Ponderings on the Trail

I believe love, by definition, is an act of vulnerability. In essence, love is taking all the frailty, brokenness, goodness, and darkness out of our own hands and placing it in the hands of another, giving them access to the core of our very personhood. In giving them this access, you have also given them an extraordinary amount of power in your life, to discover places that others cannot reach and to speak into the depths of your being. However, with this vulnerability comes the potential of an equally deep damage that comes when those whom you have given yourself to swing their words a bit too carelessly or tread a bit too roughly. In the narrow and hidden corridors of flesh that wind about in the heart, the scars etched in the walls remain long after the damage is done.

When we say that we love God, we are allowing Him into the darkest catacombs that support the structures and facades we show the world. In faith and vulnerability, we allow Light to scatter the darkness in ourselves, and give Him the authority and power to tear down and rebuild as He sees fit, oftentimes causing the buildings on the surface to come crumbling down. The vulnerability of loving God is felt in every intentional cut of His refining blade, as well as the words He speaks of life and restoration.

In truly loving someone else, we are also giving them the same access into our depths. Oftentimes, the Spirit guides people into those corridors to act on His behalf, whether they know it or not. At times, they are the ones who do the breaking down in His name, are the voice to His words, and His arms that embrace.

Bonhoeffer says that true love for a person is always first and foremost mediated by and through Christ. He says that it is easy for us to believe our love for a person is genuine when in fact it is really a distorted version that is tainted with our own brokenness and neediness. Because of the oftentimes more tangible and immediate results of our limited human love, what we give is often laced with subtle forms of manipulation, and reflects our insecurities more than the love given by God.

Nouwen reminds us that we are unable to truly love others freely until we allow ourselves to be loved by God. Until we internalize the unchanging truth of our status as beloved children of God, we will continue to look for the approval and affirmation of others when they cannot ultimately provide it. Our actions will not come from a desire to bless or to love, but will arise from the deep insecurities that come from the unhealed dark places in our being.

We cannot give to others that which we have not received. We cannot learn to love properly unless we accept the love from God. It is hard for us to be healers if we have not known hurt and healing. Until we embrace ourselves in the name and by the grace of the Lord, it will be difficult for us to embrace a friend, let alone a stranger or an enemy. “Those who fall upon the Rock will be shattered, but those whom the Rock falls upon will be crushed (Matt 21:44).” As we are shattered, may He become both the new bedrock and the new architect, and may our attempts to love others be empowered by and submitted to Him.

Bed of Needles

For a few short breaths
I find myself nestled in the bed of needles
beneath frayed umbrellas smelling like that first week of December
when the Christmas tree paints the living room green.

Here, far north of man-scapes and concrete dreams
unbesieged by a muddle of petty anesthetics and miniscule grandeurs
the thunder cracks louder off every unmarked path and speckled rock and root
and the show I watch from beneath my pine helps wash old dust off my feet.

The signs in the skies change like the whims of a woman bearing new life
E’n so, the chant of the wind has carried the death of all that I could not leave behind.
Be still, as all the world rages around,
to know that He Is, if only for a breath.

The Mongols Are A-comin'!

Let's see what happens when you stuff your heart into a backpack and drag it across the rolling expanses of Mongolian fields, while attempting to make sure 12 inexperienced teenagers make it back to their parents alive (and with some sort of growth to show).

Ta-ta for now.

All It Takes

In the attempt to forcibly move
(Because the world will not move for me)
Relativity becomes a testable theory.

Every arbitrary threshold,
Every zone of time and mile staked therein,
My resolve is harnessed and clipped
Lest I falter, stumble back,
And find myself crumbled like pillars of salt.

City streets will be redeemed
As I peer beyond the silhouette of my own nose.
O Death, where is thy victory?
O Damien Rice, where is thy sting?

老天津

Airports are existential places. They funnel the most eclectic and diverse people from around the world into one building, only to wait impatiently, sit awkwardly together for a few hours, mixed like a humanity cocktail. Then, just as randomly as they came, they are herded into airplanes like lemmings, and shot out to equally exotic places, to live our unimaginably disparate lives, never to interact again. On one hand, we are so minute, another face in a crowd of different shades. But the stories and lives behind the faces screams Imago Dei, and stands as a bulwark against dehumanization.

On the bus ride from the new Beijing airport (which is quite impressive, by the way) to Tianjin, I sat next to a man from Sierra Leone who worked for his country's Department of Transportation and Infrastructure, here to participate in a development seminar. He shared about the rebuilding of his country and African politics, and we lamented people like President Mugabe and histories like colonialism. I couldn't get diamonds, wars and child soldiers off my mind.

Unlike me, who squirmed for a mere 14 hours, it took him 3 days to get to China. He was so other to me, black as the night and wide-eyed in a city that was twice his country's population. And yet there we were, hamming it up, with him as a Brother as well.

Today, I will walk out onto the street and fill my lungs with pollution, order an egg inside a biscuit for breakfast, hug familiar friends at Fellowship, massage away the economy class aches, and find myself greeting the lamb-kabob chefs with an "Assalamu Alilkum," only to sit alone and continue entertaining the thoughts I had for 14 hours by myself in the sky.

Hello, Tianjin. It's good to be back.

