God’s Footsteps

Our friend, Emilia, shares a beautiful story of her struggles with school and provision and how when she surrendered everything to God, he transformed the situation and provided a miracle.  Through constant praying and petitioning, she saw God make what was impossible for her into something possible. 

Reblogged from: http://fro1yo.wordpress.com/

As a little girl, I had three dreams: 1) to see snow 2) to go to Disneyland 3) to go to school in the US. Silly dreams huh? But all three have come true despite the fact that all of them seemed impossible at that time. Why, do you ask? Well, I was born in a middle class family of 5 (my mom and dad, my sister, my brother and I) in Indonesia. We lived in a three bedroom apartment that my uncle owned after we moved from another uncle’s house and before that, my father’s family’s house (there’s a longer version of the story, but I’ll save it for another post). My dad worked as a manager of a bottled-water company, and earned a meager salary (equivalent to $500/month – today’s currency) – so you see the problem right? There’s no way that I can go to school in the US with my own power (or my dad’s money for that matter).

However, I never stopped dreaming. I went to school at one of the better catholic schools in Jakarta. I was proud to be there (since kindergarten), my mom wanted me to be there, and my sister was also there… so I had no intention to ever change school. Nevertheless, when it was time for me to transition to Junior High, my father made me apply to another school. Not only it is a Christian school, it is super far – 25 miles away from my house, but it also costs a fortune – so obviously all the kids who go there would be rich and snobby (in my mind). The school was offering scholarships for students who could pass their multitudes of exams… so I thought – no harm done if I were to apply and try. That would make my dad stopped bugging me.. and I could just say that I’d like to stay in my old school if I were to be accepted.

I got in.. and got the full scholarship – I was going to deny the offer, however, a silly incident changed the course of my life. I lost the receipt of my uniform athletic shoes from the Catholic school and would have to face the horrible experience of meeting the infamous scary PE teacher. I dreaded that so much that I told my dad I wanted to switch school after my first day in middle school…[click “Read More” below to continue]

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Bad Romance

God can do all things, even redeem events from our past.  When you give Jesus everything you have, he gives you everything he has…

It had been about a year since my breakup but I still felt bad when I thought about it.  The hurt and embarrassment were still there and the fear of getting hurt like that again was constantly in the back of my head whenever I went out of dates with other guys.   I’ve had breakups before and although I was sad and hurt initially, I would usually recover quickly.  The guy and I would work things out and we’d both make a concerted effort to be good friends afterwards.  However in this particular case I had my first taste of bad romance. 

We dated only briefly, about 4-6 months I think.   We were never boyfriend and girlfriend.  I think that was what made me sad.  Although he liked me, he didn’t like me enough to want more and it was pretty much implied in the beginning, but I was extremely foolish (and not to mention full of myself) because I thought  I could change his mind.  I did my best to learn about his likes and interests so that I could be all things to him.   I hid my true feelings from him so he wouldn’t think he had the upper hand but I suspected deep down he knew what was really going on.  When I finally came to terms that the relationship needed to end, he beat me to the punch and ended things on the night I scheduled a dinner so that I could end things. 

That night at dinner he said although he had a great time dating me, he needed to end things because he met someone else who he thinks could be the one.   I lost it for a little bit and said I felt used and led on because he knew how I really felt but let things drag on because he was self-centered.  Then I stopped for a bit and after a few minutes I regained composure and said it made sense to end things and that I wished him and the new girl the best.   

We stopped talking since that night.  I went through a healing process of grieving, relying on friends, reading self-help books, and doing everything and anything to keep my self busy so I wouldn’t have to think about what happened.  Those things didn’t work so I sought God.  I prayed for specific healing in areas of the relationship but I never fully gave everything up to God.  I came to terms with the truth and repented my sins (how I was a willing accomplice) but I couldn’t help but feel bad whenever I thought it.  Finally I changed my prayers and began to surrender the relationship, the breakup, and the current situation to Jesus.  I didn’t know what to ask for so I just prayed that his will be done in it.  God put it on my heart to pray forgiveness and blessings over this guy.  My heart was changing and the memories were getting less painful.  I thought this was my closure until I received a phone call from him.  Out of the blue he called to ask how I was doing and how he wanted to get together.   Since I didn’t pickup this was all on voicemail.  I sensed God wanting me to talk to him but I dragged my feet and put off making a decision for a few days.  He called again and left another message.  I finally caved and called him back.  It was the first time we talked in over a year.  The conversation was brief and we made plans to have dinner.  He was in Los Angeles and I was in Irvine at the time so he did the gracious thing and offered to meet me at 8pm on a weeknight.  A small part of me celebrated when I learned he had to sit in two hours of traffic to get to Irvine.

