Love and Death

Below is the transcript for my first biblical teaching video presentation for the religion class I am taking this Fall semester of 2016.
The video can be found on youtube at: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXFQMaDtSXg&feature=youtu.be

I hope you enjoy watching as much as I enjoyed writing this little project.

I know there are several issues that need improvement both in the lesson itself and in the video quality, but this class I am taking is designed to help me improve so stay tuned to see more and hopefully better presentations later on ^_^

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Hello everyone, welcome to my first ever, biblical lesson teaching.

I want to welcome you and I hope you find some food here among the words that God allows me to say. On that note, let us begin with a word of prayer.

Prayer

Now the passage I want us to look at today is from John 3:16.

But not the John 3:16 we all know so very well about God’s love for this earth, but instead from the book of First John, from chapter 3 and verses 16-18, and this passage is about what our love response, to God’s love, should be toward our fellow man.

1 John 3:16-18

What do these verses have in common with our current lives?

Some of you may be duly familiar with these passages,

- especially if you’re a Liberty University professor -

but something I’ve learned about the Bible is that, over the years, the more we look at the same passages over and over, and the more we study, then the more we will see God’s revelation to us

– Perhaps not all at once, and perhaps not something so totally different than what we have seen before, but we can see it more deeply and more intimately.

Here the old negative-nancy saying comes to mind, “familiarity breeds contempt,”

except in this case we have a positive spin – “familiarity breeds content.”

So let us look at the content of these passages and see what we can become more familiar with – more intimate with.

My goal here first is to help us look at the verses I mentioned and see what they are about and then secondly to open them up in a common theme to our eyes and ears that as we experience them again – we can allow God to work through those channels to speak to us so we can take away what He would have us receive.

Read 1 John 3:16-18

The first thing that pops out whenever I read a passage of scripture,

and this is just my usual personal experience,-

-is of course the spiritual conviction that comes to mind related to whatever thing I have been struggling with giving up. Whatever issue I have been striving to keep from giving to God, that’s what surfaces in my mind and I can’t get it out, especially if I am knowingly living in sin, even if its just a little thing.

You may not have this response when you first open up the passage of 1 John 3:16-18, and that’s okay.

Perhaps instead your response is one of agreement and interest. You see with your eyes something that is in agreement with your core beliefs, and that is good.

Now whether you’re convicted to the core and about to get up and leave, or whether you’re inwardly nodding excitedly in anticipation for the message on this passage, or whether you’re anywhere else in between, let me encourage you go pay attention, because the theme of these verses is “love” and when God talks to us about “love” we know its “gonna be good,” because God is a God of Love.

The first words spill out the theme clearly to us, “By this we know love……that he laid down his life for us…” and this is of course in reference to the same thing that the gospel book of John is referring to – God’s sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross for our sins, to be a propitiation for us to cover the debt accrued by our sins and to cover our dirty ugly sinful selves so that when God looks at us, He sees Jesus’ sacrifice and because “the punishment that brought us peace was on him” (Isaiah 53:5) so that our relationship with God can happen!

This is the great and significant love that this passage begins with and immediately John ties it into what we – the audience, the Christians in this world – need to be doing in our daily lives, and that’s

“and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers…”

…

Well I don’t know about you, but being beaten and having a crown of giant thorns rammed over my head and metal spikes hammered into my hands and feet…is not something that I want to be doing, and I don’t think that that particular death is what this passage is telling us we have to do, although what we do need to do may be very difficult.

Thankfully…Christ is the only one that had to die for our sins, but “laying down our life” is not only referring to our physical death! Especially if we look at the whole other 80% of this passage.

It goes on with a bit of explanation, because I’m sure the believers of the time were hearing this and were maybe wondering the same thing, saying something like “oh I don’t know about this dying stuff. I’ve got a family and a household to maintain and my net-mending business and my kid’s barmitspha is coming up and the sheep festival and the donkey races and…and…

The passage says, “But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.”

