Off With My Head...or at least my face

Sinae and I are learning that the greatest barrier in my relationship is my face. When we were dating, and even now that we have gotten married, she told me how handsome my face is. But now that we are meeting people and I can't hide my emotions, it is keeping her from enjoying company. So here I sit, wondering what on earth to do. I don't recall being told this reality by any American women but I suppose it happened. I tend to think this is not a bad thing. What human being is actually able to control her/his emotions all of the time to the point that s/he doesn't show what s/he is thinking. I believe I will become a hermit or at the most, interact with animals. I am trying not to protest this new revelation, though I find it difficult to fathom. At best, this is just cultural differences and I am afraid of what it might be at worst. Before I got married, I wanted to marry someone from a different culture, such as a black American, a Latina or a Korean. I thought the Bible talked about people coming together from different nations. Now I have to wonder if that notion is a downright lie because cultural norms seem to be laws by which we judge a person's morale. And it's amazing just how different our morale can be from one country to another. I'd invite you to join me in being a hermit, but somehow I guess that would defeat the purpose and you too might be offended by my facial expressions.

Still Trying to Grow

I continued my quest to grow through Cognitive Therapy by making files via the computer to use for sorting through my numerous negative thoughts. I'm hoping this will help me not just think about myself more positively but that it will also improve my quality of life by changing my behavior. I think today may have been a good start. I was with my wife all day today and we both seemed to enjoy each others' company. We were also doing different things though we were in each others' presence all day. Cognitive therapy is the beginning. I hope that during this vacation, and in the New Year, that I will find a renewed experience with God and that God will find me and renew me in a way I haven't known for a long time. However, regardless of what happens, I aim to continue my pursuit of truth in all facets, and I hope you'll join me whoever you are and wherever you are. I'll also try to be honest about what I am experiencing. Perhaps we can start the year fresh, together, as one people seeking for truth and finding it in the numerous ways that God reveals Godself to us.

Back to the basics...again

It's 12:50am and I am starting again at Ground Zero. No, there are no disasters. I'm still employed. I'm happily married, though my wife and I have hit a bump in the road with what language to communicate in. But I think my struggles with shame were the predecessor. I would like to trace my Christian experience from the time I got married. You may recall that I was thinking pretty seriously about Calvinism for a while. That was because I couldn't believe that there was a beautiful woman in this world who could love me for who I am and say to me, "No matter what, I will be here." I learned differently when I got married, that such a thing is true. I think we can call this the Honeymoon. And since my wife seemed to accept me unconditionally, I thought that God would have to accept me that way. I still believe my wife accepts me unconditionally, but I don't think that means she is indifferent to the way I act (aka the way I treat or her fellow Koreans). I'm learning that it is the unconditional love that has such high expectations and it is that unconditional love that confronts me to be different. It says something like, "You're stuck with me forever, Buddy. Are you gonna change or do you wanna make us miserable for the rest of your life?" So I'm learning that marriage doesn't make me perfect and it doesn't remove the many weaknesses that I have. I now think that it doesn't even cover up those weaknesses, whether they be minor or major. I would've thought that my weakness in cooking would be pretty minor but now I am finding myself dreading meals because I'm afraid of making a mistake. I really hate the feeling of not knowing what to do. Of course I can cook for myself, but cooking for someone else is another story. When I first got married, I found myself being more conservative and less cynical about God. Now I suspect I was replacing my relationship with God with my relationship with my wife. In other words, if things are good with my wife, and if we pray together then things with God must be good. Yet I hear God calling me back to God in a way I haven't heard in a long time. It seems to be as much God calling me back as it is a thirst in my heart to find God NO MATTER WHAT! So here I am. I suppose I'm making progress and successes (Something I will share more about when it becomes official) but that big capital S (Shame) is still hanging over me and it haunts me everywhere I go. You know where it has plagued me the most? In the classes I have taught. It seems that I extended the shame I feel to my students. And now I've extended it to my wife as well. So what am I going to do? I've been reading, "The Feeling Good Handbook" by David D. Burns. This is the same writer of "Feeling Good" which I highly recommended about a year or so ago. In his second book he recommends doing Cognitive Therapy fifteen minutes every day. So I'm finally going to start that tonight. So here is to yet another beginning back to the basics. That means pushing aside that constant nagging that I'm not being a good enough Christian unless I'm helping the poor (I might mention that voice still hangs around even when I am teaching English to children who can't afford to go to an academy, though I'm suspicious now that I see them with smartphones). I'm also going to cool it with the voice that tells me I need to move to another country or just go back home. I'm going to follow my favorite pastor's advice and stay where I am until God moves me. And I'm going to read the Bible, pray and look for ways to love my neighbor. That's my wife, the people who live on both sides of my apartment, the professors next to my office, the people I work with and the students I teach. Will you keep me accountable to this and call me on the carpet, so to speak, when I get all idealistic and poor-hungry? You can join me, too...if you want.

