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I'm a trendy guy, or so I'd like to think. So it's time to move xanga's, maybe I'll use both, but I might as well use one. You can rent this space if you want lol. It used to be all about the length of your subscription list. It's like a popularity rating scale. Now it doesn't matter cos there's no one on the otherside of those names. So like it is often said these days, sub my new one and i'll sub you.
http://www.xanga.com/wongsimon
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So I thought I'd draw pictures for my posts, and I also thought I'd make a post where little thought is required. I might have to start hiding my previous posts or else this page will get really cluttered. Should be an option for how many posts are shown. Anyhow, I got a small epiphany from watching walking with dinosaurs live! I used to think vegetarians were sissys, or environmental nutjobs. Then I met one and what I thought was true! lol, oh i kid. Anyhow, so we have these GINORMOUS dinos and some eat veggies only but they're still ginormous. So in terms of badass-ness, they're both pretty intense, I mean they're freaking huge! Bulky vegetarians. It's not like it's an unfair fight when it's T-rex vs Triceratops, it's pretty darn even. It's just like carnivors like to eat other dinos. In terms of overall ability to kick ass, they're evenly matched. This allows me to lean closer to a vegetarian diet but still be a freaking BAD ASS!!! Not because animals are cute and we shouldn't eat them - i'd love to go hunting. But it's not efficient, the animal has to eat so much food in order to fatten up so I can get a single steak. Whilst children in africa are starving (or so the saying goes) . . . so i'll selectively eat it and avoid some. While gorging on others lol. I want to go clubbing, seal clubbing. We should disect baby seals in highschool cos there are so darn many of them. And you get to keep their pelts as a souvi! Some of you think I'm a cruel madman, but the next time you eat delicious sushi, it's thanks to seal clubbing that we still have atlantic salmon and many other fish. k, that's all.
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| no it's not a sob story.
I was born n raised in North Vancouver in a time where asians were still a minority. Though race did not so much affect me at school, my background affected how I was raised an what activities I would participate in. No soccer teams for me, a violin or piano. But that wasn't bad persay, I just didn't grow as close of friends to my caucasian counterparts who really developed a network. I guess that's good for them to have had now that there's this asian dominance of vancouver. Still, because I was never fully involved in that circle, I never got on top there. That is to say I found that the place for me to be the man was at church. It was here that I could rule. My parents were involved in roles of the church, this translates in kid talk to fame. I'm the son of _ and _ , so I had fame. Ridiculous as it sounds it's very true, you get slightly different treatment. And I was a sunday school genius. Sunday school was actually just easy and repetitive but I was still a genius. It was hard to run faster than white boys at school because they had so much practise during soccer and such - but here, ha! I ran faster than all the asians my age. (I would later go into HKIN at UBC and learn about such sociological factors such as this that foster continued physical activity with age) So I was more well known, smarter and physically superior in church, and that made me feel good. But then again with parent involvement the time spent at church, especially one way out in vancouver just dragged on and on. Anyways, I wasn't the eldest, and age is not something we can conquer but I always wanted to be included with the older guys activities. At times they might have been mean but overall they were just automatically cool. And so maybe I emulated their mean-ness. I have reason to believe I was a pretty mean kid. I know this because I remember punching people at school, didnt' do it in church because that wouldn't be so smart but I probably was mean in other ways, making people feel inferior. But the church can't fix me, nope, I might have left a few or more scars in people's lives that I don't even remember. I was and may still be a church bully, who makes church a place no one wants to go. May God have mercy on us church bullies.
