Japan, my heart goes out to you

My heart is heavy for Japan. A month ago today, he led me to the Japan Society during a prayer time (which I wrote about earlier) and told me that Japan was precious to him. Yet just a week ago, Japan got slammed with the largest earthquake in its history, an ensuing tsunami, now a looming nuclear disaster. What's next? Hasn't Japan suffered enough?

I look through video footage of the incredible power of the waves, tumbling over seawalls as if they were merely speed bumps and rushing inland like an army carrying away anything not tied down; pictures of the aftermath, of planes and cars and parts of houses strewn about like toys carelessly dumped from a toy box; articles the now half a million Japanese in emergency shelters...and my heart breaks for people I don't know and have zero connection to. I can't help but wonder - how much more must God's heart hurt for a nation that is so precious to him?

When I went last time to the Japan Society, I felt crushed by feelings of spiritual darkness, hunger, oppression, and hopelessness in Japan. However, some of these are now physically felt, with rolling blackouts to conserve power, food rations at some shelters amounting to about 1.5 rice balls per day, and fear of radiation poisoning leading even those who live outside the official evacuation advisory area to leave their homes.

If our God is the Creator and Master of the Universe, if he came to "provide for those who grieve in Zion -- to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair" (Isaiah 61:3), then what beauty will rise from these ashes? If what Paul wrote here is true...

¹⁸ I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. ¹⁹ The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. ²⁰ For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope ²¹ that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. ²² We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. (Romans 8:18-22)

...then there has got to be an incredible glory that is coming if it's not worth comparing to what we're experiencing now. All I know how to do at this point is pray, so Lord, let that day of glory come quickly.

On a side note - closer to home, we're currently in the middle of JapanNYC, which is a month-long celebration of Japanese culture in a variety of forms, both traditional and contemporary: art, music, literature, film, architecture, anime, etc. This was planned months ago, but now is becoming a tribute to the Japanese people, (including concerts where proceeds are now going to disaster relief) so go check it out if you can!

An experience of God's love and (physical!) healing - March 3, 2011

Last Thursday night (March 3), the four major Christian ministries on campus came together for a night of interfellowship worship and prayer. I received healing during this time, and it came on the context of what Steve Choi from Remnant Christian Fellowship spoke about regarding prayer. His primary text was Jesus’ teaching on prayer in Matthew 7:7-11, where he compares prayer to a child asking his father for food:

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

“Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!

Steve went on to explain why we don’t receive things in prayer, either because we don’t ask or because we ask with wrong motives (James 4:2-3). He illustrated these reasons in light of the example of a child asking for bread as:

1) The child who is starving but won’t ask his father for bread, even though he’s holding a huge loaf of bread

2) The child who is asking for a serpent (or some other harmful thing)

After he spoke, there was an extended time of worship and prayer, and at the very end, the worship leader invited people to come up to the front and receive prayer for healing for physical pain. It just so happened that a few days before, I mildly sprained my right ankle as I was walking, but when I heard the invitation, I assumed that he was talking to people with more serious ailments.

However, as I sat in the back and continued to pray, the worship leader repeated the invitation to come and receive healing, adding, “I know there’s someone in the back who has pain in their right ankle.” By this time, he had my full attention, but I refused to go up front, making up excuse after excuse not to:

· “That can’t be me – there has to be someone else in this room with a hurting right ankle.”

· “I’m staff. I should be on the prayer team praying FOR people, not receiving prayer.” (Oh, how very humble of me…I can't believe I actually thought that)

· “It’s such a minor injury! It’s not like I have a major disease or anything.”

· “I only hurt it 4 days ago. It already feels better, and I’m sure by tomorrow it’ll be fine!”

Yet as I continued to resist, I felt God nudging me even more strongly to go up front and ask for prayer, but I refused to budge until finally he whispered, “You are the child who doesn’t ask!” And he was right – I didn’t want to bother him or inconvenience him with what I thought were minor details in my life, and to be honest, I didn’t think I was worth his time. With this final prod, I finally went up to the front and asked one of the leaders if he had made the announcement about the ankle. He had not, but offered to pray for me anyway, so he placed his hand on my ankle and prayed, and I immediately felt physical relief!

He pointed out the leader who did make the announcement about the ankle and encouraged me to ask him to pray for me too, and so I did. As the worship leader prayed for me, he told me God wanted him to tell me, “God loves YOU! Not just the world in general, but you as an individual. It doesn’t matter what you experienced in your relationship with [a person who caused me great insecurity and doubt of God’s love] – God LOVES you!” At that, I just broke down in tears, overwhelmed by God’s goodness and reveling the fact that I -- little, insignificant me – am beloved by the Master and Creator of the Universe.

