At Church of Grace to Fujianese (133 Allen Street).
I was 40 minutes late at 7:40pm. I did not expect Michael Liu to be later than I. Nonetheless, it must be noted that I was late during my last lunch time with him, last Tuesday. I was almost an hour late. I must say, the Q44 was 30 minutes late as well. But no, I cannot put all faults to the MTA bus, nor Michael's change of time from 11am to 12pm.
Traffic? Perhaps.
I heard him preach/sharing his testimony. Perhaps I've heard it once or that I thought I knew him well enough, that I was easily distracted away from his speech. The whole sermon by Dr. Tong lasted 2 hours simply because he included Michael's testimony in the first half. I can see how others would be troubled by it. The program made no mention of this detail.
It is not easy to do what Dr. Tong does. To reach out to youths that love God. With thousands of people meeting him every time, filtering out the "right" ones is certainly tough. Not to mention attacks from the narrow hearts.
I agree with Rev. Tong's agony with today's lack of Chinese evangelists. I do pray for Michael Liu. I also pray that he does not get swayed by the extreme evangelists who thinks being gospel amplifiers is equal to gospel preaching.
I took in my heart a few things from Dr. Tong's message:
1. Take everything and philosophize it, and then, theologize it, before letting it pass one's hold on it.
2. Mazda, the Japanese automobile brand, is etymologically a pagan god.
3. Those who always complain how often they were being mistreated, are proud. If you think you are good when you are good to others, then you are no good. Repeat this by replacing "good" with "spiritual", etc.
4. Dr. Tong finally (perhaps not the first time) named "Yuan Zhiming" as the one who equate Lao Zi's Dao De Jing to the Bible as God's special revelation.