On the flip side it’s been breathtaking getting out and realizing that I’ve been taking nature for granted. It’s a gift to have your mind wander. It’s a gift to roam over mossy earth. I ran out over the Oakland hills this morning to see a blanket of clouds glowing through the sunlight and pouring out over the hills into the Bay. I both wished I had my camera with me and was glad I didn’t.

He met my grandmother (ah ma, or 外媽 — but we’ve grown up calling her puo puo) while they both worked as schoolteachers at the same elementary school.

“Your ah gong was a handsome man” my grandmother says with a chuckle and a glimmer in her eye. She is dignified, ladylike, and precise. She bears eyes with depth, holding her teacup with deliberate old-world delicacy. My early memories are sprinkled with her constant presence in our house, making fantastic food and reading me chinese fables for bedtime stories.

They met in the years in between the world wars, when the world was changing. My grandma was native Taiwanese, telling me about the world she grew up in, hearing American bombers fly overhead, when alarms would sound and they would have to head to the mountains to hide in the hills. Taiwan was different then, they were raised to believe they were Japanese.

They fell in love, but they don’t speak much about it nowadays. I wonder how it was back then. She was trained as a schoolteacher, and he must have been good with the kids given his gregarious charm. It’s not hard to imagine why they fell in love, but how? I wonder if they can still remember.

These days, they live in Taipei in a modern apartment, paneled in marble and dark wood. His hands tremble when they reach for the dishes on the table. She reaches for the dish and steadies it for him. After each meal he silently shuffles to the couch and picks his teeth with a toothpick and looks out the window at the glassy beams of the Taipei 101 tower.

Her family would have nothing to do with him. He was an outsider, one of the KMT occupiers. Stories ran rampant about KMT men looking for Taiwanese wives while keeping a wife back in China. What did my great-grandfather think of him? Did they ever meet? Or did he forbid their love from the outside?

So they eloped.

Annie asks if puo-puo gets tired of cooking for us. My dad laughs. “I bet she loves it that we’re here. She loves to cook.”

The spread is enormous. Taro fish ball soup, fresh steamed fish from the market, boiled chicken, dumplings, radish salad, an array of steamed vegetables and guavas and wax apples for dessert. We lay there after each meal, stunned and deliriously happy.

My mom would tell me about how in the years down the road after their marriage, gong-gong would eventually win over my grandmother’s family with his kindness, generosity, and charm and twinkle in his eye. I wonder what it was like, a slow, gradual warming, a reconciliation that may have taken years to mend.

My uncle calls us when we’re there, asking if they want to come with them on their upcoming vacation to Japan. Puo-puo hesitates, smiling a bit, thinking. When she is thinking, she knits her brow and blinks slowly. It’s her reserved nature that defines her elegance, I decide. But she is like a wall, difficult to read. I want to ask her about her young love.

“No,” she finally says, “I should stay here. It’s cold in Japan. And I need to be with your dad.”

Later as we sit around the living room sharing our hopes for the new year (my dad puts us through these things) gong-gong makes an innocent face and tells us that his hope is that “your puo-puo should visit Japan and get out of the house and not have to take care of me.” She smiles.

Gong-gong is always dressed well: suede jackets, pressed wool, a sleek Kangol cap and shiny loafers. These days, he’s still dapper but much less mobile. His walk is reduced to a shuffle.

He’s shrunk over the years, but his charm is still there, shrouded by ailing health. As we leave, he grabs my arm and tells me he’d like to attend my wedding soon and leaves me a kiss on the neck.

On some odd days, I can vaguely remember the approach to the precipice of old love, woolen, worn & monumental. We knew we were on the verge of crossing, but never sure how to look over to the other side. Young love is easy, I realize, but old love is not.

Old love is familiar yet ill-fitting, like bumping shoulders with strangers in elevators. You never notice it arriving, and when it has, it’s morphed. The taste changes in your mouth; the notes go all blue and glassy like black piano keys.

I tried to hold her loneliness once, balancing it between both palms and guessing at its secrets. Like most notebooks go, it was silent and weighty and important. We bound it back up quickly, leaving crinkles in the seams. Sometimes I still wonder if I could have borne its weight.

Looking back, it was my embarrassment that caught me off guard. Nobody told me about it, a bottled-up outside-in feeling, a silly and shameful confusion. I felt childlike, at a loss of answers, wanting to hide. This I’ve learnt, too: I must run quickly to the father, before my armor thickens.

