{"id":366,"date":"2015-01-07T11:59:36","date_gmt":"2015-01-07T19:59:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kingdomrice.wordpress.com\/?p=366"},"modified":"2015-01-07T11:59:36","modified_gmt":"2015-01-07T19:59:36","slug":"i-killed-mr-spock-in-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kingdomrice.org\/2015\/01\/07\/i-killed-mr-spock-in-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"I killed Mr. Spock in 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"320x240\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0“I am the door for the sheep. 10:8\u00a0All who came before me were thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. 10:9\u00a0I am the door. If anyone enters through me, he will be saved, and will come in and go out, and find pasture. 10:10\u00a0The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come so that they may have life, and may have it abundantly<\/b>. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Gospel of John \u00a0(NET)<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
“Paradoxically, by withdrawing into ourselves…out of humility, we create the space for others to be themselves and to come to us on their own terms.” “The Wounded Healer” – Henry nouwen. pg 97<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
<\/div>\n
\n
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0I\u2019ve had the wrong idea about leadership and who I am for decades. But in 2014, pictures of leadership and pictures of who I am turned around more than in any other year of my life.\u00a0\u00a0For years, I’ve been in the process of killing my Mr. Spock persona. In his place? – the words of\u00a0Henry Nouwen, a since passed-on\u00a0Catholic priest\u00a0and professor says it well. He’s been a beacon to point the way to new pictures of who I am and how to lead in the way of Jesus. Let me explain…<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u201cThe thief comes to kill and destroy,<\/b>\u201d Jesus says. The \u201cthief\u201d is full of lies wrapped up in sugar-coated packages. I package that I bought into contained false pictures of myself that essentially said I was worth nothing.\u00a0If I were to draw pictures of myself growing up, I would have drawn someone barely visible among others.\u00a0\u00a0Or perhaps I would have drawn a picture of \u201cMr. Spock\u201d my old nickname growing up\u00a0(people often told me I talked like him and thought like him, so I was \u201cassigned\u201d that name.) Mr. Spock has no feelings, no sense of self. Everything was rational; there was no feeling, no passion. Mr. Spock could not sit back and relax, and would feel utterly uncomfortable doing anything that involved feelings, be it watching a football game, or being in a hospital. That was me; I hated being in those contexts.\u00a0That\u2019s because I was intent on\u00a0destroying\u00a0my own soul. I believed that I myself had no value. I embodied Asian collectivist identity to an extreme; everyone was more important to me. Not only did I grow up deferring to everyone else, I had no idea what my wants, desires, passions were. As an adult looking back to my 8 year old self, I\u00a0can now\u00a0identify my childhood passions, and it’s been healing\u2026how I wish I could have identified those then! Instead, I constantly was looking for ways to squash my soul, to kill the \u201cI.”<\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u201cI am the door.<\/b>\u201d The first two words are utterly profound; they immediately attack the lies of the thief I bought into. “\u1f10\u03b3\u03ce \u03b5\u1f30\u03bc\u03b9\u201d\u00a0Jesus says. In Greek, as in many languages, the subject is contained in the verb form, and the subject is not needed. So whenever a subject is included, it\u2019s intentional, as it is here. So that\u2019s an emphatic \u201cI\u201d that kicks off this passage; it\u2019s a bold proclamation of who Jesus is, and presents quite a different picture of the soul\u00a0than the one I pictured in my heart for decades. Jesus\u2019 pronouncement\u00a0breathes\u00a0life\u00a0into\u00a0the \u201cI\u201d, to give space for the \u201cI\u201d- soul. He wants to give life to the \u201cme.\u201d\u00a0 Jesus could not be the \u201cdoor\u201d if he was not the\u00a0\u201cI AM,\u201d the same \u201cI AM\u201d who existed before, and who kicked off the \u201cbig bang.\u201d And if I\u2019m created in image of the \u201cI am,\u201d and if the \u201cI AM\u201d came to die for me, then my soul is infinitely valuable\u00a0in of itself. The beginnings of the abundant life spoken of in John 10 is rooted in having this right picture of myself.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The health challenges of my family the past few years was what prompted me, forced me rather, to abandon my\u00a0Mr. Spock, logical-speaking, information-full, Google-brained persona.