Gorgeous day. It felt like 80 degrees and lots of sun. I sat with my back to an open window, just soaking up the rays and sipping iced tea while I attempted to read Administrative Law. Instead, I got very sleepy.

The start of the new quarter. It's always a time of new resolutions - resolving to do (and finish!) my class reading every day, to discipline myself to manage time well in order to do the important-not-urgent things, and to be excellent for Christ in all areas.

But oh, 8:15am classes! 'Tis hard, I tell ya.

A dear dear friend and father figure to me, Uncle Paul Lam - husband of Serena, father of Melanie and Brian, friend and brother to so many - passed away on Wed morning to be with the Lord. He died of stomach cancer. Our condolences to all the Lams.

He was an inspiration to all who knew him, a man of great faith, love, joy and peace even in the midst of his physical suffering. He was a blessing to all and will be sorely missed. I know that I will miss his big smiles and corny jokes, our talks about economics and politics, and the care he showed towards me and everyone. But my heart is glad to know that God has welcomed him with open arms and he rests in a far more glorious place. And one day we will meet him there.

May the rest of us honor his memory by living with the kind of faith, joy and courage he exhibited.

Southern California is WARM. REALLY warm. And sunny! It makes me want to take a nap outside (with sunblock on, of course Bev!) It's too smoggy though. And everything is so flat, I keep forgetting. (Or is that the smog covers the mountains and hence the landscape isn't visible?) But the weather makes me far more cheerful! Yea, too much grayness and drizzle can make me particularly melancholy - yes, more than usual.

I'm hanging out at the Biola library (wireless, yea!) right now. Ah, I can't get away from schools. Perhaps I'm destined to be a career student. No, really, I have some work to do and I need to turn in a draft of The Paper by Fri (or Sat.)

I had a lovely, lovely morning enjoying my Starbucks coffee, sitting near the window, reading my Bible (got a new one with larger print, and it's great b/c it lays flat and stays open!) Erin then made a nice lunch for Joy and I at her apartment. Thanks again, Erin! Those were great spinach pastry thingies. :)

I'm done with finals! yay! The rest of 2L year can only get better, it seems. As for the beloved Paper (haha, sarcastic)... it's getting close to it's, like, 10th draft.

I head back to OC on Wed... I'm hoping for sun! :)

And now... I think it's time for a big fat nap...

The most bizarre thing.

You know how pre-trib evangelical churches teach about the Rapture of Christians, i.e. those that are really saved disappear without a trace while the rest are left on earth to suffer through Tribulation, the mark of the Beast, the anti-Christ, etc.? I recall this movie we used to watch in Sunday School every few years about this very subject (did you watch it too?), and it scared the bejeebies out of everyone. I think the Left Behind series is in this same vein.

Since those Sunday School viewings, every once in a while, I'd have a few minutes of cold fear. I'd walk into the house, no one would be home (and I didn't know they had other plans,) and I'd call people to find no one answering their phones, the streets would be quiet... and there seemed to be no reasonable explanation. Everyone would be missing! Basically, I would think the Rapture had occurred and I'd been left behind. I'd think, did you leave me behind God? Maybe I'm not really a Christian after all! I've misled and fooled even myself! And this gripping fear would last until somebody, someone I knew that God couldn't possibly have left behind, would either appear or call me back.

All of that to say... I've had the odd feeling that the Rapture has occurred via personal webspace or blogspace. Entire websites have disappeared. Several weeks or days of entries have just disappeared. Or blogs have just abruptly stopped. With no explanation. Nothing.

What's going on here? Did the Blog Rapture occur? Where are you guys???

Ah, this fine city. It was inevitable. It has finally begun in Seattle.

On a less controversial note - Jason and Marcia, who came to visit Seattle this past weekend (did I mention these kooky kids are fun? My side hurts from laughing so hard when I'm around them!), are right. It doesn't really rain in Seattle at all.

We Seattle-ites insist that our city is this grey and drizzly place year-round, when in fact it is a farce because we are trying to prevent all the Californians from moving up and taking over! Yes, today I almost got a sunburn - it was a sizzling 64 degrees. Absolutely awesome.

Jason says it was -6 degrees in Fairbanks. It was painful to tell him that it was 70 degrees warmer here.

The End of Marriage in Scandinavia

This is a very, very informative and provocative article. It's lengthy, but READ IT! It's a lot of percentages and other statistics, but the implications for the U.S. are loud and clear. Wow, lots of things I hadn't even considered regarding same-sex marriage. This could push me over the edge to vote for that constitutional amendment.

What do you think?

