Discipline

Joyce is a friend of mine that works as...something to do with business analysis...in...somewhere. Haha. Her tag was "...bored...at...work..." and since I'm taking a break from slacking off at work cuz I can't find my boss once again...

me: it's that bad, eh?
Joyce: it's not that bad
I'm not that bored today
it's just become a little too mundane for my liking I think

me: work is becoming too routine, joyce?
Joyce: well i mean my learning curve has drastically slowed down
and things are just... I guess... fairly routine
and when hiccups happen, I mean they just happen, nothing new

Discipline has been a topic that wandered in the back of my mind over the last few months. It's easy to become complacent. I probably can't count the amount of time complacency comes up as a topic...especially when we talk about co-op, going home tired after work, and just not wanting to do anything. A friend of mine from Calgary recently left on co-op to Montreal, and was asking me the type of food that I eat while on co-op. I told him that while it's good to have some emergency food on hand, watch out for dependency on them. Supposedly MSG isn't healthy. Haha. Neither is McDonalds. Hmm...I guess I need to correct my coop-ly habits.

Spiritual disciplines. Among them, things like regular prayer and Bible reading times. When conversations stray to this point, I typically tell people that my fondest term would be when I was in my 2A co-op in London. No, not because of the stories that came out of that place. But because I was disciplined. Because I was submerged in a strong Christian community. Because I served much.

It was the term a few of us attempted to read through the Bible, cover to cover, 3 chapters at a time. It was the term that I prayed when I woke up, before going to work (even if I was late...but I suppose that says more about my attitude towards work than anything...haha). And yes, while I still struggled with the same things I've struggled with before (particularly with pride, in the whole UWCCF Committee Elections episode), the term felt okay. It felt like He was close, and pointed out my problems. Led me to grow. And I was advancing in my walk.

Sweet.

Enter 2B, 2B coop and 3A.

2B - Summer 2007 in Waterloo
Somewhere between being ripped from an environment where I can more or less submerge myself in a strong Christian culture that is Western ACF, back to Waterloo where I had to deal with logistics (Committee, as Communications), a moderately stressful academic term (ECE 209, 241, Calc 4, etc...), I lost the discipline I had when I was in London. Blaming the environment and busyness for my now apparent distance from God, I hoped for the best for my return to...

WKTRM3 - Calgary (Foothills Hospital)
It was here that I had hoped to find my 7000 in a church that will be difficult to change. But without the proper support, being my first real term out of CCF/ACF, it never took off. It was good, to see old friends, to see what a Stroke Ward was like, to be with family...but spiritually, this is difficult. And so as I suited up as Winter Retreat Coordinator for 2009, I sprang back to...

3A - Winter 2008 in Waterloo
The single most painful EE term. But you know what they say. Desparate people commit desparate prayers. And as the Winter Retreat team struggled to find a speaker, madly assemble bible studies...as my classmates and I fend off midterms and labs...as we rushed through the various CCF things that happened, I had no choice but to pray for help. It's easy to surrender everything when you have little going for you. That was this 3A term.

... -> WKTRM5 - Waterloo (Department of Kinesiology)
One recent interesting conversation I had with my fellow DLs brought attention to discipline once again. When I lamented about the my lack of desire to perform Biblical readings when I'm not trying to prepare for a Bible study or answer questions, because, perhaps, I feel more distant from Him, they pointed out that perhaps my lack of discipline is to blame. Perhaps, it is not some piece of God-given discipline that will cause me to want to read more...but my own discipline that will draw me to God.

A slightly different approach: should we pray even when we don't feel like it? Is there some mentality that I should have before entering into prayer? If prayer is simply the time we spent in dialog with God, attitude alone should not dictate this. Would you not greet a close friend, even if you're busy? Would you not complain to a friend that you typically do, just because life is busy? Would you not report in good news, just because that friend isn't physically around? The time-old question of...is your God a relational God...or a vending-machine God? If we're able to walk forward to meet Him, doesn't that say alot more about our attitude than if we don't (but could've), and just expect God to magically give us the motivation to do it all?

