Happy 2012! One of the first blog articles I read this year concern turning a new year resolution into 10,000 “little resolutions” by Paul David Tripp. What he means is that we will have 10,000 little moments throughout the year to make a choice to act in faith or not, to act in obedience or not, etc. It’s a good read, so please read it.

It also reminds me of the book “What Did You Expect?: Redeeming the Realities of Marriage” that Tripp wrote on marriage. In the book he kept emphasizing the concept that marriage is not to be worked out in the big decisions/moments in life, but in every day decisions to love and honor your spouse with God’s love. So I want to dedicate my first blog entry in 2012 to my wife Wendy because I wish to love her with 10,000 little moments in 2012.

It also reminds me of something I’ve been wanting to write about. I call it the the “seasons of a Christian marriage” that we might journey through our lives, from immaturity to maturity. Here are the seasons:

Season 0:
I have a lot of love to give, and I’m looking for Mr./Mrs. Right

Season 1:
I love you because you accept me just the way I am, and I accept you just the way you are

Season 2:
You need help to change into a better person, and I will help you to make those changes

Season 3:
We are not perfect, and we both need to change to become better people in order to improve this marriage

Season 4:
I’ve tried very hard but I found that I cannot change you

Season 5:
I cannot change you, only God can change you

Season 6:
I cannot change you, I can only change myself

Season 7:
I have accepted that on this side of heaven, we will remain sinners however hard we try to change

Season 8:
The biggest sinner in this marriage is me

Season 9:
God loves you more than I can love you, and it’s only by God’s grace and power that He will use me as an instrument of His grace toward you in our life together

For some reason I’ve been very happy about quite a few of the movies made in 2011. So I want to share with you those favorite movies of mine from 2011. Keep in mind that my taste in movies tend toward the dramatic ones instead of the action/comedy ones, and I prefer sad/depressing/ambiguous movies rather than movies with happy, well-defined resolutions. Anyway, here are my favorites from 2011 (ranked in order of preference, with most favorite first):

The Descendants
It’s a movie about how to love your family. But it’s not just the lovey-dovey kind. It doesn’t over-simplify love. In fact, most of the people in the movie do not seem very loveable. But by the end of the movie, you love them so much because you learn that love is complicated. Love is not love if you do not accept the joy as well as the pain of love. Great movie if you appreciate dark humor and you don’t mind some occasional crude humor. And I hope Robert Forester gets an Oscar from this.

Margin Call
Great movie about how the recent financial crisis happened. An interesting examination of how people might come to deciding to magnify those risky investments. It shows some of the blindspots of people who deal only with profits and numbers. One of my favorite scenes of the movie was the character Eric Dale rattling off numbers and statistics about how many miles of driving he helped people save, and after talking for a few minutes, the guy next to him pointed out that perhaps people might actually want to enjoy the driving. It was a great scene because it shows how people can be blinded by numbers and they forget why they’re doing what they’re doing.

Another Earth
Do not go into this one thinking it’s just a Sci-Fi movie. And it’s also not really a romantic movie either. It’s basically a psychological movie about how we deal with the big mistakes in our lives. How do we move on? Say sorry? Pretend it never happened? Try to pay back? Or seek forgiveness from yourself? All these are played out, and much more. And to think that there can be an “Other” out there who will help you is helpful. And if the ending shocks and confuses you, read this to find out more.

Super 8
How can anyone forget about Elle Fanning’s scene at the train station? But it’s much more than that. It’s basically three different fun movies at once: a coming-of-age movie, a friendship movie, and a monster movie. And all three aspects were done excellently.

The Help
It’s great to see the civil rights movement from a rare source: the “help”! And in “helping” they actually raised a generation of people sympathetic to their cause. The story is a little bit over-the-top but it’s a fun ride, and the characters are so endearing.

That’s all so far. But there are other 2011 movies that I haven’t had a chance to see yet, but I have a feeling that they would all make this list, and hopefully I’ll get to watch them soon:

• Being Elmo
• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (US Version)
• Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
• We Need to Talk About Kevin

I had a close friend in high school, and I was about to leave and go to United States. On the last day that I spent with this close friend, I didn’t know how to end the day. So I suddenly bolted for the restroom and said, “Bye, I have to go the bathroom” — and that was the last thing I ever said to him in person. I have not met him ever since that day.

