Cool like Jesus

"Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy. He wanted to see who Jesus was, but being a short man he could not, because of the crowd. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way.

When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, "Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today." So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly." ~ Luke 19:1-6

I helped out twice with the Alpha program at our church. Alpha is a program that introduces Christianity over a 12 week period through eating a meal together, watching a video and then discussion. The topics each week are very fundamental to Christianity and are well covered (i.e. Who is Jesus? Why do we pray? etc.). We're helping out next week by cooking the meal.

They were talking about "Who is Jesus?" on Wednesday's video and the guy was talking about how cool it would be to be with Jesus in those days. And I was thinking about how hard it is to be like Jesus. Yes...yes...he did ruffle a few feathers every now and then, but he really had quality conversations and relationships with a lot of people.

For example with Zaccheus, he really didn't say much and Zaccheus was bounding down to talk to him and changed his whole way of life to be with Jesus. What goodness Jesus must have exuded.

Thinking to my new relationships with my classmate I hope I exude Christ's goodness too. We went to the zoo together and it was really fun, but I always find there are times when our conversations just stop and I have not much to say to them. I feel so boring sometimes. =P Maybe my next class should be a conversation class?! I read once that if you can draw people to talk about themselves they get to think that you're really fun to talk to, even if you say very little about yourself. I'm trying out that theory and I'm not so sure it really works. It gets too unbalanced I think.

Sigh...I'll have to pray about it.

Here are some pictures from our trip to the zoo! The Taipei zoo is really quite nice! I had a lot of fun there and we only saw about 1/3 of the park (we spent almost 3 hours there). The animals in the zoo are quite unique!

My classmates.

When we got to the monkeys, the zookeeper was feeding them so we got to too! Here we are throwing bananas, tomatoes, green veggies and pieces of bread at the monkeys. It became a game to see which one of us can throw it so that the monkeys could catch it!

The butterfly conservatory was beautiful. Butterflies were flying everywhere.

Although the zoo closes at 5:00p.m. We were still strolling around the zoo for an hour after closing with nobody shooing us out. See! It's just us!