Ryu2.mind

On Christian Fellowships and Computers On Christian fellowships and computers...

---> computer
com-put-er \kem-'py:ut-er\ n, often attrib
(1646)
:one that computes; specif
:a programmable electronic device that can store, retrieve, and process
     data

Apple plans to implement an OS strategy that offers complementary product lines moving forward--Mac OS and Apple's next generation OS, Rhapsody. Mac OS will continue to deliver market leading Internet and multimedia capabilities; Rhapsody will introduce next generation OS technologies and provide a platform for breakthrough applications that leapfrog competitive OS offerings.

I had been working on this Deep Thought for actually quite some time, on and off, much more the latter unfortunately. But recently, like most people who are into high-tech, I was quite amazed when I heard the news that Apple had purchased NeXT and was going to have a strategy based around that. I ruminated about that for a while, and then the connection to this nascent Deep Thought hit me. Onward!

I proudly proclaim that I am a PC person. I run two operating systems on my computer: Microsoft Windows 95 and Linux. I also use Macintoshes and various UNIX workstations quite often in the course of my studies and my work.

But my proudness for my PC is nothing compared to my fervor to my faith: I am a Christian. Now, this year, I am in Fellowship in Christ at Stanford. Last year, I was mostly in InterVarsity, another fellowship here on campus. (I think the specific reasons about why I made the switch are tangential to the main point of this discussion. If I haven't talked to you about it yet, and you are interested please feel free to e-mail, call, or talk to me personally.)

Recently, there've been an increase in a sense of awareness of us being united in Christ, together as one campus. I consider that a good thing. While we've managed to avoid outright division, there wasn't really much of a togetherness. For a long time, I felt a sense of that myself - not really knowing fellow Christians outside of the groups I was in myself. Now, we're starting to get together, having "prayer walks" in the quad and other activities. I think that this needs to continue. At the same time, now I realize that keeping our own separate identities and differences is important as well. Read on...

Let's talk about absolute and relative things. The only absolute when it comes to a computer, as Webster succinctly puts it, is to "store, retrieve, and process data." Specifically, back in the 1930's, a guy named Turing came up with the basic mathematical nature of a computer, called a Turing machine. As long as a computing machine supports the basic operations of a Turing machine, it can do any possible computation in theory, and it can't be said to work "wrong". (take note CS109 people! =) )

I resent so-called "holy computer wars." PC vs. Macintosh vs. UNIX vs. Amiga vs. BeBox vs... - to me, it is all rubbish. Each computer type serves a slightly different segment of the computer market. Someone who is interested in doing heavy-duty scientific computing has a different need than someone interested in getting a fix of Warcraft II. Choosing a computer type is a personal decision, and you must ask yourself: what is your anticipated computing goals and activities?

Likewise, the only absolute in life itself is God and His unchanging Word, in the form of the Bible. Certainly, a fellowship may not change the Scripture itself, to do so would of course be heresy. But if a fellowship passes this litmus test of adhering to God's Word and having a grounding in that, no aspect of it can be called wrong or bad in any sense.

So what separates different entities? The "interpretation part", or the part that's "relative". One of Pastor Harold's Friday night messages in FiCS certainly has a distinct nature, different, than say a typical IV large group, just like using Windows 95 is different from typing commands into the UNIX shell.

The point is that there is no absolute that computer X is best for everything, because it would be impossible! Likewise, each fellowship has its own unique style and way of operating, each geared towards different personal and spiritual needs and preferences. It is impossible to quantify any doctrinally-sound fellowship, or even any part of it, like we can quantify the real numbers, because these aspects are innately tied to you, the believer or seeker. So, personally, when I decided to go with FiCS, it was not because I felt IV was "wrong" or "worse" than FiCS in ANY sense, it was because I thought that FiCS would better serve MY needs.

In both worlds, there is room in the market or campus for different computers or fellowships, and in fact, it is absolutely necessary to have a range of options to accomodate diverse needs.

Thus, we should not get hung up on those differences. We should appreciate them. But we should not merely stay within our own spheres. If Macs could not communicate or share data with PCs (or vice versa), there would be chaos, and the value of computers themselves would be reduced. Instead, in the computer world, we are able to have methods and standard, such as those making up the Internet, so different computers can work with each other, thereby spreading the utility of computers as a whole.

Such is the same thing in the Christian community here. We all adhere to one God, and we should leverage that, and exploit our commonality instead of being divided by small details, thereby increasing God's presence here as a whole. I thank God that He has blessed us with these inter-fellowship activities and I pray it may continue.

Of course, one should not extend this fellowship/computer analogy too far: There's nothing wrong I think with having/using more than one type of computer/OS. Sure, if you have the money, you could get a Macintosh, a PC, and a UNIX box, and have the best of all worlds: use or not use them as much as you see fit. Computer hardware and software won't get lonely and miss you, if you don't boot a machine up for a while.

On the other hand, one thing that struck me during IV's Frosh Conference which I attended, was to pick one fellowship and stick with it. Whatever the group, a fellowship's strength comes from the combined devotion and committment of all its members. A superficial involvement will compromise the spiritual unity of all.

Choosing a fellowship is an intensely personal and important decision. Shop around closely, and once you find one, stay involved. Above all, pursue righteousness relentlessly.

"For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgement, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you. Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts, according to the grace given us..."
- Romans 12:3-6 (NIV)

Multiple operating systems and computer types. They just complement each other towards one ultimate goal: to compute, as Webster's proclaims simply.

Multiple fellowships, complementing each other as well. One God. And one ultimate goal: to glorify Him in our lives and studies, and to make known the good news of the Gospel and the eternal life and salvation that only lies with our Lord Jesus Christ.

Thanks for listening.

Before we begin...

The Highlight of my day

I'm taking CS154 with Dave Hong this quarter. Of course, there are many other people that I know in it as well, but I mean, Dave's presence just makes this unlike any other class I'm in this quarter. I've never taken a class with him, so it's a new experience for me. I mean, taking classes with, say, Danny is nice and all, what with all the late nights that we pulled for Phil 160A and CS221, but I'm expecting that working with Dave Hong will be a whole new realm! =)

So sometime into the lecture, Dave asks Professor Motwani a question. And the question wasn't even dumb or anything, but when the camera zoomed in on Dave, sitting on the floor of Gates B01, and his face simultaenously appeared on all the monitors hanging from the ceiling of the classroom, I couldn't help but laugh a bit. And a few other members of the class, as well. Is it the glasses? The Dave Hong boyish charm? I don't know.

But the cool thing is that it's immortalized on video. CS154, April 1, 1998. Everyone, if you want some minor amusement, go to Meyer and watch this video. No matter what your major is -- don't watch it for the talk about languages, automata, etc, just fast forward and watch Dave on TV! Dave, I hope I'm not making you tense by writing this... =)

Now, on with the show:

It seems that at least one person out there thinks that I overuse "tense" and "spic[y|e]" in my thoughts page.

[Side note: Call them what you will, "mymind", the "humble" page, the "non-daily update", "dreams", "vacuosity", whatever. But they are all THOUGHTS PAGES. The first definition in Webster's of the word thought is "1: to form or have in the mind". Last time I checked, all our pages were originating from our minds. (Well, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe these pages really don't come from the mind, but rather you're using something like your CS107 Random Sentence Generator to come up with these pages. If so, my apologies. =) ) ]

So anyways, about my alleged "disturbing" overuse of said words: I don't deny that fact at all. Indeed, this provides evidence for two hypotheses I expound in my last thought:

1. My writing and style of communication on this page is quite different than the way I speak and write in daily life.

And more importantly,

2. The spread of "tense" and "spicy" has caused it to be used more and more frivolously by various people, myself included.

Yes, I must agree, it does weaken the impact of my thoughts as a whole, and their very frequency is diluting their potency as words. Looking at my previous thoughts, those terms have been slowly encroaching in my vocabulary. I myself didn't use spicy until the Christian video games thought rolled along. They're basically now something to keep the rhythm going, some kind of verbal percussion. If I did a global search/replace and changed all the occurances of "tense" to "uncomfortable," some of my thoughts would read quite strangely, to say the least.