I’ve been reading a book on communication skills. In the book were detailed explanations and tips on how to meet people for the first time, how to resolve conflicts, how to listen, how to validate people, how to be assertive, how to speak to your spouse and your children, etc. But there’s absolutely nothing in the book about how to say goodbyes. I think that is a glaring omission, because I have come to see goodbye not only to be a common thing in life, but also an important thing.

Just recently I had to say goodbye to a great group of colleagues. It was so hard for words to come out of my mouth.

But I think sometimes it’s actually harder for the person at the other end. It’s hard to hear someone saying “goodbye” to you. It’s hard to accept that finality of a farewell. When Jesus said his goodbyes to his disciples, he knew that any goodbye was hard to take. So he actually prepared the disciples for the goodbye by telling them ahead of time (and many times) that he would die and rise again (e.g. Matthew 16:21, 17:22-23, 20:17-19). It was super-hard for the disciples to accept that, especially Peter (Matthew 16:22-23).

Like Jesus taking a process to say goodbye to his disciples, there’s a sense that I’ve been saying goodbye to my children ever since they’re born. Every day I’m releasing the grip on my children bit by bit, and letting them control their destinies more and more. There’s a sense that, even now when they’re very small, I’ve already started preparing them for that day when we say our goodbyes. It is good that I can keep this future goodbye in mind, otherwise I would not be properly preparing them to find their own paths in the world. Even though my control over them is lessening every day, my prayer is that they would be ever more influenced by God’s truth communicated to them every day through my instructions and my actions and my examples, so that they will walk on a right path and on a godly path that glorifies God. I believe we need such a long process of goodbye to ensure we’re saying our proper goodbyes.

My thought on grace vs. moralism started a couple weeks ago, when I asked 5-year-old Chase what he learned at church. He told me that they went over the story of Abel and Cain, that Cain murdered Abel and lied to God about it, and so the lesson was: “Love your brothers and sisters.” I asked Chase, “Is that it? There’s nothing else after that?” Chase replied, “That’s it. That’s the end of the story.” So I told Chase that it’s actually not the end of the story. We read Genesis 4 together and told him the story actually ended with God giving grace to Cain, that even though his punishment deserved death, not only did God spare him from death, but He extended his protection on Cain’s life.

There is a place in teaching morals to our children. But it’s sad if we read God’s words and yet miss hearing God speak to us; and if all we see are morality lessons, then we’re in trouble.

A youth pastor that I knew told a story about taking a group of youngsters to a multi-day retreat camp. After the camp was over, as the church bus was approaching the church parking lot, he could see the parents waiting to pick up the kids. As they got off the bus, he could hear that the most common question the parents ask their kids was: “Did you behave?” He kept thinking: “We took these kids to camp to grow spiritually and to connect with God, and all you care about is whether they behaved or not?!”

In my opinion, moralism is a more dangerous threat than atheism. Or, maybe it is a form of atheism. Moralism assumes we’re capable of being good by ourselves. It’s easy to spin Bible teachings by deriving “applications” like “love your brothers and sisters” or “love your parents” or “love your neighbors.” But without also an understanding that our love is flawed, without honestly seeing how incapable we are without God’s grace, it could be a danger leading us into self-righteousnessness, and just focusing on how well we perform and “behave.”

1 John 4:21 says that “whoever loves God must also love his brother.” It must be noted that this is preceded by verse 19: “We love because He first loved us.” It takes Christ’s sacrifical love for us to help us see that we are utterly helpless unless we receive His grace, and out of the gratefulness of his past grace and the faith in God’s future grace that we can love others. The core of our ability to love and our reason to love is not because of some morals, but because of grace.

Further Reading:
God’s Grace in the Story of Cain
Preach Grace Not Moralism

What I mean to ask is: why do we need to shoot movies to get people to watch actors to demonstrate how to live God-pleasing lives in our marriage and in our fatherhood on a big screen, rather than having real life examples of godly marriages, godly fathers, and godly heroes around us in our everyday lives? I think the fact that we need these movies at all is an indirect indictment of the failure of the church to live as it should.

Right now the American society does not perceive the church as a factory producing awe-inspiring husbands and wives and fathers and mothers and citizens. Instead, the American society perceives the church as producing activists and voters that fight against same-sex marriage and abortion.

