Problem=>Victory=>Growth

It has been a long time since I’ve posted something on here, which means things are going well. Sinae and I overcame the last mountain. It seems that I may have misunderstood her, which is usually the cause of many of our mountains. I guess that is to be expected in a relationship of any kind, and especially since we are of different cultures and different languages.

I have to admit that I am finding myself in disbelief these days. I keep thinking this can’t work but it keeps on working. Tonight I was just a little bit worried that maybe all was not well but in the last hour or two we’ve been sending messages back and forth and it seems that things are well between us. So far, my first impression of Sinae being a loyal person in a relationship such as this, has yet to be proven wrong. Sometimes she has some trouble with something that comes up and after a little bit of alone time and arranging her own thoughts, and me mine, we come out on top, and I think that our relationship is getting stronger because of it.

Today, I arrived at church right on time. This was directly related to me getting up almost at the same time as my alarms went off. This still left me enough time to prepare for the class I taught this afternoon but we ended up playing other games instead. I found the sermon a little bit difficult to understand as usual, though I did find that if I stopped thinking about anything else and only focused on the pastor I could piece together what he was saying. And of course, the fact that he showed two videos also helped me make sense of what he was saying.

I think I have already referenced, “Why Men Hate Church”. I’m not recommending the book yet since I haven’t read it myself, though I do think the title has a lot of credibility. One of the videos I saw today at church was quite humorous and apparently originally directed at an English-speaking audience. Since it didn’t have much speaking from the main characters, there was not much need for a translation. The video seemed to point to the fact that a guy sometimes doesn’t fit into a traditional church service and he ends up spending more time trying to do what everyone else is doing rather than doing the things that mean the most to him personally as it relates to his relationships with other people and his relationship with God. I’m not sure if that was the original intent or if that was even the intent of the pastor, but that was my sense of it, along with a video showing Father’s School (아버지 학교), which showed men praying and hugging together as well as doing service projects. I think this fits my idea of church much better and I wonder how it suits the thinking of most men. If this has some credence to it, I wonder how the Church can bridge this gap between women and men. I’m sure there is some credence from the feminist voice for not making the church too masculine but I also wonder if there is a need to take seriously these major gender differences in order to fulfill God’s mission for the Church.