Seattle — Day 6: A Purpose

Reflections. I think that one of the hardest chapters to read in the bible is Luke 6. I say this not because it’s conceptually the hardest to grasp, but because it’s so simple and clear — Love the Lord and obey his commands. Yet, simplicity does not equate to understanding, and understanding does not necessarily mean that action will yield in, or rather, result in a bearing of fruit. I read this passage and it deeply, offensively challenges me, and if it doesn’t challenge you in any way whatsoever, I’m inclined to think that either 1) You’re perfect and you’re able to all of these things Jesus calls us to do flawlessly 2) Perhaps you’ve lost the desire to and urgency of loving the Lord, to be very blunt (or perhaps don’t know Jesus at all). If you’re reading this and do not know Jesus, I want to personally take this time to share the gospel, the good news with you. Even for those of us that “know” Jesus, may we remind ourselves of this amazing gift and freedom we have received.

Indeed, The Good News

We have all fallen short of the glory of God.

Plain and simple. There is nothing in us that desires good or even a God. There’s no longing for Him, no cravings, no purpose, no hope. Yet this is not how God intended us to be. In the beginning, God created everything, yes indeed all things and proclaimed that they were Good! He made me, he made the skies and yes, you too. However, in our wretchedness, we turned away from God, disobeyed his commandments (sinning) that were placed and intended for our good. God could have left us in this state, but God being rich in love and mercy, even when we were dead in our sin, in our disobedience, sent Christ for our sake, in the purpose of His will, that all might come to know Him and love Him (Ephesians 1–2). All your shame, pain, condemnation, Jesus died for it. He died for you. But not just died, He rose from the grave, after 3 days, and ascended into Heaven, that you may share in new life with Him (Colossians 1). A life where you no longer need to fear, no longer need to hide in shame. A life where you can be honest about your hurt and pain, not suppressing it because it’s scarred you for years, and to live in freedom. So if you would like to share in this life today, let me know, let other believers you may know, so that we may pray for you and that you can come to accept Jesus Christ as your Lord. As your Friend. As your Comfort. As your Peace. As your Savior.

Sobered. We now press in to the words of Luke 6. How difficult they are to receive as apart of us. Love your enemies, give to everyone who begs, expect nothing in return, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. What tough words, yet what’s key is the timing of when Jesus spoke these words. After Jesus gathers the disciples and calls forth the 12 apostles from them, and the crowd of people eager to be healed stand in expectancy of Jesus’ words, Jesus drops the bomb.

Following me is going to be the hardest thing that you’ve ever done, yet I promise you, it’ll be eternally worth it.

Sometimes, I’ve gone days where I’ve said: wow today was such an easy day! How relaxing! How carefree! Don’t get me wrong. Rest is good, biblical and necessary, yet many of us rest far more than we even work, especially myself. As I reflect on Luke 6, my heart is tugged and stirred because I begin to understand more and more and more and more how much I absolutely do not desire to do the will of the Father. Why would I want to pray for my enemy, let alone my own brothers who love me every moment? Why would I want to serve the homeless and poor, let alone even my own family members? I don’t even love those who love me (Luke 6:32–36). You don’t even love those who love you. Just let that sink. Yeah, it’s suppose to offend you. That’s the Holy Spirit speaking and beginning to reveal to us how wicked we are. This isn’t to finger point at accuse you or an excuse for you to send this someone you know that hasn’t been abiding in the Lord and to “convict” them to shape up their lives. This is for you. This is for me (Luke 6:39–42).

Resolve — 
May we build our foundations on Christ. Let’s stop assuming that everything’s okay. Let’s stop pretending that our relationship with Jesus is great, when we’re struggling to pray for an hour, while we can freely play iPhone games for hours and scroll idly on Facebook for hours.

“Never assume that you are good soil.” — “Prodigal God” by Tim Keller

The meaning of this statement is that we can never assume that we are in “good” state of mind, soul and heart, thinking that the word of God will just naturally seep and become apart of our lives. More often than not, I am extremely offended by what scripture teaches, at times very frustrated that I can’t understand how to apply certain principles, and especially, make Jesus apart of my life every single second, milli-second of my life. For many of us, the word of God comes and is weeded out by the worries of life, or thorns as Jesus describes in his parable (Matthew 13). Sometimes, I blatantly disobey the Fathers words and choose to not even let to word come into my heart, having it snatched immediately. But my prayer for you and you for I, is that you wrestle and ask the Lord every morning, every evening, throughout your days, that He would make you into good soil. May he make you into soil that is soft, fertilized, sown, ready to receive the seeds of life to grow and bear fruit in your life.

