The Constant Wanderer

As I lay there on the sterile sheets covering the narrow hospital bed, an old man on my right moans in pain and mumbles nonsensical words to himself. "He's probably delirious," I thought to myself. It has been more than twenty years since my last emergency room visit, and fortunately this time around my dad didn't have rush me through the doors with a blood drenched cloth over my face. Still waiting for the anesthesia to kick in, I look to my left and see a faint outline of a severely swollen foot through the privacy screen. The man and his wife are speaking in a foreign tongue, I can understand nothing but I sense that she is deeply concerned for his welfare ... how sweet. The female doctor walks to them with X-rays in hand, probably still trying to figure out what to say. They talk at length about the broken bone while I wonder how much longer before it is my turn. The bleeding has mostly stopped by now, but I am still holding onto a stained towel just in case ...

Some of you have asked me what we finally decided to name my discussion group . So here's your answer, we named it "Sunny Delight." It was a great struggle to find a name as witty and corny as the previous name , but alas we located a suitable name just in time. (Keep in mind that this is a collegian cell group, so the lameness is still allowed!) WHY? That's a great question. Let's take a look at Revelations 22:5. Here John describes New Jerusalem by saying, "And there will no longer be any night; and they will not have need of the light of a lamp nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God will illumine them ; and they will reign forever and ever." So in short, we want to be a group that delights in the light of the Lord. And to top it off, Sunny Delight has a great slogan, "Unleash the Power of the Sun." Since we love to be such witty wordsmiths, we're going to adopt it with "Unleash the Power of the Son" instead. Sonny...

For the past week I've been thinking up names for a discussion group I lead at church. Our cell group has a water theme, so for this new quarter, all the groups are supposed to have their names be a drink of some kind. After the first brain storming session, some witty person in the group came up with the name HOT TEA while saying, "Ooo and if you say it really quickly, it'll sound like hottie . Then each week when we split up someone will have say "All the hotties go into that room"" (I don't exactly know why, but the combination of corniness and wittiness made it a genius idea). Sadly, that name was rejected by executive order. Supposedly it's not Christ-centered, and that the older and more conservative folks in the church would not think it is appropriate. Way to take all the fun out of life ... Grrrr. To appease the first objection, I made up this acronym: Christ is H oly O minipotent T ranscendent T riune E verlasting A lmighty Pret...

One of my gripes about living in the Far East is the lack of moral integrity in the population. It happens in every stratus of the society: from bribing local government official to paying kickback fees to get through all the bureaucratic red tape. Everyone is so focused on accomplishing what they set out to do (making money or getting a good grade) that they simply ignore their Jiminy Cricket . Since China has such a large population and a small number of accredited universities, the competition for academic excellence is huge, and many students resort to cheating to get an advantage over their peers. What's even more depressing is that a lot of times the professors actually encourage the students to cheat, since good test grades by students somehow correlate to the fact that they were taught by a good professor. This is all very unsettling ... go read this article .

I love the discovery channel. We can learn so much about human interaction by studying animal behavior. Take lions for example, male lions urinate all over the savanna to mark their territory so other males wouldn't intrude into his controlling land. I'm sure I've seen people do that ... well, not urinate all over the place, but you know what I mean. So I was reading this article this morning about scientists pinpointing specific events that stress out baboons. I would like to post some excerpts from the article here so we can all learn from our furry friends. "In one case, an adult female, her adult daughter and a sister all attempted to usurp the power of another unit. After a week of fighting and high stress, the lower-ranked group gave up. In the second period of observed instability, an adult female named Cat ran off with a high-ranked male for several days. When she returned, a "Cat-fight" ensued with the other females. The fights not only lowere...

My gangster friend alerted me of a very interesting news story about teens and hugging . Basically, the story goes that some school districts are trying to ban students from hugging each other because hugging has become such a phenomenon in schools. And of course, students are fighting back by insisting their right to hug. If you have a couple spare minutes, you should definitely read the article. Kids are just strange these days, I don't remember people excessively hugging each other when I was in school, what's up with that?!? When I was in high school, we hugged each other from time to time, but never when we're just passing by each other in the hallway. I'm all for hugs, but this just seems a bit over the board, especially when they have all these names for different hugging styles: exponential hug, drive-by hug, true friend hug, fantastic news hug, grandma hug .... etc. When I went to college, all the hugging stopped. For some reason guys and girls got the i...

I am not a stalker. Really, I'm not. But I do enjoy people watching. I believe that everyone has an interesting life story. Sometimes the story is filled with blessings, sometimes they are marred by tragedy. But whatever the case may be, everyone has a story they want to tell you. It's amazing how much you can learn about somebody with just careful observation. I love how you can paint a creative picture of a person's life by looking at the clothes they wear, by watching they way they walk - every stride and gait tells a different story, by listening to how they talk, by noting their mannerisms, and if you're brave enough, by staring deeply into their eyes for a glimpse of their soul. When I was in East Asia, every now and then I would ride my bike to a busy shopping area, buy a cup of pearl milk tea, find some clean steps and just sit and watch people. It's something that I needed to do when I have a case of compassion fatigue. When your life is basically shar...

I don't know why, but I just spent the last 2 minutes staring at my computer screen watching this amusing video of a kitten playing with a laptop. This all makes me think that I am in desperate need a pet ... or at least some type of cute creature that will follow me around and be my minion. Now that I think about it, most evil characters in movies have their own little sidekick. Jafar from Aladdin has that annoying parrot, Scar from Lion King has those ugly hyenas, and Dr. Evil has mini-me. It's too bad that I'm not evil, it would've been cool to get an evil gremlin or a vicious goblin to do my dirty work ... like doing my laundry and parking my car. Oh well, I'm definitely in need of a pet ...

The weather these past couple weeks reminded me of Ithaca and Seattle weather. It's like Ithaca weather because it's perpetually cloudy and deprived of sun; it builds that gloomy and dreary atmosphere, driving people depressed to the point of suicide (FYI - Cornell does not have the highest suicide rate in the nation)! It's also like Seattle weather because it's always misty in the morning and it rains at least a little bit each day. The last leg of the car ride coming back from Kentucky featured one of the most exciting and frightening display of nature's raw power I've ever seen. We hit a gigantic thunderstorm system that covered the entire state of Pennsylvania. It was lightning and thundering every second and it started hailing somewhere in the middle. I simply can't describe in words how crazy it was, I wish you were there to see it. While struggling hard to see the road two feet in front of the van, I wondered if God was talking to me in thunder . ...

Over the memorial day weekend a bunch of my church friends and I went to the New Attitude Conference in Louisville Kentucky. Believe it or not, the seven of us drove 12/14 hours there in a minivan! Don't ask me why we did that ... maybe it was to save money, maybe we wanted to bond with each another through suffering, maybe we were just messed up in the brain ... but fortunately we made it there and back in one piece. Even the van had a blast, after the first 200 miles it developed a much more powerful "VvvvrrrrooOOOM" sound when you press on the gas pedal, I guess it was getting excited for the trip as much as we were. I have a lot of thoughts about the conference, but I'm not going to try to spill it out here. To give you a little taste of what it was like, the catch phrase of the conference was "Like the wheel, the Truth never changes." If you really want to know what that means, go here and embrace the humble orthodoxy . Very simply, it is a confe...