but i was surprised to realize most of them were Christians…but as i read more, i realized they were pretty cold, hard Christians, and sexists to boot.

it led me to write that last poem, “IQ.” and i couldn’t help but leave two posts on the blog where they were making fun of feminists (and perhaps women in general?), the second one being:

“i am just going to make one more post because i do not want to be pulled into a debate, but for those of you who posted scripture about Jesus ranting at the Pharisees, do you even realize why Jesus disagreed (and disagreed is a faint word for what he felt) with the Pharisees?

It was because they were prideful and full of themselves, and He saw how they loved themselves and their own righteousness…He knew they did not love others, and especially not “sinners”…and they questioned Jesus himself and disrespected Jesus because Jesus ate with sinners

it’s simple, you can pull and distort scripture all you want to back up your belief that you can sit there and judge and insult sinners or those less enlightened than yourself, but the greatest commandment is to love God, and the second greatest is to love each other…and yes, scripture also says to not judge, but to love

you pull people into the kingdom with your heart, not by using your intellect and judgements as a blunt weapon…pray, ask God to teach you how to use your heart as grandly as you use your mind”

theinterviewwithgod.com

Click on “View Presentation”

THE INTERVIEW WITH GOD

I dreamed I had an interview with God.

“So you would like to interview me?” God asked.

“If you have the time” I said.

God smiled. “My time is eternity.”
“What questions do you have in mind for me?”

“What surprises you most about humankind?”

God answered…
“That they get bored with childhood,
they rush to grow up, and then
long to be children again.”

“That they lose their health to make money…
and then lose their money to restore their health.”

“That by thinking anxiously about the future,
they forget the present,
such that they live in neither
the present nor the future.”

“That they live as if they will never die,
and die as though they had never lived.”

God’s hand took mine
and we were silent for a while.

And then I asked…
“As a parent, what are some of life’s lessons
you want your children to learn?”

“To learn they cannot make anyone
love them. All they can do
is let themselves be loved.”

“To learn that it is not good
to compare themselves to others.”

“To learn to forgive
by practicing forgiveness.”

“To learn that it only takes a few seconds
to open profound wounds in those they love,
and it can take many years to heal them.”

“To learn that a rich person
is not one who has the most,
but is one who needs the least.”

“To learn that there are people
who love them dearly,
but simply have not yet learned
how to express or show their feelings.”

“To learn that two people can
look at the same thing
and see it differently.”

“To learn that it is not enough that they
forgive one another, but they must also forgive themselves.”

“Thank you for your time,” I said humbly.

“Is there anything else
you would like your children to know?”

God smiled and said,
“Just know that I am here… always.”

-author unknown

I can’t really reveal her stories here, since they’re not mine to reveal, but they concerned just the way God had been arranging some things in her life, completely, in a way, turning her life upside down, while at the same time pointing her toward an amazing future.

Three hours later, our group was finally ready to move on. It was three hours of some of the meatiest spiritual discussion I’ve been part of in a while. I went with two of the guys, Sean and Rob, to have a late lunch and we ended up talking for a couple more hours.

One of the themes that Evette hit was the idea of surrender. Just complete surrender of your life, letting God take the reins. Indeed, the stories that were told could not have happened unless Evette had been ready to surrender herself to what God wanted to do, and if she wasn’t preparing herself constantly with prayer.

It was a great reminder for myself, as for a long time now I’ve been fairly independent, stubborn, and often rebellious. For someone as hard-headed as myself, it takes years of trying to do it my way and failing to finally get the picture.

Tonight, this theme was hammered home as I flipped through the book of Proverbs. I happened upon Proverbs 16, which begins like this:

“We humans make plans, but the Lord has the final word. We may think we know what is right, but the Lord is the judge of our motives. Share your plans with the Lord, and you will succeed.”

This hit the nail on the head for me. I know what it’s like to constantly make my own plans and then stumble around in the dark. To make plans and see that they take me into dead ends. To strike out on my own and then wonder later, “What was I thinking?”

There’s a lot of bad connotations that come with the word surrender. But as the Word also says, wisdom is all about realizing how little you know. And if you are surrendering yourself to God, that, I am discovering, may be the wisest thing us humans can ever learn to do.

But I do believe when you’re tired, you are more vulnerable. For me, that’s in the morning (for a few hours after I wake up), and late at night, right before bed. But it’s definitely more acute in the morning. Some people wake up in the morning energized, refreshed, wide-eyed. That’s not me. I wake up and it’s as if gravity is twice as strong, pulling down on my eyes, pulling down on me.

I have a great new distraction, though, as I drive to work. My friend Mike Tyus recently gave me a car stereo that plays mp3 CDs and has an input for my iPod. Having just installed it the other day, I burnt an mp3 CD with 35 songs on it. A handful of these songs are Christian worship songs, which I don’t really listen to much nowadays. This morning though, I decided to play them on the way to work. Most of them were “old school” songs from the 90s that I used to listen to in college fellowship. They were easing my mood a bit, and I was beginning to feel better. You can say, my soul was being soothed, that God was speaking to me….

