Thank you all...

After reading Alice's blog, I was very much encouraged. Thank you for taking notes on Sunday, Alice. That truly encourages me when you guys are serious about Sunday teaching; I never thought that I was good at teaching the Word of God, I pray that I can be better at it. Alice's blog made me wanting to be a better teacher of God's Word. I pray that God gives me the revelation on the sermons that are relevant and life-changing to our congregation. Please keep praying for me. Thank you.

After reading all of your blogs, guys, I only want to say - Thank you. I am so happy and thankful to have all of you!
Love,
Jack

why do we say "to make the story short"?

well...to make the story short...but i want to hear the whole story! Would you watch a movie, which they make it short for you just to save your time? No, I want the full version of what's going on in your life too. Why make it short? I wanna care.

Last time I posted my blog was the night before going to IHOP. Yes, I had so many questions that I demanded answers from God. I couldn't go on. I was running around like a headless chicken; I lost my clients in business and I lost my passion in my ministry. I felt like living a this dry land where I had no help, no backup plans, no future and maybe any minute I could die there. So I went to IHOP. The first day was pretty shocking to me because I felt like Bob Frasar was talking to me directly. He talked about something in the days of famine...which our business/career could face. Gess...God's way is higher than ours! Unfortunately I forgot most of Bob Frasar's sharing, but God did speak to me with a conviction.

Then it was Bob Hartley who shared about the Book of Ruth, the 5 characters. Then he started praying for these two couples among the congregation. I wished I was being prophesied over that night. Then the next morning, it was 4 hours in the prayer room; man, wasn't that fun? 4 hours went by so quickly when you are in a prayer mode. After that, Eric and I went to the afternoon workshop where I heard these two couples talking about the prophecy that Bob Hartley gave them. It was amazing when God speaks! The prophecy totally touched their lives in many ways and spoke of the unknown things yet to be happened. That night, Joy, Eric and I got together at Jack Stack BBQ and enjoyed a decent meal; don't we just enjoy spending time with our beloved sister. However I wanted to attend the evening session, so quickly we took Joy back to her class and drove to our meeting place without any delay. After Rick Joyner's sermon, Bob Hartley came and spoke for 30 minutes about these 5 characters again. At the end, Bob asked the congregation which characters we would like to be; at that moment, I prayed to be like a Boaz as he shared. Bob then prayed for a sister and he called her Ruth in spirit. All the sudden, Bob called my name "Jack Lee"; and he started prophesying over me; it was intense and heavy for me. I am sort of used to people prophesying over me; but this time, it was in front of 300+ people. Most importantly the prayer answered my questions and touched me deeply. God calls me a Boaz through Bob; yes, that's what I want to be!
I will post the prophecy soon on my blog. God is good all the time! Afterward Daniel Academy, a youth group, prayed for me and that's when I started weeping. He refreshes my soul.

Psalm 33, Bob Hartley gave me this, which comforted me again...He knows my needs and He calls me righteous although I might not think so. I am righteous and great because of my Lord Jesus Christ.

"But the eyes of the LORD are on those who fear Him, on those whose hope is in His unfailing love, to deliver them from death and keep them alive in famine. We wait in hope for the LORD; He is our help and our shield. In Him our hearts rejoice, for we trust in His holy name. May your unfailing love rest upon us, O LORD, even as we put our hope in You." (Psalm 33:18-22)

am i ready?

I am heading over to IHOP on Thursday. Am I ready to find out what God has in store for me? What if I don't receive what I ask for? What if I don't get any confirmation from Him? What if God still keeps silent and pats my shoulder and smiles? Would I still be able to find out what's next? I believe that He has a great plan for me and my future; I remember that I was singing "He holds my future in His hand." this morning as I was laying on my bed. Spacing out yet all the sudden this song came to my mind...."He holds my future in His hand..."

Yes, I believe.

Jesus, I know You love me....but now I can't feel You just like many others tell me that they can't feel You all the time. I still choose to believe that You have the best interest in me.

All I have and all I need is my faith in You.

Meet me in our secret place....Find me.

ouch...my finger hurts

oh no....the middle finger on my right hand is hurting like crazy; I couldn't sleep last night because it was all swallen then bleeding and gooey...gerr...it's really not funny at all. The whole day I can't do anything because of my hurting middle finger. Due to infection inside of the nail, it's killing me from head to toe. Can you imagine that a small infection in my "middle finger" would make me cry like a baby? I couldn't even use the chopesticks nor type my blog, not to mention anything more complex. So I could only sit at home and watch DVD the whole time today.

A small infection in my middle finger can affect my life; so is our sin and misbehavior, eh?

Wow...that's deep! Ouch..it hurts..>.<

'You've got to find what you love.' Steve Jobs says

Stanford Report, June 14, 2005
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Authorized Personnel Only

" Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life." Proverbs 4:23

In a relationship, it is a must to remind us all the time to guard our hearts. We must keep our hearts pure. As I saw this picture that Annie took at the Malibu pier; it reminds me of Proverbs 4:23. I think that Jesus will put up a sign in our hearts that says "Authorized Personnel Only"; and under the sign, it says Property of Jesus Christ!

That's the seal of the Holy Spirit. No trespassers to this Property!

Lord, bless all those young adults who are in a relationship now. Bless their hearts, and keep them pure.

He is my Scepter

I am going to receive a fresh anointing during this trip to IHOP this weekend. I must.
If You don't show up, I am not going to leave KC. I am running low; I need Your guidance and counseling.

You are my Scepter; You must guide me and comfort me with Your rod. This is my time to receive. This is the time to make up my mind. I want my own breakthrough!

That is Your name! Thank You for Your promises.

Gone Fishing

this is the first time Rock caught a fish...and many more afterwards.... good job, Rock!
this is me relaxing...hehe...such a nice day without sun.

I still smell like fish...totally exhausted after 3 hours of sleep last night, 1 hour of driving to Malibu, 5 hours of fishing, 2 hours of driving back due to traffic, and 2 hours of cleaning over 30 fish. Gosh...am I still alive? Thank God for a 4 hours nap after my crazy and exciting day. I woke up around 11: 30pm cuz Rock called me and asked me how the fish are; dude, they are frozen! Thanks for waking me up, yo. I started making some dinner @ 11:40pm; guess what I had, mackerels, the ones we caught today. They are very delicious! yumm... who wants some?