Well, here I am in this tiny little crowded island. I think it has been an interesting experience traveling here. In a surprisingly smart move, I actually dressed for comfort instead of the usual, so I wore suitable sleep wear all the way, and it was good. Once in the airport, for some reason I broke down and cried a couple of times, not knowing what I’ll face in the future… In the Harmony flight, I scored an aisle seat at the emergency exit row, so I got a ton of leg room there…heh. The only downside is that the washroom is right in front of me, and it gets a bit crowded. I did manage to get some sleep there, but not much. It was a very smooth flight, I have to say, even though the aircraft seems a bit old… Once landed, I had to make a long trek within YVR to catch the CI flight. And boy was it a long long way… The CI flight itself is far from full, so I got two seats to myself, and that’s kind of nice. The surprise when I got on the aircraft? The announcement that the flight is 12 hours and 45 minutes long (instead of “just” 12 hours). Yikes. But, the seemingly grueling flight was not too bad. I managed to sleep a few times as well, and these are quality sleep time, I believe… The food was strangely luxurious, so to speak…I mean, eel and smoked salmon for lunch? Wheee…. On both flights, I went into deep thoughts and wrote down a ton of things. One page worth of stuff. And considering my incredibly small handwriting, that’s a lot. Most of what I wrote, however, is too personal…so, probably won’t post it up here. In yet another surprise, I actually wasn’t afraid during both flights, like I usually do previously. There was a sense of peace through all the take-offs, landings, and turbulences. I thank the Lord for providing such peace, and for the fulfilling time I had on board.

Once in Taiwan, I was whisked away directly to church (with a washroom detour at Costco). I really didn’t feel tired, actually, so I enjoyed the time of fellowship at church. Meeting these old friends was great. Hope to bond with them during my short stay…

I don’t know why I’m so frustrated by the inability of my laptop to go online here. It never happened before…something went wrong and I have no idea what it is. It frustrates me even more that I would be so frustrated with it and wasted so much time on it! Sigh… So I guess I can only use mesister’s computer to do these online stuffs while she’s not using it…like right now, 6am in the morning…yes, still a bit jetlagged…woke up at around 4. Oh well. Oh my…I’m experiencing an earthquake…

…for a while, that is. Off to the airport in 3 hours, and I still haven’t gone to sleep…not sure I will have any sleep tonight, though. If I fall asleep now, I’m not sure I would wake up on time, so that’s a big risk…

So why am I still awake right now? Lots of things happened. First it was a dinner for four at Lunchbox (I know, it sounds ironic). Then a trek to DP where we found no one there (no one that we know, that is), and that was quite strange. A trip home is followed by a walk around campus with Kai. Then a last meeting with Samuel in Waterloo resolved some problems in my life, and revealed others as well… Man, I’m really going to miss him…

Courage. I need it.

After a few errands in the morning, I started frantically trying to find a lunch buddy, because there’s nothing to eat at home now. I called a lot of people, and all were unavailable. So I went for a desperate attempt where I decided that I would go to my office and if I meet someone I know on the way (which never happened), I would have lunch with him. I really didn’t think much of it, but while I was approaching Tim Horton’s, David was in there, he saw me and waved to me, and there you go, I’ve found a lunch buddy. Now it really shocked me that this had happened, actually…it’s almost mindblowing… Later we spotted Kai and Sophie walking by along Ring Road, and I went out to try to shock them, which didn’t work…but still, it’s even more amazing how all these things happened…

Sigh…I really wanted to see a few people before I go… Oh well, there’re still a few hours left to do that… And why is it that I can cry so much these days?

When I focus my life on Christ, everything else does seem secondary…

Made a phone call home this morning, and mesister picked it up. I don’t know why it feels really depressing that she keeps talking about what I can do and where I can go once I’m in Taiwan… Maybe it’s because all I want to do is to see the people and chat with them… Hmm…that sounds like a strange ambition for this extremely shy person, eh?

It was raining really hard all day yesterday…strange weather we have here. Made the marking all the more depressing, I guess. And it also forced me to get lunch at C&D, which made my body feel bad, so yeah…

23 hours left until I fly…

It’s been a tiring day. About 7 hours of marking pretty much drained all my energy. Sure there were some funny answers in there, but the whole process was as tiresome as usual… I’m having a giant headache right now. I’m certainly not complaining, since as compared to many of my friends, this is probably the least stress that could be experienced…

You know, I have a fear of heights…so why am I flying in less than 36 hours? I guess it’s the destination that matters…but still…

Need to tie up a few loose ends tomorrow before heading off to the airport Friday morning. I really wish I could visit a few friends here before I leave, because they would have left Waterloo by the time I return… Sigh…since when did I become such a sentimentalist?