I prayed and surrendered the situation to God and braced myself for what would happen next.  To my surprise he asked me why I was hurt and if there was anything specific he did wrong because he wanted to make things right with me.   At that moment I knew God was redeeming my bad memories of the relationship by giving me a new ending.  I was finally getting the closure I needed to move on.  My experience that night taught me the depth’s of God’s love for us.  He has nothing but the best intentions for us and that if we were to trust him and we give him everything, including those shameful and broken parts of us, God is able to turn those things and turn them into something exceedingly and abundantly better than we could ever ask.   

Go Green

I got to know God really well from a very humbling experience.  A few years back he had asked me to quit my job and I remembered panicking at the thought of not having an income.   I remembered reading Joshua 1:9 and sensed God was speaking directly to me with the verse:  “Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” I had read the bible numerous of times and have often been critical of characters who were weak in faith like the rich young ruler, who refused to sell off everything to follow God.  I thought that if I were in his place I would have whole-heartedly given away everything because I had experienced God so intimately.  I thought I loved God more than the world but I soon found out I was no better than the people I criticized. 

I didn’t want to quit because I had a good position with a good salary in a bad economy.  I was so scared because I wasn’t prepared for what would happen afterwards.  I remembered asking God to give me peace and clarity about this decision but I just became more and more confused.   My emotions were all over map.  I felt peace one day and then had anxiety attacks the next.  I became so confused that I wasn’t sure if it was God asking me to leave my job.  So I began praying differently.  Just like Gideon, I asked for a specific sign so I would know it was God speaking to me.  I prayed, “Lord, please help me because I’m so lost and confused.  I don’t know left from right and up from down.  Please tell me clearly if you want me to quit my job.  Please give me a sign.  Please…please…please help me…like put something in my chair at work so that I know it’s you.  Please let me know if it’s a green light to go.”  Files were usually hand delivered to me or left on my desk.  Rarely, if at all, was anything dropped off on my chair.  At the time I didn’t know God would answer tangible and specific prayers so I figure I would ask for the impossible so that I could continue to keep my job.

A few weeks later I almost fainted when I found the Business 2.0 magazine in my chair titled “Go Green”. Not only does no one ever leave anything in my chair, but God had literally given me the “green light” I had specifically asked him for.  There was my answer: quit your job.   

I know what I had to do but I was too scared to do it.  I couldn’t handle all the insecurities that came with being jobless so I hid from God.  I stopped reading the bible and I stopped praying all together.  I was laid off a year later.  I thought I got want I deserved but to my surprise God blessed me.  He gave me a large severance package and bonuses that more than cover the number of months that I was unemployed.  He took care of me.   Instead of punishing me for not having faith, Jesus loved me to a point of gentle repentance so that I would come back to him.  It was humbling to get undeserved grace.  I repented, God forgave me and we started over.

I wish I could tell you that I am at a point where I can give up everything for God.  Walking in faith is still a struggle, however by God’s grace I am improving.  I am learning to trust.  I guess for me it’s not something instantaneous, rather it’s more like a process—-steps in faith.  And it’s by God’s grace I am able to see his unconditional love and devotion for someone like me despite my shortcomings.  He has every reason to not love me but he still does.  It’s because of his faithfulness our relationship still works.  Even though this isn’t one of my proudest moments, I’m grateful it happened because I got to see deeper into who God—someone worthy of leaving a job for.  

UPDATE: Can Prayer Wake Up Someone from a Coma? YES.

The more I find out about Jimmy’s story of healing, the more I realize how God’s hand was truly on his life.  On Saturday night, I took Nikko’s invitation to go to a fundraiser for Jimmy’s medical bills at Palms Cycle on Venice and Motor. 