It's sort of like the Smurfs (did anyone ever watch that show?) where they regularly replace their nouns and verbs in their dialogue with "smurf" or their adjectives or adverbs with "smurfy." ("Could you smurf me some of that smurfy stuff?") Instead of actually taking the time to think up a actual word to truly express the subtle nuances of our feelings, we just throw in "spicy" or "tense" as a panacea for everything, and it is kind of distressing. I can just visualize Dave, appearing on an infomercial on late night TV: "Tense! Spicy! The words with 1000 uses! The only words you'll ever need! They slice, they dice, they make Julienne fries! Guaranteed to work for all of your expressive linguistic needs or your money back!" Then people like myself, Danny, Keith, Paul, people from other fellowships like David Tay would give their testimonies to the amazing versatility those words have added to their vocabularies (not to mention the greatly reduced variance in their vocabularies). Tense. =)

In the bigger exterior picture, is our language becoming something that makes us exclusive? Certainly, in say, IV, there isn't any distinct language, at least nothing on the order of the words that various FiCS members have introduced.

Of course, tense and spice have spread to the Christian community here at large. However, besides the Big Two, there's also a cornucopia of other expressions that often get overlooked, even by the FiCSters themselves. To mention but a few: Keith Lee says "action"... for instance, "Let's get some food action going...", "I'm gonna really bust the studying action tonight.", etc. Clara Kim always goes "teehee :9" in her update/thoughts page. To say nothing about the equally-rich Berkeley vocabulary which I am just starting to come across -- like "nasty", "sham", "weak sauce", etc. I really need to ask Kevin Lee to teach me some of it.

Personally, among the FiCS phrases, I like "Sketchy" or "Sketch factor 10." (That latter kind of sounds like something from Star Trek: "Sketch factor 10, Cap'n! The engines canna' take much more of this sketchiness!") I don't know who originated this one, but I know I've heard it being thrown around.

The Horse to bet on (in the words of Dave himself)

But the newest catchphrase that I think will come over the horizon is the maddingly simple "Hee hee!", originated by Steven "the next Dave Hong" Chang, and which will probably be popularized in the near future by Brian Chu.

This baby originated in a cabin up in Bodega Bay, in the context of a pretty initimately-brotherly discussion on things which best are left off this web page. And there IS a very specific meaning to it -- it's not just some generic phrase to indiscriminately throw about (even though I am guilty of doing just that in the following paragraph.) =) Anyways, it WILL catch on, I'll bet on it!

Hee hee!

Sony, Toshiba, Spicy, Tense...

Wow -- I got sidetracked there. Anyways, I guess my situation is somewhat like the Japanese consumer electronics industry -- lacking the verbal ingenuity of some of my other brothers, I just take their best inventions and creations, and adapt them, or combine them. The latter sometimes produces the most entertaining results. I think my worst example of this was the phrase "bust some of that spicy tee-hee-colon-nine action" when talking to Clara. Yikes!

So why do we (unconciously) go to these lengths to try to put ourselves on our own linguistic plane? Because we want to identify with a group, that group being FiCS, and in order to establish a sense of group identity, we need some differentiating traits to set us apart, for instance, from other fellowships, or groups on campus. And we pick not just any traits, but we tend to pick those which must be easy to distinguish, and perceive. Not things like that we are the on-campus ministry of Korean Central Presbyterian Church, or that we are a very Scripture-oriented group, or that we have our own UNIX server, or we have skits put on by the so-called "Soli Deo Gloria" team at a lot of meetings. Sure, those things make us unique, but they're not as visible (or in this case, audible) as "spicy" or "tense." The fact that FiCS has their own language practically allows us something that sets us apart every time that we speak.

And ironically, the intrinsic paradox here is that our desire to grasp at whatever straws we see to establish identity -- in this case, our two beloved buzzwords -- have actually cheapened their value. So, to myself, and anyone and everyone else, it's time to have a nice, long thought about how what these words really signify. In other words, we should use these words with care. I'm not saying, but they should be saved for the specialest occasions.

Imagine you were playing any shooting video game: "tense" and "spice" should be thought of as your special weapons that you can use once or twice per level to make all the enemies onscreen die. These two words should go back to their original roots as true heartfelt exclamations to indicate something truly amazing: I'm talking about stuff on the magnitude of say, someone in FiCS getting involved in a dating relationship, or me or my drawmates going to the Viennese Ball =), or something incredible like that. That would merit the use of the word spice or spicy. Likewise, an equal level of discretion should be applied to tense. Those two words are our linguistic crown jewels and should be treated as such. People should not be perceiving those words as being tools for helping to define our identity separate from others but rather as mere words to be used selectively for their intended purposes.

Of course, those are only my suggestions, and I'll leave it up to Dave, or someone else better suited to be in a position of arbiter than me to handle it. I hope I'm not infringing in your intellectual property, Dave... =)

Anyways, what does this have to do with interfellowship unity? The question to ask is whether other people feel uneasy around us, throwing around these FiCS buzzwords and inside jokes? Is our differentiation through the avenue of langauage beneficial or detrimental? It's a two way street, definitely, and I believe that we should be just using our "buzzwords" naturally, and not trying to show them off by using them merely for their own sake. At the same time, having our own atmosphere is what ultimately differentiates and defines us, as well as every other group, so we shouldn't totally let go of our uniqueness either.

Beyond the issue of those words, having been an active member of two different fellowships at different times during my college career, I've become pretty interested in interfellowship issues in general, and doing my part to offer up my talents in service to the Kingdom and to build up the Body, working on the (admittedly non-existent) web page for UIC, doing the RealAudio conversion of the ACPs, etc.

I was talking about this with Steven Chang, who like me, has participated both in InterVarsity as well as FiCS, during the FiCS brothers' hangout at Bodega Bay, just about the whole interfellowship angle, etc, and how we all posess our individual styles, yet serve one God. Hey Andrew -- you just might see me at a CCC/GCM meeting in lieu of FiCS on some Friday night -- I'm interested in just breaking out of the FiCS sphere more than I do now, and not just to, say, visit "friends" but to really experience a sense of the atmosphere of other groups.

So even though we may desire to maintain our identity, however positive that may be, we should be just seeking out other bodies of believers from time to time, and embracing their differences, but more importantly, the fact that we all share the same God. It's sort of like CS107, where you learn about different languages and styles of programming -- having been exposed to these approaches, you're supposed to become more perceptive and appreciative of the differences among the "paradigms" as well as their similarities. While this analogy may be a slight bit sketchy, my belief is that seeing how we exalt and serve the Lord in manifold ways, we gain a greater, more holistic appreciation of the Body of Christ here on the Stanford campus, rather than just being one "part" of it.

Renaissance Men

Switching to another wavelength, I was surfing the web site of my high school recently. As you might now, our school was one of the first two high schools on the Internet in the US (the other one being Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, alma mater of one Eunice Lee). Thanks to that, Al Gore came to visit, so take that, all you Sunny Hills, PV, and Whitney people... (and Lynbrook as well, Paul!) so what if you all made some lame Newsweek Top 100 list! Not to mention that we only had ONE homicide and ONE suicide during MY four years there! =)

Anyways, my AP Bio class was truly one of the more memorable classes in high school. The teacher, Mrs. McComb (who graduated from Palo Alto High School, got a degree in biochem from Harvard in three years, and then a Ph. D in math from Renssalear Polytechnic Institute in another three, and has been teaching high school ever since!) is always coming up with interesting things.

One of the more unique features of our class was that we actually put out a "journal" called the Monta Vista Journal of Molecular Biology. Basically, the best essays and lab reports from each quarter would be selected for inclusion, sort of like a real scientific journal.

So, I found out that recently, they put all the old issues of the Journal online including all my work that got "published" in there.

Tens-- errr, I mean, sort of unnerving at first, but as I went back over my old work I was kind of impressed that I actually could produce that stuff, back in high school -- that my knowledge of biology was capable of supporting work like that. (Anyways, if you really want to browse it, go right ahead -- besides my work, you might recognize some other names -- for instance, a certain FiCS junior class rep's essays are also featured.)

And what's slightly depressing is that I could never do something like this now, at least not without a LOT of remedial work. In fact, I have to admit that I can barely even comprehend my own high school work. Indeed, my unused biology knowledge has deteriorated pretty well. And I ask myself -- why must it be that way? What have I learned bio for? Just so I can take the AP test and get a line on a sheet of paper with a number from 1-5 next to it? It doesn't even help me to get out of any major requirement here at Stanford! I just crammed for the AP test, and after that, everything just basically went -- poof!

