Sorry, but now, I’m really single. No, it wasn’t that she was too demanding… we never got to that point. It was just that she didn’t know what she wanted from me, and, dare I say, us.
Today was the worst day in quite some time. The sermon was great, though. it was on Amos 1 & 2. I love the guy because he doesn’t look at a script when he preaches and simply holds a Bible in his hands for reference. “Let’s bring our best and our worst to God,” he said. I think sometimes we’re so preoccupied about looking good, thinking good at church that we really don’t grow at all. He just wrote a book called “The Dangerous Act of Worship,” which I hope to get to read in the next few days. He talked mostly about judgement and said what most of us were thinking: let’s get to the New Testament, because that’s when we know we’re saved by grace. “Forgiven, yes. Off the hook, no.”
Not really sure how many people notice these things, but there’s different groups even between each denomination (Presbyterian for example). KCPC belongs to one sect, and First Pres is another (PCUSA). I suppose my brother and I are driven away by the conservative nature of KCPC. This isn’t one of them, but if you notice, they take offertory before the sermon. I remember my dad’s church in Korea got in a big fight about when to take offertory. Take it after, they said, because if the sermon is good, they’ll pitch in more. Take it before, another group said, because how much they give shouldn’t be affected by the outcomes of an hour long service. Take communion. Some Presbyterian Churches are now starting to take the Catholic church approach: take the bread, and dip it in the wine, and eat it individually. KCPC would probably never allow that. (Edit: I meant such occurence would probably remain as an exception, not the norm, for Adult Ministry. Please let me know if the opposite has become true.). KCPC would also never allow female (Edit: ‘head’) pastors. It’s strange how even the same denomination can be so different. Even the types of songs and the type of musical instruments to be used are all fair game to be argued with. I suppose that’s why my mom was sick and tired of being a pastor’s wife. I only saw bits and pieces of it and knew early on it wasn’t something that I wanted to do. I’m glad she’s going to be receiving her Doctorate of Ministry soon, though. (Edit: I suppose a better example would be that KCPC would never allow non Christians to share in the communion. What KCPC is doing is not an uncommon practice amongst other Presbyterian churches, but it is being challenged and KCPC would not be a pioneer in that regard. I think last time I checked KCPC said something along the lines of “join us in communion only if you’re a baptized Christian,” whereas some Presbyterian churches are starting to say “anyone is welcome to join us at the Lord’s table.” I don’t think one is necessarily right and another necessarily wrong, but I do prefer one over the other.)
Funniest thing was, we’d be the biggest contributors to our own church. You don’t see a lot of that in some of the bigger churches in Korea or in the US (350+ at one point). Now days, some pastors just keep preaching even though the church doesn’t want them there anymore and never donates a penny of their earnings to the church. It was only recently I realized that when my brother and I were younger, our parents gave us the bare necessities and put the rest of it, literally, in the church. I’m not bitter about it or anything, though. Because that’s the discipline I needed to do exactly the same for myself at one point in the future, and I know I can do it because I’ve done it before. I remember growing up till I was about 16 I got the same allowance for the longest time: $10 a month. I started working at 16 so I didn’t get any allowance after that. But till then, of course $1 would go into tithe, and $4-$5 a month for offertory. I always looked forward to the 4 Sunday months because that would mean I get to keep an extra dollar. Then of course my brother and I would have to donate $2 to a kid my mom decided to ‘adopt’ or financially support in Korea. So after 2 months, I’d have about $4 saved up, just enough for a matinee movie (this was before the prices notoriously decided to double in a couple of years). My mom would donate a lot more than that, of course, to such a point that sometimes I thought to myself ‘she must be spending more money on this kid than on my brother and I,’ which obviously wasn’t true. But that’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you have a family of 3 in a 1 bedroom apartment. She got really pissed off one year because she found out that the reason our kid wasn’t writing back was because he ran away. The agency never told us and kept the money to support some other kids. We would never donate to their cause again.
I think all this is where the frustration and the impatience comes into play. I don’t mind living in the gutters myself, but I’ve spent enough time watching my parents slowly deteriorate away while everyone else decided to keep feeding their fat stomachs. Why is it that it is only the sick and the ill that truly know how to serve?
So back to the day. I found today that although my Federal tax return went through last night (god, I’m so thankful I’m getting a ton back), my NY tax return didn’t go through. So now I gotta paper mail everything. That and you can only e-file one state only one time, but I used that up for the rejected NY e-file, so now I gotta mail in both my CA and NY tax return forms. Turns out I owe some taxes for CA, because IBM decided to split my earnings at the last minute to both CA and NY.
Helen decided to flush the toilet. Two things happened: the chain got tangled up so the water kept filling up the bowl. And the toilet was also clogged. So we had overflowing water for a few minutes and I went to go check it out because I could still hear the toilet. After about an hour, hour and a half of getting a towel and a few sponges and squeezing the water out on the bathtub, it’s still wet and probably will remain that way for a few days. Turns out that the water leaked to the room below, and the pastor Eugene calls me up and says, “I see droplets of water on my ceiling that’s dripping near the bathroom. Are you guys having water problems?” He declined my offer to come by and help clean up, but he said that thankfully he got some towels to damp it down some and it seems to be contained and isolated.
My computer stopped working. Actually, I still heard my fan and my hard drives working, but I couldn’t see a single thing on the monitor. So I went to Best Buy, bought a $100 video card, and swapped them out back home. I can actually see the monitor now, and although I’m putting all of this into a $4400 limit Visa credit card with 0% on purchases till Jan 08, it’s all eating into my budget for the South America road trip this summer.
Then I settled down a bit for the Super Bowl. Was that just the crappiest half time show and set of commercials of the century or what? We ordered pizza but instead of 45-60 minutes they had told us, it took them an hour and a half. And they gave us a pizza too many, so we called the guy back to take the extra one. Afterwards, I figured I’ll work on the watered up carpet a bit and use the now fixed computer, but no, the internet was down. So I ended up listening to Blackstreet’s self-titled album from 1994, which I’m still listening to now.