My smarties colleagues!

As I come to work in my office too ....er er... or only arrive at odd
hours when no body's there or only when the security guard is
there... you really can't find me in the picture...

I am in the picture...just that you can't guess where I am.

The good news is, quite a number of my colleagues or schoolmates have graduated just THIS DEC, and have left our department already!!!
I am so happy of them, and am very proud of them. One of them shall work in around the world, setting up brain labs all over the place, and even in South Africa!!! Wow!!!

The other one has got in a Medical Doctor (MD) program and will graduate with a doctorate apart from the normal MBBS before he is 25 years old!!!
Another one got the Croucher Award... and the guy with the MD program... also got some large amount of scholarship!!

Wow!!!!!!!!!!

I am proud of them!
Well...I just study and work here, and barely be able to get things done, that sort of thing. I hope I can improve more. But I am happy to work with more and more competent colleagues!!

I wish I have more energy to face all the different challenges of my life!

Love has Poise

Love has Poise 有愛的人能自處

Love is not boastful, arrogant, or rude. 愛是不自誇，不張狂，不做害羞的事

Boasting is a way of trying to look good when we suspect we are not good. To get other's respect, reassurance, support, we create an image out of our symbols (things we wear, cars, the people we want to be seen with, the offices we try to win), to distort reality so we can grab our praise that we suspect we cannot earn.

Arrogance is an anxious grasp for power when we fear that we are weak. It is power without authenticity or authority. If we have authentic knowledge, we have intellectual power. If we have authentic leadership skills and a mandate to lead, we have power to lead. Such authentically based power is good. Arrogant people stride into prominent places; make decisions for groups and assume the others will follow. They use people as stepping-stones to power. The arrogant parent manipulates the child to feel powerful (psychological and moral power), look and feel good. Worse yet, the child is being educated not in love but in manipulation, and is learning that what counts are not what you are, but what you can do to get control of people.

Arrogance leads us to assume to be the Creator, a god, independent, self-reliant, and this leaves us empty at the center, as we are then attacked by fear and anxiety. We are worried that we lack the power to become what our pride makes us think we are. We can never get enough power to fill the soul's needs or enough to overcome the fear that we deserve less than we are getting. Arrogance causes rudeness.

Rudeness is putting people down in order to try to hold us up. Crude people have not learned the manners of society, but rude people are so anxious to stay upright he bruise anyone who threatens them.

All three result from a loss of balance that comes when we are empty at the center .

Love is the power of poise because it provides ballast at the center of our lives.

Humility , the opposite of arrogance and boasting., a willingness to accept the real relationship between God and oneself. It is the strength of accepting one's status as a dependent creature – an invaluable, responsible, creative person, but still a creature who needs the energy of God to exist at all.

Humility is the grace to accept oneself before God as a sinner, and to plead for and accept forgiveness. This self-acceptance in humility is blessed with the gift to acknowledge God as Creator and Savior. In realism we admit our private emptiness, so that the center of our lies can be filled by the Spirit of Christ. We admit weakness and claim strength at the same time. Realism relievs us of the need to boast and be arrogant because it frees us from having to fill our inner emptiness by others' praise or our own power. Our emptiness is filled by God.

A person who sets her heart on great things is high-minded . Sensing her own potential, she gracefully moves out toward achievement of good and notable things. She does not fear recognition or despise honor. Indeed, she likes what is truly honourable, worthy of honor, and so does not refuse honor out of false modesty. High-minded people also appreciate power, because there are many good things one cannot get done without power, seeking power to do good for others.

Love is not arrogant, but love can be high-minded.

Love has poise, the power to stand up straight. "Poise" originally referred to the weight placed in the center of a sailing ship for balance. By ourselves, without God, we are too light at the center, we boast, and become arrogant and rude in the hope praise from others and power over others will act as external braces to make up for lack of centered weight. Poise suggests security and grace and freedom from worries about stumbling and making a fool of you. It is God's love that gives us centered weight on the inside. It gives us poise not by telling us we cannot fall, but by assuring us that if we do he will set us right again . As the love of God keeps coming into us from outside, we can forget about our emptiness and move on toward others. As we realize that ourselves do not generate our power, God begins to fill us with himself and his love. As long as we love, the promise that gives us poise is sure: " God abides in us and his love is perfected in us" (1 John 4:12 ).

撮要自 已故牧師Rev. LB. Smedes之「愛在限制中: 在自私的世界中實踐無私的愛Love within limits: realizing selfless love in a selfish world. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1979. 」 Rev. Smedes was a retired minister in the Christian Reformed Church, a former ethics professor at Fuller Theological Seminary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_B._Smedes

Love does not seek its own

Love does not seek its own 愛不求自己的益處

Chinese summary of Rev Smedes' passage

I) "Love does not seek its own things."