As I mentioned in the last post, I felt that God had a plan for the fixed gear biking community - that they would hear the story of Jimmy’s miraculous healing and that their hearts would be convicted for the Lord.  I remember God putting that on my heart, even before I found out that Jimmy had woken up from the coma.  So as I parked my car across the street from Palms Cycle on Saturday, I stopped to pray before I went in.  I prayed “God, I’m here because of you.  Whoever you want me to meet tonight, send them to me, make it happen.”

So I walked into the back lot behind Palms Cycle, not knowing what to expect…[click “Read More” below to continue]

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Can Prayer Wake Up Someone from a Coma? YES.

I felt somewhat foolish trying to pray for someone who fell into a coma, until God heard our prayers and woke him up.  I’ve learned my lesson.  Don’t ever EVER underestimate the power of prayer.  Our God is the God of the impossible.

About a month ago there was an alleycat fixed gear bicycle race here in Los Angeles that some friends of mine were racing in.  Towards the end of the race, a participant named Jimmy was near the front of the pack, racing down a hill, when he wasn’t able to slow himself in time (a lot of fixie guys ride brakeless - it’s a macho thing).  As he sped down the hill he turned onto a road right in front a big truck that wasn’t able to slow itself.  My friend Zoe, who was ahead of Jimmy in the race, said he heard a “huge crashing sound” and that it “sounded like a car accident” of two cars colliding with one another.  Zoe didn’t know much about what happened to the kid afterward, but from what Zoe heard, the guy’s back and both legs were broken when the truck literally ran him over in the middle of the street.

Zoe first told me about the accident a few days after the race, when my roommate Ezra and I were riding together with the Westside Spokemen (a fixed gear cru) on a Tuesday night.  My heart immediately sank for the guy (whose name we didn’t know at the time), but more than grief I was immediately filled with conviction.  Conviction that I was supposed to pray for this guy for some reason I couldn’t really put my finger on.  As we rode across the city that night, I couldn’t get this guy and what had happened to him out of my mind…[click “Read More” below to continue]

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Saved by Grace and a Phone Call

“No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.” - 1 Cor. 10:13. 

How real are the promises of God in our lives?  When God promises that we will not be tempted beyond what we can bear and that He will provide a way out, does He really mean it?  Our friend C shares below a brave testimony of how God completely fulfilled this promise to her in her life:

I wasn’t initially going to write about sex. All sorts of thoughts ran through my head - what if this gets posted under my full name? What if my parents or my guy friends see it?  Shouldn’t I, as the child of missionary parents, write about something “unique”, something not experienced by almost everyone? And maybe I will - next time (I certainly have more than enough issues to make more than just one post). But for now, this is what God has laid on my heart to write about.

I grew up the child of missionary parents and grandparents. I spent my childhood either in a foreign country as a missionary kid or traveling around the US visiting Christian friends and churches.  You could probably say I’m about as Christian as they come. I didn’t date in high school, and I came into college pretty confident in my ability to resist romantic and/or sexual temptation.

My first two years did nothing to prove me wrong - secure in the certainty of my faith, I turned down the non-Christian guys who came my way - even one or two who were close friends whom I was drawn to- and as my crushes on Christian guys came to nothing, I decided that God probably didn’t want me to date in college (I received an actual conviction of this first year, but unfortunately it didn’t stop me from having crushes). By the time third year came around, I thought I had it down. I wasn’t going to date in college, in all likelihood, and even if I did it would be a Christian guy.  I wasn’t worried too much about non-Christian guys because clearly by this point I was strong enough and experienced enough to know how to handle them - hadn’t I done it several times already?  I was exactly like the young man “devoid of understanding” of Proverbs 7 - “passing along the street near [the harlot’s] corner, taking the path to her house”. Ignorant, confident.

And then someone entered my life - let’s call him Tim. We met in an unspectacular manner - I joined a new on-campus organization and he was one of the other members. I wasn’t on the look-out for romance, and for some reason I also labored under the delusion that since I didn’t expect and wasn’t looking for it, it wouldn’t appear. At the first party the group held, I noticed that Tim seemed nice and reasonably interesting,but that was it. That night, however, when I went to leave, I looked up as I was putting on my jacket and noticed that Tim was watching me. A little frisson of excitement ran over me - the guys who’d liked me in the past were, for the most part, good friends and didn’t treat me in a special way, and so get looked at by a stranger in a way that says “you are beautiful and sexy” was not something I was accustomed to, nor something I expected…[click “Read More” below to continue]

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What Do You Look Like in God’s Eyes?

