Monday, November 27, 2017

(8) 'He'll write my name...' (8)

"She's not the only one that has to 'go to work...'" [sensing the spirit]

I am finding my writing skills to be rusty, but I'm slowly trying to brush off the metaphorical cobwebs.

Taylor Swift strikes again! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-ORhEE9VVg] Wow.... Ironically, around 8 years ago, around the time when a close friend of mine was getting married, I always wanted to attend a wedding with a certain person named after a certain then well known eastern singer; however like a certain friend of mine said of his admiration for Rachel McAdams, "Taylor Swift is still my girl..." haha...This song happened to come on the PA system right on cue when I was doing some reflection about the world and its true nature. And I've come to the same general conclusion as I was taught some years ago, but with a corollary. The reason why pop (popular) music is such a hit with most people is because they are 'looking for love in all the wrong places' and the most common fallacy is trying to seek it in a significant other that isn't Jesus Christ. To quote an old prophecy from the archives a friend of mine who is now in professional ministry said once:

(can't find the quote so just going to go by memory) "If you can't find complete satisfaction in Christ, you're never going to find it in a girl.." [1.0] I assumed he spoke out of experience given the differences in his life circumstances from mine at the time.

I noticed Taylor Swift uses two interesting elements in her music video that have a strong correlation to my past experiences with this particular aspect of my life. Without getting too personal on my public blog, the elements are 'White horses' (like her song which helped me pull through 'the long drive home' some years ago) and the fact that the setting of this music video seems to have the same setting as that movie Cruel Intentions. Not to imply I was in fact that 'cruel', but maybe perceived inaccurately to be like that you could word it. Brings me to another point that another issue is the media portrays a lot of emo drama as an expected part of any romance, but while I agree it can happen in some, it would be a 'bad idea' to expect your romantic relationship will necessarily have a lot of emo drama.

I have to admit it was definitely a shocker to my system that when I had finally gotten comfortable with the gift of singleness that God suddenly started to open my eyes to show me suddenly that MAYBE He actually wants to bestow the gift of marriage onto me instead. Or perhaps similar to my experience recently with misplacing my cellphone for an entire 12 hrs and the irony of it being right by my side but only having the one usable internet connection at home to try to locate it, I couldn't cause it wasn't connected to the internet, which was weird, cause when I found it I discovered cellular data option was still switched on. Similar to how at my previous church they were discussing the inauguration of my previous English Pastor and how they said they discerned that he has the 'gift' (for ministry I presume) that maybe just like my phone, I perhaps had the gift of marriage all along, it just wasn't yet time for me to start putting it into use. There was also another ironic thing I saw when taking the bus home after working out at the gym, the bus driver had just finished his shift and he was giving instructions to a noticeably younger bus driver as to what she'll need to know when beginning hers.

So going onto the important stuff, what is my personal viewpoint on the gift of marriage in a nutshell? Well I wrote in much more detail on how marriage affect's one's ministry some years ago. And AH HA...just when I thought if I wanted to look at what I wrote earlier I would have to try to dig up my old laptop, I am forgetting one key element, it was for an ONLINE course so I should actually have it sitting in my email somewhere for easier access. Anyway, let's go with my original plan to do a summary of what I think is healthy imagery and definition of a blessed marriage. I think a healthy marriage is very much like the tree in Psalm 1:3 that bears fruit at the right time. Also going along the lines of gardening, I believe this verse also speaks a lot about marriage: "I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow." 1 Corinthians 3:6. Although I agree there obviously is free will in marriage, I also believe if the couple does not make God the foundation [Luke 6:43-49] that fruit will not continue to regrow healthy and you'll just end up with a whole bunch wasted efforts [Matthew 13, note also the explanation of the sower parable]. The concluding thought I leave you to 'drive home' with you is this, just like the way Joshua Harris terms it in his book, I believe it was the second one "Boy Meets Girl" where he says Adam probably told his daughter that things only "seem" more complicated with more options in terms of whom one can choose as a mate, "you just need to trust the Creator to bring what is good..." And honestly, let's face it, just like with all long term decisions in life, do you truly believe you know what is best for yourself and His Kingdom or maybe Jesus does?

Although I am not seeking the 'ideal secular (non-Christ centeric)' version of marriage. I pray I can aspire to be what a Christ centered marriage should look like with my previous original aspiration from my youth to be 'nothing like my (biological) father...'

Saturday, November 25, 2017

I will be faithful...

"I will become a better king..." [The Chronicles of Narnia, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, well the movie version anyhow, and if you're reading this, you'll know whether it's in the book version, since you told me you've Read it...]

