So for this week’s list, 5 things God did (sorry, I have an ongoing fixation on red, white, and shades of grey):

• being the only person obviously window shopping in a store
• speaking at an audible level and intelligible pace to cashiers and servers
• standing close enough to signal eventual intent to order but far enough to let others cut in front while I think
• asking for “just water” at a restaurant that charges more than $1 for a soft-drink
• checking the change handed to me after purchasing something

Everyone’s gone home for Chinese New Year (happy year of the legendary demon serpents to you, by the way) except me. I had too much work to take care of to be able to properly enjoy any leisure time back home to justify the travel time, so I decided to just stick around in Waterloo. I figured I would make good use of the silence and solitude to solve IMPORTANT AND PRESSING CONCERNS (ie: assignments for school).

As a result, this weekend I’ve managed to

1. finish my Calculus assignment (with one or two… fuzzy proofs/leaps of faith here and there)
2. start on my Group Theory assignment (due in a week from tomorrow)
3. not even look at the Complex Analysis assignment (due this Friday… !!!)
4. learn myself some basic LaTeX (for doing my Math assignments on, going forward)
5. convert my copy of Muse @ Glastonbury 2010 from a 9+ GB, laggy .ts file to a 2 GB, awesome .m4v file (a feat that took a whooping 5 hours of background processing)
6. start on Final Fantasy XIII (lent to me courtesy of Sharon)

…so far.

I’m actually not entirely sure how this term is supposed to work out, because I’m already finding the workload to be a bit killer. The last time I took this many Math courses at once I was in first year, and back then I had two distinct advantages, the first being that I knew most of the material from IB Math, and the second being that none of those courses were Pure Math courses. However, this is a perfectly good opportunity (is there any bad one?) to walk by faith and not by sight.

On that note, today I had a sudden epiphany regarding what I think ought to be the proper Christian attitude towards… well, just about everything in life I think. The thought was brought about by a singular line in a song that was part of a worship set at church. It went simply enough:

I am redeemed.
I am redeemed.
I am redeemed.

On the face of it, yes that is probably factually correct, and yet I couldn’t help but feel like something was missing, something important. I think this is a problem with a subset of modern worship music, stemming from a broader problem with our culture in general. It’s got to do with how we view the world around, or more specifically, how we do not, because our gaze is so completely blotted out by our selves. If ever we couldn’t see the forest through the trees, it would be now (or something like that; I’m not too good with idioms).

If we saw the world not as we do, but as we ought, those lines might go something more like this:

God redeemed me from Himself.
God redeemed me to Himself.
God redeemed me for Himself.

This does the actual situation, our circumstance, quite a bit more justice than the original lines. The new version specifies exactly Who is acting on divine initiative to rescue me from Whose just wrath, to enter into Whose holy fellowship, and for Whose ultimate pleasure. And that’s what it’s all about, always.

5 things that I left retreat with:

• the realization that I need to pray more sincerely, frequently, and purposefully (I’ve been trying to pray whenever I am walking around, between classes or errands)
• the greater realization that I need a more systematic approach to reading the Word (I’ve started an ESV one-year schedule to ensure I cover the whole Bible within a year, on top of other side-readings)
• the unshakeable conviction that extra-Biblical exercises (such as lectio divina) really should not be practiced, however deceptively “Christian” they may seem
• the makings of a coffee binge that left me with a killer headache this Monday
• the start of something interesting, engaging, and mutually beneficial between myself and some co-labourers in Christ

I thought the retreat as a whole was a mixed bag of goods. While the speaker as a person was friendly and likeable, I wish the messages had more (Biblical) substance, and less anecdotes and pop culture references. The people of God should seek to hear from Him through the Creator of the Universe, not through the Creatures of the Universe.

The free time was ample and I got to play some games of Colander, proving that Moyee + Herman + myself make an excellent Dynamic Duo + 1 for this kind of game.

I found the devotional time to be excellent, but only after I completely ditched the prescribed devotional materials, and just cozying myself to a book of the Bible. Here’s a quote of a quote from the first day’s materials:

A Christian is one who points at Christ and says, ‘I can’t prove a thing, but there’s something about his eyes and his voice. There’s something about the way he carries his head, his hands, the way he carries his cross—the way he carries me.‘
- Frederick Buechner

To put it plainly, I think the above is wrong. It’s a false portrait of what a Christian is, what his witnessing responsibilities are, and what the nature of his relationship with Christ ought to be. I don’t know Jesus vaguely by a string of “something”s about Him, I know Him through God’s revelation found in His concrete, tangible, and specific Word.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. [...] And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
- John 1:1 [...] 14 ESV

So basically, Jesus = the Word of God are one and the same, as far as John’s concerned. Thus, knowing Jesus would be the same as knowing the Word. The Word, in contrast with Buechner’s out-of-his-context quote, is solid, concrete, and certain. That’s why I have a problem with quotes like these. Taken at surface value, they maybe sound convincing. With further consideration, it turns out they implicitly undermine things you should actually be clinging to as foundational to your faith. And then you have to give concession to the fact that maybe the original author didn’t even mean what you got out of the quote, since it was presented out of its context. At the end of this whole exercise, I simply question why we’re even bothering with quotes like these if they only waste our time at best, and distract us from the Word in all other cases.

