deep within and, if necessary, express it subtly. A lot of Chinese males have bottled up their feelings deep within their hearts all their lives and some of them seem to be fuming like walking volcanoes, ready to explode anytime.

I may have inherited some of my father’s awkwardness at expressing affection and have found it hard to show my children love physically. We are not a family of hugging and kissing at all. I remember we used to kiss our boys when they were very small, but they would always wipe it off with their hands afterwards. I don’t think my children would let me do that now for a million dollars, nor do I have any desire to. in fact, the closest that Kathy gets to doing that is kissing their heads. “Let me kiss your head.” That’s the only way Kathy is allowed to show her love to her boys.

How does a household full of men show affection to one another? I ask you. Well, we do a lot of punching on the arm. It works just fine for us, except for Michael, who, not knowing how strong he has become after years of pumping iron, always hits too hard. I guess his punches might have something to do with my shoulder injury, which I originally blamed on my tennis playing. Michael might actually have been the culprit. Rob seems to know how frail his father is, so he started hitting me with his elbow instead. That softened the blow somewhat when he used his body language to say: “I love you dad.”

I hope my boys don’t do the same when they express their affection to their girl friends. I suggest you pad your shoulders a little if you intend to date one of my sons.

Parenting

“Parenting is not for cowards,” I quoted Jim Dobson in one of my previous posts, speaking about the trials and tribulations of being parents. Not only is this the case for us humans, it is so for the birds as well.

“Parenting is not for the birds,” I concluded after witnessing an unfortunate incident in our backyard this evening.

“There must be a bluejay couple in our yard. They seem to be having a good time together,” I said to Kathy as we were sipping tea on our swing.

“They sound pretty excited about something,” replied my wife.

“A happy bird couple. How sweet,” I said. As I was about to drift into some sort of deeper discussion on marriage, Kathy interrupted: “Look, there is a baby bird over there!”

Yes, there was a baby bluejay standing still a few steps from us.

“It must have fallen from its nest,” Kathy suggested.

“Perhaps.” I looked up and at the top of our giant pecan tree there seemed to be a nest.

“That must be it,” I said to my wife.

“How are the birds going to take the baby back to the nest,” I asked.

“They can’t,” Kathy answered.

I wish I could do something for them. The bird family appeared to be in a grave crisis. For a short while I even thought about putting the bird back into its nest myself, but gave up the idea rather quickly, for I have never been a good climber and I am afraid of heights.

“We need to keep Melvin away,” Kathy said, referring to a hateful cat in our neighborhood who is constantly lurking under our tree, looking for birds to devour. So William and I moved an old wooden gate to block the opening of our short fence. That was the least I could do for the bird family, I suppose.

I know the first thing I will do tomorrow is to check on the bird to see if it survives the night without its mother. There is no doubt in my mind the bluejay parents will lay awake all night, worrying about their lost baby. I have done that myself many a night, even though my children have never been lost or in grave danger such as this.

“Parenting is really for the birds,” I sighed.

Sour Grapes

Being an underdog my whole life I have leaned different ways to cope with losses and defeats and, from my personal experience, the best way is to convince yourself that you don’t really care and therefore minimize the pain of not getting what you really want.

The girl that got away really wasn’t your type after all; the college that turned you down really wasn’t your first choice; the accolades you failed to achieve really weren’t that big of a deal - the list goes on. A sour grapes mentality is one of the most effective weapons in our arsenal of defensive mechanisms by which we keep ourselves from becoming overly depressed or dejected over our losses.

That’s exactly the mentality that some people from tu had after they lost the Lone Star Showdown for the first time in four years. Instead of taking the loss graciously and congratulating the winner, they acted like they had bigger fish to fry and couldn’t care less about the loss. Responding to a reporter’s inquiry, their athletic director even acted like he had no idea where the trophy was being displayed. What a joke! If they keep on behaving like that, I am afraid it’s going to take a while for them to get the trophy back.

Winning like a big boy is easy to do, but losing like one takes real character. The way some tu people responded to the LSS loss reveals who they really are. I am so glad I chose to be an Aggie t-shirt fan.

Random Thoughts

Bouquet for Mom from Cornelia's jewels--------->


“I want to have a lot of kids,” William said to me the other day. I commended his desire to make me a grandpa someday, but he had absolutely no idea what it was going to be like and how much it was going to cost him to have children. I don’t think I have slept through the night a single time after Rob was born. “Parenting is not for cowards,” wrote Jim Dobson in his book on raising children. Are you brave enough to do it?

Rescuers found a hand sticking out from a pile of rubble in one of the cities that was devastated by the recent earthquake in China. Rescue workers felt the hand a little and thought the lady was dead. As they were walking away, sensed something strange and decided to take a second look. After they dug a little bit, they found a woman in a crouching position who was apparently dead, but in her arms they found a four-month-old baby sleeping soundly in his mother’s arms, totally unharmed. Next to the body they found the lady’s cell phone with a message on the screen that, translated into English, said: “Dear baby, if you survive this quake, please remember your mother loved you very much.”

