It’s been one year since my brother passed away.  Both my dad and my mom gave their sharings, I feel that I should write something too.

Looking back at justin’s life, I’ve learned a lot of things, but one of the things that touched me the most is how God completely changed my brother’s life.

When we’re young, we moved to many different places.  Every time we moved, we ended up in a completely new environment, and we always have to start making new friends and get used to the new environment.  In order to fit in and attract attention, Justin learned to use his imagination to tell exaggerated stories that are sometimes far from being true.  Of course, after people discovered that those stories aren’t completely true they started calling him a liar.

As the result, my brother’s relationship with his friends doesn’t turn out so well, and Justin slowly turned into an insecure person who’s desperately trying to gain recognition from his peers, and he will do everything, good or bad, just to please the people around him.  Heck, he even gave his online game account’s password to his friends and they stole it (changed the password) and laugh at him, and he didn’t even break up with them.  I remember once my dad pointed this out and told him that he doesn’t really have any real friend, Justin basically broke down and cried the whole night until like 3 am.

So that’s the Justin I know before we come to U.S.  Then when Justin got saved , everything slowly changed.  Or rather, Justin did not change, but got restored by God to be who he was created to be.  He still exaggerates a lot when he talks, but most of the time, when he talks about a person, he will talk about his strengths like they are the most important things of the world.  Like one of his friend is very good at playing starcraft, and then he’ll introduce him to me by saying “look Eric this is the CAPTAIN of the UCSB starcraft team!” As if that’s as important as winning Novel Prize.  And really, I thnk this is a very good attitude.  We are all imperfect, we all have things that we can improve on, so why pick on everything that you don’t like in a person?  I think it is much better for us to learn to appreciate each others’ strength and respect them, even if it’s something as little as playing starcraft good.

Also, another thing I see in my brother is that he had really become a person with an identity, a person with his own principles.  To be honest, when he first got saved I thought it’s another friend-pleasing thing, just something he does to please his friends at church.  But I was wrong.  When he got into argument about the prom thing in his senior year, regardless of whether he’s right or wrong (I don’t think it is a matter of right and wrong anyways), Justin showed me that he is a man of principle.  Yes, he still want to please everyone, and he still cares a lot about what his friends tinker of him, but He has found in Jesus an identity, a set of principle that he will do nothing to compromise or betray.  He no longer needs recognition from his peers to feel secure, he cares the most about whether he is doing what is right before God.

To me, a person who had lived with Justin for 20 years, his life is a living testament of God and how much He can do to change your life.  Justinis a great brother and a great blessing to everyone around him, and I truly wish that, with God’s help, I can also become a blessing like how Justin was (and is, for our God is the God of the living), instead of being a social reject like I am now :P.  May God help us and work in our lives.