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Do you really believe that what you believe is really true?
By Ern Sheong | June 1, 2009
I was kicked out of dorms about a week ago and have been crashing around. Thanks to the (super) seniors from A2F (Acts2Fellowship) for being so accommodating and hospitable! And now thanks to Mike Lim of Koinonia for allowing me to crash his apartment for the next 5 days! Next time I promise to open up my apartment to temporarily homeless students like myself :)
Moving in to apartment this Saturday with 3 other guys from church. Going to be some experience, living with three other guys from church. May God watch over us and help us to fellowship and grow together. And finally there will be a kitchen to cook and try new stuff and invite people over for meals :)
This week I have also been helping out here and there with move-ins and move-outs, which is pretty fun considering that there is nothing much for me to do anyway, besides reading books :)
This semester has been much better for me academically. Doing less subjects is indeed better. Managed an A in Rhetoric, A+ in Math 54, A- in CS61CL, and B+ in CS70. Not bad lah. Pulled that cumulative GPA up quite a bit. So well it’s not too bad and there’s still room for improvement!
Next semester would be fun and heavy, despite the same number of classes (4). I’m taking CS61B (Data Structures) with the most notorious CS Professor in the EECS Department, Hilfinger, whom one student on Rate My Professor describes as the professor who teaches you how to swim by throwing you into the sea. But the upside is that I may be learning a lot more so I’m taking it despite it being much harder than other professors. I will also be taking Chinese 1AY for dialect speakers next Fall and hopefully this time I will really learn it well, given failed previous attempts. Then there would also be CS188 and CS170, of which descriptions are in “My Berkeley Courses” on the right.
Today for church service we did something different. Instead of gathering all together in a large hall/auditorium listening to the pastor preach and singing to the praise band we split into groups and conducted home churches everywhere around Alameda. I must say that I liked it very much. We started off with a wonderful lunch, and proceeded to a simple worship session and offering. Then we watched a lecture on “Truth vs Lie”, the first of a lecture series. Then we broke into discussions to talk about the lecture we had just watched. After that we gathered at the park to play frisbee! I must say that this is very different from the usual traditional worship services, but it’s wonderful nonetheless, and perhaps even more effective in building community and forging a stronger unity among the body of believers. In fact, home churches are how Christianity began with, before it evolved to larger group settings.
Perhaps the take away question to ask yourself from the lecture today is (also labeled as “A haunting question”):
“Do you really believe that what you believe is really true?”
This question should be asked by all believers of Christ. AND it should also be asked by those who believe that there is no God, or that idol worship is true, or that money can bring you happiness, or that truth is relative, or that human beings came about because of some extraordinary chance or even from apes, or that achievement and success is everything there is, or that the universe and its creation “just happened”, etc etc. Do you really believe that that is really true?
And secondly, just as someone can really believe that jogging is good for him but does not jog himself, are you living in a way which actively applies what you believe or is it just some useless head knowledge that is totally superfluous? What you believe should have direct consequences in how you live.
This question is hard. Do I really believe that what I believe is really true? Do YOU? Don’t brush it away. You don’t want to live a wasted life.
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