I once asked PT how I would know if I love God. In typical PT fashion, he pointed me to a book (which I couldn't read, because the first chapter confused me to no end -_- Four Loves by CSLewis). But I've realized...if love between people (me towards my family and friends, for example) is not simply a result of emotions, but also a decision made to love this given person, then my desire to come before Him in prayer and reading should not be focused on wither or not I feel His presence around. That really, should just be a bonus.

me: joyce has conquered her workplace?
Joyce: haha I don't think so
but it is getting better

I'm often told that the fact that we recognize that there are alot more to grow is a good sign (it's also a good idea to recognize that you've grown too!). After all, knowing is half the battle. However, good intentions without action isn't worth very much. Another warning against complacency. In a setting where God has your spiritual growth and progress tracked and controlled, the least we can do is say "here I am, Lord."

Pre-dating Analysis of Asian Christian Dating

So this article is suppose to be food for thought, arising from yet another late night conversation (and set in my draft box for like a month). Seriously. Why does all the good conversations like to start at 11pm?! But yes. When this theory was developed, it was rather groundshaking for me because if it's true, it means I give crappy advices. That, and I like to write about random stuff, apparently. I'm not saying that most people are like this, just at the least, I'm like this, so it was alot of thinking for me here.

"Nice Guy" Theory of Dating
I once read in an article that examined "nice guys" in dating situations. The article was talk how "nice guys" don't like insisting on things, and rather have the girl take the initiative on things. Now, given that 1) the guy tends to be the initiator and 2) girls can't read minds (hint hint...neither can guys -_-), chances are that nothing will happen. And so the guy gets disappointed, frustrated and angry. Causes a rift in the relationship, all cuz the guy refuses to say anything. Fail. This is why communication is important.

So I thought about this article and realized that it's just a case of communication. With my friends, if I need something, I just ask for it. Isn't that the environment that CCF tries to encourage? So if we can be straightforward with our friends, why not with someone who's suppose to be even closer than friend? On numerous occasions, people have pointed out that Asian guys are non-confrontational (guys words for it) and/or wusses (girls words for it). This increases the chances that asian guys will fall to this situation, and forms the basis of ACD-Backdooring.

Premises of "Asian Christian Dating" (ACD)
So the typical chinese guy are wusses. In this context, I can say that it takes alot of guts to confess and express emotions (especially since traditionalism puts the weight of leadership on the guy. No, the Bible doesn't say anything about it. Bible talks about husbands and wives . A dating couple is no where near a married couple. Go listen to some 722 if you need clarification). But that's how it seems to be. Given that we face the pain of rejection and the stigma of social isolation from the said person (because we totally become a different person once they find out, you know? -_-), why would one willingly walk into a situation like this?

So guys would rather choose not to say anything, and put effort into getting to know the girl first. Why is that...

• The act of confession is a tremendously scary task, with a ride range of possible consequences (positive or negative). At worst, the guy would have lost a (potential) friend. A person that would cause attraction would probably have positive attributes that the guy admired (common interest, physical attraction, personality...read Theories of Interpersonal Attraction), so losing that potential is not cool, even from a strictly platonic point of view.
  
• Given that conservative Christians view dating as "courtship", implying the intent of marriage will be assessed during dating phase. This means that they would not want to make snap judgement on who to date, and only get into a dating relationship if they have a decent idea of how much they want to marry. This means that they would need to know each other sufficiently well. If this can't occur during dating phase (because it would be "too late" by then), it must happen in friendship phase. Dating becomes a method to discuss, share, connect, understand, and perhaps somewhat of a placeholder and declaration of intentions.
  
• We assume that heartbreak due to a breakup is always most painful, and that if we practice sufficient heart guarding, we can prevent the other person from getting into an emotional mess and handle all the thinking and worrying ourselves. The intention is good; these things are there to protect the girl. We like honour and chivalry. This means we continuously engage in a balance between wanting to keep the girl close (so I can get to know her, and she can get to know me) but not too close (to prevent emotional attachment before one is "ready", whatever ready may mean. I will reference 722 here. Or it could be a self-protection mechanism. What if the girl isn't that attractive after all...?). All this is amplified by the fact that traditional Christianly upbringing will tell us that girls are like delicate flowers or something absurd like that, and the weight of relationships and marriage that is placed by the Christian culture.
  

Well. All these sounds pretty good. Why not, right?

