As I said in my previous post, I made the move to a new hosting service recently. After consulting various sources, I found that both in the Wordpress support site as well as in the codex, there are many articles that discuss how to transfer your blog from one host to another.

I found the following articles to be most useful: The Wordpress codex has very easy to follow instructions for you to backup and restore your files, here. And, if you need a visual guide, you can also get a good one here. Even so, I encountered some problems and found that I had to venture out with slightly different steps.

I allowed myself ample time for the entire move, so I was able to rehearse the steps before making the final move.

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If you are a regular reader of this blog, you will know that I had all sorts of problems with my site that was eventually traced to a resource-hungry plugin. If you remember, they unceremoniously shut down my site. When I finally discovered the blackout, obviously I sent frantic emails asking for an explanation.

My host had the audacity to tell me off saying that they had attempted to contact me numerous times without a reply. What really irks me was the fact that I had contacted their support time and again about the issue with slowness in my blog, with spam, etc. They should have in their support system a history of my initiating their research on why the server is so slow. And, when they found out that it was without a doubt my site that was doing the slow-down, they cut me off without warning. To say it was a rude awakening is to understate the pain!

Thankfully, I had done some research before and I sort of guess it was the offending plugin. Even so, it took numerous emails before my support people would respond, and when they did they were defensive and unrepentant. The problem is not so much that they made a customer service mistake in acting so rudely, but that they refused to apologize, and did not offer any compensation for my inconvenience.

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Interesting conversation at work today with my boss. We talked about relationships and how traditionally, within Chinese culture, relationship and community took center stage. Confucian teachings highlighted the importance of the relational aspects of being human. Customs, traditions and rituals were created around community and the family as the center of the community.

However, unfortunately, like everything else the beauty of these customs, rituals and traditions became a legalistic noose around the entire culture. What was intended to accentuate relationships and what it means to be human, instead stifled an entire culture and created fear, bondage, mistrust and confusion. Both my boss and I experienced the negative effects while growing up in traditional cultural and familial settings.

Interestingly we also noticed that the same legalistic distortions in the Church, where strict authoritarianism had distorted the gospel of grace. We find that in the New Testament, there are many instructions given to support one another, to bear one another’s burdens, to pray for cone another, and to confess sins to one another. All of which are the practical implications of loving one another.

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Read all about it here. A church that grew out of a little apartment in a small university town in Southern California is spreading like wild fire throughout the so-called “Southland.” They have a site in LA and one in North OC, and even have church plants in the Bay Area and the NYC area. They recently made some kinda headline in Relevant magazine. Now they have also gone over to Bangkok. Watch out world!

The entire set of features, stories and galleries can be found here, culminated by the question, “After all the talk, will there be action?“

Of course the columnist is asking that of the local government and the authorities. While they do have a responsibility as elected officials to do something about the situation, perhaps some of us do not need to sit aside and ask the question, waiting for them to provide an answer. Perhaps some of us can do someting about providing the answer.

Perhaps we do not need for a disaster to hit before we get show the world what the church really means. Churches like this one are making positive steps in transforming the city (while they are not working directly in Skid Row (or maybe they are), they are working in places like Crenshaw High School, where they are teaching and resourcing kids to make a living legally, mentoring and showing that there are choices than joining a gang, selling drugs or doing other illegal activities).

Someone stumbled onto my blog through trying to find reasons or justification for the question that you read in the title of this post. Among the sites that came out through that search was this post written a few months ago in response to an article with a similar title. I am not sure if the post helped with finding the answer to the question. At the time I wrote the article, there were much talk about whether or not God brought on the devastation that was the Indian Ocean Tsumanis.

The recent tragedies in the gulf and elsewhere have sparked further such talk. So, why do people get so agitated at God when things go wrong? Why do people direct their anger at the Almighty? Why do we get angry at all? My counsellor used to tell me that anger is a defence mechanism. It is an angel that protects our inner child so that we are not hurt again.

Is this what is going on when people blame God for bad things that happen to them or for the bad things that they see happening around the world? Why do they hurt? Why do they get angry? Is it a quest for a sense of order, a sense of stability, for comfort? Why do they get angry?

