Every summer I take time out to go on a personal spiritual retreat. This summer I went to a special location called the “Prayer Caves” (www.prayercaves.com) in Southern California to pray and fast for four days. The experience was powerful. I came back spiritually refreshed, recharged and refocused in my life mission and purpose. During those four days I slept, prayed studied God’s word and only drank water in an actual mountain cave.
Some people would ask, “Why spend four days in a cave to pray?” My answer is
We need to learn to rest. For me, this is one of the hardest things to do. Ever since I was young I was a hard worker at anything I put my mind and heart to do. Don’t get me wrong, hard work is a good ethic and principle, but even hard work can become excessive if we do not learn to take time out to rest. God created us first as “human beings” not “human doings.” Work is only fruitful when it comes from a place of rest in our lives, not a place of strife.
We live in a digital world where we are constantly distracted, attracted and retracted to “other things” that constantly grab our attention. Whether that is our cell phone (i-phone, blackberry, smart phone), our laptop, our emails, our social media outlets (facebook.com, myspace.com, twitter.com, etc), our Television, our Radio, our IPOD, and the list goes on, it seems that the constant in flow and out flow of information is non-stop. Sometimes I lay in bed to go to sleep, but I can’t even fall asleep because
One reason I absolutely love being Chinese American is that I get to celebrate two new years. I get to celebrate January 1st New Years and I get to celebrate Chinese New Years. Of course, I kind of favor Chinese New Years over the other one because I get little red bags full of money, but more than that I get to experience a time of celebrating and spending time with family and relatives.
Ever since I was a little child, Chinese New Years was a holiday to look forward to. All of our cousins would gather together to have a great Chinese New Years feast, while we would also give out red bags to one another to start the new year fresh. As a young boy, opening red bags was like opening Christmas presents. You never knew how much money you would get. Sometimes it could be a few dollars, other times it would be
ONE DOOR CLOSES ANOTHER CAN OPEN
East Week #20 ~ “WHEN ONE DOOR CLOSES IN LIFE, ANOTHER DOOR WILL OPEN”
Helen Keller the famous American writer once said, “When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.”
This quote could not be more true in my life, and I’m sure many others. As I’ve had time to reflect upon my life these past days, I’m happy to see where I’ve been, yet I am more happy to see where I am going. In the past, I used to always focus on what didn’t happen in my life, what should have been, or what could have been, thus leaving me discouraged. A lot of us, like me before, put so much of our focus everyday on pass failures. It could be failures in our relationships, our decisions, our career choices, or mistakes we have made which are we are not able to fix. Even though we know that we can’t change the past, we still dwell on it, letting it plague us like a virus that never leaves our mind and emotions. But, if we always focus on the past doors that have closed, we will become blind to the open doors and opportunities that may come our way.
 |