commemorating a father

another death.  two of the best men i've known have now passed away unexpectedly within 7 months of each other.

.....blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.....

i first met jeff in the middle of nowhere, back when i taught english in a mountainside farm town of 30,000 people in one of the poorest counties in china.  i mentioned in a blog post on Feb 20, 2005 that two travelling worship bands were planning to play a concert at our school.  one of their leaders happened to be a lively, wisecracking japanese-american who made it a point to strike up a conversation with every person who crossed his path, language barriers be damned.

five years, a wife, and a couple intercontinental moves later, my friend mentioned a pastor in north taipei whose calling was to disciple and mentor men.  his name popped up in a couple other places and a short while later i received a distinct impression from the Lord, telling me to meet this man, that he would play a significant role in my life.

i walked into oasis church in 天母 one sunday in the fall of 2010 and found myself staring at the lively japanese-american who was cracking jokes to the congregation as he preached his sermon.  after the service i walked up to him and he stared back at me.  what...you...baojing?!

he introduced me to his amazing wife, i introduced him to mine, and they unofficially adopted us into their family.  from that point on, taiwan became home.  over the next few years, jeff and his wife poured into us like nothing we'd ever experienced before.

.....Your love, Lord, reaches to the heavens, Your faithfulness to the skies.
Your righteousness is like the highest mountains, Your justice like the great deep.....

this has been a dark year.  i don't understand why good men are dying early deaths and why pain seems to be increasing.  i don't understand it, i don't like it, and...somehow it has only strengthened my conviction in the goodness of God.

a couple months ago i wrote the following email to friends who suffered a late term miscarriage:

i can't imagine the depths that must creep up on you when you let your guard down or even just pause a moment to reflect.  i can't imagine the intensity of the wrestling that may be going on inside your hearts and your spirits.  but i know our God is big enough to take all of your pain, all your grief, all your blackness, and give you all of Himself in return.  clinging to faith in the face of tragedy may seem like a mindless cop out to some, but i think to us it's in fact the deepest expression of faith, the deepest way we can let Him into our lives.  after all, God lost a son Himself - He's not above this kind of pain.

this was part of jeff's legacy to me - while we both loved to live and explore the world, he trained me to do so while keeping the eyes of my spirit open to the greater reality around me than what could be seen by my physical eyes.  this is what he modeled everyday.  this is how he poured and poured and poured himself out EVERY SINGLE DAY and never ran dry.

we visited jeff and his wife for a few days this past may.  it was instantly our home away from home.  after we left, i sent them this message:

just wanted to say thanks again for letting us stay with you and for all the other things you've done for us.  being around your family and in your home always makes me feel...elevated, where i get the most tangible sense of God's reality being superior to the world we see around us.  even if we're just sitting around watching goofballs on tv.  thanks for being so real and so awesome.

and thank you jeff, for letting me witness how a man of purest heart walks with and sees God in his daily life.  thank you for fostering a conviction in me that God always makes good things out of bad.  thank you for pouring into me to the point where i can now give myself over to both fully grieving and fully rejoicing at your passing.

the book of hebrews says Jesus endured the cross for the joy set before him.  and so we endure our grief, fixing the eyes of our spirit on the author and perfecter of our faith, being sustained by the joy set before us of one day joining our friends and arriving at home, one more time.

commemorating a brother

one freak accident and so many lives are changed forever.  no warning blip, no whisper to say 'brace yourself - a big one's coming.'

the world has shrunk, this morning's colors seem inordinately dull, and the conflict between faith in things unseen and pain of genuine loss has never seemed greater.  faith presents ancient scriptures while pain attacks with accusations of injustice and irrational fragility.  faith counters with its chief ally hope and the irrationality of love entering into our fragility in the form of Jesus.

it hurts.  but in the end, one man's death doesn't diminish the goodness of God.  not even if that man is young and overflowing with smiles and life.  not even if that man has one of the sweetest and gentlest temperaments that could conceivably be designed.  not even if that man was the first person besides my wife and i with whom my baby daughter felt comfortable enough to fall asleep on.

farewell for now, brother.  we'll see you soon.

processing grace

when i was 10 i saw a wordless skit performed by a high school youth group that depicted man's creation, fall, and redemption.  i was struck by the beautiful idea of a God who loved us to the point of death and for the first time that i can remember, i cried as a result of something resonating in my spirit.

this idea of love captured my mind and my emotions, but it failed to capture my heart, and as a result, my life.  i understood grace but had a deeper and rawer understanding of scrutiny and consequence.  i had an adolescent boy's typical issues with self-worth, the perception of others, a desire to be accepted (often at the expense of others), which many times manifested in bad behavior, which resulted in the disappointment and rejection of others, which resulted in shame, which resulted in more bad behavior.

