About the importance of encouragement:
Today was a pretty relaxing day, so I was just randomly emailing people whom I hadn't talked to in a while, that I knew from high school and other random places.
One of these people I emailed was a girl at Harvard, who's a mutual friend of myself, Keith, and Rae-eun. She was in HRAACF, has a fairly interesting thoughts page (as Andrew noted, they are far from a Stanford-only phenomenon), and she knows people there like Chris Min, Grace Kwak, as well as random Asian people across the nation like Kevin Lee (FiCB), Beverly Yang, Matt Fei, and Desiree Ong. She has been termed the "female Danny Chai." Bold claim, eh? Perhaps even heretical?
Anyways, her friends brought her to Christianity her freshman year. She knew a lot of Christians through CTY and other usual methods for Asian-American networking, but her family was not Christian, and she never really thought of the issue -- until she went on a retreat and accepted Christ. And it was really encouraging for me just for me to talk with her whenever I had the time, emailing her once in a while, reading her updates on the web about how she was doing, and the stuff she was doing in her fellowship, etc...
So, she emailed me back for the first time in months, and what she said hit me like a lightining bolt:
Anyways, paraphrasing her email somewhat, and rendering things in the third person.
It wasn't her intention to get me down or anything, but she wanted to let me know that she was no longer Christian. She had to think hard about familial and other issues this summer, and she realized that could not commit to a religion like Christianity, and she has "firmly made up [her] mind in this regard."
"i do appreciate your concern." And she wanted me, next time I saw Keith or Rae-Eun, to say hi for that person. She signs off:
take care,
Nameoftheperson
And that's it. End of email. Tense.
OK, Harvard person. This rant's for you.
You cannot even begin to imagine the sadness that I felt when I read your e-mail, and the shock that hit me at those words that you wrote: "i am no longer christian."
How could you -- a student at one of the world's most august academic institutions, "firmly" set your mind to anything, anything, and just intellectually close it off like that, let along this, your religious belief?
You accepted Christ into your life, and I remember reading your testimony. "The Feeling" -- that was title of the thoughts page entry you had on October 16, 1996. I almost cried when I read it, damn it. I ALMOST CRIED. Imagine, me crying when I read a web page. Well, I pretty much almost did. I nearly cried at your eloquent, heartfelt description, of how in the boat in the middle of the lake, in the rustic autumn setting of New England mountains at the HRAACF retreat, you said the Believer's Prayer with a friend for the first time, how you confessed that you were a sinner and asked for the Lord Jesus Christ to come into your heart as your Lord and Savior. I rejoiced at how you, in your thoughts page, recalled your first Bible study, of how your friends gave you a Bible with your name engraved in it as a surprise present. I cried at God's love, how the power of His love could change a life like yours.
Remember, how you told me when you were having lunch with me at Gombei's, the summer before your freshman year, how you weren't religious at all, and then to have Christ come into your heart so suddenly, it served as an encouragement for myself and for a lot of my brothers and sisters in FiCS.
So I ask you, where is that Feeling now? Was it just a delusion? Was the love that your Christian brothers and sisters in HRAACF shown you an illusion to you? Maybe a bad dream? I ask, where has your Harvard education led you? How has it opened your mind? Perhaps I should be asking, how has it closed it? If opposition from your family can cause you to have such a about-face of your beliefs, then I really must wonder at how open your mind will be to new and bold ideas of any sort that might not seem appealing to you, and how strong your intellectual foundation must be, and whether it will stand up to the winds of false teachings and deceptions that prevail in this world.
Did you "feel" anything when you "realized" that you "could not commit to a religion like Christianity?" Should that be called an "anti-Feeling?" Does the "anti-Feeling" annihilate the "Feeling" like anti-matter annhilates matter? Want to write a thought page on it, like you wrote when you first accepted Him into your heart? Religion is about conviction, and if you are convicted that you could not commit to a religion like Christianity, if you feel so absolutely about it that you have "firmly set your mind in this regard", then I challenge you to declare it to the world. Tell it to Keith and Rae-Eun. Tell it like it is to myself. Go on. Write a thoughts page as to why Christianity was not for you -- how your familial issues made you just reject everything in your heart that you held dear about Christ and His Gospel. Heck, you don't even have to put it online -- just make a personal journal entry or something, if your faith that you do not need Christ exceeds the faith you have (I refuse to use the past tense) in Christ -- I sure if this is true, then you have enough conviction to fully explain it.
