interesting

The lady asked me, “When was the last time you had your eyes checked?” (…) I was counting the years “Well a good four years, around 2002″ I guess I’m bad with math, I got my last glasses at the end of 2002 - it’s been five years… I had a hard time not smiling as we went through the various little eye tests - I just think they’re funny, that’s all. As she was measuring the strength of my glasses I told the lady that since my first glasses (back in… 1999 I think) I never knew the actual strength of my lenses. ” - 0.75 on both eyes myopia, then - o.50 and - 0.25 astigmatism ” according to my lenses. After all the little tests that made me dizzy and partly blind, she told me my vision hadn’t changed a bit apart for my astigmatism that was better. She told me twice that my glasses were very good for me.

When I got my appointment yesterday I was certain I was going to buy new glasses, there was no question. I was quite happy to get out of the “spectacle trade” (hahahah!) knowing that my eyes were fine and my glasses too. To be sure it would have been neat to get new glasses after five years but, these are still quite alright. So there’s just less money going out of my bank account.

Another interesting thing, look closely at this picture:

You can find THREE books that are upside down. What is their common denominator? They are French books and they actually are not upside down. All the books you see are “up side up”, only the French books have the side writing going the opposite way, upside down, while the English ones have the side writing “up side up”. Interesting eh?

’bout time

Hello readers.

There are so many things I could do but I do so little. I’m starting my third week of strike, well, it is not that I personally am on strike but my university faculty is, so even if I would go to class, strikers would keep me from getting to the room. We’ve been voting, at the beginning of every week to see if we want to continue the strike or not and so far, there has always been more people for than against, so no school. I must say that I enjoyed the first two weeks off but now I find it quite frustrating and more people are afraid that we’ll lose the whole semester. We’ll see what happens. All I can do is sit for 5 hours every Monday and vote against it - I’m sort of wasting a lot of time right now.

So I don’t really know what to do with so much time on my hands. Well, I do have to work on a few assignments so they are ready when the strike is over and I do have Bible study meetings every week, but apart from that, the routine gets me down and I feel like there is little meaning in my life right now, I’m just waiting for the strike to be over I suppose.

Anyways, that’s my life right now.

lies and lies

I started my second week of strike at university. We voted yesterday and the majority decided that we would continue the strike for another two weeks. Yes it is frustrating.

There is one course that’s still on. Literature. Tonight we talked about Paradise Lost by John Milton, a puritan of the 16oos. I was appalled at how people can interpret a book and then form their own view of God. The conclusion: God is evil and Satan is a pretty nice guy who’s got good reasons for doing evil, he’s not our friend, but still, he probably isn’t worse than God. I really wanted to get up and speak of God’s truth, but there was so many lies thrown at me that I didn’t know where to start and how to be relevant. I felt discouraged and furious at the same time.

I walked to the metro station with a guy and had the opportunity to chat about it with him. We revisited the idea that God was evil, using evil to corrupt mankind and then show up as the hero (man there is so much in-congruency in this concept). I tried to make him understand that God was simply giving us the choice to love Him or reject Him and those who don’t want Him, well it’s too bad but the only place to go where God is not is Hell.

I know that there is more to the issue, we didn’t talk about sin and how God is Holy and how sinners simply can’t spend eternity in His Presence, but we’ve talked about it at other times and hopefully will get to talk about it some more God willing.

I’m furious because people don’t get to hear the truth. They hear each other’s interpretations of a book - not inspired by God and form their own views of God and Satan. The teacher doesn’t help either. It’s not that they absolutely believe everything they hear, but it encourages untruth and sheds a shadow on God, casts doubts on who He is, creates friendship with evil. I have no clue what to do about it but to pray for them all. Presenting the Gospel would be irrelevant to them at this point since they have little to no knowledge of any truth about God. -sigh.

Youth

We were four as usual, sitting at our kitchen table talking about church and youth. Our stomachs were full of shepherds’ pie, beets and the eve’s doughnuts that we had to bring home from a supper at our friends’ place. After talking about the challenges and differences there is between our two churches and dreaming of uniting them, we created a tree of all the young people we knew that somehow were linked to our churches. We found a total of 36 kids from age 12 to 20. We thought it was quite crazy to be in contact with s many young people when we remembered that our churches have roughly 40 members (including children) each. We’ve seen about 40% of them coming to the youth meetings and we are wondering how we can reach the other 60%.

What is most interesting is that a big part of our contacts do not even go to church. What happens is that we make announcements at church for the youth meetings and when church is over, you always have a parent or two coming up to you, telling you s/he is separated or divorced and they have a teen or two who’s spending every other weekend with them. The teens aren’t Christians, but maybe they would like to join our youth meetings. So we write down their names and phone numbers and keep in touch.

