A Lifetime of Love

I finally finished "Sheet Music", a book about how to have a healthy, intimate relationship with my wife. To put it more bluntly, it's about how to have better sex with one's spouse or significant other (I would guess the author is aiming more for the former than the latter). You're probably dying to hear all the details of the "good parts" of the book but I will let you find those in the book itself. Rather, I'll offer you a brief application of what I take away from the book. This book reinforces for me that a marital relationship is ultimately analogous of Christ's relationship with his followers. That relationship is not an easy-come-easy-go relationship. It also involves the ups and downs of the joys and sorrows of two people having an intimate relationship where they have made a covenant with one another, vowing not to be unfaithful to that relationship. More to the point, this book makes the point over-and-over again that sex is not just the cherry-on-top of a committed relationship but that it is at the center of the relationship and that everything the couple does centers around that. That may be baffling but rather than try to make sense of that paradox here I'll let you read the book. Suffice it to say that if a couple is not mutually loving one another that they will not have a healthy sexual relationship. Need a more basic example? How about a mistake I made with my wife tonight? Well, the jury is still out on whether it was really a mistake (That's the jury on my side, if you will). I thought we were just going for a brief visit to McDonald's to enjoy a few moments of air-conditioning, ice cream and iced coffee and my wife thought we were going to enjoy a few areas of air-conditioning, regardless of how much conversation we had. Well, when she saw how displeased we were at not doing anything that seemed productive, I found myself in the doghouse. Now surely you can see how this mistake on my part (or for the sake of my ego, both of our parts) might affect "tonight".

A More Reflective Life?

I've been on a roller coaster for the last three days or perhaps longer than that. Teaching seems to be a roller coaster of emotions, where I tend to base my worth on how students respond to me. I think I have struggled with the concept of teaching English for as long as I have been teaching, which has been for about four years and five months now. I keep thinking that I need to find THAT job which brings me ultimate fulfillment. But my last visit to America earlier this summer left me thinking I am barking up the wrong tree and that I need to make some resolve to somehow not equate my self-worth with the work I am doing. When I think about how best to process all of that, what with all the negative thoughts I have and all, the prospect of writing sounds more and more appealing. I have worked with different people at the Camp I'm required to work every year and regardless of the personality I seem to have trouble with the person I'm working with. When I say "trouble" I mean that I find myself feeling less adequate than the other person. Once that happens I negate the value of any worth I might have. So, I hope this is the beginning of a beautiful journey of writing books in two areas, one related to my satisfaction with myself in reference to the job I work at and hopefully another area will be with family relationships and theology or better yet might be philosophy of religion or just philosophy. In order to do this, I'm going to need your help. Can you keep me accountable to write and not simply do journaling that sounds like a diary, though I still seem to need that, too?

A New Adventure

I've started a long, difficult process of saying goodbye to colleagues and students. After all the applying I've done to try to get a job in Seoul, I have accepted a position at a university outside of Seoul, but a little closer than where I am now. Most of the time, especially with students, people receive the news without asking questions. But sometimes people want to know why I am moving to a new place. I've given a variety of answers but I'm not quite sure what the truth is. 1. It's because I want to work at a university that has a system more organized that increases the chances of me being successful in teaching students how to have a conversation in English. 2. I want to become a better instructor by working with colleagues in a more collaborative environment where what instructors think has an impact on how the university organizes its system. 3. I am displeased with the new curriculum that my current university is using and I can't bear the thought of continuing where I am at if the same curriculum is going to continue to be implemented, regardless of feedback that the whole of the international faculty thinks about it. 4. I've been teaching at the same university for four years and I want to experience working at another Christian university with similar values which also has a strong reputation throughout Korea. 5. I don't feel satisfied doing what I am doing where I am currently teaching and I want to see if that changes if I teach at a university with a different system. Of course there is no easy answer to this matter. I would guess that number five is the winner. If that is true, this is only a commentary on myself and has nothing to do with anyone else. This sort of thing resonates with my experience of the first college I attended after I finished Bible School. The university started to have some difficulties and there were people on both sides of the fence. Some said we should jump off a sinking ship and others said that if everyone leaves the ship would inevitably sink. I'm starting to wonder if my colleagues or I am thinking that way. Whatever the outcome of that discussion, I am learning how wrong my thinking has been about how little of an impact I am having on those around me. I guess one could say I am learning about the ministry of presence and that it may not make much difference what kind of work I do. I wonder if I am the type of person who finds no satisfaction in his job in and of itself, no matter what it is, but simply in connecting with other human beings. All that said, there is a bittersweet feeling about changing jobs, and I guess that is true regardless of what country one lives in. I am feeling a lot of that bittersweetness as I see the looks on students faces as they learn I am leaving. I hope we can continue to keep in touch, though I am sure that professors who are on campus will be students first choice, and that's probably the way it should be.

