20-22 Covid-19 Daily Reflections

We heard about different horrendous conditions of nursing homes and senior homes around this time last year as Covid-19 claimed many lives of elderly folks across the country. Various governments and politicians vowed that they seek to change things, and business is not as usual. "Is it really?" we might want to ask. What I have heard from folks who work in these facilities is we have hardly done enough. Senior abuse doesn't just take place in these places. More abuse has been done by those who are supposed to take care of them. Some of them suffer from loneliness and abandonment because their kids don't even come for visits. Some are damaged because kids take advantage of their finance. Some children humiliate their elderly parents because they don't remember things and they don't make sense. W e are willing to embarrass our elderly publicly, knowing quite well their cognitive awareness is failing. These folks cannot process their thoughts, follow...

  We are all familiar with what the wicked Queen in Snow White asked the mirror on the wall in order to be sure that she was still the most beautiful woman. "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?" And expected the mirror answered: "Thou, O Queen, art the fairest in the land." We might not ask the same question to God. However, the intention we have in talking to God sometimes might not be all that different in terms of motives. Here are a few examples. "Can we trust that you are with us when things are hard?" "Why are we experiencing the immense loneliness while claiming that you are with us?" "Why don't we feel like we understand what you are doing? It doesn't seem that you care for us." When we think through these types of questions, we know that we are dealing with our insecurity. Jesus knew His disciple's fears before the crucifixion. He knew that Peter would be afraid and denied Him three times. He...

  I have mixed feelings about what is happening at the border between the US and Mexico. I keep asking myself: "what is the proper response?". The influx of new migrants has created a humanitarian crisis. A large number of children is also a concern. I am also annoyed by politicians who use the misery of these people to gain their political advantage. We should be able to be a lot more organized and more orderly in our compassion. Today is Monday of Easter week. It is the time of the year Christians celebrate God's faithfulness and forgiveness to humanity. If we claim that we have received that freely from God, we should be able to live that out more generously. More than ever before, the world needs to experience that grace. Being gracious for us is to learn how to serve others although they are not always in agreement with us. Our lesson is to learn to be more present with those who suffer. We need to walk away from our desire to gain power in this world. The real power...

  I am troubled by some of the media stated that ORU should be banned from March Madness because its stand same-sex marriage. Whether we agree with ORU or not, it doesn't give us the right to condemn people because they take a different moral position than ours. Morality can only make sense when we keep having conversations about what we don't agree with one another. None of us sees the meaning of life or God fully. We only know what we believe has been revealed to us by God or what we have claimed to understand. People have the right not to attend ORU or not to go to church. That is their prerogative. However, I don't think it is morally healthy to take away people's choices because we happen to disagree with them. The hypocrisy is troublesome. We preach inclusiveness while practicing condemnation of those who disagree with us. The intolerance towards diverse opinions about morality is perceived as openness. We have also discovered that we live in a culture that no lon...

  It might be a good idea to write an open letter to those who have learned how to hate Asians. Please feel free to share it if you think it is appropriate. Asians have been living in North America since the California Gold Rush in the 1850s. Many of us were born here. Many of us are living in the reality of being bi-culture in our ways of life. Many of us are actually proud of calling ourselves Canadian or American before anything else. We have integrated into many different facets of life in North America. It is a stereotype to think that we are only good at Math. If you look around, you see us in medicine, music, performing arts, business, sports, theology, philosophy, and more. We want to make a difference where we live. We want to have a contribution to Canada and the US. Yes, we do eat with chopsticks. However, not too many of us know how to fight with them. We have no problem using forks and knives while enjoying a steak dinner, a flavorful plate of pasta, or souvlaki. No do...

Some people have been asking this question: Why doesn't God reveal Himself in ways that we can all see and understand Who He is and What He is about to do. It is a good question when we have to deal with recent horrible events. It demands us to look at everything with more than just our own set of eyes. I will not attempt to answer this question without considering some personal experiences. There is a story about an unbelieving king and a rabbi who happened to be good friends. The rabbi came to visit the King one day. The king gave him the privilege to stay in the room in the palace that has the most beautiful view. So the rabbi decided to paint what he saw. It was an incredible work of art. The king was so impressed and asked his friend: "How did you do it?" The rabbi said to his friend: "It was nothing really. I just put the little paint here and some more there. They just came together accidentally" The King knew that his friend was pulling his leg because ...

  Once again, we had to deal with the unexplainable madness on Monday in Boulder, Colorado, as a shooter went on a rampage and killed ten people, including a police officer. What happens to the US as these mass killing incidents have become too regular. Many people inside King Soopers at the time were waiting for their Covid-19 vaccine shots. What an agony? Some of the staff, who were giving these shots, were hurt by the shooter. What happened to this person who committed this senseless act? The answer confirms our human brokenness. It could be that he lives in loneliness, and life has deprived him of the reality of love. He has learned to hate and demonize others. He could only see what he believes that he had the right to eliminate and destroy. It could be that a victim became an offender. We see that so often in our society as we fail to engage people who need help to deal with the consequences of their brokenness. It doesn't justify anything. It just confirms that evil deeds ha...

