May Flowers & Touchstones

This spring has been so peculiarly and particularly beautiful to me.

Every yellow flash of forsythia. Fivesythia. Sixsythia. Sevensythia. Fine, Eightsythia.

Giant Magnolia petals.

Every friend who is moving on. The babies on their way. Every change, attended with joy and not fear.

Not anymore. Never alone, and never afraid.

Preparing to say goodbye to my brownstone home of six (!) years. And the garden. Candles every night.

Grilling five out of seven days in a week.

The spontaneous garden parties. The children who have scribbled on its tiles with chalk.

Sending friends away for four months of well-deserved rest. Their absence blessing, providing for, and housing my big sister and me.

Mountainclimbing with her. Sifting through this season. With flaming hots a means of grace.

The bleeding hearts, tulips, hyacinths, hydrangeas that have returned.

Sinking into winter grief that did not in the end overcome them.

Enjoying pursuit.

Thank you for being so clear about what you wanted and expected. It makes me certain, that I don't have that to give, to you, now. How free and fair it felt to say that.

And to permit, nothing that you wouldn't want me to do with my brother. Nothing that you wouldn't do with a child in your care. How that was honest and generous.

Change.

I look at the photographs I have taken over the last few years.

And I see how life has become more colorful, beautiful, precious and memorable to me.

The sparkle. The gala that came and went. How God sent Bailey to help me.

Creating a machine that did not exist before. Being satisfied at my production.

How Nikelle, Peggy, and Jonny, were living with me altogether during Mother's Day weekend. Cuddle puddles. Family.

These DC two who have captivated my interest. Gifted me with a category for someone I could begin to consider forsaking all others for.

Chasing a lost child all the way around the world. Cinque Terre, Venice, Cebu, Manila, Guam.

Chasing chickens.

Sharing stories.

The calendar pages turn and turn. They were not wasted or given over. Even the pages I lost, Dad, you counted.

I am living in a kaleidoscope.

The beauty is dizzying.

It has not always been so. It will not always be so. And that's okay.

MT

I shared my testimony at morning service today as part of the MT training year.

Christine Kang-Hui

Christine and I crossed paths for only a (too) short, but oh-so-intense time. The time was like Christine herself: Very short, but oh, so intense.

In the year that I knew her, she was like the fortified hull of a powerful ship, cutting and plowing through the thick and defensive top-ice of my heart, to carve out safe passage, open the way to radical healing. Oh man, did she probe. Quite surgically, I recall. She had earlier in her life endured several of the similar pains and struggles I then faced; she knew the terrain of those ravines and credibly testified to the Lord's sufficiency, even there.

Did I believe her? She dared me to. It is hard to dismiss the words and the notice of a dying woman.

Christine was one of the first women to welcome me to Emmanuel. She saw right through my politeness and refused my evasive answers to "Are you okay?" and "How are you?" There were not many corners to hide in at our tiny evening service back then, and certainly not from her watchful eye. She saw through me, and also saw me––her attentive (and sometimes aggressive) kindness was so instrumental in lifting the crushing weight of my invisibility cloak. When I felt I had no fight left, she said she saw feist, story, and song in me and that she was determined to see it surface. She also told me that my ex-boyfriend sucked and that God was holding out for me, someday, family beyond my wildest of dreams. She said she hoped to be around to tell me, "I told you so."

I am thankful to Ken for creating and allowing the space for Christine to minister to me. He would take the couch when Christine invited me over to spend the night. Christine would always say to him, "Can we feed her?" this, "Let's feed her" that (and he did). When we went to the Fall 2011 Princeton Conference on Reformed Theology, he encouraged us to room together. She (absurdly) apologized for the gurgle of her machines and feeding tubes--as she often did for even slightly inconveniencing anybody around her, by her dying. Those were precious days of learning about Gods sovereignty in and over suffering. In the next few months, those around her watched her live out everything she learned of this, and watched her fight for her true and living hope. She was appropriately mournful, and astonishingly fearless, in the face of death. She planned her own funeral and helped everyone else grieve (what!!).

In dying well, as she did learn by grace to do three years ago, she again pointed us along the Way of life before us. I am so grateful to have had this strong friend who forged ahead and who promised to cheer us on from the finish line.

Yesterday, we feasted.

Google Voice

As the Lunar New Year coincides with Gramma's birthday this year, the celebration would have been a much-anticipated feast.

Just a foretaste of our Banquet to come, at which we'll feast with laughter, though all hunger has been banished––sated forever.

Yesterday, we feasted.
Tomorrow, we'll feast again.

Happy birthday, Gram. Love and miss you so very much. It's any Asian Grandma's job to preside over the kitchen for the big events––you're gone now, but I'm learning to run with your torch, your love of lavish feasting, for any/all Family, with delicious and serious fooding. Yesterday in your honor, I threw a dinner party for 7 kids and 14 adults. We made 220 of 4 types of dumplings, 2 types of Asian greens, 2 types of 湯圓, 壽桃... We had peanut candy, tangerines, and red envelopes. I'm so glad you shared all those things with me.