I like how C.S. Lewis also picked the word "DAWN" for the title of his book. Seems almost preordained too. I don't know if I'll be like a Calvinist and say everything in life is absolutely going to be like that, but I do truly believe that if God has a strong leading towards for you to do something that He does indeed have a purpose behind it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV5iZBTNYrk&list=RDGMEMMib4QpREwENw3_jAc0YgNwVMkV5iZBTNYrk

Although, my life didn't end up the way I thought it would when I met a certain Someone that somewhat aspired me to start this blog, the first blog I ever wrote, or as I later had it prophesied over in 2006 I believe it was, maybe 2009, "God has a work for you to do..." [One of the Urbana conferences, I attended.] I always thought it would be as Russell Peters put it "really cool" if one of these Urbanas I would run into the (some of) the larger Christian community that God has blessed me with and everybody would be able to see a ring on my mate's finger as a testament similar to the prophecy Rick Warren and his Wife (I believe if I remember right, her name begins with the same letter as mine too, haha what do you know). Well year 14 of this blog is coming up and so is the next Urbana, so who knows...

I definitely promise before God to continue writing in this blog sticking with the currently level of anonymity it holds because you never know who you could end up reaching out to and inspiring to live or reorient their life towards Christ. And looks like I did 'call it' in the blog entry that had been sitting in my drafts for some time now:

"one of the themes of this movie is that things that our futures are also written based on all the things that happen in the present and past, regardless of whether we want these things to happen or not" [posted on a different day, but link: http://life-of-agent-k.blogspot.ca/2017/11/meet-robinsons.html]

Using my spiritual discernment abilities to try to discern what God is speaking in movies on some of my entries, I recall an interesting line from something I read 7 years ago (LOL probably to the date/month too if I think about it) that really caught my eye.

Without looking it up, I believe reads exactly like this:
"You're STILL always talking about movies and you're STILL ruining all the endings, please stop!!!"

I one day would maybe hope to meet that person who submitted those words for the publication or perhaps I already have (or rather whoever it was that told that person to submit that posting to the seminary newsletter)... :)

Thursday, November 16, 2017

"Meet The Robinsons..."

Original Date Started Typing [Some Years Ago]

A Christian friend of mine recently pointed out that maybe I was 'meant to get sick' for this week, well personally I've never been THAT 'Calvinistic' in my beliefs, but encountering him recently reminded me of something else another Christian told me before: "If it happens, then it's God's will..." After having a discussion with her about that statement, I realized that she wasn't asserting that everything that happens is because God 'wanted' it to happen, but rather she was reminding us that nothing can happen unless God 'permits' it to, like in the example of when Satan needed God's permission in order to 'test' Job [Job 2:7].

Anyhow, not too sure perhaps why I decided to get into that above intro so much, perhaps it is a good prelude to my commentary on this movie though, because one of the themes of this movie is that things that our futures are also written based on all the things that happen in the present and past, regardless of whether we want these things to happen or not. For those of you who also watch Star Trek, this is known as 'the timeline' and is based on a belief that every event has an effect on a future event and if past events are changed, the future is consequently also altered.

To run or 'spoil' as little of the movie as possible, I will also just say that something like this happens to the main character in which his 'timeline' is altered by visitors from the future and he needs to fix it in order to prevent a possible timeline that will lead to 'mass destruction'. The moral of this movie is that we may at times consider ourselves insignificant when really we are important or as my other friend likes to quote Marianne Williamson, "we are powerful beyond measure" [http://explorersfoundation.org/glyphery/122.html]

TODAY:

2 Corinthians 3:2-3

2 Corinthians 2 2 Corinthians 4

2 Corinthians 3:2-3New International Version (NIV)

2 You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone. 3 You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stonebut on tablets of human hearts.

Every hour every minute...

"Time to clean out the trash..." AKA The Intermission...

It appears it's been almost a month since my last update on this blog and there's good reasons for that, however, I can try to rectify the situation. Anyhow, I came up with the title to this entry because I recently dusted off the majority of my room and also ended up with a lot of trash because I was reusing some of the tissues I've been using to blow my nose to do some of the dusting.

Lately I've realized that I haven't been as good with fighting off diseases as I used to be in the past. Well, there was a time before that in which I used to struggle with some other types of infections as well. As my blog follower put it, in a sense, I also need to 'clean out' my body (from germs) as well...

He's paid our dues...

[Verse 1]
I've paid my dues
Time after time
I've done my sentence
But committed no crime
And bad mistakeS
I've made a few
I've come through...

We are the champions my friends,

We'll keep on fighting till the end...

