Psalms 139:16

Come with me for a moment. To a manger. Nestled in a small village on a cloudless starry night. Everything about this moment is beautiful. Well.. almost everything. The setting. The scene. The silence of the wonder, it is all beautiful. Even the pungent smell of animal manure that fills the small manger cannot distill the beauty of this moment. Listen to the stillness of night and hear the angels, the choirs of heaven joining in to hail the arrival of the Prince of peace into the world. This scene plays out in a lowly manger with characters hand-picked and positioned by the Director, God Himself. There surrounded by the crude smells of farm animals sits an ordinary teenage girl, holding  the Son of God in swaddling clothes. No titles or credentials she holds. No trophies. No awards.  Just steadfast. Just faithful. Behind the young virgin mother stands a young carpenter, a man who like his y...

I've been flipping through the pages of the word of God over the last few days for something. Anything . Cause on days when I am desperate to just know God's heart, to see God or hear Him, and I simply cannot, I crave to read something written by Him. Crave for just even a glimpse of a whisper of God. For so many selfish reasons than one.  I've been in this place for a while now. Z calls in a "limbo". So much unknowns lie here. So many uncertainties.  And in this place where I've been, I have been  desperate to grab a hold of something from His Word. For anything I can cling onto. Something I can rest on. Something. Anything. So as I flipped the pages of the Bible this morning, I came to 1 Chronicles. I had been avoiding starting Chronicles.... Cause I judge books. Not by the cover. But by the name. Granted, I know that THIS IS THE WORD of GOD and all books of His Word are God-inspired, God-breathed. I know this. Believe this. But... I still judge a bo...

Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven by which we must be saved. Acts 4:12 Only JESUS CHRIST is powerful enough to save us from the deathly wages of our sins and from the daily messes and mess-ups that hound our lives. ONLY Jesus has that redemptive power to SAVE us and make us whole. ..Make our lives and our minds whole! Rom 10:9 says if you confess + believe = You WILL be SAVED!  I'm not sure about where you stand, but this is where I stand: I stand with the weight of realities, in the midst of struggles with those sins that so easily gets in my life, with heartaches and fears.. But I'm standing on this promise today, standing with this saving knowledge, that Jesus still saves! He STILL is in the business of rescuing us from the middle of  raging storms, from anxieties and fears, from heartache and hidden wounds. Jesus still saves. And it is my belief that as much as I needed to be saved from sin and come to know Him initially, I n...

So, in times that are good, in times that are bad For any time I've had at all, I will be glad And I will boast in the cross, I'll boast in His name I will boast in the sunshine, boast in His reign What's my life if it's not praising You? Another dollar in my bank account of vain pursuit I do not count my life as any value, precious at all Let me finish my race, let me answer Your call -- Lecrae 

"Now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love" I Corinthians 13:13 In life, there are three essentials. As essential as water, food and shelter, there are these three essentials: Faith. Hope. Love. I suspect there will come a day when we will look at our faith, our faith in men, in religion and find it inadequate. Find incongruity in the faith of men, incongruity in what preachers preach and what they actually practice.  Even find ourselves disappointed at our own inability to have faith, to believe in the supernatural or perceive the power of God in the midst of mounting failures, tragedies... I suspect there will come days when hope is hard to reach. Days when our hope is crushed by the weight of our realities.  Weight of all the dreams that lay beyond our grasp. There will nights, where in the darkness we will find ourselves hopeless. But according to 1 Corinthians 13:13, one thing wi...

(Disclaimer: This is gonna be a sappy post. Tomorrow I'll have something emo or angry to impart. But today, cheesy it will be!)  Today a patient came into the ED (emergency department) for suicidal ideation. And after the ER doc, I was the next in line as a medical student on psychiatry call to see her. As slow as I am, I spent some time piecing together her life, listening to her story as she spilled the contents of her broken heart to a complete stranger.  After the story was compiled and then reported to my 'boss', we went into the room to meet the women with the broken heart.  He asked her questions. Questions that I forgot to ask, pieces that I missed. Somewhere between the beginning and the end, he asked if she was continuing to have suicidal thoughts. And she replied no. With a slight smile now she said talking it out with me made her feel better... Its funny really... This experience has made me realize that my love for medicine has nothing to do with medicine....

Long walks in the dark through woods grown behind the park I asked God who I'm supposed to be The stars smiled down on me God answered in silent reverie I said a prayer and fell asleep -- Dream, Priscilla Ahn

I sat in on a session of group therapy at an inpatient facility that houses adolescents and children with psychiatric illness. Essentially, its a small group of boys and girls that meets with a facilitator, a therapist in this case, and these adolescents freely discuss their struggles, their stressors, with their peers. Surprisingly, in the group they open up and talk unguarded about what they face. On one of the days I sat in, an adolescent boy came in. He was new here. His first day. Sat at the end of the long table. Quite. Polite. When it became his turn to talk, he shifted in his chair and admitted he was struggling with suicidal thoughts and depression that has haunted him for years.  Diving deeper into the conversation, he spoke of a history of abuse. A constant feeling like he wasn't good enough. Never good enough. His grades weren't good enough... My heart stopped when he said his grades weren't good enough.... It was familiar for I knew the feeling. I know the ...

Didn't realize that I'm the biggest jerk in the world..... =/

I find myself in a funk today that I find myself in every so often.. it often happens when my life hangs in a haze, when all I see is fog and the beautiful sun glazed path to a beautiful and bright tomorrow isn't so obvious. My attitude shows it. My speech declares it. My life displays it. And yet I miss the obvious. Something ain't right... And it took me more than a second to realize that - that something is with me. I took a breath in a conversation with my cousin yesterday and realized my groans and complaints echoed through the empty car. These days, I have more complaints before the throne of God than praise for the infinite things that keep me walking instead of crawling. Rather than listing the things that I find wrong and totally unfair on this blog and further fuel my attitude of non-gratitude, I'll tell you what God kindly told me the other day...that I mildly ignored.  (How amazing is the love of God that kindly nudges us and whispers to us wisdom to dra...