Urbana sharing...

I know this post is kinda late, but I guess better late than never... Besides the next Urbana won't be till 2009 anyhow, so you still have almost 3 whole years to look forward to it :P

So ya, I went to Urbana... yeah! And yes, it did cost me $600 But actually, it probably won't in the long run, cause the church is subsidizing some of it. For example, my registration fee, for a non-student, the conference costs well over $400, I think close to $450... but I used the AFC discount code and it was only like $395 after that. Then I only wrote a check for $295 USD because $100 USD was paid by our group coordinator Lisa for all of us. She also paid for the bus ride there up front and I think the Hotel might also be covered by the church as well. Altogether, there is supposed to be $3000 (CDN$ I think) worth of subsidy spread among ten people who went. I saw some of you at Urbana as well, which was nice. :) Especially you Johnathan which I haven't seen for so long, it was nice of you to have lunch with us. Vince, I'm sorry I didn't wait for you guys at dinner that day, dinner was at 5:30 and it was almost 6:00 when another friend from my bus came to the Hotel and I went to dinner with him. Later that day, in the dinner line, I also ran into a CC 2006 friend Evelyn Fu.... she didn't quite recognize me at first and we both kinda gave each other the weird squinting look then I was like "Evelyn?"... So was it worth it? I think so! Eric makes fun of me saying I haven't found my calling yet... Well wake up and smell the coffee, I think most people Urbana or not have not found their calling yet. Some people think that Urbana is more of a conference just for people who plan to be Missionaries... I think not... I do believe what the speakers are saying, that we all have a calling and I don't think that all of us necessarily have a calling to be a missionary, but we do all have a mission and we do all have a calling from God! In terms of calling, well I did have a strong feeling that I need to do something for God at the last night when we also had a joint 22,000+ people communion. See how many people are there? Told you it is a once in a lifetime event that every Christian should attend. But actually I know at least several people whom are attending Urbana for at least the second time. A lot of church leaders also go, I saw Rev. Dr. DW from *seminary* there when I was in line for the washroom. I also had this dream, I wonder if maybe God is trying to tell me something... BTW, this dream did not happen during Urbana, but after, when I was sleeping in my own bed at home. So anyhow, my dream was that I turned a Brothel into a centre for orphans and those recovering from Prostitution. Interesting... But I also had another strange dream that night, in this second dream I had after that first one, I dreamt I was reading my friend Queenie's blog and it was a December 31st entry and she was saying how Dec. 31st depresses her cause it reminds her of her ex back in 2001... Weird... Well part of the reason why I often have multiple dreams is because I often wake up in the middle of the night to go the washroom, #1...

Ok, well actually I can't remember the second dream that night. But it's been a while since I started this e-mail (about a week) and I've had another interesting Christ related dream. I was evangelising to my ex-coworker at Nihon Auto when my other co-worker who I think I remember is Siek or some other religion started talking about re-incarnation. So then I presented a point about re-incarnation. What if there's person A, who's the re-incarnation of Hitler and person B, the re-incarnation of Mother Teresa? When you think about it, there's really not too much person A can do in terms of good deeds to make up for the deeds of Hitler. Likewise, what can person B do that is so bad to offset the good deeds of mother Teresa? When you think about it, where is the justice in re-incarnation? Why should you in your present life pay for the consequences of your past life?

But anyhow, Urbana was good! :) Other than it being a really long bus ride, it didn't seem like a really long retreat to me. I guess cause I've been to Campus Challenge and that's already a 4 day retreat so Urbana really only feels like 1 day longer. I heard Winners fellowship also has/had some 1 week retreats before. On the first night, the speaker was trying to tell us we need to use the bible to influence the world. So he had us hold the bible in one hand and our cellphones in the other. But before that, he wanted us to turn on our cellphones and to text a friend to tell them we are at Urbana. I tired, but was unsuccessful, both me and my other Telus using friend couldn't do it. Apparently when I was down there in St. Louis, my cellphone had a triangle on the top of the display. My friend says "that means your cellphone company is charing you more money...", but I think it's more than that. I did try making a call with it because my friend didn't show up where we were meeting at the hotel before dinner yet. But it said I was connected to Verizon and I could either use my credit card or make a collect call. Perhaps it would have worked if I had more than $0.15 cents left on my phone account at the time, but perhaps not. But now I'll never know.