Have time for losers...Cause we are the champions...of His world...

['His' Queen]

-----------------------------------------------
*The above was written well before today's current publish date...

So....basically I've come to the realization that I've been pretty much having almost seven years of silence on this blog. Does that mean 'the dark Knight' has disappeared? Did some believe perhaps he perished? Or maybe God was helping him to 'take out the trash'...? It can be amazing sometimes what your community can do for you in service when you are also faithfully serve your community...sometimes that is just how you gotta as the movie says 'attack life', how to "stay in control of the game when the puck isn't yours..." it takes both doing the Work of God while doing his Will and it'll all be (Ducks)Worthwhile :)

As my spiritual director put it, "sometimes God can speak very loudly through your circumstances" and I did understand the main point the Lord wanted to get across was that 'you cannot stay at seminary because of J...' and it took me many a years to discern his will behind that and in the meantime I have been prayerfully trying to serve him to the best of my ability given my limited spiritual and physical resources. In essence I had sort of become the dark Knight, but also the anti-version because I had been 'exiled' (probably a little harsher sounding than I think it should be) from seminary and also had very limited material resources compared to Bruce Wayne in the movies.

Interestingly enough in the years that followed my 'exile', there have been a lot of legal charges and scandals that took place in my local church and either I was as the recent TV series The Good Place put it 'the kink in the system' or maybe as I now try to look at the good/God side of these events, maybe God's like: "Oh believe me my beloved son, there are much more publicly humiliating sins you could have committed and try not to look too severely at your own sin, just continue being faithful to me 'in little...' As well, your aspiration to continue to seek my face in marriage and to be married before your return to seminary is in fact a noble one..."

iSaveTheLastDance: "It was my stupid prayer that God will make it abundantly clear as to who I should marry so that I can honor Him in this area and I wanted so badly for it to come true..."

"It maybe can still come true..." ['A' Friend]

'Sometimes your persistent widow praying can work, sometimes might just be a James 1-2 issue...it's hard I know' [ST&JC]

God felt this post needed something a little extra: 1 Peter 4

The strangest dream I ever had...

I was trying to think of an interesting title for this entry, but the only ones I could think of had to do with the story line anyhow and I thought that maybe the title would be a 'turn-off' and lead people not to read this entry if they did not know that it was in fact based on a dream I had this week. While it is true that it does indeed still come from my mind so to speak, it is not something I intended to think up on my own.

There likely will be some details in this dream that I'll end up leaving out, but this dream starts off kind of borrowing a subject from a TV series I used to watch, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I apologize if this narrative does 'borrow' material from other copyrighted story lines, but as I mentioned, it is a dream and not my original intention. It starts off by illustrating how a good witch who does magic for good is lead into a kind of Christian cult that [did not finish the entry but probably I was not sure as to why I ended it here at the time....]

This actually isn't the strangest dream I have had, that one dear friends would be the one that ended up leading my 'spirit fingers'/hands to make a certain letter of the alphabet appear on the top/roof of my '___-mobile' ;)

iGenesis 44:

First let me try to tell you the dream and the circumstances at the time to lead up to the potential present interpretation. To summarize before I go to the commentary section, let me also state I will also only use the present tense, which is now past tense interpretation of the dream after.

Dream [Stardate: sometime in Spring of 2010 maybe? Well 2010 is all I know]:

So the dream consists of three elements, or maybe you could say 2 contexts and 2 subjects. God at the time also sent me someone gifted with dream interpretation into my presence to assist in interpreting the dream a bit. Perhaps three themes is the best way to put it, the three themes would be utility, relationships and providence. In the dream, the subjects were the Accord and Altima which were both vehicles of my immediate biological family at the time I had the dream, however I only took the Accord with me to seminary for my own personal use. I guess 'personal use' here are the key operating words here perhaps. Anyhow forgot whichever vehicle, actually hmmm did I forget or maybe the past circumstances were actually the complete opposite of the possibility portrayed in the dream? Yes I believe that was it actually, in the dream the Altima had the 2 front brakes that couldn't
be repaired and in the time following the dream it was actually the rear disc brakes on the Accord that we felt were too costly to repair hence we decided not to keep the vehicle. A part of me felt like I 'died' metaphorically when I had to part with the Accord cause as I put it to a friend AKA 'DWong Answer', "I had always hoped that one day I would be able to drive my kids in that car..." ah well, guess God had other plans huh...the other subjects in the dream was someone was maybe only a few years older than J who at the time was engaged (girl in dream was then engaged, not J) in the setting of us having fellowship in her parents' home and then another girl also appeared whom I had never seen before and still haven't seen, I would not say I am still trying to find this 'mystery girl' I get that God was trying to symbolize "someone new" with whoever it was in that dream....

