Yesterday, while clearing files off my old computer, I came across a poem I wrote. It is a love poem and I feel like I am destroying my reputation. But alas, got to keep it real. Enjoy and tell me what you think about it.

To me

To me
You are a little bird singing in the morning
That awakens the heart with purpose
And enjoins with my soul in praising its maker

To me
You are the desert flower in heat of day
That calls the passing traveler
To pause and say a prayer for his beloved

Aye, that you might see your own beauty
Reflected in the oasis pond
Dressed in the finest of garments

-Kwasi
2007

This week has been awesome. I am smoothly settling into my new place. I am getting along well with my roomies though I barely see them at home. For instance, I see Cory more often elsewhere than at home. I had coffee with Soji again but this time my car didn't get stolen. Instead, we discussed his Phd research with is very similar to a project I am working on. Praise God for dropping him into my lap. In the midst of our technical talks, he told me about a sermon he heard at MPPC about Ash wednesday, which is today by the way. Ash wednesday is especially celebrated in the catholic church as a day of atonement. It also coincides with the first day Jesus went into the desert for 40 days to be tempted by the Devil. When the priest uses the ashes to make a cross on your head, he intones "From dust you were made, from dust you will return". As I was telling Leah T. the other day, in a 100 years from now, or for sure a 1000 years, everything we do or accomplish will have turned to dust. Very little we do on earth is really more than ashes in the long run. Even our righteousness (if its self-righteousness) will be worth nothing. Ash wednesday reminds me not to take my life too seriously because all turns to dust at the end. But it does remind me to take God very seriously. This is why the day is set aside for atonement. As I get older, I see more and more how messed up I really am. Even worse, I realise that due to the selfishness in this world, Its hard to be truly loving without being prepared to lose everything. He is showing me that without Him, I really don't have any hope. I thought I was a good person because I didn't chase money, women or drugs. I thought I was good because I didnt cheat (except in games ;), steal or intentionally harm others. I thought my good church boy behavior will get me into heaven. But now I realise just how bad I am. The things I used to look up to; education, church community (I thought the world of church people), people's approval, my sense of righteousness, were all idols and are now ashes in my mouth. All of them have brought me so much pain and trouble because they blocked me from the true source of all happiness which is God. My trust in Education lead me to become prideful and a workaholic and made me feel like a failure when i burnt out. My belief in the lie that church people were or should be perfect prevented me from truly connecting with people at point of their need. My need to make others happy lead me to me neglecting to take care of myself. And my pursuit of righteousness led to self righteousness which made it difficult for me to authentic and to forgive others.
In short, I aspired to good things and those good things became bad. All I really have left is my relationship with God. Everything else I have is suspect. I have no idea whether it will turn to good or bad. But this i know for sure, it will turn into ashes. Oh Lord, I give you my everything, please ransform it for eternal purposes. Happy Ash wednesday everyone!

This week was crazy hectic, fun and challenging. I do not remember a more seesaw week in my life. The trip to Tahoe last week was off the hook. It was incredible getting to know YAF people better. It was awesome getting to spend time with loving people. I also went downhill skiing for the first time in my life. It was a blast. I definitely plan on skiing on the regular. If only Tahoe wasn't so far away. Sigh. After averaging 5 hours of sleep a night, I was very tired during the week. I barely did any work on the color filter project. However, I found out that Soji did is thesis on EM waves and has the expertise I need to pull of the project. Praise God, I am so glad I met him. I moved in with Cory and co. on wednesday. As much I liked living in sunnyvale, it feels good to move. I feel much freer now. We also had incredible developments at work. While not everything is official, I believe we are much closer to our goal of fully developing our technology. I then spent this past weekend in Monterey with Cory, Kristen, Hung-Tzu, Alex, Annie and Kim. We had a great time celebrating Kristen's birthday. We ate great food and had a great dance party and explored tide pools.

So one might wonder, why was this such a seesaw week? I think its probably due to the lingering effects of Asemia's death. It has made me extra sensitive to people. I feel my emotions much more strongly. My empathetic ability has also shot through the roof. I almost literally feel the emotion others are feeling when I am talking to them. This leads to being either super elated or downright negative depending on the person I am talking to. For instance, the ski trip was intense because everyone was excited and that excitment almost wiped me out. Cory and Kristen were very happy and I couldnt help but share in their joy. Chuck and Keith were quite relieved by the good news and again it calmed me down. However I also felt a negative aspect of human behavior - competition. Competion is the desire to beat someone else in one aspect or the other. This can be great in games and things that dont matter. On the hand, it can pretty destructive when applied in daily life. People tend two have these two views in life. One view holds that we are here on earth to succeed together in life. Our goal is to all defeat the challenges that the world presents. People who hold this view love to help others achieve their goals and defeat life's obstacles. The second view measures success by how much better one is, compared to their peers. Everyone sort of falls between these two schools of thought. When Asemia died, I lost my desire to compare myself to others. I asked myself; when I die, how will it matter whether I was better or worse than anyone? When I leave, I will leave alone. How much wealth or knowledge I gained wont matter. What others thought of me wont matter. The only thing that will matter is what God thinks of me. This leads me to truly focus on enjoying life. And the way I do this is by overcoming my challenges and helping others overcome theirs. Its by encouraging others when they falter and letting God's love to humanity flow through me, knowing that I will be refreshed by that love as it makes its way through and out of me. To bring home the point, God open my eyes to see how competitive or cooperative others were. The insecurity I saw in competitive people was sad. The joy I saw in cooperative folks was awesome.