The more I think of it and the more I feel humbled by the love these parents have for Christ. They only get to spend every other weekend with their kids and they would freely give up their precious Friday night or Saturday afternoon with them if only their kids could be with a Christian group, because they do not know Jesus.

I am really glad to see the kind of clientelle we have and really pray that more and more kids will be coming and get to know Jesus at our youth meetings.

How narrow is your door?

I went to prayer meeting tonight. I guess I thought it was at 7:30 (like any good church you know…) but I when I sat down I thought I was mistaken because the pastor was giving a class on how to do evangelism with a special set of cards with drawings on them. I was almost going to ask if it was the prayer meeting but I realized that you don’t just pray at prayer meetings.

Some thoughts I had during the meeting:

1. Man, it feels as if we’re in the business of winning souls to Christ. All these tricks and… but I wonder why. Why do these people want to talk about Jesus to people?

2. Is it me or some people don’t really understand what the Gospel is all about? What does “Believing in Jesus” actually mean to you?

I am someone who really cares about motivation. I shouldn’t worry about other people’s motivation, that’s not of my business and what’s my motivation for caring so much about people’s motivation anyways? Oh well, what I mean to say is that I feel as if a lot of people want to see more and more people coming to Christ for reasons that do not necessarily glorify God or put Him first.

More people at church! They will finally have peace in their lives! She won’t go to Hell! He won’t have to struggle with that problem anymore!

To be sure these things are good and most are true, but I wonder if people are “getting saved” for the right reasons. It seems that we offer salvation because Jesus heals, feeds and mends the broken heart.  People then receive salvation because they want to be healed, they want Jesus for His gifts. I don’t know, but for me, I want to see people coming to Christ so that more people can love and treasure and  glorify God, not because they want to have a good, pleasant life or to have a bigger church or even, I don’t primarily care about people not going to Hell. I care about Christ being loved and magnified by sincere hearts.

People need to hear the Gospel - even the Christians. People need to be instructed in the Word. People need to read the Word. People need to know the truth and be rooted in it.

Recipes?

Hey, if you’re feeling like baking or cooking, I added two recipes to the recipe page up there. Easy, unbaked cherry cheesecake pie… or just cherry pie in French and… some General Tao chicken (your kitchen will smell like an Asian restaurant).

I’ve tried them both and they are delicious - even the chicken - no matter how complicated it may to do (or the weird ingredients) I’m sure you’ll succeed on the very first time you make it!

Mont Royal

There’s something happening every other week with the Verdun youth group. It’s either on a Friday night for a Bible study or on a Saturday afternoon for anything that’s different. Today we went sledding on mount Royal. I had told the leaders it would not be as easy if we’d have a bunch of six graders with us, but we still went for the idea. It was only in the morning that the leaders realized that we were actually responsible for the kids and we were not that prepared.

We were 10 people, mostly around the age of 12 years old. We took the metro, then the bus, then we walked up the mount - well I would call it a hill, I’m sorry - with our “crazy carpets”, “black snows” and “toboggans”. The wife of the Bible study guy accompanied us, which I thought was really nice of her. She is actually teaching French in a secondary school so we had some good chats (as I want to become an ESL teacher eh). We slid down the hill many times and took lots of pictures. By the end I was pretty damp and cold, I do admit that I wasn’t dressed properly enough. Finally we left, waited for the bus forever (about 7 minutes….), I was so glad to finally be in a warm place. A church, a lady had made supper for us (well, a lady from my church and a lady from the other church) so we had a good time.

No matter how young the kids were, I kept finding myself looking at them and wondering, “Are they going to become strong men and women of God?”, “Are they going to learn to savor and love Jesus Christ so much that this world means little to them?”. So I was praying throughout the day for these kids. I don’t know how to reach out to them - I feel more comfortable with older teens. But I really pray that God will do a great work in their hearts through what’s happening with the youth group.

Evening

Oh before I start - my university association has gone on strike and it’s starting this coming Monday. It means that all my courses are canceled until we get enough people to vote against the strike. Next vote is on Monday, February 18 in the morning, so you can pray that things will be straightened up so we don’t lose too many weeks or even worse, have our semester canceled.