Looking back is a great way of looking forward. Actually that doesn't make any sense unless I further explain. Nowadays I hear stories of ex-church goers. One such person was beat up once by a pastor's kid, he went and told the authorities but they called him out to be a liar though he had the marks of a beating. When I heard that, I knew it was me, though I was not the one doing the beating, the sin is still mine own. One of Heath Ledger's memorial services was protested by a Baptist Church in the states, claiming he, the actor in brokeback mountain, was evil or something. At first I thought, what a joke!? this is ridiculous this church and their actions. But then I knew that sin was our own, churches are painted with the same brush. We can't be the body of Christ and just say that that certain church was being retarded, we can't disconnect from it. We just have to acknowledge it and ask the world for forgiveness. The ever reoccuring line, the church is a whore but she's my mother. And I think another line should be added, and my father, the king, is amazing. And though there are so many lives broken by churches today, so many people still leaving at all walks of life, the church has played a role in some positive outcome in our lives.
So by this point you've either forgotten the opening picture or you're wondering why it is. Well as we're moving into our new church there has been a micro debate, actually there's no debate but a small insignificant quickly brushed away issue of crosses. We're going to have a cross embedded into our sign outside and a cross with glowy lights in the middle of the front sanctuary wall. So why would there be a debate? At first, I thought the arguement for the empty tomb was made quite clear by Pastor Seetoh where in the resurrection not the crucification should be more of the focus. Never the less I had drawn up a rejected plan of a from sign that would be an empty tomb that could double as a skateboard ramp and a shelter from rain. I kinda wanted hobos and teenage punks to come 'utilise' (some say vandalize) our sign. It didn't fly so whatever, but it did get me thinking about an age old tool of the Christian Evangelist. The bridge. The illustration where man is seperated by this vast chasm of sin from God. That Jesus becomes this wooden bridge with a strange hump in the middle so we can cross it. It's classic - but does it make sense? So I thought, if we centered it around an empty tomb how would it look? Brilliant actually. I drew it for you visual learners.
kewl eh? but if you were to put that in any sunday school or church material you'd censor out the colourful metaphors because sinners don't swear, ever! So continuing onwards. Due to the churches sketchy past with people, some may see our cross and see only this. It's linked so you actively choose to click and view that. Some might think it heretical, defend the cross one might add. But let's go back to the israelites in the desert. They looked around at all their neighbours and they all had kings so they wanted a king - and God gave them a king. We looked around at all other religions, all cultures and companies, they have a logo/symbol, we want a symbol - is it God given? The fish is another such example of symbols. It's image isn't even biblical but it is christian now! Because our God is too crazy and no one can look at him without dying, we needed something we could look at and focus on so we took the roman death machine and made it our symbol of hope. Hardcore. Then it lost it's hardcoreness and now it's just a symbol. If you think about it, we've almost made an idol out of the cross, it's in our songs, "oh the wonderful cross", that's like worshipping wood! At least gold is classy but WOOD! But what we might not have realized, and what the israelites might not have realized, is that a figurehead or symbol is weak. It can be attacked, it can be mocked, it can be destroyed. An invisible God is much more immune to such trifle things. This brings me back to one of my favourite misread texts - conforming to the patterns of this world. Study a bit of sociology and one realizes how much we conform without even being aware. So we bring our worldy views and then that's how we 'do church'. Sunday school, bible study, we got to get creative with our conformity, and stop naming it after things no one wants to do anyways. I don't like school and I suck at studying - tacking church or God to it doesn't make it any more appealing to your average joe.
Well them pictures took up enough space so it's time for me to pack my heresies back into their boxes and hide them under the bed for a while yet. Maybe God has left the church, cos I see him on the streets. I should invite him to church one day. We'll have a good laugh. In the end, although the term church has been sloffed around, it's not really church, it's people. There are some people in a church that do not always agree. When we make it that specific, we can't hate on our brothers and want always to have our way. The church is nice though, a nice inanimate object to antagonize and criticize. Certain people are the problem, and when people are the problem - I am the problem. It's not what's wrong with the world, it's what's wrong with me that the world is still like that. It's a grim future, when asked about letting homeless people sleep in our spare rooms of houses or the church, we often talk about 'security issues' and such. So if even the most hospitable and genuinely loving people can't let one cold bum sleep in an empty warm room. We need Jesus to bring his mansion with many rooms sooner than we know.