We as people have a tendency to look at ourselves with the most critical, hurtful and hateful of lenses: our own eyes.  I started to realize this on my own road to growth and change, that the harshest critic of who I was, wasn’t any person I’d ever met, any disappointment or obstacle I’d faced in life, but was merely the voice inside my own head.  That familiar voice, that almost all of us face at times, says “You are not good enough.  You have not achieved enough.  You are not worthy to be loved.”

I was reminded of this today because I have a strong, gifted brother in Christ from my bible study that God has a real plan for, but who has doubts in who he really is, what he’s capable of, and what he’s called for.  God just showed him in a real and tangible way how much he is truly loved by a miraculous healing he experienced yesterday and then shared on Facebook.  I, personally, was wowed by his story, and was impressed at his faith that allowed him to be supernaturally healed.

J, as I’ll call him, had been suffering hearing loss in his left ear since December 2008.  He first lost his hearing back then for five weeks when he used the wrong kind of rubbing alcohol to try and clean his ears.  Over the next year, his hearing would come and go, but it was never quite right.  Because he couldn’t hear properly, he had lost the ability to sing, or hear himself correctly.

Yesterday, as we were studying the word in the afternoon, our pastor Jaeson prophesized that someone’s hearing would be restored at the worship gathering we were having in Korea Town that night… [click “Read More” below to continue]

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“Everything Came Back to Me!”

Our friend Esna, an aspiring musician here in LA, sent us an incredible testimony about answered prayer and God working in her life that we wanted to share:

Two Friday nights ago (Jan. 22) I was out with my friends and I parked my car on a yellow loading zone knowing that it was ok to do that after 6:30pm. By the time I got back to my car around 2am, it wasn’t there. I immediately started panicking not knowing what to do because it had never happened to me before. I started calling a bunch of people but they weren’t answering and I decided to call 911. They told me that I should report it as a stolen vehicle. I was hoping that my car had just been towed, and I kept calling all the tow places near that area, but they said they didn’t have it. Two of my friends ended up coming to pick me up and I had to spend the night at my friend’s house.

The next morning, still in disbelief, I called the tow places all over again only to hear that they still didn’t have my car.  At this point I was realizing all the things that were in my car. The most important to me was my guitar, a classical guitar. It’s not an expensive one, but it was the first guitar that I ever owned and the first guitar that I picked up and tried to play and figure out chords on. It was full of sentimental value. I wanted to keep him forever. Second, was my diary. I went to a missions trip with my work (a musical choir where I choreograph) to Beijing and that’s where I started to write in that diary so it had a lot of memories written down. Then there were other things like my rainboots, clothes, sleeping bags, and things like that.  All of it was gone.

I was without a car for three days. I kept thinking about all the things I had to do in the upcoming week: auditions, photo shoot, music video shoot, short film shoot, work etc. I couldn’t get over the fact that because I didn’t have a car my life was in shambles. But it was in these three days that I finally took the time to talk to God. I had been too busy thinking about things that I had to do that I wasn’t spending any time with God or giving him thanks for anything.

I’m pursuing a career in entertainment and recently things had been going really well for me. I now realize that this was a way for God to slow me down and make me realize what is really important at the end of the day. I realized that God is the ultimate provider, not me. He showed me the goodness in people which I was starting to believe wasn’t there. People offered to buy me a new guitar and even help with paying for a new car. People were offering rides and even offering to lend their car to me.  God was providing in the midst of what I was going through.

Now during this whole time people were praying for the return of my car (which I didn’t find out until afterwards).  But their prayers were completely answered because the police finally called and said they had found my car.  Incredibly, it was returned to me in one piece, not a scatch.  And my guitar and all my other belongings were still in the car!  EVERYTHING came back to me.  It was a miracle. 

Prayers were definitely answered and I was reminded once again of the magnitude of our God. He cared for me so much, that he broke me to realize that I need Him. If I didn’t go through this experience, I would’ve fallen into arrogance and probably strayed away more and more.

I’m thankful and more mindful and humble of the opportunities that are coming my way because of all this madness. :)

Coda to this amazing story - here’s a video we found of Esna performing one of her songs on that favorite guitar that was lost, but came back to her through prayer: