day 173: resourcefulness and our lock-in

christina and matthew slacking and taking a picture instead of working on prepping crafts... haha j/k

our power outage actually came on a relatively convenient weekend… i mean… it’s never convenient to be without electricity, but of all the weekends this summer… this was one of the better ones (of course it would’ve been even better if it happened while i’m in mexico cuz nobody would be home… my dad’s gonna be in la driving back with my older brother and my little bro and i will be in mexico).  the reason why it was a good weekend is… my little brother really wasn’t home at all this whole weekend… haha he had already planned beforehand to go to the 찜질방 on friday night, and then saturday he had a trip to six flags with the youth group during the day, and then in the afternoon/evening/night, he and i both had a lock-in with our missions team.  so saturday, i was debating whether or not i wanted to go to six flags with the yg, but decided against it… so i was just home chillin before our lock-in.  my dad and i went out to lunch together and then after lunch, he actually went out to like home depot or something and rented one of those really really really super long extension cords haha and we plugged it in to the outlet in the common area for our condo building… like… there are 4 units in our building, and there’s an outlet just outside our door, and we plugged it into there and snaked it all the way to his room and then we plugged in a power strip… and then another power strip went into that one… so we used it to power his computer, our internet modem/router, and his tv and printer and like all the electronics in his room haha and even before we rented that long extension cord, on friday, my dad had put together a bunch of power strips to plug in the stuff in the living room so we could have a light and a fan and our tv on so resourceful haha

technically, we were like… stealing electricity from our condo association cuz, but meh… desperate times call for desperate measures.  honestly, i’m a little surprised that we didn’t like blow a circuit cuz we had a LOT of stuff plugged into that one outlet haha

anyways… so while i was home for a bit on saturday, i was able to get online and watch tv  and then in the evening, i headed over to dr. song’s house where we were having our lock-in.  the lock-in was really good for the most part.  we did a lot of prepping crafts for our trip… we spent so many hours that night just sitting around cutting and punching holes and tracing haha some of the kids complained a bit… but it was a lotta work, and i was pretty proud of most of them.  we also got to practice some skits and played silent football and had some late night 라면 (one of the kids calls it 나면… and he’s in 8th grade… hahaha) and just got to chill.  going into the lock-in, i was really just hoping to be able to hang out with the kids going on the trip, and i think God’s really bringing our team together.  there were a couple of rough spots, and some of the younger boys like… did a really really sloppy job on the crafts cuz they didn’t wanna do it at all… so we’re gonna have to redo some of the stuff, but it’s ok… all a part of the process i suppose  i’m excited to see what God’s gonna do through this team this summer…

day 172: life without electricity…

geese eating at sunset

 

friday, i woke up late… around noon… and our power was out o.O  i asked my little brother what happened, and he said he didn’t know but he heard some man like working on the circuit breaker box outside and then our power went out and then the man left… so i was like… what the… maybe they messed something up… but we had no power, so no lights in the bathroom… which meant… i didn’t shower… haha i just brushed my teeth and washed my face and then i left to go tutor.  after tutoring, i went over to my 할머니’s place, cuz a week ago, she forgot to give her offering to my dad to give to the church… my grandma hasn’t been able to attend church for a while now, cuz her doctor told her that if she keeps going up and down stairs, she’s gonna have to start using a cane cuz it’s bad for her back and her knees, and at our church, there are no handicap access ramps anywhere… and you have to climb stairs to get up to the main sanctuary and then stairs down to the fellowship hall and stuff… so yeah she just listens to sermons from home, and she sends her tithe to church through my dad.  anywho… she forgot to give it to my dad when she came over last friday, so she asked me to go get it from her.  when i went to her place, she offered me some food, so i ate a little bit there, and she made some 떡보끼 for me to take home too

afterwards, i met up with connie at caribou coffee, and we chilled here for a bit… and i got a call from my dad and he told me that the power was still out… and basically… i found out that the power was out because the power company SHUT OUR POWER DOWN!  haha apparently, my dad forgot to pay the bill last month, and they sent him a notice through the mail that he never got, and so like… our account was delinquent and they just shut off the power… he called them when he got home from work and he made the payment and everything, but then they said that all their techs were off for the weekend so they weren’t gonna turn our power back on till monday or maybe even tuesday! -..- major fail… haha so my dad told me i should stay out of the house if i can haha

