Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith

Read more about it in this Time Magazine article. Even "saints" are humans. I really like the conclusion of this article.

Consistent with her ongoing fight against pride, Teresa's rationale for suppressing her personal correspondence was "I want the work to remain only His." If the letters became public, she explained to Picachy, "people will think more of me — less of Jesus."

The particularly holy are no less prone than the rest of us to misjudge the workings of history — or, if you will, of God's providence. Teresa considered the perceived absence of God in her life as her most shameful secret but eventually learned that it could be seen as a gift abetting her calling. If her worries about publicizing it also turn out to be misplaced — if a book of hasty, troubled notes turns out to ease the spiritual road of thousands of fellow believers, there would be no shame in having been wrong — but happily, even wonderfully wrong — twice.

I can't help thinking if her first vision is too "grand" that she missed all the more subtle signs God showed her along her life. As I have repeatedly said before in this blog, I do believe God shows Himself most of the time through boring things in our lives.

I am sure most of us have been through these darkest hours before. Here's another saint's take on this.

CGST TEE course (Autumn)

The course list for the coming autumn is available.

I'm thinking about the Book of Daniel... What about you?

(Initially I intended to stop taking the course for a while coz I've really got too much to do, but Daniel seemed very interesting, I have always wanted to know the meaning of the latter part of that book...)

P.S. I just realised it's a Sat AFTERNOON course... that means I cannot attend fellowship... ARGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Tao Fong Shan and my first Labyrinth experience

We went to a retreat camp last weekend. I am sure many Christians in Hong Kong knew about this place-- Tao Fong Shan, I have been there several times before but I have never stayed there at night.

For those of you who didn't know, it's a place where they tried to merge Chinese culture with Christianity. For example, this church was built in a Chinese style.





And there's also a meditation room. Quite Catholic in style, I like it. With candles and Jesus was carved on the cross.



And a huge cross





And this is the "narrow path" leading to the "narrow gate"





The most special thing I tried this time is the labyrinth-- a tool for meditation. (For more info in Chinese from the Tao Fong website. This link from the Grace Cathedral got much more info tho!)



I realised during my walk through the labyrinth, one needs to walk away from the centre before one can get to the centre. We often pursue our goals singlemindedly, but the fact is we often need to let go and do whatever God wants instead of rushing to grab what we want. When I arrived at the centre, I realised it's so bare, I like the periphery more. =) All the more reason to let go and let God do whatever He wants with us.

Of course, all of us have different feelings after the meditation. You can try it here online!! I think physically walking is a much more interesting experience. :)

For more about the facilities, check this out.

Working the Angles

Just read a review on this book. (I haven't read this book, but I have read Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work, it's a pretty good book, so I think it'll probably be a good one.) From the introduction of Working the Angles written by Eugene Peterson:

American pastors are abandoning their posts, left and right, and at an alarming rate. They are not leaving their churches and getting other jobs. Congregations still pay their salaries. Their names remain on the church stationary and they continue to appear in pulpits on Sundays. But they are abandoning their posts, their calling. They have gone whoring after other gods. What they do with their time under the guise of pastoral ministry hasn’t the remotest connection with what the church’s pastors have done for most of twenty centuries.

A few of us are angry about it. We are angry because we have been deserted…. It is bitterly disappointing to enter a room full of people whom you have every reason to expect share the quest and commitments of pastoral work and find within ten minutes that they most definitely do not. They talk of images and statistics. They drop names. They discuss influence and status. Matters of God and the soul and Scripture are not grist for their mills.

The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shopkeepers, and the shops they keep are churches. They are preoccupied with shopkeeper’s concerns–how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that the customers will lay out more money.

Some of them are very good shopkeepers. They attract a lot of customers, pull in great sums of money, develop splendid reputations. Yet it is still shopkeeping; religious shopkeeping, to be sure, but shopkeeping all the same. The marketing strategies of the fast-food franchise occupy the waking minds of these entrepreneurs; while asleep they dream of the kind of success that will get the attention of journalists.

The biblical fact is that there are no successful churches. There are, instead, communities of sinners, gathered before God week after week in towns and villages all over the world. The Holy Spirit gathers them and does his work in them. In these communities of sinners, one of the sinners is called pastor and given a designated responsibility in the community. The pastor’s responsibility is to keep the community attentive to God. It is this responsibility that is being abandoned in spades.

How true this is. This is NOT just happening in the States, also in Hong Kong. sigh... I have once heard someone said, "you want to go an find the perfect church, the minute you go into that church, it's no longer perfect, coz you're imperfect."

This is just so sad when pastors stop doing their jobs.

Cape Refuge

I have never been able to finish any Christian novel before. Well, I have only tried reading "Left Behind" before. I had pretty high hopes for Cape Refuge coz its reviews on Amazon are quite good. And Terri Blackstock was a a best-selling writer before she was called to write Christian fiction.

I am sorry to say it's a big disappointment for me. I don't like mystery a lot, but even I can guess who the killer was from the start... and it's so obviously being written to preach a certain message, and I think that IS a poor way of trying to convey a message across. One should do it in more subtle ways to make a story enjoyable.

And the story is far from enjoyable. I had to flip through the second half of the book to finish it. I can't believe Blackstock was a bestselling writer before, coz she wrote badly now... hmm... tho she's writing for a different genre now.

Whereas Diana Gabaldon (my favourite writer, a devout Catholic) wrote historical fiction, but you can see Christian messages everywhere in her book. An example of it can be found in one of my previous posts.

When is there going to be some good Christian novels??!!
(Sorry for any grammatical error, it's 4:30am)

My Jesus I Love Thee

Doulos

The ship will visit Hongkong during 11/9-7/10 at the Harbour City at TST.

All tickets will be available on 18/8 at 基道書樓／中信書室／循道衛理書室／怡樂坊．

For more information, pls check this out.

Why the godly guys aren't hot, and the hot guys aren't godly

Just read this interesting explanation on this topic. While I agree with the above statement, I don't think this is a problem for most Christian guys, I don't think they're so "pure" that they don't know how to pursue a girl, but I've never seen any hot godly guys, have you?

one day, the Christian boy feels physical attraction to a girl, and since nobody has delimited where physical attraction ends and where sinful lust begins, the whole thing is tainted with guilt. He sees no way he can express attraction or flirt with a “sister” with “absolute purity.”...He’s been convinced that flirting and dating are “sinful” or “manipulative,” and is embarrassed before himself that he even has physical attractions, ’cause all he’s ever been told is that character and godliness are all important in a mate. (Christian authors and preachers often won’t even acknowledge the aspect of physical attraction which initiates virtually all pursuits.)

So what often happens next is that the godly Christian guy goes to the Christian book store for help (I’m telling you, just about all of my friends have done this, and all of them are still single)–because God knows his dad is never going to teach him how to flirt, to read body language, or to practice proper dating etiquette, and what he finds is that all the books in the Christian book store on relationships only talk about the morals (in other words, more accusations of wrongdoing and wrong feelings), and not the mechanics of winning a girl’s heart. And God knows there aren’t any sanctified men’s magazines; while attempting to learn about style, grooming, fitness, and how to approach women from such a magazine, the reader is bombarded with images of bikini clad women, raunchy articles about sexual practices, and fixations on material wealth and worldly lusts. (Blessed is he who does not take the counsel of the ungodly. . .)

Missionaries from Korea overzealous??

Two of the Korean hostages have been released by Taliban yesterday. Since their kidnapping, their careless disregard of their own safety has been criticised by many. This article discussed whether their approach is overzealous. This is an excerpt.

South Korea had over 16,000 evangelical missionaries abroad as of the end of 2006, the second biggest source of missionaries after the United States.

Korean Christians are passionate evangelists, but what they don't have is a careful, reasoned strategy, insiders say. Since Christianity entered Korea 100 years ago this year through Pyongyang, now the North Korean capital, the number of churches in Korea has mushroomed as have the number of missionaries. But their inexperience often left them ill-prepared and ignorant of rules and pra ctices in regions where proselytizing is prohibited by law, they said.

The captives, mostly in their 20s and 30s from Saemmul Community Church just south of Seoul, overlooked many critical points that might have saved them from their ordeal, government officials said. The volunteers were on a 10-day good-will aid trip to Afghanistan during their summer vacations, They did not report to the local police when traveling from Kabul to Kandahar, the former stronghold of the Taliban where security is a problem. Their bus was of a type that the locals knew would be used for foreigners. In addition, they ignored warnings from the Foreign Ministry and National Intelligence Service that they would be in danger in the war-ripped region...

"Korean missionaries have strong emotional fervor but they are weak in strategy," he said. "Missionary work is about humbling ourselves, listening to what locals say, what other missionaries there say ... We use the term 'spiritual war' but that doesn't mean we wage war against local residents. We cannot be combative delivering God's words."...

"If they identify themselves as Christians, put on a placard that says they are from a church, they're making themselves perfect targets of terror attacks... If they are good, they naturally draw people. We can't say, 'Believe in Jesus or go to hell'," Kim said.

Like many others, the Yoido church sends out full-time missionaries, mostly professionals like doctors or engineers, to Afghanistan and other Islamic countries, but they operate in a subtle way, he said. He said they never put on a religious label but try to mingle with locals as "good neighbors." The Yoido church has 600 full-time missionaries in 55 countries and sends out about 1,500 short-term missionaries every summer for a week or two.

He said it's a "top secret" how many missionaries it has now in Afghanistan for security reasons.
Still, aggressive evangelism is a key practice of many Korean churches, which believe their current prosperity flows from the work of Western missionaries who came here during Japan's colonial rule or the Korean War. The believe they should emulate and pay back those missionaries, some of whom were martyred, through service to third world countries...

"It's a theological question whether aggressive proselytizing is right or wrong. Many say that Christians should try more to understand and sympathize with locals rather than to convert them, but it's not easy to say aggressive evangelism is wrong because that's a fundamental denial of what the decree says," he said, "But we will have a big debate about this. That's for sure."

God said we should be brave, not foolish. Martyrs should only die because they have to, NOT because they want to or mistakes that can be easily corrected.

I did not pray for their release, (I am not sure if that is God's will, how will God sort out this problem humans created?), I just prayed for their peace even when they are being held captive.

1st Anniversary Really!

Today is really the first anniversary of my spiritual journal, and I just briefly glanced through my blog again to see how God talked to me in the past year, here are some selected posts...

Walking with God
Saul vs David
Andrew
Reflections on Christianity and Christians
Offering and Sin (Sermon 10/9/06)
Thoughts on Sermon 8/10/06 (Matthew 22:36-40)
Pistos ho Kalon
Tired of being "good"
What is a good spiritual life??
Trust
REVIVAL - What I have learnt in the retreat camp (on Mark chapter 9) Part 1
What I learnt in the retreat camp on Mark 9 (Part 3)
Continuing on the journey with Jacob
Joshua 3:1-5 Sermon
Church problems
Offer yourself as a Living Sacrifice
The ark of convenant (1 Chronicles 13) & David
Letters from Leavers
What's so Amazing about Evangelicals?
Francis Beckwith
Forgiveness again...