And you claim the reason why you repudiated Christianity was your family. Think of how it must be for the Chinese, the North Koreans, everyone where family is the least of their worries. People die for their faith. And they face it boldly. Because they are secure in the knowledge that they have eternal life. How it must be for them, to maintain their underground churches, risking being "outted" by the government at every move! Do your parents have dominion over your beliefs as well -- have they succeeded in doing what leaders like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao could not?
And through it all, in times of suffering and trouble, faith perseveres! How the Israelites wandering in the desert, or in Pharoah's kingdom feel? How Job must have felt when he lost all of his worldly posessions, and yet, he continued to praise God. Now, I'm not going to cite stuff from teh Bible, but everything I write will be from my heart.
"i could not commit to a religion like christianity"
OK, this sounds a bit like:
"i could not commit to a college like harvard"
"i could not commit to a online service like AOL"
"i could not commit to a company like microsoft"
OK, those might be valid things to say.
but: "i could not commit to a religion like christianity"
So you were saying that you were not "really" a Christian before, after you said the prayer for Christ to come in -- that you were just, you know, trying it out, just hanging out with your Christian friends to see what their life was like, beofre you decided whether you wanted to "commit"?
It's not like joining a club, or subscribing to a magazine -- there is no trial period, no "ProFro" week, no money-back guarantee. Christianity is new life, and in Christ, you are born again.
And in all this, Christ is LIFE. It is not something to enhance your life -- it is LIFE. It is not some luxury item like cable TV that you could live your life without, for YOU CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT CHRIST AS YOUR SAVIOR. I hope you remember that from what HRAACF taught you.
You see, God loves you infinitely -- even though we don't. I don't. None of us do, or can. And the Lord as the shepard knows that His sheep may sometimes wander astray. His love will never let you go. It's that simple. And He requires no money, no physical deeds, no hazing during "initiation ties" -- just your belief. A belief that you had embraced, that you had ackowledged, that you had ACCEPTED. At least I hope you did.
So you "appreciate my concern" eh? Well, if my concern in emailing you is enough to garner your appreciation, then how about the appreciation of the concern which Christ Jesus showed the world by dying up there on the cross? A world that had fallen out of God's favor when Adam and Eve sinned on that day -- a world whose people are doomed to destruction, if not only for the saving grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, sacrificing Himself for YOU. It seems preposterous, but He died for exactly this. Would that be worthy of your appreciation?
And all that we need to do is to have faith -- to believe. He who believes in Him will never die.
So once more I cry for you, and you will be in my prayers, and that His arms may continue to embrace you, and for you to feel His love, and His compassion, a love that cannot be found anywhere on this Earth except thorough Him. And that love is just waiting for you to rediscover it. Remember, He will always be there for you, even if we aren't.
As Romans 15:13 says, may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. And, may His love and forgiveness surround you and lift you, dear friend.
Anyways, she will never read this thoughts page, and if she does, so much the better. Some of you may think it wrong for me to be raving so much -- after all, we are supposed to show love towards those who spite us, right? Well, in doing so, we will heap burning coals upon their heads, so here's some burning coals for ya.
So what does this mean for us? Well, this is why we absolutely need encouragement for those who are seekers and those who are new Christians. This is why we need fellowship, and why a supportive fellowship is important to us, but of utmost importance to new believers, and this is why we should love others. By fellowship, I mean it in the broadest sense -- not just specific organizations, but any group of N believers, where N >= 2. Most importantly, we need to love those, and truly make a committment to disciple them, and to spur each other on and hold each other accountable.
It should be mentioned that I am not criticizing the HRAACF people that she knew -- I am NOT saying that they did not encouarge enough -- I've never personally attended one of their meetings, so again, I am not dissing their fellowship. It seems, sad as it might be, that she just never got the full picture of Christianity herself, that her acceptance of Christ was not with all her heart, soul, and mind -- that she did not know what having Christ in her really meant.
