What about the change? What about the difference?

Had an interesting conversation with some students of mine today.

The bell-ringer in one of my classes was asking my students to describe a memory from their childhood. As I was helping one of my students, another one of my students asked the following out loud.

Student 1: Mr. Kim, how do you spell whiskey?

Me: uhm... w-h-i-s-k-e-y

Student 2(who I was helping): Man... you never drank whiskey before!

Student 1: Heck yeah, I sure did! When I was young, I drank whiskey and beer.

Student 2: You did not...

Student 1: Yeah! I did but I stopped when I became a Christian.

Later on, student 1 showed me his journal entry... and it turns out to be a list of ways he had upset his parents, vices, and horrible behaviors. Then he shared that he had done all of them before he became a Christian, and then once becoming a Christian, had stopped. 

Though I just sat and laughed for awhile over this, it also occurred to me how much gospel truth this student had just brought forth. 

2 Corinthians 5:16-18 says, "From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation."

Romans 12:2 says,"Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect."

As Christians, we are to change and be transformed. Christ died that we might be made anew. The gospels and the New Testament epistles speak consistently of this new radical way of living. Yet, so many of us as followers of Christ live such lukewarm lives. True, we all fall short of God's standards. But our lives also should reflect an appropriate response to the radical love that God shows us. As we delve deeper and deeper into the gospel, our lives, my life, need to show a radical change in our worldview and how we live our lives.

We need to continue to challenge ourselves in the outwardly way we witness to others, our thought lives, and in our spiritual disciplines. 

I'm reminded of the old SCC song. haha somewhat corny I suppose, but hits it right on the spot!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqBROlAiqlE

What abut the Change? What about the Difference?

Till next time,

Soli Deo Gloria

Sam Kim

Where have the last two years gone?

Wow.. I can't believe it has been two years since my last post. I've decided that I will try to maintain a blog again. Mainly to keep up with the discipline of journalling and recording how God is moving in my life. lol, I pray that God will keep my disciplined in this discipline. But we shall see!

 For those of you who find your way back to this blog, I am still teaching in Louisiana as a Special Education Teacher. It has been my absolute privilege to serve my students for the past two and a half years and it's been my blessing to see how they have grown even in the most minuscule of ways. What the future holds for me, I shall perhaps discuss in a future post.

But today, I wanted to share about a section of the book The Reason for God by Tim Keller. I picked up this book in New York City over the Thanksgiving break and it has been challenging as I take a fresh look at an intellectual argument for Christianity.

This particular section is in a fairly early part of the book in a chapter called Christianity Is a Straitjacket. I will type out the entirety of this particular section for your reading pleasure (hopefully I am not breaking any copyright laws?).

                                                                ----------------------------------

Taken from The Reason for God by Tim Keller, p.48-51.

Love, the Ultimate Freedom, Is More Constraining Than We Might Think
What then is the moral-spiritual reality we must acknowledge to thrive? What is the environment that liberates us if we confine ourselves to it, like water liberates the fish? Love. Love is the most liberating freedom-loss of all.

One of the principles of love-either love for a friend or romantic love-is that you have to lose independence to attain greater intimacy. If you want the "freedoms" of love- the fulfillment, security, sense of worth that it brings-you must limit your freedom in many ways. You cannot enter a deep relationship and still make unilateral decisions or allow your friend or lover no say in how you live your life. To experience the joy and freedom of love, you must give up your personal autonomy. The French novelist Francoise Sagan expressed this well in an interview in Le Monde. She expressed that she was satisfied with the way she had lived her life and had no regrets:

Interviewer: Then you have had the freedom you wanted?
Sagan: Yes... I was obviously less free when I was in love with someone... But one's not in love all the time. Apart from that...I'm free.

Sagan is right. A love relationship limits your personal options. Again we are confronted with the complexity of the concept of "freedom." Human beings are most free and alive in relationships of love. We only become ourselves in love, and yet healthy love relationships involve mutual, unselfish service, a mutual loss of independence. C.S. Lewis puts it eloquently:

Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket-safe, dark, motionless, airless-it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.

Freedom, then, is not the absence of limitations and constraints but it is finding the right ones, those that fit our nature and liberate us.

