my korean side

i once took a "how asian are you" test online. i am all white, however, according to the test i am 36% asian, this was 2% higher than my all chinese friend jamie wong.

my mother-in-law was in town for three weeks, she flew in from korea to meet beniah for the first time. this was great, its nice when you enjoy your in-laws.

julie is an amazing cook.

she is also a wonderful halmany (grandmother), even a better grandmother than cook, which is hard to imagine.

i learned a few things from her last trip a year and a half ago, she shows her love through gifts. i know you might think i'm crazy, but this was a hard one for me to swallow, my family has never been huge into gift giving. i was much better at receiving this time around. also, i can expect something in my house to be redecorated every time i come home from work. again, wasn't easy for me the first time, but i have done a better job realizing that she just wants to do nice things and is that so bad?

along with julie, came yumi and suki. yumi is my new sister-in-law who i have never met before and suki is paul and yumi's dog. paul is in kuwait, soon to be iraq and yumi is back to korea to finish up her visa/green card/residency stuff...which means we get suki for the mean time!

yumi (above) loves nature, it amazed me how many things she has in common with paul, because paul is a pretty unique cat. i think they make a good pair.

suki demands attention, but a very sweet dog and we are happy to have her.

driscoll

i am quickly becoming a mark driscoll fan. i heard about him the first time a couple years ago and much more recently as i have been attending revolution because my pastor is clearly a big fan. mark sums up theology in an eloquent way that i feel people would be stretching (a lot) to argue with, yet people do.

check this link out for a quick light-hearted discussion about sex with comedian d.l. hughley and please if you have an hour get a load of this interview where mark discusses a number of great topics such as parenthood, church planting, missions, the gospel, alcohol, homosexuality, state schools and more. obviously each topic is addressed only briefly, but i love it when people can express what i believe, only more eloquently than i can.

how does God change the world?

you will have to come to revolution saturday to find out

c u @ 5!

church, the way it should be

since i visited the church i grew up in over christmas i have been thinking about church a lot. i remember why i never invited my friends to attend with me. it was not a place that would be relevant to their lives. church should be a place you can be proud to bring your friends.

my church has gone through some major overhauls and relaunched as revolution about five months ago. it was shaky at first, there was a point where only 11 people were in the service. God is moving, not to say the only way to gauge how God works is through numbers, but for numbers people like me it has been nice to see our growth pushing 80 over the last few weeks.

about a year ago my wife asked me why we were still in tucson, it took me off guard, but as i thought it came to me that the reason we are here may be revolution. since then, i have been asked to preach three times(the third is coming next week on valentines day, i will speak on jonah 3...see above graphic). i have also joined the elder board.

as i have been thinking about church i have realized how blessed i am to be apart of a church that is both challenging to the seasoned christian while presents the gospel in a way that is relevant to the first time chruch attender. a church that calls us to live out our faith and bring people back to Jesus. revolution, in my opinion is church the way it should be.

reality check

lately i have realized that we, as a culture, seem to be afraid of reality. we try to escape the realities of our life and what we have handed to us and instead long to be like someone else, buy things we can't afford, or use mind altering substances to forget. we are constantly focusing on what we want--instead of what we have.

a couple different things brought this up in my mind. i heard recently by a couple different people that the small intestine actually absorbs more alcohol into your body and some people actually inject alcohol through their anus as a means to get drunk. now, that doesn't sound like any fun to me, (both the intoxication and injecting though anus) but again, it's a way to escape reality.

i'm also stunned by the average amount of debt an american has. in 2004 43% of ameican families spend more than they earn and an average american household carries $8,000 in credit card debt (that does not include student loan debt). as we all know, this is huge. we know that as a country we have spent way more than we can afford and we have only begun to pay for our mistakes. but i worry what lesson will come of this. we need to not only be more accountable and live within our means, but we also to face reality.

what is it about ourselves that we are so afraid of? why do people scrap by only to use the little paycheck they just cashed for mind altering substances? why do we want to have the newest and greatest thing? why has our identity become what we own instead of who we are at the core?

i am by no means saying that i am not guilty of escaping reality. i just realized what an epidemic it is.