What a good quarter. I am very satisfied with the balance I have achieved between people/play and school. I love people. I like learning too, but studying somehow doesn't always equate to learning, and learning science is just not as cool as learning about people. Personally. I guess you could say that I like to learn about my God's creation, and my favorite thing to learn about is God's most beautiful creation.

Let that sink in.

So yes, work has picked up, and there's a price to pay for wanting to learn about people more than books, but God has made me rather rich in that area, and I don't mind paying that price. What's a couple of hours of discomfort after getting graded stuff back, compared to the eternal investment I hope I'm making in people?

But I've been having very frequent dizzy/lightheaded spells lately, for like the past week. I'm getting a little concerned. Several things are making me suspect high blood pressure. HIGH blood pressure???? I'm out of my mind. We'll see. My dear Elena, please feel better soon. We don't want any abnormal things to happen during our college career now, do we? Unless He wills it, but I guess then there's nothing we can do about that now, is there? But I would rather not, God.

Now, off to see Tangled with a Kevin and others. Sorry, Ochem. I've already spent so much time with you today.

This quarter has been so chill, somehow. I thought last quarter would be chill, but it wasn't chill, and I thought this quarter was going to be not chill, but it's so chill. I never thought I would say this. I love chem lab. It's my favorite class. And I love having all morning classes, because every afternoon I feel like I have no school and it's break. It felt like break for the first few weeks of school. This past week it kind of felt like school because I tried to sit and study for my midterms tomorrow. I haven't completely forgotten how to study, fortunately. But really, I wonder sometimes if I should be working harder, because I'm often reminded of the verse that says to work at everything with all your heart, as working for the Lord and not men. I work at other things, such as investing in people, with all my heart. And I work at school hard enough to do very well. What is all of my heart? Does this verse even apply to this situation? Because it's actually talking about how slaves should obey their masters. Can that be extended to the relationship that I have with school? .............maybe not.

Jesus is Everything to me

But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ pleasurefungradeshealthcomfortsmartsmoneymusicfriendsfamily. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord <3, for whose sake I have lost (am losing) all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him... I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead! And don't forget that our citizenship is in heaven! (Phil 3:7-10, 20)

Facebook won't let me make my status more than 420 characters. This is 627 characters.

FAQ: How was Canada?

It was very good. I thought it'd be boring, but it wasn't. What did I do? Well, I hung out with family, a lot. (No picture for privacy reasons.) I ate a hecka lot. Vancouver seafood and stuff... unfortunately this seafood is cheaper when shipped to Cupertino than it is in Vancouver itself. Somehow. I ate a lot of money. This family knows how to spend money. Although I think paying $300-$500 for a little extra material at the bottom of your not-made-in-China dress shirts is a little excessive. But I fully approve of the food spending! Also, I had my first real drink, and it was legal.

The ironic thing is that the house there is very well heated. I walked around in a tshirt. But it's freezing outside. As in when you try to drink water that you left in the car overnight, it's full of ice, and your feet freeze numb after half an hour. Coming back here and walking out of the airport, I thought it very warm in comparison to Seattle. Very warm and comfortable. But the house I stayed at last night in cozy San Jose was freaking FREEZING. Anyway.

We also did a few touristy things. Nothing I haven't seen before, but seeing things in life is different than seeing them in decade (plus) old memories. For one, the Capilano Suspension Bridge with lights at night. This sidewalk-wide wooden bridge swings over a fat gorge/ravine thing with a river at the bottom. I love heights. Too bad it was night and hard to appreciate it... at least for me. My cousin's dog saw it too well.

\

I also saw some historical sights. Such as the hospital I was born in, and the first apartment I remember living in:

Hecka weird. Because I remember walking to a preschool from this apartment, and I thought I remembered how to get there. But I thought it couldn't be right because I was 4 or 5 at the time, and I haven't seen the place since. Well guess what, it's exactly where I remembered it to be. I can't believe I remembered how to get there. I still don't even know how to get to church when I'm in SD. Anyway.

