A Christian’s Open Letter to Myka and James Stauffer

Dear Myka and James Stauffer,

You are trash and I hate you.

This is what I’d love to write. This is honestly how I feel in my heart right now. But I am a Christian, and I am called to not hate you, but rather love you despite hating your sin, and oh boy do you have a lot. Not that I don’t have my own sins, but you — how dare you? How could you? How can you?

You call yourselves Christians, so I will judge you as a Christian according to 1 Corinthians 5:12. Listen well, “Christians”:

You live in unrepentant sin.

This is not an exhaustive list of your sins – they are just the ones that I can list for now without exhausting myself mentally when I think of you:

You live in the unrepentant sin of uprooting an innocent child from his loving foster home in China.
You live in the unrepentant sin of exploiting him for views and millions of dollars.
You live in the unrepentant sin of lying to your viewers to fund your lavish lifestyle under the guise of paying for your child’s medical care.
You live in the unrepentant sin of abusing your adopted child.
You live in the unrepentant sin of acting upon your White Saviour Complex for shoulder pats and affirmation.
You live in the unrepentant sin of attempting to gaslight a non-verbal 4yr old to absolve yourself of responsibility.
You live in the unrepentant sin of inflicting unspeakable mental damage and trauma upon him for the rest of his life. As if he wasn’t already struggling enough.
You live in the unrepentant sin of declaring that you are the victim here, and that you are justified in abandoning him. Sorry, my bad, you “re-homed” him. Like an animal.
And the worst part: you live in the unrepentant sin of using the name of God in vain, suggesting that He is all-loving and therefore forgives you for everything.

How dare you.

God does indeed forgive. But He forgives those who are repentant. He forgives those who come before Him, crying for forgiveness, begging on their knees for mercy, broken by the weight of the sins on their shoulders. He desires mercy, and He will never turn away a contrite heart.

But you? You are shallow, selfish, narcissistic, greedy… insolent, haughty, boastful, an inventor of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. You are filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. You deserve to die.

So repent. Genuinely repent. You do not fool anyone with your crocodile tears. Come before Him with your true heart and your true tears. Beg for forgiveness – not so that you can manipulate your followers for more money and continue your social media career, but so that you can learn to truly love others as you love yourself.

I would love to see that day, because the world can see how much you love yourselves. I’d love to see the day you love others the same amount.

If you do not repent, you will face the wrath of my almighty God. You do not know Him for you worship the god of yourself, an image created by you. But I hope you come to know Him. I hope you come to true repentance, and receive true forgiveness.

Remember this:

And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done. And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done.

Revelation 20:12-13, ESV

And thanks be to God, I no longer hate you, for I know that vengeance is His, and He will repay.

I implore you to seek truth, to seek Him. I pray that if you are grieved, you will be grieved to repentance; be convicted. I know that child is in His hands, as are you. My God will protect him, but as for you – decide if you will be true to your Christian claims, or stop using the name of God in vain.

With all the Christ-like love I can muster,
Crystina.

Black Lives Matter #BlackoutTuesday

I was yesterday years old when I finally understood why All Lives Can’t Matter Until Black Lives Matter. I still don’t understand all of it, but I am thankful that I am no longer as ignorant as I once was, and I’m sorry it’s taken this long.

I have other blog posts in drafts that I was originally going to publish these days, but those can wait. This is so much more important.

To be honest I’m still processing, and there’s just been so much happening in the world that is draining my mental and emotional capacity, but today is #blackouttuesday, and I want to note down my initial thoughts. I’ve been quiet on this issue for a long time, but no more.

I’m not sure how or where to begin, but perhaps I will start by making public the messages I’ve written to friends privately.

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Finance: No-Penalty CD vs A High-Yield Savings Account

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This post was published on 5/30/2020 and last edited on 6/16/2020.

Click here to skip this post and just read what we ended up opening.

In my previous post I wrote about researching the best CD in the market at present because we were interested in opening up a new one.

However, what we found out during the process of deliberation between Ally and Marcus, was that Marcus also have a High-Yield Savings Account (HYSA) that offers 1.30% APY. Also if you don’t live in California, there are other banks that give much higher APY %’s for their HYSAs. What the heck! So I guess if you live in another state you should look into what’s best for you there.

Anyways, let’s go back to the 1.30% APY that we actually have access to. This is higher than most of the no-penalty CDs!

But there’s also a reason for this: this high APY rate will fluctuate as the Federal Reserve’s interest rates rise or decrease, so you aren’t guaranteed that rate will remain. The Marcus representative I spoke to advised that unfortunately they do not send out emails to notify their customers if the APY rate decreases.

Edit: Turns out this is untrue and they do actually notify customers if their rates change! I literally just received this email:

As such, we had to decide if we should still open up a CD to lock in the APY rate, or if we should just put the investment into a HYSA instead. Also, if we were still going to open up a CD, should we open a 7mo or 11mo one? By this time, I already had my heart set on Marcus by Goldman Sachs, so all of these are related to what they offer. Here’s our thought process:

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Recipe: The Best Chocolate Chip & Walnut Banana Bread

This recipe is actually fool-proof because I am not a baker. And yes, it is the best chocolate chip and walnut banana bread. (Because if your banana bread doesn’t have chocolate chips or walnuts in, what’s even the point amiright?)

I have tried various recipes to varying degrees of success (though Jacky was more than happy to eat all of them, and my neighbours graciously accepted to eat some too haha), but this one I’m writing down so I never forget.

And you, in case you are not a baker either, can benefit too. Ha!

For the first time ever it did not come out all dense and crusty; the bread was so moist and the colour was just perrrfect and the chocolate was all melty and, well, we didn’t take many photos before we dug in.

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Finance: Best No Penalty CD May 2020

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This post was published on 26th May 2020 and edited on 27th May 2020.

The Basics

CD stands for “Certificate of Deposit”, meaning you deposit a sum of money into a bank that must remain in the bank for a fixed term, in order for you to receive a certain percentage of interest on your money. Anyone who has more than $1k just hanging out in their bank account should consider opening up a CD to get a higher interest rate.

…Which is why I looked into it. Our interest savings account is on 0.01% APY whereas your average no-penalty CD is offering 1.00% APY – that’s 100x higher than what I’m getting with my bank right now. (Note: “APY” just means the amount of interest you’ll earn on your money over period of 1yr, compounding annually. It stands for “Annual Percentage Yield”.)

Typically if you withdraw the money early, you will be charged penalties of varying severity depending on the bank. I looked into current CD’s being offered at the highest rates of interest, that will allow you to close it down and take out your money (and interest) after just 7 days, with zero penalties.

Now there are certainly longer-term CDs that offer higher APY’s, but you never know when you’re going to need your money back, and right now the interest rates are very low due to economic instability from COVID, so I do not recommend getting stuck in a long-term CD. This is true especially if you have a larger sum of money to invest, and if you don’t have that much to invest, the extra 0.1-0.3% APY won’t make much of a difference anyway.

But why should you trust me, a random person on the internet? You don’t have to, but I’ve spent hours researching this because I am not super well-versed in all of this investment/financial jargon malarky, and I’ve decided to summarise my key findings in lay-mans terms here to save you time from doing it yourself. I do also have a Business Studies degree from one of the top UK universities, if that helps.

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