above this cycle, the concept of God loving us even when we behave badly - of loving us so much that all the bad behavior everyone could ever do only caused Him to reach out and give humanity the greatest hug possible through Jesus - floated in a disconnected vacuum in my outlook on life.

in the decades since then, God has continuously prodded and poked at this vacuum to let the life-revolutionizing nature of His love flood outwards and into my relationship with Him and others around me.  but it's a process, and a journey, and often a cycle, and sometimes i find myself cowering needlessly, waiting to be squished by the full weight of His disapproval.

and now, as i've become a father myself and have been thinking about how my relationship with karis will develop as she grows, i've realized that it is amazingly, suffocatingly important to me that she will always know that i love her NO MATTER WHAT, and that her unawareness of this would be more painful to me than any behavior or action she could do herself.

and so i wonder if the message of grace can be explained by what affects God's heart more - when i disobey Him, or when i fail to recognize that He loves me even after/despite/regardless of my disobedience?

tomorrow is easter and yesterday was good friday.  yesterday, after being nailed to the cross, Jesus implored God to have mercy on the people tormenting him, to 'forgive them for they know not what they do.'  yesterday, Jesus proclaimed that His heart was for God to pour out His love and mercy on us instead of letting us spiral downwards in a cycle of consequence, guilt, and shame.

tomorrow, God makes it happen.

inspired by a german dissident

well, it's been over five years.  

since the last post, i've started working full-time, gotten married, moved overseas, and become a father.  this series of life events might lead some towards greater introspection, but i seem to have gone the other way.

according to goodreads.com, since september 2010 i've read 65 books.  here's a categorization, from most to least read:

22: fantasy
13: science-fiction
12: not so literary fiction
6: literary fiction
4: kurt vonnegut
3: not so thought-provoking non-fiction
3: thought-provoking non-fiction
2: Jesus-related

i really wanted to put a sarcastic caption here.
been reading way too many cracked.com articles...

hm...a bit heavy on empty calories and light on nutritional value.  also, kurt vonnegut gets his own category just cause he's the man.  

i'm currently reading through a biography of dietrich bonhoeffer, the german theologian who was executed for his involvement in the valkyrie plot to assassinate hitler.  the biographer quotes extensively from bonhoeffer's personal letters and diary entries, and it's absolutely fascinating how rich and engaged his inner thought life was.

so, here's my new year's resolution.  actually, let's call it a declaration instead, to be more proactive and less reactive.  take a bit of thoreau (or more accurately, that kid in dead poet's society who quotes thoreau, since i barely remember walden from 10th grade english):

I wanted to live deliberately, I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,

To put to rout all that was not life and not when I had come to die
Discover that I had not lived

and shift the orientation from humanism to heaven with 1 Corinthians 7:

Let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him,

and to which God has called him

and determine to think more freely, reflect more intentionally, and process the world more deeply, and as daily life both settles and expands, to have it be characterized by this:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time

(after all, i couldn't really kick-start this blog again without some help from t.s...)

i just got back from a week on the east coast, to celebrate my dad's 60th birthday. it was an eventful week, i got to see 5 friends from college, all of whom i hadn't seen in 3-5 years. re-acquaintance with people and places i haven't seen in a long time always triggers some kind of emotional response in me...maybe i'll write something about that later.

it was my dad's 60th birthday, and my mom planned an elaborate surprise celebration for him at church...me and my sister's duties were to say something, perform something, and make a slide show out of something. i wasn't really feeling up to it, especially the speech part. i couldn't in good conscience say something along the lines of being grateful for the eternally solid love of a father or anything. besides being banal and overly saccharine, it would feel dishonest - me and my dad just don't have that kind of relationship. not that he hasn't provided for me or loved me in his own way, it's just that we don't know each other well enough for me to make that kind of grand claim about his place in my life.

strangely enough, my recalcitrance about the whole thing started wearing down when i began putting pictures of my dad's childhood into the slideshow the night before the celebration. it was seriously unnerving seeing pictures of my parents when they were children and young adults. it's weird thinking of them in any function other than the one they serve as my parents i suppose. it made me start thinking about what kind of life journey my dad has been on, and what role i've played in it, and how i've seen him evolve and mature over the part of his journey that has included me. so in the middle of putting the slideshow together, i paused to start typing my speech, and this is what i ended up saying in front of his congregation the next day:

*****

My dad has always been somewhat of a mystery to me. When I think about his role in my life, I think about all the things he’s done for me and our family, all the things he’s given to me and our family. Though he’s quick to smile, he’s also often introspective and difficult to read. Seems like I inherited the introspection while the smiles went to my sister.

In my life, I haven’t given enough thought to the profundity of how, out of all the possible ways in which our relationship with our Lord could be described, the most common one is a Father and His children. This is amazingly profound. This means that my relationship with this man sitting here is cut out of the same pattern as my relationship with God Himself. The way he views me is a slice of the way He views me.