anyways… so connie and i had dinner at taco bell AGAIN! cuz she wanted some haha and then we went over to best buy cuz she wanted to get an itrip for her car.  we got the itrip, which works really really well, btw, so i guess you really do get what you pay for… they’re expensive, but really good quality.  and then we went to the glen to go take a walk and sit by the pond and watch the sunset.  it was nice going out there… the lake was peaceful as usual… and it was nice to go out and take pictures in nature again… feel like i haven’t really done that very much at all since i got back to chicago.  while we were out by the pond, i couldn’t help but notice that there were couples like everywhere i looked haha… not just people couples… although there were at least like 5-6 other couples we saw there… but the ducks, the geese, these swallows that nested in like… this roof structure thing on the dock, and even DRAGONFLIES haha (oh and of course for the ducks, there was like one male pimp with 3 duckettes following him around haha) so much love in the air haha

after we sat by the pond for a while, we kept walking up the path to this gazebo up on a hill, and we watched the sunset from there and took some pictures.  and while we were up there, connie wrote a little something on one of the ledges with her pen haha… vandalizing!

after the glen, i still didn’t wanna go home cuz it was gonna be hot and no ac and no tv, no internet, no light, no anything there… so we went to dunkin robbins on dempster to go chill there and get online.  we were there for a few hours when jonny called me and asked if he could take the car for the night cuz he was gonna go to the new 찜질방 that they opened in the suburbs here (well… relatively new… i think it’s been around for a few months now… maybe even close to a year?) and they were gonna spend the night there… so we packed up our stuff and drove over to pick up connie’s car from lakeview, and then to red mango where jonny was with his friends, and i gave him my car, and then we drove BACK to dunkin robbins and stayed there for another few hours and then finally went home… haha

it’s crazy how dependent we are on electricity… feel so helpless without it.  actually on friday night, when i got home… i took advantage of the time with no tv and no internet by catching up on blogging by writing out these blogs on microsoft word so i could just copy-paste later haha.  thank God it was a pretty cool, breezy night and not one of those hot, muggy ones

day 171: connipher day

connie and me on the boat with the best skyline in the world as a backdrop

the chicago skyline... sears tower on the left, trump in the center, and john hancock on the right

:)

7/8 is a bit of a special day for connie and me… 5 years ago, today, was the day we first started dating… obviously, there were some rough patches in the middle, so it hasn’t really been 5 years of us being together, but we decided to go celebrate a bit anyway.  so after she got off work, we met up and went to the train station and took the train out to the city.  we ended up taking one of the architecture boat tours through chicago.  this was wendella’s sunset tour, and the person selling the tickets at the little booth said that it stops in front of grant park’s buckingham fountain for a light show and then comes back.  it’s a 2 hour boat ride, and i was really excited to be able to see the city from the lake at sunset and to be able to catch the light show.  the sky was amazing when we got on the boat at around 7:45, so i was extra excited.

anywho, we got on and the tour was great, of course, and the city of chicago never ceases to amaze me… unfortunately, though, the sky ended up being toooooo cloudy to get a good view of the sunset actually, the clouds along the horizon were really thick and dark, so we didn’t get to see much of a sunset at all, but it was a good time with connie… and when we stopped at buckingham fountain, we were there for like a minute… and it definitely wasn’t a light show… haha we just saw the fountain from a distance and stopped there for a bit and left :\ haha but even with those light disappointments, the tour was great.  got to take some pictures with connie with the beautiful chicago skyline in the background and just got to spend a good two hours with here out on the lake  anybody who comes to visit chicago should definitely check out wendella’s boat tours cuz they’re awesome and relatively cheap.  you learn so much about chicago’s history on those tours… it’s awesome.  a couple of the new things i learned today:

