Final Year

So at long last I’m heading into my (supposed) final year at university. And once again the dynamics of how my week runs changes; so I suppose I should update most people (who are) on what entails my life for this year, and specifically this semester.

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University

This final year might actually be a bit easier than last year (though to be fair last year was the hardest of my uni career). My Actuarial course for this semester is 1 of 2 non-mathematical courses I will need to complete this year. That is a huge surprise since everyone does expect my course to be nothing but maths; instead it’s exactly the opposite. The course is about thinking through the theoretical issues behind what we do with the maths. Rather than teach us more maths, we need to be taught how to use them in the workplace; so I guess it’s a more practical course although we only deal with case scenarios in the course. Strangely, the lecturer runs the course as a student interaction class. He doesn’t provide much notes and doesn’t want us taking notes. Rather, he wants us to be giving input during class and having us all think through the same topic and add to each other’s understanding. It’s different to other courses I guess and may prove to be more interesting than others since it’s being run differently. It will still be hard since we don’t actually have any notes for any exam discussion questions (yes, no more maths in the exams for this course haha).

 

My other two math courses are third year subjects which so far appear to be easier than last year’s math courses; hopefully they stay that way. My last course is a second year finance course which if done in second year would be considered extremely difficult. But doing it in fourth year, and also after doing an Actuarial course last semester that was EXACTLY like it, this finance course should pose no challenge for me too. Of course the last time I acted arrogantly towards a course in this way, I didn’t do that great; but that’s probably due to the fact that I didn’t study for it, knowing that I had studied for it once already in another course.

Internships

Recently I have been trying to take these things called “internships” a bit more seriously. I always knew they held some sort of significance over a future job after graduating from university. I guess, with all the busyness that is my weekly routine, I never really got around into researching what they were about. Today I can’t say that I’m up to scratch, but for the least I’ve submitted a few applications to a few places. Some say that’s a good effort, others wonder why I’ve submitted so few.

 

What worries me at the start is that having an internship and not having one can actually be the difference between getting a job (upon graduating) and not getting a job. While it’s good to know that having an internship makes finding a job so much easier, it makes me nervous to think that I must obtain one for fear that I won’t be able to get a job in the future. Of course, I know that failing to get an internship is not the end of the world and it might just merely mean putting more effort later, rather than now.

 

As I went through filling out some of the application forms, I was reminded of applying for the Co-op Scholarship at the start of uni, and how easily I was rejected with the material I put down there. In terms of Extracurricular Activities and Skills and Experience, there is no doubt that a dominant majority of all that for me is all the ministry I have been going about since year 11. Without adding up the hours in total for church, CBS, RICE, ISCF, etc, if there was anything I had to mention on my resume, it would have to be these activities. But are these “acceptable” activities that companies and firms would look for? To me, it seems like Christian ministry is very undervalued in their eyes, whereas “helping out with a uni society barbeque” (just pulling a random example) may be deemed as an important display of teamwork. My Co-op Scholarship was probably rejected for this reason.

 

And that annoys and upsets me a bit, which is why I don’t have much of a care for scholarships of internships now; what company would care about what I’ve done for a God who politically speaking may or may not exist (and from a conservative point of view, he probably doesn’t exist)? It makes me feel quite discouraged and disappointed in every company in society. How would you make them understand the value of youth group, or Bible Studies and such? When it comes to “naming achievements” from your extracurricular activities, do people dare to just simply put down medals and awards? Our high school had a pretty funny merit award system, and we figured out ways to get around the system a bit (in an honest way of course) and obtain a higher class of merit than was expected; by that, most people in our grade were able to obtain the highest level of award, which makes it not that special since everyone had it. Oh, but to companies, would they give you the job because you obtained the highest level award from an educational institution?

 

What value is awards and medals, and do they truly reflect your effort and the person that you are? What would I put down for “achievements”? I would be tempted to put down something like “winning people to Christ for eternal life”. While applicants and companies are taking pride in bits and pieces of paper, I would try to be taking pride in having helped people find the Man who gives eternal life. If I had a choice being eternal life and a piece of paper that did nothing, I’d know what I’d pick. But, what company would accept that to be an achievement, that you helped people find Christ, find life, and find true meaning to life? What value or mark could you put to that for them to measure?