Now I don’t have a lot of time left, but before I finish here, let me finish unpacking these points on “love” and “death” and I’ll try to tie it into what we should be doing with our lives in TODAY.

Here, John begins with the theme of love, moves through the reminder of the great sacrifice of Christ, lifts that up as an example of what we should be doing in our daily lives, then makes a statement of what might be happening instead, because he knows we are humans who are making mistakes, and then he ends with a much needed encouragement towards mending our ways by following what God’s word tells us to do…which of course should result in good.

“But if anyone has this world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?”

This part of the passage is the meat. This is the main point.

The believers at the time were human, the believers of this time were human and we humans have a huge tendency to seek, seek, seek after what makes us feel good and what makes us happy and the pursuit of goodness and pleasure are not inherently evil but for us as a “holy priesthood” (1 Peter 2:9) there is something more to life and what we always can so easily forget is that as we go and live and seek to gain, we forget about others or we ignore others, especially the dirty and the hurting and when we are stuck on the next thing that we hope to gain from our next event or experience, we ignore the brothers who are suffering all around us…

Or, we are sufficiently proud of ourselves for giving a monthly mail offering to a poor kid in a far away country.

Or we are sufficiently proud of ourselves for being so encouraging in the morning welcome at church.

Or we are sufficiently proud of ourselves for being so fantastically ministry minded when we helped that person pick that thing up that they dropped but they didn’t notice.

These are good things, and we should keep doing them, but is this laying down our life?

Are we responding to 1 John 3:16-18 like we should?

I believe that God is referring to us laying down our plans and our extracurricular activities…not the stuff that we have to do to keep getting by, but things that we don’t have to do, the PLEASURE SEEKING that we all know is there, no matter how big or small.

If we are honest with ourselves we can see it clearly. And if it is not there, then praise be to God! But be aware and don’t let personal pleasure seeking get between you and sharing Christ’s love with the world around you!

God has each one of us in the place where we need to be – as little lights in this dark world – as little children – simple and dependent on God – confounding the wise of this world and we should be loving them all which in this day and age of hustle and bustle and iphones and vacations and sports and even if I didn’t mention your particular hobby, we all have one that we could do a little less of so we could do a little more of this loving in action!

Now I’m not here to preach fire and brimstone on anyone, least of all God’s chosen people whose salvation status is safe and secure in His hands, but what I do want to do and what John wants to do and what God wants to do is help us notice that when we see this passage, we are honest with ourselves about our lives, we recognize what areas we need cutting out, what God has already been trying to trim, and whether we have been resisting or whether we have been dragging our feet, let us remember Christ’s bold acceptance of the crucifixion sacrifice and stand up from grasping around on the ground for the next bit of pleasure, dust ourselves off, and look to God to lead us in practical steps towards meeting the needs of those around us.

May God bless us in that endeavor.

Alice and Tim Piotrowicz - Okinawa Honeymoon Trip 2016

Welcome to my blog everyone. I don't write much, but when something really cool happens then I usually try to share it here. This post is going to be a bit long as its about my honeymoon with my lovely wife Alice and we took lots of nice photos to show you all. She and I had a wonderful wedding day on September 24th and if you weren't there then I pity you because it was great!
If you did make it to our wedding ceremony and/or banquet, then we thank you for joining us in celebrating our marriage commitment before God. I felt truly blessed by the singing and how smoothly everything moved along so if you helped us out in some big or small way, thank you for loving us by giving your time and support. I know my family and Alice's family really enjoyed the whole wedding and although it was super busy and time just seemed to fly by, I won't be forgetting that special day anytime soon. We are excited to see our professionally-done wedding photos and I know you want to see them too so we will try to make a gallery available online within a month or so.
Now that I got that bit out of the way, I want to share with you all about the nice time we had on our honeymoon.