Yet this is an incomplete analogy because God is unchanging, but my dad is changing…he is human, and he is changing to become more like God. I’ve seen it over the course of my life. Instead of becoming harder and more prideful, he has become gentler and more humble, and this has played out in my relationship with him.

My dad has always been somewhat of a mystery to me, but it is a changing mystery. He is a man who expresses himself through giving and service. Whatever I’ve needed, he’s provided. I realize now that these provisions have changed over the years as well, as my needs have changed, as I have changed, and as he has changed. Out of all the things he’s ever given to me, which include dolls, giant teddy bears, spending money, short grunts of encouragement, a Super Nintendo, food, clothes, rides to school, and, uh, college tuition, the thing I cherish the most is not something that I can touch or hold – it’s an email I received from him two years ago, on my 24^th birthday. This day is about him and not me, but I want to recite the email because I think it contains the subtleties of his heart, as my dad, that have taken me my entire life to begin to understand and appreciate. It reads:

Dear Pete,

Happy Birthday, Though we can not celebrate together,

May this birthday become the one that your launch own destination,

And take up the challenge of our family's future direction.

Let your ingenuity and creativity blossom,

And bear fruit in the long run.

I thank the Lord for giving you a tender heart,

And a loving spirit for others.

Continue to walk on the path of the Lord,

Which is better than any other way.

Take a good care of yourself,

That is the best gift to Mom and me.

Thanks, Dad. I read that now and then when I need a grunt of encouragement, when I need affirmation, when I just need to know that I am loved. So thanks, Dad, for your mystery, for your heart, for everything.

*****

i think i'm beginning to understand the concept of a spiritual wilderness. my roommate last year and one of our friends used to refer to it all the time, which struck me as weird and incongruent because they had two of the most mature faiths i've ever been around.

this is my definition - being driven to an increasingly deeper understanding of how meaningless life is without the sweetness of the Lord, yet being unable to taste it. desire and knowledge of Him, without the experience.

is it being driven to spiritual desperation that lets us know with certainty that we want nothing more than Him? is it a God-given thirst for Him that strips the paint off everything and transforms it all into a meaning-less wilderness? everything becomes lackluster without Him. it seems like a cruel method - making someone want something so much through withholding it.

but it's a strange kind of withholding. you can't know much you're missing, unless you know how much you're missing. you can't wail and wallow in spiritual destitution unless you know how destitute you are. and you can't know how destitute you are unless you have a reference point. and you can't know what the reference point is unless you've actually encountered it.

the silence of God - written about by people like shusaku endo, mother theresa, and king david. one has an unhappy ending, one may or may not have a happy ending, and one seems to leap straight out of the wilderness into His presence.

king david wrote psalm 13, which is broken into two tremendously dissonant sections. what happened exactly, in the unwritten space between sections?

How long, O Lord? Will You forget me forever?
How long will You hide Your face from me?
How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
Consider and answer me, O Lord my God; light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death,
Lest my enemy say, "I have prevailed over him," lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken.

But I have trusted in your steadfast love; and my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
I will sing to the Lord, because He has dealt bountifully with me.

the present - the silence of God. the past - His steadfast love, His bountiful dealings. the future - our rejoicing, our song. there is no devastating logic, only devastating perseverance and faith. in the end, it seems to be the wilderness itself that gets devastated.

but for now, the sleep of death still threatens. the blessing at the end of the Jacobian night of struggle is still many layers of darkness away.

a post from a friend's xanga (as in i DIDN'T WRITE the following)...something simply, beautifully, and penetratingly expressed:

truths ive been chewing on lately...

jesus frees.

never give up loving.

people need the lord.

reader, dont ever forget your identity in christ makes you the free-est person alive(and better off dead!). there isn't a thing you can do to make youself happier, but only to embrace a simple cross with blood stained wood that sets every sin, every bondage, every hurt and sadness free. oh jesus, you make us free! so dont let darkness creep up on you like that. no, you look to jesus. you look at that cross and you kneel down. your heart cries out, jesus you're all i want. jesus you make sense. jesus, you love me.
and then you think about the ones you love. the ones who are closest to your heart--but who dont know you. and it's like no matter how much you love them, they dont understand this love. like gandhi has once said, first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight with you, and then you win. what a beautiful way to approach those whom we love. loving them into jesus. your love, jesus. it's the highest love out there.
but we need to know our emptiness to seek God. we need to ask you God to fill it. this void that we hide away from everyone else. when we meet you God, there's light just everywhere. no darkness can overcome it. those who need you most reject you in your face. when who you are, and who we are is so evident. we are weak, but you are strong. but they reject you--again and again because the idea of worshiping you for who you are is utterly unspeakable. but God, you're so patient. you're definitely more patient than i am.

