Blog#1 Introduction

Unlike many Asian families, I grow up in a family who believes Christianity, and naturally I also became a Christian. Both my parents are very into Christianity, and they also “pray” to God every day. For a Christian, the “practice” is quite simple, we close our hands together and “talk to god.” This is one of many rituals that Christians do very frequently- pray. Christians pray in many occasions: before going to work; before each meal; during sick time, etc. In general, praying is what Christians do to communicate with God, and we are taught to see God as a father, who cares and loves everyone on earth even the non-believer. Ever since I was a child, I remembered my father kneed by the bed with my mom and pray every morning. I did not understand why they would pray in the morning before they go to work every day. My father would also be enraged if I proposed to ditch the church on Sunday. My understanding to the word “religion” is a kind of notion that gives the believers the hope in passion, strong enough to conduct certain rituals in order to justify what the believers think the greater entity would be pleased about. I was almost never truly passionate about something. Religion used to be something that I took for granted, but I had never been consistently passionate about it. My father, however, is the opposite.

            My father helps out in the church and participates various activities of the church. Sometime, he is the usher whose duty is to hand out bulletins to people. Usher is an important role in the church because an usher is the first person to be seen from afar and is also the one who greets the new comer. My father believes that usher, just as every other position in a church structure, is an invaluable position. He believes that God evaluate each individual by the individual’s passion in serving God, so even as little as an usher can be remembered by God as long as he or she has the passion in being an usher. At some other times, he would attend the prayer request meeting, where church members pray together for the people in need. Usually, people who go to the prayer request meeting would pray at one thing at a time in a circle, and the process for praying can take a long time, depending on the number of prayer requests the church received weekly.

            When I asked my father how he became so spiritual, he replied that he had gone through various testimonies that he determined impossible to be coincidental. He shared one testimony with me one day when I confronted him with the tightened financial pressure in our family. Although this testimony is not the very first few reasons that he became actively participated in the church, it is one of many reasons that strengthens his belief in God’s existence. As depression has been going on for quite a while, my parent’s financial burdens grow more heavily each day, leaving them with the only choice to loan from the bank. In the end, my parents loaned ten of thousand dollars, which they considered not possible to be paid back. My mother cried desperately every day back then as I later discovered, but the scenario only seemed to go worse. My father, who bible study each day before bed, had a dream one day: a rock climber was climbing on a cliff up high alone when the night is approaching. The climber’s safety rope breaks, so the climber can only hang on the cliff with his hands. However, it is freezing and dark on the cliff. The climber cannot see anything on the cliff, believing he will soon die of low temperature or the fall from the cliff. Helplessly, the climber prayed to God, and God miraculously instructs the climber to let go of his hands to fall in to the darkness cliff. The climber, in fear, eventually did not let go of his hands and are frozen to death as the result. Later when his body is discovered, the police found a rock that is just right below him, which if he fell, would not have killed him. Soon after the dream, my father was told that a friend of his may offer him a job to pay off the debt in Taiwan, a place where my father does not intend to go. He recalled what happened to the climber and finally decided to let go of his linger in China and work in Taiwan. It turned out he not only was able to start paying the debt, but he also just needed to go to Taiwan once every two weeks, which is not a bad thing at all.

            As a Christian, I believe the existence of God, but I also understand the logic for those who do not have religions. I conclude that religion is really a subjective matter after all, since every incident can be translated in terms of probability. Nevertheless, we, as human beings, can also never rule out that a greater entity is in control. More often than not, it is the uncertainty that makes human beings to fear or imagine that such entity exists, and that to believe or not is simply a subjective matter.