Pilgrim's Pursuit: Seeing Well, Fellowshiping Well

I've been without Facebook for five days now, and I guess I'm getting used to it. The first day I must've checked my phone 50 times for Facebook updates, only to realize again and again that I don't even have the app on my phone anymore. Old habits die hard. Anyway, the break's been good so far. I use email, Skype, and Kakao to communicate with friends and family, and my mind feels less cluttered now that I'm not seeing my every acquaintance's day-to-day life on my newsfeed. The only suffocating feeling I've had so far is from not being able to share pictures from my own day-to-day life. I hope I'll grow more content with that over time. For now, I'll share a few pictures here. :-)

But before I do, I imagine there are some of you who may have lost sleep worrying about my new glasses that were causing me to stumble and have poor depth perception. Well, you can stop your fretting. After two days had passed and my depth perception hadn't improved, I realized I had no choice but to get a professional eye exam (mostly because I couldn't risk hiking until the problem was resolved). So I prayed for God to reveal the mystery of my true prescription to an optometrist and to provide a cheap solution. Guess what the optometrist discovered? The prescription was indeed correct and unchanged from 5 years ago. BUT, the lenses were in backwards! I paid $7 for the eye exam and got the lenses put back in correctly (for free, of course!) at the glasses shop. Now I can see perfectly, and I'm so thankful for clear vision and a simple solution!

This week, I've been enjoying two new books I got in the mail. The first is Bomb, a very well-researched, well-written, true account of "the race to build--and steal--the world's most dangerous weapon" (aka the atomic bomb). It's written for young adults, but it's the perfect level for me. I guess that makes me young, although a guy at church said today that I look more like mid-30s than late 20s. Ha! The other book I've been reading is DK's Japanese Phrase Book. I can't wait to try out some of the expressions on my host family when I go to Hiroshima over spring break.

It's kind of funny, the more I read, the more I want to read. Likewise, the more I hike, the more I want to hike. (I wonder if healthy food could grow on me the same way?) Anyway, one of my goals for this year is to go hiking once a month. Afraid I'd get too busy to go this month, I squeezed in a hike on March 1st. But this afternoon, I was already antsy to go again. My friend Juhee, along with a man who has recently starting attending my church and is very eager to learn more about the Gospel, spontaneously decided to join me. I realized through today's hike how much I take Christian community and fellowship for granted. To me, today was just a normal day. But to my "seeking" friend, it meant the world. I wonder how many people are so parched for fellowship. And I'm reminded of the cost, for it really requires laying down your life--your ambition, self-centeredness, self-glory, free time, money, etc.--to participate in that fellowship and extend it to others. I was struck by my new friend's reflection on the day. Not only was it a so-called special event in his life, but what impressed him most were the simplest acts of caring and sharing together: offering to take the back instead of the lead, encouraging each other up the mountain, chatting over a coffee break, taking pictures. God used the smallest acts of love and inclusion to glorify the Body of Christ. It made me realize that God is using me even when I'm completely unaware of my value or influence. Even when I'm just taking pictures!