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So it's been a week since my last post. I had thought about making this post last week, but I wanted to more carefully consider more points. But hopefully it'll be long enough to deter people from reading it therefore being just a way to put my thoughts down. When I was growing up, my dad refused to use PC cos he didn't know how and didn't want to learn. Oh how we longed for a Windows computer to run RedAlert, Starcraft, CS - anything. I played demo games that weren't really that fun but we made the most of it. Then dawned the age of the iMac, the internet. Computers now had more than just a gaming function. There were many hurdles, music downloading was starting to roll, of course napster was only available for the PC so even though we had a cd burner, we had no songs to burn. Winamp and winamp skins were all the range, but of course there was nothing like that for mac. With ResEdit I learned to edit MSN to make my own skin, it was ghetto. ICQ was the only one available for a long while, msn came around afterwards. Then they introduced iMacs in school, for some reason, these macs sucked. Ours was running high loads (lots of pictures) for it's age and the school one's just failed at life. Everything seemed backwards on a mac but then viruses and rumors of viruses would occasionally keep me happy that I could not get infected. Emoticons, we take them for granted but there was a time when they didn't work. Custom one's still don't work for macs. So why all this talk about the past and computers? Recently macs have made a huge comeback, iPods, Macbooks, Air, iPhone. Seems everyone wants to go mac these days. Bringing their old pc habits (left side icons and messy desktops) and maybe bringing their viruses as well (wtih parallel windows running and new hackers emerging). It would feel like the hater PC users are flocking to my world of mac that I have lived with, struggled with and grown accustomed to. It's like my abused friend that I've stuck with and now he's become celebrity. So what's the big fuss? It would be how this attitude translates across things in life. Church is one of these such things. People have worked hard to create the church we see today, it has it's flaws but those people feel a great deal of sentimentality attached to it. Times are changing and we are not those men, we must create our own sense of church if we are to survive. The mac I knew is dead, like when mac moved from version 9 to 10 (none of you were there for that switch) it was a big change, the new version had plenty of errors and put too much load on the computer so it lagged. But eventually it has evolved and now we have Leopard (that I haven't installed yet). In the same way a lot of this old stuff might have to be scrapped, it's great but doesn't work. An old mac user must accept the PC users that are coming on mac, the same ones that insulted macs, the haters.
We at church have become very cliquey without knowing it. But walk into a church that's not yours these days and you'll notice that some people don't want to talk to you at all and will just sort of stare at you as the outsider. Some assigned person will great you but getting to know anyone is just hard. You'll see people form specific goups and even though they might try or seem to try (hopefully) to include you, you'll most likely feel out of place. From years of being told to invite friends to church, most of us have been turned off to that idea because we don't really want them coming to church. No doubt we want them to know and encounter God, but not come to church. Church is just something we christians sit through every sunday.
