new blog space

I've just created a new blog space, where all my future posting shall be done under http://stranger-on-earth.blogspot.com/

So my parents are here in town for a week, arrived last Saturday.  Spend the whole the weekend with them, drove them all over the place, slept on a tiny couch in the hotel, and (gasp!) took them to church on Sunday.  I’d been praying incessantly that God will do great things during their stay, and that I should expect Jesus to show up.  Scenarios came to my mind, maybe they will come to church with me and (ZAP!!!) God brings them to their knees in tears and confession?  Or maybe I get to open my can of well-scripted blah-blah, in time to a carefully controlled conversation, and (WOW!!!) enlightenment dawns upon them and change their lives? 

But soon it became clear to me that miracle is nothing without love, and what they get to experience the love of God must come from His people.  It’s no longer about me now is it?  It’s no longer about earning their respect, no longer about making rights of wrongs, defining a new territorial sonship, or to tell them enjoy the trip but please don’t mess with my life?  Speak the truth in love, but love is what makes it so impossible to speak the truth. 

This morning as I awoke in a splash of sun, a voice came to me to pray that God would help me love them more than I love myself, that I would love them more than I love myself, that I would love them more than I love myself, that I would love them more than I love myself, that I would love them more than I love myself.......

All I can hear is Jesus telling me to love them like He loves me.

Nobody has returned my phone call yet and now I am stuck with my co-worker.  That¡¦s right, two lonely techies stuck at work pondering what to do on a typical Friday summer night.  My co-worker was eager to watch a movie, but I swore I would never pay up another $10.00 to watch anything in theatre unless it¡¦s Das Boot Return.  Talk about inflationary pressure, I remember the time not long ago when a movie ticket cost $4.50 at Riverside Theatre in Austin (U.T. student ID required).  Well, after it came down to the wire we decided to just stop by the Bellevue downtown park and ¡§stroll¡¨.  On the way there I asked him if we can also swing by my place first and picked up a football, I mean, it just made me feel safer.  And who knows in case he is also interested in having some running drills, right?

So this will be his last Friday at work.  Next week he will be leaving, preparing for his eventual graduate study at Univ. of Washington.  I¡¦m sure a lot of things are going on in his mind right at this moment, as he seems unsure of what is ahead.  God has put him in my heart for many months now.  And more and more he¡¦s opening himself up as we¡¦ve hung out outside of work, in small group, weekend and Sunday at church.  He really enjoys Bluesky¡¦s worship music (no surprise), and he wouldn¡¦t miss a chance to come to our small group.  I¡¦ve even seen him turned down a conference call request at work: ¡§any day is okay but not Tuesday¡KI¡¦ve got something special going on that night!!!¡¨ (and add to it whatever accent that suits your imagination).  Whenever someone in our group laid hands on him and prayed I just loved to watch how truth and love can speak even to a foreign student alone in a foreign land, learning a foreign language and seeking a foreign God. 

Tonight was alittle different though.  I felt quite beat-up by the end of day at work, after I stumbled (ahem) across a quasi-porn website (a blog posted by a bend-up Wall-street trader who has found a venting humor in pictures of scandalously naked women, all under the title of ¡§national economic interest¡¨.  THANK you Barry for posting the link!!!).  I kept telling God tonight the mission is going to abort; it¡¦s just not going to work out with my conscience.

But in the end who knows how the conversation got started, as hours passed the day got too dark for football tossing but he seemed to want to linger just alittle longer.  As we started ¡§strolling¡¨ I began to share with him about my childhood memory in Taiwan.  How was it like to feel estranged from your parents (or to ever rarely see them), succumbed to the all-omnipotent academic pressure, full of self-doubt and always fearful of disappointments.  What was it like to come home with less-than-perfect test scores and to endure hours of abuses like a piece of meat that Rocky Balboa gets his practices from.  Longing for a puppy-romance, a guilt-free weekend, freedom, revolution, happiness, or just love?  It is a common theme that both of us can relate to, or that we have seen in many of our friends who also grew up in that machine society.  Told him about my awe as a kid each time I visited Taipei, the capital city of Taiwan and the seemingly lone window of the small island to the ¡§modern and progressive West¡¨.  As the story-telling continues to my teenage years I began to tell him about my encounter with the spiritual evil, the fear and hate I had for the many still-practiced Chinese superstitions there.  He kept coming back to me hinting that I was maybe seeing things induced from my overly-stressed child life.  Knowing it is futile to persuade someone else to agree on one¡¦s own subjective experience, a light bulb came on in my head and I turned around to him and said, ¡§Do you realize what you should¡¦ve asked me as a harder question?¡¨  ¡§It is not to debate whether demonic power exists or not in this world, but it is to ask that how you, as an individual, can respond to a type of evils that is beyond the control of mankind.¡¨  ¡§Few people have the honesty to go further than the existence debate because no one wants to admit their only response to this is fear.  But if you become a Christian the power to overcome no longer comes from within, but it is the genuine God that provides us the courage to face down what is harmful from even beyond this material universe.  And that is what faith in Jesus gives you, an empowerment!¡¨ 

