After I got back to my room today, I got a gchat from a high school friend, now a college freshman, whom I hadn’t talked to in a while….and so after chatting a bit, we started talking about christianity, and I guess his main reservation was that he believed people are free to choose whatever they want in life, and God doesn’t have a role in it.

I tried thinking of examples, and talked about Jonah, etc, and then got some advice from greg who mentioned how God named everything in Genesis 1, but then left it for man to name everything in Genesis 2, representing the beginning of this relationship where man did have free choice, but it was for the glory of God in the end.

After a while….totally facepalm moment…but I realized that the essence of being a Christian in itself is giving up our free will and submitting our lives to Christ, and we talked about the difference between believing in Christ and following Christ.

But still now, I wonder how much I’d really be willing to give up for God…I had this dream last night, where my friends and I were at this camp and weren’t allowed to leave, and we were going to be sentenced to death. I don’t remember whether it was religiously motivated, but I guess that’s what persecution must feel like. I distinctively remember asking my friend, who was being all casual, “aren’t you worried that you’re going to die?”

Anyway, played this at joint small group last week, such an amazing song: