The Best Wedding Ever

Okay, you knew this one was coming, didn't you?:

Wedding #1 – The Grand Atrium, Vienna VA

The skinny:  Well, there are too many stories to tell about the week of wedding preparations, so I'll just give a little account of the day.  It didn't start well.  I woke up in the morning to find that my hair dryer was gone.  CC, who chose to sleep the last night with her bridesmaids because the hair person was coming to the hotel at 7 AM, had taken the hair dryer and forgot to tell me.  Now if you've read this post, you'd know that hair is very important to me.  I still get flack for being a guy that blow-dries his hair, but lemme tell you, there's a big difference between having my hair blow-dried and air-dried.  Like a half inch difference.  My hair's kinda puffy, and in a normal emergency situation, I could probably give myself hathead to keep it down, but that's not without risks, and heck this was my wedding day and I needed a dryer.  So I sent one of my groomsmen to go to the local CVS to buy a blowdryer at 9:00 AM, but I was also sending another of my groomsmen to the local Kinko's to make copies of the program insert and lo and behold, they get into a big argument about how to get there and in whose car.  I'm thinking, Hurry up, dammit, I need my dryer.  Finally they leave.  I shower and wait, and my hair starts drying by itself.  Too fast.  I debate about whether to wash it again, but finally the hair dryer arrives.  I dry the hair and set off for the church.

It was a beautiful day and the ceremony itself went fairly smoothly except for the part when CC, who was repeating the marriage vows, blurted out, "...will love you in every circumstance, till death... WHAT???"  Very encouraging.  Supposedly the pastor, my brother, was reading the vows too fast for her to repeat.  Or maybe she had a singular moment of clarity.  It was nice to come out from the church and have everyone throw rose petals at us, which I didn't expect.  It was not so nice to come out of the church to find my car had been decorated by my classy groomsmen with letters that read, "Just Married, SUCKA!" on one side, and "Just Married, LOSER!" on the other.  Another sign on the back of the car instructed other cars to honk when they saw us, but all we got were weird looks probably because the drivers couldn't figure out whether we were indeed celebrating our newlywed status or whether we were insulting them by calling them "SUCKA!".  The reception also went fairly smoothly even though my best man started off his toast by saying, "There are many stories I could tell about Hooju, but I'll just say one or two.  There was this time he was set-up on this blind date with this girl from California..."  The particular details of this date are explained in this post and it sure as hell wasn't something I wanted brought up at MY WEDDING, but thankfully he kind of made it touching.  Sort of.  We were forced to eat unwashed fruit in a last-minute wedding game devised by this same classy best man who gave the ex-girlfriend toast and created "Just Married, SUCKA!" but lots of GFC people got a chance to catch up with each other, so it looked like they had fun.  Afterwards, CC and I went to a nice place for dinner where she promptly fell asleep from exhaustion.

Food:  6.  Hors d'oevres were probably the best part.  The scallops wrapped in bacon were really good as were the mushrooms stuffed with crabmeat, but the beef kinda tasted like Arby's and the salmon was moist, but had a very nondescript sauce.  The veggies were cooked perfectly - tender, but not mushy.

Female talent:  2.  Dang, I felt bad for the single guys.  The groom's friends were mostly a bunch of old men, but there were a few bright spots from the bride's side.  The bride was hot. 

Fun:  5.  It was fun being the center of attention sometimes, and other times not.  I got tired of smiling and I wish more people would have danced, but I heard everybody was really full from lunch.

Projected forecast:  Are you kidding?  In my mind, we've been married since Date #2.  All of this was just a formality... 

GFC Spring Retreat 2005

Consider the words in this song:

Lord, I give you my life
I give you my soul
I live for you alone
Every breath that I take, every moment I'm awake
Lord, have your way in me.

Is this song supposed to make you feel good?  Do I really live for Him alone?  Umm, no.  You know what it feels like to sing a lie to the Lord?  It burns...