But I am pointing out that, yeah, if we do not love those who are seeking by spending quality, personal one on one time with them, then what kind of impression of Christians are we making on these people? If we just bring them to Gospel Night and then just neglect them, leaving them to fend sprititually for themselves, then something like this could happen here to whomever we choose to bring, as well -- someone who succumbs to the pressures of others, gets disillusioned, and just gets defeated spirititually, confused as just to what this whole thing is about, anyways, like the girl from Harvard. If they develop confused attitudes or misconceptions about what it Christianity truly means, like this person did, then who will set them straight? Who are the only ones that can do it?
Boy, her letter just got me mad, not at her, but mad at myself, and all my other brothers and sisters: for we, and other people just lack conviction and dedication to truly reach out and minister to those around us -- and I mean, not just bringing them to a seeker meeting, but to follow up on it, nurturing them in their spiritual growth, and supporting them as they discover what it means to live a life glorifying Him.
And I don't just have seekers and new Christians in mind either. As I've mentioned before, there are people who are on the, shall we say, "boundary" of FiCS -- they come maybe once a quarter or something, and they don't attend church much on Sundays, aren't part of a small group, but, well, have Christ in their hearts technically, and we still consider ourselves "friends" -- some of them, in fact, might even be our drawmates!
We need to be ministering to those people and keeping them accountable. Again, I won't mention any specific names, but you can probably guess -- just look through the FiCS directory and see the names that you don't see that often, that don't ring a bell to you. And these people certainly need our love as well -- and they don't receive it, since they don't attend, while we, the "core" group of FiCS, just hang out amongst ourselves. And because they do not feel the love and the companionship that they have, it's a vicious cycle, a positive feedback loop essentially. We need to love, but especially those whom we do not see much, those are the ones who need to realize that, yeah, we are there for them, and Christ is there too. And that this is a Fellowship in Christ and our love is what others will know that we Christians by.
And I won't shut up about this and WHAT THIS MEANS TO US, YES, YOU WHO ARE READING THIS THOUGHTS PAGE NOW. I WILL NOT, AND IF WE DO NOT ENCOURAGE, IF WE JUST STICK AMONGST OURSELVES AND NOT REACH OUT, IF WE DO NOT FOLLOW UP CONSISTENTLY ON AND DEVELOP A RELATIONSHIP WITH THOSE WHO WE OUTREACH TO, HOLDING THEM ACCOUNTABLE, THEN IT IS WRONG. WRONG. WRONG. AND WE MIGHT AS WELL BE DOING NOTHING AT ALL IN THAT CASE.
OK, end of rant.
Dreams, Part II
Apparently more and more people are reading this thoughts page. So, I just want to say hi to Dave Chu, the graphics group people, and Joan Hwang at Princeton, who very recently discovered, through the magic of AltaVista, the leading role she played in one of my dreams. Heehee.
Speaking of which, I had a pretty harrowing pre-Stats 116 midterm experience itself, involving another weird Andrew Wong-esque dream. Well, harrowing's probably the wrong word. It was just plain loopy. Definitely more so than Danny's experience.
I, like Danny, had proscratinated a bit in finishing the Stats take-home midterm, albeit to a lesser degree than him. I went to sleep around 3:50 or so. The alarm clock went off, but I just reflexively turned the alarm off, and dozed off again.
During my brief second sleep, I had a weird, rather techie, dream -- the setting was sort of like "Austin Powers", but at MIT. Yes, MIT. There was a lot of 60's/70's hacker culture involved, but I think the date was modern because in the dream, I was using a SGI Indy workstation, and doing stuff on Athena, their equivalent of the Leland environment. Anyways, what I remember was that this woman sits next to the workstation, and she is completely naked! She tries to log in, but can't, so I asker her what was her account name. She replied that she didn't have one, so I told her, totally nonchalantly -- you need to get an Athena acount, pointing her to the consulting desk. Tense. And then I woke up, and I saw the clock: 9:36. I freaked out for a bit, and then I thought... Whew! God's providence is awesome!
Ahhhh.... they're everywhere!
Even though the fellowship I hang out the most with these days is FiCS, I'm still on the IV mailing list, and while it's definitely no fics-chat@lists, some interesting items do occassionally get sent over it. No, I'm not going to turn this Deep Thought into a IV vs. [insert fellowship name here] comparison.