"The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They say God became Man. Every other miracle prepares for this, or exhibits this, or results from this...

In the Christian story God descends to reascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to recapitulate in the womb ancient and prehuman phases of life; down to the very roots and seabed of the Nature He had created. But he goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up with Him. One has the picture of a strong man stooping lower and lower to get himself underneath some great complicated burden. He must stoop in order to lift, he must almost disappear under the load before he incredibly straightens his back and marches off with the whole mass swaying on his shoulders. Or one may think of a diver, first reducing himself to nakedness, then glancing in midair, then gone with a splash, vanished, rushing down through green and warm water into black and cold water, down through increasing pressure into the deathlike region of ooze and slime and old decay; then up again, back to color and light, his lungs almost bursting, till suddeny he breaks surface again, holding in his hand the dripping, precious thing that he went down to recover. He and it are both colored now that they have come up into the light: down below, where it lay colorless in the dark, he lost his color too.

In this descent and reascent everyone will recognize a familiar pattern: a thing written all over the world. It is the pattern of vegetable life. It must belittle itself into something hard, small, and deathlike, it must fall into the ground: then the new life reascends. It is the pattern of animal generation too... So it is also in our moral and emotional life. The first innocent and spontaneous desires have to submit to the deathlike process of control or total denial: but from that there is a reascent to fully formed character in which the strength of the original material all operates but in a new way. Death and Rebith - go down to go up - it is a key principle. Through this bottleneck, this belittlement, the highroad nearly always lies."

-- C.S. Lewis, Miracles


It's very difficult to submit my "(not-so) innocent and spontaneous desires" to control or total denial. For example, impatience and irritation at unnecessary delays and stupidity is pretty normal, right? When someone isn't listening to me, why shouldn't I feel a little offended? Why shouldn't I...?!?! I'm not the one in the wrong here! I deserve to depend on the timeliness of buses! Why must you drag me into helping that woman when I clearly have so many other things to do, when you could do it yourself? I'm so tired and I want to go home. You're being so clever, and sliding out of the responsibility while I'm left holding the bag..... errrgghh. Irritation. Impatience. My rights, my time, my schedule, my tiredness. Sigh. I am so un-Christlike today.

An interesting excerpt:

"Do You Recognize This Jesus?" by Kenneth L.
Woodward, excerpted from the NEW YORK TIMES op.ed
page (2.25.04)

Watching THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, Mel Gibson's new
movie, I kept thinking the following: it is
Christians, not Jews, who should be shocked by this
film.

Mr. Gibson's raw images invade our religious comfort
zone, which has long since been cleansed of the
Gospels' harsher edges. Most Americans worship in
churches where the bloodied body of Jesus is absent
from sanctuary crosses or else styled in ways so
abstract that there is no hint of suffering. In
sermons, too, the emphasis all too often is on the
smoothly therapeutic: what Jesus can do for me.

More than 60 years ago, H. Richard Neibuhr
summarized the creed of an easygoing American
Christianity that has in our time triumphantly come
to pass: "A God without wrath brought men without
sin into a kingdom without judgment though the
ministrations of a Christ without a cross." Despite
its muscular excess, Mr. Gibson's symbol-laden film
is a welcome repudiation of all that.

THE PASSION OF CHRIST is violent - no
question. Although Mel Gibson the believer
identifies with a traditionalist movement that
rejects Vatican Council II, Mel Gibson the artist
here displays a thoroughly Catholic sensibility, one
that since the Middle Ages has emphasized Jesus as
the suffering savior crowned with thorns. Martin
Luther, too, would have recognized in this film his
own theology of the cross.

But there is a little twist here. In his prerelease
screenings, Mr. Gibson invited mostly conservative
evangelical clergy. They in turn responded by
reserving huge blocks of movie tickets for their
congregations...

And what's so strange about this? Unlike Mr.
Gibson's film, evangelical Protestantism is
inherently non-visual. As spiritual descendants of
the left wing of the Reformation, evangelicals are
heirs to an iconoclastic tradition that produced the
"stripping of the altars," as the historian Eamon
Duffy nicely put it. That began in the late 16th
century, when radical Protestants removed Christ's
body from the cross. To the Puritans, displays of
the body of Jesus represented what they considered
the idol worship of the Papists. To this day,
evangelical sanctuaries can be identified by their
lack of visual stimulation; it is rare to see
statues or stained-glass windows with human figures.
For evangelicals, the symbols are all in sermon and
song: verbal icons. It's a different sensibility.

For this reason, I think, evangelical audiences will
be shocked by what they see...