Yahweh is my father I heard someone once cry, and I will do the same. He has gifted us a hundred sadnesses for our good, and we will soon (soon) sing songs in firelight and know again the barely-floating sensations of joy. He is the one who has ordained for us the seasons. I will yield to his grip and submit to his kiln. Stay low to the ground I heard once, and felt it True.

There was some sort of relief, I decided, in having set foot in the Occupy camp and finding it quiet. Wednesday, Oakland was paraded across the global consciousness as national news media displayed scenes of urban warfare, with ghostly images of terror-stricken faces sent helter-skelter across the airwaves. Zach showed me the frontpage of the BBC website (Occupy Oakland protestors disrupt city) and made a cutting remark about how the protestors were making fools of themselves on global media and how Oakland was going to suffer. The next morning we all got worried emails and well-intentioned text messages from friends and family: hey, you doing okay? to which we’d respond with sheepish grace that no, we weren’t part of the protests and no, Oakland hadn’t burnt to the ground. Yet.

That Saturday we walked the downtown Oakland area and stood among the protestors in Frank Ogawa Plaza and I tried taking it in, inhaling the hot, musty mess, sidling up to the sleeping giant. I’m not quite sure what I had expected: chaos, rowdier citizens, widespread aggression and disquiet? Instead we found sleepy-eyed campers, dreadlocked ponytails, and hand-drawn raggedy signs. You could smell the weed from blocks away. Nate confirmed the portable toilets were overflowing and rancid.

Self-conscious, I realized later, is how I feel, not knowing how to identify with this spectacle. My sentiments about the whole thing are less of explosive outrage than subtle helplessness. Here I was, middle-class and Asian-American, walking through the tent city of the dispossessed, and I felt both a repulsion to the sideshow and an isolating sense of guilt knowing that I was a stranger to racial and economic injustice.

We bumped into Bonnie on the way over, a homeless friend of ours who makes appearances often at the church. “You should have been there, they had us cornered” she exclaimed with wide eyes, giggling in her two-toned accent. “Pohh-leece got us trapped up on both sides. I got some of that gas stuff in me, and it make you tear up real bad.”

Bonnie had stayed with the protestors for a couple of days. “It was like a war, let me tell you, and the sad thing”–her voice dropped to a whisper–“is nobody can help you.”

I wondered what Bonnie must have felt; my mind replayed scenes from a Free Speech Movement documentary I once watched at Cal. Observe: an aerial shot from what must have been a tall building or a helicopter, riot police on either ends of the block, smoke rising from the street in lazy, elegant arcs. Notice: a couple of figures limp for cover, fumbling to cover their eyes. See: grainy film, shot black and white, viva free speech & the cause of justice, fin.

So I was relieved to find Frank Ogawa Plaza rather pleasant. A tent city had risen, built on fresh-laid straw, with hypnotic Native American drumming drifting through camp. Smiling stoners sat cross-legged in a corner beneath a tarp and gazed intently into the distance. A mini-rally proceeded in another, where a megaphone-toting Latina woman was organizing that afternoon’s march on Wells Fargo. In other words, it was amusingly like college. We opened our burritos and ate on the steps of the City Hall amphitheater and watched the tent city pulse as it awoke.

The Tuesday night that things got bad, I was running the lake under the assured hum of news helicopters, but I couldn’t tell you if things were out of the ordinary. It was strange, I suppose because I had imagined that should my city go down in flames, everybody should know about it and share in the panic and outrage. Women pushed murmuring babies by in fancy strollers. The wind whispered through the grove of trees around the lake’s finger-bend. Runners grunted to each other, pushing gravel through the ground. Starlight & Lake Merritt’s necklace, swan, geese, & ghetto birds all there to witness war, but somebody had forgotten to remind me.

Saturday, Kylan and Betty and I walked up Telegraph and prayed for Occupy Oakland and I felt rather foolish for not knowing what exactly to pray for. I remembered Silvia’s weight of sadness, when she showed up and wound up feeling lost and helpless and hurt for the brokenness of the world she lived in and the chaos unfolding around her and the need for Jesus to show up right there and occupy…

Proverbs 29 was a comfort, the words breathing and expanding in my thoughts:

When the righteous increase, the people rejoice but when the wicked rule, people groan

and,

The poor and the oppressor meet together, the LORD gives light to them both

Earlier that morning I dreamt we were evacuating our city in long single-file strands. We wound through our neighborhood, and I remember standing in our living room arguing with Justin whether we should load this or that couch into the U-Haul. People shuffled by outside in colorless clothing, feeling here and gone at the same time. Children whispered to each other in shy, hushed tones. The helicopters were there again, whirling lazily, watching overhead. In that moment I knew (though a dream) the question had become not how we would leave, but whether we would stay.