They also have this cutesy poodle that looks like a lamb. He was very fun.

Anyhow. Got back at 12 last night after a day of travelling and still  managed to party hop and play until 7 something in the morning and still get home in one piece. The only allnighter I will ever pull is for new years (when else would you arrive at a party at 2AM?). In the morning, I found myself saying weird things that I don't mean. Also the only day of the year I actually need my glasses, and I'm proud to say that I had the foresight to bring them back this year (haha, foresight). And then up at 5AM tomorrow and on my way back to SD!! My sleep schedule will be fixed soon.

PS happy new year!! This year, I resolve to... not sure yet. I can't even remember what I resolved last year. I resolve to remember my resolution. jk.

HI FROM THE NORTH. I'm having a very good time here, and am sad to leave so soon, but also very happy to come home to whatever new year's plans end up happening, and then back to SD!!!!!!! It  has not been boring here at all. More later. And it will not be boring when I go home for one day. And it will NOT be boring when I go back to SD. I will NOT overstudy this quarter. However much I end up studying, I get the same grade anyway. Anyway. Life looks good. I plan on thoroughly enjoying my last night here, I plan on thoroughly enjoying my new year's, and I plan on thoroughly enjoying my classes and my friends when school starts up again. All the while thoroughly enjoying God, who gives my life meaning. Otherwise, life is extremely meaningless, as I am sure you have heard me complain about before. Really 没意思. How can one bear it. But anyhow! I'm excited for life!

I just realized that I still have the blog title from the summer. Oops I meant to change it when summer ended, and I forgot for a complete quarter. Good job, Elena. Anyway, so it's titled Hallelujah~ now. I decided on a simple title. Forget the clever profound ones. This is simple. Just simply, praise God. I feel very hallelujah these days. Yesterday I could not focus on reading because I was very aware of God for some reason. I felt the need to ... something. Praise him, hold out my arms and love him, worship him, stand up, dance around, bow down, cry out, be silent, soak him in, spill out adoration, I don't know. A book seemed too trivial to waste my time on. There's a big God out there to worship. And when I worship, I'm sooooo fulfilled. I think this sensation can be described as being in love. I think my heart is going to burst. Anyhow, hallelujah... just simple praise and adoration. God is so good.

PS happy birthday, dear Neilson. You have been a blessing in my life. :]

Today I went to two services...

... in two different languages. ... because I had nothing else to do, lol. It was very interesting. In the first one, Pastor Dean talked about the fall of man (which I see in a whole new light now, thanks to Paradise Lost), and the promise of the seed that will bruise the serpent's head, and how it's such a promise of hope for Adam and Eve after that nasty fall. In the second one, Pastor Kwan talked about the birth of Jesus and (briefly) about  how it was the answer to promise made 700 years ago through Isaiah... no, actually, many thousands of years ago at the very fall of man through God himself. And I was very hit by the amazing continuity of God's providence in human history, from the first Adam, to the second Adam Jesus, through us today who die and live because of the first and second Adams. Just as we can't get away from the curse of the first Adam, as surely as we are going to die (call it human nature or nature or evolutionary traits or whatever you want, you know humans are imperfect and die eventually), we also can't get away from the redemption of Jesus the second Adam, as surely as (or as long as?) we want to live.

That is all. Short and sweet. I'm not trying to be preachy but seriously, I cry myself awake many mornings because I want those in the first Adam to find the second Adam so bad.

I am having a freaking awesome break at school. My apartment is a magnet for people still left here. We have a ton of food and desserts. I actually get ochem and I actually like Paradise Lost. WE WENT TO FASHION VALLEY YESTERDAY AND GOT THE COOLEST THING EVER. I can't say what yet. And I swear, it is Christmas. For the first couple of days, I thought I was deluding myself because Lylan played Christmas music and it was freezing and there was no school, but then I went to the mall and everything actually was Christmas!!!!!!! So it must be Christmas. ^^ Except today felt like fall.