• chicago is home to the 2nd largest (not tallest) building in america next to the pentagon
• there’s a whole like… neighborhood in chicago that was developed from landfill.  a man built a house on this little island-ish thing just off the coast in the lake and in order to connect that little piece of land with the rest of chicago, he asked builders who were developing on the coast to dump their garbage in the lake between his island and the shore… and he connected it and then he claimed that land as his own and said it was like… separate from chicago, because technically it was outside the jurisdiction of chicago, and he eventually sold off a bunch of that land at really high prices.  it’s one of the nicest, priciest areas in chicago now, cuz it’s right on the lakefront o.O
• there’s only one building that is east of lake shore drive in chicago
• we can thank montgomery ward for the awesome parks and greenery in chicago, because he personally fought a long, hard battle against the city of chicago with his own money to set aside parts of chicago to remain undeveloped

ok so during the boat tour, connie kept saying that she was getting bit by all these mosquitoes and she was like itching all over her arms and legs… and i kept telling her to stop scratching them, but she was like really really itchy.  anywho, towards the end of the tour, she was looking at her arms and stuff and she realized that she was breaking out in hives!  we still have no idea what she was having an allergic reaction to, but it was definitely hives, and it was like all over her arms and legs… so as soon as we got off the boat, we started heading back to the train station and we stopped at a walgreens to get her some benadryl.  i was a little torn between benadryl and cortisone (anti-itch cream), cuz it seemed like her allergic reaction wasn’t really gonna get much worse than it was… so i texted sarah chang to ask what we should do and she advised us to definitely get the benadryl and that we could get cortisone to treat the itchiness as well, but we definitely needed to get the benadryl… haha so we bought benadryl and then we kept walking a bit and then we realized we didn’t have anything to drink to take the pills, so we stopped again at another walgreens along the way to get a bottle of water and she took the medicine (i think this was only her 2nd or 3rd time taking pills ever haha thank God i forced her to learn to take pills before ).  ok so after our second stop at a walgreens, we were walking to the train station and i couldn’t remember if the train was at 10:25 or at 10:35, and we were cutting it really close to our train’s departure time… so we hurried to the station, and we made it there like 2-3 minutes before our train left  if we missed that train, we would’ve had to wait till 12:30 to take the last train that goes to the station by my house haha so it was definitely a good thing that we made it there in time.  it was extra good, cuz connie passed out on the train.  the benadryl made her really drowsy, and she was knocked out… haha to be honest… when we got back to glenview, i was a little worried about her driving home, but she made it home safely  twas another good day in the city of chicago, as always.  i’m so thankful to live here… and i’m thankful for you, conch

oh yeah, she colored a picture of spiderman for me at work today haha and she wrote me a little note on the back hahaha

day 170: blessed

not too much to write about for wednesday.  i went to college group as usual on wednesday night, and tonight we got into a discussion about what it means to be “blessed.”  the passage we read was psalm 84, and like so many other passages in scripture, it says “blessed are those who…” and “blessed is the man who…”  so naturally, that leads to the question of… what exactly does it mean to be blessed?  and furthermore, what does it mean when we sing songs like “blessed be the name of the Lord”?  does blessed mean the same thing in both contexts?  i think in christian circles, there’s a lotta “christian lingo” that just gets thrown around, like the words “blessed”, or “grace”, or even “saved”, and it’s not right for us to just go on tossing those terms around without really know what exactly we mean when we say them.  and i’m really really not pointing fingers, because i’m personally struggling through what it means when i use those words too… i mean earlier this spring, i shared on this blog that i was going through a phase where i was trying to figure out what God’s grace is all about, and on wednesday night, i was in the same boat with everyone else, struggling to figure out what it means to be blessed… anywho… i have my thoughts, and i shared some of them on wednesday night, but i wanna get some feedback from those of you who read this and see what y’all think about this whole thing.

what does it mean to be blessed?  what does it mean to bless God or to bless His name?  does blessed mean the same thing in both contexts?