Yet, should we totally sacrifice academic breadth for the singular pursuit of any interest? Anyways, my CS240A prof, of all people, says that indeed, we should be Renaissance men, like those minds of the enlightenment, thinkers well versed in the ways of both the arts and the sciences, and pursue disciplines for the love of learning. We should be constantly taking classes spanning as broad an intellectual spectrum as possible, and not just for the sake of fulfilling DRs or GERs or racking up the AP tests, or whatever. I admit that I have been very, very, very guilty of this myself, and probably the majority of my techie brethren as well. (Of course, fuzzies are perfectly capable of just staying in their own world as well, even though they do have much more breathing room in their majors... =) )

Dynamic fields are often those that combine multiple disciplines, and often, many intellectual breakthroughs have been a result of thinking beyond a one-sided avenue. Case in point:

Others have extolled the virtues of their academic field in their thought pages, so now I'll take a turn with computer science, particularly the subfield of computer graphics. I can't speak for other areas of CS, and I don't know why some people would go into anything else other than graphics, but this is a really spic-- whoops, diverse field.

It combines stuff from not only "computer science" in the traditional sense of the word like algorithms, etc, but also mathematics, optics, thermodynamics, material science, electrical engineering, statistics, even cognitive psychology! Even though it's only a subset of CS, it's gotten to the point where no one is capable of being a expert in "graphics." But owing to its academic diversity, anyone who seriously studies graphics will get very good exposure to all these difference sciences, and how they interact -- in this case, to simulate visually the real world as faithfully as possible, modelling how light is transported, reflected, refracted, scattered, and so forth, how our eyes perceive that light, etc., etc. Many ideas and techniques in graphics have been inspired by these scientific fields outside of traditional CS.

One of the most striking aspects of it to me is the whole interdiscplinary nature of it. The moral here is that just limiting your pursuit of knowledge to one avenue, or basically following a well-traveled path towards graduation, without taking some detours, you're probably denying yourself some platforms for knowledge and enrichment that will help in your own studies and coming up with your own ideas.

Premeds seem to be particularly bad in this regard. OK, the typical premed is a bio major, (OK, maybe biomechanical engineering, chem, or chem e -- still basically the same stuff), does research in the labs for a honors thesis, is usually involved in some group helping kids like Project AIYME or Kids With Dreams.

OK, before you start flaming me, I am not disapproving of the medical field, and I am not saying that all, or even most, premeds are like this. There are many exceptions, like Phill Sung. But I'm just saying that pre-meds seem to be more apt to fit into a cookie-cutter mold than other types of students. Maybe it will be a dynamic system with feedback -- seeing a glut of Biological Sciences majors, perhaps the med school admissions committees will start to look elsewhere, and maybe the hot ticket to med school will start to shift... Hmmm...

So, with academics as well as with our spiritual walk, we should look beyond our "own" turf, and at least get a sense of what else is out there, whether it be intellectual fields, or Christian fellowships.

And speaking of fellowships...

Finally, for the UIC folk who are reading this:

There's been talk at the meetings, etc. of just having one fellowship lead each time we have an All Campus Praise, to "improve the quality" of the worship. I'd like to give my assent to that. For future all campus retreats, and for the all campus praises: have the fellowships lead worship individually!

For heaven's sake, the way we do it now -- it's kind of like taking the Berlin Philharmonic, Metallica, and Celine Dion, putting them together, and asking them to perform Beatles songs. By the way, you can quote me on that.

As with their other spiritual aspects, each fellowship clearly has their own unique musical style, a style that should be appreciated and highlighted, rather than rendered homogenous by combining different groups. For instance, we at FiCS really get the guitar and especially the bass action going, eg Georgie's power slide on "Meet Us Here", compared to, say, Mlosayhi's more laid back playing in the IV worship team.

On the other hand, IV is richly endowed in the percussive/rhythm department, using drums, bongos, tambourines, and those funky egg thingies regularly in their worship, whereas we just like to clap it out ourselves.

Or take other KCPC ministries, FiCB for instance: They really use the keyboards to great advantage, using many different instruments and patches: string ensembles, synth brass, the works. I first heard them during Junior Retreat, and their rendition of "Firm Foundation" was truly awe-inspiring, with the trumpets blaring, the electric organ playing... incredible.

Anyways, I don't think that having one fellowship do it at a time will particularly undermine the message of unity that we're giving.

Finally, I claim (not boldly) that the intersection of the individual repertoires of all the fellowships is far from being the empty set. The traditional ones, like Amazing Grace, but also more contemporary ones like As the Deer, Shout to the Lord, We Exalt Thee, Good to Me. Those songs I have heard sung everywhere, whether at my church back home, at FiCS, at IV, at KCPC, wherever. They're oldies but they're goodies. So we do have a common musical foundation, it would seem, for worship no matter which fellowship is leading, and then they can spice it up with their own unique songs.

But, in any case, no matter who's on it, here's to the worship team busting out some stinkin' bold and spicy worship action at the ACR! Teehee :9 =)

Arrrgh...

I have a CS161 problem set which is already late by one day. But, hopefully, I will beat Andrew, so that I won't get the title of "last person to update his thoughts page" about the ACR. [Update -- it looks like Andrew beat me! But, hey, quality cannot be rushed... ]

Before I begin, I want to know: why isn't my page listed in your jack.html file? Yes, I mean you. Grrrr... =)

First, about the ASSU elections, since I was writing about this even before ACR:

Call me a cynic, but I think that the elections are basically nothing more than a means to make the print shops very very happy during the month of April, really. Politics are a joke here. I'm just apathetic, maybe, or maybe I'm just ignorant of change, but it's basically who's got the coolest slogans. Even the article in the Daily after the elections were over noted the fact that all of the senators who won had easily identifiable buzzwords. No substance whatsoever, just pure, unadulterated hype.

Also, Dave, I did vote for the AASA special fee, but basically only because many of my friends are/were on AASA Core, or are/were officers of other Asian-American organizations that fall under the AASA umbrella. I did vote for every other ethnic organization on campus that was requesting a special fee, so at least I'm not prejudiced racially... =)

Yeah, I realize that I am a total sellout. I think that if I didn't know anyone on AASA Core, I would probably vote no for them, as well as the special fee for all the otherd ethnic groups on campus, for the same reasons as outlined in Dave Hong's thought. My point is just that in the so-called farce that wears the name of "politics" at Stanford University, whoever gets the money, whoever gets the positions, it doesn't matter at all in the end. Just same old, same old like they say...

Also, partly because I do not want to let my opinions be swayed by who has the most memorable campaign pun, I did not vote for any of the senatorial candidates on the ballot, but instead, I wrote in ALL my senators. If you are a regular reader of this thoughts page, chances are good that I wrote you in. See, I reward faithful readers. =)

But yeah, it's good to have a respite from the inanity which marks the ASSU elections. One thing that I find memorable is this graphic in the Stanford Review, our right-wing publication: they have the block letters "ASSU" with a magnifying glass highlighting the first three letters.

Interesting. (spoken in the Keith Lee style.)

OK, now about the ACR.

Anyways, by now, you have probably seen the "anonymous" letter that most likely has been actively circulating amongst the Christian lists here. By the way, I got rebuked by Henry for the very first time in my life for finding out and revealing the person's identity. Anyways, to the person who wrote it: if you are going to write an anonymous letter, do not blow your cover by logging into a saga from the same computer where you write the anonymous letter from! Heehee. But seriously though, the words of the author ring painfully true, and I'll go into that later. Reading those words though truly helpd to set me heart for the retreat, and coming back from it, those feelings have just been strengthened.

About the worship: Like I said, Danny, I will concede that you guys did manage to pull off the ACR worship pretty well. While I never change my thoughts pages, I'll hand it to you, you're sort of right. I guess the last ACP had me a bit disappointed -- and this is nothing against Mlosayhi and the other people there, it was just the lack of coordination, or synergy. You know what I mean? Anyways, compared to that, it was very solid and I would even say, great.

So, the ACR was much better. One thing, though was that they were all songs that I knew, and I certainly do not consider myself to have an extensive exposure to Christian praise music, especially outside the Vineyard world. So, I meant that while from a technical standpoint, worship was quite good, I really didn't get a chance to get exposed to new songs. But it's all good, as Ohms would say. Just worshiping amongst the body is just awesome.

Another cool thing: as I was coming back, I met Brad Johanason, a EE grad student who is in Cornerstone. He was driving me, Irving, Dave Yue, and James Han back to Stanford, so we struck up a conversation, even though we were all dead tired. The cool thing is that it turns out that he is working in the same graphics research laboratory, for the same prof, as I am working! It was really encouraging to see a fellow brother in Him amongst my academic colleagues, and to know that His spirit is present everywhere, even at the Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory. Peter Wilkes spoke of the academic environment in universities, and the sterile absence of any spiritual aspect, and even in a area like computer graphics, it's really reassuring to know that there are fellow believers out there.