Anyways, Mark Lo recently sent out, what to me, was basically a message encouraging everyone to "give the matter some thought and consider sticking with IV -- you won't regret it." Anyways, I'll save commentary as to the validity of his email and the thoughts expressed for another thought, if at all -- I am certainly not in the optimum position to truly analyze it anyways.
But what I found most amusing by far though was the fact that there were at least two FiCS-isms I spotted in my quick reading of his mail.
From owner-ivcf-news@lists.Stanford.EDU Fri May 1 10:22:46 1998
Date: Fri, 1 May 1998 10:22:18 -0700 (PDT)
From: Mark Lo <mlosayhi@leland.Stanford.EDU>
Reply-To: Mark Lo <mlosayhi@leland.Stanford.ED>
To: ivcf-news@lists.Stanford.EDU
Subject: an encouragement
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Sender: owner-ivcf-news@lists.Stanford.EDU
Precedence: bulk
hello all, my name is Mark Lo, i'm a senior, and i hope that i am not
abusing this list. if you respond to me, please respond to me personally
and not to the list.
:) I am sorry that this is so long, feel free to delete as you may not be
interested at all about what i want to share. :) this is not meant to be a
sermon!
however, i did want very much to speak my heart on matters related to
InterVarsity at Stanford, especially coming off of Tilden's talk tonight.
I know that many of us are going through transitions like crazy, and one
of the transitions or choices that we may be facing is the decision of
whether to fellowship with InterVarsity in the coming year. I have talked
to quite a few of you about the matter, and I know that it is on your
hearts.
I thought that quite a few people looked a bit surprised/dazed after the
announcements of staffing changes in the next year, etc. So I wanted to
share a little bit, if i may, about my almost-4 years' experience with IV.
I confess that I can identify with the people who are currently asking
themselves, "Should I be changing fellowships?" Myself, I have asked that
question almost every year with the exception of this last one. I have
seen people whom I love and have served with move on to other fellowships;
many citing discontent with the teaching or "feeding" of IV. My heart has
been broken and sometimes I have found myself wondering if I was just the
last one on a sinking ship, since so many people weren't "getting
anything from iV". I confess that I have sometimes been disillusioned with
staff and the structural choices made re. large group, small group, etc.
My small group leaders and I talked about my rebellious side, my
"authority issues", my un-conformity, my despising of structure. and it
has definitely seemed like a struggle for me to remain in this
fellowship over the years. to those seniors out there who know me, perhaps
you can remember my lengthy complaints and tirades from frosh year. you
probably felt/feel the same way i did.
and look, here i am still in IV and making a plug. :) woo whee.
I just wanted to encourage those who are making decisions about their
fellowship home for next year, because I have been there, the place where
you are now. I encourage you to commit to the people around you and to
also be willing to be faithful through the hard times.
For some of you, God may be really telling you to switch to another
fellowship, or to concentrate more on your non-Christian friendships, or
to pursue God through other avenues, or other choices. I think that
tilden's sugggestions of discerning our passions, the Biblical values we
live by, our unique experiences, our community accountability, the call of
the Spirit, and our own
circumstances -- these are definitely ways to try to be faithful to God in
our choice.
*** But I also think that what I have learned over the past 4 years is
this:
my committment is to the people, not to the structure or "group" of IV.
InterVarsity is the people, not the structure.
That is the one thing which has kept me in this fellowship for this long:
i am with people I love and who are my community in the Biblical sense.
And what i do to fellowship, or to serve, it is connected to these people.
I know that it will be difficult transitioning from a non-staffed
fellowship to a staffed one, the change may prove to be very different
than it is now. i know that people may feel uncomfortable or angry, even,
with the changes. and people may talk of "leaving the fellowship" and
such. It's a personal choice that all of us must wrestle with...when are
we supposed to stick and when are we supposed to move on?
realistically, the individuals who fellowship-hop may have a difficult
time to build lasting community, because after 2 or so years in one place,
and 2 or so years in another place, it's difficult to really get to know
people and to trust people. This actually isn't my own conviction, but
rather the convictions of those who i have talked to who have already
graduated.
