|
Tmblweed
|
read my profile
sign my guestbook
Name: Jason
Country: United States
State: California
Birthday: 12/27/1980
Gender: Male
Interests: sleeping, eating, serving God through church activities, going to Thailand for short-term or mid-term missions
Expertise: math (haha...yeah, right...)
Occupation: R&D for Kumon
Industry: Education/Research
Message: message meEmail: email me
AIM:  Tmblweed89
ICQ:  17415851
Member Since:
2/21/2003
 True
|
|
| So I got pulled into a mini-meeting today.
Well, not really.
More like an ambush.
One of our company VP's cornered me and dragged me (seriously...he took me by the hand and pulled me into a corner) and brought me to where my former boss and her boss were sitting. He sits me down and was like, "We REALLY want you to move here to the headquarters."
<sigh> I learned a long time ago to never say an outright No to anything, because who knows what will open up.
At the same time, the manager of our SF office has been asking me to move to their office and join their team and change roles, so that I'm overseeing about 15 - 20 Kumon centers in the San Jose/Milpitas/Cupertino/South Bay area.
I dunno. If my parents weren't in Cali, I wouldn't mind relocating here to New Jersey.
Or if I wasn't serving at GAP at church, I wouldn't mind moving back to the Bay Area.
But they are.
And I am. And I like it.
But how many other times like this will there be, career-wise? And would I be a fool for passing up an opportunity like this?
<sigh>
| | |
| hehehe...haven't touched xanga for 3 months. Sorry about that y'all. 
I just haven't blogged a lot recently. Not that there's nothing on my mind. It's more like there's SOOOO much on my mind that I don't even know where to start.
Job-wise, the SF office is pleading for me to move there, as well as my old boss who relocated to our headquarters in New Jersey.
Church-wise, there's so many changes going on in our church that I don't even know where to start.
Ministry-wise, I'm losing a really dear fellows ministry leader, since he'll be moving out of town because of his job.
On the up-side, I'm traveling a lot recently. Went to Chicago last week.
And I touched down in New Jersey about 6 hours ago!
Hm, maybe I should go into the city tomorrow night. I've never actually gone into NYC before...
Going back home to SJ for a business trip next week.
Flying back and then flying up to SF the week after.
Okay, it's about 12:30AM right now. I should go to sleep so that I can wake up and still do my devotions and get up in time for work tomorrow at 8:30AM...which is 5:30AM Cali time...
hehehehe...
xanga, my old buddy, I've missed you. hehe. 
| | |
| I have a 7AM flight tomorrow. I should be asleep. But it's 10:30PM, a little under 3 hours earlier than my normal sleeping time. Bah. I can't sleep.
So, I shall blog. hehehe...
Around 2 years ago, God called Pastor Jeff to leave Chinese Bible Church move to Atlanta.
Around 1 year ago, our landlords changed our service time to 1:30PM
In the past few days, our church has crossed the $1 Million mark and will proceed to buy our new property.
In about 2 weeks, another significant church-related announcement will come out. (Nothing about me!)
I also know that:
Chinese Baptist Church is in the middle of raising money and filing permits to do a massive church reconstruction.
And in about 6 months, Pastor Terrence will be stepping down
15 years ago, when I was 14 years old:
The English pastor from my home church stepped down. To be fair, it's much better than CBibleC or CBaptistC's situation. The English pastor and our Church Board had sooo many problems.
He resigned after a meeting of the church leadership members were called. I remember that it was in the middle of the week. Once word started spreading from phone to phone, it was like a tiny tsunami wave. Unfortunately, a significant amount of people in the English congregation had already been agreeing with the English pastor, so they left, also. Some went with him; others couldn't stand the church politics and went to other churches.
Within the next few months, most of our youth group leaders left, as well.
And there was me and my class. We had just joined CIA only about 1 - 2 years earlier. And this bombshell hit.
So the church board scrambled. They hired a new pastor extremely fast. And (unfairly to him, in my opinion), they also told him that he had to lead the youth group until a new director of youth ministries could be found.
Within the period of the next 2 to 3 years, my class shrunk from around 10, to around 2 - 3. I don't think that it was because of who the new pastor was. I think it was because most of my classmates felt abandoned by the leaders. To be fair, I don't fault anybody for it; I think that it's a completely valid reason to change churches, if you feel like you're not spiritually growing. But the people in my class still felt abandoned.
Around 8 years ago, when I was around 20 years old:
Yup, you got it:
Same cycle happened.
Over time, there had been conflict building up between the (new) English pastor and the Board. And they went their separate ways. Fortunately, a youth minister had already been hired in the English side, so the current youth at that time had someone to watch over them, and they didn't have to go through what I went through.
What makes CBibleC's and CBaptistC's situations different from my home church is that unlike my home church, I don't think there's any malicious intent or any disagreements or any arguments. For both CBC's, it's like God is calling people to do different things, and there is general consensus and agreement.
That's an awesome blessing.
But that doesn't mean that it's easy to go through.
It wasn't easy when Pastor Jeff left. It won't be easy when Pastor leaves.
This past Sunday after church, I hung out with a brother from church. We talked from around 3:30PM all the way until the sun started going down, almost 4 hours in total. We talked about the church's past, the church's present, and the church's future. We talked about specific people and named names and talked about their spiritual walks.
And then we started talking about how we could encourage the ones who were getting disappointed.
We started talking about hanging out with the new ones who had recently started coming.
We started talking about praying for those who we could see God beginning to raise them up as leaders.
We started talking about being an influence for those who we knew could only stay here for a few months.