Also along the lines of Dave's recent thought: Our freshman year was indeed instrumental in sowing the seeds of unity in the Body. We had the infamous frosh jam sessions, and even our own classwide mailing list, onfire99@lists. My IV frosh group was da bomb as well, I have to say, and it is just amazing how we have just grown and truly become servants for the Lord. Besides myself, there's people like Keith Lee, a testament of God's love and how He can truly change lives, Paul Lee, Leo Jeng, leading an IV frosh group, Lynn Wang, one of the prayer coordinators for IV, Joyce Koo, leading a frosh womens' bible study for CCC, etc. etc. We are probably the 1995-1996 equivalent of the infamous Donner Party. Bold claim? Anyways, Caroline Wu mentioned that we can leverage our frosh year unity to promote unity amongst the different fellowships. So, we're going to get together for dinner sometime, hopefully. Maybe just pray for one another's ministries, you know. Anyways, that was what cool about IV freshman year, and even though we've branched out fellowship-wise, I know that the people I met in frosh group will be some of my closest spiritual friends.

As some of you know, I'm facilitating an RPG here in Bob. It's sort of like leading a small group, in a sense. And I've never really thought of myself as a leader. But leadership is not limited to those with a title, if we are truly to change ourselves and mobilize ourselves, it is something that we, the members have to take initiative, not just people with titles and hopefully have it trickle down to the rest of us. No matter what part of the Body we belong to, it is our body -- the fellowship that we belong to -- it is our fellowship, and this holds true for FiCS, for IV, for CCC/GCM, for Harvest, for whatever, and it is our church, etc... we, not the people who wear titles, need to actively go forth and demonstrate our love and our desire to serve, not just for our brothers and sisters in Christ, but to everyone.

Many, many of my friends are going on missions trips this year, certainly a whole lot more than last year. China seems to be the "in" place to be. I'm thinking about taking a little "vacation" in Asia this summer myself, but unfortunately, I'll probably be going in September, so I probably won't have intersecting schedules with the missions people. But hey, you still get to chill with the likes of Keith Lee and Bev Yang in Beijing! Five words part II: "Keith Lee dance. Tiananmen Square." OK, tense.

Seriously, though. I've been thinking about this, and I think international missions is not what God is calling me to do, for the time being. First of all, I need to gain knowledge of His Word and of Him.

In many fields, there are two realms: the theoretical, and the practical, and they complement each other, while at the same time, being quite different -- being good in one area by no means ensures that you're good in the other realm. CS is no expection: Take someone like Beverly Yang -- she gets A+'s in every CS class she takes, and EFFORTLESSLY too (and I generally mean it, too, believe me, having known her, a lot of the things people say about her studying ability ARE true...) but wouldn't know a 72-pin SIMM if it hit her on the head (Thanks, Eric for that example. =) ). If you actually read this Bev, I'm not trying to poke fun at you, I'm just saying, that having a extensive knowledge of something doesn't mean that you can apply it.

On the other hand, there are people like me, who slack off by doing stuff like writing web thought pages, and consequently struggle for the "A" or "A-", but by doing so, have better knowledge of how to apply it all. I'm not saying that I'm using any CS knowledge in writing my thought pages, but you get the picture. On the other hand, even if you never plan to write a single line of code, it's mighty useful, and in some cases, even neccesary, to have at least SOME knowledge of what goes behind the scenes: In computer graphics, for instance, if you're going to do Toy Story or Titanic quality work, you need to know about illumination algorithms, transformation matrices, properties of materials, noise functions, and things like that -- you need to know how all those myriad options in your rendering program do, and what they all mean in terms of the picture you're going to get. And stuff like that, I think are better learned in an academic setting with a grounding in theory, and why things work why they do.

And right now, in my own religious walk, I've been growing in my practical knowledge in terms of how I should live my own life and act towards others, but as far as apologetics, foundations, knowing the Word, and other areas, I've just been a slacker, and I basically know zip at this time. I totally admire people like, say, Tim Dalrymple, Adrian, or Pastor Harold, who can just study and swallow this stuff like people study CS, or bio, or IE, or whatever. I really do. Zeal without knowledge is can only get you so far, as in CS. And, yeah, not everyone is called to be a missionary, and it is just wrong to want to go because all your friends are going. I can visualize myself in that position, but definitely not in the present time. To run, you must first learn to walk, as the saying goes...

Even as one who grows in knowledge though, I've come to the conclusion that it is indeed important to identify your own missions field -- for Christ, in the Great Commission, calls to all of us; it may not be China or other far reaches of the world, but we can find those in need right on this campus. So, personally, I think my missions field and ability, for that matter, for now is that of just support, and encouragement. There are certainly brothers and sisters of FiCS and other fellowships out there who are just so encouraging, and it's not like I'm ever going to be like them -- to some extent I think, encouragement is a innate gift, like, say, having perfect pitch, or ability in athletics, or computer science, or dorkiness, etc.

But we all should be encouraging one another nevertheless, and there are some who need it more than others, it has dawned on me. There are members who are in the words of one junior brother, are on the "margin" of FiCS. By being on the margin, I mean that they attend maybe the first one or two FiCS meetings each quarter during the year, and then just stop coming, but they're still on, say fics@lists or fics-chat@lists. I won't name any names, but they truly need us. We really need to be reaching out to them and encouraging them -- being part of the "great cloud" of witnesses that is mentioned in Hebrews 12.

Another thing: I have been thinking of just how richly blessed I am having being born into a Christian family. So many of my friends come from families who are non-believers. To me, when they go back home, living with parents who think that they're part of some cult, or even living in countries where only a few percent of the populace are Christians, and wondering how their faith can still hold strong just almost overwhelms me, and at the same time, reminds me of just how strong God's love is and how He is truly our firm foundation, the Rock on which we stand. And I've taken it so much for granted, and yeah, I just feel a sense to express to God and to others of how much He loved me for this, and how I just have such a supportive group of people in my family.

"Won't you change us, Lord?" In case you were wondering (Danny!), that was my contribution to the spontaneous "Kumbayah" versification going on during the campfire. And as I look, I am so painfully aware that all of us need to be changed, and that we truly have not shown love. I have felt unloved -- what it must feel like to a non-Christian particularly, especially one who feels felt out by Christians who are supposed to be loving!

As the anonymous email expressed so forcefully and cogently, we've basically been insular in our own dorms, and frankly, I think it sucks. I remember freshman year, that I really wanted to be a part of the dorm life and for the most part, I was. Sure, spicy people like Mike Rosenblum, Keith Lee, Howard Loo, Beatrice Lee, Santos Marroquin the ASSU VP, Wing-See Lai, Helen Vo, and others were part of it as well, and we really got the dorm community going, but I still had to get to know them, and freshman year, I did make the effort to do so. Sophomore year in Serra was nowhere as fun in that area. Maybe it was because I was really starting to take classes and immerse myself in work, but I think also, one part of it, is that even though at the same time, even though I thought I was growing in my faith, I was also insulating myself more and more from the rest of the world, in this case, the non-Christians of Serra because I didn't want anything to do with their ways. This situation was excacerbated for me somewhat ironically because there were so many Christians that I knew, my roommate Leo, James, Dave Hong, Mimi, Desiree (for two weeks, at least), their draw group, Tilden, Michele Chung, etc. etc. Hanging out with everyone was pretty cool, but as a result, I felt little need to know the non-Christians, and so I didn't really participate in the dorm activities, since I felt I knew enough people from my Christian friends! Ironic.

Now, this year, I have not attended a single house meeting this year. We're just apathetic, and we are basically living in our own insular, sealed world. We are the "phantoms" of the dorms, as the anonymous e-mailer said.

This random email I got drives the point home. I had sent out a message to our dorm mailing list, and he decided to check out the URL of my web page in my signature, and he emailed me this (names have been changed, of course)

From randombobguy@leland.Stanford.EDU  Wed Apr 22 22:59:11 1998
Date: Wed, 22 Apr 1998 22:59:08 -0700 (PDT)
From: Random Bob guy <randombobguy@leland.Stanford.EDU>
To: Mark I-Kai Wang <mwang@leland.Stanford.EDU>
Subject: yer homepage
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; chavrset=US-ASCII


hey,

after noticing the fun quote on your .sig file, i just spent a while going
through your home page, and I wanted to let you know that i enjoyed it.
well thought out and executed. 

...but i filled out the form to tell you this, and got an error.. the .prl
file wasn't found in the cgi bin. or something.

yah. anyway.. good job. it's a shame i had to read about you to get a feel
for who you are, tho'..

later,
random bob guy

So, yeah, we should be reaching out more. And practically, the small groups should be doing service, I think. We need more stuff like OHC last winter quarter. Or not even some grandiose organized activity like that, but just doing random small stuff, in our dorms, help to plan stuff, or to tutor people with their classes, or to help set up their in-room network connections, or just stuff like that.

Anyways, today in the Bob laundry room, as I was emptying out someone's load of clothes that had been washed, I put them into the dryer, and then I inserted 75 cents and dried it for them. Well, it's a start... =)

So, we go to retreats and we are just feeling high and euphoric, and then we go, and then it tapers off, exponentially, to the same old status quo. Anyways, I know that this sounds contrited, but, yeah, my freshman or even my sophomore year, I could not ever imagine something like this being pulled off. When we look back, we can say -- this is where the unity movement was revived. At Mount Gilead -- we truly got a sense of together that was concrete, people praying for one another, worshipping, playing basketball. It was better than any ACP, better than one of CH's onfire99 jam sessions, and I felt like I had never felt like it before, definitely not since freshman year, and maybe not even then.

Yeah. So props to everyone who put it on. But the words of Pastor Wilkes and others, like I said, are just awesome, and maybe I'm hyping it too much, but I think that, yeah, they do have the potential to truly re-ignite the unity movement here at Stanford and truly make the Body here visible, and not just as the fodder of Daily cartoons. Anyways, I implore you to listen to the messages again, especially Peter Wilkes'. Buy the recordings, or check out the RealAudio versions on the web site. And, yes, I am playing a good part in bring this stuff to fruition, and no, this is not a plug for my work, since I'm not making money on this anyways (most likely, I'll still end up a bit in the red), and it takes around 12 or so hours just to prepare each master recording (noise reduction, and all that, you know). Multiply that by eight different masters, and that's to say nothing of duplicating them! But don't just look over your notes, but hear Wilkes speak, relish in the British accent, and truly take the words to heart -- that we should love the world, and others will love us likewise. Even better: Eddie or Slim -- you should encode all the ACR stuff as MP3s and upload it everywhere to every site on the Internet you can think of! Now here's some MP3s that *should* be pirated widely! =)

Later y'all.

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. Anderson

'Wiedersehen!

"It's been a while, but we're back in style..."
-- the Chipmunks

Yes, faithful readers, the Thoughts are back. I've been a slacker, I have to admit. A real slacker this summer. On the other hand though, these thoughts are about vision, and vision, like clay, is something that is flexible, undergoing constant refinement on its way to being shaped. Today, Sunday October 4th, 1998, I had a very satisfying talk with Paul KisoLA Lee and Dave Chu about a lot of the stuff, and more, and I think that just gave me the impetus, as well as the clarity I needed to reify those last remaining abstract, amorphous wisps of ideas that had been floating in the back of my head. (Ahh... I love imagery.)

I should warn you too that this Deep Thought, having been essentially in production all summer, is a real doozie -- 35K in size, 10K more than my previous largest one. So, hang on!

Sunrise, Sunset

So anyways, this summer has been pretty interesting for me. I've been working in the Data Mining and Visualization Group of Silicon Graphics doing an internship there, researching and implementing various aspects of graphical visualization of data sets. But that's not the least of it, for I am also proud to announce that the SGI intern team throughly trounced the Sun Microsystems interns in our second annual corporate volleyball contest! Sun is a rival company about half a mile away to the west of us in Mountain View who think that having the rights to a slow, interpreted language sharing a name with an Indonesian island as well as a sophomore FiCS sister somehow makes you the coolest thing in the world.

(Of course, no offense to the the three brothers and sisters working there. Hint: their names rhyme with Lephen Stim, Shivan in, and Sorraine Lhih) [NOTE: As of 10/2/1998, two of these people mentioned no longer work at Sun. I wonder why...?]

Booyah!

Anyways, the exact area that I'm working in is called data mining, which is where the software product I am working on (yours for the low low price of $23,000 per copy!) falls under. It's an interesting synthesis of three areas of computer science: databases, artificial intelligence, and graphics/visualization.

Data-mining is poised to become a multi-billion dollar industry in the next century, simply because all these companies are putting everything in big databases, and they need some way to make sense out of all those terabytes of data. Forget about ADSL, digital TV, intelligent agents, or anything else, because data mining is happening NOW. As Simon Yun would say, YEAH BABY YEAH. For instance, data mining is what allows you to take a huge database consisting of a list the products that every customer at, say, Safeway, buys everytime they shop there, and see that people who buy peanut butter often buy jelly, or that the percentage of people aged 25-35 tend to buy fat-free foods is proportional to the longitude of the city they are living. It's pretty dope stuff.

And I think that this -- the information visulization part (I'll leave the databases and AI for others) -- is the first area that I've found which intrigues me, something that I can pour out my research energies towards for a resonably long time, and still feel excited about. It's not like simply implementing Office code in Visual C++ like I did working for the Evil Empire last summer, but my work this summer was really open ended, the kind of thing where I had to spend time in the Math/CS library at Stanford, tracking down research papers. A genuine field with a burgeoning industry attached to it, as well as drawing from multiple academic areas of computer science. And anyways, it excites me because this is an area that I actually feel cool about delving into more, of pursuing, not just abandoning it once my summer internship is over. In other words, I've found a definite direction out of this summer.

So this summer, and I think this upcoming year is one of discovery for me on a variety of different fronts, and of finding direction, vision, of what I want to do with my life, and where I want to do it, not only in terms of academics, or business, but in a deeper sense as well. And so lie these Thoughts. A lot of these ideas I will probably expound and expand upon in future Deep Thoughts. In a way, I hope that this writing is a kernel, a initiator where I hope ideas spring forth and take on life of their own, in my own life, as well as in words.

Onward, ho!

You know, life as a graduate student will be completely different than the regimen that I've underwent the past three years. Well, not completely different in the schedule itself or even my lifestyle, but just in my whole philosophy and outlook of my priorities in life.

In my situation, it's even more interesting because it's my fourth undergrad year, as well as my first year technically as a grad student. So, right now, I am in the precarious, yet interesting state of being BOTH an undergraduate and a graduate student: living in a rocking dorm this year, but at the same time, having words like RA-ship, TA-ship, thesis, Rains, EV, no longer be foreign concepts or far off places, but very real concerns kind of adds a whole new dimension to what up until now, had basically been -- relatively speaking -- ignorant bliss up to now. Whoops, sorry about the run-on there, but then again, I don't think many readers of this page are English majors, anyways.

So, I've pretty much decided that I'm not going to pull a Beverly Yang and graduate in four years with my Master's, since to do that, I would have to take 18-20 units of CS each quarter -- to say nothing of DRs.

Then again, if I do it in five years, I will have a lot more freedom and flexibility in terms of my load of required academic courses for my major. And that means that I'll actually have some breathing room in my schedule. Classes in areas like Chinese, economics, industrial engineering, philosophy, sociology, and other disciplines that I've always been fascinated by, but never had time to pursue. After all, the pursuit of knowledge, especially at a place as diverse as Stanford, should not be dicatated by DRs or GERs.

And I think back and remember, THIS was a lot of the reason why I ultimately came here and not somewhere like Caltech or MIT. Yet, I've been an incredible hypocrite in truly taking advantage of the character of our school. I guess many of my fellow School of Engineering brethren also are at least somewhat guilty of this as well. Fortunately, I suppose most people who are reading this page have strived to not be too parochial in their areas of study, but still, it sure feels comfortable to know that you have at least an extra year to explore, to sample the various delicacies from the smorgasbord before they take it away from you forever.

Dude, I love food analogies. I love Esther Lee. She is like the food analogy girl. Right now, I'd say my situation right now is like being George or Davis at Palace Buffet -- you don't know where to start. My philosophy is rather akin to what those two brothers might be expected to do in a situation like that -- find a few good things to take, and then dig in!

And the feeling is that, after always eating rice, kimchee, and other East Asian cuisine (feel free to subsitute your favorite area of the world), sampling fare from other areas always tastes interesting, even if it is not always good. And if you find something good, you can keep on eating it.

But just as with the consumption of food, it's important not to overstuff yourself -- because you won't have room for desert, or in a more extreme case, might get sick altogether. In other words, it's not just the variety of food I consume, but also the quantity.

