+FillUs

I can now testify to the truthfulness of running the last third of a marathon with your heart. Physique plays an important part of the game, but at mile 20, everyone feels crappy. At the end, it is the mind who keeps one going, keeps one persevering, and keeps one enduring pain. During the last few miles, I really wanted to stop. My legs are sore, my feet hurt, and my knees feel like they could buckle anytime. My body probably really hated me for not listening, but I had to go with my heart that said no stopping. To my rescue, my friend Greg Hassen from Southcoast Road Runners found me and ran me in at mile 22. That was tremendous help. Perhaps I would have really stopped if he didn`t pace me and kept me companied. Thank God for sending help right when I needed it. Although I didn`t meet my arbitrary goal of 4:30, I was happy about the race. It was arbitrary because I never ran 26.2 miles in my life. Running an 8 minute pace on a 10 mile run doesn`t mean I could do the same for another...

“In Jesus’ name, amen.” We all close our prayers with that. However, how often do we left Jesus out in the bulk of our prayer until the very end? How often do we begin our prayers with a list of request, follow by more requests, and just reiterate “In Jesus’ name, amen” like we always do to close it off. In Praying Backwards, author and president of Covenant Theological Seminary urges us “to use that routine phrase as the premise and basis for prayer,” rather than stamping God’s name at the end to seal the deal. For architects, our list (and the clients’) of requests is replaced with programs and budgets. Perhaps it would be more feasible for clients (in our case, churches) to come to us with just a budget and a list of programs, do away with BlueSky and charette and dive right into the solution. But without first listening to God and without God’s vision as our premise and basis of our design, what we are responding to are just needs. In Who’s your city, author Richard Florida named a...

The Social Network, a film which narrates the inception of Facebook reminded me the joy I had learning programming as a high schooler. I remember writing really simple programs using C++ and made my first web page in basic html in grade 10. The joy came from creating and problem solving. Nothing like spending hours cracking a puzzle and in the process, creating something out of nothing, ex nihilo. Type in a string of codes and integers and something wonderful comes out of it. This makes me wonder whether God had the same satisfaction creating the world. He is the only one truly created something out of nothing (“creatio ex nihilo”). He spoke, and the world came into existence. He saw what He made, and “behold, it was very good.” We are all on God’s Facebook. He invited all of us to be His friends.