And we couldn't stop talking. We started seeing how God was moving in each one of their lives. We laughed and remembered how they used to be, and we marveled and proudly smiled at where they are now. We laughed and remembered how we used to be! We talked about those with whom we may have a different opinion with, but we smiled and knew that in the end, we're still the same family.
I went home that night with a smile. A really big one. One that I haven't felt for a very long time.
See, it doesn't matter who comes and who goes.
It only matters if we've reached out to them and they know that we care. Even if they're here only for the summer or only for a year.
Because, unlike the situations in my home church, I've known for a long time that God's behind all these changes happening at the CBC's.
I may disagree with some of the day-to-day decisions made at both churches, but I know that God is behind all of this.
And even with very strong and passionate disagreements, I know that the unity is still being maintained within both churches.
.
That's why I smile. =)
| | |
| For the longest time, people have been telling me that Lost and 24 are great series to watch.
So I purposely don't watch them. Because if they're really, really good, then I know that I'll get really, really addicted. But considering that Lost is coming up on its final season, I figure that now's a good time to start watching it. So I'm borrowing the past 5 seasons from a friend (I'm still on the 1st season), and in the beginning, it was dragging. But last night, it got REALLY good. (If you watch Lost, it was the episode where Ethan shows up.) So I'm really happy that even in the 1st season, it's at least starting to get catchy.
So, on my Facebook, I change my status to:
starting watching "Lost" from Season 1. Noooooo...the addiction is startinggg!!!
And one by one, my friends start commenting. For example, Egan writes: I liked season 1. Stuff like that.
And then, the epic fail happens:
Me: Does it get better through the different seasons?
Egan: IMO, it got dumber...
Annie: aint u supposed to be @ work?
Ping Ping: i m lost when i m watching lost
***** : I love LOST!! I wonder what happened after the island exploded! Were they all reset to the beginning??
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 
| | |
| Sorry, it's been about a month since I've wrote a quality entry. But there's been a reason behind this. I've purposely haven't made any comment about the church building, until the official decision came out, because...
...honestly, I'm not the biggest supporter of the idea.
And I never was.
There. I said it.
But I don't care. I really don't. Even though I'm not enthusiastic about the idea, it's not like I'm going to go around bad-mouthing the idea or trying to cause trouble about it. In fact, I purposely decided not to write anything until the official decision came out, because I want to respect the decision of our church leaders.
But you have know why I don't really care either way.
And for you to know that, you have to know why I'm dead-tired exhausted now and feel like I'm about to puke or faint, while I write this:
Around 8:45PM last night, I got word that this 72-year-old guy from church had been sent to the ER, because of "spots" seen on his CAT scan earlier that morning, and the doctors had thought that it could be another tumor. A few of us from my fellowship as well as the English Congregation hustled down to the ER.
I didn't get home until 4AM.
He's got no family. A 72-year-old man all by himself. No wife, no kids. His parents have long passed away. One brother died 2 years ago. Another lives in Alaska. His cousin drove over from Mar Vista, but they're not extremely close. So, he's all by himself.
But as we hung around in his small hospital room from around 9PM until 2AM, we talked so much. The 5 of us (including his cousin) were cracking jokes and telling stories. He talked about him being a football coach, a teacher, about being on the Czech border, almost being sent to fight the Germans. He talked about the first time he saw me and thought to himself, "He's like the Pillsbury Doughboy!" (to which I almost started crying! hahahaha...) We talked about church and we wondered about the future of the congregation. Cindy talked about her boyfriend and how he's traveling to different countries to support missionaries through his gift of photography. I talked about Kumon (hahahahahaha....no surprise there!)....
At 4AM, I was soooooo tired. I'm sure we all were! (And I still am! hehe...)
But this is what fellowship really is: It's being there for people, especially in the worst of times.
This is going to sound conceited, but in reality, it almost broke my heart:
Throughout the night, he kept thanking us over and over. He said, "I've been to hospitals for so many years now. I usually go by myself; I come by myself, and I leave by myself. I'm so used to it, and it's no big deal. This is the first time that I've had so many people come and care about me!!"
It broke my heart because I thought to myself, "How long has it been that we've barely seen him, even though he's come to church so many times? How heart-breaking and personally convicting it is to see this 72-year-old man's eyes light up even at 3AM because this is the first time that he's seen people want to be with him and he won't stop laughing and grinning and joking?"
And that's what hit me the most:
Honestly, I don't care about getting a new church building right away.
I don't even care about getting a new English pastor right away.
How sad it would be if we got a new building and got a new pastor, but in the pursuit of those two things, we had lost focus about the people?
Right before the VBS graduation last year, I was very upset with the GAP teens who were helping out with VBS. The older AWANA/VBS kids were going absolutely crazy and were ticking off the teens. And I'm not saying that I wasn't sympathetic to the GAP teens for getting upset at the AWANA kids. After all, the kids were going absolutely crazy.
But what hurt the most is that in the pursuit to "be efficient" or to "have order," it was easy for us to overlook the needs of the kids. We saw them as "kids who should listen & obey" instead of "kids that we want to get to know more and walk alongside them instead of above them" (To be fair to the GAP teens, I acted the same way they did at their age...heh...) And it showed. Instead of lecturing them, we yelled at them. Instead of patiently pointing out their wrong, we vented at them.
We put circumstances over the people.
If the new building is a good move, then I'm cool with that.
If the new building isn't a good move, I'm cool with that, as well.
If it takes us two weeks to find an English pastor, I'm cool with that.
If it takes us another two years to find an English pastor, I'm cool with that, as well.
I don't care about circumstances anymore. They're utterly unimportant.
It's the people.
And it's especially those who are the loneliest, those who are the the saddest, those who are the ones that nobody would naturally want to hang around with.
| | |
|
