“We are all the best person we know and, in general, tend to think we’re pretty unbiased as well. Illusory superiority can help us keep a healthy, optimistic attitude, but it can also prevent us from doing something great.

Recently Derek Sivers, founder and former president of CDBaby, posted about the benefits of assuming you’re below average. The suggestion is this: if you don’t assume you’re all that great you’ll be much more open to learning new things, asking more questions, and approaching situations with the sort of humility that leads to considering a good idea you may have otherwise thought to be stupid.”

Get Smarter by Realizing You’re Not That Great – Lifehacker

“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves.” (Phil. 2:3)

With a bit of tweaking and re-phrasing, I think it can translate into some fairly biblically-sound principles that church ministry should be done according to:

1. Autonomy –> Each person should ultimately be led by the inner guidance of the Holy Spirit, instead of the type of church leadership that likes to seize control and micro-manage things. (Of course church unity and proper individual/corporate spiritual discernment must be emphasized here, in order to prevent everyone basically doing their own thing.)
2. Mastery –> Each person’s spiritual gifts should be identified, embraced, and unleashed. Reintroduce spiritual disciplines into the life of church, so that people learn to become better at it. Develop a culture of excellence, for the glory of God.
3. Purpose –> We need a robust biblical theology to give us the grand purpose and eschatalogical meaning of living our lives and being the Church in this age. We should not be motivated by church growth or any kind of glorious numerical increase, but by God’s deep love for the world and the eschatalogical picture of the redeemed cosmos.

Related posts:

1. God, family, then church?

I believe we must not orient ourselves towards only one of the past, present, or future perspectives, but embrace all three under the providence of our Triune God. Just as it is written in the Anglican liturgy:

“Have mercy upon us, have mercy upon us, most merciful Father; for thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, forgive us all that is past; and grant that we may ever hereafter serve and please thee in newness of life, to the honor and glory of thy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.” (Book of Common Prayer, Confession of Sin)

「現在我們痛心懊悔，求你憐憫我們，為了聖子耶穌基督，饒恕我們的已往，扶助我們的現在， 引導我們的將來，使我們樂意遵行你的旨意，歸榮耀給你的聖名。阿們。」（公禱書，認罪文）

With so many questions up in the air, will the show be able to answer them all in the end? I am sure millions of fans worldwide are dying to know. But that is not as important as whether the characters can find resolution in their story arcs, for that is where we viewers have most of our emotional investment. Who cares what that smoke monster is, really? What we care about is whether Jin and Sun can reunite, who Kate loves the most, if John has really died in vain, or if Hurley can really break the curse in his life.

I think LOST is proof that Lyotard‘s definition of “postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives” is not entirely correct. Yes, we are incredulous about modernistic, overly-optimistic, manipulative, and oppressive metanarratives, but we still crave for metanarratives that can explain the lingering mysteries and tie all the loose ends together. Deep in our human psychic has this craving for resolution. It’s in our DNA. We’d go crazy if LOST just ended with season 5.

LOST perfectly demonstrates that small, local narratives can co-exist with a larger metanarrative that gives meaning, or at least enrich the meaning of our human existence. If we only have local narratives that are radically different and mutually exclusive, I believe we will end up with tribalism and even more antagonism in our humanity. If we only had a single metanarrative that seeks to explain everything but ignores the intricate differences and diversity of our human experience, it will also lead to an ahistorical and inhumanistic structuralist view of life that fails to touch the human soul. Rather than opting for either-or, why can’t we have both?

I believe LOST gained such popularity worldwide because it is able to make each of us resonate with the characters and the experiences that they struggle through, while hinting that there is something larger going on out there that ties all our experiences together, and that there IS a meaning behind all those seemingly improbable coincidences. LOST is only fictional, yet it has already tapped into the deepest needs of our human soul. What if there is a real metanarrative to our common existence? What would that mean to us?

That, is why I have been called to be a story teller…. telling this metanarrative that ties all the threads of our lives together.

