Rant of the Exiles

Lake Schmidell, Desolation Wilderness After attending the bar mitzvah of a friend of Caleb's earlier this year, I got excited about doing some kind of manhood ritual for him.  It was my first bar mitzvah and I was deeply moved by the experience. I identified two aspects of the Jewish coming of age ceremony where the adolescent male invests in the process. First, he must sing a large section of the Old Testament in Hebrew from memory. Second, he must perform a community service project and present a report during the ceremony. There was incredible symbolism throughout the worship service. Everything is sung in Hebrew and the rabbi did a great job explaining the meaning behind the objects. The Torah is held up and people touch it as it passes to demonstrate reverence and obedience. This ceremony represented the confluence of four distinct identities: spiritual, ethnic, family, and gender. The closet Protestant equivalent is baptism, if baptism were also ethnic and gender-orient...

Olaf, the gregarious but clueless snowman, does not wrestle with depression in the movie Frozen. However the actor who plays him, Josh Gad, does play an addict in the 2013 comedy Thanks for Sharing . Thanks for Sharing has an ambitious premise. It attempts to portray the journey of three sex addicts (Gad, Mark Ruffalo, and Tim Robbins) in a humorous way. It does a decent job but the last 30 minutes are Hollywood-predictable.  There's one main reason I would recommend watching it - Josh Gad's writing scene. Gad has the rare ability to convey insight with humor. And in about three minutes, he's able to express nonverbally exactly what it feels like to be caught in an addictive pattern. And it's hilarious too. For the past couple weeks, I've taught about the negative mood cycle, a term coined by my seminary professor, David Eckman . The negative mood cycle describes the addictive pattern. It starts with some kind of negative emotion - boredom, depressio...

1) Can I crash on your couch tonight? 2) You know Taiwan and China are different countries right?  I'm Taiwanese American AND Chinese American. My parents are from Taiwan but originally from mainland China. It's actually two different countries. Taiwan is recognized by the United Nations as a nation but the People's Republic of China, that is, mainland China, sees Taiwan as a renegade province. Thus, Taiwan has a big chip on its shoulder when it comes to sovereignty and foreign affairs. The two countries have this strained relationship. But it's been better recently. It's all kinda complicated.  Kobe, why are you walking away? 3) When do you think Yellow Mamba will catch on? 4) So I read you make 900 jumpers a day. Do you ever, like, you know, do the same thing with passing? 5) Like I was wondering could we maybe work something out like for every 10th pass I give you, maybe you could send one back my way?  I could make like one of tho...

Depression is not sin. That's what my wife told me in response to a statement I made during my sermon this past Sunday. I should not have categorized depression as a sin behavior.  My wife was right. Depression is not sin. But it is often accompanied by sin. Just as it's difficult to masturbate without lustful thoughts, it's difficult to be depressed without self-hatred, mistrust, or fear. I had been giving a talk about the negative mood cycle. For example, if confronted with a difficult writing assignment, every fiber of our being resists putting words on the page. In order to address our negative mood, we lust after some kind of solace, some chemical boost that will give us the energy we need to start working or avoid thinking about it altogether. From there, we pursue self-medicating behaviors - eating, social media, TV, pornography, video games, substance abuse, etc. Some of those behaviors are overtly sinful (porn, substance abuse) and some are only sinful wh...

Over at our South Africa ministry trip blog 

Having the emotional capacity to focus on something besides one's own needs. In a social interaction, emotional bandwidth is the ability to divert attention away from how one is being perceived (and one's interests) towards attending to the other person. It means feeling secure enough with who you are that you can focus on another person's verbal and non-verbal language. In a conversation, it's crucial to have enough emotional bandwidth to observe the other person objectively.  An example: Although Victor is a perceptive person, he doesn't have the emotional bandwidth to notice whether people are interested in what he's talking about. If he felt more secure as a person, he would be freed up to listen empathetically to others.

Time management help:  For as long as I can remember, I've struggled with procrastination, lack of focus, and the inability to complete tasks. As the latch-key kid of Chinese immigrant parents, I knew the drill - come home from school, have a snack, and then do homework and practice violin until dinner.  Yeah right. Instead I would lounge around, snacking and imitating the moves I saw on MTV (my generation learned dance from music videos not Youtube). I would try to start an assignment only to be distracted by something going on outside. My friends would come over. If we had social media, it would have been game over. I always believed my problem was time management. If I could only organize my time more efficiently, I would be far more productive. If I could only set up a plan where I  allocated a specified number of minutes to important tasks, I would be able to get things done.  It never worked.  No matter how well I planned, the boost...