I guess this was supposed to lead into the second part, but in reality, it was the previous part that budded from the second part. The controversial part. The throwing thoughts out there part. Besides mac, I also grew up with the church. The message of Christianity is GREAT! God loved the world but it was all full of dirty sinners so instead of smiting them He sent Jesus who paid the penalty of sin, being death, and voila after conquering death He got for us all to have, eternal life! Isn't that awesome? So what are we going to do with all these people who receive this eternal life? Well instead of getting them to tell everyone else, we locked them in a building every sunday and pumped them full of things from this book. I think what I'm trying to say, is that the Bible, is just a book. This is a dangerous statement in itself. All scripture is God breathed you know? But so are people, dust. The bible is a whole bunch of book smooshed together. Some parts are translated poetry, some are history and others are prophecy. I think there are a jabillion more sub categories that people have come up with. We're good at that, labelling, it was our first assignment from God - label animals. So here's a tangent, about evolution, it is true that cell theory and all that inheriting stuff can be true, God made beasts of sea, air and land. He just made a whole schmorguz borg of animals, he didn't classify them or name them, they were all unique, they still are. So when he told Adam to name them all, Adam broke it down into what they looked like. Over generations we further specified it and made a science out of it, zoology. Then comes evolution which is a theory to prove zoology - not disprove creation. Because the labels that we created needed evolution to prove it. If animals were just all called beasts, we wouldn't be trying to prove that they were all the same, we know they are all the same they just look different. If you get that, you're a genius like me. Back to where I was. The bible. I hope that by now no one is reading. But at the same time I secretly hope that the conservatives are reading. And parallel to that hope I hope they are not because my ability to communicate what has been rolling in my head for a week isn't perfect. I have a few quotes from this book to go along with my shinanigans, Jesus lived an awesome life. There paper was too expensive for his apostles to afford and record all the stuff Jesus did. This is good because we'd be taught to memorize a lot more if they had microsoft word. In John it says that it all began with the Word. This word is usually known as the bible! NO, it's actually just Jesus - it says it right after the fact. So really, it's all about Jesus what do you know? There's a lot of explaining what he did but a lot of not explaining what he did too, all the stuff that was left out. Memorizing someone's life word for word (as wordily as whatever translation you might use) is somewhat detracting and very timeconsuming. It is also dangerous, there is a certain verse that seems great for encouraging people to bear with it "Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men so that you will not grow weary and lose heart" The danger here is that if you wanted to spur yourself on with this verse while you are in a bad situation, you pass judgement on your oppressors, they are sinful men - when we are sinful men. I guess I'm not the type of person who really wants to convince you of this viewpoint. A lot of people build there lives on the bible, this is good. I've seen people read the bible in the sub at ubc, this is also good. But I haven't seen someone that reads their bible and can at the same time notice people around them who are struggling and who aren't feeling all that great. Faces buried so deep within a book that it takes priority over certain friendships that never had a chance to begin. The bible isn't bad, it's great, a lot of great stuff in there. But there are Christians who can't read, there were Christians who didn't have a bible - they saw Jesus walking around or saw his bumbuddies and what they were doing. They didn't memorize what they said, they didn't copy exactly what they did, we'd still be having house churches and communities that shared if they did. They got creative, they saw something, then added to it. We have different types of churches and ministries this day cos of that. It just seems our nose is too much into this book right now and we don't see it as a whole, as a story, the word as a person, Jesus Christ. We pinpoint and study small obscure things while we could just read the whole thing as a story and say to ourselves, i"m gonna do that. But that's too dangerous, study the abstract parts so that you don't have to do the literal stuff like go sell everything or go eat with prostitutes and tax collectors. Turn water in to wine? No just don't drink. The bible is still somethign that should be read, maybe memorized, but if bible study is what christian life comprises of then it sucks. I'd love to see 2 outreach events for every bible study or $100 to the poor for every $30 leather bound gold trimmed mini sized esv bible. Or an hour spent on teaching people how to read for every 5 minutes we spend reading the bible. Which would then require 30 minutes of studying to be such a useful teacher for every 2 minutes spent memorizing a card. I'd love to see less bibles that say "Living Word" in gold letters and more people that beam living word with their golden lives. You might say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope some day you will join us, and the world will live as one. Now wouldn't that be a nice note to end it on? A quote from John Lennon. But no, we must also realize that dreams usually happen whilst sleeping and day dreams really take you away from reality. If I admit to being a dreamer, then I must emphasize that I am a sleeper. Not just in the literal sense but in the sense that I'm not likely to do much, you don't do much when you sleep - you toss and turn and disrupt the bed. It's easier to stay awake with other people, so fellow insomniacs, a revolution is about to begin. So when I previously said to get your face in the book, today i give you quite the opposite challenge, get your face out of the book and see the bigger picture, we're living in biblical times. Don't facebook, facejesus. I feel like a real genius sometimes, that one's completely original =D. If you think that's some retarded vague statement liek teh ever so cliche God Loves You. Jesus can be faced anywhere because whenever we help people in need, we help Jesus. That's a quote from JC himself.
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