That is, love does not drive us to get and keep what is properly ours - our property – for which we need not thank anyone. If we do not get these things, we are victims of an injustice. Justice is done when everyone gets what is coming to him or her. We seek justice when we seek "our own." We have justice when we get "our own."

Can we be loving and assertive?

Love does not move us to seek justice for ourselves. Love will drive us to move heaven and earth to seek justice for others.

Love does not cancel anyone's rights. But agapic love moves one freely to forgo one's claim on what one has a right to have. God's love does this to every person it touches. It comes as a power in life that moves us to pass up our chances to seize what belongs to us.

There is a way to cope with this tension which rec­ognizes the priority of self-denying love and also ad­mits the legitimacy of self-asserting justice.

1. Seeking our rights for the sake of others' rights. If I can help my neighbor get his rights by asserting my own, agapic love is on the side of asserting them. But if sacrificing my rights is required in order to help my neighbor get his rights, agapic love will move me to make the sac­rifice. Seeking your own rights is thus consistent with agapic love to the extent that doing so helps a neighbor.

2. Seeking our rights to fulfill our calling to stewardship. A second occasion for seeking our own rights goes deeply into the very reason we exist. we must sometimes assert our rights in order to fulfil that calling. We are born into the world with a job to do. And the job we have to do is the job of taking care of God's world and God's people. Agapic love moves us to be good stewards. Thus, whenever someone gets in the way of my stewardship, I must somehow remove that obstacle. I must demand my rights so that I can take care of my corner of God's earth.

3. Seeking the right to truth of what we are. We have an undeniable right to be what we truly are and to be known as what we are. What we are is the image of God. God himself is our model. He asserts himself by in­sisting on his own divine holiness. Holiness is God's zeal for the truth about himself. His revelation of holi­ness is a manifesto of his inalienable right to be known as the exclusive Lord of creation.

What are the guidelines for sacrificing rights?

1. We may not force other people to sacrifice their rights.

2. We ought not to sacrifice our rights if doing so would hinder the progress of rights for others.

3. Any sacrifice of our rights must leave us in a state to love effectively another day. Love is without limit, but lovers are limited. Each of us has a certain supply of energy and only so much time and power to expend it. Prudence will sometimes set limits to self-giving for the sake of effective love.

Love needs discernment / spiritual wisdom

Being willing to sacrifice our rights is one thing; know­ing when is another. Love needs the sensitive gift of discernment. Discern­ment is insight into the mixture of motives moving our own hearts. Love needs the gift of discernment to focus its drive toward others in helping service.

Discernment is an answer to prayer. Paul tells us he prayed that his fellow Christians would be "filled with the knowledge of his [God's] will in spiritual wis­dom and understanding" (Colossians 1:9). He was praying for discernment. Spiritual wisdom helps us decide when to speak and when to keep silent, when to act and when to wait, when to fight and when to surrender. Spiritual wisdom - fallible and subjective - is the power to know what is really going on when others are camou­flaging the issues. And it is the power to know what is really going on inside our own hearts.

II) "Love does not seek its own self." Love is the power that moves us to seek others. This being true, love appears to resist one of the deepest drives within any healthy being - the drive to discover and become one's own ideal self.

What is it that we seek when we seek ourselves?

1. We seek self-knowledge. We cannot be at peace with ourselves until we know who we really are, i.e., to know our own identity.

2. We seek to become ourselves. This is the goal of every person awake to his or her own potential.

If we' make our self the end, the ultimate goal, the final aim of our striving, we are in conflict with agapic love. Love does not seek its self as the living end. Instead love is the power that drives us to seek our selves as a means to being agents of love.

Love needs self-seeking

1. Agapic love takes a lot of energy. To be in loving condition for the rigors of agape, we need to be physically and spiritually fit.

2. Love must do its work now through the reality of our actual selves. Love cannot wait until we find and become our ideal selves. For this reason, our self-seek­ing must also take the form of a search for and an ac­ceptance of our real selves.

3. Love requires us to seek a self that is wise, discreet, and politic, so that it can do its work through us. Ef­fective love is as much an art as it is a good intention, and like all art, it comes with hard work, persistent seeking for our most effective selves.

Love gives us freedom from self-seeking.

The ideal self is an intolerant self. It will never forgive us for failing to be what we ought ideally to be. It becomes our demanding idol. But most of us are uncertain as to what our ideal self is really like. Is the ideal self the assertive self? or the sexy self? or the powerful self? or perhaps the self of moral virtue? Maybe it is a composite of all these. Unsure, we bow frantically to them all, being confused about our search, and deeply anxious to become all that his/her ideal self demands. It is the essence of what Paul called the commandment that promises life but kills us in the end (Romans 7:10), let the ideal defeat us, and force us into quiet despair and secret guilt.

Love liberates us from the idol of our ideal selves. It does not deny that there is an ideal self; it only refuses to move us to seek the ideal self as an ultimate goal. W ith the gift of love, we can accept our real selves, far removed from the ideal, and live lovingly through these limited and warped and blemished selves. It convinces us that God accepts our actual self in forgiveness and adoption as his children. God's love, then, shows us that our actual, blemished self is the only self that can be an agent of love.

Love liberates us from this idol by showing that the ideal self can and will be handled by God. Jesus Christ is the model of our ideal self; he is what we are meant to be. And God will lead us to that self in his own time. Love itself will give us the ideal self, love does not need to seek its own self as the ultimate goal in life.

Love's liberation allows us to regard our ideal self with a sense of humor. We can strive with God's help to be a better self, to become more of our ideal, our true, Christian self. We know that the only purpose for seek­ing our ideal selves is to become better at seeking oth­ers. And we, in love, can now seek others with our real selves. We can seek others the better, in fact, the more we leave the ideal self with God and let love move us the way we are.

撮要自 已故牧師Rev. LB. Smedes之「愛在限制中: 在自私的世界中實踐無私的愛Love within limits: realizing selfless love in a selfish world. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1979. 」 Rev. Smedes was a retired minister in the Christian Reformed Church, a former ethics professor at Fuller Theological Seminary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_B._Smedes

Love is NOT Resentful

Love is not Resentful 愛裏不計算人的惡

Chinese version

RESENTMENT IS YESTERDAY'S irritation scratched into the sensitive membranes of our memory. Any evil once done is an everlasting fact. We remember the hurts so that we ca! n enjoy the pain of yesterday over and over again. We keep it alive for the pleasure we can get from our resentment against the one who hurts us. We also enjoy feeling noble and worthy as the decent person who was wrongly hurt.

Resentment brings us deadly pleasures.

Resentment forces a neighbor to be and remain an enemy. As we insist on keeping score of hurts, resent­ment feeds our anxiety that we are behind in this game of ill-will and must catch up. Each one must pay for the pain he caused before he can face us as a moral equal. We insulate ourselves from feeling any obligation to re­member his needs. We frame that single wrong vividly, intensely, painfully in our memory. This is how resentment justifies our refusal to love by falsifying reality.

We want the offending person to remember the wrong as clearly as we do, so that when we finally even the score, he will be hurt enough to satisfy us. Resent­ment is really a painful desire that the other person feel a pain he knows he deserves.

Suppose that it was you who once caused hurt to someone, and that the person you hurt has kept the memory of that alive for years. He has woven a tangled web of resentment against you. You have felt it, obliquely and subtly but acutely. You felt his anger without explanation, rejection without confron­tation. His resentment has hurt you just as it has been hurting him. He lets your hurtful act fester in his mind; you let his refusal to forgive fester in your mind. Resentment in both parties make reconciliation difficult.

Love exorcises resentment.

Needless to say, agapic love does not shield us from hurt. Love is not a desensitizer. The loving person hurts, and he knows who and what caused the hurt. Love has the power to look cruel facts in the face, see them for what they are, even when aimed at us . Love does not blind us to reality or gloss over pain. But love's concern for the hurts of the one who causes hurt empowers us to forgive before we dig a channel for resentment in our memory.

Love alone has the power to release memory's grip on yesterday's evil, for only love is the power that moves us toward people without expectation of return and therefore with a great tolerance for hurt. The person with the power to forget is the person who can bring others around to doing the same. Able to start fresh for himself, leaving past history's confu­sion tangled, he can carry on Christ's own ministry of reconciliation.

Love is the power that drives us toward the other who has done us wrong because it is able to tear up every moral score­ card. This is reconciliation, and reconciliation is love's ultimate goal.

Love does not demand explanations and apologies or keep accounts.

Love does not take pleasure in remembering how much we have coming from people who hurt us.

For love is the power whose only direction is the help, healing, and salvation of the other person.

This is why love has the power to overcome resentment.

撮要自 已故牧師Rev. LB. Smedes之「愛在限制中: 在自私的世界中實踐無私的愛Love within limits: realizing selfless love in a selfish world. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1979. 」 Rev. Smedes was a retired minister in the Christian Reformed Church, a former ethics professor at Fuller Theological Seminary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_B._Smedes

Love is NOT Irritable

Love is not Irritable 愛裏不輕易發怒

Chinese version

Irritability is a spiritual readiness to get angry. Anger is an emotion, even a kind of passion. And it brings pain; anger makes us scream and sometimes cry be­cause of the pain. But anger is also energy. An angry person wants to tear things apart. Unlike sadness, which is heavy and immobile, anger pushes us into attack.

The basic cause of irritability is erotic love. Erotic love is the root of irritability because it is personal power generated by personal need. We reach out and strive for anything that promises to satisfy our deep desires to be complete human beings. This restless reaching beyond us is what erotic love is. Erotic love is the root of irritability because our pur­suit of fullness always falls short of the perfect ending. Our frustrated need for the satisfaction of being a fulfilled, complete person is the single, deepest cause of our irrita­bility.