心理學上，有一種病態叫做 codependency (共同依賴症)。其中有一方面的症狀叫 compliance patterns，如下：

• 為免被人排斥或惹來憤怒，我會妥協自己的價值標準和正直的心。
• 我對他人的感受非常敏感，並且會產生同樣的感受。
• 我對他人忠誠至極，就算長期處於有害不健康的情況下也好。
• 我視他人的意見和感受比自己的更加高，並且不敢表達不同的意見和自己的感受。
• 我寧願放下自己的關注和利益，也要滿足別人想要做的。
• 我會以性換取愛，就算在自己不願意的情況下也好。

或許不是完完全全的 codependency，因為不是雙方互相依賴，但我至少卻觀察到單方面不健康的依賴。

想怎樣去詮釋，釋隨尊便。

Now here’s finally scientific evidence showing that what you behold, you become.

In one way, that’s why many long-married couples do look somewhat alike.

In another way, that’s also why fans dress like their idols, mimic their behaviors, and continue to lose who they really are and become exact replicas of their idols. As the Psalmist said in Psalm 115:4-8:

“But their idols are silver and gold,
made by human hands.

They have mouths, but cannot speak,
eyes, but cannot see.

They have ears, but cannot hear,
noses, but cannot smell.

They have hands, but cannot feel,
feet, but cannot walk,
nor can they utter a sound with their throats.

Those who make them will be like them,
and so will all who trust in them.”

The Scriptures tell us that when we behold idols, we become like them–dehumanized and lifeless. But when we behold Jesus, the archetype of the new humanity, we will become increasingly like Him (2 Cor 3:18) and more and more “truly human”. Beholding Jesus restores our humanity. Beholding anything else takes away our humanity.

In The Lord of the Rings, Gollum’s obsession with the Ring actually caused changes in his physical appearances, uglified him, and drove him to insanity.

What are you currently beholding in your life? Take a good look at the mirror and you’ll probably know.

Even if you choose to create, do you have the inner substance to create things that are meaningful?

Andy Crouch, author of Culture Making, makes the case that the way of practice–the way of nurturing the inside by enduring the hard and initially unsatisfying work–is the key to attaining any long-lasting satisfaction in life. Any other ways short-cutting the process will not do it.

This is truly one of the best articles I have read in a while.

Qideas.org: From Purchases To Practices – Andy Crouch

“Without practices, even creativity is in the long run unsatisfying. Millions of former bloggers will tell you so.” – Andy Crouch

Related posts:
基本功
Rock Band 與苦功

Related posts:

1. Create Value, Not Consume Time

Freedom and security have always been uneasy together; the things that secure us tend to bind us down, and those that free us often feel like risks. We are meant to be free enough to really love God and one another, but true freedom can happen only if we completely trust in God’s ultimate care for us. And to really trust God, we must begin to relax our grip and ease our concern about all the lesser sources of security to which we have become attached. This can feel risky indeed.

Little in our normal life supports really trusting God. All around us we see bad things happening to people, and, at least on our terms, God may not seem trustworthy at all. Our culture communicates that truly putting oneself in God’s hands is superstitious, irresponsible, even psychotic. “In God We Trust” may be inscribed on American money, but the money itself usually feels more trustworthy. In this world of daily experience, Jesus’ words about the lilies of the field can sound naive, even dangerous. Few if any of us are able to follow Jesus’ call for trust completely.

Instead, we assume that trust in God should be only a spiritual ideal, wistfully and distantly respected, but impossible to apply in the down-to-earth conduct of our daily lives. True spiritual freedom, we maintain, is something that we can consider after we have established our physical and relational security in the world. In our culture, the three gods we do trust for security are possessions, power, and human relationships. To a greater or lesser extent, all of us worship this false trinity.

Gerald G. May, M.D., Addiction & Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), 32.

Let us be candid with ourselves. Yes, we are all idolaters. No one is exempt.

