Dinner @ Yi Ting Huo Xia in Tai Chung City, Taiwan

Treated to a dinner at Taiwan largest chain restaurant by the Ong's family. This restaurant is famous for its prawns, cooked in various style, such as garlic, shaoxing wine or purely steam.

Hsinchu, Taiwan in April 2019

We were blessed with good hosts, Prof. Chang and Associate Prof. Hsieh.  They took us to a good authentic Taiwanese cuisine which include sea food and minced pork rice.

Lunch at HAKKA LAO CAFE @ CRC

After more than four decades, met up with an old class mate, Guan Chye for lunch at Hakka Lao Cafe with Thuan Hee.  We had a good time sharing about the good old memories of school days.

Growing Old

As we grow older, we can dwell on the failures and hardships of our past, or we can remember God's faithfulness, accept His discipline, and keep looking to the future in faith.

Just like Moses, when he was 120 years old, he stood with the Israelites before they crossed the Jordan River and entered the Promised Land.  He could not go with them because he had disobeyed the Lord when in anger he struck the rock in the wilderness。 (Numbers 20:12,24)

Happiness or Joy ?

As of March 2019, Finland was ranked the happiest country in the world twice in a row.

So what is happiness to you?

Happiness is when your life fulfills your needs.  In other words, happiness comes when you feel satisfied and fulfilled.  Happiness is a feeling of contentment, that life is just as it should be.  Perfect happiness, enlightenment, comes when you have all of your needs satisfied.

Happiness usually depend on happening and circumstances and can change at times.

Happiness is a choice.  You can choose to be happy.  There's going to be stress in life, but it's your choice whether you let it affect you or not.

It is important to know the difference between being happy and having joy. ... That is because happiness is an emotion in which we "experience feelings ranging from contentment and satisfaction to bliss and intense pleasure," whereas joy "is a stronger, less common feeling than happiness and is based on internal well-being or the anticipation of well-being.

Lunch @ AN VIET at GURNEY PLAZA

Lemongrass Ginger

Lunch at a Vietnamese Casual Dining restaurant, Gurney Plaza after Church Service.

Premium Beef Noodle Soup

Pork Rib Noodle Soup

Lemongrass Chicken Chop

Dinner @ YAW's ROAST & GRILL

Dinner fellowship with the Cheah's and Yeap's family at Yaw's Roast and Grill.
A good time of fellowship and sharing.

Fellowship is a spiritual thing while friendship is an earthly thing.

The three temptations

One of the greatest foes of the Christian is religious complacency.  Religious complacency is encountered almost everywhere among Christians these days, and its presence is a sign and a prophecy.   For every Christian will become at last what his desires have made him.

The world system uses three devices to trap Christians :

a) the lust (desire) of the flesh; also commonly known as "sex"

b) the lust of the eyes; also commonly known as "money"

c) the pride of life; also commonly known as "power"

These same devices trapped Eve back in the Garden of Eden. "And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food [the lust of the flesh], and that it was pleasant to the eyes [the lust of the eyes], and a tree to be desired to make one wise [the pride of life], she took of the fruit" (Genesis 3:6)

a) The lust of the flesh refers to the basis nature of unregenerate man that makes him blind to spiritual truth.  It is a disordered desire for pleasure, such as gluttony, disordered sexual acts, drug & alcohol abuse, etc. 

In First Corinthians 2:14, "The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness,and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit."

b) The lust of the eyes operates in a more refined way.  It is a disordered desire for possession, such as theft, covetousness, and materialism in general.  The context is loving the things of this world more than loving God.

c) The pride of life is the desire to be like God but apart from God.  This happens whenever we put ourselves in the place of God by failing to recognize that He is God, and we are not.

Any sin you can think of will have its origin in one of these three and in a way, the first two stem from the third.  Pride is also known as the root of sin.

In James 4:13-17, it says this about boasting "Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.”  Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow.   What is your life?  You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.  Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”  As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes.  All such boasting is evil.   If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.

"Contentment with earthly goods is the mark of a saint; Contentment with our spiritual state is a mark of inward blindness". - A.W. Tozer 

Philippians 3:13-14 "Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." KJV

Lunch @ Wang Thai Restaurant All Season

Blessed to a lunch meal at a Thai restaurant by a Korean friend.

Birthday dinner at The SSambap Korea B.B.Q

Celebrated mum's 81st Birthday at The SSambap Korean B.B.Q. with
Doenjang Jjigae (soyabean paste stew),  Godeungeo Gui (grilled mackerel),  Japchae (glass noodles with sauteed vegetables) and Jeyuk Deopbap (spicy stir-fried pork with rice).

Side dishes

Doenjang Jjigae

Japchae

Godeungeo Gun