But as I was on the freeway in the slow lane, a silver Acura with dark, dark-tinted windows sped by in the lane merging in from the right. He sped several cars ahead of me and in the very last moment, as his lane exitted the freeway, he cut into the slow lane. He had squeezed into a small space going at a high speed.

I moved into the next lane, my mood already darkening. I would have stared at him as I passed him, but my lane was curving to the right and I had to focus on the road at the last instant as I passed him. Those negative thoughts started coming. I’m usually a pretty mellow guy, but as I said, it’s on that morning drive to work that my temper can be tested.

He must be a young asian or latino male, I thought, since living in the San Gabriel Valley, that’s who you usually see driving “suped up” Hondas and Acuras, driving like they own the road. The silver Acura then sped by in the slow lane, going at least 80-85 mph. What a shallow soul I thought — what a shallow soul to put so much of his identity into his car, driving like no one else mattered …

I was about to exit the freeway myself, and I was getting lost in these thoughts. Shallow soul, shallow soul, shallow soul. Whack! Something hit my window. It was a blur, so I didn’t know what it was — something that fell from a tree? It didn’t leave a mark on the window, but the sudden, sharp sound against my window broke me out of my trance. The music I was listening to came back to me. It was the song “Hungry (Fall on My Knees)” by Kathryn Scott.

Hungry I come to You
For I know You satisfy
I am empty but I know
Your love does not run dry

Strange how the music completely disappeared from my consciousness in the last few minutes as I succumbed to my thoughts. They were thoughts of judgment, condemnation, anger.

Now I sit here and I remember when I was younger, how I sometimes also drove with the same attitude. I would speed, I would weave in and out of traffic. I was young and foolish, but now am I old and hypocritical? Is it I with the shallow soul? Who one moment was trying to soak in God’s love and in the next was judging and condemning a young man I didn’t even know?

This is the daily struggle. Who do you succumb to? What do you choose to fill your mind with? What do you choose to fill your heart with? There’s a thin line between two sides, and it is easy to walk over to the other side, while believing you are with God.

in the approximately 12 years since, I’ve definitely have gone through long periods where I didn’t act like a believer. And, now I realize there have always been things that caused rifts in my identity as a person and as a believer.

To not get into them too much, these things include the fact that I am probably the first and only Christian in my family, to the best of my knowledge. To this day, my parents pray to our ancestors, and have Buddha and other idols around. It’s the Chinese way. Beyond that, there’s the fact that I went to a university, and was a Sociology major. I didn’t realize at the time that I was receiving what many considered a liberal education, coming to grips with how society worked, from a liberal point of view. I was frustrated when I realized that many Christians today believe that the political party to have allegiance to is the Republican Party.

I was liberal in other regards and did things that I knew was not in line with the teachings of the Church. (Now I know I was just being a regular ol’ sinner, the kind of person Jesus wants to reach out to.) And of course, I took science courses at UCLA also. So in recent years, when the Christian movement to push “Intelligent Design” in schools instead of evolution started, I had to shake my head. Whenever I read about a Christian trying to criticize evolution, I pitied them for sounding as misinformed as they did. I realized that I was ruined, because I’ve heard the arguments for evolution, and I knew they were strong. I’ve been taught the science behind it. So here was another rift between my Christian identity, and who I was as a student, not just of the education system, but of life.

So, it was refreshing to come across an article on CNN.com today, written by a scientist. A scientist who is a believer also. Really it shouldn’t be so rare, and I guess it’s not as rare as you may first guess. As Dr. Francis Collins states in his article, scientists get an indepth look into the workings of the universe, a universe so majestic and unfathomable as to point to the fingerprints of a Creator.

It’s also refreshing, though, because he defends science too, and says things that I was beginning to think you shouldn’t say as a Christian. I know I haven’t said these things, because I’ve gotten into arguments with other believers before about other issues, and I just didn’t have the heart anymore to get into intense debates where you are basically pitting rational arguments against emotional ones. But Dr. Collins starts to reconcile the heart and the mind in his article.

Use the link or see it below. But first, I’m also putting here a video “bumper” from Mosaic’s recent Soul Cravings series. It amuses me greatly, and also has a small connection to what this post is about.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/03/collins.commentary/index.html

Collins: Why this scientist believes in God
POSTED: 4:23 p.m. EDT, April 4, 2007

By Dr. Francis Collins
Special to CNN

Editor’s note: Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., is the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. His most recent book is “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.”

ROCKVILLE, Maryland (CNN) — I am a scientist and a believer, and I find no conflict between those world views.