As we got in our car and drove we talked more about our family, my beloved younger brother and the sibling rivalry he has with his sister.  Again I felt the prompting from God so I seized the chance and shared with him my thoughts on the nature of manhood.  The need for fatherhood in Taiwan has never been greater, I told him, as in the last 50 years or so the role of man in a family has swung from a traditionally authoritative tyrant to a modern feminized passive-aggressive bread-earner.  Today¡¦s definitions for men are toilers for greed and status, and lost are the God-embedded desires for honor, justice, courage, and wisdom!  Because of this distorted lie men are told to find their worth in fame and power, and they will work to death without ever loving their identity and knowing their true passion.  His wife will lament her marriage because no amount of wealth can satisfy her need and she¡¦d married to a machine that does not communicate (or doesn¡¦t care how).  His boy will grow up learning about himself after TV and peers, or worse, from a patronizing mother who will raise him demasculated, i.e. an all-around "nice" guy with nada leadership skills.  His daughter will grow up not knowing how to trust a man, lest respecting the one with whom she wishes to spend the rest of her life.  But to find our true passion and the right sense of manhood, beside violence and sexuality, it is all written in the word of God, and the learning process only requires our simple faith and obedience to Jesus, I challenged him. 

I left my preaching there, as we arrived at his apartment and I had to drop him off back to his place.  I don¡¦t know if what I¡¦ve said made any sense to him or not, but I felt very excited to be in the midst of what God is mysteriously putting together for his people and his church.  Funny how such a dull night like this can give me so much joy in return.

Thursday, 06/15

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Woke up, feeling the stiffness of the rock underneath the tent, I went out to see that James has already started the stove and boiled some water for us.  The guy even went away to do his quite time and back before he started the morning, such a devotion.  The view now is quite clear; we were camping real close to the fast-running Icicle Creek.  On the other side across the barren mountains stood up thousand feet onto the sky.  Looks like a huge forest fire tore up this place a few years ago; the new vegetations are slowly gaining back their lost burned-up turfs. 

Our morning workout before getting ready for the rigor: Jimmy had his first bowl regulation with a shovel, Kris painstakingly completed his dental hygiene by the creek, James dipped himself in the water with bravery and screamed back to shore, and I squatted and daydreamed mindlessly about meeting a bear on the trail. 

Before leaving James had to show me where he did his quite time.  It was on a huge boulder protruding into the river.  To get there we had to hop over a few spaces in a close breath, as the killer current was running fast underneath.  The rock was at a junction where the creek bends and curves to the other direction.  Water hits the rock and gets diverted here like a tour-de-force and the volume was so loud we had to shout to hear each other.  A few hundred feet away the fury finally gets tapered down before it leaves out of the scene.  Just imagine what a test would be to sit here reading my Bible with any sense of peace and comfort.

11:30 am, got to the trailhead parking lot.  The sky was overcast but feels balmy. 

The trail started with a bridge that took us across Icicle Creek to the mountain bottom.  Ten minutes up the hike we had our first break, as Jimmy began to shed his layers from the sweat.  The overcast clouds that I¡¦d been worrying about all morning actually kept us well from the drying sun, especially here in Central Washington.   Another ten more minutes and we can see the valley farms miles ahead, as they were nicely dotted in between those interleaved mountain legs.  According to what we read, the trail starts at an elevation of ~500 feet, eventually gaining up to ~5400 feet at Nada Lake, until it reaches Snow Lake at ~5900 feet.  Total distance in one way is measured around seven and half miles; a good distance for a day trip, even much better with the monkeys on my back. 

