Carbon Copy Copyrighted

Yesterday I had the decidedly dubious honor of being asked how responsible I was. It took me a while to actually formulate an at least coherent reply, and even that I felt wholly unsatisfied with. But after having some time to piece together my thoughts, I feel I’ve reached a more workable answer.

Before I could even attempt to re-answer the question, I first tried to figure out what my personal definition of “responsible” was. I eventually settled on this one: “the ability to prioritize and adhere to said priorities.”

In that case, the next step (lol I hate this writing style, I feel like I’m writing a philosophy paper or something droll like that) would be to solve what exactly are my priorities.

As a Christian, one’s priority should be to, well, put God first. To put God first means, according to Matt. 22:37-39: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

In layman’s terms, giving my all to God, submitting my will and my life to Him, should be my priority. To be responsible thus is to follow God with all I’ve got.

To answer the original question of whether I’m responsible or not: do I recognize that I should be doing that in the first place? Am I giving my everything for God?

To recognizing God’s sovereignty in my life: yes. God taught me the importance of putting him first last year.

But am I really giving my everything for God? Well, this is where I—and everyone else—has to be honest and say nope. I could be giving a lot, but even near perfection is simply not enough to cut it in terms of being responsible. Even a 99% is a failing F grade, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). God is a jealous God and He wants all of us. Ultimately, I have to humble myself and realize that only with His help can I be responsible, that the next line in Paul’s letter, Romans 3:24, that I am “justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus,” is the only way I can live a life of Godly responsibility.

So, am I responsible?

By my own efforts? Not in the least bit.

But if I let God control things? More than just merely possible—it’s already happened.

Reminder to self: when God brings something to your attention the first time, it’s probably not a good idea to dawdle around and wait for reminder number two. It usually comes at a greater cost.

Though I am (pleasantly) surprised by the peace I’ve had this week.

Everyday, one needs to acknowledge that we’re all simply messed up on the inside, very messed up indeed. It’s just that some of us do a significantly better job hiding it than others. And doing a better job hiding our misdeeds is no credit to your bank account in my opinion—in fact in some cases I would venture to say that it means you lack guts to admit you’re messed up and are too prideful to admit your wrongs.

Reason why I’m bringing this up is due to a slew of statuses I saw on my Facebook newsfeed today by many of my Asian friends about, well, that touchy little topic we like to keep closeted off called racism. Angry posts about racist comments regarding the tsunami and a Youtube video by a certain not just slightly annoyed UCLA girl to be exact.

I’m not here to hammer anyone, to make any overarching statements, or to even say that I’m correct. All I wish to point out is this simple fact to everyone: we are all broken. We are all failures. We all do wrong things. We are all full of misconceived perceptions. And we are all racist.

Come on, seriously. As a Taiwanese American, I can attest to the fact that we’re full of prejudiced comments and ideas too. The amount of prejudice that comes out during an average conversation at the dinner table at my home scares me sometimes. If you just look deep enough into your soul/heart/mind/whatever you want to call it, I’m willing to bet my life’s income that you do possess a few perhaps unsettling preconceptions about certain age groups, ethnic groups, or income brackets.

I say this not as if to tell you all to live with it. To the contrary, I say this with as much brotherly love in Christ I can muster even as I’m feeling saddened by what’s going on in the internet once again as hate speech clashes with counter-hate speech. This attitude of us-versus-you leads to no good. My first two years of college are an example of my attempt to follow that mentality with terrible results.

Especially as a Christian, our first reaction should not be to get angry. Remember that God is love, not hate. Love is patient and love is kind and slow to anger. Let us pray, let us apologize, let us forgive, let us have dialogue with love, not hate. Instead of partisanship and hatred, let’s try to reach out to each other.

I completely acknowledge that we may seem to have little in common on the surface. I’m not saying that America is a melting pot or anything like that here—to assert that would be foolish and I like the fruit salad metaphor much better anyways. But I believe that diversity is possible within the bounds of unity, that the two are not mutually exclusive. It’s hard, sure, but if we push ourselves towards the right mindset, towards one of openness and kindness instead of automatically seeking to defend ourselves against attack, a new page can be turned.

With that in mind, first off I wish to apologize for any spiteful comments and any excessive behavior on the part of myself and anyone else who wishes to apologize with me.

Secondly, as a Christian I forgive you, all who have fired barbed, racist comments—whether intentionally or unintentionally—towards others of a different heritage.

This week God showed me my biggest strengths and weaknesses, including aspects he had previously made known before. May he continue to guide me and to reveal to me how and why he created me wonderfully as his child and help me to seek wholeheartedly after him in whatever I do, not turning to the left or the right for lesser things.

As the Charlie Hall song goes:

Give us clean hands
and give us pure hearts
Let us not lift our souls to another
Oh God let us be
a generation that seeks
that seeks Your face, Oh God of Jacob

I was gonna buy myself (and a friend) some electric guitar strings online today but turns out I had two sets in my room already, haha! Thank God for giving me the idea to first check if I already had spare strings before trying to purchase them :D

thecottonjin asked: hi. who is this? :)

Daniel Yang.

I actually don’t remember who you are either…lol did you start following me first or was it the other way around…we probably met through Roots I’m guessing?

