so, I renamed my blog, but I haven't yet said what it is about my life that I consider to be "experimental". so here it is:
Not that life is so easily compartmentalized, but my experiments lie roughly in three areas:
1. my career/vocation
2. my church
3. my personal walk with God
so here goes:
Experiment #1: I was a computer science major in college, then worked for a few different software companies over the course of 8 years. It was never really what I wanted to do, but it paid the bills (both mine & people I supported). A few years ago, however, I realized that I saw no future that I desired in software and started letting my manager know that I was looking into other careers. This dragged on for like 3 years.
Then, in the winter of 2003, I realized how FREE I was. No wife, no debt, no kids, nothing really tying me down. I saw that this was my last chance to really attempt a career change full time (as opposed to staying in the current job while looking at other things) - to quit, try other jobs, go to grad school, etc.
So I QUIT. No next job, no grad school admission, just quit. The plan was to travel a bit, learn to relax, and then start exploring other vocations.
This is an experiment in the sense that hardly anyone I know of personally has tried something like this, at this late stage in life.
Experiment #2: Well, so quitting work required me to move home down here in SoCal with my parents. As such, I had to leave the only church I've ever really been a part of and would have to find a new one down here.
As long as I was making a change, I decided that I was going to look for something very specific. I need to find a "room of grace" - the kind described in one of my favorite books, "True Faced". A place where people are honest about their sins, where they are confessed to one another and forgiven, where maturation happens as life is passed to life in discipleship and in the power of the spirit. I know, sounds so idealistic. but I know it happens.
As such, based at least on my own interpretations, I decided to try a non-asian church. In my view, the asian shame-based culture has made it difficult and rare for this sort of environment to be hatched. In fact, I don't know of one Korean-American church that can claim to have this sort of interaction going on. I'm sure there's some out there, but I don't know of any.
And so, I'm trying my hand at belonging to a 'white' church. For now, it's Abundant Life Community Church in Pasadena.
Experiment #3: As it regards my personal walk with God, I want to be careful what I share. On one hand, I'm a new, firm believer in honesty & transparency. On the other hand, I don't want to stumble anybody as much of my new approaches to the spiritual disciplines aren't always met with approval. But here goes.
So basically, I've been, for a very long time, in a state where reading the bible and praying have been very arduous for me. So I've stopped. I haven't stopped seeking God; in fact, I'm reading other books more than ever before, even books teaching about passages in the bible. But I've dropped all the
striving, all the
grinding. To some measure, I'm sure that as I've sought to let go of guilt and fear as motivating factors, I've probably thown out some of the baby with the bathwater in stopping the other disciplines, but it's what I've done.
In fact, ironically, it's probably the first real step of faith I'd ever taken. Not since my initial prayer to ask Jesus into my life have I ever made a decision with so much helplessness and awareness that I can do nothing to save myself.
Effectively, my thought process/prayer was something like this: "well, I'm gonna stop striving in these ways. If later, it proves that I'm just not a genuine believer, then so be it - I'd be sad, but let God be God; all I know is, this is not the kind of worship that God asked for, I am tired of dead works, and I cannot continue in this way; and that if I am to be saved, HE must save me. I'm letting go."
It was such a feeling of helplessness and fear - which only proved this: that my "assurance" (if you could call it that) was totally based on my performance and that I had very little trust in God's intentions to save and that my awareness that even sanctification is totally of His grace & initiative was very shallow.
Since then, it's been up and down. Very much a valley of shadows, a wandering in the wilderness, a slow rebuilding of the walls as I seek to rebuild TRUST. But as internally tough as it's been, I feel like I'm living instead of dying.
Anyways, so those are the experiments. There's much I'd like to write about on each one, and I still have those things I noted earlier. I just wanted to give future entries a context.
