What I Want

I met two pretty amazing men today. One of them was Irwin Jacobs, the founder and former CEO of Qualcomm, the telecommunications company that supplies all of the cellular phone protocols that we use today. A few members of my master’s program got to have a Q&A session with him. Without this person we would not have the 2G and 3G networks that we use today – we’d still be using the cell phone technology we had 10 years ago, if even. He’s an impressive guy – undergrad at Cornell, PhD at MIT, professor at MIT and UCSD, started Qualcomm, and is now among the 1000 richest men in the world. After the meeting with Jacobs, I got a better insight of what my future could look like – including the line between science and business and the road to success. If he did all of that with a PhD, maybe that’s what I want. But I’m not sure.

Strangely, I was much more impressed by the other person I “met” (in the loose sense of the word) and I was more sure that I wanted what he had. He is none other than your favorite short Korean pastor – PR.

In the first of two meetings with him today, we talked about fasting – when, why, and how. I have always hated fasting. I’ve known that God has called us to do it, but the very concept of it was just nonsensical and unnecessary to me. Just the suggestion of it brings up distastefulness. And yet, by the time PR was done describing it, I was almost ready to start fasting then and there. Why? It was PR’s assurance that we would experience God. That by not doing it, I am missing out on something - and he made me believe it. The testimony of a man that loves food as much as he does is pretty powerful. His testimony reminded me how much of God I had yet to experience. I thought I had been doing well this past week, but I’ve barely scratched the surface of what God can do. In terms of achievements, if you can call it such, if there were an objective bar for them, his seemed much greater than Jacobs.

What happened next in the xtreme dship meeting, my head is still trying to process. Suffice it to say that it involved a combination of angels, invisible daggers and nets, and healings. The point is that what PR sees is not what most of us sees. The angel that was so invisible to us is as obvious as the blue sky on a cloudless day is to him.

And yet, we could see. If we wanted to. PR isn’t some mystical man with some special anointment (I think). In fact, the Bible has spelled out exactly what it takes to experience God in such a powerful way. It’s simple – to love God above everything else, like the woman who just wanted to touch Jesus’ cloak. Her desperate faith healed her. Sure, this kind of everything is the kind of everything after you think you’ve given everything. But still, that’s all.

What’s the point of being able to experience God in this way? I don’t know, but what’s the point of being Irwin Jacobs? It might just be because I’m a sucker for mystery and the unknown, but I think it would be way cooler to experience God like that than to be among the 1000 richest men in the world. At the very least, it’s more permanent. Hearing the life of a man like Irwin Jacobs is nice, but it doesn’t make me feel like I’m missing out on something. Hearing about the life of a man that has met God in all the ways that PR has makes me feel like I’m missing out on so much.

Scary part is -- it might be easier to achieve wealth and all those other things than it is to achieve that level of closeness to God, even if that is what I want more than all of those other things.