Though it is traditionally acceptable for the newlyweds to hop off to their honeymoon immediately following their marriage, since my parents were sticking around for a few more days we decided to delay our trip for a little while longer. I am glad we did, because Alice got to know my parents a little better and we had a genuinely nice time seeing some sites with them.
(Though apparently I didn't take many photos of those couple of days, sorry. But here is one where we were having a nice lunch with Alice and her parents.)


As soon as October 2nd rolled around, we were getting pretty excited with packing and getting ready for a 7-day honeymoon trip to Okinawa! We were fairly certain that we paid for two pieces of luggage each, but when we got to the airport on Sunday evening, we discovered that was not the case, so after shipping back one of my empty luggage pieces and moving some other stuff around, we were all checked-in and ready to board the flight.



I don't really remember the short flight but when we arrived we also discovered that because we had chosen such a cheap ticket from a lesser-known airline, we had landed in some obscure location several miles away from the main airport complex.










So after a long and packed shuttle-bus ride, we were finally in the main area where we were lucky enough to get me a SIM card at the local 7-Eleven-style-convenient store known as LAWSON.
For some reason the store made me feel like watching an old western movie.





Looking for our first taxi, we wandered around for a bit, and finally Alice asked a random guard who directed us to the correct area to get a taxi. We babbled a bit with the driver about the address I had saved on my phone, we piled our luggage in the tiny trunk and off we went. After a short ride and some bumbling with the local currency we were at our first of three hotels, The Mercure. We checked-in smoothly enough and had a good nights rest in preparation for the beginning of our big adventure together.




 Second day of our trip

After a passable brunch at the hotel restaurant we took our second taxi to the city in order to pick up the rental car we had reserved. Now originally, when Alice brought up the idea of having me drive in Japan, I thought that was totally not something I wanted to do. I was understandably afraid to drive around in a totally different place that I've never been before and on the opposite side of the road! However, after some prayer and meditation, I decided to man-up and progress. I made the reservation online and when we finally found the little car rental shop it didn't take more than a few minutes and some paperwork till I and my co-pilot were ready to brave the roads of Okinawa together in our adorable Mazda Demio. Having reviewed the road signs before the trip I merely had to key-in the desired location's phone number or mapcode and the car did the rest!
But no, I'm joking, I did have to steer and break and stuff, however every car in Okinawa comes equipped with the GPS system which was a huge blessing and it really helped make the whole trip a huge success as far as getting where we needed to go.

Less than an hour after picking up our car, we found a nice little place to park it while we wandered around the international tourist street and did some quick shopping before the weather turned bad due to the approaching typhoon. We grabbed a quick lunch and as the rain began to fall more frequently we got ourselves back and setup the rental in the Mercure parking lot. After chilling out at the local Family Mart for a bit to see how the weather would play out, we decided to brave the rain and winds to do some more shopping and find dinner. While perusing the items in one of the few shops still opened on the evening before Typhoon Chaba hit Naha, Okinawa, we asked the elderly woman at the shop where we could get a good steak in the area. She quickly called up her fellow shop-owner friend who directed us to follow him down several different streets and ended up outside a tiny bar which was shuttered and closed. He disappeared inside and after some rousing of the restaurant owner we were welcomed in to sit and enjoy chatting while the kind host cooked us up some fine lemon-butter-steak with noodles and eggs! After we finished our meal and as the winds and torrential rain began to really get more get crazy, we zoomed back to the Mercure and back to our cozy little room to watch some TV.

Third day

After checking out of the Mercure hotel we made our way towards the northerly part of Okinawa. It wasn't too long of a drive, but by mid-morning we were feeling hungry so we looked up a good place to eat and found ourselves waiting for the doors to open in Duku village where we tried some sweet-potato noodles in the traditional Japanese sit-down restaurant. After eating our fill and making lots of polite slurping noises we got back in our Mazda and headed to a nearby local beach site known as Cape Manzamo.