The next day, I tried meeting up with CCFers for lunch. The people from my CC small groups did not reply to my e-mail so I assume they weren't comming. Anyhow after arriving at the rendevous location in front of the Hilton and meeting up with the rest of RCCF, we had trouble finding a place to eat. All the resturants were full as there were over 22,000 of us at the conference. We tried going to Hooters figuring that'll be the one place without too many people, but even that was a 20 minute wait. As we were walking away, I saw people with Urbana bracelets on when I looked through the window. :P One of us, I think I remember it was just one, decided to buy a sandwich from the resturant in the hotel for $6. Not wanting to pay that much for a sandwich, I ended up not eating lunch. I figure I could fast, besides dinner on the first day for my group was scheduled for 5:30PM which wasn't that far away anyhow. But then I noticed I had some cookies in my backpack during the workshop so I ate some... Saved some $ I guess :P

The first workshop I went to was Struggling With The Asian Dream, wasn't very fascinating. I was tired and fell asleep during some of it too. To quote Forest Gump "That's all I have to say about that..." Hehe, but the second workshop I went to was called Single in Missions. As Russell Peters put it "What was that for...? Just in case..." :P The second workshop was both funny and informative. I was telling my friend a little bit about this yesturday over Pho... The one thing I can remember about that workshop was from the very beginning... The lady who told us "Yes, I am single" as it would be inappropriate for her to be leading the workshop if she wasn't, told us how to answer the question "Are you married?" Apparently, she said we should answer with "I am not married YET..." Hehe, it sounds simple, but it's true and it DOES do a lot. I rememeber when I was still doing that commission based job and I was older than the person I was working with who also asked me "Are you married?" It's true, I said no and they do ask me MORE questions... such as "Why not?" and etc... etc... so now next time I will say "I am not married YET..." LOL :P Even though I know it's not available at the webcast of Urbana 2006 at http://www.urbana.org/u2006.webcast.cfm I won't get into details of ALL the workshops I attended. I also didn't attend any during two of the session time slots. One of them, I was going to attend the meeting for the Urbana Unity Choir, but turns out it was full. Seeing how I was already late for any workshop at that point and I didn't really plan out which one I was going to, I skipped it to get some food. Another one, on the last day, we were unable to get any lunch from the place we were told is pretty empty. Eventually we went back to St. Louis Bread Company like for the 5th time we were there... crazy, but anyhow the workshops had again already started so I just visted the Canadian lounge and met a guy there before going to the next workshop.

I think it was the second last day, perhaps not, but we didn't have workshops, we had "community meetings" instead. I went to the famous Rick Warren's community meeting. I didn't go primary because Rick Warren was leading it, but because the theme Questions&Answers was particularly interesting to me, I like those and it's been a long time since we had one of those for fellowship. Well the first impression I got was that he was chubbier than I expected :P I mean, at least from the ones I've had, I'm already used to the fact that Pastoral staff tend to be overweight, but he was like whoa... :P It's like when I was reading his book, Purpose Driven Life, I never saw what he looked like, but I didn't expect him to be THAT fat. :P He also turns out to be an extremely funny guy in person. It's not something you would noticed from reading his book and also from the main sermon he gave to the entire group in the Edward Jones dome. But during the community meeting, he was extremely funny! A lot of the jokes were focused around his marriage... Apparently he and his wife Kay got engaged on their second date and this was like 8 days after the first one! Whoa! :O I wonder what kinda record I can set... :P However, on their honeymoon, they both were like "We saved ourselves for this?" LOL... so jokes... Later on, they came to the conclusion that they were going to make it work "even if it kills us" and they ended up getting a marriage counsellor. He said maybe they should be on a Visa commercial, "Visa saved our marriage". Apparently in the beginning of their marriage, their church was still small then and they were only making $800 a month, yet had to pay I think it was $400 a month for the marriage counsellor. In the end he said they ran up a $1500 Visa bill to help pay for the counselling. But it turns out it was worth it, "the first few years were like hell on earth, but we still had 29 years of a good marriage"... then his wife was like "I thought it was more like 27..." LOL so jokes! He also said that we ought to listen to our wives, cause often they are the holy spirit... hmm true that! ;) He also said "I prefer kissing in tongues", hehe... Sometime during the season he also made this joke about how him and his Christian brothers were part of the BTTRU fartenity... hehe, BTTRU, Bachelors Till The Rapture United... Then his wife said that she and her sisters, as a result of this were part of the FFIC... Forsaken Foxes In Christ ROTFL... :P Rick Warren also stated something important, the purpose of marriage is to make you holy not happy. And there should be no divorce, "there's no such thing as incompatible"... "He doesn't have the income and she's not patible..." LOL... it is kinda silly people get married and later find out they are not meant for each other... He also had some cool acroynms for ways that don't work and only SLOW AIDS... Supply Condoms, Limit number of partners, Offer needle exchange, Wait for your first sexual experience... and how to STOP AIDS... Save sex for marriage, Train men to treat women and childern with respect, Offer treatment through churches, Pledge yourself to one partner for life... seems simple enough, but it's so true... He only answered like 5 questions during the session, but it was very informative very all, he is wise indeed...

