Prayer

(Oh, I’m so not a preacher, even though my cellmates might disagree since I tend to do a lot of it when we meet up 😉 , but here is something I’ve been thinking about for a while now)

Recently, I’ve become increasingly aware of how much faith requires action.

In the past I’ve seen prayer as something very passive. You sit down, often by yourself, and you ask God for a lot of stuff. Or you thank him, but it’s the same thing – God is the one who should be acting, or has been acting on your prayer.

But if you think of yourself and the gifts you receive from God, haven’t they come through you acting in faith on what you have been praying for? Take spiritual gifts for instance. If you ask to receive the gift of speaking in tongues, or the gift of giving, they will not come to you just like that. You will not find yourself suddenly babbling a lot of nonsense or suddenly see how you have put a hundred euro bill in the offering box. (At least this is what I think, maybe it really happened this way for some…) You yourself have to open your mouth and you yourself have to dig into your wallet and pull out that bill. It’s not like God would possess your body for a few hours and let your conscience stand beside and watch all the crazy stuff he is doing with you.

I’m not saying that it’s all up to us. I just think we need to act so that God can work through us. If we never open our mouths how can God have any chance to say something through us?

And I’ve started to think, that if this is the case than maybe it’s the same with all sorts of prayer as well. If you are praying for a friend and you don’t act on what you are praying, how will anything ever happen. Oh, it could happen, but would it not be neat if it did so when you where there. And this is not just praying for someone to become a Christian, it could just as well be that someone would do good in an exam or feel better about themselves or just that their everyday life would be blessed.

Isn’t it always better to talk to a person about these things than to talk to God about them? Or is this a radical idea? Of course you should also pray to God, in this way He will have a chance to guide you in what you are saying and to give you ideas on how to help that person. But if you are sitting at home thinking about someone and praying for that person, instead of actually phoning him/her up, that just sounds stupid.

Praying could then be something more of a motivational speech. You know, like the ones you do before phoning someone when you know you have to speak in Finnish. Because opening your heart and your mouth and telling it like it is, is like practise for the soul. Something to make you courageous enough to go out there and actually do something.

Hmmm, so I’m not actually practising this yet, but it is something I would like to do more and more.

My faith in God should go beyond Him being able to do anything, to me being able to do anything through Him.

And finally I’d like to quote something I read in Mickelsson.net today: God, behind my words is a life that wants to honor you.

              

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Sweet tomatoes

I love Chinese food but when someone asks me what my favourite dish is it can be a bit hard to explain, especially if the person asking happens to be Chinese.

My favourite dish is Sweet eggs and tomatoes.

I firmly believe that this is one of the most common dishes in China. All Chinese I’ve met disagree. I try to explain it: “It’s like a mixture of egg and tomatoes, looks like tomato sauce with some egg in it”. Their faces just go blank: “I’ve never tasted anything like that, but (with a consoling voice) you know, China is very big, maybe it’s a dish they only serve in Hong Kong”. I now know for a fact that this isn’t true. My father recently went to a factory near Shanghai where he had the exact same dish in the factory canteen!

But I guess I’m just not explaining it correctly, and also; who would believe that of all Chinese dishes I would come to choose this one as my favourite…

It must be something like a Chinese person explaining his favourite Finnish dish like this: “Well, it’s like meat porridge with raisins in it”. And you go totally blank:” I have never tasted anything like that, but maybe they eat it up in the northern parts of the country, or near the Russian border, they probably have some very weird, traditional stuff there”. And your Chinese friend goes:” No you can actually buy it in any supermarket. It comes in little boxes and you just have to heat it in the microwave oven”.

And how ashamed you’d be when you realize that what he/she is describing is actually leverlåda/maksalaatikko (liver in a box)- the most common dish there is.

But here is the recipe for Sweet egg and tomatoes (maybe some Chinese will understand what I’m talking about now)

• 6 large tomatoes
• 1 tsp spring onion
• 4 eggs
• 1 tsp freshly grated ginger
• 2 tsp salt
• 2 tbsp sugar (well I’m not so sure about this, my original recipe says 3 tsp of sugar, but I say throw in as much as you dare)
• 4 tbsp oil

First you boil the tomatoes for 30 second until the skin starts to fall off. Then you peel them, chop them up in wedges and take out all the runny stuff inside. Then you fry the eggs together with 1/2 tsp salt and some oil until the eggs are completely white. After that, you put the eggs in a separate bowl while frying the ginger and spring onion. Add the tomatoes, sugar and the rest of the salt to the pan and let boil. Add the egg and let boil some more. Serve with rice 🙂

I’ve probably showed you this picture before, but I just love it so much so here it is again. It is me eating at my favourite canteen in CUHK.  In the picture you’ll see some other favourites of mine, I call them: Sweet cucumber with chicken and Egg plant with minced meat!

               

                   

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My weekend in pictures OR Following my parents’ advice

As my parents have at least 25 years more life experience than I, I try to follow their advice. But sometimes it tends to go overboard…

I come from a very orderly household. And you might think that I’m a pretty organized person too. But if that’s your opinion I bet you haven’t seen my closet! While writing my thesis I’ve ignored all non-important cleaning issues. Like dusting ontop of the kitchen cabinets, taking out old newspapers and organizing my closet. This is the result:

In my parents’ opinion it’s good to save your banking accounts for at least 3 years before throwing them away. In my very organized filing system I therefore found receipts dating back to 2001…

After 3 hours of intense labour:

I still get chocked every time I open my closet to take out some clothes…

One thing, however, that’s organized are my kitchen cabinets. This is in part due to my mother’s love for tin containers. And because of her belief that everything stays more clean inside a container than in a bag. I just think it looks pretty 🙂 Even though it takes up three times more space than the regular flour bags would. The result of my containers were apple-pear bread (because I ran out of apple) and orange-raisin bread. Yum!

When living alone it’s good to have tools like a hammer and a screwdriver at hand in case of an emergency. A hammer can be used for lots of things, among others grinding spices… After having wished for it several years in a row, I could finally add a knife to my toolbox. This was after I’d agreed to always wear gloves when using it. So here is a picture for you mother, I’m cutting the stems of my tulips – wearing gloves!

And how come I’ve had time to do all this organizing and baking this weekend? Well I’m sick. Or rather on the verge of becoming sick. My temperature is around 37.3 degrees Celsius and my upbringing is yet again causing me to do the right thing. Which is to stay inside even though the sun is shining and I’m feeling quite healthy!

             

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Chow

My co-workers favourite thing to do is to tease Zhao, the Chinese guy. That’s because he usually doesn’t understand that they are joking and gets all worked up, which is kind of funny to watch. And this is especially true if you are questioning something related to China.

Today’s question was: Do Chinese people really eat Dalmatians?

It took a while before Z understood what a Dalmatian was. They tried to explain by referring to Disney’s 101 dalmatian movie, but he was still clueless.

The second question of the day then became: Don’t Chinese people watch Disney?

By then Z was really worked up and tried to defend himself by saying that he only watch Tom and Jerry and the Simpsons.

My co-workers still wouldn’t let him be and asked again: Do Chinese people eat Dalmatians?

Finally Z understood and shouted out a “no”.

Next question: is there a difference between one dog and another, since Chinese people obviously eat dogs?

And then he explained it so brilliantly that I just had to quote him here (that’s why I wrote this little story). He said:

Some dogs are like pets and some dogs are like pigs.

There you go!

These are dogs you eat:

And these are dogs you don’t:

 Easy to see why isn’t it. They are sooo much cuter when they have dots…

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