Backdoor Hypothesis- possible scenario

1. Acquaintance phase - Boy meets girl. random encounter!
   
2. Friendship phase - Gets to know her, through some given means.
   
3. Attraction phase - Notes enough attributes about the girl to be attracted. I am assuming that the concept of "love at first sight" is ridiculous. Enough said. The guy now has enough reasons to get closer, in the name of "getting to know her better," in order to assess his and her position better. Would this work out? Would this not? External consult, massive praying, endless nights of thinking...all occur at this phase.
• The guy will now suffer from self-serving bias. He will begin to look for hints that the girl reciprocates his emotions. Unless he doesn't think the girl likes him, in which case he will look for hints that she doesn't like him, making life a bit more painful than it has to. Heart-guarding for girls typically sit somewhere in this area.
• The girl is none the wiser. She just sees a guy acquaintance making the effort to get to know her better. As far as she knows, nothing has changed, and the guy is just acting like a good friend. Who doesn't want a good friend?
  
• Given this, chances are, the guy will sit here at this stage for a while. Complacency is a powerful inertial force to overcome. Lets keep it safe. Why not?
4. At some point, he sees enough evidence that she likes him, or he can't hold it in anymore... "the heart wants what it wants!" -> confession event
   
• The girl is absolutely floored. Given that she did not have the same assumptions, she did not consider him in that fashion at all. Off the top of her head, not being prepared for this outcome, her reply is no. Or that she needs time to think about it. But we'll say it's a typical girl...and she says no. Rejection isn't something easily taken, nor delivered, especially between friends.
5. The guy is devastated. He pulls back, because obviously, it'll be too painful to be near her. He now have several options. Ignoring that he just totally confused this friend of his, he can...
• Pretend he never said anything. Push aside some emotions. Attempt to keep the friendship. If he got this far, they should be decent friends by now. Set aside himself for the girl he had pledged to heart-guard. There'll be some adjustment periods, and this process will be long and perhaps a bit ackward, but the two of them would've kept a good friend at the end of the day. Yay. Happy ending. Not quite. Emotional attachments takes a while to overcome, especially if the girl starts to date some other guy.
• Get mad and frustrated. After all, wasn't she responding properly?! Totally thought she liked me back...darn that self-serving bias. Confused? Probably leads isolation...wants recovery time. Fair enough. In the maintime, both people lost a friend. Adjusting to losing a friend is often an emotional process, giving rise to more confusion. Possibilities such as the pressure to date (in order to maintain the friendship) may become a concern.
  

Conflicts

• The people described in these premises have a tendency to date for courtship. That means the process of getting to know each other better has been pushed more more into friendship phase instead of dating phase. Given that some people closely relate courtship with marriage, one logically would want to know the potential partner as well as possible before proposing anything. However, by moving the "get to know" stage into the friendship phase, "dating" sometimes becomes a general acceptance that the couple is married. This is a problem. The attachment, commitment and emotions attached to a married couple cannot be transfered to a dating one..."dating" is not a biblical state. I think that's something people forget often...that dating != married (lack of commitment), that passages like Eph 5 (wife, submit to husbands...) don't apply here. Remember...she is not responsible to the guy. She is responsible to her father.
• The alternatives then, is to date to "get to know" someone. However, point 3 of "Why get to know the girl first" states why this is hypothetically a bad idea. If people just started dating to see how things go, in a closer-knit environment like CCF, breakups tends to lead to ackwardness, people leaving the fellowship, etc. This is why they suggested us not to date classmates, back when we first started Engineering, because we'll see the same set of people day in and day out...

Solutions

There is no real, clear solution. This entry describes a general situation, in a very general way.

The best one can do is probably step in before one suffers from self-serving bias too much. Any given friendship/relationship must be firmly rooted in mutual trust. Thus, by keeping something significant like this from them, in a way, you've told them that you can't trust trust them with this (perhaps you can't, but that's another issue). It is probably a good idea to make sure both people are on the same page (prevent point 3 in "Backdoor"), in trying to figure all this out. Supposely, "knowing is half the battle."

But be ready for the consequences of your actions. Let your yes be yes, and no be no. Consider not pitying the guys you reject, because that'll just make things harder for him on the long run. I believe that if two people want to maintain a friendship badly enough, they can work though anything...hopefully even the ackwardness of a rejection.

What should you have gotten out of this?
No, I'm not saying confess like mad. One should keep in mind of the fact that we suffer from self-serving bias. That if the girl doesn't know what's going on, it is easy for her to write things off as a "brotherly" thing, and thus approach the entire situation with a very different basis. And that something like this is definitely as difficult for you as it is for her.