Ah…I hate the research I’m doing (or not doing). It just horrifies me to think that I’m expected to do this for a long time… Couldn’t I get a break for a while? What is the Lord’s calling in all of this? So yeah, the supervisor meeting inspired all of these thoughts…

Morning meeting…lunch with David and Clarence…long and deep afternoon nap…very boring proctoring…heh, I annoyed Chen Jie to no end. In other news, an excellent J! yesterday, and an excellent Millionaire today (a 20-year-old kid won $100K, and is still going on tomorrow…).

My God, why are temptations the strongest during my dreams?

A couple of days ago (maybe), I’ve planned to cook some leftover stuff from the fridge for lunch today. Well, when the time came to cook, I really want to just give up, mostly because I find it too tedious… I thought about inviting people for lunch, but didn’t make it happen. I grudgingly started cooking anyway, but not long after I started, Li Zhen called asking me to go out for lunch. Well, good idea, why don’t you come over here for lunch? So there you go, Li Zhen and Chen Jie came over for lunch, and I started to enjoy the cooking…who knew? Nothing’s a coincidence, that’s what I believe. So anyway, we had a nice home-made three-course meal, and then had fun at the game room downstairs. I won’t say how I crushed them in foosball…heh.

I was tinkering with another idea this morning…how about if I drive around to visit people between the end of August and the beginning of September? I can start to imagine the places that I would visit already…Montreal, Saskatoon, Vancouver, Seattle, Boise, Pittsburgh…it would be a long drive, and contribute to global warming, but it sounds too good to pass up on. Maybe a bit too adventurous for me… I guess I also need to find someone along for the ride and share in the time and driving, for otherwise I might go insane…

I sort of did my taxes today, and boy, I have to pay over $600 in income taxes…yikes.

I’ve done a lot of sharing of my experiences of this past term lately. But I have to remember, almost all of them were done at the prompting of the Lord, instead of being initiated by myself. That is quite important, because only the sharing done for the Lord seems relevant, and yielded peace in my heart afterwards. If I am the one initiating the sharing, then it usually ends up flat and becomes a bit self-centred? Another interesting thing I’ve noticed is that when the Lord wants me to share, it’s usually without preconceived scripts and it just flows fluently and naturally; but when I share on my own, I would think about what I would say, and usually end up stuttering through it and missing the main points. Again, this lends to the notion of surrender all of myself to Jesus, doing what He wants me to do instead of doing what I want to do…

Before, I find the notion of living day by day in the Lord to be a daunting task, probably because I can’t seem to imagine myself keeping this up for the rest of my life (which may be long). But the epiphany for today is that it shouldn’t be like that…instead, living day by day is exactly living one day at a time without thinking about what might happen in the future. So each day, decide to live for the Lord for the day and that’s it. It also lends to the notion of living each day to the fullest, which to me means living this particular day for the Lord. Surely I see that there may be times ahead where I may walk in a spiritual desert, but that’s not my concern right now. My concern should be the present, as the present presents enough to handle already.

Re-read chapter 2 of Abide in Christ for the third time this afternoon. This book is simply a gem. Need to remember to trust and obey, obey and trust, and surrender every part of my life to Christ, and then I shall find rest. I still long for this abiding unbroken fellowship with Christ as promised…

Pastor Henry talked about life on earth as being temporary, and also experiences in faith and stuff, and I kept nodding my head because that is exactly what I had experienced in the past week or so. Also, the last time Pastor Henry spoke, he talked about being weak for God, and that is exactly what I had experienced as well. So yeah, that’s pretty special.

After the service, I sort of played up the “playing at Kai’s place” bit and got strange reactions from Samuel…heh. Anyway, we simply moved some stuffs from Kai’s place to my place for temporary storage while he’s away. Later I offered mom’s dumplings as lunch, and he was a bit stunned, because he hasn’t had a dumpling in a long time. Makes me wonder if I have taken a lot of things for granted and forgot to appreciate small things like having dumplings and stuff… Anyway, we had a nice chat, nothing too serious, and that’s that.

Mix bag: Skating at RIM Park was cancelled, so I was kind of disappointed. The mccf prayer meeting attracted a lot of people this time around, actually, so I felt a bit uncomfortable…and the loud music next door didn’t help, either. I guess I still need a lot of training in prayers… In other news, I finally finished the giant puzzle book today, so it’s time to start a new one? Five days away from flying to Taiwan…seems like there are so many things to do, yet I just couldn’t do them? I don’t know. Also, it may have been the last time that I see some of these people in Waterloo…and it brings a bit of pain in my heart. I have a lot of mixed emotions once again, but the joy of the Lord is still here, and I’m thankful for that. I just hope that the disappointments in life won’t trump the joy and peace from Jesus.