 

But there is one clear thing wrong with hat I just said above. We don’t “achieve” eternal life for other people, I haven’t “achieved” eternal life for the youth that I serve at church. Nor have I achieved “Jesus” for them. Coincidentally we’re going through 1 Corinthians 3 at youth group this Sunday; and 1 Cor 3:5-7 says:

“What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe – as the Lord has assigned to each his task. I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow.”

I can take no merit for anything in ministry that I have done to this date, because truly it was God who did the hard work (and I thought my work felt hard as it was). What can I boast in then that I have achieved? Nothing. And so what have I to show to companies as achievements over the years? Pretty much nothing. But clearly my “lack of achievements” doesn’t really reflect who I am, and what I am able to do through God.

 

So at the end of the day, for me, I harbour little hope as I fill in internship applications, knowing that there isn’t much I can legitimately put down on paper, and knowing that the way I’ve lived my life will not be appreciated by secular society. It disgusts me a bit I guess, and why shouldn’t it when all the effort you’ve put into the past few years is not counted. However this is okay, it does mean that I’ll keep trying and to not worry if things don’t go the way I want them to.

 

 

A Different Sort of Internship

There is one internship that stands out from the rest, and if there’s any internship I’d ever want to make, it would be this one; and I know that I’ve made it.

 

This particular internship is quite simple, it only has one yes/no question: “Do you believe in Jesus Christ?” No doubt, this is clearly the “internship” into a place in heaven. While most people would expect getting into heaven to be harder than getting a job in a big company, it is actually somewhat simple. Sadly, answering yes to that question isn’t easy for a lot of people.

 

Furthermore, you are free to attach your resumes, your cover letters, list down all your achievements, put down the fact you went to the best schools and universities, and anything you’d expect your average company to look at. However, God won’t look at any of that; all He cares is whether you ticked yes or no to that question about believing in Jesus, his son. All you have to do is tick “yes” (and actually mean it), and that’s it.

 

So while companies might not care about how we serve God, for our internship applications, neither does God care about the things you would submit to those companies, as a basis to get into heaven; a strange but pleasant twist of fate huh?

Mid-Year Conference 2011 – Friday

So for once on the last night of MYC, I managed to rack up 3-4 hours of sleep as opposed to 0 hours. Still, the dawn of the last day pretty much meant that camp was coming to an end, and we would soon no longer have all that time to sit together with other Christians, to have fellowship and to study God’s Word. Which is probably why over the years we’ve managed to see that the time spent at MYC is precious and needs to be used in a manner that reflects how rare the opportunity is. Just like all the speakers say, you really don’t get a daily chance to study God’s Word so in depth outside of MYC.

 

Anyway for this last day I was a bit detached from the activities that we did and so I wasn’t really paying attention too much. So I’ll spend the latter half of this post just reflecting on everything that happened over the five days.

 

Bible Study

The last Bible Study for the week was just going over the passage once more and making sure that we’re able to digest everything we looked at over the week. Every group had members missing here in there (most likely catching up on sleep) and so we disbanded groups and formed new ones. This allowed us to see what other people learnt from the passage over the week since we were pretty much stuck with the same people the whole week and never had a chance to compare “research” with other people. We formed a group of about 5-6 and just shared what we learnt over the week, and sat together to read other relevant passages to “humanity”. We had quite fruitful conversation and it was good for us to pray at the end, showing how indeed we as Christians are united because we can so freely pray with one another.

 

Final Talk

Because we only had the morning on Friday to do stuff, the talk was much shorter than the ones in the night session; and this last talk was just to wrap up everything we’ve learnt about humanity over the week. The last talk was on Acts 17:16-34 and we were reminded that we live in a world where people fail to acknowledge God, and in some cases, refuse to acknowledge God. We were reminded that we will suffer for being Christian because of all these conflicting beliefs that people have. But we are reminded to not worry because we are at peace with and in the day when Jesus returns to judge the living and the dead, we will inherit the kingdom of heaven alongside Jesus. Until then, we should be ready to endure any type of suffering and we should also be actively seeking out those who are still “lost in ignorance” and calling them to repentance.