Being irritable is not a sin; but it is the inevitable result of being a sinful creature trying to grow into maturity and fullness. But being irritable is a possible menace, for it robs us of joy and it can always spread into hostility.

Some things agapic love does not do for irritability

1. Agape does not disguise anger. We give signals to other people that they have done some­thing that deserves anger, but that we are too good to get angry. This gives us the luxury of expressing anger without the risk of having it thrown back at us. Disguising anger relieves other people of the re­sponsibility of doing something about our anger. But it forces them to cope with an irritable person, who will not let his or her anger be recognized for what it is. And the disguises behind which life is lived in painful anger only prevent us from changing the situation that causes the real anger, and makes us more irritable.

2. Agape does not unleash anger . "Be angry, but do not sin" (Ephesians 4:26). He may have been saying: "Do not disguise your anger, but do not let it roam the streets unleashed either."

3. Agape does not remove irritants from our lives. If divine love possessed everyone in our environment, we might be free of irritants. People irritate us by rubbing our sensitive egos. They ignore us when we need to be noticed. They remind us of duty when we want to have fun. People even irritate us by their love. Love is often put in clumsy hands. People push into our lives and cling to us with love when we want to be left alone.

4. Agape does not reduce irritability by forbidding anger. Agapic love does not overcome our irritability by persuading us that we should not be irritable. If we try love because we are commanded, we will only become the more irritable as people and prevent us from feeling loving. To forbid all anger in the name of love is as mistaken as forbidding someone to be irritable. Love does not make anger wrong. There are things in life that demand our getting angry at them. Not to feel anger at them would mean we are either insensitive to evil or afraid to feel anger. We would be less than human if we failed to get angry at pain and the loss of precious things in our own lives. Jeremiah was seething when he said, "I am full of the wrath of the Lord; I am weary of holding it in" Jeremiah 6:11). Jesus was furious with the Phari­sees.

What does agapic love do to reduce irritability?

Generally, love reduces irritability because Love has the power to turn the direction of our desire towards the needs of other people.

1. Agapic love reduces irritability because it meets our deepest need. There is no way to experience the power of agape without experiencing God himself. This is the point John makes persistently: "If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. . . . God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him" (1 John 4:12, 16).

2. Agapic love reduces the potential for frustration.

Agapic love dethrones self-satisfaction as the ruling monarch of our lives. Once satisfying our own deepest desires is less than our ultimate goal, love begins to reduce our irritability by thrusting our energies in the direction of the needs and rights of other people. Agape does not take away the needs that eros seeks to satisfy nor reduce the number of things that frustrate us, but we no longer feel the frustrations in the same way. A shift of concern from self to others reduces irritation.

3. Agapic love gives power to communicate anger. The power of love gives us the freedom to admit that we are angry and to express our anger constructively.

4. Agapic love increases gratitude. Agapic love is the power to overcome irritability because it is the power to see life as a gift. The world is a gift, a playground where we discover our very selves as gifts of God. The first breath of the morning, the chance to be healthy, the opportunity to work - all of it a gift from God! Gratitude is an antidote to irritability.

In sum, first, agapic love does not unravel a lifetime of irritability at once. The inflam­mation of the ego takes a long time to heal. Second, we need to get angry, and we need the ability for rage. Agapic love, in fact, will move us to anger at things that leave a person cold who is driven only by a need to satisfy himself. Things that do not touch us directly may infuriate us because they frustrate our brothers and sisters in their move for justice. With agapic love we will be given a new power for anger, but at the same time we will be amazed at our tolerance for annoyances that used to drive us up the wall because they blocked our way to pleasure and fulfillment

________________________________________________________________
撮要自 已故牧師Rev. LB. Smedes之「愛在限制中: 在自私的世界中實踐無私的愛Love within limits: realizing selfless love in a selfish world. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1979. 」 Rev. Smedes was a retired minister in the Christian Reformed Church, a former ethics professor at Fuller Theological Seminary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_B._Smedes

Love is NOT Jealous

Love is Not Jealous 愛是不嫉妒

Jealousy is ...
- the fear of losing someone
- the pain of being left out of the loved one's life
- a feeling of pain at losing touch with someone we love because he/she has been stolen away by someone else.

Lovers are jealous
Lovers are jealous because erotic love is born of need. Erotic love demands total possession, exclusive rights to another person., moves us toward complete fulfilment in another person. However, individuals need separation and independence from lovers as much as they need union with them. So, eros is always accompanied by some jealousy. Jealousy is felt in all forms of erotic love: romantic love, friendship, sibling's rivalry for parent's love, etc.

Agapic love is not jealous.: not a seekiing, grasping, holding love, but a giving love, a love that lets go. It is not the love of need, but the love of power. It is the power to move us toward another person with no expectation of reward -- not even the reward of exclusive loving.

