OK, I'll get straight to the point here.  The way to happiness and eternal salvation is through buying at least $10,000 of pottery at Greenbridge.  If you don't have that much money, take out a loan.  If you haven't started a collection of such beautiful pottery, I'd strongly suggest you start now. Yes, right now.  <Just kidding. But it is excellent pottery. Click here for more info>.

As far as I can remember, I had been searching for solutions that really got to the root of things, not just bandage them up, but truly solve them. Doing this often involved seeing the 'big picture'- what's often called 'thinking out of the box' in the business world. As Albert Einstein once said, 'Common sense is what makes you think the world is flat'. In a similar way that Einstein searched for a way to amalgamate these different laws and theories of physics, I had also yearned to do the same thing with a lot of things in my life.

My earliest experience with Christianity is one I don't really remember.  When was in around four years old, my parents sent my sister and me to Sunday School.  Even though I don't recall going there, I had spent my childhood not really looking into Christianity.  In fact, there many times when I was repelled from it- having seen Christians as the harsh, judging type- the ones that Lee Strobel, in his book God's Outrageous Claims, terms 'holier-than-thou' Christians.  Thus, Christians, in my mind, became too much like:

 I saw too many people like Rush Limbaugh that embodied this that anger, twisting other people's words around to fit their own needs, and showing none of the grace, compassion and love that my sister had supposedly learned about in Sunday School. But, on the other hand, since sixth or seventh grade, I noticed I had this sense of emptiness; a feeling that no matter how hard I tried at things, I was never satisfied. So continued my search for what and where my soul really was.

All this time, I didn't completely close the door to religion as a way of filling this gaping vacuum in my soul.  Especially in my later years in college, I realized that at least there was a higher power, that, for example, the efforts of the smartest scientists and engineers around the world and computers the size of my apartment yielded only limited predictions on exactly how many degrees the Earth will heat up due to global warming or to exactly what point contaminated groundwater will flow.  In essence, I knew that scientism, the view that science had the answer to all of the world's problems, was a contradiction in terms.  Specifically, this was and is so because science is based on certain assumptions, which had to come from some body of knowledge when science first began.  Moreover, I knew that, the world of chemistry, biology and physics was all based on certain mathematical constants, constants that happen as a result of laws that allow not only in life itself but other things many people take fore granted- gravity, water to drink, air to breathe... the list could go on and on.

One cold December night my junior year in college, this emptiness was hitting me particularly hard.  So I asked my neighbor next door if he had some inspirational music.  He always seemed to have this life flowing from him, and had nice collection of music.  So he lent me a gospel music CD by Kirk Franklin and the Family.  I found the music interesting, but as he didn't really share his faith with me for whatever reason, I simply found the music to be an uplifting and not much more than that.  I didn't attribute it to the fact that he was a Christian or that the message of the music was about the joy one can have in Christ.

I thought I had found the reason for this emptiness, and a panacea for it. At the suggestion of my boss, I had gone to a speech and hearing therapist, who initially diagnosed me as having learning disability (LD, of which dyslexia is a form) and attention deficit disorder (ADD). One of the symptoms of ADD has been this constant feeling of emptiness. But upon further analysis and consulting a psychiatrist and a speech and hearing expert. Their final conclusion was that I had characteristics of LD and ADD, but I didn't specifically have it. That didn't satisfy me. So I was pretty much sent back to square one in search for a definitive answer to this seemingly eternal feeling of emptiness. In addition, I looked at dyslexics like Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison and saw that, if they done things like invent the light bulb and discover the laws of relativity, I could and would also find a way. I wasn't quite sure how, but I would find a way.

I had suppressed this search until a year after graduation. I was having a hard time finding a niche at work, and wondered where it was all going.  Even though I had made many friends through OCA and other groups, there was still this vague sense of emptiness that started to really bother me again.  It was around this time that I also was visiting my close friend Mulan (name changed for security reasons).  She invited me to her Bible Study, on the basis that it was an important part of her life and was willing to share it with me, giving me the option to do something else instead, if I so desired.  But, wanting to keep an open mind, I decided to go. I didn't want to take an attitude like my brother who, even though he'd never actually been to MIT, said "It's funny, that you go to MIT and you don't see any students, because they're all underground- coming up for sunlight might hurt them."   Initially, there was some element of disbelief, of wanting to prove that there were some serious fallacies in what Mulan believed.  Thinking I could do this by using what I learned in five years of engineering, I asked more and more questions.  It was then that I started to realize that this emptiness that went beyond LD, ADD, or any other human affliction.  This is as the band dc talk sings in their song 'Since I Met You', which is on their Supernatural album:

At every party and as far anybody knew - everything was cool, but
The truth was bottled up inside of me
I was as lonely as a man could be
And my 200 friends couldn't fill the void in my soul
It was a giant hole

Nothing made any sense
I thought there would never be an end
Then love came knocking at my door

Here's some of the reasoning I went through:

Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in the mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continuing to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it - he will be blessed in what he does.

Romans 8:31-32 states:

If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for all - how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?

I felt this way at my interview for my last job, where, in the words of my manager, 'I bewitched everyone'. The only thing I could say was that it was God's spirit guiding the process, giving me the words to speak, and the ability to present myself well.; that as the passage above states, 'If God be for us, who can be against us?'

During my work there, I had the opportunity in the huge expanses of the Gila and Lincoln National forests, to ruminate on what God has and will do for me. These were plans that are infinitely taller than any mountain or tree I could see, and infinitely more expansive than any forest could ever be.

Yet, even though this work was interesting, there was still an element missing.   So, I found the following passage in Isaiah (55:1-3) compelling.

Come, all you who are thirsty,
    Come to the water;
and you who have no money,
   come, buy, eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
   without money and without cost.
Why spend money on what is not bread,
   and your labor on what does not satisfy?
Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good,
   and your soul may delight in the richest of
      fare.
I will make an everlasting covenant with you,
   my faithful love promised to David.

In effect, the past two jobs were examples of the 'labor that does not satisfy'- they did not truly utilize my spiritual gifts.  Nonetheless, each of these jobs has taught me a lot that has added to my innate gifts from God.

And so now that Christ has come into my life, it's not that I no longer have troubles, but rather that I see the meaning and therefore guidance to my hardships, Jesus Christ is truly the only rock we can stand on. All other things pass by and are, in comparison, unreliable. I've come to realize that in being a Christian, one goes through a process of continual transformation, a transformation that one can't necessarily immediately see, but will see through time as one's walk with God continues.  In other words, I can see that 'big picture'- that these hardships have a purpose, a purpose that I often perceive through prayer and spending quiet time with God.  It's not like my life is a bowl of cherries, but I've found comfort, guidance and inspiration in my trials and tribulations.   Now, my picture of Christians has completely changed from the cold characters that I described above; it's now more like

Furthermore, I know that God has awesome plans for me- more than I ever would imagine. I will be starting graduate classes at University of Maryland this spring, where I'll be able to further implement these skills that He has given me.