As the director of the Human Genome Project, I have led a consortium of scientists to read out the 3.1 billion letters of the human genome, our own DNA instruction book. As a believer, I see DNA, the information molecule of all living things, as God’s language, and the elegance and complexity of our own bodies and the rest of nature as a reflection of God’s plan.

I did not always embrace these perspectives. As a graduate student in physical chemistry in the 1970s, I was an atheist, finding no reason to postulate the existence of any truths outside of mathematics, physics and chemistry. But then I went to medical school, and encountered life and death issues at the bedsides of my patients. Challenged by one of those patients, who asked “What do you believe, doctor?”, I began searching for answers.

I had to admit that the science I loved so much was powerless to answer questions such as “What is the meaning of life?” “Why am I here?” “Why does mathematics work, anyway?” “If the universe had a beginning, who created it?” “Why are the physical constants in the universe so finely tuned to allow the possibility of complex life forms?” “Why do humans have a moral sense?” “What happens after we die?” (Watch Francis Collins discuss how he came to believe in God )

I had always assumed that faith was based on purely emotional and irrational arguments, and was astounded to discover, initially in the writings of the Oxford scholar C.S. Lewis and subsequently from many other sources, that one could build a very strong case for the plausibility of the existence of God on purely rational grounds. My earlier atheist’s assertion that “I know there is no God” emerged as the least defensible. As the British writer G.K. Chesterton famously remarked, “Atheism is the most daring of all dogmas, for it is the assertion of a universal negative.”

But reason alone cannot prove the existence of God. Faith is reason plus revelation, and the revelation part requires one to think with the spirit as well as with the mind. You have to hear the music, not just read the notes on the page. Ultimately, a leap of faith is required.

For me, that leap came in my 27th year, after a search to learn more about God’s character led me to the person of Jesus Christ. Here was a person with remarkably strong historical evidence of his life, who made astounding statements about loving your neighbor, and whose claims about being God’s son seemed to demand a decision about whether he was deluded or the real thing. After resisting for nearly two years, I found it impossible to go on living in such a state of uncertainty, and I became a follower of Jesus.

So, some have asked, doesn’t your brain explode? Can you both pursue an understanding of how life works using the tools of genetics and molecular biology, and worship a creator God? Aren’t evolution and faith in God incompatible? Can a scientist believe in miracles like the resurrection?

Actually, I find no conflict here, and neither apparently do the 40 percent of working scientists who claim to be believers. Yes, evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true. If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things.

But why couldn’t this be God’s plan for creation? True, this is incompatible with an ultra-literal interpretation of Genesis, but long before Darwin, there were many thoughtful interpreters like St. Augustine, who found it impossible to be exactly sure what the meaning of that amazing creation story was supposed to be. So attaching oneself to such literal interpretations in the face of compelling scientific evidence pointing to the ancient age of Earth and the relatedness of living things by evolution seems neither wise nor necessary for the believer.

I have found there is a wonderful harmony in the complementary truths of science and faith. The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. God can be found in the cathedral or in the laboratory. By investigating God’s majestic and awesome creation, science can actually be a means of worship.

Regardless, I got a little peek into the past tonight. For whatever reason, I don’t ask my parents much about when I was young, but today, they were talking about some incidents from when I was two or three years old.

My mom helps take care of a couple of babies, both only around one to one and half years old. Apparently, the younger one is starting to stress my mom out a little bit by upending small furniture and items and doing other things.

She was talking to my dad about this, and it got them to start talking about ME when I was really young.

When I was around two or three, and my family and I were all still living in Vietnam, my parents owned a sort of general store or bakery. Well, about four or five buildings down the street was a theater, where music concerts and other plays or performances occurred. I guess I was usually at the store with my parents as they managed it. However, whenever some sort of performance played at the theater, they would have to keep a careful eye on me, because I guess I would always leave the store on my own, walk down the street, and go into the theater.

Of course, because I was only two or three, the ticket counterperson wouldn’t see me and I would go inside and watch the show. It sounded like this happened often, and my dad would always have to run into the theater and look all around until he found me.

Also, my mom says that they had a cabinet and shelf where they kept the stereo. Apparently, I often pulled out the drawers at the bottom. I would pull the bottom out the furthest, then the next, and so on, until I had created steps for myself to climb up. I would sit up there and turn on the stereo so I could listen to music.

Wow. I don’t remember any of this at all, but so many years later, I’m dancing, choreographing, and enjoying putting together dance performances. I used to say that I never had an idea about what I wanted to do when “I grew up,” unlike many other kids. But perhaps I had a clue from the very beginning, when I was two or three, and for whatever reason, I just forgot about it.

And then, amazing, God still brought me back to the things that I was so passionate about even as a toddler. All the while, I was simply along the ride, unaware of what was going on. The simplicity but complexity of it all stuns me.