Now, in terms of my political views, I am also against same-sex marriage (which I explained elsewhere), but I’ve always felt uneasy joining those Prop 8 rallies a few years ago. The thing that made me feel uneasy was that the slogan was “Protect Marriage,” but I didn’t feel like we were fully “protecting marriages.” If we were to protect marriages, we would also need to turn our attention to reducing divorces. If we were to protect marriages, we wouldn’t just be casting a vote at the ballot box.

Out of that uneasiness about the “Protect Marriage” slogan, I worked harder to build a better marital relationship with my wife. I’ve dedicated more time to learning and practicing to be a good father. We also led more studies in our church groups about how to strengthen our marriages and our roles as parents. We’ve also taken extra time to counsel couples who have marital struggles.

I also appreciate fellow Christians in the public arena who live their faith. One person I admire is San Francisco Giants pitcher Jeremy Affeldt, who started a charity to fight child sex trafficking, and who wrote blogs read by many Giants fans to express his faith and how Christ influences his everyday life. I think that his series of blog entries on “How to Be A Dad” is required reading for every dad.

We need more Christians who live to bring glory to God. We need the church to live lives that show the power of the gospel, instead of just voting for propositions or politicians. Let the church obsolete the need for movies like “Fireproof” and “Courageous” by being ubiquitous real-life witnesses to the truth of God, so much that we won’t feel the need to make those movies.

“Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 5:16)

A few months ago, someone who knew me through my blog (http://ahtimsir.wordpress.com/) referred to my blog as a “ministry” — perhaps it’s because of all the posts I wrote about my thoughts on the church, the Bible, the world, about parenting, etc. I told him, “I never thought of my blog as a ministry. It’s just somewhere that I can write on and express my thoughts, because I think about a lot of things.”

A few weeks ago during small group time, Dickson said that a lot of times when he led Bible study, it was really his way of “struggling out loud” — that is, dealing with the issues of faith (and doubt) through leading the Bible study. In a way, this blog of mine is my way of struggling out loud as well. For example, if in a blog post, I am strongly advocating about a position/opinion, it’s often because I was reminding myself that I needed to learn more about it or be more strongly convicted of it.

No one struggles out loud as much as Apostle Paul did in Romans 7: “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. …… For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.” Yet even Paul’s struggling words are considered part of inspired Scripture. That is amazing.

This reminds me of a recent article by Mark Galli in Christianity Today about the nature of faith and doubt. Galli wrote: “We’re inclined to pity those who live with doubts, wondering if they are really as committed, as Christian, as we are. And our ‘pastoral’ attitude is sometimes, ‘Why don’t they just snap out of it?’ Such self-justification assumes that faith is a product of will power—that our doubtless faith is a virtue we’ve developed.” But faith is not will power; neither is “faith” a personal thing that we develop or cultivate. True faith does not really depend on us trying hard to believe better. It all has to come from God. We can have faith because of God’s grace. As we struggle, as we doubt, we are at the same time expressing our yearning and our longing for God, and to express that our satisfaction can only be found in Him.

I want to end with one more quote from Mark Galli’s article. He confessed: “I’m one of those muddling Christians, who implicitly trusts God in the face of all manner of evil, and yet who daily wavers between sin and obedience, usually giving way to the former and wistfully longing for more of the latter. Nor have I been known to enjoy beatific visions. In the end, there is only one thing that justifies our lives, whether those lives are characterized by a doubting faith or a doubtless faith. And that is the Cross.”

In our family, we are determined to help our children experience a first-hand, heartfelt relationship with Christ. We try to talk about Jesus and his life even in casual conversations, like he’s a friend who’s involved in our lives. Under this context, I want to share two recent stories about Chase, our 5.5-year-old, and his relationship with the Gospel.

Story #1

We had been explaining to Chase that our dog Choco is very old and her physical health is not as good these days, and perhaps one day Choco might die. So this morning, Chase suddenly asked me: “What happens when those bad people come and beat up Choco? Will she feel a lot of pain?” I was scratching my head — why would Chase think that someone would actually come and beat up Choco? So I kept asking and reasoning with Chase, but he kept saying someone would come and beat up Choco and Choco would die. And then I figured out what Chase’s logic was: the only time that Chase heard about someone dying was Jesus dying on the cross. We told Chase and showed Chase how Jesus got beaten up and bled and died. So naturally, when I told him that Choco would die, the only way he thought that our dog could die is when some bad people would come and beat up Choco!