Living with Flaws

Why is it that when I tell my wife on a daily basis that I'm not perfect she seems to be okay with that but then when it comes to an issue that is more sensitive that issue seems to be enough to damn our relationship? The key word is "seems". We've been going on for several hours without saying more than necessary. I suppose it will end tomorrow but this being the big deal it seems to be, it may take longer. Meanwhile, I'm trying to get as much work done as possible so that I have room to negotiate tomorrow. Lest the reader think I'm arrogant, I know I have flaws. That's why I've become interested in Calvinism in recent weeks. This gives me a sense of freedom and acceptance. But in moments of not feeling accepted it makes me wonder if Calvinism can be true. And yet in those moments, such as these, where I don't understand why things are such a big deal, I find great peace in the idea that God might accept me in spite of my many flaws. However, that doesn't mean that God is really okay with my flaws. Could God be seen through the perspective of my wife, who although I think she will leave me if she has any sense, she probably won't and instead she will sweat drops of blood in order to make sure I'm a million times better. It's just that the idea of a loving God whom I can't see are get into an argument with seems much more romantic, no pun intended.

Taking the Reformers for Granted

I started reading the intro. to Calvin's Institutes. It's amazing how oblivious I am to the Reformers' suffering after all the theology I've studied. I think I've focused more on what they believed than who they were as people. And I'm grateful that John Calvin took the risk and wrote his Institutes. I'm not sure if I'll get them read before I have to return the book. If not, hopefully it will make good vacation reading. But then again, hopefully I'll begin to get started. I'm still trying to look at the eyes through the world of Calvinism to see whether this is a plausible perspective. I experienced two things today that made me think of this perspective. The first was in the church service I participated in today. It was in English, which was a nice change. We sang a sang that spoke of submitting to the Lordship of Christ. This struck me as odd in a way. If God is sovereign then why are we submitting ourselves to the Lordship of Christ? Doesn't Christ already have us? But then I wondered if there could be a paradox in that and if that is part of the futility of being human, that we don't really have a right to choose. The other was in an e-mail from a student who spoke of "losing" the Holy Spirit. I began to wonder what it might be like to not be able to lose the Holy Spirit. If the Holy Spirit is a downpayment which is to serve as a guarantee of what is to come, how could we lose the Holy Spirit. I hope s/he only meant that s/he felt like s/he had lost the Holy Spirit, but I suppose both are plausible in Wesleyan or Arminian thought.