Anyway, so I just curled up in the corner somewhere and walked my way through my favourite book of Romans, after which I found the fruitfulness of the devotional time with God increase exponentially. I never even bothered with the second day’s devotional materials so that I could spend more time going through Romans. How I ever forgot about the joy and excitement found in reading the (translated) Words of God I will never know, but I hope it never leaves me again.

Basically, the lesson to be learned is that anything that draws you away from the Word cannot be Good News, by definition, so cling to the Word.

So far, I’ve only attended the first lecture for every one of my courses this term (barring Statistics for Business 2, which has its first class this afternoon). I had to skip all of today’s classes (ie: the second classes for two Pure Math courses, Advanced Calculus 3, and the aforementioned Statistics) so as to be home in time to get a ride from Arthur up to retreat. It’s kind of sucky that I have to miss all those lectures (I’m the kind of lazy that means I probably won’t get caught up until I really have to). But, this is a one-off kind of thing, so I don’t think it’ll be too bad; plus, it’s just the second lecture, what could I possibly miss?

5 things I’m bringing with me to retreat:

• bass and amp; I’ll be needing them for worship team
• notebook and pencil; I’ll be needing them for journal entries and doodling
• homework; I’ve got an assignment (already) for Calculus that I ought to finish over the weekend, leaving Monday and Tuesday open for catching up on ALL the classes
• phone; I know the packing list says these are banned, but I need it for the alarms and clock… so I assume that staying on airplane mode and not playing any games over the weekend should be acceptable
• shorts; I know it’s a winter retreat but I don’t plan on running around outside like a goof-off a lot, and I suspect that shorts + flip-flops will be way more convenient for 90% of the weekend inside of the place

I am sort of excited for the retreat. From what I gathered, a very small subset of the congregation will actually be attending, meaning that (hopefully) there will be much more flexibility for sharing and/or chilling time. I think a bunch of the older folks that I quite look up to will be there, and I also get to share a room with Gabriel (a sort of strange arrangement got us here, but whatever works I guess), so if nothing else, I hope to learn some good stuff this weekend.

Anyway, this is where I’ll be for the next 2-3 days (until Sunday afternoon) so here’s to you, blog reader, until at least Sunday!

I promised my dental surgeon that I’d give his practice some good words if/when I fully recovered from my wisdom teeth removal, and so…

Come one, come all to Dr. Allan C. Moon’s “Oral Maxillofacial & Implant Surgery” practice!

Here’s a list of his credentials (as per his pamphlet):

• BS
• MS
• DDS (not Dungeons and Dragons Sorcerer)
• MRCD(C)
• DIP.OMS

Here’s the contact info:

100 Cowdray Court (Sheppard and Kennedy)
Suite 120, Ground Floor
Scarborough, Ontario M1S 5C8

Phone: 416 298 0303
Fax: 416 298 1074
Email:

Anyway, long story short, I’m all better now from the surgery (actually, I was probably fully okay as of a week or two ago), and I felt like now was as a good a time as any to drop a line to commend Dr. Moon on a procedure well done. I believe very much that people who set out to do a good job and accomplish it deserve to be at the very least acknowledged for their effort, and praised for their success.

He was very quick and efficient when it came to the actual procedure, removing all four of my wisdom teeth in under 45 minutes, with minimal discomfort for myself (I was awake but sluggish for the whole thing). I even got to keep three of the four teeth, which was all the ones that weren’t impacted sideways (he had to explode the last one into little bits to pluck out, so there wasn’t much to keep). My jaw was numb from the anesthesia, and then eventually achey but that was more or less the worst of it.

The bleeding subsided shortly during the same afternoon, and my stitches fell out mostly on their own accord within a week. I did some tampering with the stitches using a small pair of scissors, but that was only to cut out an annoying bit of string. There wasn’t really much pain or extreme difficulty eating that I recall, but I was also hopped up on Tylenol 2 tablets and working a desk job the whole week, so I have little recollection of the time after the surgery.

And thus ends a semi-copout info post. Such is life during the holiday season! Hopefully Dr. Moon is enjoying his holidays before getting back into the swing of fixing people’s teeth for a nominal, reasonable fee.