\u00a0With those \u201cold pictures\u201d I\u00a0thought I could\u00a0fix anything with information, just as Mr. Spock would. But that did not work with my ill wife and the issues I was having with my son. One month,\u00a0I had to take each member of my family, including both my parents to the ER. My Mr. Spock persona did not help me deal with the\u00a0stress and grief one bit. It took at least a year to let go\u00a0of the \u201cworld\u201d that was built upon\u00a0that\u00a0false picture of me. It\u2019s as if I had to scrape all the paint off of the old picture, and get down the the canvas before I could live from the new pictures, which are in fact, real pictures, able to deal with the stress and challenges of life as of late.<\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Henry Nouwen went through a similar journey. A professor for a couple of decades, he transitioned to living among the mentally and physically handicapped. And it\u2019s as if life started for him after that transition. And it\u2019s from that place he wrote the words I quoted above. For me, 2014 marked the beginning of a new kind of life. How?<\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0“Paradoxically, by withdrawing into ourselves\u201d – To withdraw into ourselves demands not only that there is a soul there, but that this soul is worth dying for. As I\u2019ve dove into myself, I began to find my passions, feelings, desires, everything that\u2019s been buried for decades. And there, I found new abundance. Using the painting metaphor, it\u2019s as if I\u2019ve scraped away enough of the old painting only to discover that God has painted a masterpiece there the whole time. Then it\u2019s a matter of restoration of what\u2019s been ordained long ago. After enough scraping, enough restoration, you hit a tipping point where the masterpiece underneath shifts the entire perspective. One no longer sees the false picture on top, but the masterpiece underneath. The “real image” beneath now defines the entire painting. For me, that shift happened in 2014.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The fruit that comes out of all this is aplenty. As I make space for my own soul to thrive, I am making space for others to thrive with me. In the past under my old pictures, I sold what I knew\u2026and I had a good number of guitar licks that I sold too.\u00a0I made a living selling my mental knowledge (and also selling off my guitar skills, 7 guitar classes\u00a0per week at one time). I\u2019ve retired from selling information, be it technical, biblical, or musical. I started Kingdom Rice because people who relate to an Asian background tend not to see the tremendous values they bring, to their work, to God\u2019s Kingdom, to everything. In the dozens of churches I\u2019ve taught in, especially the Asian ones,\u00a0whenever\u00a0I say something like\u00a0\u201cAsians and Asian culture\u00a0are an untapped ASSET to God\u2019s Kingdom,\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0I typically\u00a0get the \u201cI\u2019ve never imagined that before\u201d kind of stare.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a02014 was a year where I feel I\u2019m at the gateway to the abundant life Jesus has always had in store. My old pictures of myself could not sustain the health challenges of my family. It\u2019s been a painful retiring of those old pictures for sure. I declare my Mr. Spock persona dead! And these new pictures have helped me to enlarge my soul, and in 2014, I experienced that more than ever before. Kingdom Rice is another fruit of these new pictures.\u00a0For 2015, I’m looking forward to even greater abundance,\u00a0larger soul enlarging, and creating more space for my\u00a0soul and for the souls of others to roam, and to \u201cfind pasture\u201d (the opposite of this is using information-first leading to manipulate others to confirm) \u00a0I led by serving up contextual information, and I was an expert in it. But there was no “me” in it. In the words of Nouwen, by “withdrawing into myself” I can tap into how God made me, and offer something in my leading I could never before, the “pastures” Jesus speaks of, where our souls could freely go in and out. That is abundant living, living where we are ALIVE!<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0“I am the door for the sheep. 10:8\u00a0All who came before me were thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. 10:9\u00a0I am the door. If anyone enters through me, he will be saved, and will come in and go out, and find pasture. 10:10\u00a0The thief comes only to steal and kill…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kingdomrice.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kingdomrice.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kingdomrice.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kingdomrice.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kingdomrice.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kingdomrice.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kingdomrice.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kingdomrice.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kingdomrice.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}