And I think quantity is an area of my course selections which I am re-examining. First off, I would like to (re-)iterate that I am not a CS whiz like Bev. I work really slow -- whether it is because I just think slowly, or I find distractings like thinking up Deep Thoughts, I can't honestly say. Have I suffered on the CS major fast track? Yes I have. Both in relationships with Christian, and perhaps more importantly, non-Christian friends. I've already sort of related my concerns in previous Deep Thoughts about this. And in a way, coterming is reassuring because you know that you do have breathing room to arrange your courses, and take courses more with a mind towards learning what you what to learn, when you want to learn it, rather than trying to search for the arrangement that will satisfy major requirements and still allow one to graduate on time.

And, I think, the cornerstone of the vision that I'm forming this year is just to be one of those people who isn't overwhelmed with work, but, instead of letting academics be my God, to truly have time to play as well as work. In a sense, it's almost a throwback to freshman year, when all of us were so idyllic. (Play "Voices" from Macross Plus to get the emotional effect....) I know it sounds kind of cheesy, and please don't get me wrong -- I loved junior year, even though I was really (to continue the food motif) pigging out on the coursework, and hanging out with my drawmates (including Davis), but it really didn't do anything to help the non-Christian perception of us as insular people who only interact with the world when we want to convert others.

Anyways, I think my outlook as far as finding time this year to do things can be summarized in a very spicy quote from Frederick Buechner that I learned this summer from a... ummm, friend of a friend:

"Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace."

So, thanks Lord, for grace, and for the life that we have as a testament to that.

And I look to the future as well. For a long time, Silicon Graphics was a dream company for me to work with, and I envisioned working in their R & D after I got my degree to develop the latest eye-dazzling graphics applications, the stuff that gets on the national news media.

How the world has changed since then. SGI -- as is the case with practically every other high tech company not located in Washington state -- has been facing some serious competition in the market. The morale is depressing at times. They even have a internal newsgroup dedicated to whining and complaining. I guess every company has more or less its share of dissenters, but the atitude at SGI just seems to hang over the company at times, like a slight but omnipresent pall of gloom.

Now, I don't blame the company -- I love SGI and always will, and deep within, they still have the combination of a core group of talented people who will stay until the very end, and the drive and motivation to blaze new frontiers on the technological envelope in quite a few areas of computer science and engineering, ideas that are only emulated by other companies later. But on the other hand, just the fact that it's a major company makes it a ripe target and liable to take a beating -- the same way it is for every company, and in such a environment like that, the trailblazing thrill of innovation gets sometimes lost to the hustle bustle of the daily regimen of business competition, restructuring, "reductions in force", and a lot of other administrativia that a small startup wouldn't face.

These days, the allure of a startup where, just like Scott Underwood sings, you are in control, seems more and more attractive to me now. About the only thing that's been preventing me from going on the fast track to graduation and then entering the world of business is that I haven't found a idea that I can truly set my heart towards.

And I want to make sure that any company that I'm associated with has a lot of coolness factor. You know what I mean? As an example, SGI was at the peak of its coolness around late 1993 to early 1994. Riding on the heels of Jurassic Park, the company did pretty well, with its name, and those funky blue, green, and purple machines. Just a company that will stand above the tide, and make in one way or another, a bold statement, just like SGI does with their cases of their workstations. This explains which I have yet to stumble on a cool premise which would be able to make a statement to the rest of the industry like that.

On a side note, there are currently three graduate students in Computer Science in FiCS: Danny, Bev, and myself. And it turns out that our areas of specializations are, respective, AI, databases, and graphics! Yup, you guessed it -- as I said before, data-mining is basically a mixture of those three areas!

So one time, I was talking to Danny Chai, and we sort of came to the conclusion that we should start a company in the field of data mining. Hey -- it's more down to earth than Christian video games! Myself, Danny, and Bev will be the technical core. Keith and CH can do the finance bit. Justin Chang and/or Jocelyn Yeh will head up our legal department. Clara will write the documentation.

For the others, well, a lot of biotech/pharmaceutical companies -- Roche, Bayer AG, Merck, Genetech, etc, are acutally using a lot of data mining stuff as well, for DNA sequencing and stuff. So all you bio/chem/premed people... keep us in mind, and MAYBE we'll find something for you all... =)

I think we'll call our company... FICS. Firm Involved in Computer Science. Yeah, that's it! (To avoid confusion with any other entity, that abbreviation's FICS, not FiCS.) So, if anyone wants to be a part of this, please email me, before we IPO, cash in our riches, and things really start to get hectic. Thanks. Yeah, baby. Don't be let out!

But then again, I wouldn't do a startup unless I found something that I could really set my heart towards. Something that would basically become my passion in life, after God. Seriously. And I'm not sure if I did get in to it, I would be willing to let go of it. Something that you've worked hard for, it's very hard to leave it, and rest assured that it is in good hands, making usre that it doesn't get bogged down in internal politcal quibbles, or mere mismanagement, or simply people who lose their acuity in keeping up with the market. In a way, you're almost paranoid about passing on the torch because you don't know what they'll do with it in terms of future direction.

So even if I did work on a startup, it would be hard for me to leave it. to build, and then leaving it, and that I can look back on, and say, that's our baby we helped build, it's still growing strong, and we're mighty proud of it. It just seems like other people might have other visions of where to take a company, or other project. Take my high school's web page. I have to say that they have, well, really sanitized it since the days back in the spring of 1994 when I first started it up, when I wrote all the HTML myself using Windows Notepad, and pico. Sure, it might look more "professional" now, but at the same time, it's devoid of personality and identity -- something which www.mvhs.fuhsd.org definitely had when my comrades and myself were at its helm. And of course, there is the saga Apple computer after the first era of Steve Jobs, which I won't repeat what every other piece of media has done ad infinitum.

In short, we would definitely have to make sure that FICS is headed somewhere with an astute core group of people at the helm, and quite possibily, we may never really leave the company, but just get retained as "consultants" or another. Again, just one more thing to keep in mind as entrepreneurs, underscoring the fact that working at a startup would be in a way, a lifelong committment.

As I look beyond the Silicon Valley mega-corporation rat race, I also look beyond the vally itself in terms of the geographical location where I want to establish a foothold.

And this summer, I think that my eyes have turned beyond California, indeed, beyond the US -- to the Middle Kingdom.

Enter the Dragon

The first and last time I went to China, in the summer of 1991, I honestly have to admit that I sort of disliked the whole experience. Having just flew in from from the consumer-electronics mecca of Hong Kong, I didn't see a single video game store ANYWHERE! To add to my depression, it was heavily raining in Beijing, in addition to being hot and humid, all at the same time! I think that the combination of these factors immediately caused my emotions to go into "sad mode" for the remainder of my stay =(. Plus, I got sort of sick while eating something I had in a little noodle restaurant near the Great Wall. Especially, once we got outside certain districts of Beijing, I was hating it, with all the squat toilet action, and everything. Ugh. Anyways, I was actually sort of elated when I left China.

Over seven years later, things have changed. Both over there in China, the country having adopted more and more Western elements, and here, myself having grown infinitely, my outlook is starting to shift. Seriously, I'm starting to contemplate the possibility of going to China next year and spend some time in the land. And I don't mean Hong Kong either, I mean the mainland -- either on short term missions, or doing Princeton in Beijing.

The option of PiB, and talking with people like Spice Lee and Jocelyn, is quite enticing. Chinese is probably my funnest class this quarter, and there is just no subsitute for getting immersed in a country where you are forced to use the language, and being part of the culture as well, just to get a feel of a country where one might spend several years of one's life or more.

As for missions -- in a previous Deep Thought, I had said that international missions was not for me. Again, this changed this summer as well. Hearing Paul Lee's emails from Japan, and talking with him, as well as Keith, on the phone during the summer, Asia is a culture in which the pace of material gain is far outstripping the pace of its spiritual gain. Even when I was there, names like KFC, Pizza Hut, and McDonalds had already established a foothold. (My stomach and intenstines were forever thankful for this.)

And yet, even as China westernizes even more, the moral and spiritual framework could not be more different. For instance, the "unchurched" in America have in general, at least, attended church at least a few times in their life. And many people here of course, attend churches during Christmas, Easter, and other "holidays." The fathers of our nation at least saw fit to include religious language, in the Declaration of Independence for instance, or the Great Seal -- "In God We Trust". You won't find anything like that in China.

The stats are something like 1-2% of the population in China are Christian, without any significant church-attending body outside of the body of professed Christians. Furthermore, 80% of those believers are in rural areas, outside from the political, economic, and social centers of China, apart from having any bit of influence as the Pacific Rim enters the 21st century.