I am competitive. I definitely want to succeed in life. But my opponents are not my fellow humans. My fight is against systems of sin and oppression in our world. My fight is against injustice, disease and hatred. These are much worthier opponents and together we can take them down. But if we compete with each other, we will all lose to these forces. As it is said, united we stand, divided we fall.

Visions of Mortality

I am grieving. Two days ago, my Dad sent me a text. My cousin Asemia had just died, in his sleep. He was only 24 years old. My heart broke. How could he die so young? My mind started wandering; no more playdates with Asemia; no more will I hear his laughter and see his ridiculous antics; no more will I be able to guide, love and cherish him. Arghh!
I am so sad. My heart is so sorrowful. I spent the last few days in denial but I anger is setting in. I dont believe in fairness in life so I doubt I will remain angry for long.

However, there is beauty in grieving. I find myself cherishing people more. Moving ahead in life is no longer as important as cherishing the people that I have. I called all my siblings the morning i heard the news. I believe I have treated everyone I met with more attention and love than usual.

When you come face to face with mortality, you can't help but put more value on the important things in life; God, family and friends. Without them, life is empty.
Grief also leads me to reexamine my life and evaluate it according to what is truly important to me as opposed to what society expects. As I was crying out to God this morning, He showed me a number of things.

First, He showed me that by holding on to society's standards of love and righteousness, I was blocking His ability to pour out His Love and Righteousness to the world through me. Its not that I have to stop being loving and righteous. What He was saying was that I had to let go of my own standards of love and righteousness and trust that He will take over that area of responsibility and that He will do a better job than me.

He also showed me how due to my childhood upbringing, I had become a perfectionist. You see, my mum had an interesting technique of raising us. She never believed we, the children, had done enough unless we were the best. If I went to her and said "hey mom, check this out, I was second in my class", her response will be "why were you not first, you should study more". Tiger mom for sure. While this always made me strive for more, it had a very dark side to it. What my mom was projecting unto me, was the idea that if you weren't the best, then you wouldn't make it in life. She herself is trapped in that same mentality. A mentality that developed because she was raised by a mean stepmother who always tried to put her down and make her believe she was never good enough. So even though my mom loved us kids, she still made us believe we weren't good enough because she never believed she was good enough. My father did a much healthier job of encouraging us to do better but my mum always found it hard to consider our results as excellent. Looking back, our academic results where excellent. Our extra-curricular activities where stellar. Our behavior was exemplary but we never heard these words from our mother. Her response was, this isn't perfect. Hence I am now a perfectionist and God is trying to help me see that I can't be perfect. He is perfect. I can be below average, average, above average or excellent and He will still love me.
With an awareness of his love, I can dial down my personal expections from perfect to excellent. Then to good. Dial it down further to average. Continue to do this until it reaches zero, the perfect spot. Because, when I am nothing, then God is everything. Its going to be a long journey I definitely need His grace. By dying to myself everyday and taking up my cross, I can achieve this. Zero is perfection because in Zero, all that is left is God. Amen

My life is definitely getting more and more interesting by the day due to more car drama. I might be able to write a book about my car troubles if they continue at this rate. First of all though, let me recount the day's events.
I woke up way too early today at 7:45am with only 5.5 hrs of sleep. Conrad gave me a ride to work this morning. Liam woke up just before I left home and he looked so miserable, poor kid is in a lot of pain. Yay for vicodine though! I went into the cleanroom to assist the morning team but their work was so boring to me that I had to leave. I spent the rest of the morning looking up dance songs for a party I planning to throw. I really hope my boss doesn't read this blog. But just in case, "boss, I really had nothing else to do :p" Keith dropped me off at the Avis to pick up my rental car. Which I promptly crashed. Actually it was both I and the parking attendant that crashed it. It is really hard to say since noone was in the car when we released the brakes. Well since, the attendant released it, i will say that he crashed the car. Fortunately, the manager agreed with me and they gave me a chevy impala instead. God be praised! I met Paul Taylor for lunch and we had a great discussion about YAF. I found out that we have the same personality type ENFP as well as a strong T trait. No wonder I thought he was so cool :). I went back to work and came home and had dinner with Donna and Liam. Donna brought food for us since she heard Liam had accident and she is awesome like that. I went to a book discussion of Every man's battle at PBC. There was some really good sharing there. I learnt a lot. One thing in particular was that we men are always searching for intimacy. We tend to look to women and sex for it. However only God can provide that intimacy we need. That was profound. I always thought my wife will provide the intimacy that I needed but apparently not. I have therefore decided that I will look to God to provide me the most intimacy. Its kind of wierd for us men to think of Jesus as our bridegroom. May God help me with that. Afterwards, I, along with Ken and Andrea helped Jen assemble her Ikea furniture. I am so tired now. My bed calleth. I hope tomorrow is less adventurous :).
Kwasi

Yesterday was my first day at work after my vacation. Liam let me borrow his car since he was working from home today. He broke his collarbone and his on vicodine. As such he can't drive, so we are now both dependent on each other. I need a car and he needs a driver :). Nice how God works these things out. Anyways, I took his turbo-charged subaru to work and it was a fun drive.

It was good to see my boss and coworkers again. Luckily, it was a nice relaxing day with little work so I spent most of the day chatting. On a high note, I had a faith conversation with my boss. I think his faith is growing. Its awesome since I have been praying for it on and off for so long. Hopefully he will become a great christian CEO. He did share on cool thing with me though. He told me the definition of great faith is to regard something as good as done. That really encouraged me hold on to certain promises of God better. I should not doubt, I should assume that those promises are as good as done and develop an attitude based on those beliefs. Keith, my coworker bought me both lunch and dinner. He is one of the most generous people I know. Its quite amazing how much he cares for people. On the flip side, he can passionately dislike you if you mistreat him. I think he might be an ESFJ personality type which is very rare in men.

I went to the foundation experiment afterwards and Pastor Danielle gave a great exposition on the diversity of the early church. It was made up of hebraic Jews, Greco-roman jews and gentiles from many nations. What a mess? I wonder how they stayed together. She also explain to me that while we can be assured that the only way to know God the Father was through Jesus Christ, we shouldnt assume that only Christians go to heaven. She said the text strongly implies that fact but it doesn't say it explicitly. For all we know, God gives every sinner a chance to join him in paradise after they die. I pray that God in His great mercy will give everyone a great chance to share in the awesomeness of His love. That said, there is nothing like the sweet fellowship of God in this earthly life. I won't trade anything for it as I am sure that nothing satisfies except for God.

This means that perhaps we could evangelise to non-christians by saying that "hey look, we dont know if you are going to heaven or hell, that is for God to decide. But if you want to have the abundant and fulfilling life on earth, Jesus Christ is the way." As the apostle Paul said "Nothing we obtain in this world compares to the surpassing value of knowing Jesus Christ".

After the study, I went to play basketball at 24 hr fitness. There was a team there that had 2 6-6 guys that could dunk like crazy. I couldn't wait for the opportunity to guard one of them in a game. When i got the opportunity, I was able to make his life quite difficult :). His team still won but I was quite happy i was able to take away a lot of his shots. He still got the dunks in though :(.

I am now trying very hard to sleep but I can't due to all the endorphins i got from basketball, and I have to wake up in 5 hours, sigh!

W00T!If feels good to write again. Life
got really busy the past few years so I stopped processing things in writing.
Anyways, yesterday was one of the most eventful days of my life! Whew, it was
quite epic! The day started normally. I woke up and first thing I did was
to check if City Team needed me to help wash their vans. While volunteer work is
not the first thing I think about when I wake up, it happened that my friends
were signed up to wash vans there that morning. Naturally, I wanted to join them
but alas, I wasn't needed. Cindy J then called me and told me she was going to
stop tutoring and become a full time interior designer. That totally made my day
since I am sure she will become quite wealthy knowing how good she is. If life
becomes hard one day, my plan is to move back in with Dan and Cindy J (fingers
crossed) :). After talking to Cindy for a while, I decided to drive over to her
house to hang out there. Mellissa joined us later and we started talking about
having boundaries and being able to take care of yourself. Cindy explained it to
me using an analogy. She said, your physical/emotional/spiritual self is like a
garden with a gate. You have to always tend your garden before you tend others
otherwise your garden will die. You also have to man your gate to a prevent
others from coming in to mess up your garden. You only allow good things in so
that your garden remains great. This is awesome because from now on i dont
plan on allowing anyone to mess with my garden. I am so excited about this.
Later that evening, Dan came home and we all went out for eat ethiopian food.
Yum yum! After dinner, I met up with Soji for coffee in East San Jose. I yelped
for a good coffee place and cafe 288 came out on top. We met up there only to
realise that it was not a typical cafe. Anyway it was still a lot of fun getting
to hear Soji's experiences in the US. I left the cafe close to midnight only to
realise that my car was gone. I was in total disbelief! I immediately called the
towing hotline to see if my car had been accidentally towed. Apparently not,
they told me it had been stolen. In fact, the even asked me if I had a 1993
honda accord before i told them the type of car I had. Apparently, thieves love
the 93 Accords :(. Soji and I waited till 1:00am before the cops showed up to
take a stolen car report. The cop was a fun guy though so it was easy to make
light of the situation and have a good conversation about stealing cars.
Apparently, you can use a fork to start my car. Go figure! Soji dropped me off
at home and I had a good night sleep.