In Matthew 9: 14-17, we have the story of the disciples of John coming to Jesus to inquire why His disciples did not fast, while those of John’s and the Pharisees did. Jesus’ answer to them, in part, reads,

“No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. Neither do men pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”

Some have taken this passage to mean that Jesus indeed has come to set up a new morality, one that surpasses the Old Testament’s law. Earlier, I argued that Jesus elsewhere taught that He was not opposed to the Old Testament Law. In fact, rather than think that Jesus has come to introduce a higher morality, or that He has come to extend the law, we ought to think of Him as doing what He said He came to do: to confirm and re-affirm the grace and mercy that was intertwined in the Old Testament Law.

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One of my favorite authors have just had her latest book, Saving Fish from Drowning published. I read Tan several years ago, and got hooked on her string of novels, The Joy Luck Club, Kitchen God’s Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses and The Bonesetter’s Daughter. Saving Fish from Drowning is a departure from her other books which have a semi-autobiographical and based in either China or Chinese American contexts. In this work, Tan based her story in what is now known as Myamar with a hope of exposing to the world what a repressive country it really is. I hope this leads to a day, not too far away, when Aung San Suu Kyi is finally released and the repressive government is either overthrown or reformed.

My last post outlined some reasons why we might consider King Saul to be a textbook case of a toxic leader. According to Jean Lipman-Blumen in her book, “The Allure of Toxic Leaders,toxic leaders are those who engage in destructive practices and exhibit personality dysfunctions, who often “cause serious harm to their organizations and their followers.” Saul seem to fit those descriptions as I outlined in my last post.

In leadership literature there is a tendency to highlight and distinguish toxic leaders from good leaders. The term “good” used here, as Joanne Ciulla (Coston Family Chair in Leadership and Ethics at the Jeppson School of Leadership Studies, in her article, “Leadership Ethics: Mapping the Territory” in Ethics, the Heart of Leadership) clarifies, is used in two senses: as morally good as well as effective or technically good. The danger here is to focus on only the heroic aspects of leaders and to look for super-heroes in our leaders, only to be disappointed when they all come up short. Earlier on, I noted this all too common tendency of “pedestalizing” our leaders (yeah, it’s that word again!).

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More stories on L.A.’s Skid Row, following last Sunday’s Part One of the Series, Demons are Winning on Skid Row, you can find Part Two: A Corner Where L.A. hits Rock Bottom and Part Three: Offering Compassion: Not a Cure on this page. Also on that page you can view photos and video stories of the author, Steve Lopez, a columnist (whose column I try to read every chance I get) of the Los Angeles Times. As I watch this gallery, my heart when out to the thousand or so people who call Skid Row their home, day in, day out, and words of my Savior ring afresh in my ears: “‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’” Perhaps, as you watch the gallery yourself, you might also want to ask God what He would have you do for the least of these.

I can close the browser. I can switch off the laptop. I can look around me, and get busy again, and I can even feel really grateful that my family has such nice comfortable things around ourselves and forget about them. Or I can put some action to the compassion I feel. One small way I have resolved to do so is to make a donation to the Los Angeles Mission, one of many groups providing solace, care and compassion to those who suffer at our doorsteps.

At a business luncheon gathering this afternoon, I had a strange experience. One of the emcees very emotionally asked the guests all to stand prior to the reciting the oath of allegiance together. He got very emotional, and had choked back his tears as he expressed anger at those who were trying to take the phrase “under God” from the oath and so, according to him, undermine the religious foundations of this nation. He went on to encourage all those present to “fight” for their rights to keep the phrase in the pledge.

That sounded rather odd to me. I know this is something about which many have very strong views. Since I am not an American, I know some people might think I have no business wading into this controversy. But then, I live in this country, and I share the same faith, so I can’t help but wonder out loud (or out write, if you like) if Christians who think that this is a worthy of a “fight” are really expending their energy at the wrong “target”. Maybe our spiritual battle is really about something else.

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Skid row exists because we’ve created it — although until now, with the downtown renaissance approaching its borders — we’ve mostly been able to ignore it.

By shutting mental hospitals, adding thousands to the rolls of medically uninsured, skimping on rehab and keeping social services out of respectable neighborhoods, we’ve guaranteed this teeming human landfill.

Paramedics like Chavez are left to deal with the wreckage. He delivers babies on sidewalks and treats open sores crawling with maggots. He can tell you about Naked Man, who strolls about in the buff and carries on erudite conversations as if he were in coat and tie, and about the once-esteemed professor who wandered the streets in a death spiral after his family perished in a car crash.

Read the whole story here.