A New Identity

Gosh, it's been so long since I
posted, I've almost forgotten how.  Mmmm... so I've been thinking
of Turkey, and CC and I joke about going there as missionaries, but
it's only half-joking since yeah, we'd love for God to use us there,
but realistically, I don't think I've shared the gospel with anyone in
like, 2-3 years.  So, if I'm not really sharing the good news with
people here, what makes me think I'm going to share the gospel in a
Muslim country where I won't even be able to speak the language? 
Can I be what I haven't been before?  Well, y'know, different
circumstances bring out different things in people.  That's the
great thing
about going to a place where no one knows you.  You have the
opportunity to become anything you want to be.  To re-invent
yourself in a completely new context.  There are no bad habits to
break, no routines to fall into, no expectations to fulfill.  You
are a new creation, at least to the people that you meet.  There
lies my hope.  And besides, it is God who moves isn't it?  We
just have to be willing and ready. 

I don't ever want to plan another
wedding.  It sucks.  CC's not even all that bad about it, and
it still sucks.  No wonder the divorce rate is so high in this
country.  You have all these women running around with this
impossible, glorified vision of their wedding and how does that fantasy
not manage to filter into their expectations for their marriage? 
On the day of her wedding, she becomes a princess who marries her
Prince Charming and rides off in a golden limo to live happily ever
after.  Thank goodness we're not Indian.  Then we'd have to
stretch this sucker out over like four days.  I would die. 
Baby, I love you...

If You Need a Smile...

You have to go to Daniel Chang's Xanga and watch this video.  SOOOOOO funny...

A Late Friday Night

Sometimes I wish I could live life on the edge, take the big risk, make
some really bad decisions.  Not that I would, but I somehow I feel
I've even lost that potential.  Or maybe I never had it, and it's
all about the type of person you are, and if you're this type, you'll
do this in a certain situation and if you're not, you won't.  That
would be sad, wouldn't it?  To know that your options were really
quite limited to begin with based on your personality... that you were
never really free at all.  Bound by the confines of your
character...

I only hope to love as my mom does.

One Last Story

Visions – Part 7 of 7

He got up around noon the next day and went to the police station.  As promised, the report was finished and they also gave him the name of the hospital where his victim was recovering.  He felt not quite himself, but he knew he had to go and talk to the guy today.  Today should have been a day of orientation, like the first day you have at a new school or job where you’re allowed to do nothing more than soak in the details and rhythm of your new situation in life.  Except for Micah, it was the new position of his mind.  He was to re-incorporate himself into a world where there was no God.  To be sure, it saddened him as if he had just broken up with a long-time girlfriend whom he still loved, but he could find no other way to solve the ambiguities of his former worldview.  It would be hard to reinterpret a world without God, and he knew he needed practice.  While driving he pushed himself to speed a little faster than usual.  He had always driven over the speed limit, but now he reminded himself that he only needed to worry about the state troopers, and not whether God was watching.  He considered all the new freedoms he might have, but strangely, the thought of picking up the old vices of his past made him uneasy.  It had been a long time since he really partied or drank and he wasn’t sure he remembered how.  Most importantly, he decided he would quit law school.  It was true that he had already invested a lot of time and energy into the project, but if there was no God, there was no vision, and consequently no need to keep up pretenses.  Still, he couldn’t help feeling a stab of pain for Thailand.  Whether he had imagined his vision or not, there really were lots of little girls in dirty yellow T-shirts that were trapped in an agonizing life.  This fact was true, and quietly nagged at Micah like a splinter that refused to come out of his skin.

