I feel different this time around (I was eighteen the last time I visited). Older, but not necessarily in that way. Like I have the wits about me to wrap around people and feel their bumps and bruises. I feel like I can understand him more through the lens of my dad. His faults, and his irrefutable spirit are at play in my dad, and most likely in me. Maybe I’m more alert to the forces at play in his life, my father’s life and mine: the legacy of the Revolution, his time spent in the KMT military, and my father’s childhood spent along the banks of the river.

I want to know the source of yie yie’s joy

Show me what a life lived in grace looks like: unfettered, joyous, rampant.

I told someone once that I wanted to have the guts to laugh at myself and loosen up a bit. I think I was born melancholy (and I protested as much when I tested so in a personality test–this much is true about my artist tendencies–but I hated the word. It made me sound depressed). Mainly what I saw and disliked in myself were my perfectionistic tendencies, because it’s easier to deal with knowns and facts and details and my capabilities than to face the chaos of messy-and-human.

Show me how to hold onto life loosely.

Perhaps what C.S. Lewis says is true, that having a grasp of our mortality does us a lot of good. I want to understand that our good moments don’t last forever, and that to savor them slowly is a gift in itself. And maybe the guts I wanted are the insides that I want filled with thick, hearty gratitude, shared and spilled over in the company of friends (I’m using soup imagery because Eric made a frickin good stew the other night. And it’s cold in here.).

Hearty, joyous, wise and gracious. I think that describes the man I’d like to grow into.

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.

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.

• 94610 prayer walk with church community. Gary shared that doing these walks builds hope in us… helps us remember there’s hope for Oakland. Give us eyes and ears and a heart for the city and our neighborhood. And afterwards I bought a brioche knot + a pizza slice at Arizmendi and 2 peaches from the farmer’s market. Freakin good.
• Did a 35-mile loop from Regen to Lake Chabot and back via Skyline with Eric and a friend. Nothing but godawful fatigue at the end. Came back and passed out for a good while.
• Microwave TJ curry for dinner + a diet Coke someone left in the fridge. Amazing.
• Sent Betty back with Kylan. Today I didn’t mind.
• Cleaned bathrooms and the kitchen, and enjoyed the alone time. Thought a lot about how I’ve changed this year.
• Sat out in the night air for a few minutes and just took it in.

I don’t know what it was about today but it just felt good. God’s been good to me.

I don’t know how to give grace to the people who drink on our doorsteps. I get resentful of people who have entitlement attitudes, and sense a creeping sense of dread of answering the doorbell to give food to folks who ask for it. I’m tired of cleaning up human shit from our sidewalks and parking lot. I’ve come to realize that my biggest fear is that I will annihilate myself in service, deeds, good works and on top of that nothing will change.

Once Dave and I busted out onto the entranceway where homeless folks sleep on our doorstep because they were making a drunken racket. We yelled at them, hard: pointed at their beer bottles–don’t you ever drink on our doorstep again!–gesticulating angrily, adrenaline flaring–don’t you lie to me! You can’t sleep here anymore. Yes, it was a power trip. No, we couldn’t tolerate the noise and racket they were putting up. Yes, they were annoying the entire neighborhood. No, we weren’t doing it very lovingly. Who’s right? What was the right thing to do? Where was Jesus, and what would he have done?

They returned the next night.

I think we romanticize urban ministry sometimes, serving the poor, but have forgotten to count the cost. I often feel like that rich young ruler who, having heard Jesus’ call to sell his possessions and leave a comfortable life, leaves sad. Because honestly, I do not know if I want to be here.

Lord, help me. Jesus, show me where you are right here, right now. I don’t like dwelling in the tension of the brokenness of my neighborhood and the peace that is far away, already promised but not yet here. I know the answer is somewhere in hearing the inner voice of Love, in simply being a son and being Loved. Right now, I just feel stuck.

Last night I went back home to the quiet streets of Saratoga and I knew I couldn’t go back. It didn’t feel real. But I don’t want to stay here either, swimming through the garbage in my soul and not knowing how to be well. Do I want to be well?, the Healer asks. Yes, but help my unbelief.

A few cloudy Sundays ago I was watching Bruce play with Darren on the steps of our church. Screaming fire trucks were storming our street. Bruce ran down the steps, swept a wide-eyed Darren into his arms and ran down to watch the commotion fade down East 15th.

Darren’s eyes were bright and mouth was agape. “That was a fire twuck!” he exclaimed, jabbing a stubby finger in the direction of the receding lights.

Man, Darren was so taken by that truck.

–

I’ve been thinking lately about how simple we need to become to “get” to the Father heart of God. I’m really tired of overthinking things. I’m tired of trying to push things on my own or intellectualizing you or my purpose here.

I’m thinking about this Imposter that I’ve created, the image in me that I like to put forth as someone competent, artsy, smart, funny, mature. My greatest fear is that someone will discover me in the times when I can’t keep up the ruse and find me unlovable. My Imposter can cover that for me, so I don’t have to face the disappointment of being myself.

I.

I am surrounded by my friends, but this memory is unattached with context. I don’t know where this is or how old I am (how old am I? sixteen?) But there is laughter: pale white walls of laughter, ringing in my ears. They are laughing at me (with me? something I said?) and I’ve got this stupid smile on my face and I don’t get it. All I can do is play along and smile, imagining they’re not laughing at me, they’re laughing because I’m self-deprecating and I’m funny and my cheeks burn, straining under the weight of this two-ton grin. Surely they see it’s not real, but I hope against hope that nobody notices.

II.

I am six, buried in numbers, two by two by six by twelve by what the hell is happening. There is a wall of numbers rushing straight at me, and I can’t think through the tears but all I know how to do is swim to the other side of the numbers. If I can trust my slipping memory, the numbers will fall out before the seconds expire and the waters won’t overwhelm me but alas, the waves are lapping over the edge and my eyes begin to overflow.

III.

A memory of performing, being on stage, drinking the laughter or applause or accolades of friends. I love it here. I feel at home here. I feel powerful here. But the lights turn off and people go home to their families and I am left sitting in my car with the key in the ignition, soon to be turned if not for the weight of an inconsolable loneliness. What do you do when you pour yourself out yet you cannot drink your fill?

–

Jesus, I just want to hang out with you and have you sweep me into your arms and we can run after fire trucks. Or we can do what you wanna do. I don’t care. I just wanna be the kid with a stupid grin on his face watching his Dad do his thing.

Sometimes I catch myself these days thinking of you; miscellaneous memories of you teaching Sunday school to a crowd of rowdy fifth graders, or how you’d say something affectionate in a fatherly way to Joe to his embarrassment every time we showed up at your house to hang out. Though I didn’t know you well Mr. Tang, this much is true: things aren’t the same without you.

the hope, the hope