I woke far too early, thirsty, trying to recall how the air felt against my cheeks: thwup thwup thwup thwup thwup.

I smelled it coming last week, but it didn’t arrive until today. It smelled like autumn, it was warm rain, ticklish; it was musty with diamond dew and faded memories of running through these trees at our old church camp site, redwood trees tickling the clouds and the sweet fragrance of pine cones and the pricks of needles in my shoes. That’s the kind of place where the mist envelops your eyes and causes you to blink, over and over and over again. Memories of the bell ringing on the steeple, calling us in for dinner as we would push past adults with understanding smiles to get to turkey and gravy and pumpkin pie, stuffing ourselves and running back out into the wild, pretending we were secret agents.

But there it was again in a different form, carrying us back from LA through the fertile fields of the Central Valley, sunlight streaking over our heads and we drove back and debated whether we were old or not. That previous night at the wedding I asked my table if they’d ever really felt old, and that maybe the better question was whether we ever wished we were young again. We all laughed it off, or at least a bit nervously. I wonder if there’s a slight terror to the feeling of it overcoming us, afraid that maybe one day we’d wake up and feel some gloom of extra gravity and it’d hit us: oh crap and we’d carry this fear to our twenty-fifth year high school reunions, strung ’round our necks like medallions. But there rushing past sunkissed fields listening to country crooners I wondered if I’d ever really grow old, with the sun on my back and laughter, sweet laughter around me.

I think the warmth of autumn reminds me that all things must change, they must grow and move in season. One day I know I must be old, and I will have known a love that is young and weathered, resilient and yielding and tested True. I will have known the courage of a little boy, spoken to the weighty fears of my young man self, into the maturity that awaits on the other side, the line that we will not know we have crossed until the leaves have long since changed their color.

There is no time for thinking now, but the mechanical slapslap of feet against pavement. I can sum up Murakami’s book: what does he think about when running? Nothing. Justin’s been reading more about running lately and letting me read his books. I realize that I enjoy how mechanical it is: I like the forward lean, the rhythmic labor of breathing, driving forward, but not too far forward lest you tumble (where?). I’ve been feeling more aggressive with my run form, enjoying the feeling of being fast and the brushing of warm rays on my back. It’s going to get me in trouble.

I lean into the whoopsiedaisy turn lane and find that will be occupied in three-two-one but thankfully I reel back in and thank my lucky stars. A wandering Kia once leaned into me and gently lay my bike down in the bike lane. I am happy to report I didn’t go down with it, but wondered in a few panicked moments if people would do their better thinking laying down.

With much sighing, a flock of photons once barreled into the earth in a lazy arc, leaving tendrils of dirt-dust in its wake. The sun bathed us in a lemonade glow in the evening–I tried to catch it in the viewfinder, but decided to let the moment stand silent, solemn by my side, the way you would imagine you would feel in one of those movie-moments pregnant with meaning, voiced by a steel guitar. On the way back from Portland I imagined just that, feeling like our car was the only one in the world, leaning into thin slices of daylight. I caught myself singing along to the stereo, and at that moment thought that we should drive to the world’s edge, then go some more.

Crater Lake, OR

On the heels of that post and in a different spirit, I also want to say that I’m thoroughly enjoying this trip to Portland with some friends. Good eats, good company and a lot of coffee, food trucks, walking, cooking, good beer, beautiful runs, downtime, and trees.

That, plus like 30% of our waking time has been spent at this table at Powell’s City of Books. Books are cool, kids. I am reminded that I like words, particularly ones that are strung together nicely.

This was the year I stopped romanticizing urban ministry.

I honestly came in with the idea that I was going to be really warmhearted and be an amazing rescuer and friend of the poor who could really see peoples’ humanity past their issues. Instead, I found myself bitter at a lot of folks. R, who was doing great in his alcohol recovery, stole from us. We banned M from sleeping on our porch steps because her sharp urine scent was too much. P sleeps in the bushes, but occasionally defecates in the lot. I learned to dread the sound of the doorbell, which meant inconveniencing me to run up and answer the door and heat up some food. I hated being inconvenienced.

