Pastor James Fam

When the “teachers of the law” pressed Jesus to make his top picks among the commandments, he replied that the greatest act is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength, followed secondly by loving your neighbor as yourself. (Mark 12:30-31) This suggest that our priority is to love God first and then loving others and loving ourselves become by-products of our first choice to develop a relationship with God the Father.

“If it’s from God, it will only get stronger.” And with those words we ended our conversation in a coffee shop in the late Fall of 2007. Within a few weeks, I tendered my resignation from an engineering profession that I have enjoyed and excelled in for the past eight years to commit myself fully into ministerial vocation.

Most of us have probably been taught at a young age to show respect to our parents. The late Aretha Franklin is well-remembered for a popular tuneasking for some R-E-S-P-E-C-T. I would suggest that more than giving respect, what we need more of in our culture today is HONOUR. 

In the movie Bruce Almighty, Jim Carrey’s character was given almighty powers by a fictitious God (played by Morgan Freeman) to teach him how difficult it is to run the world. While the movie does not focus on providing sound theology, there are many spiritual aspects in the story that are worth contemplating.

Have you ever owned a counterfeit? A fake designer watch, imitation brand name handbag, replica headphones, or maybe even a pair of knockoff sneakers that were way too cheap to be true. Whether by mistake or by choice, the satisfaction that a counterfeit brings is usually short-lived, and disappointment ensues once you have the chance to compare it to the real thing.

I enjoy animated movies and a recent 3D film that intrigued me is The Emoji Movie.  Go back a decade and emoji would not ring a bell in most people’s minds, but the widespread adoption of text and picture messaging led Oxford Dictionaries to make “emoji” the 2015 Word of the Year!What really caught my attention from the plot of the movie was the main character – Gene, a “meh” emoji.