Jealousy hurts.
Jealousy is the pain we feel when our role, our position, is threatened by someone close to us. Envy can stimulate us to try harder. Jealousy stimulates us only to resentment of the person who does better. Eg we envy our teacher's knowledge, we are jealous of our classmates who got straight As when we get Cs.

God is jealous
But jealousy is not in itself a sin. God is a model of jealousy. "I the Lord they God am a jealous God" God wants to be what he is, the only God of all the creation. He cannot shares his people with false gods, fabricated illusions. But he will share his people with other people. God feels no pain when we share our love for him with a fellow human. God is also not jealous when men and women give themselves to each other. He created us to give ourselves, heart and body, to others besides himself; and he is glad.

God's love moves Him to let others be themselves. God wanted the world to be, to be beautiful and powerful in its own way. He did not need to create a photocopy of himself like Narcissus. He allowed them to be themselves, like God and yet very different from him. God does not monopolize existence.

Agape transcends jealousy without destroying it
Love is the inner power to be happy when someone else shares your friend; to rejoice in the superior talent, or power of someone close to you. Indeed, love is the power to be glad when another person shares a part of your loved one's life that you cannot share.

Love as the power to share persons originates in a God who could give his Son to win many and who would love each other. Such love knows that sharing a friend is not losing one but only making the circle a little larger.

To be loved with this love and to share its power is to overcome fear -- even the fear of loss, even the fear of being left out. This love enablese us to transcend jealousy.It overcomes fear as it overcomes self-pity, the insecurity and suspeicion of erotic love --> the power of sharing without being threatened.

Where agape enables us, we will rise above jealousy, but we will not eliminate it. God knows that we must live by erotic love: to follow the longings of our soul & body for something beyond ourselves to satisfy this need. We will be jealous in this finite, sinful life as long as we love erotically. As long as we love with both eros and agape, we will live in creatiave tension with jealousy.

From this tension creative compromises can come.
Within marriage eros demands exclusive sexual love; this demand rises fromthe heart of marriage. Every spouse has the right ot jealousy when the hearat of marriage is being threatened. Agape refelcts boundaries and limits in life. But where the partnership is not in fact threatened, Christian love of agape is the power to share a husabnd or wife with another.

Jealousy becomes the more cruel the more intese are the the expectations of eros and the threats to its fulfilment. If we have nothing else in the world to live for but our lover, we are vulnerable to the worst fits of jealousy.

Agapic love is the power to diminish the pain of jealousy because it keeps us from expecting too much from another finite person, not give our souls to idols, idol of ideal person. Agape keeps eros from expecting everything in this life. It further diminishes the pain of jealousy because the power to share, we also learn to be thankful that someone else can discover and to add on what you lack in meeting all the needs of your loved one..

Agape is the power one can transcend without eliminating the pain of jealousy. Let jealousy be a tinge of hurt that reminds us how much we still love and care, be an exciting revelation to the other person that he or she is loved enough to cause pain; let it be a warning system that protects a marriage by reminding us that we love within limits. But the power of agapic giving and sharing will prevent jealousy from building fences of self-protection against any sharing of love and loved ones.

Agape is the power of sharing, ie, love is not jealous.


撮要自 已故牧師Rev. LB. Smedes之「愛在限制中: 在自私的世界中實踐無私的愛Love within limits: realizing selfless love in a selfish world. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1979. 」 Rev. Smedes was a retired minister in the Christian Reformed Church, a former ethics professor at Fuller Theological Seminary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_B._Smedes

Love is Kind

Chinese summary of Rev Smedes' passage


LOVE IS A POWER that moves us to be kind.
Kindness is the will to save; it is God's awesome power channeled into gentle healing.
Such kindness may be soft, not weak;
tender, but not feeble;
sensitive, but not fragile.


Kindness is power
Our world cannot understand that love is power and that kindness is the work of that power.
Kindness is the power that moves us to support and heal someone who ffers nothing in return.
Kindness is the power to move a self-centered ego toward the weak, the ugly, the heart, and to move that ego to invest itself in personal care with no expectation of reward.

Realities about power
Human power is the energy within us to affect persons outside us. Power is neutral, it can be harmful, or creative and helpful. God's power is always the energizer of help, for God is love. Human power is always mixed -- helpful and destructive.

Power is exploitative when it is used to diminish the power of other persons (eg, slaveholders). Exploitative power is at work whenever we maneuver other people to do what we wish them to do in a way that cheats them of a genuine choice. Exploitative power is inevitably unkind.

Servant power is human power used to increase the power of a weaker person. The best example is parents nurture a child into an independent personality - the child can exercise his/her human power to decide, to will consistently, to stick with promises, to demonstrate affection in the midst of tension; the power that gives one freedom to bow before the Lord and accept His love. With this direct expression of kindness in servant power, we are free from anxiety about our own weakness, free to be gentle, openly caring.