please please please leave some feedback

ok so beyond the bible study, for the second week in a row, chanhan and i got paired up as prayer partners, and i really like our little talks together, and this week, we both decided that we needed to take more action as accountability partners this week, so i’ve committed this week to do my quiet time every day before i touch my computer y’all can keep me accountable to that, too!  there were some other things we talked about as well, but nothing i can share publicly haha anywho, i’m thankful for good brothers like chanhan

inception

ok so i was at dinner last night with my family and a few other families… this was actually at the same house where i was so encouraged last time about the adults’ perspective on all the church issues and how much it has changed in the past few years… anywho… while i was sitting there listening in on their conversation, i made a huge connection with the ending of the movie, inception.  if you haven’t seen it yet, this is your spoiler alert, because i’m talking about like… the very end of the movie…

anyway, so this conversation started with my dad saying that someone a few weeks back was talking about like the days when they were in elementary school… and my dad realized that that was FORTY years ago haha and how it’s so ridiculous that that much time has gone by.  and then mr. ha said that like… if you think about it… they’ve been going to church for probably almost just as long.. my dad started going to church when he was in middle school, and mr. ha is about ten years younger and he’s been going to church his whole life i think… anyway.. he’s like… yeah and during those forty years, we probably went to church about twice a week, on fridays and sundays, well really it was probably more, but let’s just say it was about twice a week… and that’s a crazy number of days spent at church… and how much have we really done?

and then he shared that it was just in this past year that he started making a lot of realizations… and one of them was that… when Jesus Christ died for us on the cross, he wasn’t doing it to save our lives… the invitation wasn’t, hey i’m going to die for you to save your life… his invitation was… i’m going to die for you… and now i’m coming after you to kill you, too.  haha yes that’s a shocker… and maybe that sounds really extreme, but wasn’t his invitation for us to die with Him?

ok so i’m gonna make a little detour so that i can make the connection with inception.  so at the end of the movie, when leo dicaprio is talking to his dead wife, and she keeps asking him to commit suicide with her, and he keeps telling her that they can’t, because of the kids, and because this is reality and she’s making a mistake… and all the while, she keeps asking him to die with her because of the idea that he planted in her mind… well, at least that’s his version of it.. at the end of the movie, everyone’s left wondering who was right… leo, or his wife?  if his wife was right, then maybe LEO had an idea incepted into his mind, saying that the life that he was living was reality even though it was a dream.  anyway… so finally here’s the connection, if you haven’t already made it yourself.. Jesus is like leo’s wife, inviting us to die with Him so that we can stop living in this false reality, but we’re like leo.  he refuses to the very end to do it, because he’s convinced that the life that he’s living is reality.  and really there’s no way to know who’s right and who’s wrong until you take the plunge… if he jumps off that hotel ledge with his wife and she was wrong, then they’re both dead for nothing.  if he jumps off and she was right, then they return to reality.  in the same way, with our faith, we have to take the plunge.  we can never be completely sure if we’re right or wrong until we jump head first and commit to following Christ completely.  and satan incepts that idea into our minds, convincing us that THIS life is the one that’s important… this is all of reality, and that we need to live for the here and now.  but the good news here… and the big difference in this comparison, is that leo and his wife were peers.  they both had the same information and therefore, one theory was just as good as the other.  in our relationship with christ, though, He’s GOD!  haha He knows everything.  of course believing that also requires faith, but if we claim to believe that He is truly the one and only God, then the decision to follow Him wherever He leads us should be a simple one.

He died, so that we can follow Him in his death.  it’s not that He died and now we can live a happier life… He died, and if we follow Him, we will die, too, and therefore… this life is not the one that all of our hope hangs on… that’s why even when everything in our lives falls apart, we can still have that hope!  because the hope is not in something in this world.  we’ve already died to this world if we’re real followers of Christ.  so yes, we might be happier in the midst of all of the chaos in our lives, but that wasn’t the end goal… it’s just a side effect of being a believer.

ok i’m in a bit of a time crunch, and i just woke up like 45 minutes ago, so i’m still a little groggy… but i hope this all made sense… i’ll probably read it over again later to day and make some edits if i need to…

Jesus is inviting every one of us to die with Him TODAY… are you willing to take the dive?  i need to be reminded of that every day… so many days go by with me mindlessly going through the motions… but 30 years from now, i don’t wanna look back and feel like i should’ve done more and taken advantage of more of the opportunities that i had.  the difference between us and the forefathers of our faith, like abraham and david and isaac is not that they were awesome, upright people and therefore God was able to use them in greater ways than he uses us… they were just as messed up as we are… they were just more willing to obey when Jesus called on them…