Further Reading: Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters by Timothy Keller (www.counterfeitgods.com)

Related posts:

1. Commitment and Freedom

Devdutt Pattanaik: East vs. West — the myths that mystify | Video on TED.com

A few things I appreciate from Pattanaik’s talk:

1. He pointed out the inevitable subjectivity each of us possess. This is one of the best insights postmodernism has taught us.
2. He pointed out how all our behaviors are ultimately formed by our worldviews, which are in turn made up of stories, symbols, and rituals. This is exactly the model N. T. Wright provides to help understand worldviews (Chapter 8 – Story, Symbol, Praxis: Elements of Israel’s Worldview, The New Testament and the People of God, Fortress Press, 1992)
3. He did not endorse either way of thinking (although you can still sense he has a slight bias towards the Eastern way of thinking), but in the end he challenged us to stop thinking in either/or terms, but integrate both in a holistic way. We need both modes of thinking.

A few things I disagree with him:

1. He dichotomized things too easily, seeing them in simplistic and dualistic ways. (Isn’t this exactly the Indo-Greco worldview he’s not able to transcend from?)
2. He grossly lumped the Jewish and Hellenistic cultures together as one without distinction.
3. He used Alexander and a gymnosophist to represent two entire worldviews. But are they truly representative of each worldview or culture? I doubt an average Indian, when faced with day-to-day pain and suffering, is able to see the world with such indifference like the gymnosophists; and an average Westerner, enduring the same frailties of the common life, can live with such bravery and courage like Alexander. Generalization and stereo-typing are always unhelpful.

Nevertheless, I think our world needs more of this kind of discussion and mutual-understanding, so that we can minimize the impact when the civilizations do clash.

As Christians, we also have to be aware of our modernistic ways of thinking, endlessly pursuing after isolated nuggets of so-called “objective and propositional truths” from the Bible, and instead return to the way how God has always instructed and formed His people — through stories, symbols, and rituals. Only by immersing ourselves in the biblical story, its symbols and rituals, can we then know how to think and behave according to God’s redemptive plan in the world.

大家所掙扎的，不外乎吃飯購物時，面對著千多百多款的選擇，感到無所適從，自責優柔寡斷。

唔想諗、唔想煩、唔想 commit，是大家的心聲。

自問我也可能是個患上了「選擇困難症」的人，因為我最討厭去到茶餐廳要從百多樣的碟頭飯揀一碟。我寧願冇乜得揀，今日 C 餐特價就 C 餐，快快脆脆落單，好過左諗右諗，樣樣都想食，被各樣美味食物的名稱以及我豐富的想像力誘惑得要死一樣。

我們這一代揀碟頭飯如是，揀手機如是，大學揀科選職業更加不堪。

揀不到不是最大問題。最大問題是慢慢形成了「跟風主義」，人說好便好，缺乏了自我思考審判的能力。

在這個物質豐盛（甚至氾濫）的社會裡，為什麼雜誌裡會有那麼多的「本週特別推介」、Top Ten Ranking、最 Hit 最潮最多人用的產品介紹呢？豈不是供應著這一代患有「選擇困難症」人士的一個「選擇捷徑」？

「既然呢個產品某某名星都用，我用實冇死啦。」

「呢間學校排名咁高，駛乜諗適唔適合啊，實掂！」

究竟這種現像的核心問題是甚麼呢？

是我們的審美眼光出現了問題嗎？世界上面的確有很多好的東西，但有很多是不能跟別的比較的。若我們硬要抱著一個「選到最好」的心態去比，便會出現「選擇困難症」。「人云最好」跟「最適合我」是兩樣的東西。

又或許是我們這一代自少父母甚麼都給我們選擇了，也沒有教導我們如何選擇，以至於當我們真的要面對人生眾多的選擇時，變得癱瘓 (paralyzed)。

又或許自少父母甚麼都給我們，任何事物隨手可得，並有自主權去選擇，毫無界限 (boundary) 可言。以至於我們根本不知道自己喜歡甚麼、不喜歡甚麼，想要甚麼、不想要甚麼，整個人變得 emotionally numb。所以「是但啦」變成了很多人的口頭禪。

我們這一代最需要的不是更多的選擇，而是怎樣認識自己，審視世界，並有智慧地從眾多的選擇中揀出最合適自己的東西。