Our original plan is to do a 19 miles loop instead of stopping short at Snow Lake.  After Snow Lake the trail should take us to the lower Enchantment area (Lake Vivian, Lake Leprechaun, etc.), ascend to the highest point at Aassgard Pass (~7500 feet), follow by a steep descend of 2500 feet or so to Colchuk Lake, then continue on to Lake Stuart, and out to the exit.  Our last checkup with the Ranger station confirmed the severe trail conditions at both lower and upper Enchantment.  Ice axe plus crampon were recommended to descend from Aassgard Pass to Colchuk Lake.  In hindsight it was a blessing the snow kept us from acting out on our plan.  There is nothing heroic in trying to do too much out here; our egos could have become the worst enemy to survival.

Pretty soon we were taking short breaks, looking back at the trail and comforting ourselves in the elevation we have gotten by thousand.  The bottom of the candy puff cloud is getting closer now, felt like if we can only get to the top of the ridge I am going to snatch and Ziploc a piece of cloud back home. 

We spend a good hour walking thru a burn zone.  The switchback ascend was now taking a toll on my right knee.  I wanted to fall behind the last leg and slowly pushed off on my other leg.  James spotted me and asked if I like to receive a prayer.  The rest also gathered around and they all laid their hands on me.  It is a humbling moment to remember when fellow backpackers got down on their knees to pray for their weakest link.  James also furthered the cause by asking each of us to think about moments in our life when we as men felt disappointed by our fathers; it was meant to be a mellow-out icebreaker when we huddle together later at night for warmth.  Our steep attempts as a child to please our fathers often end up falling short of our need for approval, and the disappointments then in turn hinder our view of the true gracious Father that God is.  Well the thinking was over at any rate to conserve what mental energy I had left; my right knee felt well after the prayer but my left legs soon started cramping.  

The trail evened out, met Icicle Creek again to end the burned zone.  Minutes later we were out of the neck again and the switchback just lead us up through more rocks and elevations. 

Peanut butter and jelly sandwich never looked so nasty and tasted so good¡K¡K

6:00 pm, we arrived at Nada Lake.  Right before we got there I slipped and fell hard on a pointed rock.  Why am I such a lousy hiker, I screamed in the back of my head, despite missing the tailbone by inches.

The Lake opened in front of our eyes like a gift.  We were shedding off our backpacks and ready to jump in like the Second Coming is now.  The sun was hanging just over above the mountain across on the other side.  I can see the bottom of the lake from where we stood.  The sight was so much more breathtaking after the hard works that we put into.  The rest and celebration; however, was short-lived.  Despite the beauty here and the availability of the campsite we haven¡¦t forgotten where we were supposed to end the day.  Even Jimmy, our first-time hiker guest, was soon taking up the courage for more miles. 

At 7:00 pm we alas arrived at Snow Lake.  All we had to do now is walk across a dam to get to the lake shore, but the heavy snowmelt this year has strong water flooding over on top of it (the fun never stops).  We tried to log walk but it was too hard; all too eager to end the day, we all got down and just walked across the freezing water.  The consequence didn¡¦t strike us until we hiked off the dam, that we will be wearing those wet shoes again tomorrow unless they get dried up somehow.  Great, but who cares!  We need to look for a campsite soon, the sun is eclipsing behind the mountain and the sky will be getting dark fast. 

Whoever thinks having Jimmy the newbie in this trip is a bad idea should dip into Snow Lake for 10 seconds as an act of repentance.  The dude cooked up such a nice dinner for us; we had a perfect chicken with rice and gravy that was almost without burn!  It is an understated praise especially when we compare in hindsight what happened to our meal the next day.  

9:00 pm, time to wrap things up and getting ready for bed.  We tried to hang our backpacks high up to the tree branches, but after some work of futility we decided to trust God with our belonging and just threw them up next to each other on the ground.  If the bear ripped them up tonight at least it¡¦ll be easier getting down tomorrow, assuming the animal won¡¦t further smell his way to our campsite and rip us to pieces too.

I need to dust off my blog again, that is, it is time to continue my daily writing regardless of a faulty promise to anyone who does indeed keep track of my life.  It is a much harder task to turn up a travel journey than spitting out some daily random thought, especially when I've always feel obliged to document the history to its truest memory.  But so much had happened since the trip and yeah, it's time to move on...

I'll post what I have partially written down, and when the project (talk about work!) is finally done anyone who is interested to follow up is sure welcomed to shoot me a mail!