A note before I begin: whoever reads this blog probably will be more socially conscious than the people who actually need to hear this—mostly our parents—but I feel motivated to write about this anyways.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been away so much so I didn’t notice this until now, but coming back this Christmas break I’m suddenly seeing a lot of Hispanic immigrants in the area. In the past we all were used to seeing them bumming around in front of the Home Depot on De Anza Boulevard, but now they seem so much more pervasive. They’re working in the fast food chains, they’re hired for contracting jobs, and—whoa—now the Chinese restaurants and supermarkets.

It’s not a bad thing. I personally find this new element of racial diversity (in an admittedly dull place with only Asians and Caucasians) intriguing and something we should welcome. After all, it’s part of the American idea of equality and opportunity for all right?

But some days, it hurts. It really hurts.

Today I was at the fish market section of a Chinese supermarket and an argument broke out. I’m not too sure about the details, but what I saw was a middle-class Chinese dad cussing out a Hispanic employee there, then the employee giving him the finger, then the dad grabbing a fish and throwing it at the employee, leading to him being nearly thrown out of the market.

Perhaps it isn’t racial tension. Maybe it’s simply a case of a socioeconomic class divide, between the poor (the Hispanic employee) and the rich (Asian dad gone haywire).

But regardless, it’s sad to see such flare-ups in the community. Putting it into perspective, as my parents try to do re-modeling and talk to contractors about the construction market, I’ve heard a lot of, well let’s just say negative comments, being tossed around concerning the recent influx of Hispanics in town.

Not only that, I also am getting the sense that such sentiments may well exist between the more affluent older generation of Asian immigrants with their college degrees and steady jobs and newer arrivals from the Far East who come over lacking that sort of educational background and are regulated to menial labor, sometimes directly competing with Hispanic laborers for work.

I really don’t know where I’m going with this blog post, except to say that I feel that something is simmering. Something is simmering out at the supermarkets, at the construction sites, outside the Home Depots and Lowe’s, at the backroom restaurants.

My sincere hope is that this issue dies out with time, just like how now Caucasians in our area have accepted us Asian Americans (remember how a decade or so ago allegations of “white flight” flew about?). 

But for this tension to pan out into peaceful coexistence, we need to get into the right mindset. Even if you’re against amnesty or alien cultures moving into our “cherished” Asia-town, the reality is that these new immigrants are here to stay and will become a permanent fixture of the community. Trying to push them out will only make life for everyone worse. For the sake of making our livelihoods easier, we should just try being at peace with them.

Or if you can’t agree with that, at the very least can we not resort to chucking dead fish at them?

So I just spent the last hour listening to Third Day’s new album Move, downloading music from a newer band called Tim Be Told that I was surprised to find out had Christian roots, and reading the Bible (crunching through Luke 13 right now) instead of studying for my Chinese midterm tomorrow. Lol

It’s time to take a break.

Not necessarily going off into the woods or driving out to the countryside for a weekend, not that. No, for we all know that God can be found anywhere, even in the darkest of places (Furious Love? :D)

So for the next 40 days I’m planning to, God willing, embark on a 40-day period slated for pursuing God. It’s something similar to what I did this summer—someone suggested I go and take out all secular music and video games from my life for 40 days and instead replace it with God time.

I’m posting this not because I want attention or praise or anything like that. I’m posting this for I need accountability, for oftentimes the very things we choose to fast are the things that we desire the most, and that theorem holds true in my case this time around.

The next 40 days are the hardest of my semester probably, given that I have several major research papers due for my classes and the end of the fasting season will coincide with the beginning of finals season. But that’s exactly why I need Him all the more in my life, not less—because if there’s one thing I’ve learned this last year, it’s that with God all things are possible, and without Him nothing is.

Basic rundown of the post…please pray for:

1) Keeping faithful to my commitment of no video games* and secular music for the next 40 days

2) Me replacing those times with God, not using it for other seemingly important concerns like studying, hanging out

3) That I will do this with a humble and willing heart

4) That God will reveal Himself to me through the course of this on a daily basis and after the fast too

5) Love, just love…

*For my Gtown friends, the video game portion of the fast is only when I choose to play by myself. I’m still up for playing Halo (I guess we can term this corporate/community gaming?) with you guys if you want to (:D).

You know what’s funny? Ever since this summer, I can’t listen to certain bands anymore.

For example, I’ve tried repeatedly to listen to Maroon 5 (one of my fav bands) but each time I can only get through a few minutes of it before I shut it off as I find myself unable to stand the lyrics.

It’s really weird. I never paid attention to lyrics of songs really, choosing to listen more to the instrumental composition of those pieces, thus glossing over content potentially contrary to what I guess might be God’s will. But now suddenly those words are popping out at me.

Coming off my experiences this summer, I’m definitely listening to a lot more music from the Christian genres/the CCM “ghetto (as one music critic phrased it) than before, though that doesn’t mean I’m not listening to secular music still.

It does mean, however, that suddenly there are things that I can’t listen to anymore without feeling turned off.* Interesting. I wonder where this will lead me.

Now back to drawing that cartoon that’s due in half an hour :D

As I listen to some Oasis—secular yes but I guess God isn’t telling me to stop listening to that yet.

*Don’t take this note to mean that Maroon 5 is bad or listening to secular music is outright horrible. As the Bible says/as what we know as Christians, some people do need different standards. What causes one to sin doesn’t tempt in the least another. What soils one won’t necessarily make unclean another person.