Talking with people like Keith, Danny Chai, Tim Dalyrmple, Grace Hsiao, and others who went to China this summer has really been a blessing. Really. China is just a spiritual vacuum, I have heard from much more than one source. And even though I too saw that CCC video multiple times last year, I had always thought that the part of the Body that I belonged to wasn't the part that was sent on missions. But my bold claim is that missions is not a particular talent, and that rather, missions is an end to which we are called, and as it us up to us to discover our particular talents, it is up to us to discover our particular mission field -- the calling of missions is not necessarily coupled to any specific spiritual gifts.

But of course, my summer plans is all in His hands. And even as missions begin to come more and more into my heart, I realize even more brutally that I am truly imperfect. and this summer, I have come to realize my own weaknesses in my walk with Him -- in my own impatience, my judgmentalness, in my complancency in living in my comfort zone. Besides that, I can't swing, like Yang2 Hua2 Li4, Yongil Lee and Lee Gan Loon. So that avenue of ministry -- very liu2 xing2 in Beijing -- is denied for me for the time being. May I be transformed in a way that is pleasing to Him, by God, and by Richard Powers as well. =)

Anyways, in any case, after I finish, I can go visit Korea, Taiwan, and, of course... Singapore, because David Tay, aka Ditty will be getting married. He graduated this year, and he was Dave Hong's roommate junior year, which was how I got to know him. [You know, 1999 is shaping up to be a bumper-crop year for weddings. Four waiting in the pipeline and counting! DUDE, EVERYONE, HOLD OFF ON GETTING MARRIED THIS YEAR, OK?!? MY AIRFARE BILL IS HATING IT.]

Ahhh... Singapore. I remember in 1988, when I last went there, they had this spicy thing called TeleText. Many TVs in Singapore could recieve this information. This was WELL before the Internet became commercialized. [Say, if any Singaporean reads this page, can you let me know if they still have it?]

[Y'know, I tend to remember my various trips to Asia by what video games/other goodies I manage to pick up there. For instance, the 1988 trip to Singapore was when I picked up Super Mario Brothers 3, and Zelda 2, a year before the US release.]

Dang, seriously, everyone from Singapore I know is cool. There are only a few other geographical regions that I can make this claim Among the Singapoareans I know are Joseph Gan, dicta--, err, I mean, director of Testimony; his SO, Li-Ping, one of Des' drawmates; they

Heck, it would be pretty spicy to live in Singapore, at least for a few years on a job assignment, before coming back to the states. Like what Tammy Wang's family did. Anyways, _______ and I, we'll send our two kids to Raffles Junior College. They will be one of the dozens that place sends to Stanford each year. And of course, they will kick everyone else pretty soundly academically.

Dude, other than China proper, either Singapore, Hong Kong or even merry old England itself (I've never been to Europe, after all) would be extremely interesting for me to really spend a few years in. You know, there's just something cool about the British, the land itself, as well as their former colonies like Singapore and HK, the fusion of East and West, the funky British/Asian accent. The cosmopolitan mix of those places, while having the populace retaining a distinct ethnic and cultural identity, not just an amalalgamation of them, like, say, NYC, is just totally cool, you know? The coolest people I know largely hail from one of those places. Props to the British Empire!

Spice, yah?

Calvinist theology for computer scientists

During this summer, I've been hanging out a lot in Mirrielees, and among the many people who came over to visit us, I've been chilling with Phil Wang a lot, and every Wednesday night, I've been getting a dose of hard-core Calvinist theology. It's all about TULIP, baby: Total depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistable Grace, and Perseverance of the Saints. Theology is just a really dope subject, I as a analytical CS major, has come to realize that this is just really cool stuff, to think about religion, for up to how has been mainly an emotional subject for me, in a analytical, comparative sense. I love Phil Wang. I love Adrian Pei. I love Tim Dalrymple. (Don't worry, Joyce, not in THAT sense... =) )

And for me, Calvinism is a bit unnerving. Not wrong, but unnerving. Then again, the Gospel message itself is, as someone I heard put it, is offensive to all sinners. But even though it's really heavy stuff, I just find it so cool. And recently, I just realized that CS154 -- Automata Theory -- just kind of go hand in hand with helping me to understand some of it! Bold, eh?

Anyways, I seriously loved that class. I have never gotten a CS grade as high as I did (other than in computer graphics) in 154. Of course, I do not mean to brag, but just to tell you that, man, there's just something about the subject that draws me to it.

So, one of the spicy things we learned was that there are things that cannot be computed -- no matter how fast your computer is, how much time you have on your hands: you will never, never get an answer in a finite amount of time! Bold, eh? For instance, you can't tell if a arbitrary program will ever halt if you run it! It's undecidable -- because the only way you know if it will stop is to actually simulate a computer running the program, and you won't know if the program runs forever unless it -- ta da! -- runs forever!

It's the same with the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. In a sense, we can think of ourselves and the undecidable question of whether each one of us will be elected, as being Turing machines, running a program, and not knowing if some of us will end up in a halting state or not before the end of time -- hence, undecidable. Pretty bold, huh?

Anyways, if you want me to explain this more, please invite me out to dinner (at somewhere other than Stern dining). Thanks.

Similarly, another interesting work that I've been going through this summer is Desiring God, by John Piper. Piper's bold claim is that we exist for the purpose of giving pleasure to God, "to glorify Him by enjoying Him forever", and even bolder, "The chief end of God is to glorfy God and enjoy himself forever."

In the human realm, we call such an atitude narcissism. But my Piper-inspired bold claim is that it is not narcissism if there is no other option -- if there is nothing else to glorify, or if there is an not an option of non-glorification. In other words, we can only apply the negative term narcissistic if we have a yardstick which exemplifies the what would be considered something "positive."

To formulate it precisely: if we assume axioms that say everyone must glorfy someone, and God is the be all and end all, then what can He glorify? Nothing except Himself, for to glorify anything else would be to glorify something below Him, and thus contradict the definition of glorification. To put it another way, God is like the base case in a recursive relationship of glorification.

Thus, as glorification of anyone else is unacceptable for Him, God is not a narcissistic snob. Say, am I being heretical?

Unity Revisited

Anyways, I know that not everyone who professes their beliefs in Jesus Christ subscribes exactly to these fine points, and that's another thing that's been on my mind lately.

The motif of unity in the Christian community, is like a fractal pattern: one that repeats itself on different scales. Unity within the church, among the different fellowships on campus, among the different campuses that frequent a church like KCPC, and among the schools across the country as well. The notion of unity is something else that I've dealt with in my Deep Thoughts and otherwise, and it's another component of the vision I am developing for how I want to serve the Body here, hopefully being able to help address at least some of these levels. For if others view Christians as just a fragmented group of people, divisive amongst fellowships and schools, and not really helping one another out, despite the calling in the Bible to do so, how will that aid our outreach, our ministry?

One of the things that I've learned is that one should not be get caught up in differences "of the second order" as Paster Peter Wilkes said during the 1998 Stanford All-Campus Retreat, caught up to the point of alienating others.

We all know that we have been oft-criticized for being closed and insular, both Christians as a whole, and FiCS in general. A freshman in our dorm, who is Christian, related to me how she had "a very bad impression" of FiCS when she came as a profro, because it was so "cliquish". Yikes! At least she was brutally honest, but still it kind of hits home, with this coming from a fellow believer! Of course, the "cliquishness" of FiCS probably doesn't stem directly from our theological beliefs, but I suppose it's conceivable that that's how other Christians might feel about our cliqueness and tendency not to associate with "outsiders" that much which would seem to communicate an atitude of self-righteousness, that we're right, and they're not.

I had a pretty stimulating discussion with Jimmy Ahn when I visited him late summer. God will save those who believe the basic tenets, of course -- justification through grace alone, the fact that Jesus died for the elect, and so on. But just knowing the finer aspects just increases your experience, the joy of salvation. Kind of like knowing how everything in your computer works -- how your full-clock-speed internal L2 cache in your Pentium II Xeon beats the pants off the half-speed one in your PowerPC G3 -- increases your enjoyment of computing. =)

And it's not even those minor differences as well that we should accept, but even if we have more substantial, fundamental differences with others, we mustn't merely brush those people off to the side, unwilling to deal with them, but rather actively address them in a engaging, stimulating manner.

I mean, take someone Catholic, like, say, Pam Tsai. Would she feel comfortable in FiCS? Now, I should emphasize that I don't really have an answer to this. Then again, I've never seen Pam at FiCS before. Hmmmm....

