Bluebellia

A five-year-old girl, when seeing her father playing guitar on stage would run up the stage and huge him tightly. She wouldn’t care what the rest of the world think. Nothing is more important to her than her love for her daddy. She just has to show to him how much she loves him. I look at that and think how we as Christians should be more like her: care a bit less about what people may think of our Christian faith, our lifestyle, our actions, and more about our relationship with God. Run to him as fast as we can and show Him our love. Genuinely. Vulnerably. Like a little child to her parent. Wouldn’t that be great?

A long time ago, these was this 80-year-old guy working for his father-in-law tending to animals. Being an anti-social (or more correctly, “asocial”), he usually hung out by himself in the backyard. One evening, God suddenly appeared before him and said, hey Moses, I want you to be the leader of your people and get them out of Egypt to escape slavery and to live in this awesome land I promised to you guys’ ancestor a while back. So Moses did, after giving all kinds of excuses one could possibly think of. Why didn’t God come to Moses 40 years earlier, when he was in his prime, fully ready to bring justice and make a difference? Why now, when Moses was already a 80-year old man who liked to give condescending looks to millennials and their silly gadgets? No longer the muscular Egyptian prince, Moses was now a frail old man with nothing but a shepherd’s stick in his hand. So why now? It’s so easy for us to include God in our own plans. But it’s much more rewarding to put ourselves ...

As graduate students, are we proud of our Christian faith? Are we afraid that if our colleagues and our professors find out, we would be ridiculed and belittled? How do we explain our beliefs in this academic world of rationality and scientific methods? We all have different pasts, but many of us share a similar story: there was this one period in our lives during which we were away from God and lived the way of the world; we may even did embarrassing things! And we didn’t like that. We didn’t like how we were, or what we were becoming as a person. And we came back. Do you know what that story sounds like? My good friend Kevin pointed out that it’s analogous to conducting an experiment in a controlled environment. Everything was kept the same; we were the same; the one variable factor was God (or more precisely, our acceptance of God. He Himself is ever-constant). We recorded the results, and we drew the conclusion. What was the reason for my faith, you ask? It was the result ...