Our 春聯 were 仁愛，喜樂，和平，忍耐，恩慈，良善，信實，溫柔，節制 because these are the fruits of Springtime, the gifts of Easter's renewal, the marks of the true flourishing we desire.

So much of me is made of what I learned from you, you'll be with me like a handprint on my heart.



Gram passed away Aug 2014 but is fondly remembered with gratitude and joy.

I wonder what banquet lies before her now.

Happy Birthday, 阿嬤!

Happy New Year.

disarmed, dispossessed, and breathtakingly free

We are no longer prisoners of our own warfare.
I want to say with Athenagoras of Constantinople:

I have waged this war against myself for many years.
It was terrible.

But now I am disarmed.
I am no longer frightened of anything
because love banishes fear.
I am disarmed of the need to be right
and to justify myself by disqualifying others
I am no longer on the defensive,
holding onto my riches

I just want to welcome and to share.
I dont hold on to my ideas and projects . . .
I no longer seek to compare.
What is good, true and real is always for me the best.
When we are disarmed and dispossessed of self,
if we open our hearts to the God-Man
who makes all things new,
then He takes away past hurts
and reveals a new world
where everything is possible.

Comfort,
comfort my people, says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and cry to her that her warfare is ended
that her iniquity is pardoned,
that she has received from the LORD's hand
double for her sins.

Love Notices Wet Hair: On the Ministry of Noticing

What is sharp-eyed love?

When I was studying Attic Greek, I was transfixed upon the verb λανθάνω – I am hidden, escape notice. A word, a verb, that named my busy pain.

Ultimately it's a metaphysically impossible activity (Q&A11 of the First Catechism . . . He always sees me). Yet a falsely imagined but felt invisibility has so much been a part of my days and years.

* * *

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

// Simone Weil

* * *

Sister Girl,

This is an article I've returned to again and again over the years. It was written by a full-time college ministry worker.

Its contents are why I got weepy during our brunch with Ava, as she shared about the simultaneous love & loss that can overwhelm her when she thinks of her children while recalling her own mother. The same paradoxical lack & abundance burn me when I get to be part of a church that cares and provides for children, part of ministries for students, and wonder why I wasn't worth protecting and advocating for. How did I escape their notice?

In the end, Ava said, it is God who loves and raises and saves us, through poverty & plenty alike. In the end, it's so that I get to know and enjoy Him.

You strike a tender nerve there when you behave like you're invisible.

The necessity of the ministry of noticing, of seeing. And the pain of being invisible and unknown. After all, isn't this such a part of what Jesus did in so many of his gentle encounters with broken women? He spotted and saw them through and through and did not look away, turned all eyes on her, away from the person of power, onto the marginalized. I think, He knew what they needed. 

Q11: Can you see God?
A11: No, I cannot see God, but he always sees me.

Even when I fail to see/recognize Him, fail to see myself rightly. Even when nobody else noticed I was in need. He saw, knew. So we lack nothing. We are no longer orphans (nor were we ever). Thank you for reminding me. Have a great week!

EYL

* * *

Who am i that You are mindful of me?

---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: Esther

Date: Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 9:18 PM

Subject: 

To: boo friend

boo love,

I too was a lurker in churches once. I always attended, on the fringes. And would invariably end up feeling overlooked or unsafe. And I would leave in search of a city of refuge. I went to several churches over the years waiting for welcome from its people. Ended up feeling safe only if anonymous.

Liberation came with feeling seen/known by God. This quality was what I came to experience as Papa God's love. 1 Cor 13 stunned me, I couldn't believe the words staring at me from the Bible's pages... "For now we see dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known." What? I was suddenly always Seen, and always Safe...

March 2011 Epiphany

Learning to be a child, 6.

who    in the world
can make impertinent requests, persistently, with shameless audacity?
for whom is it safe to do so?

a small child. with a loving father.

how can we know that in prayer our desires will be fulfilled?

NOT because it is an automated technique––mastery over which guarantees results. no, a relational story is given.

a story about fish and eggs, and about poisonous desert stingers.

this is a story that tells us who we are. it tells us that

we can pour the molten chaos of our desires out, onto Abba's lap, and there be gathered, fathered, formed, contained.

what You will give me, will be what I truly desire

not what I think is food, but what will truly nourish

perhaps you lost faith.

not in God, per se.

but definitely in prayer.

maybe there was a time when you were asking, and asking.
you were inappropriately bold, and you were unabashedly believing.

and it crushed you because that thing you were asking for was something actually and obviously good.

why?

why?

i don't know.

i really don't.

but what i do know, is:

God is up to something.

and it is Love.

how can you know it is love?

hurry please, run after me:

at those foothills––lies Gethsemane

scale the garden wall, come see

the eternal Son there boldly asks

Father, let this suffering pass

Father, keep from me your wrath

the Father's will, we know unfurled

for to spare the Christ our Lord

would have been the death of the world

Father I will drink as You have tasked

to spare My sister from that flask

.

to know this Child, is to know enough:
see how this looks from my seat above

I'm up to something, and it's Love.

how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!

thankful for yls15 and a year of abe's friendship

Learning to be a Child, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1