“For each tree will be known by its fruit.” — Luke 6:44

I say this because I love you, I love all of you that are reading this and have been praying for you. I say this because I love me, I love how Jesus loves me in my brokenness in my failures and triumphs, and want nothing but the same for you. For you to encounter Jesus today like never before (Luke 6:31).

Work From Home — 
Today I’ll be working from home because I wasn’t feeling all too well and also because we’re relocating buildings at noon anyways. It’ll be like this until Monday yay. I’m excited to be in the new building and then to start taking pictures of my workspace to send to you guys. I use to have to walk/commute 20 blocks to work, which really isn’t bad at all, but after the relocation, my commute will be 5 minutes in walking distance, 5 blocks. It’s gonna be awesome. I just hope the building is nice. But until Monday, it’ll just be me at home doing some work. Oh yeah to clarify, it’s not that I was sick or anything, I’m doing ok regarding “illness.” I was just having some crazy back spasms. Lately, my lower back has been hurting a lot, to the point where I can’t move or can’t do anything for a couple seconds. I’ve tried stretching it out, cracking it, and now I’m in the process of changing some things in my diet and sleeping in a different posture to see if that’ll help. A part of me thinks that it has to do with the pain medication I took after I got my wisdom teeth removed 2 weeks ago. The doctors had me on some crazy high pain killers which I essentially needed to take because my teeth/mouth were hurting so much. Though I’ve had lower back pain in the past, it’s never been this bad, and it’s directly correlated in timeline with the surgery and taking the drugs. Please pray for me that the Lord would teach me to depend on Him and His mercy for me throughout the process of me dealing with this pain, and that if it is in will, that the Lord would bring healing in my life in this specific area. Thank you.

For Geeks/Tech nerds: Home brew is amazing. This thing straight up saves lives. I’ve used it in the past before many times, but its in this past week that I’ve come to fully appreciate and be in awe of what a wondrous creation it is. Kudos to you Max Howell kudos to you my man. You seriously make a programmer’s life so much easier. Also, you should all consider downloading Oh My Zsh [http://ohmyz.sh/] if you’re a git/term user, like everyone in the industry basically haha. It’s awesome too. My good old manager Andrew saved me from many tears of using Gitbash and other applications, by introducing this to me and I was drooling (take into note that this is because of what I work on aha. Gitbash could be fine for what you’re dealing with. Love you Gitbash ❤. No hard feelings). Consider checking it out and using it. Anyways, back to non-tech stuff.

Cool Stuff — I’m fascinated by sharks, yet at the same time, terrified of them. I think that’s so cool and amazing how you can be captivated by a concept, an image, or even a fish, yet be so terribly scared of them at the same time. I think that this is a really cool way to understand, in a small juxtaposition of how it looks to adore, yet fear the Lord. Wow, but really… I kind of I want to get an encyclopedia on sharks or something. Maybe I’ll just Wiki it instead haha.

Shark Wiki is Awesome.

[For the sake of not making this too long, I have chosen to not elaborate on this topic]

I think overall today was a very restful day. It’s nice to have days like this where I can stay home, work at home, cook my own meals, sit down in silence and just process everything that’s happening in my life. In the past few months I’ve been able to do this very frequently, not in the staying at home and chilling, but in the opportunity to just hide, take refuge and figure out my life with Jesus.

Sobering Note — It’s really great how Medium, this writing application that I’ve been using to write my stories, doesn’t keep track of how many people read your stories or whatever. It keeps my heart in check, both in arrogance and faith. The recommendations through Medium though have been very encouraging (thanks Grace Noh, Eric Huang and Liz Mo honestly) and have been reminding me that there’s purpose in the writings. Also thank you to all those who’ve messaged me via text or facebook messenger encouraging me, and even complimenting the writing that’s been produced. I’m incredibly humbled that the Lord would use hands like mine to bless you all, and hopefully many more that chose to remain silent on this issue. But yeah getting back to the topic, I love that this application doesn’t keep track of how many views the article gets or the story has. The reason why I say this is because I think I’m very prone in my fleshly nature to be drawn to having a performance driven mentality when my eyes aren’t fixed on Jesus. How many views did I get today? How many people read the blog today?

