After an exciting first week, my expectations for the second were set pretty high. Having been pumped up about how exciting the Word of God can be and seeing the depth and richness of the Word, I headed into the second week, hoping that the gist of Calvinism would be made known to me in that one week.
However, after the first day, my bubble was burst and I had to re-evaluate my expectations for the rest of the week. I previously mentioned about my ignorance of the Chinese part of the Synod and this is partially due to my incompetence in the language, so having a lecture done mainly in Chinese is a sure way of losing me. My mental ability to decipher, translate and understand Chinese in realtime is quite limited as I have found out during the singing of Chinese songs, where I am struggling to catch up to say the correct pronunciation at the right time which leaves me with no spare brain power to process the meaning of the words. The inevitable conclusion to the first day was the sporadic grasping of a few points and a lot of "huh?"s and "what is that in English?".
I mean no disrespect for the speaker and I acknowledge that this is more of a reflection of my own shortcomings and I feel that this is sounding more of a rant than anything else, so I shall try to change course now. I was very thankful for the next day where the speaker tried to use English as the main language of communication and things got a lot better.
One thing that I realised was that Christianity is a thinking "religion" (for lack of a better word). There is so much to process, so many ways to interpret the source text and so many schools of thought to consider. How can anyone say that it is a blind faith when there is so much thinking going on? Of course I recognise that this might not apply to everyone, but the uniqueness of each person's life and how God can work in it means that we each have to ponder what our faith means to us and apply it in our own distinctive way.
Ultimately, I probably left the week with more questions than when it first started. I don't see this as a bad thing, but rather a renewed interest in the Word and doctrine. Time to add more topics to read up on to the list of things to complete this summer holiday.
Joshua Lee
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