The Psychology of Calvinism

I'm still entrenched in Calvinistic thought, perhaps more now than last time. I'm in the desert at the moment. I'll say more about that shortly. I felt a lot of peace today as I considered the idea that we are all filthy and the fact that anything good happens is a shear act of the Divine (aka God). I found myself surprised at various moments today, such as when the department secretary covered the sign outside of my office door which had a professor's name who no longer uses the office since he moved elsewhere. I was also pleased to see students responding when they did. But I was still disheartened when they didn't respond. Yet that didn't seem to wear me down as much as it has in the past. I've also been thinking a lot about unconditional love, something I could sure use a lot more of. Or so it seems. At the moment I can't comprehend the possibility that a relationship with God could possibly be broken to the point that one had no salvation though one had begun the process of salvation. What a joyful thought that there is absolutely nothing I could do to end the relationship with God. Verses such as Romans 8 (Nothing can separate us from the love of God...) and the promised Holy Spirit which is to serve as a guarantee of the fulness of salvation. What good is a guarantee if God doesn't follow through with it? I recalled what my university and seminary professors said about Calvinism being a logical system and I wondered what might be wrong with that in contrast to those anti-Calvinist scholars who made statements against Calvinism based on preference ("I have never liked Calvinism" or "Since I believe in free will going to a Calvinistic school was never much of an option to me"). I'm still not sure about concepts that God chooses who to save and who not to save but total depravity makes a lot of sense to me. There was a battle that I began against Calvinism in varying degrees (i.e. from 3 points to 4 1/2 points) when I enrolled in a Bible school in the fall of 1996 and I feel like I've been in battle against Calvinism until now. It makes me wonder if my resistance to Calvinism robbed me of the joy I felt when I first started attending that school. And now I find myself wanting to surrender to the God whose perfection makes my greatest deed look like the most filthy of crimes. But to be honest, the thing that makes me resonate the most with Calvinism is that I feel the most wicked in my own heart. Hearing about the optimism of Grace from the Wesleyan perspective sounds ideal but overwhelming to me. I like the Aristotelian philosophy of perfection in terms of actualized potential rather than perfection in the absolute sense. And yet I feel like even in terms of purpose I fall short and that I might as well aim for absolute perfection for the result seems to be the same at the end of the day. When I think about my own inadequacies and connect it with Calvinism's total depravity, the thought "Well Duh" comes to mind. That is to say, no wonder I feel so dirty inside because I AM dirty inside! That was all good and well until tonight when I had a fight with my wife over something that seemed so trivial and yet now is such a big mountain that we can hardly talk at 12:12am. I thought I was managing myself very well in struggling to understand a normal Korean conversation between my wife and some students. Of course she knew I was frustrated with myself and wanted to know how she could help me the next time. The way I saw it, I was the one whose works were as filthy rags who had made the mistake or that I had sinned. But she wasn't satisfied with that and as she kept asking me I got more and more frustrated along with her and I once again proved my wickedness by fighting fire with fire. I even tried praying to God to confess my unknown sin at which point she left the apartment for a few hours and just returned. I guess I'll try to resolve the conflict and pray that the Sovereign Lord might somehow intervene in spite of myself.

Me? A Calvinist?

I could have posted something when I had a hard day last week. It was one of those realities where I'm not perfect and even though sometimes people need to accept me as a flawed human being, I would like to overcome those flaws so that people wouldn't have to cater to my flaws. In that case, it wasn't about my current flaws but about my past flaws that created issues of distrust. The following day, I beat myself up over the feelings I had about myself not being perfect. While all those thoughts were coming about what a flawed human being I am, thoughts of Calvinism also came to mind. You probably know me well enough to know that I try to be as Wesleyan as possible and as little Calvinism as possible. I started to wonder last Monday if that was just because I didn't want to face the fact that I am flawed. I was thinking especially of the first point of TULIP which states that all human beings are totally depraved. That thought seemed more in line to me in that moment than the idea that there is something good in human beings, especially in this one. I further thought about my long battle against Calvinism that started when I went to Bible school. I saw a video-lectured recording of Dr. William Abraham in which he stated that he thought Calvinism came from the pits of Hell and further stated his allegiance to Wesleyanism, a perfect fit for a Methodist. That statement made me wonder how many times we choose what to believe based on what interests us the most. I know that Dr. Abraham is a million times smarter than me, and so I proffer this blog not as an attempt to outsmart a theological genius but rather to suggest a point of view to myself that I might like to be more open-minded to. As I reflect on the many conversations I've heard on this subject, I recall hearing a lot of non-Calvinists reject Calvinistic thought (which I want to remind the reader is not necessarily equivalent with John Calvin's thought) based on their own presuppositions or that they just didn't like Calvinism and I have heard more Calvinists argue on Biblical grounds that the system is true. I suppose both could be misrepresentations in one way or another, for there must surely be Wesleyans on a more Biblical front and Calvinists on a more philosophical one. When I was a student at a Nazarene university I found this dilemma could only be resolved on philosophical rather than Biblical grounds. Now I am looking at it from more of a psychological perspective than a philosophical one. I want to close this blog by sharing some good news about myself and my beliefs. I have found myself being much more skeptical about Christian thought since I have gotten married. I now see the truth in my friend Brad's counsel that whether or not our spouse shares the same faith we do has a lot to do with what we actually believe ourselves. I trust this is a good thing, whether I am resting in a second naivate or simply resting in what seems to be the most solid truth as far as we can tell as human beings. I suppose where I am at in that regard is still up for debate. But I am also hopeful that being more resolved in this regard of faith will also give me even more freedom to wrestle with the hard questions without being the double-minded person that the Epistle of James talks about.