I had to take a short nap in the car but before long we were hiking through some sea-side jungle and ended up having a romantic walk down through a large cave used in the past by local tribes for some seasonal festivities and out onto the sharp pointy rocks, where we stood amongst a zillion little snails, and took in the sights and smells of the ocean.

 Before too long we found ourselves driving towards the second hotel location and although that was a bit of a long drive, and although I couldn't figure out how to turn off the annoying radio because every-time I stopped the car at a light it would turn itself back on, I couldn't help but look at Alice in the passenger seat and smile and she would smile back at me, we were happy to be traveling together.

The Kise Beach hotel was our second location to stay for a couple nights and since we arrived to check-in at about mid-afternoon, we walked the beach and took some romantic photos.

 

 Apparently they had a place for a wedding ceremony built onto the beach.

Alice and I wearing flip-flops on the seashore.

 Alice inside the Kise Beach Hotel Lobby looking at the remnant clouds of the typhoon.

We found some other newlyweds, but they weren't very talkative :\

God has made some truly adorable creatures.















After settling into our new hotel room, we decided to have our dinner at the hotel Okinawa Izakaya restaurant where I tried my first glass of Orion beer and Alice and I shared a few savory dishes including one which I liked very much, bitter-melon mixed with spam and eggs. Yum!
We also tried our first sea-grapes write off the vine!

Fourth day
After I ate like a bird and Alice ate what she could to make it worth our money that we spent at the Kise Beach buffet breakfast, we both hopped in the car and headed north-west towards the famous Okinawa Aquarium! We spent a few hours gawking and gazing at sea-creatures of all kinds.

After the aquarium we drove a while and made our way onto KouRi Island where we took a nice tour of the beach-tower ocean-view observatory.

While the sun went down, Alice and I drove in a southern-ly direction back towards our hotel and stopped in a mountain town to do some grocery shopping and then get dinner at a ManMi restaurant where Alice had some nice BBQ that was so good I forgot what thing I ordered.

Fifth day
After checking out of the Kise Beach hotel and not knowing what we were gonna be missing as far as accommodations go, we struck-out to travel again now more south towards the middle of Okinawa where we found a nice A&W restaurant to fill our bellies with good foods and good soda.

The weather was gorgeous and the sun was shining powerful and bright as we made our way toward the Busena Ocean Park where we enjoyed seeing so many exotic fish in the underwater observatory and glass-bottom boat ride!

After a little walking and a lot of sun we drove to eat lunch at a Hama Sushi restaurant where we enjoyed sharing several different dishes with each other.








Drive, drive, drive... and we made it to Sunset beach where we were unable to see a beautiful sunset but Alice was beautiful and we took some photos anyway.

As the sun went down past the horizon we found ourselves wandering around the beach area and we discovered the converted army-base American village full of shops and restaurants and shiny lights.

For dinner we had a lovely talk over a couple of burgers at JB's.

We made our way back to our third and final lodging, the Spice Motel, which we had checked into earlier in the afternoon (I do not recommend this place) and we there dreamt of our plans to return to the beach the next day for swimming!


Sixth day
Swimming was so great. Unfortunately my phone is not waterproof so I have zero photos of that part of our sixth day, but the memory will forever be in my mind. It was a real joy just walking around in the ocean, neck-deep in water, with Alice in-tow on the figure-eight floaty we rented. We talked, we laughed, I burned my irises with salt water, we got our skin blasted from the scorching sun, and it was really such a good time. I think this was the most happy part of my trip.
I can't say that the rest of the trip was unhappy, but it definitely got stressful a bit stressful later on, though things turned out alright in the end.