Redemption of Place

In my town, there is a small dirt road that leads into creeks coming in from the bay. In an open expanse and solitude rare for suburbia, one can look across the bay and see the glowing lights of Atlantic City reminding me, “all that glitters is not gold.” Here, throughout high school, I’ve written countless stanzas of angsty teen poetry and learned the freedom of cursing at God. When I come back “home” to New Jersey, this is still my haven of solitude, a place that simultaneously accepts my mourning and reminds me of God’s faithfulness and promises.

For an overly sentimental bastard like me, there is a lot of power in a place. Psychologists who’ve done research on environmental cues say that our surroundings have enormous strength in helping us recall habits, thoughts and events, sometimes against our conscious will.

So, today is my last day in America for the next few short months. I’m returning to a place I spent most of last year in. With the place come all the people, activities, smells and thoughts that made the experience what it was. The thoughts that accompanied me alone on crowded buses will show their face again. The wanderings of a heart when I saunter the humid night streets, looking for 羊肉串, will return. But speaking of a place he revisited, a friend recently said, “I felt like I left a part of myself back at Wheaton when I left. But I picked it up and ran with it when I visited again.”

This is my hope as I return to that dusty dirty city, that I will participate in a redemption of place. Perhaps something has changed between December of last year and tomorrow, when I sit cramped by a window seat watching an ocean of clouds wash by. Perhaps the change will allow me to face those memories that spit in my face, and take back from them the pieces of me they should’ve never been given. Perhaps, when I leave again this time, I will fly back more healed, more whole for facing this place.

Eventually, like my friend, I’ll go back to Wheaton and run away with the pieces that I left there as well.

The Prophetic Tradition

I was never one who had a lot of beef with Jeremiah Wright. In fact, when I first heard his comments, I was glad that someone had the chutzpah to speak such poignant words to the rest of us. I look at the Old Testament prophets, John the Baptist, and Jesus, and am grateful for those who refuse to let us sit comfortably in our self-satisfying, conscience-appeasing illusions. I remember driving through a city and listening with amusement to a Christian talk show as the white hosts, who apparently had very little understanding of the life and plight of minorities in this country, evoked the name of Christ in condemning Obama for being associated with Pastor Wright. Though these thoughts are a little after the fact, I believe they remain pertinent, as the Church will forever need voices who are bold enough to challenge the powers and principalities, both inside and outside the Body. In the end, I'm sad that Obama had to leave his church because of politics. He made a dignified effort to try and remain true. Unfortunately, it will continue to be used against him. But I'm glad to know that his pastor wasn't afraid of pushing for change or speaking the truth, and that for so many years, Obama listened to him preach.

(Found on Rich Wu's Blog, for full version, see here.)

"It may surprise many in white America, for whom Martin Luther King, Jr. is the only black preacher of whom they have ever heard, to learn that there are a lot of Jeremiah Wrights out there who week after week give expression to that classic definition of prophetic preaching that is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” What would one expect of a black preacher whose Christian name is Jeremiah?

While I could not possibly agree with everything that Jeremiah Wright says, I do know that when a preacher, especially a black urban preacher, fails to speak truth to power and refuses to speak of what is wrong in the ardent hope of making it right, that preacher is, in Milton’s words, a “blind mouth,” and a repudiation of God’s solemn call to him. Preachers, despite much evidence to the contrary, are not called to celebrate the status quo, even an American status quo, and when they do their job properly they call us all to a higher standard. Preachers are not perfect, nor are they the only people allowed to be credible critics of our time and place, but they are among the very few whose vocation it is to make us aspire to something other than the status quo. For too long we have made God an ally in the American way; the highest standards of preaching in America require that we should seek to be God’s ally, helping God and one another to create a world in which we seek to live as God would have us live. To criticize America is not a sin, but it is a sin to mistake America for God, and it is both sin and dereliction of duty to fail to note the difference."

Speaking about the the dangers of how our worship lies to God, Mark Labberton, a pastor in Berkeley and another modern day prophet, writes in his book, "The Dangerous Act of Worship":

"In another lie about God, we make the Lord of heaven and earth our tribal deity when we try to make him serve nationalistic ends. Whether we think of Constantine or the British Empire or American Manifest Destiny or more recent instances, religiously instigated nationalism diminishes God and subverts his mission. This is never how the Lord presents himself, but it is a frequent lie we tell others by our actions. We perpetuate this lie by making God out to be our nation's God, the One who has a preference toward us-- deservedly, some say! God can be represented as the servant of our wishes, a vending-machine-type fulfiller of the desires of our hearts (Psalm 37:4), which are sometimes little more than Christmas lists."

Preach!!

Obama-rama

Ok Obama, you got the nomination. Congratulations on bringing about a historical event... a black presidential candidate. You have the charisma to get people dreaming about change. You have the rhetoric and the sincerity.

The question is, can you really deliver?

All in a Day's Work

Today,

I rubbed the scars on my knuckles and remembered you.

I bought 5 ripe avocados and smiled.

I saw a bumblebee on my dashboard and thought of you.

I turned the radio off, drove with the windows down and felt your silence blow through my hair.

Here's to Giving Up

Giving up well is like trying to gracefully eat spaghetti while wearing a white shirt; …one wonders if it’s ever been done successfully.

When the sour sting of bitterness starts lingering in the mouth after the teeth are brushed at night… when anger is found systematically speckling your blurred consciousness in the mornings, all is not right. Moving forward should not be independent of Agape, and true healing cannot take root in hatred.

Mending, at the cost of love, is not mending at all.