 

 

Journey Back

After taking a bunch of photos during and after lunch, we finally left Merroo Christian Centre and headed home. Transport wasn’t too hard to organise and once we got it all sorted we headed off. Traditionally, the car I’m in always heads back to Hong Kong de Cafe for afternoon tea; and I think we really that meal because we were all so hungry, especially for this last day. Condensing the final hours of MYC into a sentence or two, we simply drove back, had afternoon tea, went home, slept, and today here we are heading into semester 2. Such was the conclusion of our semester break.

 

 

 

 

 

Reflections

Thinking over the last five days, I felt like a lot was accomplished. I’ll probably end up repeating some of the things I’ve said over the last four posts. There was no way I’d miss MYC this year and I was glad to have come. In terms of learning about the topic “humanity”, I didn’t feel like I learnt much extra, most of the stuff we learnt this week was stuff we knew most of (as opposed to say last year’s topic of “Holy Spirit” where we probably knew next to nothing about it). However, one thing I wasn’t able to do before was to put all these factors together and weave it into one big picture. It’s somewhat easy to look at the different aspects of the Bible and to treat them separately; but when you manage to put everything together, you really do get a much bigger picture that enlightens you. Of course, we’re not talking about a complete and sudden change in the way we live, but it certainly does change your perspective a bit and allows you to direct your life better based on the knowledge you attained. Humanity was a pretty good topic to go through this year and I found it was quiet relevant to many worldly issues we face today, things within our culture which we don’t think too hard about such as career and relationships because we just treat them the way they are right now as normal, when the Bible might say it’s not a good thing.

 

I won’t nag too much about food, but this year food was a bit of an issue; there just simply wasn’t enough to eat. It’s a bit hard day after day going through each meal knowing you’re not full, and feeling upset because of it (because that’s how your body will feel if you don’t feed it). Of course, there are many factors that attribute to this; the most obvious fact is that there were about 700+ of us at camp, and preparing food for 700 people is no easy task. So our hearts must definitely go out to the camp staff for being able to pull of such a feat. Because food had to be mass produced in a short amount of time, this also means we can’t really expect any sort of gourmet food. Of course, most of us could’ve had seconds (and thirds and fourths) but for our faculty, we kept ending everything very very late; most of time up to 30 mins into a meal, so by the time we got down to the cafeteria most of the food was gone and we would get the chance to have even seconds (let alone thirds and fourths). Again, that’s what you get when you’re in a discussion group with 125 other people, it doesn’t move as fast as other groups with half the number of people. Sad how all these factors were just stacked against us this whole week. But in any case, we must be thankful for the food because everything had an explanation and was within reason, even if our stomachs did not feel the same.

 

Catching up with people was hard because we had the responsibility to look out for the first years or anyone who was coming to MYC for the first time. And when you get heaps of first years coming, that just adds a lot of people in your personal list of people you need to catch up with over the five days at MYC. As such for me it was hard to balance my time between meeting up with new people and catching up with old friends. I can’t say I got to know many of the new people that well, but proportion-wise there was just too many people to go through so it felt like we didn’t talk to many people. I was glad to have been able to catch up with my primary and high school friends, particularly those not in the Commerce faculty. There were many people I hadn’t seen for a long time and so being able to sit down with them at breakfast, lunch or dinner and just chatting to see how our lives had been was a moment I valued a lot. Becoming more and more busy as life goes on really makes you look and see that even the short 30 minutes you get to chat with a friend over a meal is a very precious time indeed. I was able to catch up with most of my friends I hadn’t talked to in a while, there were others I wasn’t able to catch up with as much but I was glad with the time I managed to get. And since MYC is over, it simply means that we need to learn to create time for ourselves to catch up with these friends, outside of our normal weekly routine.