After the beach and buying some gifts in the American village we went looking for lunch but traveled to the totally wrong place and had to drive all the way back the way we came which wasted about an hour. Instead of finding our original destination we parked at a Nakayukui rest-stop to grab lunch which wasn't too bad actually. 
After that we finally found our way and made it to a bigger sort of town where walked to find a little hide-away tea restaurant where the owner taught us how to make special bubbly foam tea with sugar and peanut sprinkles! It tasted pretty good ^_^

As the sun was setting on our sixth and final full day, we headed to the Ashibinaa outlet mall to visit Muji and a grocery store where I got to eat the famous Okinawa taco rice which tasted like a taco without the crunch. 

Along the way we visited a store known as Manga Souko where I bought a couple of gifts and we snapped this photo of an escaped reptile exhibit. 

I saw a commercial of auJAPAN starring three men from Japanese folklore who were really funny and I felt inclined to get a picture in honor of that.

Here is me taking a photo inside auJAPAN with a poster of those three folklore dudes.

Seventh day

On the morning of our final day in Okinawa, Alice and I took a few last-minute couples photos, politely checked out of the Spice Motel and made our way south back towards the airport in Naha so we could be ready for our flight which was at 6 pm. 

Fearing that we wouldn't get another chance soon too do so, we ate at A&W again, though this visit was less enjoyable than the last due to our sun-burned backs giving us a lot of pain and I was starting to get sick of driving all over the place. Alice kindly smiled at me in the car and thanked me for being so willing to drive us around for the honeymoon trip. After some prayer and meditation I was pretty okay and we drove onward. 

The morning was young so we went back to the alley shops that had been closed on our first trip during the typhoon and found it a hustling and bustling with open doors and tourists so we took an hour or so to make some last-minute gift purchases and then we headed off to lunch.

For lunch Alice wanted to stand for 2 hours in the blazing sun for a famous noodle shop. The place was run by only two cooks and no one else but we finally made it in after a while and the noodles were pretty good, though I wouldn't do it again.

After the lunch we decided it was about time to head back towards the airport to drop-off the rental car and say goodbye to Okinawa, however we got stuck in traffic which got redirected on every block for some unknown reason.
There were highwaymen with uniforms making everyone go around a different way and we kept trying to get to the drop-off location where our car belonged, but there was just no way into that area.

It took me a great deal of self-control, patience and all the driving skills I had acquired up to that point to get as close to the rental company as possible, but as we pulled alongside yet another roadblock, the clock was ticking past 2:30 and I decided to be assertive.
I rolled down the window and demanded entrance to the blocked off part of town, because I had to get my car back to the rental company so we could catch our flight. After some rough and very uncertain chatting with the guard, he pulled the barrier aside for us as he tried to call a translator over. A female guard showed up with good English and we were able to make our case more clear. She had us pull into a parking lot where we were prepared to leave the car for the company to pick up themselves due to the fact that access to their shop was blocked off for the day. We discovered that the local community was holding their annual tug-of-war competition and there was a large gathering of festively dressed people congregated near the corner which we needed to turn past to get rid of our car. After several frustrating minutes they wandered on away from that area and Alice and I were able to get the car through and up into the rental-company parking lot where we dropped off the keys and made a quick luggage-burdened exit towards the traffic again where we could get a taxi to the airport.
After some hard walking and burn-pained back aches, we made it to the street where a taxi picked us up and we were able to convey a sense of urgency. I was nervous we would miss our flight, but after some thinking I decided that wasn't the worst thing in the world, and we could probably just get another flight anyway. Well we did our best and with God's help we made it to the airport and, after another packed shuttle-bus ride, into the check-in line. We had a few issues with our luggage, since it was overflowing with several fragile gifts, and we ended up having to pay extra to check some baggage, but in the end it was not so bad and soon we were waiting for our delayed flight to come take us home.

We landed back in Taiwan, got our luggage and found ourselves finally getting back home where we rested up from our awesome adventure.

All-in-all it was a wonderful trip and God really took care of us. Alice is great to travel with and I hope she and I can travel more soon. It was a great way to begin our marriage and we feel so blessed to be together as husband and wife.