Collegial power is the human power we experience along with another person. E.g. mutual and beneficial criticism between scientists, student-and-teacher. It is edifying power, the power to build, to nurture, to add to the strengths of persons.
Too often, collegial power within a Christian community is replaced by negative criticism; the temptation is strong to serve each other only by ministering to other's weaknesses. Collegial power is increased when we minister to each other's strengths, encouraging what is strong ot grow still stronger. Church collegial power is possible through the shared Spirit. Several centers of human power encounter each other in love with the result that the power of each person is increased by the power of the others. Collegial power - bracing, challenging, and critical -- is compatible with kindness.

Exploitative power - unkind, depends on the weakness of others; enhanced through exploitation of the weakness of others.
Collegial power - consistent with kindness; depends on the strength of others; enhance our power by integrating others' power into our life
Servant power - direct expression of kindness
Kindness - comes directly from the power of love

Kindness dares to be weak
The ultimate model of powerful kindness is God. He does not need to exploit, to be stimulated by competition... God is self-generating power of selfless, giving love.
God has the power to be indiscriminate in kindness (Luke 6:35). "He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good.." (Matthew 5:45).

Kindness is love's readiness to move close to another person in order to heal, to enhance the life of another person. It takes power to be kind because kindness is risky.

The only way to keep kindness alive in a world where obvious power is prized most is to come back to the cross of Christ, where divine power healed the world by becoming weak within the world. The kindness of Christ's cross looks like weakness because it is tender, vulnerable, asks nothing, gives everything, and stops personally to the weakest, and ugliest. This utter weakness was utter redemptive power. It is divine power.

Love moved God to become a person like us. Love led Him, as a human, to use his power wholly as servant power. In this ultimate weakness, infinite power was set loose in the world. "The weakness of God is stronger than men" (1 Corinthians 1:25) Ultimate kindness is ultimate power. It means that it takes great power to be free enough to be radically kind, to become weak with the weak in order to heal them.

Kindness is intelligent and tough
Love's kindness works within the limits of life's hard realities. We have limited resources. Might a kind person, by mismanaging hsi resources, actually be unkind and unfair? Kindness must be used with wisdom within a structure of justice and fairness. Kindness to one is limited by the fair claims of many others.

Love is always kind, but kind acts are not always loving acts. eg, the rich politician may stand with the poor in order to get their vote. We do few things from hearts of pure kindness. But this does not the edge off the power of kindness. Paul only says that love is the power that moves us in the direction of kindness. As we are moved by love, we will also be moved to be kind.

Kindness is always a move toward healing. Kindness sometimes needs to be very hard/tough instead of being gentle in order to heal (eg forcing an addict to go through withdrawal symptoms). Kindness means to withhold what harms as well as give what heals. We must calculate the means most likely to achieve the most healing end.

In touch with God, then, we will be kind.
Justice must be the framework, and wisdom must give the insight to tell when kindness is just. We will be kind only imperfectly, for we are not ready for perfection. But influenced by God's love we will have the power to be kind. We will feel the stirring of a love powerful enough to make us willing to be weak. And we will discover that being able to get close to another person in order to heal is our greatest strength.



Chinese version: 愛是恩慈


Summarized from 撮要自 已故牧師Rev. LB. Smedes之「愛在限制中: 在自私的世界中實踐無私的愛Love within limits: realizing selfless love in a selfish world. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1979. 」 Rev. Smedes was a retired minister in the Christian Reformed Church, a former ethics professor at Fuller Theological Seminary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_B._Smedes

Love Suffers Long

Chinese summary of Rev Smedes' passage

Love is an uncommon power to cope with common suffering.
Suffering is having to endure what we very much want not to endure.

The sufferer is a prisoner, stuck with unwanted misery.

The paradox of longsuffering is that we must choose to suffer long. To suffer is to be a victim; to be long-suffering is in a sense to be free.. Longsuffering is when we make a decision for what we do not want, choose to live indefinitely with what we hate. This is the paradox that makes longsuffering a creative art of living: the power to be a creative victim.

Longsuffering is not passive, it is a tough, active, aggressive style of life. The power of affirming and creating life in the midst of suffering.

The source of power is divine love.
- --> Agapic love is the liberating power that moves us toward our neighbor with no demand for rewards.
Erotic love, on the other hand, has no power for longsfuffering. Eros is desire. It drives us toward something because we are at a loss without it. Eros reaches out beyond one's lonely self becasue alonesness hurts. Eros is always the passion to overcome suffering, but it can be frustrated, betrayed, burned out, eros is destined for suffering, as Eros cannot wait.

There are limits to longsuffering.

Love's power make us able to suffer long. We don't know when it ends, it is long but it is not endless. God draws that line to stop when it is time.

