Quarantined in Xiamen

I must share a bit about my return trip to China. The story began in Chicago, where my flight to Los Angeles was delayed 1 1/2 hours. When I finally reached Los Angeles, my next flight had already boarded, and I was not quite sure how to find it. It was not just at another gate; it was in a different terminal. I frantically searched and ran to the other terminal and went through security again. As I was running to the gate, I could hear the announcement: "Would the following seven people immediately board the plane: ... Philip Hallstrom ... The door is ready to close." I needed to poop, but dare not stop at the toilet. I was dreadfully thirsty from racing, but dare not stop to buy water. I reached the gate and boarded in asthma attack. The remainder of that flight was uneventful.

I arrived in Hong Kong at 5 a.m., passed the Swine flu checkpoint, and braced for a four-hour layover. I exchanged some money and ate breakfast at Popeye's Chicken, which advertised some Halal-certified selections. Right before boarding, I splurged on my last gourmet coffee for a long time. On the plane, they served me a second breakfast. I looked at the pork sausage and cheese sandwich, and immediately discerned that it was not the kosher meal that I had pre-ordered. I reported this to the stewardess and after several minutes, they found my special meal. I must say that this was the best Kosher meals I've ever had. Go Dragon Air! What I don't understand is the reason that Cathay Pacific's Kosher meal was so lackluster. They are owned by the same company.

Upon arrival in Xiamen, the stewardess announced that they would be doing the Swine flu checks on the plane instead of in the terminal like in Hong Kong. The officials boarded the plane, visited each passenger, and touched a instrument to our foreheads. When she touched my forehead, a solemn look came over her face. Then she touched it again, and there was no improvement. She asked me to stick a thermometer in my armpit and went on to assess other passengers. She came back, saw my reading, and went to confer with some other officials. When she came back, she demanded my passport and travel papers and ordered me to follow her. I slowly exited the plane while all the other passengers looked upon me like a Jewish leper.

She took me to a room where officials repeatedly interrogated me about my itinerary and my symptoms. I repeatedly recounted all the places I had been in the US. I repeatedly reported that I was only a little hot. They looked at my throat and became more agitated. They took a throat culture and then told me that I needed to go to the hospital. My friends Jordan and Eveline had come to the airport to pick me up. I contacted Jordan and told him that an official would be delivering my suitcases to him and could he help me by taking them home for me. When the official returned, she said that when she took my luggage through customs, the customs agent had found an entire suitcase full of theological books. I deflected as best I could by saying that it was actually a mix of theological and psychological books, and it is because I have an interest in those topics. I still do not know what became of my books.

Anyways, other travelers of questionable health came and went. This other girl Tammy and I were the only ones they decided to quarantine. Tammy was an American-born Chinese, but she could only speak Cantonese, not Mandarin. I ended up translating for her. Everyone was perplexed why she could not speak Mandarin, but I, a white guy, could. We waited a desparately long time until finally an ambulance arrived and escorted us to a hospital outside the island. They EMTs were dressed in gear like out of the movie Outbreak.

We were locked in separate quarantine rooms. The room was relatively comfortable except for being quite hot and there not being any windows to get circulation. It had a little door that opened into a chamber where people would leave food for me to pick up.

Another decked out doctor visited me and took another throat culture. He said that I could get out when I met both of two conditions: 1) My body temperature was normal and 2) My throat culture came back negative. A nurse asked me what I would want to eat for supper. I replied that I did not like pork, so could I just get green vegetables. She said that would be fine. When dinner arrived, it was pig intestine soup plus pig ... I cannot even identify the part of the body. I mean, if I am suspected of swine flu, is it too much to ask not to give me swine to eat? I ate it anyway.

My mobile phone had no money on it, so I could not make any calls or send text messages, but I could receive calls. Jordan called me, and I asked him to put some money into my account, which he did and for which I am very thankful. Not having a phone would have been hard. Over the course of the afternoon and evening, several friends from the Bridge sent text messages expressing their concern.

The hospital did have wireless internet, but it required an account with China Telecom, which I did not have. I contacted Jordan, and he let me use his account, and so I got online and was able to send my family an email to report my situation. I am so thankful that the Vineyard Christian Fellowship of Oak Park gave me a laptop computer three days before I left the US. Being in quaratine without a computer would have been much harder.

They slipped me a piece of paper advising me of my right to be visited by a US consul. I declined the right since I fully believe that this is a false alarm. Every couple hours I took my temperature and eventually the fever broke. The throat culture was outsourced to another location, and the report had not yet come back, so I had to spend the night. Quite jet lagged, I went to bed at 7:30 p.m.

When I woke up on the morning of June 11, I really wanted to take a shower. Remember that the morning of June 8 was the last time I showered: I was ripe. The odd thing is that the bathroom did not even have hand soap. This struck me as really odd considering that I am trying to fight an infectious disease. Breakfast came: congee, breakfast cake, hardboiled egg, and milk. Eventually, a nurse offered to give me hand soap, a towel, and some hospital clothes. So I joyfully showered at 10 a.m.

It is now 5:14 p.m. I asked the nurse, and she said that my report has not come back. From reading the news, I see that it can take 3 days to process a throat culture. I guess the labs are overrun with samples. The doctor has not even visited me today since other people are much more severe than I. Note: I am not severe; I don't even have a fever any more. I just cannot get the results of my test back to prove that I am fine.

I will update this blog more later when there is something more to say.

A Coming Together

Introduction

Last week my brain had a coming together. I was finally able to see the truth and co-applicability of three things that over the past year had struck me as odd yet potent. I will share these below.

Lust Inflicts Injury That Needs Healing

Last year I started seeing a Christian counselor. He prescribed for me a weekly checklist of disciplines that I was to observe. This was a negotiated checklist: if I felt that his suggestion was beyond my then-current level of healing, I could reject it. One thing that he suggested was this: if I lusted, I should send him an email reporting this so that he can pray for the healing of the self-injury that occurred. At the time I considered this to be a very odd discipline for two reasons:

1. It presupposed that lust was discrete. In other words, it presupposed that there was a definitive boundary between sexual temptation and lust, such that I could in fact know whether I crossed it. At the time, all the motions in my soul seemed like the unbroken flow of a river with no recognizable national boundary, so I resisted this discipline. In the end after he quantified lust, I accepted the discipline: if I looked at someone with sexual desire or sexually fantasized about someone in excess of three seconds, that counted as lust.
2. It suggested that there was something beyond forgiveness that I needed after lusting, namely, healing of an objective, specific wound. This struck me as very odd--especially since it was he who would pray for the healing of that wound. I mean, if I can pray for my own forgiveness, I certainly can pray for my own healing. In retrospect, his request was quite wise. Since I did not yet believe that each incidence of lust discretely and objectively wounds my soul, I hardly could pray with faith for the healing of this wound. But he wanted to make sure that it got healed regardless of the state of my faith, so he took it on himself to pray for it.

I do not actually recall our discussing this mysterious wound, but the question certainly stuck in my mind, and I have continued ruminating on it for months after ceasing to see that counselor. Last week, I finally grasped the concept. It is implied by 1 Peter 2:11: Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. A passion (lust) of the flesh wages war against my soul; thus, if I permit one, it will inflict an injury on my soul. 1 Corinthians 7:9 and Romans 1:27 both metaphorically compare passion to fire, so a burn would be an apt description of this wound. This realization also helped to firm up the notion of lust's discreteness. If lust causes a burn and I have a lust burn, this implies that I in fact lusted.

Lust Surrenders Ground to Satan That Needs to Be Retaken

Last month I met with a different counselor for two sessions. He led me in prayer concerning a number of experiences in my life. For each experience, one of the things that he asked me to pray was I ask you, Lord Jesus, to take back ground given to the enemy through X and I yield that ground to Your control. When he led me in the prayers, I followed along, but I made a mental that I needed to meditate on this expression later. It struck me as quite analogous to the wounding mentioned above and again implied that there was something beyond forgiveness that I needed.

Last week I finally grasped the concept. Ephesians 4:26-27 says: Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil. This word translated opportunity means place, any portion or space marked off, as it were from surrounding space. In other words, through sin we give ground to the devil. And if we merely ask God for forgiveness, it is possible that we will merely be forgiven and not recover the lost ground. I don't pretend to know what it actually means that the devil possesses ground in my soul, but I hypothesize that it at least entails this: Our conscience is desensitized a degree and thus repeating the sin that caused the ground-loss will be one degree easier.

Strategic Prayer

A while back Amy gave a teaching on being strategic in spiritual warfare. The gist was as follows: The powers of darkness know my weaknesses, have devised a personalized strategy to destroy me, and are actively trying to implement that strategy. Thus, it should not come as a surprise to me that the temptations I experience seem fine-tuned to trip me up with high degree of effectiveness. Furthermore, since their goal is not just my one-time failure but my destruction, it is wise to intentionally prepare a counter-strategy. When I heard her, I was reminded of 2 Corinthians 2:10-11, Indeed, what I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, has been for your sake in the presence of Christ, so that we would not be outwitted by Satan; for we are not ignorant of his designs. Unfortunately, I just could not envision what such a counter-strategy might look like.

Well, last month when I met with the second counselor, he proposed a pattern for combating lies that I believe. The strategy was very good, but I will just focus on the last step here: For each lie X that I am strategizing to overcome, I select a specific prayer target (PT), i.e., a specific person or group for whom to pray. Then when I am being tempted to believe lie X, I pray the following for the associated PT: I pray that you use PT to bring great destruction to Satan's kingdom. He explained that if I do this consistently, the Evil One will notice that every time he tempts me to believe lie X, his kingdom experiences great destruction at the hands of PT. As a result, he will back off tempting me to believe lie X. This struck me as a very valuable tool.

The Application

As I was driving in the car last week, all three of these came into my mind, and I envisioned a new better-rounded weapon for battling lust. This is the program:

1. Heal existing wounds and take back already lost ground. I listed every person for whom I had lusted at some time in the past. The I confessed the sin, asked God to heal me of the injury, asked God to take back the ground that I had lost, and then asked God to use that person to bring great destruction to Satan's kingdom. This took a significant block of time. When I could not think of any more people, I asked the Holy Spirit to bring more people to mind, which He did. This was important because I want to have a truly clean start.
2. Having taken care of the past, now use the concept in the present. When I am tempted to lust for X, I out loud ask God to use X to bring great destruction to Satan's kingdom. I keep praying along these lines until the temptation recedes.
3. If I fail again and lust in the future, I repeat step one for that person.

I feel much more hopeful than I have a in a long while because I feel empowered now to do battle. I would be interested to know if this post was useful to anyone else.

Fruits of the May 2009 Retreat

On May 1 - 3, 2009, I attended the semi-annual Red Tag retreat. One of the themes was God's four omni's: omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, and omnibeneficence. Below I will try to share some insights with which I came away.

I basically have a mental block on the fourth omni (omnibeneficence) that has become the cords that bind me, and they were relentlessly tight all day Friday night through Saturday afternoon. During the free time Saturday afternoon, my friend Doreen proactively sought me out for some reconciliation issues. Then she began to run into the same mental block in me that made it impossible for me either to receive God's love or accept myself. She was inspired to ask some questions. Then when I could not answer a question, she instructed me to ask God right then and there and then waited until I heard an answer. I saw three pictures over the course of that meeting, and then another one Sunday afternoon. I will describe them below:

1. She asked me what God felt when the sperm penetrated the egg that would develop into me. The only thing I could think was that He was disappointed that a different sperm had not penetrated and created a different person. So she told me to ask Him, which I trepidly did. I saw a picture of a large deer with a huge rack of antlers rapidly jumping to the top of a mountain (Songs 2:8-9). When he reached it, he lifted his head and wave his antlers wildly. I instinctively knew that he was excited and proud because his fawn had just been born, and I felt the excitement and pride of God for me.
2. Then I shared the reason I was so afraid of being alone. God is omnipresent, but I feel that He does not like me. The result is a God who is rather peeved that He cannot help being in the same space as me. This has made it very hard to be alone because I cannot get the picture out of my mind of His disgust at being trapped with me. Doreen told me to ask God what He felt next time I was alone with him. I told her that that was not reasonable since my anxiety level at that point is already so high that I most likely would not be able to hear. So she told me to ask him right there what He felt when I was alone with Him. I saw a picture of a boy and his dad together going through a maze made out of tall stacks of hay. I instinctively knew that the father already knew the path to the end, so his purpose was not to find the exit but rather to enjoy the time together with his son. I saw the little boy run ahead several times, get lost, and then run back to his dad to ask which way to go. His dad would always answer, "Let's try this way." I felt God's pleasure at being alone with me.
   
3. I shared with Doreen that I long have had a picture in my mind of my sister getting injured as a child and running to my dad for comfort. He backed away from her as from one with leprosy and then called to my mom, "Janet, your daughter needs you." This picture symbolized what God felt toward me--disgust at my weakness and brokenness. As I prayed, I saw a wolf spider, carrying its children on its back (it looked like this) I instinctively knew that the spider enjoyed the closeness and physical contact with its children and was draw to them because of their weakness and inability to care for themself.
4. Something with which I have long struggled is God's seeming general unavailability when I seek him. While the red tags were sharing their testimonies on Sunday afternoon, I spontaneously saw a fourth picture. It was of a stalagmite and its accompanying stalactite. I remembered that they there were formed by water dripping down from the ceiling, first leaving a calcium deposit on top and then on the bottom. I instinctively knew the interpretation: 1) Even my capacity to reach up to God (the upward-reaching stalagmite) has its source first in grace coming down to me (the water dropping from the ceiling) and 2) At the same time that I am reaching out to God (stalagmite), God is simultaneously reaching out to me (stalactite), and in fact, he reaches out first (the drop leaves calcium on the top first and then the bottom).