Morning and afternoon were spent mostly on sleep, read, pray, and puzzle, amongst gospel music. Fellowship was great. For some odd reason, I shared my experience this past semester again…almost drew a tear out of my eyes… We had a wonderful prayer meeting. Mary’s talk was good too…heh. Nice to see Paul again. Looks like more targets for weekend visitations coming up…

Ah…but the main event was the dinner. Wayne and I went out for dinner. At first, we searched for a non-full restaurant from Northfield and King down to Erb and King…heh. Settled on a Viet-Thai restaurant…and we proceeded to talk for more than two hours! It’s amazing, isn’t it? A once shy person in me can participate in a conversation that lasted that long. We talked about lots of things, some serious, some not so serious, but somehow we seem to end up praising Samuel at the end of each topic, to which Wayne is indignant about…heh. Anyway, we had a wonderful time of sharing, and hope to do this again some day.

This past week has been one where I became a testimony for God using the weak to accomplish His works. And I’m definitely humbled by it.

This is how we should serve God isn’t it? Wait for God to prompt you to do something, and then just obey. O the joy of obeying God! It’s not “I want to do this and this for God,” but instead, it’s “Lord, here I am waiting for You.”

Surprisingly, I’m actually looking forward to this trip to Taiwan. I really want to meet my old friends, and I feel that I’m returning as a new person. Whatever the Lord has planned for me, whatever surprises that I’m going to face, I’m ready. Sort of. Well, on second thought…nevermind.

Still looking for an alternative sport…preferably an indoor sport, hopefully it can be an intense exercise, and one that doesn’t involve balls…

Lesson for today: When God provides an opportunity, don’t pass it up. I felt this sense of calm, peace and joy after all is said and done, and that is good enough for me.

Woke up, studied the Bible, short call from Samuel, office hour where nobody came, Francis and I had a nasty conversation on msn that lasted about two hours, home to sleep, went out with Li Zhen, and here I am. Nope, despite what it seems, I absolutely did not waste this day at all. In fact, it was one of the more fulfilling days that I had in recent memory. Thank God.

There is still this sense of regret that I could have attended the accountability group meeting yesterday, if only I knew it was happening after I arrived back in Waterloo…oh well.

8 hours, 3 cities, 280.0 kilometres. Clarence is quite a character, isn’t he? It was fun having him around. First stop, visit Christina in downtown Toronto to have lunch. But we got there too early, so we took a detour around Lakeshore, visited a park there, and had an impromptu prayer meeting. Noodles lunch was ok, I guess, but the main point here is that the couple hasn’t seen each other for weeks, so this would be a nice reunion of some sort… Then it was off to Metro Square where I finally picked up my plane tickets…wheeeeee! Talked briefly with Joseph before being interrupted by a visiting customer. T&T was next, and then a couple of Christian bookstores, and then we headed home…but not before hitting multiple traffic jams while I was falling asleep (and so did Clarence…heh). Overall, a nice (and tiring) trip, and a bonus of sunshine and (very) warm temperature throughout, thank God.

How great is our God, sing with me
How great is our God, and all will see
How great, how great, is our God.

Tomorrow: oh boy I just hope I don’t waste tomorrow like I did yesterday…

Ah…I wasted most of today…and it didn’t feel good at all. In fact, at one point my stomach was feeling quite queasy about having wasted the day, spending a lot of time on puzzles…then again, it could be the terrible food that I was consuming myself…

I’m spiritually weak. I’m starting my life as a Christian from the beginning. It pains me when some see me as more than who I really am. I just hope and pray that I don’t become a stumbling block.

Going to Toronto tomorrow. This used to be a good idea, but now I’m starting to think otherwise…probably because I would be missing a lot of stuff here in Waterloo, which I didn’t know. But anyway, I need to pick up the plane tickets, so that’s that.

Back to the present…I had a very dizzying head when I woke up this morning, and that continued through the day. It was a terrible reminder of the past when my head does that all the time, and it seems to have come back today. It’s like, if I don’t make sudden movements to my head, then it’s fine, but once I start to move it, I get incredibly dizzy. Eventually had a long nap in the afternoon and that made it a lot better. By that time, however, I had stayed at home for the entire day, and I thought that was not good. So then I went out with Li Zhen to do some grocery shopping and then dinner at my place. It looks like I should start driving people to grocery shopping everyday…that would be fun.

It’s actually snowing pretty hard outside right now. Amazing. April 4th, and still snowing. It’s even more amazing considering that it was 19 degrees yesterday…

A note from the past… For the mccf dinner, I uploaded my photos in a zip file (more than 200MB) and put compressed versions on my gallery. Just for the night of that dinner, bandwidth usage shot up to 1.6GB! Wheeeeee! Finally I get to use some of the promised bandwidth…I mean, normally the website uses only around 3-5MB of bandwidth per day when I’m allowed to use 10GB per day…somehow it felt good to put all that wasted bandwidth to use!