Note to self. Do not listen to what other people say about classes, because apparently I think differently than everyone else.

Usually this is a good thing. Supposedly hard classes and bad teachers are never as hard or bad as everyone says. This is the first time I've encountered this negatively. my physics lab is supposed to be an easy class and for some reason I'm having a really hard time with it. How is it that I can handle dr weare, but not physics lab. In MECHANICS. -_- i like physics in a book and i like it in real life but i don't like it in a lab anymore. i don't see how I'm going to handle the notorious chem lab next quarter. i'm aiming to pass.

I should stop complaining about physics lab because apparently it's the only class i ever talk about, and everyone knows i hate it already.

in other news, ochem is really cool and i love making reactions happen, except i'm starting to get lost with SN2, SN1, E2, and E1 reactions. they all look the same now. bad. extra ochem lectures and textbook date time.

I'M HAVING BRILLIANT PHYSICS LAB BREAKTHROUGH MOMENTS but i don't know what they mean. this is very frustrating.

It's a stressful time...

... with a humanities paper and ochem midterm coming up on Monday, on top of everything else. And Monday, of all days. I am determined to keep Sunday my playday, which means I have to finish everything by Saturday night. If I lock myself up and write my paper, I'm going to fail my midterm. If I study for my midterm, my paper will not be as polished. Not to mention hum reading, physics lab report (I plan on not failing any more of those), and physics quiz. It's a stressful time.

So this morning, I was trying to make myself relax a bit by preparing myself to fail everything. My usual method of stress relief. No expectations, no stress. It wasn't working, because I knew I wasn't going to fail. I was just driving myself hard even though I knew I was going to do well anyway. It doesn't make sense, but I couldn't stop. Embarrassing, because I like to pride myself on not stressing out about school. This is dumb.

And so it was in this state that I was reminded that God holds my future career in his hands (this is not a general statement for everybody. I mean quite literally for ME), so it REALLY doesn't matter what my grades look like. It's REALLY not worth it to allow any other part of my life to suffer so I can get those grades, so I can get that job, so whatever blahblahblah. Because whether I screw myself up or succeed now, God promises to intervene later. So it really, quite literally, doesn't matter. Oh yes, that felt good. Look, I should be writing my amazing essay right now, but I'm writing this instead to share with ya'll, if anybody still checks. Lol sorry I suck at updating now because I'm too busy with life. Hope you're all doing amazing, call if you wanna talk. I may be too busy to update, but it is extremely unlikely that I'm too busy to talk. Okiedokie that's all for now, have an amazing weekend guys oh wait it's only Thursday why do I keep thinking it's Friday.

Something you can die from

Hi real world, I'm back! The past week I've been at LSTP!!!!! Sort of like a retreat for LS. I won't go into too much detail, but there were a few things I learned that I wanted to share.

For one. The first night we walked up the mountain and watched the sunset. Or rather, we were late and watched the rainbow sky after the sun set. That's right, rainbow! HOC5ers, you know there's an Easyworship background that's like a hill with a post-sunset rainbow sky and the moon? It was almost exactly that. It was beautiful. So we were supposed to think about God's creation and God or something. So I thought about how God created everything. Ok, that's cool. I thought about the amazing design of everything. I thought about how big everything was. I thought about how beautiful everything was. Ok, that's all nice, but I've heard it all before. Uhm this is random, but I had part of this Skillet song stuck in my head for some reason. It goes something like, will you be there/my heart grows cold. Depressing. I was annoyed that it was in my head. Hearts aren't supposed to be cold. I looked at the moon. The moon is cold. Come to think of it, nature is cold. Even the mountain in front of me, which is on earth, is cold. I looked at a tree on top of the mountain and I thought about the coldness of the mountain. Not only physically, but also emotionally. I thought about if I was just dropped on that mountain somewhere, alone. I thought about the part of the mountain I was working on earlier in the day, collecting rocks to make a trail. That means there is no existing trail there. It's treacherous. If you're not careful, it's so easy just to slip on the leaves, fall down the mountain through acres of poison oak (just found out that I'm immune bwahahah), and crash into a beehive and get stung by a million bees (like our leader did that day) before you get eaten by a mountain lion. Or freeze to death or starve to death or a million other things. Cold. It's beautiful, but you can die from it. Fearsome. As God is: beautiful, but you can die from him. So beautiful beyond words, but you can REALLY die from him. Real fearsome, eh?

Second thing. On the schedule there was something titled LAX. The LA airport. What are we going to do there? They wouldn't tell me. Someone put the idea in my head that we might be evangelizing. The whole week, I thought maybe we were going to do cold evangelism there. That freaks me. I told myself not to worry until Thursday. And Thursday morning, I told God I was scared to death. He told me not to worry. So I took a step back and thought, what exactly was I afraid of anyway? It's just telling people the gospel. But for some reason, I have this deep, unshakeable fear of cold evangelizing. It's not because I'm ashamed; I can approach strangers and ask them if I can pray for them, I can tell anyone the gospel if such an oppurtunity naturally arises, but I cannot bring myself to be at peace with the idea of simply approaching a stranger for the purpose of telling them the gospel. I know it has something to do with my conception of cold evangelism. It's... cold. I felt like half of evangelizing is allowing people to see the hand of God in your life, in real life. Randomly approaching strangers and telling them the gospel doesn't really allow that. In fact, if such a person were to approach me and tried to tell me the gospel, even though I'm a Christian, I would be suspicious. I know from experience. So what exactly am I afraid of? I finally put my finger on it: I'm afraid of appearing loveless. Interesting how I have this gut reaction against being verbal for Jesus without attaching actions of love. That is a good sign: it shows that I understand in my heart (not just head) the fundamentality of love in the gospel (only by the grace of God). Not that cold evangelism is bad, it's just not really my thing, I guess....

Ok, that's all for now, I'M SUPER EXCITED TO MOVE IN TOMORROW AND SEE EVERYONEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!

I woke myself up last night laughing... and you thought sleep-talking was weird.

Some things in life...

...we just have to learn over and over again. The past couple of weeks I've been trying to find someone to pick me up from the airport in SD, with no success. Not only is 9/11 a strange day to fly, but it is also awkwardly between quarters, so everyone's at home or Taiwan or something. At first I was confident that I could find a ride from my awesome networking skills at SD. I started out by asking people one by one, waiting until one replied before I tried the next one. At the end of last week, I realized time was short so I started contacting people simultaneously, without waiting for a reply before I messaged the next person. Still no success. My number of attempts must have been approaching a dozen now. At the beginning of this week, I realized time was really running short, so I put up a mass plea on my Facebook status. Finally I got one iffy yes. This morning, I realized that I completely left God out of the picture. I'd been relying on myself to find myself a ride. I forgot that it would be much easier if I just asked God. So I said to him this morning that it's in his hands now, I'll trust him to find me a ride. And then I sent one more email and sat back and waited for the yes's to roll in. By this evening, I was trying to figure out who to allow to pick me up and who to turn down. Well, there you go, lesson of the day relearned. How dumb of me to have to go through this again.

itunes: Lemonade (Chris Rice) - thanks to my "friend who is not the same age."

Summer plans for 2011

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I skimmed my journal today, back to when I started my current notebook like three years ago, and boy, hindsight 20/20. I can now see what I failed to see in my life back then. Dumb Elena grows wiser with time, that's good. Or shall we say, blind Elena suddenly sees clearer when she's not in the situation anymore? Anyway, I also see how I've grown, and all the prayers that God answered. Haha, when I got back from orientation, I wrote that would God please grant me a strong Christian community because I cannot deal with it if everyone was like the people in my orientation group. God has more than answered that prayer. I have an interfellowship, interchurch, intercollege Christian community. I love that. And one thing that I saw that I wrote a lot was that God isn't first in my life, God I'm losing my passion for you, blahblahblah. Ok, well God still isn't first in my life sometimes, but many of my idols are gone, and I wouldn't say I have a problem with "losing my passion" anymore. I dunno how that happened, but he's always on my mind, and I seek him in a much more stable manner now. Maybe because I'm not overwhelmed with and distracted by school and everything I was involved in anymore. Life used to be such a big time crunch, such a big distraction... Maybe I have my priorities figured out better now, I dunno. Maybe I don't rely on emotions as much now? I don't know how it happened, but it did, and it's very cool to behold how I've grown. That is all for now.