*** this is one thing i have seen of God as well: He wants us to learn
faithfulness and submission. From what i see in the Bible, that is His
character, and if we really are trying to be more Christ-like, we want to
be like that. Those are the lessons i have been taught again and again,
constantly, as i don't learn very well. We go through
hard times, we struggle, we suffer. ANd we think that fellowship sucks
sometimes, we complain about the lack of good teaching, we don't feel fed
by God. But i believe it is safe to say that God grows us in perseverence,
to stand, when all else is done, to stand. To suffer but to still hope.
This is Christ.
Sorry, this sounds so preachy. but it's been true for me, at least. i know
that consumerism and individualism play a huge part in deciding about
fellowships: what can _I_ get out of this? How is _my_ relationship with
God going to benefit from this?
I have been repenting of my own individualism and I know that I probably
have no right to be saying what i have been saying, based on my own
hypocrisy. but it still must be said.
When God saves us, I am not sure that He saves us in order to be
self-suficient Christians. Is this Heretical? I am not sure about that,
but what I do see in the Bible is God using broken people together in
community to do His work.
ANd about teaching...lately i have been convicted that although i myself
enjoy teaching that is dynamic, inspiring, and encouraging, I may not be
applying the teaching in my life. ANd i will make a bold claim here and
say that i believe that participating in Biblically-based community is at
least as important as receiving teaching (which is also necessary). If
every week we were taught, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart,
soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself," over and over, i
think we would complain that the teaching was bad, we weren't getting
anything new out of it. We wouldn't be learning anything we didn't know
already. but that doesn't mean i was _doing_ it, ya know what i mean? so
what matters is that we are _doing_ the Bible, we are doing the teaching,
and we can have community to hold us accountable to the teaching...
I am cutting this off, before everyone hates me more for writing so much.
Recap:
* applying tilden't choice-making strategies for decisions re.
fellowship
* encourage committing to the brothers and sisters around you, rather than
to a "group" or structure
* encourage faithfulness and submission to God, which plays out in real
life by being faithful to friends in fellowship, and submitting to each
other -- it will be extremely difficult at times, i have no doubt.
if you'd like to talk more in person about this, i would be up for it, but
i really don't have any special wisdom or anything about the matter, and i
can't tell you what to do, since it's a personal decision. i can encourage
you in the ways i have already tried to in this email...or you can also
talk to others, or nikki and tilden. :)
sorry for the length.
peace,
mark
Quite interesting, Mark.
Watch your .signatures!
Beverly recently sent out a message to the FiCS junior class, asking us to pray for a sister of ours for whom a family member had passed away recently. The request and message was very sincere and heartfelt, but I found the =) in Bev's .signature to be totally inappropriate for the occasion. To Bev's credit, that was the only place where =) was used, and if you have ever received an email from Bev, you know that she normally sprinkles them liberally in her text. So, I guess she just overlooked that ine=) in her .signature. It's an example though of how easy it is to overlook something that's automatically inserted in each and every email you write, and how it may not always contribute to what you want to convey in your mail.
Anyways, some people, mostly foreign grad students, have the phrase "Sincerely," in their .signature file. This applies to at least one person in the graphics group. I guess they think of it as a phrase that always ends correspondence written in the English language, without knowing its true meaning. That's way up there on the cheeziness scale. How can you be "sincere" about what you write if that phrase is automatically included by a computer in each email message you write?!
Speaking of which, I haven't updated my .signature in a while myself. In fact, there is a quote by Jeremy S. Anderson that I have had in there ever since I knew I was coming to Stanford during my senior year of high school:
-- Mark Wang "There are two major things to come Computer Graphics Group, Stanford Univ. out of Berkeley, LSD and BSD. We mwang@graphics.stanford.edu don't believe this to be a http://graphics.stanford.edu/~mwang/ coincidence." - Jeremy S. AndersonAnd like the out-of-place =) in Bev's .signature, sometimes I email, say Berkeley brothers and sisters, without realizing that that quote is still in there, sitting there for over 3 years. And, hey, the presence of that quote sort of contradicts the fact that we're supposed to love them regardless of what school they go to. So, I'm thinking about replacing that quote. If you, faithful thoughts page reader, have an idea for a spicy quote to put in there, please email me. Thanks.
'Wiedersehen!