Story #2

Recently we bought a used children Bible story book for the kids. It’s a pretty thick Bible with lots of pictures. When I brought it home, Chase immediately took it and started flipping through the Bible story book. At first I thought he was just looking at the well-painted pictures, but soon I noticed by his facial expression that he was looking for something in the book. So I asked Chase what he was looking for. It turns out he was trying to find the part in the Bible illustrating Jesus’s death on the cross. Basically he was trying to evaluate whether this is a good Bible story book or not by (a) whether it talks about Jesus dying on the cross; (b) how well it talks about it. And nothing else matters. I learned something that day, from my boy who’s single-mindedly pursuing a cross-centered faith.

“For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” (1 Corinthians 2:2)

Long time no blog — but I have not abandoned blogging just yet… so watch for more…

Despite the busyness of 3 kids and a challenging job, reading has been an important part of my life, and it has also been an increasingly important part of Wendy’s life as well.

We’ve read a lot of really good books in the past 12-18 months. I just want to share some of them with you. We hope this short list of books can be useful to you all!

Parenting Books

• “Gospel-Powered Parenting” – William Farley
• “Journey of a Strong-Willed Child” – Kendra Smiley

Testimonies

• “Choosing to SEE: A Journey of Struggle and Hope” – Mary Beth Chapman
• “Unshaken: Rising From The Ruins of Haiti’s Hotel Montana” – Daniel Woolley

Marriage

• “What Did You Expect?” – Paul David Tripp

Theology/Doctrine

• “Earthen Vessels: Why Our Bodies Matter to Our Faith” – Matthew Lee Anderson
• “Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit” – Francis Chan
• “Future Grace” – John Piper
• “Life Together” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• “What Is The Gospel?” – Greg Gilbert

photo © 2009 Leland Francisco | more info (via: Wylio)

After that conversation, I thought about it over and over, and I realized that this is perhaps why we don’t often pray to God. Our lives are messy, my life is messy, and even though we have made lots of messes and disasters in our lives, we often do not talk to God about those things, let alone just the common matters in our lives. However, many times when I hear people’s teachings about prayer, they use “law-based” approaches to get people to pray, e.g. “You should pray everyday for N minutes!” or “How do you pray? Start with adoration, then confession, then thanksgiving, then …… etc.” or “If you say you believe in pray, then you should pray!”

When Jesus’ disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, Jesus did not go into guilt trips, nor prescribe a daily prayer regiment. He did not even tell them the different ingredients of a prayer (despite well-meaning bible teachers who over-analyze Jesus’ prayers). His only response was to simply be an example — He prayed.

The first word in the Lord’s prayer — “Father” — was the most significant word in the prayer. Jesus reminded us that it was our relationship with God, our acknowledgment as His son and He our Father, our willingness to humble in the light of who He is, that should lead us to prayer. In the words of a blogger, “Prayerlessness is the inevitable result of pride or a lack of faith, usually both.” If I were there when Jesus taught his disciples to pray, in the words of the movie Jerry Maguire, I think I would say, “You had me at ‘Father’!”

I sponsor two youngsters through Compassion International, offering a bit of financial support in their state of poverty, and giving them encouragement whenever I can. Once in a while, a letter from these youngsters would touch your heart and remind you what’s important in life.

One such youngster’s named is Deep (whose touching story, BTW, was once featured on a Compassion International blog post). He is a university student in India. This is an excerpt from a letter he wrote in February:

I got a sum of rupees as Christmas gift. I have always used the Christmas gift for myself but this time I have planned it to give it to my family. I want to buy one full pant for my father. Because my father has only one full pant and he has worn it again and again when I was see it I fell very sad, and I thought that in this Christmas I will give one full pant to my father and he will be very happy.

This is the kind of message that puts our culture and lifestyle to shame. I look in my own closet and I see so much more clothes than I need. On any given morning, I can choose between 30-40 nice looking shirts, 5-6 good pants, and 2 pairs of shoes to wear for the day. And we keep buying more. We keep acquiring more material things. We are already living in our big houses, each person already driving a nice car, and we spend so much of our money on luxury and on entertainment, and we like critiquing the quality of food between different restaurants.

Oh, to be happy with very little, and to find satisfaction outside of materialism ……