悩み

the URL of this blog doesn't make sense. Only angiosperms have fruit. What am I thinking.

Anyway, there's been a lot on my mind lately. The word that comes to mind is 悩んでる。Troubled, but not in trouble. (More languages = wider range of expressive vocab!)

The Problem of Pain by CS Lewis has been very thought-provoking. It basically explores the question, if God is good, then why is there pain, or something like that. Anddd to make a long story short, basically he says that the primal sin of man is that of choosing self above God, which is not exactly the way things were meant to be (what's more important, the Creator or the created?). So anyway, I was thinking about how often I choose self above God... and it's like 99% of the time. No, I don't go about breaking the law. You could call me a Pharisee, kind of. I follow the law, for the most part. In the eyes of man, I come pretty close to blameless. But that darn primal sin nags at me and nags at me, and even though you can't tell from the outside, I know that 99% of the time I do things to please myself, because I am the center of my universe. Adam's sin is my sin. And your sin. In him all have sinned and all died. Anyhow, the dilemma that this raised was that I don't know what it means to have God constantly at the center. Is the Holy Spirit even working in me????

So I went on a walk and a large portion of Romans 7 and 8 (summary: I don't do what I want to do, but I do what I don't want to do... what a wretched man I am, who will save me? Jesus of course! ...There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus...) kept running through my head. Except it was spotty, so I figured I should reread all of Romans and the answer would be in there somewhere. First, I was reminded that salvation is by faith and has nothing to do with how much you sin. Ok, fine, I know that I'm saved, I'm just wondering how come I still have so much sin if I'm supposed to be dead to it. And then... I almost expected this, but we talked about Romans 7 and 8 in Sunday School like 2 days later. To make a long story short (second try), we are to count ourselves dead to sin (Rom 6:11), but we are still putting to death the deeds of the body (Rom 8:13). Basically, your cancer is being removed, so you should start acting like a normal person again as a sign of faith that you are getting better, but at the same time, there are still lingering symptoms of the illness that we are still fighting. Kind of. The very fact that there is war being waged in my members indicates that the Spirit is at work putting to death the deeds of the body. I'm not completely rid of my sinful nature yet, but the struggle is on, and there will be a day when I'm completely sanctified. But until then... it's a struggle. If there's no struggle, then something is wrong. Check yourself.

The other thing is that I was suddenly notified that I had been chosen to serve on LS core team next year, and they were wondering if I would accept. WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME EARLIER when I was thinking about which direction I want to go this year. So it's in-reach or out-reach, and I would really like to take care of LS and pray for them and love them and wrap myself up in this family, but at the same time I don't want to wrap myself up in the Christian bubble. My heart is to build relationships with those who don't know him yet. But then, LS is very missions-minded and I'm sure I could do a lot with outreach as a group. But it's not the same as building relationships. Are the options even mutually exclusive?

...Among a plethora of other things on my mind. For example, Amazon just canceled my order for Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan due to lack of availability.