 

The last thing I would want to reflect over is of course the issue concerning Mandy; it wouldn’t be a complete reflection unless I actually addressed this last issue. I’ll be sparing with my words in case I say anything offensive. Most of you who went to MYC would know (though it was never spoken) that one of my primary duties was to “look after” Mandy (I’m not quite sure what the appropriate verb clause should be). Anyway, we know that’s it’s always a hard issue to get the message across to everyone that when Mandy seizes everything is actually completely okay, that she isn’t in any danger. It was a pretty rough week as people saw or heard and there really isn’t explanation that either one of us can give, that’s just how camps occur. But I was quite encouraged by the number of people who did flock by to ask if she was okay, and in many cases, to assist in keeping her physically safe from hurting herself (again she is never in any danger at all). One memory comes to mind, where in Wednesday night, we all banded together and formulated a strategy to get Mandy back to her room, which was an impossibly long walk for her to pull off in her state. And so we all formed a crowd control/escort unit; we managed to border her off from other people, to keep them from staring and making her feel nervous, and then we had a driver bring their car to the entrance of the hall and a few of us carried and transported her back to her room. That was an image of not only simple cooperation but an also an image of Christian love; where people who didn’t really know Mandy well all came to help as much as they could. Having said that, most people just stood at a distance, stared and pointed, which at first I thought was quite rude and unloving; but I see that they probably have never witnessed anything of the sort and so they wouldn’t know how to react to it, that’s completely fine. For everyone else who was brave enough to check up on her, you have my many thanks as well; it was encouraging to see everyone’s love and support for her.

 

Well I think that wraps up MYC for yet another year. There were many experiences to be had over the week; and as we continue to grow year by year in the love and knowledge of Jesus Christ, I hope that we’ll be able to continue looking out for one another and keeping each other accountable to their godliness since it seems clear that as things get busier, it becomes harder to keep track of our own Christian lives, which is why it is a good thing to have others helping us through that. I look forward to chatting with people over this year’s MYC as well as to seeing everyone again for next year’s one.

Mid-Year Conference 2011 – Thursday

It’s funny how by the fourth day, you seem to not think about the rest of camp that lies ahead, but start to reflect on how much has gone by in the last three days. And to put things into perspective, the start of Thursday makes me think about how there’s only one more night left to enjoy the fellowship with everyone, one more night that have fun and to catch up people we weren’t able to chat with since the last three days; because Friday would pretty much be the end of MYC (and everyone goes *sadface* over that of course).

 

I’m running out of relevant photos so I’m just going to slap random ones for this post, which might not have been taken on Thursday.

 

Bible Study

Today we just looked through the Old Testament references that are in our passage and seeing if they help create meaning in Peter’s letter. Of course, without the passage actually being listed in our booklets, and without using a Bible for cross-referencing, we would’ve been completely useless at figuring out where to get the references from; yes, we’re not all Bible freaks who can memorize huge chunks of the Bible. We were all pretty tired today so I’m glad we had lighter work today. The passage has pretty much come together, I guess we’re all just trying to digest the whole passage and put it all together in our minds, and that takes time, hopefully one day.

 

 

Seminar

Today we spent the morning looking at the idea of “rest” which seems closely related to the “Sabbath”. Again the idea of “rest” originates from Genesis where God rests on the seventh day. And when it comes to thinking about how this “rest” applies to us, I just want to skip ahead to say that indeed the idea of “rest” is not on parallel with the tradition of the “Sabbath” where we actually rest from doing work. Resting one day a week to not do any work is not a command in the Bible that’s relevant to us today; it was a tradition earlier on in the history of the Israelites and some churches today still follow it. However, we saw that “rest” was more a state that we enter into through having peace with God.

 

In the Old Testament we looked through several examples where the king of Israel would tear down idols and turn the nation of Israel back into godly people, and the “land” enters a state of “rest”. It’s clear now that “rest” doesn’t actually mean physical rest, but it’s like being at peace with God, such that all hostility between God and His people are put to rest. In a state of rest, Israel was blessed by God and they were prosperous (it’s wrong here to think that following God leads to prosperity; this is what we call the “prosperity gospel” which is false). However, we see that the idea of being at rest with God is a good thing, because being at war with God can only mean us being crushed by Him.