The Dangers of Shopping on a Rainy Day

I had the most traumatic experience of my life when it comes to shopping, but it wasn't as traumatic as you may imagine. It started with the idea of multi-tasking. I wanted to take our car in for an oil change, trying to be more responsible with the car my wife owned before we got married. Usually I move slowly but last Saturday I was going to get the oil changed no matter what. I had to take the car up a floor since there was no place to park it. While trying to juggle a book, a folder, a laptop and an umbrella I dropped the book and folder. One person saw me drop it and made a verbal sound, somehow seeming to express her condolences without saying anything directly to me. Then I completely lost it when I stepped on a flat escalator comparable to the picture above except the escalator was going down. And I went down and landed hard on my right arm. Even though I was wearing a jacket and a sweatshirt, I managed to hurt my arm bad enough to keep a bandage on the wound every day since then. Unfortunately, the computer was my wife's and I just happened to drop it on the corner where the switch was. Fortunately, she could still turn it on but we took it to the Samsung After-service center around the block and they were able to fix it temporarily. I learned that day that I'm not invincible. It is really quite a shame that we brought all those things with us because we didn't get much accomplished that day, certainly not enough to justify all of that work. This whole experience made me wonder how many times I could have been hurt like that. I seem to recall other instances where I start to feel my feet shifting from under me but I always managed to regain my composure when I didn't have my hands full. I'm probably over-analyzing, like a good INTJ tends to do, but I can't help but wonder if God's voice was somehow in the midst of all of that, saying, "Give those things to me so you can stand." Actually, these days we seem to feel quite burdened as we develop more and more of what it means to be married and what ordained ministry might look like, whether we want to step into that role or not. I guess it really is true that less is more.

I'm Prejudiced

I hope I spelled that right. This is my latest, and perhaps the most difficult revelation, that has come to my attention. I've been having a lot of battles with my wife. I thought, perhaps we thought, it was because of vision or my wanting to become an ordained minister of some kind, but it seems that the real problem is prejudice? My crime? I apparently thought that if a Korean woman loved me at all it was because I am an American and that I could be her ticket to freedom. Fortunate for me, for a lot of growth, I didn't marry a Korean who was scouting her odds of being matched up with an American. Somehow she just fell in love with this odd duck. If you know me at all, you may be either thinking what a hypocrite I am or perhaps you are one of my many good friends who thinks I need to cut myself a little slack. To be honest with you, I'm not sure where I stand myself. I will say there is a strange sense of peace after going out and shopping by myself, something I probably haven't done since I got married. And one of the shocking places I found myself was in the car section. Actually, that shouldn't be so shocking. I've been into cars since I was in elementary or middle school. My first vow of independence to myself and God was to show my dad and brother that I could fix a car on my own. I mostly succeeded at that, except when I tried to change ball joints on my '78 Ford Fairmont and I wound up taking the whole front end apart. I learned a lot but the mechanic wasn't happy with me at all. And here I am, under different circumstances, and the same feeling of peace and confusion and disappointment, all at the same time. I suppose things will be okay. I hope they will. But the blessing and the curse of this mystery that there is no certainty on how everything will turn out. But something tells me I am right where I need to be, which makes me all the more indebted to my wife who happens to be from another country. I hope I can learn to see her as my wife without the culture or the ethnicity. Does she really see me that way?

In Motion

It's been a while since I've posted anything. I would say that means life is busy and good for me. Today I hit a bump in the road by "settling" into married life. It seems ironic to me how a very simple action or no action can turn into a big problem. I suppose the same could be true, stated from a positive standpoint. If a person does a small thing, it could turn into something big. When Lent started on Ash Wednesday, I vowed to go to early morning prayer meetings called, "Early Morning Prayer Meetings (새벽기도회, saebyeokkidohwae)". I started off doing well, since it was vacation. I would get up around 4:30, go to the prayer meeting at 5:00, exercise after leaving church and then coming home to take a nap. Once the semester started, I didn't have a chance to take a nap but I still felt good about getting up early in the morning and I found that my sense of shame diminished as well. Then I decided to treat myself to a morning of sleeping in and my commitment was broken. So now I am left with the dilemma of what to do now that Lent is nearly over and what I will do after Easter comes. To tell you the truth, I feel like I have said sorry to God so many times that there is no forgiveness left.

From "The Notebook" to "Forest Gump"

I've been thinking a lot about the past lately...perhaps too much. Watching "The Notebook" stirred up some raw emotions in me. It reminded me of my own past and things I've been struggling with lately. It seems to make one think a lot about choice, though the gist of the movie seems to be about loyalty to the person one loves. Then I watched "Forest Gump", a movie about a guy who seems to be doing his own thing but then winds up making a significant difference. Of course the movie deals with destiny from time to time. And I found myself at the altar of a Sovereign God this morning. My life has taken some interesting turns lately. I met a woman whom I expected to simply learn Korean from while she learned English, though I probably expected a little bit more. We fell in love and now we've been married for almost seven months. We didn't believe it at the time but things just fell together between us and our families accepting each other and now we are focusing on developing a healthy relationship with each other before we have children. Sometimes I really feel like I am my own worst enemy. If Satan is real, I could pretty easily convince myself that I am my own Satan. I find myself thinking back to the friends I had before I got married. Even though I didn't date them, I now see the emotional bond I had with them and why it was so important to my wife to cut those ties in order to be faithful to her. I wish that someone I could tell all of them thanks for all the things they taught me and that I'm sorry we couldn't be friends forever. I thought we could. But that we carry those memories with us. Some of those friends I didn't even bid goodbye to because I thought it would be rude to say, "I can't talk to you anymore because I'm getting married." And there is still a part of me that hopes that in God's sovereignty that those friends can somehow naturally become friends with my wife someday. Sounds impossible? With God, all things are possible, are they not? But lest I set myself up for disappointment, for now, I'm content entrusting those friends in God's loving care. After all, God can do more for them than I ever could.