Love is your power to suffer longer than you think you can. But only you can tell (from God) when you ought to stop. Do not lost contact with love, before you decide to stop suffering. For the rest, keep attuned to the Spirit and keep your eyes open to what is really going on in your life.

Marriage is a special case because martial longsfufering is done within a covenant. Covenants are broken because people live by eros alone and turn their backs on the power of agape. Agape is the power to suffer the pains of frustrated and rejected and betrayed erotic love, and it is the power to suffer them long. How long? No one can draw the line for others. Maybe when I turn off suffering for the sake of my pleasure, I turn it off too soon.

Longsuffering is not acceptance of evil.
To suffer evil takes patience and courage: to bear with it even though we reject it. It is a power developed within reality.
To accept evil is to capitulate/affirm to it that it is good in order to escape its horror. It is a denial of reality.
We are sinners, but God accepts praise from us in the midst of evil. He will have no praise for evil.

Suffering long has a positive purpose.
Love is the courage to love life and be glad for it.
Love is the courage to discover that life is not completely tied to the precious goods we have lost or have not yet found.
The model of longsfuffering love is God himself. Why does hi not let us finish ourselves off with all our sins?
Love suffers long so that time can be created for redemptive powers to do their work, so that justice can be fought for without hasty and needless violence, so that reconciliation may be possible.
Love suffers long so that suffering can finally cease..

And when love gives us the power to suffer long, love also gives us the power to see reasons for rejoicing while we suffer.

Chinese version: 愛是恆久忍耐

Summarize from L. B. Smedes. Love withing limits: realizing selfless love in a selfish world

撮要自 已故牧師Rev. LB. Smedes之「愛在限制中: 在自私的世界中實踐無私的愛Love within limits: realizing selfless love in a selfish world. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1979. 」 Rev. Smedes was a retired minister in the Christian Reformed Church, a former ethics professor at Fuller Theological Seminary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_B._Smedes

My conversion (simple)

• Most families here are cultural Buddhist, like mine. After 16-17
  years of Catholic school education, unexpectedly, I made a sincere
  convertion to Tin Toaism, and became a vegetarian. I faced great opposition from my family as it was not a common religion but I persist. The eating habit was a family nuisance.

Catholicism - I had always agree with Catholic teachings but had not punch hard into my longing for TRUTH. Looking back, I had not get in the depths of it, I guess.

Tin Toaism brought me new insights about life, and the trivility and ephemerality of existence. Good deeds and extensive customs of it are taken up by me as my vow of committment to the religion.

• However, I truly felt loved by Jesus, NOT that I have been a good gal, NOT that I have done or will do anything. He forgives past, present, and even future and unawared misdeeds of mine. This forgiveness = full acceptance.

I do not need to earn it, like being a vegetarian, or by virtue/deeds/going to church.

This is truly profound for me.

• And after one of my biggest struggle in my life, I convert to Christianity.

• The year of full-time study in an Evangelical Seminary was my happiest time of my life. I was only then appreciate the true meaning and love of a fellowship: to receive others' acceptance and help. I have been too used to giving, and can trust to receive.

• My Faith fuels me with happiness to make my life quest. I wish
  everybody find out and be with their source of love

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Cultural Exchange between East-West on Adolescence

Hi Shela

Nice meeting you via email. I am a year 1 student of the PsyD program taught by Dr Zelm, and in my early thirties. Currently I am doing research with patients who first experience psychosis in a teaching hospital. I am very happy to have got your email so soon! I was intended to email you yesterday but Dr Zelm said wait a while until your professor has announced about this first.

The idea of talking to real people from a different background on the other side of the world is very exciting indeed!

How would you describe / consider the impact of (i -> iii) in your adolescence?
i) your intellectual growth: any important decision made during your adolescence that you still feel a great impact now?
ii) your parents
iii) your peer (white and black Americans)


Instructions from Dr Zelm:
"Below, you will see that you have been paired with a USA “partner” for this assignment. All students are in the PsyD program, and most are in their first year. They are also taking Lifespan Development on-line with another instructor. They use the same textbook but they have different readings and assignments. They are of all ages (25 to 55 years), level of clinical experience, ethnicity (Caucasian, African American, Asian) and many live far from California, so they are a fairly diverse group. We ask you and your USA partner to initiate e-mail contact during the week of 6 November and to discuss your adolescent experiences, based on your assignment from last week. Both classes have read the same article on the stages of adolescence, and both classes completed the same assignment. "


a. What did you learn about the adolescent experience of your partner?

b. What similarities and differences do you note with your own?

c. If possible based on what you have learned from your partner, consider what might account for these differences, such as: nationality, age, ethnicity/race, gender, socioeconomic status, family relationships.

d. Please comment on this experience – interesting/not interesting, useful/not useful, fun/stressful? Any other comments?