God, you really love us.
because you truly make us real.

pushing off a paper and reaching into the newly constructed vault of Precious Things...a recent set of thoughts, expressed to e. maybe this will clarify the lack of april cruelty.

*****

=)

the age we live in requires us to nod in the direction of junior high and high school because it feels unreal that we're floating higher and higher but it's good, i think...it is a circle back to what first love was like, except incomparably deeper and more resonant because it breaks through scales of cynicism that have hardened over certain parts of our hearts through our experiences before we met each other...before you were dropped into my life...and emerges purer because of it, like a column of light racing towards heaven that is fully aware of the dinginess it burst out of, and made more beautiful by this consciousness. i'm going to try to write this entire email without using the backspace, to send you my unadulterated thinking, and also to save time, though i'd much rather be spending all night corresponding with you in some way, through email since you're sleeping now. though i used the backspace in the first part, in that long run on sentence...tried to paint a picture of how i look at the light that is expanding in the space between me and you, though i don't know how clear i'm being, or how much of pretentiousness i'm avoiding. but it's a beautiful thing. sometimes, usually when i go pee, i think about if i should be expressing things like this, and or even feeling things like this to express, and then i think that i'm not purposefully searching for things to express or grasping at things to say to you to try to make your heart beat faster, which i hope it does though, because i want to have that effect on you because you make mine beat faster and my breath catches in my throat when i even start thinking of you, like now. then when i flush the toilet i wonder how long it will last like this, and then i decide not to worry about it...going only au natural isn't the wisest thing, but there has to be a balance between regulation and natural progression, and we removed the emotional barrier of expression after you were here a few weeks ago. though that was a conscious choice...even so, i haven't been like this before, with anyone else, this sense of falling in love with my eyes wide open...i haven't felt like i wanted to endlessly find new ways to talk about you and think about you and the role you've come to assume in my life. i feel free, and liberated, and guilt-free, without the need to justify myself to you, or to myself, or to examine every action through every possible lens of motivation. i couldn't claim a divine green light in releasing the floodgates of connection between souls and allowing things to snowball between us like they have and gather momentum exponentially, but in this sense it is almost does feel like it's back to first love, and i feel no hesitation to be swept away in the tide that brings us closer and closer together, except now i have binoculars and can see far into the distance, both behind us and in front of us, and maybe that will help to navigate through things that come up, and we have oars of experience and learned humility and that will also help us steer into the future, and it feels almost like i've gone through the experiences that i have in order to be able to see you honestly and fully and appreciate you without reservation and think of you without placing myself at the center of my reference point...a (brief) lifetime spent learning and failing to love, so that i can show love to you, and strive to do so to greater extents when i do fail. i have to confess, i used the backspace a bunch of times in this paragraph, but it was still an unbroken chain of thought that came out, untailored and unrefined, unlike how i usually write to you in emails. i'm in a mood where everything feels like poetry, and everything is a different aspect or manifestation of our light. and this light seems to be expanding and expanding in my chest, till i'm dying of wanting to be next to you again, and breathe your oxygen into my lungs to make them function. i’m very deeply in love with you, and i miss you.

*****

April is the sweetest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

we were asked to write a short statement on post-modernism for sunday school a few weeks ago.

***

My understanding of post-modernism. I don’t really understand it that well, at least well enough to articulate, even though I have a feeling it’s something that may have greatly influenced my attitudes and mindsets, as discussed last week. I think it has something to do with relativism and the denial of absolutes, and the questioning of the inherent value of things previously assumed to be inherently valuable. It diminishes the ability to accept simplicity and purity, usually playing the role of self-congratulatory and condescending critic…the post-modern mindset is arrogant in its tendency to see through things yet contributes nothing constructive in turn. It is a way of thinking that acknowledges the failures of modern and enlightenment schools of thought in their efforts to place ultimate meaning within the grasp of man’s rational capabilities but offers no substitute solution, unlike Kierkegaard’s transference of meaning from wholly rational reason to wholly irrational faith.

To my understanding, the ultimate effect of post-modern thinking is the apathy and groundlessness of the current generation of young people.

***

i think i may be out-dated. are we in the post-post-modern era now? what the hell does that look like? how can you advance past the stage of the denial of the existence of stages?

i've decided to stop beating around the bush and allow myself to be simple and happy. hopefully. this is my, um, november resolution. let's call it a thanksgiving resolution. let go of the unholy and masturbatory pseudo-satisfaction of wallowing in the bittersweetness of life and let God make me happy. that last bit wasn't just an excuse to use the word masturbatory in a sentence. hopefully.

wow, imagine if that actually happened. i'd have to find entirely new patterns of thought to occupy my brain. have to trust that not all depth and meaning comes from dissonance, i suppose. like the man said,

We are not here to verify,
Instruct ourselves, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. We are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.