I learned that the poor despise the rich with the lens of entitlement, and the rich despise the poor with a lens of laziness and deservedness. I now see the complex web of power structures, decadeslong injustices, and people that give up in the face of overwhelming difficulty. I wrestle a lot with a desire to escape and turn my back. I hesitate to press in. I know now, ever more than ever, that we both need Jesus to humble us and equalize us.

This was a year of community

Take our recent baptism from a couple of months ago. R*, an African-American member who has wrestled with a long history of alcoholism and other issues, was prayed over by P, an older white man, S, a hapa young professional, and Betty, a wheelchair-bound white lady. I looked at the picture and wondered what can explain this except the Gospel?

Or the time that Eric engineered a sled so that we could take Betty, wheelchair and all, down to Ocean Beach for a bonfire. What can explain that?

Or the times that we hit up In-n-Out at random times in the middle of the night, or did a monthly San Tung run, or chowed on Yummy Guide after a Betty dropoff. I’m going to remember running trails with Nate, or swimming with Eric and Justin. And there was that one time that Eric did my chores for me while I worked on some programming project because he saw I was stressed. <3.

This was a year of slowing down

I realized that I live from task to task and thrive on stress. I need to stop this. I know this because I feel really antsy if I go the whole day without knocking anything out from my todo list. I will literally feel like exploding.

We live in a world of to-do lists and Getting Things Done. I am learning to stop, chat, laugh, and listen.

This was a year of humility.

I never liked doing my cleaning chores, or being asked to do something that was really inconvenient to my schedule. But those service times were pretty sweet if I had the right attitude. I will say that I got a lot of sermons knocked out while scrubbing toilets.

This was a year of getting better at people things

…and not be so clueless with friendships and relationships ‘n stuff.

This was a year of recentering

And in the end, I want Jesus’ reality more than ever. I’m learning that God’s a good dad, and I can trust him.

Hey Dad, I think I’m only starting to realize that I’m lucky to be your son.

This week, the interns and I have been at the Not for Sale Academy receiving training on human trafficking before we head out to the Philippines in April. I’m feeling a lot of heaviness, hearing stories about people held captive under another’s power.

A few things I’ve been chewing on:

• The perversion of masculinity, a fascination (and insecurity) with power, control & ego versus the created Ideal: protective, disciplined, self-sacrificing, Christlike.
• I’m nervous about entering darkness; the thought of walking a red-light district scares me. Can I handle it? Also: thoughts on continual prayer as we walk through the shadows. We need to pray to survive.
• I’m glad I’m going with this group of guys.
• It’s okay to feel pain. I’m wondering if I even want to be identified with this movement because of the heaviness surrounding it. I’m realizing that maybe the pain of the world is what God wants us to feel–to grieve alongside the broken and the powerless and to be saddened by the injustice in the world.
• On the other side, I’m thankful that our God is a God of vengeance and justice. He promises to repay for evil. That is very. comforting. Honestly, I’m not sure how I would deal with the brokenness without an Absolute, a Good framework.
• But honestly, I mostly want to turn and go back to life as usual and pretend like I haven’t looked into the void.
• “Don’t you see?” (I’m imagining the voice of Tim Keller here). “Jesus Christ suffered the ultimate injustice so that we can be justified–and so that the world can know Justice.” The Gospel is that the justice that was to be exacted on the murderer, the pimp, the politician, the single mother, the CEO, the checkout clerk and me… was placed on Jesus. Augh. Grace. Bitterness-melting, soul-lifting, hope-restoring Grace.
• This is a sexy movement. Call+Response was about rock stars. The t-shirts are fashionable. We talk about entrepreneurial ventures and new business paradigms. People I meet are well-put together. But would I still be out here if this were a movement to end homelessness? How about adoption?  I wrestle with the question about whether it’s about me wanting to be identified as a hip, socially-aware Christian, or if I’m actually loving people and moving out from there.

Tonight my small group simply picked up trash around our Lake Merritt neighborhood. But I was talking with Tammie and Justin about how it should be the case that a neighborhood should be better off because Christians live there.

It is uncomfortable and we are getting nervous with the onset of darkness. We say hello to a woman at a street corner who merely mumbles back. Lazily, a police helicopter hovers in the skies.