Stuff That Matters in Life

Katy’s Weblog

Read this definition of discipleship from church:

Intentionally imitating Christ and reproducing increasing Christlikeness in others through caring relationships that practice accountability.

Various forms of discipleship: Family (parents and children), One-on-one/mentoring; Biblical counseling (issue-specific); Evangelism (from unbeliever to a believer); Sermons (being discipled by the Word); Sunday School (being discipled by the Word); Small group (more in-depth than sermon); Personal quiet times in the Word (being discipled by the Word)

There is nothing wrong with this definition, it’s one way to make concrete a nebulous concept. But I think discipleship can also happen unintentionally. You might be living out your life of faith without intentionally trying to disciple anyone, but when people see your life, they are motivated to do the same to be like Christ.

I am often discipled by people like that. Most of the time, they don’t even know they’ve helped me to grow in Christlikeness.

I have a friend name Iscah. I thought it’s a made up name, but yesterday I read it in the Bible.

Iscah is the daughter of Haran; Haran is Abraham’s brother, that makes Iscah Abraham’s niece. (Gen 11:29). Her brother is Lot, who traveled to Canaan with Abraham. Though she is only mentioned one time in the Bible, Iscah’s close relationship to the well-known father Abraham makes her a pretty famous as well. (Some Jewish traditions says Iscah is called Sarai, which makes her Abraham’s wife.)

I’ve been following a daily Bible reading plan from the YouVersion app on my iPhone. It’s a great way to keep track of my Bible reading.

Finding Iscah in the Bible is only one of a lot of good stuff I learn from the Bible. Most importantly I learn about God who reveals Himself through the Bible.

P.S. Wikipedia says Iscah is the Hebrew for Jessica.

This book has given me a whole new way of thinking about world missions. K.P. Yahannan, an Indian (from India) writes about the vision God called him to, and the reasons for that vision.

The mission organization he started, Gospel for Asia has the distinctive of supporting national missionaries rather than sending missionaries overseas. He…

Read more of “Revolution in World Missions by K.P. Yahannan”

My daughter has a very heavy load of classes this year, her junior year of high school. It’s only the second week of school and she’s stressing out – “I have SO MUCH homework!” She’s studying every single minute, and not having a balanced life.

I gave her a lecture about why she should not worry and should not be working so frantically: No matter how much you study, your future is not controlled by you. God has your future in his hands. Stop relying on your own efforts. Trust God and no matter how you do on your tests, you’ll be fine.

My own words was echoed back to me as I heard God telling me the same thing: No matter how much effort you put in, you cannot control the future. Stop trying so hard and relying on your own efforts; trust in me and I will help you.

Fresh off the press, I borrowed AB’s copy of Francis Chan’s new book Erasing Hell.

About a third of the book analyzes specific passages of the Bible to discover whether hell is retributive or corrective (a second chance to go to heaven), and whether it’s eternal or annihilation (completely destroy the soul).  Since I don’t need to be convinced that hell does exist and that it’s a place of eternal judgement, I read through those chapters quickly. For those who are not sure, those chapters are very informative.

The premise of the book is that we cannot impart our own ideas about what is or is not hell, but rather we need to see what God says in the Bible. We have to let God be God. Even if you don’t believe the Bible, you might want to hear what Jesus says about hell, and this book explains it well.

The best parts of the book are the introduction, the first two chapters and chapter 6. The most important lesson in the book that Chan keeps reiterating throughout is hell should not be taken as an academic subject to be discussed. People’s future is on the line. “In other words, don’t forget that the doctrine you are studying may be the destiny of many people.”

So what do I do with the information that hell is real and horrible? I don’t know.

Friday 7/8

The most exciting thing about landing in Taiwan is not Taiwan, but seeing E greeting us at the airport! He flew in from Saigon a few hours earlier, joining us for this vacation.

Second on the list of exciting thing about Taiwan is meeting T’s friends. They have a nice big van that took us to our hotel. The freeway we took looked pretty much like the US, but when we stopped for food (T’s friend kindly took us to get food) at a small night market, it was not at all like the US. It was close to 11pm and lots of people were around. T’s friends bought us several items to try, which turned out to be the most well-known ones that we later saw in other night markets – oyster pancake thing, fried squid, beef noodle soup, ice cream wrapped in mochi skin thing, and some boba drinks. We were tired, so we took the food and ate at the hotel. It felt good to relax and enjoy the goodies on this first night in Taiwan.

This is the oyster pancake thing with gravy on top. All take-out foods are put into these types of boxes.

This is soup put into a bag for take-out. Gravy is packaged this way too.

Our first hotel in Taipei, the Yomi. I’ll give it 3 1/2 stars.

My friend LL showed me this book and asked if I’ve read it. I had not even heard of the author (later to find that Platt is a friend of a friend I just met), but I was curious and always up for a good book. The cover says it’s a New York Times Bestseller. I was also intrigued by the subtitle – Taking back your faith from the American Dream. After reading Radical by David Platt, I am indeed challenged to evaluate how much our church really does operate on the same principles of the American Dream.

Read more of “Radical by David Platt”