I share this story with you because the point is not “Jess got healed!” but rather “God LOOOOOOVES you, and he loves YOU!” I simply got to experience that love through the avenue of healing, and I pray that you too will be able to experience the incredible joy of that love from a Father who always gives his children bread, not stones.

Dreams, the mind, Inception, and Hindusim - Feb 25, 2011

Most Friday afternoons, I go with one or two students from CSFC to talk to people on campus about their thoughts on spirituality. This particular Friday, Wei, Diogo, and I saw a guy in saffron robes and decided ask him about his spiritual background. It turns out that he’s the Hindu chaplain on campus, and he leads a weekly Hindu discussion group on Friday evenings. This week’s discussion topic was the mind and dreams, with some clips from the movie Inception and some verses from the Bhagavad Gita (holy text). He invited us to join, so I accepted, although Wei and Diogo had prior obligations.

Through my four years and school (and 1.5 in campus ministry), I’ve never attended a discussion group outside of CSFC. However, as I observed this Hindu discussion group, I realized that it wasn’t so different from CSFC large group. Both CSFC and this discussion group gather to learn about spiritual truth. Sometimes these gatherings include food, sometimes there’s an illustration of a particular point with a movie clip, and there’s always the question of what the texts say about a particular topic and how it applies to our lives.

The discussion itself was pretty interesting, and I actually participated quite a bit, which is really uncharacteristic of me (just ask anyone who was in my Lit Hum class in college). Some food for thought:

· You can never trace the beginning of a dream, so you never know if what you’re experiencing is real or a dream until you wake up….but what if you never wake up?

· It seems that one of the ways to achieve a higher spiritual state is to learn to control your mind. However, you can’t control your subconscious, so then what?

· If our dreams are our subconscious replaying things we’ve experienced, and there’s evidence that babies (and even fetuses) may dream (ok, technically, all that was proved was that they go through REM sleep), what do babies dream about? The conclusion was that since they haven’t experienced the world yet, the most likely solution is that they dream about previous lives.

From the last point, we got into a long discussion on past lives and reincarnation, but personally by this point I was just getting frustrated because I felt that a lot of what was being said was internally inconsistent.

However, as I continued listening, I started wondering – what would it look like for a few Christians to attend this group together regularly, build relationships in this group, and have ongoing dialogue comparing perspectives? In other words (to use jargon from the Epic Movement Launching class) what would it look like for CSFC to be a missional community to other groups on campus?

I don’t know, but this experience has gotten me excited about checking out other spiritual/religious discussion groups on campus. I’m dreaming of a time when CSFC will finally stop living in its own little bubble and wait for people to come to us, but instead proactively step out into different pockets of campus.

Meeting God at the Japan Society - Feb 18, 2011

During this week’s staff meeting, Regina led us on a prayer exercise adapted from Robert Linthicum’s article, “Learning to love your city, part 2.” In this exercise, you look at a map (in our case, a Google map of the neighborhood around the office), ask God to reveal a site that is particularly precious to him, walk to the site, observe, read from the Bible, and pray.

As I looked over the map of midtown east, I felt inexplicably drawn to the Japan Society (on 47^th between 1^st and 2^nd), which I didn’t even know existed. I’ve never really been particularly interested in Japan or Japanese culture, and to be honest, I don’t even really like Japanese food that much (sometimes I can be pretty ethnocentric about my Chinese heritage). I went anyway, curious to see why the Lord had shown that to me.

When I arrived, I noticed a poster advertising their 6-month film series, with one film each month illustrating each of 6 planes of Buddhist existence, sometimes referred to as the “Six Paths” (Rokudō 六道). Half of the titles were in Japanese, but when I saw the last three (“Fires on the Plane,” “Hell,” and “Sword of Doom”), I just started crying because I felt so weighed by feelings of darkness, hopelessness, and spiritual oppression for the people of Japan. Japan summer projects, I’m praying for you guys!

It turns out that the day I went was the very last night of the film series, so I went back later that night to see the film, but they were sold out of tickets. I ended up chatting with the receptionist for a bit and picking up some brochures for upcoming events and a Japanese culture map of the city. Turns out there’s a cluster of Japanese restaurants and businesses right by our office!

I’m convinced that it wasn’t a coincidence that God led me there on that day, and clearly the point wasn’t the film itself, but perhaps a greater compassion and heart of prayer for the Japanese in NYC and abroad. Who knows? I’m looking forward to where God will take me next on this journey.