But to me, it would be interesting to go to a Catholic church service and just see what it's like. I'm not claiming that Catholicism is right. But it's interesting just flipping through the Catholic song books and seeing how many songs that I have know because I have sung them in Protestant churches. In a way, it's actually sort of amazing that we do share such a high degree of similarity even though we have a few fundamental differences, and it leads me to wonder how millions of people could have died over the differences in religious faiths that share such a large common set of beliefs.

Today, Pastor Eugene related a few tidbits of the illustrious history of the San Francisco Korean Central Presbyterian Church, such as how we occupied a Jewish synagogue in San Francisco until it was damaged by the 1989 earthquake, and how the facility we had afterwards, up until now was actually the Jim Jones temple!!! And now, we'll be worshiping in a Catholic church, and the Father of that church actually came out and spoke to us during the first service, about the common love that our Father shares, a love that both bodies believe in.

Now, the believers of Catholicism occupies an interesting area, between the totally unsaved, and us. Of course, Catholicism contradicts the tenet of justification through faith alone that we adhere to. But then you have the book of James, chapter 5 of Galatians, and others, about the role of works in a life of faith, which is why I assume Rich Mullins is not being heretical when he sings Screen Door. So while Catholicism may be directly contrary to what we have been taught, I suppose, it is not some totally evil cult, something that we should look upon with total disregard at, lest those who have no religious faith at all, just decide that all these divisions are just too much for them.

So, while the Gospel message is offensive to sinners, the messenger should not be. Be bold, be gentle, and to embrace unity, while keeping our own distinct spiritual identity. And keeping with the theme of vision here, our vision for FiCS, which I am just excited beyond words about is that we would be a kinder, gentler fellowship, reaching out to those who do not believe in Christ, and also, those whose beliefs just differ somewhat. Praise God that Pastor Harold is back -- it will just be cool talking to him as well as hearing him talk, and it's just really cool how he'll engage those who are seeking, as well as we ourselves.

In the very end, tt all boils down to one thing -- vision for this year, this summer, and the future.

So, one thing that I truly desire now to just always keep and build upon a vision for what I want to do. Go on missions, work at a startup, or whatever, all keeping His purpose for me at the forefront of it all.

Be Thou my Vision, O Lord of my heart;
Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art
Thou my best thought, by day or by night,
Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.

Be Thou my Wisdom, and Thou my true Word;
I ever with Thee and Thou with me, Lord;
Thou my great Father, I Thy true son;
Thou in me dwelling, and I with Thee one.

Riches I heed not, nor man's empty praise,
Thou mine inheritance, now and always:
Thou and Thou only, first in my heart,
High King of heaven, my Treasure Thou art.

High King of heaven, my victory won,
May I reach heaven's joys, O bright heaven's Sun!
Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,
Still be my Vision, O Ruler of all.

Repeat Chorus.

And here they are. My noonchi tells me that there is still more that I could write, but it also tells me that people have been suffering because of my mental drought here in this little corner of cyberpsace.

Mind you, I will possibly flesh these thoughts out later.

And without further ado...

Over the break, I've had some productive and relaxing times. OK, it's plain and generic, but 1) I can't write, and 2) I've read and have been convicted that plain and simple speech is a virtue.

I've found out, for instance, that many people that I've known for years from high school and elsewhere, have come to know Christ as their Lord and Savior, or at least seeking, actively participating in church and fellowship. and I just have to priase Him and His good work for that.

Video game theology

And another good thing about Christmas break was on a less eternal level: I've had the chance to delve into video games again. Much of my gaming energy this break has been expended on two eagerly awaited titles.

Both of them, Metal Gear Solid and Zelda 64 are truly technological tour de forces.

Now, I just really clicked with MGS -- the synergy of the plot, and the graphics, with that dark, foreboding film-noir feeling -- kinda like the Batman films or something.

However, I felt Zelda 64 was somewhat overrated. OK, feel free to flame me and neg me on your page, Danny, but I felt I got a better gaming experience out of MGS. It just integrated the plotline really well into the game, and I just felt more of a sense of atmosphere in the gameplay mechanics itself -- using the night vision goggles was especially unfo, for instance. Or maybe I just clicked with all the high-tech gadgets and weaponry, I don't know. Perhaps I was just expecting something more revolutionary, that would recreate the feeling of my first Zelda experience, back in my elementary school days. Now, I certainly felt that sense of renewal when I first played Mario 64 -- I guess that Zelda 64 just didn't offer something insanely novel enough over either the predecessors in the Zelda series, or on the other hand, games like M64, or BAnjo Kazooie, or whatever. Sorry.

Video gaming is truly an art, something which cannot be boiled down into a few components. Zelda 64 had better graphics, a more expansive world, but when it all came togehter, the synergy wasn't there in force as much as it was in MGS -- you know what I mean?

One thing though is that it points to the maturing of video games as a true art form, not just a computer program you interact with. FF8's soundtrack will feature Faye Wong, HK pop star -- Squaresoft paid $1 million for that song alone. I remember when the first computer game costing over $1 million was made -- I believe it was some King's Quest or other, and it made industry news.

Certainly, Z64 has got the gameplay in place. Maybe the earth tones are just a bit drab. Or maybe the music is sort of lackluster -- at least parts of it. Or maybe the screenplay was a bit too scattered and unfocused for my taste. It was a good plot -- just lacked that literary umph.

Anyways, my point is that numbers and quantitative stats like you see in the gaming mags only mean part of the picture. It's how you combine the disparate elements of a game, and it's not a simple linear combination or anything like that. There is just no way that evaluating a game or indeed, any art form, can be reduced into numbers like that.

It's kind of like salvation -- there's no set formula to get you into heaven, no amount of works performed will make you one of the elect. Yeah, maybe we should adopt this example for Sunday Bible study!!

BTW, I found this N64 emulator which can run Super Mario 64 or Zelda 64, and plays at pratically full frame rate at 800x600 resolution on a PII-400 or better with a Voodoo 2. It's pretty suburban.

Worlds apart

From my Deep Thoughts of April 29, 1998:

-Seriously, though. I've been thinking about this, and I think international missions is not what God is calling me to do, for the time being. First of all, I need to gain knowledge of His Word and of Him.

From my Deep Thoughts of October 5, 1998:

Talking with people like Keith, Danny Chai, Tim Dalyrmple, Grace Hsiao, and others who went to China this summer has really been a blessing. Really. China is just a spiritual vacuum, I have heard from much more than one source. And even though I too saw that CCC video multiple times last year, I had always thought that the part of the Body that I belonged to wasn't the part that was sent on missions. But my bold claim is that missions is not a particular talent, and that rather, missions is an end to which we are called, and as it us up to us to discover our particular talents, it is up to us to discover our particular mission field -- the calling of missions is not necessarily coupled to any specific spiritual gifts.

But of course, my summer plans is all in His hands. And even as missions begin to come more and more into my heart, I realize even more brutally that I am truly imperfect. and this summer, I have come to realize my own weaknesses in my walk with Him -- in my own impatience, my judgmentalness, in my complancency in living in my comfort zone. Besides that, I can't swing, like Yang2 Hua2 Li4, Yongil Lee and Lee Gan Loon. So that avenue of ministry -- very liu2 xing2 in Beijing -- is denied for me for the time being. May I be transformed in a way that is pleasing to Him, by God, and by Richard Powers as well. =)

Recently, someone asked me: what is our calling in life?

The Westminister Shorter Catechism, of course, exposits this question and its answer quite clearly:

"The chief end of man is to glorify God AND enjoy him forever."

But don't we glorify God infinitely more when we go up to heaven than remaining her on Earth -- that the splendours of heaven will outshine any ephermal thing in this world, right?

Who would lose out if all of the elect were be beamed up to heaven right here and now, a la Enoch? God would be again in communion with His people. We would be in heaven. So who or what on Earth needs us? The only purpose we have is for the people here, to serve them, to reach out to them.

[Much like me going to the Viennese Ball -- I've realized the only stream of return on investment that I'll be getting for VB are people -- the only purpose for me is for the just hanging out with friends and my date. I'm certainly not going to get any satisfaction from the dancing part -- I'm learning so I hopefully won't get any pain from it! =P]

"Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.And surely I am with you always to the veryend of the age."

So my bold question is, what's to prevent us from killing ourselves?

Is it glorifying Him here on Earth? Surely nothing here can compare with the portait of heaven filled with His absolute, unspeakable glory painted in Revelation 4, for instance.

So Justin's bold