One Last Story

Visions – Part 6 of 7

Micah stood staring at the man who was in a crumpled heap in front of him.  It took him several minutes to comprehend what had just occurred and finally call AAA.  He had hit someone.  With his car.  He was going to get sued.  He might even go to jail.  This couldn’t be happening.  It simply didn’t make sense to Micah.  It didn’t feel like God’s plan for him.  The police arrived before the ambulance and after a quick examination of the victim and the setting, the policeman informed Micah that the man was intoxicated and judging by the tiny piles of vomit littered around the sidewalk, was probably bent over the side of the road and in the process of throwing up the rest of his dinner when Micah’s car came around the bend.  The policeman offered him a smile and a pat on the back and told him it would have been very difficult to see him from a car in that position.  “Still,” he said, “find a good lawyer.”  Funny, Micah thought.  The paramedics told him that the man was unconscious and didn’t seem to have any broken bones, but they wouldn’t be able to know more until they got him to the hospital.  After the ambulance left, the policeman asked him if he needed a ride home and Micah declined.  The last thing he was told was to come by the station in the next couple of days and pick up the police report.  Weary and still somewhat in shock, Micah got into his car and slowly drove home.  Naturally, he couldn’t sleep.  Mainly he wondered why.  Why had this happened?  What was God’s purpose in it?  It seemed like a nightmarish puzzle whose solution was just beyond his grasp.  The more he thought about it, the more creative his mind got with the answers.  Maybe God wanted to test him in some way.  Or punish him.  Or maybe it had nothing to do with him.  Maybe the other guy was an alcoholic and this was God’s way of getting him to stop.  Or maybe this was meant to be a quirky opportunity for Micah to share the gospel with this man.  Or what if… God brought him to Thailand, and into contact with the girl in the yellow T-shirt, and gave him the vision to be a lawyer, because he knew that this would happen to Micah at this very moment.  So that in reality, law school was not meant for his future mission to save the underage sex workers of the world, but just so that he’d be better prepared and knowledgeable for the certain legal battles that would come in the following days.  That could be possible.  In the darkness, Micah was determined to locate by feel what he could no longer see.  Exhausted and confused, at some point he fell asleep.  The next day, he skipped classes and stayed in bed most of the day.  He didn’t eat.  His head was throbbing as if from overuse.  Picking up from where he left off last night, he reasoned that if all things were ordered by God, then this staying home in bed must be as well.  It was good for him to skip classes and stay home.  It must be what God wanted.  And he spent the rest of the day and night creating permutation after permutation of reality in his mind, always seeking but never finding the flawless answer.  There was an area, he was sure of it, where the worlds of God and man overlapped, where their wills came together and what was true in one realm was true in the other and all he needed was a second or two there to clear his mind.  But that moment never came, and in the morning, frustrated and angry, Micah could only draw one final conclusion: it was absurd.  All of it.  Everything he had been thinking was mere fabrication.  Why had he insisted on ascribing cosmic meaning to every little event in his life?  It had all started with his vision, but that too must have been a fable.  And inescapable was the idea that perhaps, in fact, God was a construct as well.  To save his sanity, Micah decided, he needed to renounce the Lord.

One Last Story

Visions – Part 5 of 7

By most standards, it was a typical Indian summer in New York, except that it normally didn’t extend into the first week of October.  In other parts of the country, a few extra weeks of warm weather would be cause for celebration, but New Yorkers, sensitive to the minutest changes in scheduling, were impatient for the cold to arrive.  Especially confused were the trees, who would have by now initiated their shutdown procedures for the winter and shed their brilliant plumage.  As it was, the leaves had not changed color yet, and the trees seemed to have a droopy, fatigued air about them, as if they too were tired of waiting for the fall.  To Micah, the warm air made time pass even more slowly, and studying was never a greater chore.  In the days following his lunch with Josiah, he had tried very hard to not remember their conversation.  He instinctively felt there were hazards, pitfalls buried within those ideas and to go there risked never being able to come back.  During his quiet times, he prayed for strength, wisdom, but most of all, clarity.  On Sunday, he went to Redeemer’s night service.  Though it wasn’t his home church, it offered wonderful sermons and praise time and you could feel part of a great big body without having to say a word to another soul.  More than a sermon, Pastor Keller offered something akin to free Christian therapy every time he went up to speak.  For 40 minutes Micah garnered deep insights into himself and God, and at the end would wake up as if from a trance, not being able to pinpoint exactly what he had learned but feeling that something had changed within him nonetheless.  But this Sunday, as he began losing himself in the sermon, his mind inexplicably began re-living the details of that encounter in Thailand.  And then the questions started firing all at once.  What if what she said wasn’t “very cheap”?  Maybe she was saying something in Thai.  Or what if it had nothing to do with sex at all?  Maybe all she wanted to do was to sell him some cheap elephant figurines.  Plus, what the heck was he doing in the red-light district in the first place?  Is that something God would have been pleased with?  No.  So why would he have given him a vision through it?  What if the vision actually came from Satan just to confuse him and send him off on a tangent that God never intended?  What if he just made up the entire thing?  By the end of service, Micah was sweating.  All of his doubts had just broken loose and he couldn’t run fast enough to stuff them back into the box they came from.  And suddenly he was filled with a raw, unadulterated fear, the kind of fear that a child has difficulty naming or identifying but is made all the more intense because of the unknown.  As he struggled to get up and leave, he vaguely heard the usual offer for people with prayer requests to come to the front and be prayed for by the officers of the church.  In desperation, he began moving to the stage.  There wasn’t much of a line and he soon came face to face with an elderly woman, who asked with a smile what he’d like prayer for.  Surprisingly, Micah gathered himself and managed to summarize the chaotic mess in his head.  He blurted out:

One Last Story

Visions – Part 4 of 7

His first semester as a 1L had passed by quickly enough.  He was excited, motivated, and though there was a period of serious adjustment, he felt well on his way to fulfilling his calling.  But starting with the second semester, little things began to eat at him: the class hierarchy, with the top students and their high index numbers and scholarships pitted against the weaker full-tuition paying strugglers like himself, having to read endless volumes of poorly-written case books, the daily struggle to verbally defend himself in class or get embarrassed by his professors, constantly having to correct people about his school (“Oh, you go to NYU Law?”  “No, no, not NYU.  It’s called New York Law School.”)...  The list went on.  And though he tried to stop it, some part of his mind kept trying to run the math on the $165,000 in loans he would have accrued at the end of his three years versus the probable $38,000 salary he would start out with as a public defender.  The numbers refused to add up but his mind went over them again and again like a computer program stuck in an endless loop.  More distressingly, he was beginning to realize that law was a highly specialized profession, or rather, that it required a specific kind of person.  Number one, he wasn’t sure he had that type of personality, and number two, if he didn’t, he knew he would acquire it soon enough if he stayed in law.  And that was alarming.  He had never imagined that God would call him to sacrifice even his personality for his calling.  These days, he began having nightmares.  It was a recurring one, where he was forced to argue with his high school team against the debate team from hell on any trivial topic that a fiendish looking moderator would throw out.  Next topic: Navel Lint - Clean or Don’t Clean?  He was still shaking off his dream when he met Josiah for lunch.  Josiah, a former youth pastor, was a member of his small group and one of the few people he confided in.  It didn’t take long for Micah to summarize the problem.

“I think I’m losing my mind.”

“Hmm…”

“Seriously, maybe I should transfer to a different school.  Maybe it’s just being here, y’know?”

“Hmm…”

“Maybe I should take next semester off.  Just regroup and recharge somewhere…”

“Micah, listen.  Y’know, the vision isn’t everything.”

“What do you mean?  Do I wanna hear this?”

“Fine, just take what I’m about to say with a grain of salt.”

“Ok…”

“Y’know, when I went to seminary, I had a vision, too.  I really believed that God wanted me to be a pastor.  I was sure of it, and that vision got me through some really tough years.”

“Yeah, you’ve mentioned that before.”

“But afterwards, when I actually had my own church, I realized I wasn’t really cut out for it.  I mean, I learned a lot in seminary and I’m grateful for the experience, but….”

“But what?”

“Well, we’re sinners.  We’re fallen.  Our minds don’t always see things properly.  ‘The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.’  I really wanted to be a pastor.  It’s how I thought God wanted to use me.  But it just wasn’t that way.”

“What are you saying?  That you imagined your vision?”

“You don’t have to put it like that.  I wasn’t delusional.  But maybe I just didn’t see it clearly, y’know?

“This isn’t helping me.”

“Fine.  Forget I said anything.”

For the rest of the lunch, they carefully avoided any talk of spiritual matters.  But Micah couldn’t forget.