Past Interpretation:

"So...she's a newer model..." referring to the Altima. "You're still always talking about movies and you're still ruining all the endings!!" [Seminary Newsletter]

For some reason I feel the bed calling out to me again so I will honor that calling for now and type more later...

"I'm like a vault baby, locked down..." -Alex Hitchens

Two weeks ago, I finally won the softball tournament in the church league for the first time in my life and I will be writing an entry about that sometime soon. First, I wanted to write about a concept I got inspired by in a dream. [don't have any dreams of note recently
Maybe cause God already knows I'm now wide aWake to his strong calling but definitely wouldn't hurt to write the dreams down the next time I have them for building up my experience with dream interpreting...]

To be honest I'm not really sure I can remember exactly why I capitalized that W, maybe cause of the theological concept of a "WAKE". Anyhow, it's really loving of Jesus that every time I reflect upon the about the blessing that is R, there's always something the Spirit will do to reaffirm just how much of a blessing He has given us to remind me of my need to be faithful both to the Lord and my err 'loRd' :P LOL... I used to know a W, in fact, 'not the only' W, back in my undergraduate days and turns out her major shared the same abbreviation as R's full initials.

LOL, I'm not really sure why I used this as the title to do a draft entry in some years proceeding when this post was actually posted as I've never got around to finishing it and turns out I may already have another entry that shares this same name. Not to mention, I recently forgot that the main female character in this movie, her name happens to be Sarah! It was like, OH YEAH... [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0386588/?ref_=nv_sr_1]

I once had a professor who told us he never locks his car and never locks his house. His point was that if something got stolen, it was never really his in the first place. When I think about it, there is something that does belong to us that we often don't 'lock' and I will start to talk about this with some verses in the bible:

"Above everything else, guard your heart. It is where your life comes from." [Proverbs 4:23]

I think sometimes we do need to 'lock' certain things... not necessarily to protect from actual theft, but to defer the temptation to steal or cause others to 'Miss the mark'. I recently started to take this to heart a lot more when it comes to people unfriending me on Facebook; as wherever the spirit leads, one should follow without question but others may not necessarily have a subjective understanding of the situation and as I have been learning neither does the subject himself at times.

I'm in the middle of posting some Draft posts I wrote in my "7 year sabbatical" [as per one of my drivers when I broke my left ring finger during one of my summer courses 'Sometimes God speaks very loudly through our circumstances' -DK] after I had left my 'full course LOAD' at seminary; little did I know that I would also be taking a similar sabbatical and it again would also be related to this finger as well....

Perhaps the best course of action is to begin with trying to summarize what God has been showing me in these past 7 years since my exile/exodus...

In the first year, it was very similar to Jane's powers in the Twilight series, nothing but a whole whack and a lot of pain. I may still be suppressing a bit of the memories from that year as I can't even seem to recall if I even played Christian softball that year. Hmm actually if my gift of memory serves me right I think I did play and I was on TW's Rangers team. I also started to learn about marriage from other people's testimonies of their own life experiences starting with some close friends of mine. I was also able to compare and contrast a lot of the theology from both the paper I wrote and the one J wrote to current day interpretations of how following God works in ideal and non ideal situations and how all of these factors influence our effectiveness in Ministry. "Capital M" as DK said. I believe the end of 2011 was also the year I suffered from an extreme anal fissure combined with hemorrhoids (according to another physician as I saw a few of them about it) so the physical pain was also quite unbearable at the end of the year, so much so I really wanted my life not to continue just from the physical pain of those few months alone. Suffice to say I've been taking a lot of really strong medically prescribed drugs from the summer of 2010 onward.

In the following year, I did try to return to my Roots more and was very much focusing on trying to stand on my own two feet. God also showed this ideology to be futile, particularly in the circumstance when I dropped a polished railroad spike onto my left foot and eventually my previous psychological wounds also reopened most likely from losing sleep due to the physical pain and I was once again hospitalized. iWonderWoman: I also briefly volunteered in the children's ministry at my local church for a brief time this year and ran into some old friends also volunteering such as WC. I assume this is 2012, which was also the year my mom pushed me to sell the Accord, had I kept it, I probably could have gotten at least another 2-3 years out of it if I kept up with the maintenance. There are still people I know personally are driving vehicles made in the 1990s. I haven't seen the first Wonder Woman (with Gal Gadot) movie, but I assumed maybe her significant other passed away. I just recently watched Justice League to find out I have that in common with this fictional character as well in some ways.