We had a Bible study tonight. There was a new person and it was quite something different to have her with us. At first she seemed to be very shy and uncomfortable, but it didn’t take long before she started taking control of the Bible study, almost preaching at us on points that she considered more important than others and would not let anybody else share. What I found quite controversial is that she was saying how, if you really have the love of God in you, you should not be weak but should be confident and not fear what people think of you, simply do what Jesus wants you to do. Then she kept on excusing herself for talking so much, “I’m sorry! It’s just the Spirit!” and “I’m sorry, but I have to let the Spirit speak.” She kept excusing the Holy Spirit for what He was doing through her. It did not make sense to me. I have no clue if she was truly filled with the Holy Spirit, but she obviously had a hard time showing respect for the people around.

I do want to be open to this kind of people and what they have to say, but I find it tough to be listening and try to understand them when they disrupt our Bible study time and when they draw so much attention on themselves, their gifts, their opinions.

I feel like I’ve been put in a boiling pot of people that are so different from me. A mixed of Evangelicals from various denominations, Catholics, this last person. I don’t feel at home, but I want to seek God’s Truth in His Word and learn how I can love these people without compromising God’s Truth. Yes, you can pay for me.

Utopia

The Fry’s left around 7pm and I smelled like fish. I figured I had time to go downtown and listen to the second half of my literature class. I waited for the class break at 7:30, got in the classroom and sat with some friends. I hadn’t missed much they said.

People did a presentation on the book Utopia by Thomas Moore and at the end they asked us, “So, what is utopia for you?” The professor had just taken a gulp of water and choked in hearing the question (which was quite funny and he laughed too). I listened to people talk about their own ideas of a perfect world and happiness. I knew I had something to say about utopia (especially that I had described God’s utopia, my hope to the friend sitting next to me just a few days ago). There was this redundancy in people’s comments, that man tried to create utopia through the centuries and even individual utopia, but man had never reached it, it always got destroyed somehow. A colleague behind me was saying that the problem was that the world was constantly changing, so when we were about to reach utopia (a very good world or society or, etc.) times changed and so it didn’t work anymore. I raised my hand not exactly sure what I was going to say, but I knew I had to come back to my colleague’s comment. I said that the problem was not that the world kept changing - the problem laid in the reality that imperfect people simply cannot create anything perfect, so it was no surprise that we could not reach utopia by own on efforts. I continued by telling them that real utopia is to go back to the garden of Eden (we’d touched that a little earlier), real happiness and utopia would happen in a city that God Himself made and rule over. I didn’t get any further and people started lowering the standard to happiness, all of the sudden we were not talking about a perfect world, but a good enough world with lots of individuality that gave us enough freedom but made us live in a way that wouldn’t hurt the people around us (impossible to achieve, they confessed it).

I’m pretty sure most people probably thought, “Ah, religion again” and thought my ideas were quite ridiculous and out of this world. It is tough to live in a world that has no thoughts for God. I pray that some people will think about what I said, even though it was very little.

I happened to get out of the building with a guy I hadn’t talked in a long while and we realized we lived sort of near each other, so we walked and took the metro together, chatting about life, utopia and how selfish people are. We talked about divorce and love. I explained to him that most people nowadays didn’t know much about love - barely a feeling - and how in Hebrew they have like five words for the word love, each carrying a different side of love. I couldn’t remember them all, but we had a good time chatting about love being much more than the feeling itself.

I am quite thankful to God that I decided to go to university instead of staying home, even if I just got half the class. It seems that God puts new people in my life or good conversations these days, people I can pray for.

“Quiet Strength”

I was sitting in a classroom, listening to the teacher talking about some … something. I don’t know why but the topic pushed my neighbor to tease me by saying that I was insane, “I was just kidding! Actually, I think that you’re the most sane or “équilibrée” (balanced) person in our class.” We were in class so I did not ask what she meant at that time but I sent her an email about it - I was curious and wondering why she believed so. I was excited, because I believe that anything that people find different about me, is from God, it’s not from me.

She explained what she meant in an email, mentioning a few points.

1. It probably has to do with your beliefs. (But it doesn’t really matter what you believe in, anybody could come to the same sort of “understanding” you have by believing in something else than what you believe in).

2. I think it has to do with knowing who you are, where you’re going and what is important.

3. I notice the little comments you make and they make me think.

4. I think that you basically know that happiness lies in rejoicing in daily little things.

5. Perhaps the best way to sum it up would be that you seem to have this “quiet strength” that allows you to go through life without worrying too much over small details or obstacles…

Man, I really thought that her email touched very interesting points. I’m excited about it because we (as Christians) usually hope that unbelievers will notice something different about us, not so much in our personality or whatnot, but something deeper that they don’t have. I’m excited because it’ll give me an opportunity to tell her why I am that way, the hope I have, Jesus.

You can pray for her.