For a love relationship to be healthy there must be a mutual loss of independence. It can't be just one way. Both sides must say to the other, "I will adjust to you. I will change for you. I'll serve you even though it means a sacrifice for me." If only one party does all the sacrificing and giving, and the other does all the ordering and taking, the relationship will be exploitative and will oppress and distort the lives of both people.

At first sight, then, a relationship with God seems inherently dehumanizing. Surely it will have to be "one way," God's way. God, the divine being, has all the power. I must adjust to God-there is now way that God could adjust to and serve me.

While this may be true in other forms of religion and belief in God, it is not true in Christianity. In the most radical way, God has adjusted to us-in his incarnation and atonement. In Jesus Christ he became a limited human being, vulnerable to suffering and death. On the cross, he submitted to our condition-as sinners-and died in our place to forgive us. In the most profound way, God has said to us, in Christ, "I will adjust to you. I will change for you. I'll serve you though it means a sacrifice for me." If he has done this for us, we can and should say the same to God and others. St. Paul writes, "the love of Christ constrains us" (2 Corinthians 5:14)

A friend of C.S. Lewis's was once asked, "Is it easy to love God?" and he replied, "It is easy to those who do it." That is not as paradoxical as it sounds. When you fall deeply in love, you want to please the beloved. You don't wait for the person to ask you to do something for her. You eagerly research and learn every little thing that brings her pleasure. Then you get it for her, even if it costs you money or great inconvenience. "Your wish is my command," you feel-and it doesn't feel oppressive at all. From the outside, bemused friends may think, "She's leading him around by the nose," but from the inside it feels like heaven.

For a Christian, it's the same with Jesus. The love of Christ constrains. Once you realize how Jesus changed for you and gave himself for you, you aren't afraid of giving up your freedom and therefore finding your freedom in him.

                                                     ----------------------------------
         

Prior to this section, Keller is arguing against the statement that Christianity is limit to personal growth and potential because it constrains our freedom to choose our own beliefs. So I think the argument for love constraining us while at the same time liberating us is incredibly important to notice. I think as I grow older, this concept of self-sacrificing love becomes more apparent. Even in my relationship with my students, I realize that I genuinely love them for the people that they are. Though they constantly cut up and test my patience, at the end of the day, I would do anything for them. My love for them constrains me from pursuing another career or spending my free time doing anything else, and yet because of this constraint, I'm able to fully serve them as their teacher. So I agree with his point that love is that environment that liberates us if we confine ourselves to it.

Keller then makes such an important point. God is God. The very definition of God means a Super Being. From a humanistic standpoint, this should warrant nothing but a serving relationship because God is greater than us. It reminds me of the olden days where there were Kings and Queens who held an ultimate form of sovereignty in their kingdom. They could do whatever they wanted to their people and their people could do nothing back except to serve. Yet, the Christian faith shows us that God, though being omnipotent and omniscient humbles himself and adjusts himself radically to reach out to us first. What a love relationship that is. God submitting himself to our condition as sinners, paying the price for forgiveness himself and then inviting us to live a freed life in him. And that freedom, though constraining because of the standard God calls us to, is in fact such liberating freedom, particularly because it is a total response to God's love for us.

I love saturday's at starbucks spent reading and chilling :D

Soli Deo Gloria!

Multiplication Tables, Girls, and Randomness

For the first nine weeks of the school year, I've been telling one of my students how important it is for him to know his multiplication tables. I told him that he couldn't do division without knowing his multiplication tables and that he couldn't do a lot of math without that knowledge. Finally, several weeks ago I asked him what would happen when a girl came up to him and asked him a question about the multiplication table. Wouldn't he feel dumb if that happened and he didn't know the answer?

My student walks into my room today and first thing he says to me is

Student: "OMG... Mr. Sam... she asked me!"
Me: what? Who asked you what? Did someone ask you out?
Student: "noooo... a girl asked me what 6x7 was.."
Me: LOL.. "what'd you tell her?
Student: "That I didn't know"
Me: I told you man! You should've listened to me!

I love it when random things I say come true :) Thank you Lord. Hopefully he'll be more motivated to learn his multiplication table now :)

Have a good day!

Long Overdue

haha.. and a month and a half after I update that "it's coming", It's finally here! haha Didn't think you'd have to wait that long did you guys! (I didn't either)

I really do apologize for those who have been waiting for an update. I've come to realize that there was so much that I've been meaning to write that every time that I've sat down to update, I get overwhelmed by the enormity of it all. This is what happens when you keep procrastinating...