I think that its natural that you start caring about the things that you put your time and prayer into and I think that this is healthy. It show thats you care deeply about these things; however, when not stewarded well, a pandora’s box of sin, condemnation and shame can easily be opened in our hearts and minds. By stewardship, in this case I’m referring to the stewarding of our thoughts, my own thoughts, regarding the results that we see present before us in our lives in everything that we do. In my case, take this blog for instance. How easy would it be to gauge the impact or effectiveness based on the evidence I see by my own eyes, with my sight, and not by faith? 50 people read it today nice! While in another day the response might be, what? Only 2 people read it? What did I do wrong? Or maybe even, 100 people? Dang I’m getting pretty good at this. Man I’m awesome.

By grace, these haven’t been thoughts that have entered into my mind as I’ve been blogging so far, one of factors being the fact that number of readers isn’t shown, which helps by providing a healthy murkiness. This issue though is something that extends to much more intimate and personal depths of my heart than just this blog. This performance driven mentality is constantly knocking at door of my new self in Christ, and tempting me to fall back on my own talents, skills, character even, to make Jesus take a back seat to what I’m able to do. Just think about your own life, and how so much of the shame that you feel or condemnation that you throw up yourself is based on expectations that you didn’t meet. It could as simple as posting an Instagram photo and only getting 10 likes when you thought you’d get hundreds to thinking that you failed and let down your leaders, or worse, the Lord, based off of the number of people show up or explicitly tell you I was so blessed today by you. At least for many of the Asian brothers and sisters out there, this is a very big and real issue that is crippling us as believers today. When we continue to judge how far the Lord is going to take us or how effectivity he’s using us based off of what we see before us with our sight, we’re limiting, or worse, eliminating completely any room for faith in our lives.

Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. — Hebrews 11:1

For those of us who are in Christ, all things that we do must be done for the glory of God. Whether we drink, whether we eat, whether we study, whether we rest, whether we minister, whether we receive, all of it must be done to the glory of our heavenly Father (1 Corinthians 10:31). With that being said, in everything that we do, we must put the faith through prayer and hope in the promise of the Christ that what we are doing is God glorifying, and through humility, willingly submit ourselves to correction when the Holy Spirit intervenes to guide us in the way everlasting. I say all of this to explain in the best way possible that living in a manner that is based off of how much action you see or result you receive, and then receiving that as our identity will end up destroying you. I can testify to it myself, as many who know about what’s been happening in the past few years of my life can as well. Don’t live based off of how much recognition you get, how many people like your posts, how many recruiters call you back, living by sight, but rather, live by faith (Romans 5). If you have received Christ as your Savior, you know, or perhaps you don’t and this will sober you, that we are identified as sons and daughters of the Highest King (Ephesians 1). Yes we still work!, but not to perform. He’s already satisfied with you. If saved, then saved indeed. Not by works, not by merit, but by grace and grace alone, and this friends, means everything to us.

This is an issue that is very near to my heart because I struggle with this. I struggle to see that God has purposed my being here in Amazon when I see so many around me so much more competent than myself, so much more intelligent, skilled, ready. Yet I hear the words of the Father saying that through his word, he has equipped and prepared me, making me competent for every good work (2 Timothy 3:16–17). God has placed me here for a reason, even though I may not entirely see it (if you don’t know what the heck is going on by this, feel free to read the last blog post); however, even amongst a great cloud of uncertainty, I have a rock to cling on that is forever Certain.

Prayer Requests: 
Please pray for me that I would be continually able to choose a radical life of freedom and life in my new self, that being to not live off of a performance driven mentality and to walk and act in the identity as a heir to the throne of God.

Additional Comments — Please feel free to continue to recommend and write encouraging messages to me. I am by no meaning discouraging this, or even encouraging for that matter. If you feel lead by the Spirit to recommend, to message, to comment, whatever, that it’ll bless and motivate me, then please do so. I need you as the body of Christ, and even those that don’t know Jesus, to respond and communicate with me, as I am with you.

Also the last two blogs (this included) have been a bit longer due to the sharing of why I’m here in Seattle and the sharing of the gospel in this one. I’d appreciate some feedback if you think this is a good length, they should be shorter, more centered on whatever. This blog is for your sake, so please let me know what you want to be hearing regarding my adventures with Christ. Disclaimer: Everything that I do share though are things that are relevant throughout the day that the post is made and are the meditations of my heart and mind, that I think are safe to share with you.

Thank you for reading.