Speaking of Rick Warren, recently V asked me to borrow my copy of his book, "The Purpose Driven Life" again... I told her it was just lying on my shelf and she could have it for as long as she wanted. It was an interesting coincidence that on the same Monday of that week I was having dinner with another friend and I was telling him that I think I also got the book as a gift like he did, but I wasn't sure and not sure as to from who I got it from personally. Coincidently also when V msged me on MSN on Wednesday night, I was not home at the time and not at the computer, I should have been in auto away mode, but I guess that didn't difer her. :P It just so happens that at that time I had just dropped off or was in the process of dropping of "Princess" Lili after we ate after CCF... It turns out when I check out my copy of the book that it was "Princess" that gave me my copy of the book in March 2004... I remember I was reading 3 books at the time, Purpose Driven Life, I Kissed Dating Goodbye and this biography, I think I was doing D.L. Moody I had to read for dedication fellowship. It was quite a lot, but lucky I was on my summer at the time, although I did have to work during July and a bit of August...

At CCF, I had a chance to share a bit of my experience at Urbana... well it was more like our church's vision... after hearing what Vince had to say about how he could apply his Comp-Sci to be used by God and in missions... On Sunday, two of the people in my church who also went with me to Urbana shared and also mentioned our vision. Hehe, but this time I put a TWIST on it! How better to demonstrate what I heard that "in MCBC... I heard that people in the English side don't even know who the head of the chinese fellowship is...." then to do a live experiment since I had MCBC people in da CCF house? :P I was mentioning how the majority of us probably go to a chinese church and it probably has multiple congregations like ours.... So I was like "Arthur... you go to that church (MCBC).... who's the chairman of the chinese fellowship?" And he was like "I don't know...." Ha! Kristen was right! Well I told her that day at the Urbana debrief meeting "I don't know who the chairperson of the chinese fellowship at our church is either..." but she countered with "Ya, but if I told you it was like.... Chilli, you would at least know who she is right?" True... I would... I guess, when churches get bigger and have seperate worships all the time, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of everyone. In fact, there's probably a lot of older adults in the Mandarin and Cantonese side that I don't know if they aren't and even if they are the parents of people in the English congregation... Anyhow, so ya, we also had one person from the chinese side come to Urbana with us and we hope in the future maybe it can be more. The vision we have is that we want more unity and love between the different congregations in our church... Like that part in the Urbana summary video I shared, "The liver cannot say to the lungs, I am all grown up now, I don't need you....the...etc... etc... I don't need you......... The sign of maturity is not independance but interdependance..." As part of trying to fulfill our mission, the ten of us will intentionally not sit on the right side of the santuary where the English side typically sits during every joint worship, but instead we will disperse ourselves among the chinese congregation to get to know them better. I made the comment that it's kinda like a short time mission trip and instead of "Mission Across the Miles", maybe it's more like "Mission Across the Ailes"! :P They all thought it was funny and have adapted this name of mine. The church thought it was a good name too. ;) All in all, I had a good time at Urbana and it was definetely worth it. I only really had to pay mostly for the conference itself and the $ I spent there on meals as my church reimbursed each of us $300CDN as a subsidy and that covers most, but not all of the bus and hotel costs.

Until the next Urbana,

Cell Phone is free for 1 day...

Hmm I haven't updated for a while... But soon I will post my Urbana sharing blog here.... Just wanted to let you guys know today (February 10th) is my birthday so every year on February 10th, my cellphone is free for the whole day... 12AM to 12AM...

My Birthday is now over :( so I took my # down... you had your chance :P actually nobody called. :( Boo... oh well...