Anyhow, I am sitting at Barnes and Nobles currently and working on lesson plans, and I decided that I needed a break, so here I am.

Two and a half months have passed since the craziness of summer Institute, which is where I'll start this update :P

Summer Institute in the Mississippi Delta was quite frankly an experience of a lifetime. Arriving in Cleveland, Mississippi in the middle of June, I came in knowing not what to expect, not knowing what Teach For America was really about, and by every means possible, completely unprepared to teach. After a week of orientation (meaning 15 hour days of instruction on the principles of effective teaching, seminars, and activities), we were introduced to our first class of students as teachers. The next four weeks of teaching 4th graders was the most intense experience of my life. Making adjustments each day to ensure that we were learning from mistakes and improving our effectiveness as educators. Those 5 weeks formed the basis of my formal instruction on being a teacher.

Several people have asked me whether it's effective to put a teacher into a classroom after only 5 weeks of training as opposed to those that go the formal route. To now answer that question, I believe that yes it is to an extent. Simply put, of course more training would be beneficial for anybody. However, given those 5 weeks, I believe that now being in my own classroom I am using every skill that I learned at institute in my everyday teaching.

Following the end of institute, I moved back to South Louisiana (the Greater Baton Rouge area) for another week of planning for the school year. This year found an extremely slow hiring process for the South Louisiana region (I just heard that the last of our corps members were hired last week!) I was blessed to have been hired on the wednesday I got back to the region.

So starting on August 9, 2010, I was officially a teacher of the Pointe Coupee Parish School Board teaching at Livonia High School as the self-contained Special Education teacher. August 12, 2010 was the first day of school and now two months later, I can only say that each day is a continuous learning process.

My experience in the classroom has so far been extremely challenging but enjoyable. Though I face various challenges with my students, I am blessed to have a solid administration and an extremely helpful Special Education department in the school and at the school board. I also have two para-educators in my room who have been so far amazing. One of them in particular has simply inspired me by the way she loves these students as if they were her own. She comes to work each day and just seriously loves on them, and I'm really challenged to be more reflective of the gospel to them as well.

The students in my classroom face various challenges of their own. Some are challenged physically, some mentally, some behaviorally. However, the one common thread that they share are that they are each students. The upsetting thing about that is that for the last several years, most of them may as well not have been students. They came to school to pass the time and because they had to. In terms of academics, they simply learned basic life skills, not because of a lack of capability but rather because of a lack of expectation. I found that at the beginning of this school year, all my plans to teach them 8th grade level standards (as the youngest was in 8th grade), were not going to happen. Upon giving some diagnostic assessments, I discovered that my students (8th-12th graders)on average ranged from Pre-K to 3rd grade levels in reading and in math. They had no desire to learn, nor did they understand why they needed to learn.

I spent an entire month investing them into learning and how to learn. It was a difficult battle and still is, but I'm proud to say that they are now students who are learning spelling words, how to read, and basic math skills. To share some of the accomplishments that they've made so far: One student who did not know his alphabet nor his numbers at the start of the year is now fluent in recognizing alphabets and nearly fluent in the letter sounds; a senior who was adamant about graduating this year has decided to stay in school another year to learn more; two of my students who did not know how to read words are now reading Kindergarten and 1st grade level books. These students each have a goal to make 2-3 years of growth within this year and are well on their way to getting there.

haha, well this was a rather long update. Thanks to everyone that takes the time to read and please please feel free to ask any more questions about what I'm doing or about TFA in general.

NEXT UPDATE: Life in South Louisiana

I really really am going to try to be better at updating more often.. please keep me accountable!!

Prayer Requests:
- That I would be reflecting the Gospel in my classroom and in my life here
- Several of my students live very tough lives. Pray that they would be encouraged and find some peace.

It's Coming...

Prepare for an Update!!!

Some Things are Worth the Wait!

This was probably not one of those things, but better late than never!! but...

First! Institute is OVER!

Second, I FOUND MY CAMERA!

Two very great reasons for me to be thankful to God :)

As a result of both of these reasons, I now have the time, as well as MANY pictures to update with. I may split this over several blog posts in the next couple of days :)

However, in order to be a bit more sequenced according to time, I will start off with the update that should have started it all off!