The lady may have died, but her love for her child remained. One can imagine she still managed to nurse her baby and shelter him from harm in her dying hour, and still prayed for her baby’s safety with her last breath. That was something every mother would have done for her baby and I believe that was something you will surely do for your children if, God forbid, a situation such as that arises.

Hey, give your mother a call and tell her how much you love her, will you?

On Spying

William reminded me yesterday that I have neglected posting about my eldest in my blog. “Rob would get hurt. He is very sensitive, you know,” he said. Being a busy Wall Street banker I don’t think Rob has any time or energy to care about what his father does in his spare time. Nonetheless, for the sake of fairness I will make a brief post about Rob.

One of my favorite things to do when the boys were growing up was to spy on my children’s courtship of girls. One can hardly blame a daughterless father for doing that, really. Blame Cornelia’s inability to deliver, I had been waiting far too long to have a daughter and, as years went by, this longing turned into some sort of neuroses that made me spy on my children’s dating life. I remember vividly what happened when Rob asked a girl to the prom. It took place right before tennis practice. I rarely missed the boys’ practice for fear of missing a Kodak moment such as that. I saw Rob sheepishly approach a girl and mumble something to her. The girl’s face lit up and she could not stop smiling throughout the entire practice. I knew something had happened. Unfortunately, Rob couldn’t stay awake through prom night and the relationship failed to blossom. It was nonetheless an exciting experience for me. I was, in fact, preparing to be the father of a blonde daughter then.

Since Rob has been dating a wonderful girl for a while now, my attention has turned to my other two sons. Knowing my idiosyncratic habit of spying on them, Michael has learned to guard his communication with the opposite sex, or the lack thereof, very tightly and it has become impossible for me to get any inkling of his dating possibilities. I even enlisted someone to help me spy on him, but Michael was alerted somehow and cut off the important source of my information for good. I tried to spy on William as well, but things are going pretty slow with him these days. William started to read out all the names of his female contacts from his cell phone after I mocked him for not having any trace of female voice-traffic on his telephone for the longest time. “Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink,” I said to myself.

Now you know what a pathetic dad I am! By the way, I am willing to pay for any “juicy news” about my sons (Michael and William) and the amount of the payment will depend on the degree of juiciness of the news and the difficulty of acquiring the information. E-mail me if you have any news and we will discuss the terms.

Peanut-picking Contest

It’s hard to have a son who is not very similar to you either in looks or status. William may have inherited my poetic temperament and writing ability but, except one of his thumbs, he looks very different from me. Well, it doesn’t really bother me, for after twenty-two years of working on it, I have finally accepted the fact; but not so with William. For some odd reason, he’s been into being Chinese these days and is easily offended by people not recognizing his proud heritage. Recently we went to a Vietnamese restaurant for lunch and he took offense because the waitress gave me a pair of chopsticks but handed William a spoon and fork instead. “How could she do that? Didn’t she know that I am a Chinese?” “Half Chinese,” I corrected him. I guess it really bothered him, because he is still grumbling about it a week or two later.

I commend his desire for wanting to be like his father and over family supper tonight I offered him an opportunity to prove that he is really his father’s equal - I challenged him to a peanut-picking competition. William, as you and I know, doesn’t lack confidence as far as competitions are concerned. “Who is better than me?” he burst out, singing his favorite line. “I am!” I bellowed back. The contest went like this: each of us was to transfer fifteen peanuts from one plate to another with chopsticks and the first one to finish the task would win. The results: 15 peanuts to 7. The real Chinese won.

I guess there is at least one thing I can do better than my son. Surprisingly, the victory gave me quite a thrill, considering how small the win was. But a win is a win, and I will take it with pride. By the way, I challenge any one of you to a chopstick-peanut-picking competition if you consider yourself good at the ancient art of chopsticking. “Who is better than me?”

A Love Story

Priscilla and Aquila
“Greet Priscilla and Aquila…they risked their lives for me.”
Ro 16:3

Priscilla and Aquila could have made a comfortable home in the city of Corinth and supported themselves through tent making. But things changed completely when they met Paul.

They were aliens in this Grecian town and might have found it difficult to adjust to the new city. They might have been overtaken by homesickness for the sunny Italy where they had grown up. But being so young, they were hopeful about carving a niche for themselves in this booming metropolis where people came from all over to trade and to do sightseeing. Life wasn’t all that hopeless, really.

“We will work hard and maybe someday we can build ourselves a house and raise a large family,” Aquila said to his wife tenderly.

“I am beginning to like this place. The weather is pretty good and people are nice. Not a bad place to make a home,” replied Priscilla, her brown eyes gleaming with hope and joy as she looked toward their future. For a young couple fortified by their passionate love for each other, nothing was too hard to conquer.

Then a fellow Jew appeared in their lives that made all the difference. Through Paul’s message, the couple’s lives were transformed and their aspirations for their future changed completely as well.

“How about building a home in Corinth?” “How about starting a family?” they asked themselves. Did they ever go through any struggles easing out their old life and entering into the new? Perhaps. But it was a lot easier for them to start off their new life when two hearts which were once united in romantic love were now becoming one in their love for Christ. Aquila couldn’t have done this alone, neither could have Priscilla. It’s such a beautiful thing to see when a couple is united in their love and service for Christ.

It is awfully difficult for a servant of God to fly solo in his spiritual journey. Paul was one of those rare breeds who could do it, and do it so gracefully. I don’t think many people have the ability to do what the apostle did. With special endowment from the Lord, Paul was able to accomplish great things that ordinarily would have required two people to achieve. I would have been overcome by loneliness and vexed by self-pity had I been called to do what Paul did alone.

Marriage, although it has made me strong in many ways, also has made me timid. Having children is one of the greatest blessings in life, but it may also take away your courage and romantic spirit and make you too pragmatic to make any attempt to venture into the unknown for the sake of the kingdom.

Priscilla and Aquila might not have had such a problem, though. They didn’t seem to have any worries for their children, if they had any, and with hearts fortified by their love for Christ and for each other they risked their lives for Paul and for the church. Theirs was truly a great romance, but is rarely mentioned as a love story as we understand it. With the love of the Lord in their marriage, their love for each other was transcended and superceded by love for Him, which made it so much more beautiful than what it was.

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.

Michael, a closet Ole Miss Rebel

(No place to hide!)



Let the truth be known to the whole world: Michael Sea is a closet Ole Miss fan. I have proof:

1.He called to tell me that he is applying for the University of Mississippi Medical Center ER residency this afternoon. “Make sure to mention that you are a legacy,” I encouraged him. “That will give you a leg up in getting in.” “I don’t think that will help,” he said. “It will,” I affirmed. I think that’s what he will do. Of all the ER residencies in the nation, the fact that he chose to apply for UMC in Jackson only goes to prove that he has hidden feeling for the school, and it has ripened to come out.

2.Anyone who knows Michael knows what a softie Michael is as far as his feelings for old things and old times are concerned. I can vouch that Ole Miss is his first love, a love rooted in his heart that cannot be replaced by any other school. How can he forget the cold winter night when his father dressed him up in red and blue Ole Miss warm-ups and took him to Ted Smith Coliseum to watch the Rebels play? How can he ever forget the magical night when Gerald Glass outscored Chris Jackson, or the weekend when Shaq came to town and our boys dominated him?

3.Oh, the pictures of the magnolias on the Grove that he used to hug and climb as a little boy, and the golden maple trees and the dogwoods on campus that have been forever etched in his heart. They must bring his heart joy and pain when they resurface in his mind year after year, giving him a pensive mood and making him long for home. Besides, how can any impressionable little boy forget the scene where so many Southern belles richly adorn themselves on Saturday afternoon, going to a football game as if going to dance in a ball?

4.His strong feeling for Aggieland is really a disguise and a futile attempt to make him forget his first love. Sooner or later, we will find out the truth. Therefore let us encourage Michael not to torture himself by hiding his secret infatuation with Ole Miss and to come out of the closet. There is no shame in doing that, Michael. Ole Miss is a grand old university worthy of your love and admiration. Come back to the family. The Colonel and your Ole Miss are waiting for you with open arms, and the band will play “Dixie” for your homecoming.

No Call!

GUILTY!!!


I was expecting the Aggies to lose even when they were ten points ahead and about eight minutes from upsetting the mighty Bruins; therefore, the notorious no-call at the end of the game didn’t bother me all that much. That’s how things are supposed to end in the real world, isn’t it? The little guys are always victimized by the class bully and, no matter how hard the less-endowed try, the bully always comes out on top. We all know too well how the jocks always get the cheerleaders and homecoming queens and we get the rejects and the nerds and there is nothing we can do but feel sorry for ourselves and hope for a better world where fair is fair and sunshine always burns away filthy air. I do by no means consider the proud fighting Aggies little guys, but in the world of college basketball, we are relatively small, especially compared to UCLA.

Going back to the no-call.

1.The bad guys may get to the Final Four, or even win the whole thing, but we are still the ones who will get the last laugh – a moral victory is, in fact, a real victory in my book - the Book of Judgment, that is.

2.Being robbed of a victory, or a possible victory, is better than victory itself, for a victory will quickly be forgotten, but a near-victory will forever be remembered. Remember the one that got away? O the yearning that creates so much pain akin to joy! Have I lost you here, dear readers?

3.We have gained so many friends by losing. Misery does love company, for most of us are wannebes, not bes. Believe it not, I even overheard some sympathetic comments coming from the talking heads on the Red Raider radio program. Amazing! The people who enjoy hating everything Aggie finally came to their senses and sided with the good guys.

4.The no-call further fortified the Aggie notion of “us-against-the world” and made us more united as a family. By the way, am I part of the proud Aggie family, Michael? Can I cash in all the hours that I have earned from Ole Miss for an Aggie ring?

5.Of course, there is always next year. The expectation bred by failure is far greater than by success, and the joy of a long-awaited triumph tastes much sweeter than otherwise.

6.Therefore three cheers for the no-call and for all the losers in the mad pursuit of an inglorious crown in this long “Ides of March.”