My first partner is an Indian American who was born in India and immigrated to America with her parents when she was one year old. She was raised in America and grew up with Americans peers (White and Black) and had very few Indian peers.

Our parents were quite involved in both of our lives from childhood through adulthood. She experienced this importance in her strong attachment with her parents. She also experienced this importance in her choice of interest and subjects to take during her adolescence. She would rather have a good relationship with her parents and so after a few fights , she gradually grew out of it without their support. Her parents later on felt quite guilty of not being supportive of her in her early teens about drama.

My parents have also been very involved in my life from childhood through adulthood, and in much similar ways as hers: during my adolescence, in my choice of interest and academic subjects that had great implication on my future career. The key difference was that I experienced this as their authority as parents over me as their adolescent child, rather than a sense of strong attachment like my US partner.

I also did not fight much and maintained a harmonious relationship with my parents as much as possible, however, I continued or persevered with my choice quietly, secretly, and delayed its expression until years later. After from those 2 areas, and about religions, my parents did give me much freehand as well regarding choice of friends, and how to spend my time, and can happily tolerate separation for the sake of better education during my adolescence like my US partner.


Both of us were not rebellious in our adolescence, even though due to difference reasons, and this may be due to our cultural background that stress a lot on the importance of family in one’s life. I guess, for my US partner, she is getting the benefits of both cultures, a tradition of close family-ties from Indian culture, and the willingness to overtly express love and affection between family members in the American culture, and that forms her basis of strong attachment with her parents.

For me, my Chinese cultural background formed the basis of me trying to keep a harmonious relationship in the traditional power structure of a Chinese family: parents have the authority as seniors in the family, and children’s role is to obey. That was why I did not rebel overtly with my parents. However, as emotions or affections were not usually expressed between family members, I experience more distance and hierarchy in my child-parent relationship, and so less attachment than my US partner.

I have never realized my lack of attachment with my parents in the midst of such harmonious and trusting relationships within my family. Not until I have this assignments and when I talked with others. I got this impression too from my comparison with my other US partner too. And that is why this has given me a profound impact. I have to re-think again about the impact of my few struggles with my parents and also I have never realized that I am in a child-parent hierarchy inherited from my cultural background and that it does have an impact on my emotional feelings and relationship with my parents.


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My second partner is of English and Irish descent and grew up in a rural community’s lower-middle class family.

I shared with her independence from peer pressure because we both felt not being part of our peer groups, only for different reasons. She felt indifferent to her peer’s existence and like more in her private world. I, too, stayed in my private world, part of it like her because of not being understood, did not share our peer’s interests, like popular music, but I was more because of the alienation I felt from my peers who were mostly in the upper socioeconomic class. My US partner did not felt the impact of social class in social relationships in US.

My alienation also came from the superiority in academic achievements of my peers who came from the upper class family. While there was neither little competition nor challenging work involved in my US partner’s school years, academic merits meant a lot to the students at my secondary school. I felt left alone while my US partner felt indifferent to her peers. I developed my own reliance system, struggling hard to accept my weakness academically but that I had other strengths in more subtle ways, and gradually stayed out of the competition among my student peers. Some of my peers built up strong friendships with me because I came from a different part of the world from them and so there was no obvious competition between us and we can stay quite independent of each other and yet trusting and harmonious with each other.

The difference in our puberty experience is firstly physical, and secondly cultural, I guess. I just happened to have a late, smooth and physically insignificant puberty as compared to my US partner. Diet and genes may contribute to that difference. But the impact of the physical change on our psychological well-being might be very different if I were to go through her traumatic change.

It could be that I came from a cultural background that stress a lot on academic merits and personal achievement, competitively, and where physical appearance, although important to any adolescent, can at most come second, after achievements. I might have less of an impact on my self-perception given my social background and expectation. Personal excellence did had a high impact on my peer relationships during my adolescence, much more than my US partner. I guess this might be better understood as the difference between rural and cosmopolitan upbringing, plus that Asian parents usually put more emphasis on academics than American parents, than purely cultural.

One very nice surprise in this exchange is that I run into somebody who loves Ballet as well. I also danced over 15 years, quitted very reluctantly and felt such a lost of personal identity and emotional attachment too when I quitted it. I have never shared with anybody regarding this lost, as I have always thought that it was a bit obscure and sounds obsessive to me. We wrote at length about the lost and the emotional imbalance we went through. I also found running as a substitute too. In recent years, I tried Flamingo dancing, and she has recently restarted Ballet. We felt more at peace with some kind of dancing even after we had quitted for over a decade now. It brought me such a great relief regarding my lost of Ballet as I can talk with her without the fear of being obscure or what. Only when I put this in writing and have a listening ear, an echoing person, I experience a relief that I had never known of. I never know that I still feel the lost of it, not until I talked with her.

Thank you for the very insightful assignment. It was indeed unexpectedly insightful for me.

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