 

Today, we are also at peace with God through Jesus Christ and so we too are in “rest”. Yet at the same time we are still waiting to enter that “rest” because today we obviously are still in a hostile world and things don’t obviously look like they’re in a state of rest. So, much like salvation, we count ourselves “saved” today even though physically speaking we have not been “saved” yet; but because we are assured of it, we are confident enough to call ourselves “saved” because we know it will one day happen. The same path of thinking applies to being at “rest” as well. As such, being at “rest” has absolutely nothing to do with the Sabbath today.

 

 

Free Time

Here are a couple of pictures that describe what happened in most of our free time this week:

 

 

 

I think I already explained before how this year us third years have left the culture of wanting to plays card games like Mafia, or Jungle Speed, but to use our free time to sit down and chat and catch up with people. I think it became more of a need within our faculty because we had such a large group that we all probably never got round to catching up with each other, but rather to meet new people. So we used free time to catch with one another and to chat and encourage one another, which was cool.

 

I spent this last afternoon sleeping because I was dead tired. To be honest I ended up skipping the briefing for second semester mission. I know that I won’t have time this semester to help out with that anyway so I used the opportunity to sleep; probably not the best thing I could’ve done but it really was a tiring week this week.

 

 

Evening Session

The final night’s talk was from Colossians 3:1-17 and the main takeaway point was that we as humans have been freed from slavery to sin to become slaves to righteousness. Carl talked about the idea of freedom and he briefly showed how some forms of freedom are actually not good because it allows us to go and do whatever we want, usually resulting in something that harms us. And so it was good to not be completely free, and in the context of being a Christian, we don’t actually have “freedom” in the sense of what we usually think that word means.

 

By being stuck in sin, we are described to be slaves to sin, meaning we are trapped in an endless cycle of sinning and we are stuck under the penalty of sin which is death. But Jesus frees us from sin, not to become free, but in fact to become slaves again, but to righteousness. I found it interesting that Carl picked up the Exodus and showed how the Israelites were freed from the slavery to Egypt, not to be free and roam the desert as they wished; but freed from the Egyptians so that they may become slaves to God. That’s a weird concept to grasp but because Carl explained why freedom isn’t exactly a good thing (for instance, it allows our society to allow gay marriages for which I am against), we ask ourselves whether slavery is a good thing. The only condition we would require for being slaves, is that we have a loving and caring master (usually not in harmony with the feeling that the word “slave” gives off). Because God is loving and caring, because his slave and servant isn’t a bad thing; we just need to be rid of the bad connotations that we normally associate “slavery” with.

 

This final talk managed to tie in everything we’ve looked at over the last four days. Because of what Jesus has accomplished, for himself, for the human race, and for us, we now find our identity in Him and we now belong to Him and are his servants. Who we are as humans then, is that we’re servants of Jesus Christ, and this is a good thing because by having peace with our master, we are not facing eternal judgement but await an inheritance of eternal life. This does put the perspective back into life; it might not directly give us guidance on how we should live in our daily lives, but it does help us work out our direction in life and help us to realign it with what God wants it to be.

 

 

Final Night

All my ideas will be going over the place from this point on. Traditionally, we have the most fun on the final night because that’s what people would naturally do on the last night of camp. So I guess it’s not really a traditional thing, but more of a natural thing. The harsh thing about it all was that the staff closed off all the meeting areas early in the night (1am is considered early if we’re talking about the final night). They closed these rooms up because everyone was being too noisy and all, and that indeed is a shameful thing to hear; we as a uni got scolded during announcements in one of the evening sessions this week and it’s sad to hear that the final night would be uneventful. Nevertheless I stayed up till 3am playing cards with some of the graduates, who, for them, it would’ve been their final night for their final MYC. This was probably how the last night of MYC should’ve been spent: just calmly relaxing and having light leisure fun with the people who won’t be back next year, and then actually sleeping because it would be a wise thing to get rest before the final day at MYC.

 

So this year, the final night was uneventful as in past years, but that’s okay; wouldn’t have wanted to face blacking out again here and there on Friday. It was a pleasant way to end the night.