But I started to think about what it really meant to give a
testimony. Most people talk about what their life was before they met God or how
they met God, but mine is more about what has happened to me after I met Him
and my journey so far. If there is one way I can say that describes my life so
far is that God sure does have a sense of humor. For me, I was never really
able to empathize with that saying until I really started to look back on my
life and really examining the different things that has happened to me.
I grew up in a very typical Asian family. My parents immigrated to the U.S. in the early 80s from China. I was born on a snowy winter morning
on March 17th of 1986 in Reno, NV. Throughout most of my adolescent
life I had no idea who God was or any concept of Him. My parents are pretty
atheist when it came to all things religious. The concept of praying to a
higher being or an afterlife was ridiculous in their eyes because for them, the
only person you can rely on is yourself.
In sixth grade I moved from San Jose to a small town called
Burlingame and that was where I first started going to church. My best friend
Anthony, who I had just met in gym class at the time, invited me to go to
church with him and his mother. Like I said earlier, I had no concept of God so
I had no idea what was in store for me. Being the new kid in town, I was very
bored on most weekends so I figured why the heck not. My first day at church
was quite the interesting one. You see Anthony and his mother attended an Assemblies
of God church. For those of you who don’t know what the Assemblies of God is, Assemblies
of God churches are very charismatic Pentecostal churches, who believed in the
manifestation of the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues quite often. So you
could imagine my surprise when the pastor’s wife started yelling out a foreign
language I never heard before during service and then the associate pastor
yelling out something else in English right after. I have never been so
confused in my life. However that didn’t stop me from going to church and I
eventually started going to youth group with my friends. That summer my youth
pastor gave us a chance to accept Christ in our lives and I didn’t know quite
what that meant but he put it this way.
“If
you accept Christ and later in life you find out that this was all fake, you
lose nothing. However, if you find out it is all real, you gain everything”
So I figured what do I have to lose? And then began my
“Christian” walk.
Throughout most of my junior high and high school career I
was what I called a ‘twice-a- week Christian’. Basically I was a ‘good
Christian boy’ on Wednesdays for youth group and Sundays for church. Every
other day of the week I was just like anyone else. In high school, I started
doing a lot of underage drinking. It wasn’t until my senior year that I really
started to take my faith a little more seriously.
Then came that one fateful summer night… I was taking one of
my best friend’s home after a typical night youth group. I pulled into his
driveway and waited for him to get out. He didn’t move. My first thought was uh
are you going to get out or what? Do I need to get the door for you? What’s the
deal? I was tired and I had work the next day so I just wanted him to get out
so I could go home and knock out. Just as I was about to say something he
finally spoke up. He asked me how long will we keep kidding ourselves. How long
do you think we’re going to last as Christians in college if we keep living
like the way we do. We know God is real but we don’t treat our lives seriously
at all. My first thought was speak for yourself man! I am perfectly fine. But I
knew that was a lie. I started to seriously ponder the way I lived my life up
until that moment. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that if I didn’t do
something that day, my faith or walk, whatever of it was real, would’ve just
disappeared in college. So that night, July 23rd, 2003, my friend
and I rededicated our lives to God.
However that wasn’t the end. It wasn’t long until I found
out college gave me whole new set issues I had to deal with. During my freshmen
year, I started going to InterVarsity but I just didn’t feel very comfortable
there. I remember seeing AACF when I was at my freshmen orientation but for
some reason it I just kept thinking it didn’t seem legit to me. All the other
Christian fellowships had interesting names like Campus Crusade, InterVarsity,
and Epic. Asian American Christian Fellowship, that’s not a name, that’s a
description! Anyways, in my 2nd year @ UCR I started going to AACF. Didn’t
really want to at first but the only reason I did go was because I really liked
this girl. As I started to make friends in AACF, I for some reason gravitated
towards a certain group of people. You see our Double A at UCR had about 100
some odd people and that meant a good amount of cliques and a very clear split in
the dynamic of students. There was the party crowd and the non-partiers. I
think you can assume who I naturally was attracted to. It wasn’t before long
that I went back to my old ways and ironically enough; all of my party friends
were from AACF. I continued to live a lukewarm life where I did ministry for
AACF but would go out with my friends almost every week. Again it was my senior
year that I finally decided to tone it down and really start taking things more
seriously. A few of the older AACFers who I really looked up to, talked to me
about what I was doing and for some reason it really spoke to me. I knew that
life after college was going to be very different and needed to shape up.
Throughout that year, I had this feeling that my time was
not done at AACF. My staffer Warren at UCR, asked me if I thought about
staffing for AACF and my first thought was HECK NO. Are you crazy or something?
That’s the last thing I want to do after college. But like I first said God has
a sense of humor because look at where I am right now!
As I continue to discover this thing called being an adult,
God is always giving me new challenges and definitely doesn’t sugar coat any of
them. Earlier this year, on January 18th, 2012, I suffered a minor
heart attack at the age of only 25 years old. When I say minor, on a scale of 1
to 10 it’d be a 2, but it was a heart attack none the less. Doctors were baffled
that someone my age had one. It was a 1 in a million chance and I was that 1. I
don’t think my life was in serious jeopardy at the time but it really got me
thinking. People say all the time that life is short and for most of us, we
finally get it when it’s something that hits so close to home.
God continually reveals to me crazy things in my life, paths
I didn’t think I’d go on and people I may or may not have wanted to meet. I
don’t know what else is in stored for me but I do know that it will be an interesting
ride and I want God to be my driver.
