Pastor David shares some reflections following the Alaska earthquake.

<p>Pastor David shares some reflections following the Alaska earthquake.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Hillside O’Malley SDA Church

David Shin

Reflections After the Alaska Earthquake

Yesterday, after the earthquake, I decided to jump in the car and fill my gas tank.

And as soon as I got on O'Malley, I was like, oh, everybody else has the same idea.

And as I was sitting in my car on Abbott, never seen it like that before.

And I had a lot of time to think and reflect.

I think it took me 2 hours to get gas, going out and coming back.

So, you know, you're in the car just doing nothing, and I just started to reflect on life.

I tend to get kind of philosophical in these moments, don't you?

And there's certain times in your life that you have an awakening, and I think yesterday was 1 of those moments, right?

You come to this time when things are crystallized to what is essential and what is core and what is peripheral.

Sometimes we get all bent out of shape over little things.

And yesterday, it was like, Lord save me, right?

And you didn't know what was gonna happen next, especially when the tsunami warning came, all of these cars were headed up the hillside.

I don't know if you saw that, but there was this back-to-back traffic coming up the hillside, and you could see in people's eyes as I tried to get into Home Depot, but they said, there's no way, and, but I could see in the staff's eyes, there was a look of this is not business as usual and uncertainty.

And we as human beings, we like security.

And yesterday was a reminder how fragile our earthly security really is.

Just in a few seconds, everything that we hold onto as our security can be taken away just like that.

And the question is, what do you hang to then?

And I don't wish for another earthquake, but this is an opportunity, isn't it, For us to reflect on our lives and to ask the fundamental core questions of what is important.

So I've changed my message after that wake-up call yesterday, and I got very little sleep last night.

And so, these are some reflections this morning and some themes that have been in my mind for a little bit of time.

And I pray that through this opportunity that we have in the aftermath of what took place yesterday, that all of us could be reflective and think about life's most important questions.

Psalm 90, verse 10 through 12, this is a Psalm of Moses.

And he says, the days of our lives are 70 years, and if by reason of strength they are 80 years, yet their boast is only labor and sorrow, for it is soon cut off and we fly away.

Who knows the power of your anger for the fear of you, so is your wrath, so teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of understanding." Moses is reflecting on life, and he says life is short, life is finite.

We need to calculate how we are going to spend our life, our time, and this is an interesting statistic that I came across in regards to where we spend our time.

It says for the average American that leaves college at 22 and lives to be 70.

Now, I'm just using this as a statistic here.

The 48-year adult lifespan can be broken down into a few key activities.

So from 22 to 70, 48 years, during that time, you will spend on average 16 years working.

That's nonstop, without any breaks for eating, sleeping, or vacationing.

The next biggest drain on your time is a shocker, it's media.

You could spend up to 8 years watching TV on the internet and other sources of media.

You can spend up to 4 years eating and then 2 years commuting for the average American.

And then it went on to say that when all these activities are subtracted, you will have less than 4 years to do what you desire to do.

Like spend time with a spouse or loved 1, time with the children and grandchildren, outings and vacations, and it goes on to say that this is approximately 1 12th of your life.

Tragically, most of that time will be postponed to a period called retirement, when many people no longer enjoy the health needed to live life to the fullest.

And after you take out 16 years working, 15 years sleeping, 8 years on social media or television, I hope not.

You take away all of these elements and you have very little time to do what you actually want to do.

The Bible reflects on the brevity of life.

It is like a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.

James 4, 14, as for man, his days are like grass, as a flower of the field so he flourishes for the wind passes over it and it is gone And its place remembers it no more and the Reverend Billy Graham before he passed away said the greatest surprise to me is the brevity of life.

My grandmother, before she passed away, visited our home and took the opportunity to sit me down.

And She said, let me tell you about my life.

And this is 1 of those moments that I will always treasure.

Her passing on her legacy in a way, her story.

She told the story of how she fled North Korea to South Korea with a diaper bag and my mother.

Penniless, after the war, then went to Japan as missionaries, then to America.

And she worked her fingers to the bone to support her family.

And finally, she said that when she came to the place when she could finally take a breath and say, now I can relax, She looked in the mirror, and she was almost 80 years old.

And she looked at me and said, David, you're lucky.

And she said, take advantage of the gift you've been given.

Ecclesiastes chapter 7 verse 2 says, "'Better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting, for that is the end of all men, and the living will take it to heart.'" There are certain moments in which our life tends to crystallize and our values seem to emerge and yesterday was 1 of those moments when you suddenly have a distillation of values I Was talking with the conference president yesterday right before he made his public announcement about the Alaska conference.

And he told me, David, it's interesting, because here we are arguing about policy.

And we suddenly realize what's really important.

And I had the privilege of going to Africa a number of years ago.

You can see that we're very excited to be there.

This is 1 of our rides that we had in the van.

And we were in this Toyota van Going around a blind corner on the wrong side of the road, there's a local driver, he's very, very good, and we're going around this corner, and I'm just bracing myself for a head-on collision.

And I turned to Chester in the midst of that corner, and I said, Chester, we're going to die.

I said, Chester, we are going to die in Africa.

I was just waiting for that impact, And he turned to me, very sympathetic by the way, he turned to me and he said, David, if we die, we die.

And anyways, I got bitten by mosquitoes a lot.

I told this story a little bit before and they seemed to like me more than anybody else.

Came back to America and it was around December in Virginia and I started getting these flu-like symptoms and there was a flu bug going around, so I thought it was just classic cold flu and went on for 6 days.

Finally, I went to my parents and I told them, something's wrong, This is not normal.

So I go to the hospital and the doctor that had been on duty that night happened to have been a missionary to Africa.

So he took 1 look at me and said, David, I'm not going to even wait for the blood test to come back.

He said, at the top of my list is malaria.

And I found out very quickly what malaria was.

A mosquito bites you and takes your blood and leaves a gift.

Leaves a parasite that goes into your bloodstream and then into your red blood cells.

Well, actually, it incubates in your liver for a little bit and then they go into your red blood cells and then They infiltrate and they multiply and then when they get to a certain tipping point, that red blood cell bursts.

And I found out later that I had a fatal form of malaria.

There's falciparum and Vivax, I forgot the name of it.

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Reflections After the Alaska Earthquake

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