*drumroll please*

The ROAD TRIP to LA! This will be very picture heavy, so enjoy!

So to give a bit of background... on May 30th, two of my roommates from college (Alex Kim and Tim Chung) and I, left on an epic road trip that would take us 2,432 miles over the course of 6 days through mountains, valleys, deserts, cities, and bayous. We visited 8 states, 3 National Parks, and 1 dinosaur museum. We played in Vegas, hiked in Arches, Canyonlands, and Mese Verde National Park, and played countless games of Settlers and Sequence. But now, ladies and gentlemen, a picture history of "LA to LA"

Day 1: Cerritos to Vegas (Angie, Eric, Eunice, Steven met us in Vegas)

We stayed at the Luxor in two rooms with the greatest view of the vents on top of the casino. LOL, ate at the M Hotel's Studio B buffet. (Pretty bomb in my opinion) and then spent the rest of the night playing Blackjack and Holdem at the Excalibur till 5:30 am. loll, Tim and Alex definitely went up a pretty good amount. And Eric and I broke even. Sorry, didn't take a lot of pictures here, though i should have.. lol

Alex, Angie, and I on the way to Vegas

Alex sleeping in the back (This was a common sight)

Welcome to Nevada Sign!

The Crew in Vegas (Angie, Eunice, Steven, Eric, Tim, Alex, Sam)

Day 2: Vegas to Green River, UT

We spent most of the day in Vegas, playing a bit more, looking around and just hanging out. Around 4:30 or 5ish we said our goodbyes and Alex, Tim, and I took off on our 6 hour drive to Green River, UT where we were spending the night.

Driving through canyons in the North Western part of Arizona

Representing the L . A . L at the Utah border :)

Preparing the most epic game of Settlers, won by yours truly

Playing Tetris in the morning

Motel 6 in Green River, UT

Day 3: Green River, UT to Arches National Park to Canyonlands National Park to Cortez, CO

Leaving our Motel 6 at 11 am, we drove out to Arches National Park. This place is definitely a sight to behold. The red rock that covers this place is like nothing you've ever seen before! We took several hours touring the different areas of the park and saw some of the more famous arches. After eating lunch in the town of Moab, we drove out to Canyonlands National Park or as Tim likes to say (Great Canyon National Park). I think either name works to be honest. Here, we had one of our bigger adventures. The district of the park that we went to was called the Needles. This area was fairly small in terms of road access so near the end of the road. We parked and walked off trail into the canyon. We went a pretty good ways into the canyons (at least half a mile) over and under rocks. Because it was getting late, with the sun going down, we were able to take some amazing pictures here.

At the Visitor Center

Tim and Alex modeling after the birds (these are elegible bachelors ladies!!)

There was definitely no hole in the rock....

This is called Newspaper Rock

On the way to Canyonlands National Park

Some of the most beautiful country I've ever seen

It's getting late, so I'll finish off the trip in the next post! Enjoy!

Happy Fourth of July!

*EDIT*

So I figured I should share

a little bit about my weekend as well :)

This weekend, a group of us went back to Baton Rouge to look at housing and get a well needed weekend away from Institute. We left Friday night after school and aft

er a whopping 6 hours of driving, got into Point Coupee (Right outside of Baton Rouge) where we stayed at Meg's, a 2009 CM, house. I had heard but I never saw till this trip just how beautiful Point Coupee was. *side note* I might get placed here!

This was the house we stayed at

The view from the back of the house

The False River

Saturday was spent going around the city looking at different apartments and houses. I think I've settled on living in an apartment. Now I need to find a roommate :P

Saturday Night is where the excitement starts. I'll say one word and leave it to the pictures: Crawfish

3 Pounds of Crawfish per person = Full Sam

We lucked out because it was the last day of Crawfish season and got the last batch of this season's catch.

On Sunday Morning, we left around 10 am and took a free ferry ride across the Mississippi and headed back to Cleveland.

The Ferry

The Crew: Peter, Lori, Katy, Caitlin

A brief recap of what otherwise was an amazingly restful weekend :)

*end edit*

The town of Cleveland, MS threw a Fourth of July party for TFA last night. There was awesome food, awesome music, and even more awesome fireworks. Needless to say, I was quite impressed. Thanks Cleveland!

Hope everyone had a great Fourth of July!