Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, How hard it is for a person to change! (I feel stupid already for what I said just now because it is too obvious, too trite for the words to be even uttered.) And "born again"?  How elusive an idea, how utopian a dream, how unfeasible a proposition! I hate this rain and wind.  I absolutely detest driving in the dark in this rain and wind.  It could have been a much more reasonable affair if people are to be reasonable about their own life and others', to not dress in deep dark colors wearing headphone and sometimes thumbing their phone while on the road. But I can't change even my own kids.  It is not fashionable to dress bright.  It is pathetic to wear a flashing light.  I hope they don't look at their phone but I doubt my hope.  There's always something coming through the phone that they have to answer to.  How does one jump out of what is expected of him and look at life anew? The world is killing them softly if not fin...

Dear Eugene, This morning: " The bodies of 26 teenage women and girls have been found in the Mediterranean, Italian police said. " Were they tortured, sexually abused?   Does it still matter, now that they are no more?   Who is going to make such non-matter matter again?   Who is going to speak a word for them now that they are silenced? When did it happen?   When I was holding up my pious hands singing songs in church?   When I was articulating my sound theology out of my pizza breath on Saturday night?   When I was watching some Chinese Rocky movie for the umpteenth time with my family on Sunday night, followed right after by some ultra-HD nature "documentary" that tells of the same story of survival-of-the-fittest, over-eaten, over-talked, over a hill that I knew not the purpose to climb but did it anyway? The 26 teenage girls did not survive; I did.   I guess that's the story.   I guess I should be happy I came out on the winni...

Dear Eugene, What is the biggest lie of religion?  You are a pastor, a "religion practitioner" in the eye of the world; you must have an answer or two for this question, I suppose? I think the biggest lie religion tells us is that once we are "in", once we have god--or, more like, god-ideas--in our pocket, we could stop asking questions (and hence keep giving answers). Summer is the travel season.  Everyone looks forward to one's next "get away."  No Christian I know ever asks, But Jesus has never "gotten away" from his tiny backyard turf during his earthly life...how did he then find himself?  He didn't explore or experience enough of life to know enough, feel enough, live enough, didn't he?  How can such a provincial existence say or mean anything to anyone but his own petty, parochial self?  He didn't even have a place he could truly call "home"; he was in exile with his Jewish kinfolk, lorded over by a fo...