  I had a conversation with a business leader recently about authenticity. It came up at our table discussion about why people don't seem to trust their political leaders much these days? Authenticity is missing, and people's skepticism dominates their responses. So what is authenticity? Be genuine in dealing with good and evil. We cannot tolerate the language of compromise. When we comprise the truth with evil deeds, we might begin to wander in the wilderness immorality. In that wilderness, there are many voices. They deceive and create fears. Be true to our words. How often we heard people say that he (she) is full of it? When people begin to distrust our words, there might be no truth in us. We can use languages to either build or destroy a community. Be free to confess our sins to one another. It is a humble step to restore our relationships with one another. It is also a sign of courage to acknowledge our responsibility. We restore freedom when we confess our sins to one a...

  What would we have to look forward to after we get over this Covid-19? Can life ever be the same? We know that some businesses have made some changes. We have adjusted to how we conduct our daily lives. We become more aware that we can lose our freedom at any time. We begin to wonder about a world without isolation and quarantine. So what do we have to look forward to at the end? Freedom within the framework of limitation: life might become somewhat normal after we succeed in our vaccination. However, that won't happen until people agree that it is needed. That is one social contract that we have not yet had. How do we go about balancing our freedom and our self-imposed of its limitation so that things can work? Unmasking our needs: it will be good to see smiles again. We need to be able to reconnect in person. Our need for human touch has been missing for more than a year. We need to be able to sing freely in church worship. Our longing to gather because the virtual community ju...

  I took a friend a few weeks ago on a cultural discovery trip as we spent time in the Asian district in our city. She was having fun because she realized that there is a lot more happening in that area than she knew. We went to different grocery stores and a Vietnamese sub store. My heart was saddened by the news of various racially motivated acts against Asians in the US. The displayed gestures and the languages, these attackers used, tell us that they have never have true experience with other cultural groups so that they can widen their awareness and adjust their views of others. When we give ourselves the right to disregard the values and the worth of people who are simply different from us, we have failed to understand the true meaning of God's grace and beauty. Our differences should reveal the vastness of God's beauty, our diversity should be celebrated as God's creation, and our distinct cultures can be embraced as God's various expressions of meaning. It is ha...

  March Madness is here. It is my favorite college sports tournament. It didn't take long for us to see a few upsets during the first few days of the competition as Ohio, Virginia and Tennessee failed to advance. I am always skeptical about the team rankings. They don't really mean much when teams have to do or die in one game. The experts sometimes fail badly. When it comes to how we should conduct our lives, who should be the experts we rely on? Sometimes we are not sure about our faith leaders because so many of them have been influenced by their own political leaning and needs for power. We saw enough of that during the last elections. Christians need to overcome the ignorance of our own Scriptures. We should not look for shortcuts by listening to self-proclaimed prophets. Some of these prophets are more about profits than the truth of God. We need to depend on God's revelation to understand how He has been dealing with humanity. When God speaks, it is not about human g...

  I got a phone call from a friend who informed me that her brother died after getting beat up in an alley. Doctors could not stop the bleeding in his brain. He had a challenging life, and not much had gone well for him. However, his siblings will miss him as they deal with their grief and sorrow. Sometimes it is easy to look down on the sins of others and think how good or lucky we are for not having to be in their positions. We might want to consider our own sinful nature before entertaining such thoughts. So as I listened to his sister and prayed for him, I have to trust that God knew who he was and what was going in his mind during the years he had on earth. Only God knows the secret of our human hearts. Here it what written in 1 Samuel 16: 7: "But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look at his appearance or at the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” So our st...

  A good friend wrote me this week and shared with me that she has been using Psalm 91 as her prayer for me. That is wonderful. When rereading the psalm, two main themes came back to me: Our refuge in God and His protection. We will be able to understand them when we are committed ourselves to: A life of prayers: I am not referring to the religious approach to prayers. It is about having a personal relationship with God and the awareness of His steady presence in our lives. It is about allowing our hearts to long after the heart of God. There are much listening and very little talking. Ongoing interaction with God: we seek our refuge in God not just because we are in trouble. We find our oneness with God when we take refuge in Him. We then realize that we don't have to fight anymore. It is the tranquillity that comes from trusting God and His faithfulness. It is more about remaining in Him instead of running toward Him. Learning to pursue God in different contexts of our lives: We ...

  God sometimes has a great sense of humour. Yet, He is doing that to reveal our broken self to us. God's messages can come to us through various funny moments of our lives. My wife still tells me the thought she had when she was a teenager. Her mom was driving her home from the hospital where her dad worked. She saw a Vietnamese restaurant and thought to herself: "Vietnamese restaurant? Who in the world would eat that food?" Well, she now has it as often as she needs. Having Vietnamese food is easy. Being married to one is another story. I came home after a teaching trip to a university a few years ago. I was teaching on "Cross-Cultural Challenges in Contemporary Churches". My youngest daughter sat down next to me on the couch and said: "You and mom will never understand us". Although I was surprised, I agreed with her. I asked her to explain her thoughts behind that statement more to me. " You were born in Vietnam, Ông and Bà (my parents) are bo...

  Curiosity is powerful and an incredible motivator. It can take us to either personal greatness or severe self-destruction.  Many scientific discoveries began with curiosity. Many men and women, who devote their lives to help others, have started their journey by being curious about a world with less suffering. However, when we look at the other side of the coin, curiosity has also been a source of many unpleasant and painful events in human existence. Sometimes we are so pulled by our curiosity that we disregard the lack of good outcomes. We can say that Adam and Eve were curious about what it meant to live their lives with the desire to be a god to themselves. That is not that much different from many people today. They want to have utopia while having no interest in the reality of human brokenness. Curiosity can come from our disconnectedness and our discontentment. I have seen young people who decided to walk away from a loving and caring home because they were curious ab...

  People have started talking about traveling as the vaccination plans have begun to gain momentum in Canada and the USA. My brothers and sisters have already started planning for a family reunion. It is a much-needed one because many of us could come to my father's funeral in Montreal last November. I have friends who have talked about going back to Vietnam to see friends and family. Relationships are essential in human life, and traveling is how we maintain and grow our relationships with others. Being shut out and cut off from families and friends is not that normal for us. Some people feel as if they are losing the needed equilibrium in their lives. We are relational because God created us in His image, a relational image. Relationships are our guidelines for meaningful lives. Good relationships tend to challenge us and shape us. For some people, good relationships make them better. They learn to take responsibility and leadership when they grew up in healthy relationships. Oth...

It was this time last year that everything changed. I was in Montreal with my dad. He was very sick, and most of us came to be with him. All of my brothers, who are not from Canada, had to leave because things were shutting down. They needed to get home before the borders were closed to travelers. I got back to the hotel to discover that everything also shut down. The lobby and the restaurant were closed. There was no more room service. I decided to go outside to get some food. There were not too many options. It was an eerie feeling to walk right downtown Montreal about 7 pm, and not too many people were around. Since then, we have experienced many heartaches that many Canadians had to go through by being unable to care for their elderly parents. The horrid stories we heard about nursing homes in Montreal were hitting home when we learned that people in the same facility with my dad started getting Covid-19 and dying. Covid-19 was not a conspiracy anymore. My dad got it an...

Today is π Day. π is an incredible mathematical concept and has a long-lasting presence in human history. We use π in farming, power generation, space science, meteorology, construction theory, and more. Definition: π is the ratio of the circumference of any circle to the diameter of that circle. If this is too much math for some of you, I am sorry. Have you ever thought that π is also mentioned in the Bible? "And he [Hiram] made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one rim to the other it was round all about, and...a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about....And it was a handbreadth thick...."  (1 Kings 7: 23 and 26) The notion of π has been present in human history for a long time. The Babylonians (c. 2000 BCE) used 3.125 to approximate π. Ancient Egyptians used a value of 256/81 or about 3.16045. Archimedes came up with 3.1418 in his calculation. There is a parallel between π and the cross for me. When we subject any human life experience (circumference) against hi...

Most of us would have to accept certain conditions when we get a job, belong to a group, or join the army. It is not about losing our freedom, being trapped, or being judged by others. It is about the choice that we have to accept both the privileges and the duty we have. If we live our lives by going after our benefits only, we have made one seriously wrong assumption about life. It is even more damaging when people use the suffering and the unfortunate events in other people's lives to advance their agenda and selfish ambition. There is a lack of integrity and honesty when they pursue that path of life. There is no shame and nothing noble in that way of living. Some people might say that is the utmost form of self-serving. Many years ago, I met a young woman who decided to take her faith in Jesus seriously. She came and asked me to baptize her. We discussed the consequences of her decision to be baptized. She was about to lose all of her privileges. Her family disowne...

  Thinking Ahead is challenging for many of us because we are so preoccupied with what is going on right now. When that happens, we fail to have the needed imagination to anticipate God's work in the world. When we don't think ahead, we might not see the importance of prayers. So how does it means to think ahead? Make sure we make time to meditate and ponder to have the chance to see things from a different perspective. We need to have the freedom to remove ourselves from our daily tasks to have our moments alone with God. We will learn to see the world from a totally different set of eyes. Sometimes we are just so busy and fail to see what is happening around us. We learn to survive without any imagination. Think about different forces (internal and external) that have been pulling us apart. We need to ask the question of why these forces can have such a pull. The worse thing we can do is to dismiss them. It is the moment to realize that we are fighting a spiritual battle. It ...

  It is exciting and challenging for expecting parents is to come up with the name for their baby. Baby-names tend to have their time as well. Some of them might be common in the past, and we hardly see them today. Some names reflect the cultural heritage of the parents. Some names are there because they current with what is going on in the world. Some of them we have no ideas how they came about. We all have nicknames, and they tend to be used by people who are dear to us. Husbands and wives have unique names for one another. Parents have endearing names for their kids. The Bible also tells us that God has given us new names for us when we come to know Him. God changed Abram's name (high father) to Abraham (father of a multitude). He also changed Sarai's name (my princess) to Sarah (mother of nations). Jesus changed Simon's name to Peter (Cephas, means the rock) after Simon declared that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. That was his intention for Peter'...