[Edit] Videos...
So I was just shown a series of Wong Fu shorts that fits somewhere into this general realm of things. It was amusing to watch, and I'm sure many people who'd be reading this would relate, so linking...
Wong Fu - Just a Nice Guy: Part 1 (Problem), 2 (Lesson) and 3 (Risk).

Winter 09 - Term reflection

Wow. Haven't written for a while. Lets see if I can pull together some coherency.

I remember during Summer 08 term, I found myself filled with a sense of disappointment. I found myself focused on the fact that, once the current grads of this year leaves CCF, CCF will cease being the same as I know it. I guess, it has to do with the fact that most of people I talk to comes from this year. Things that I strongly associate with CCF, like Westcourt and Mcdougall, have traditionally been of this year. Contrasting all this upperyear focus with the fact that there seems to be an absence of the lower years. The fellowship feels smaller. There's less people around. Where are all the people stepping up? Although I had a chance to chat with a past alum (Dave Tse) about this, it didn't do too much to reassure me, at the end of the day. As I went through last Fall (3B) and this winter (WKTRM5) watching the people in CCF...as a DL, I saw this the most: our bible study leader count is terrible. There were days when no one showed to prestudy (1 John 4 study). Cell group attendance, while never consistent, has never dropped below 1 person showing up (Women cell last term). It's over. How would this fellowship last, if it's so distance from each other and so separated?

Perhaps the biggest thing that changed my view of all this was my work on Caring and Subcommittee.

Being on Caring brought me in contact with many people. In my attempt to figure out how they see the fellowship and if they're being provided for or not, I generally start off things with a handful of questions, asking them how they are and what fellowship is to them. When I took on Subcommittee as well, my question list extended fairly easily. And so although I can easily spend a few hours chatting with a given individual, it was worth it.

• Where do you stand right now? Where do you want to go? How do you want to grow?
• What is fellowship/CCF to you? What do you get out of it? What do you want out of it?
• Are there people you can go to for advice? Is CCF a safe place for you to share your struggles without fear of being shut down?
• Where do you want to see CCF in the future? What is your vision for it?

Sometimes people didn't have an answer ready. That's fine, I didn't really expect these things to be stuff that people think about all the time. But I threw these questions out there. Make them question themselves. Make them question where they are. Gotta work against that complacency. This entire process was actually quite fun, partly because I was somewhat familiar with the handful I was assigned. Didn't have to work to the topic with too much small talk or anything. Just alot of sharing, about what they want to see in the next little bit in their walk in this fellowship

And even though the majority of the people I talked to were second years, the response of some of these people were crazy. They're more advanced with their walk at this point than I was myself, in 3rd year...I was talking to someone heading in 2B...to find that they've already discovered things that I started learning in WKTRM3...this person is more ahead than I was when I was that age... These kids are more mature than I gave them credit for.

I remember that, during Sharing last Friday (which I wasn't totally awake for all of it...but there's at least two copies of minutes floating around, I'll get to it soon -_-), someone said something along the lines of..."Your ceilings becomes our floor." Idea being that as we pour our knowledge downwards, towards the incoming people, they start equipped with that. The knowledge that CCF is slowly growing, surpassing what we are capable of, simply because we existed and is building the future generations, was encouraging. Perhaps there is still alot of work to be done...but I'm a bit more reassured that as the current grads move on...as my year prepares to move on...CCF is in good hands. There really is alot of potential in these kids.

Realizing this, I started to look for evidence for the rising loweryears. I look at something like Outreach...and realize that it's composed entirely of froshes. Of all people who ran for Committee this term, half of them were second years. During Discussion night, the people that asked the most amount of questions were the second year people. The various components of Grad Dinner was saturated with first and second years. When I brought all this up during Committee meeting this week, as we did our own end-of-term sharing, it lead to a flurry of agreements. Perhaps CCF isn't in that bad of a shape after all. It's not as how I see it. But people are still growing. And so CCF lives on. Passing on the torch...

Atlas

Sometimes I wonder if the decisions and the surrounding thought processes around it are difficult and painful because it really is a bad idea and we're better off quitting while we're ahead...or it is simply a preview of what is to come and we're being told to gear up for it...

Things like career and what to do with ourselves, as we approach graduation. Things like where to call our home base, the place where we'll live and grow. Things like deciding what is important, and pursuing it.

Things like who, out of the hundreds of people we've met, that we'll keep maintaining an effort. Things like who do we stand with, and pour time into. Things like ministry and who you want to be serving with.

It seems to be just a matter of where and who. Everything else is details.