On Time and God

So it occurred to me that the passage of time is characterized by decay and change. How do you know that time is passing? Well, for one thing, you can tell by the increase in overall entropy (randomness) in the world. That seems to be a universal marker for the passage of time. They say the universe will end in a heat death which basically means that chaos will eat the world. As long as time progresses and matter exists, entropy will happen and increase. It just does. It's inherent in the nature of time, just like balls dropped at the surface of earth always fall down. Everything in nature wants to be at a lower energy level, which basically means everything in nature wants to fall into chaos. Negative entropy doesn't exist for the universe. And neither does time go backwards. On a more micro level, the increase of entropy translates into decay. You can tell a new house from an old house because the old house shows more signs of decay. Time just does that to stuff. You can never make an old house naturally look like a new house after a while, because time doesn't go backwards. On an even more micro level, time will sometimes look simply like change, not necessarily negative change. Think of anything alive and growing. A growing plant looks like it's defying decay and entropy for a while, but let's not forget the cost of its growth on the surroundings. And in the end, even the most robust of plants will become a fossil or less after a million years. Even your mind/soul, which are not physical things, experience time. I don't need to explain that because we all experience time and are aware of it.

Ok. So time always causes decay and change, and God never decays or changes. Therefore, God does not experience time, except in the person of Jesus. Think of all the implications. Praying for something after the fact does not make the prayer any less valid than praying for something before the fact. It's all the same to him (although it's rather counterintuitive to us who do experience time). Predestination becomes much less of a problem because it's no longer an issue of God-chose-me-so-I'm forced-to-be-Christian/God-didn't-choose-me-so-there's-no-way-I-can-believe-even-if-I-wanted-to. He sees your post-death judgment in the present tense before you were born. There is no injustice in choosing or not choosing you before your birth. It's really not that complicated.

Anyhow. Credits to C.S. Lewis and my time travel seminar (for predestination). Many years ago, I had formulated a lot of the ideas here, plus other related ideas, but I thought maybe I was being heretical because to no one ever prays for things in the past and everyone always seemed to get hung up on predestination which I thought shouldn't really be a moral problem if this was true. Now I read all of C.S. Lewis' stuff on God and time and (I am not kidding) our ideas are the same down to the very analogies we used (not included here), although his ideas were slightly more developed. Wes said that's because we both have the same Holy Spirit, haha, which actually makes a lot of sense. Anyway, I think God's transcendence over time is something that too many Christians forget about, so here's to serve as a reminder. Also, I wanted to share because the scientific/logical backing is something I only recently realized, so it's new to me, too. Hopefully, it's logically and theologically sound.

Jesus in Japan!

Some of you know that recently I've developed a ...strong interest in the advancement of the gospel in Japan. This guy came to my church in SD and he is the reason Japan caught my eye. I met him briefly that week and he is so sweet.



I cannot bear to think that 98 or whatever percent of people in Japan have never even heard the gospel and meanwhile so many are killing themselves for what I strongly suspect is academic and job pressure. Monta Vista seems to see similar trends.  That's why it hits me so hard, because it's so close to home. They NEED Jesus and the hope that comes from knowing that your performance has nothing to do with your worth. Anyway, the point is that Seima and his family have been forced to postpone their departure to Japan because of insufficient funds. I know that they would appreciate your prayer and financial support a lot right now. hint. hint. :]

Ahh, my heart's never really left human bio. So I changed back. Actually, it's pending approval right now and will be approved shortly. I couldn't handle looking at all my chosen bio electives and knowing that they described a human bio major while being denied the right to call myself a human bio major. General bio just doesn't sound as cool. Ok that's all.

Oh yes and as much as I complain about not knowing what to do with myself after my class ends, don't listen to me, because I will be fine. I'm happy at home. I'm not dying of loneliness or boredom, and I won't. Talk about getting in touch with my introverted side, but really. Solitude is good sometimes. I am consuming a fair number of books (maybe I'm a little too absorbed sometimes) and I will get myself to hang out with all the people I normally don't see once my class ends. I will pack for school, I will hang out with my family and my God, I will cook, I will clean, I will read more, I will play piano, I will play with my cat, and I will not go crazy from idleness. Even after everyone starts school, I will live at Kevin and Erica's houses if I have to, but I will not go crazy from idleness, boredom, or loneliness. I will enjoy my summer to the fullest and I will not be ready to leave for school until the day I actually leave. Alrighty, that's the mindset, Elena.