The Everyday Club

4/21/11    Tak,      84
At a McDonalds today I met an older Asian man with an interesting history. Tak grew up as a pastor’s son in Hong Kong. When he was 14 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and also attacked, invaded and occupied Hong Kong. Tak’s school closed down and he was forced to work in the shipyards, becoming a machinist by trade. He later moved to Canada and then Chicago, where he bought a machine shop and invented and patented the first automatic fortune cookie maker. Through all this however, Tak had decided he does not believe in God’s existence. He believes that since people can’t know how creation began, they have decided to create various “gods” simply out of the fear of the unknown. I agreed that it is wrong to create our own ideas about God – this violates the 2nd commandment against idols, and I tried to help Tak understand that we can only know God as He chooses to reveal Himself. The evidence for His existence is all around us – just as we know about wind by seeing it’s effects – we can see the evidence of our creator from the creation. “What would it take for you to believe in God?” I asked him. He really couldn’t say. He isn’t even open to the idea of God’s existence. We both look at the same thing – the mystery of the beginnings of the universe – and come to completely opposite conclusions. May God give Tak the same grace he has given me, the ability to see what is right in front of me, the signature of the creator over all of His creation.