Hmm...I had previous started writing a summary of some of the things I learned from year 3 on wards, but both the draft on my cellphone is inaccessible (because it is currently not functioning) and the other text I typed the other day, it seems I either shut off the computer before updating or it potentially crashed. Anyhow so year 3 was kind of the hardest yet most interesting years too I suppose. It didn't take much for the holy spirit to be able to direct me to knowing J got married to someone else, on the same year where I had finally won the softball tournament in the Christian League I was always usually like the Leafs in most recent years (before they stopped being able to make it to the playoffs after 2014 I believe), always being eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. Ironically, I finally completely my aspiration of winning, but nobody I had in mind at the time to complete the other initial aspiration linked to this one. I did start to meet other people, but seemed one by one God circumstantially eliminated them too...In addition to J getting married, I also lost both my biological father in 2011 and his mom, my grandmother in 2012, so definitely had quite a big back of mixed feelings that year.

Year four, not an very eventful year in of itself. It marked a one year mark since I started to play ice hockey but I guess this is also the first year I didn't lose a physical relationship in my life. I think prior to this year I had still given marriage some brief consideration, but this year in particular, God started to change and work in my heart in terms of the longevity and amount of joy one can expect in an earthly relationship is incomparable to that of an eternal one with our saviour. This is probably also the year as I had told some of my friends and my immediate biological family (mostly when my mom asked) that I had become more firm in my decision to no longer proactively seek out marriage. Perhaps a better way of stating this is I no longer was going to take marriage 'into my own hands and try to bring God into it', but rather I would just 'continue to live my life for God and if God wanted to bring a marriage into it, I wouldn't fight him on it...' My mom termed this as "giving up", but I never stated it as such to any of my friends, more so I would just tell them that I had "no expectations regarding marriage" because at this point in my life I was already getting cozy/comfortable with the idea of being single and didn't like the concept of potentially putting my heart "out there" again only to let some other experience with naive thinking bring it to another heartbreak. As title of this post itself, it was like that line in the movie, I had decided to become like a 'vault' and 'lock down' my heart.

Year 5, I well... it is kind of hard to do a non-hindsight account of this year in some ways perhaps. But I will try to be as 'bring myself back to 2015' as much as possible. Again I will Google "Popular Movies of 2015" (as I did with 2014) as a memory aid. It is interesting what movie IMDb.com highlights at the top of their 2015 list LOL... Anyways, focus.... So in 2014/2015 I had unfortunately gradually came to a decision to pretty much stop attending Sunday church services altogether for various reasons. So I would say that 'not being in a relationship/marriage' wasn't the only thing I was being or getting 'comfortable' with. There were various reasons for not attending besides just perhaps the overall lack of accountability to attendance as a Christ follower. Finances were definitely one. The Altima we had was already starting to run down and maintenance was starting to become an issue in addition to it already starting to use more gas than before due to lack of maintenance. And unfortunately I also sided with my mom that attending church was a 'waste of gas', which for the most part held some degree of truth to it given the circumstances at the time there wasn't much different I would be doing attending versus not attending from a physical perspective. I guess I focused too much on my own struggles in years prior to 2015, the fact that it became so difficult to see other couples at church, how difficult it was to find a job (outside of doing ministry/school). All of these things added up, in addition to I often found myself playing hockey late on Saturdays and wouldn't be until home 1AM or later most of the time. So there's that... I think the worse part of it though, is that both my faith and actions [James 1-2] were starting to wilt and unfortunately I did kind of 'lack conviction' [EW] in terms of wanting to do much to rectify the situation.

Year 6, I think it was the year of just being metaphorically 'lost and wandering' a lot [like the Israelites wandering the desert/wilderness for 40 years]. I think somewhere in early 2014, maybe 2015, I had declared bankruptcy and it didn't really help that if I had found a job they would garnish my wages as that really limited my motivation to find work in general, unless it was an extremely high paying job and I would rather they garnish my wages rather than not have a job. However, it made it difficult for me to stay motivated to just take any job without increasing my income by much, if any increase at all just for the experience and in all honestly, I think God did make use of the time to continue in my healing process because I continued to leave more and more things 'in His hands' rather than my own including the fact that I never stopped looking for work entirely, but still continued to put myself out there to see whether I would be hired/not...

[post in progress]

When year 7 started rowing around my mom was getting impatient always asking me 'is this all you care about nowadays? Playing hockey and Pokemon?

The gospel according to _ _ _ _, [ https://life-of-agent-k.blogspot.com/2012/ ]