Singing my frustrations... singing my prayers...

Peace everyone;

For those of you who do not know... the last week has been really crazy up in here... pollution that was literally beyond hazardous (For 2/5 of the week it just read "Beyond Index"), pollution-induced illness, two-year-old bill payments being demanded, shady landlords, upcoming evictions, unpaying debtors...

I was riding the subway tonight and my emotions on the situation just started writing themselves into a verse...

The Devil tryin' to lie to me - friends try to get high with me
People asking favors then turning a blind eye to me...

So I came home tonight and recorded then mixed this song about the emotions I've been feeling over the last week. I wanted to be honest and put myself out there in front of man - but more importantly, in front of God. You could say that Peace of Mind is a prayer of sorts... when I was feeling frustrated and absolutely knew that I would only get thru this with strength beyond what I myself could provide.

Peace of Mind is streaming on my Youtube channel right now.



-jglc a/k/a Grand Master Chu

voices

In my travels - particularly the legs of my journeys that have taken me through New Haven, New York, and Beijing - I've met men and women who feel, material possessions stripped away, as though the only thing they have left is their story.

I've also met many people, regardless of economic status, who feel that their stories are unimportant and unheeded. Some of these people remember their stories, but think that they're only useful as a means to an end. Hoping to monetize their background, they leverage their characteristics and very selves into concrete value. They don't think who they are matters so much as what they can accomplish.

How many people have been told, over and over again, that their stories don't matter?

How can these men and women find a voice - and how can we tell them that there is Someone out there to whom their lives matter, on an intimate level?

A new beginning.

"All Good Things..." -English Proverb. Or Star Trek: The Next Generation episode.

Even the humblest of things can spring from a humble beginning; but every humble beginning must come from the end of some other beginning (it's profound. [no it's not]), whether more or less humble.

And so, I must, with misty-eyed regret, contemplate the end of a thing; and the beginning of another.

It's one of the oldest voices in the book of tragically spurned love: "I'm sorry; there's another...". But here we go: while American Dream, Chinese Hero has served as a wonderful jumping-off point for my musings, personal and professional, I now find it more useful - if not necessary - to divide the two spheres of my identity.

But this is not an end! It is a beginning!

American Dream, Chinese Hero will continue on in more or less of its present (and traditional) form: a forum for me to post shakily-taken photographs from my camera(phone), eject musings of a highly unprofessional (and undesirable) nature, and post about the latest and greatest in the sneaker/mixtape/rap album world.

But there will be no more of the wittily incisive (yeah right) commentary on race, ethnicity, politics, philosophy, or theology that have preceded it. Instead, new things arise:

1) For vague (and unqualified) sociological discourse - both personal reflections and public musings - having to do with the field of Asian-American studies, hip-hop discource, political discussions (such as Affirmative Action and Just War theory), and other academic subjects, please head to Iason De Silentio.

The title - "Jason from the Silence" - comes from the pseudonym of Danish existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, Johannes de Silentio, referencing the Biblical John the Baptist: a voice out of the silence, speaking into silent world around him. This was literal and prophetic: John came into prophetic existence in the wilderness of 1st-century Judea, far from the urban centers of his time; and his voice came into the public sphere following four hundred years of prophetic silence. John's voice - strident, urgent - was the wake-up call preparing the people for a new revelation.

Kierkegaard found himself in similar circumstances. In his 19th-century Denmark, he faced an overbearing church hierarchy, a numb national congregation, and inadequate, distant theologies. Kierkegaard's voice awoke, aroused, and enlivened his people, Church, and philosophy forever, in his role as the Father of (Christian) Existentialism.


2) For formal and informal reflections on Evangelicalism, ministry, the global Church, Scripture, and faith, I am establishing a third space, seeking my name.

Names, in short, have power: when they are forced onto us (as by a schoolyard bully), they are repugnant, hateful, instruments of spite and derision. When snatched from the lips of a lover, they are glorious, shimmering, eternal things.

As a Christian, one of the things to which I cling dearly - desperately - is the thought that my name - given to me not only by my earthly parents, but my eternal Father - is written "in the Book of Life", a book within which no hand could ever dare raise the power to blot or inscribe a single character.

The Biblical conception of naming is an interesting thing: not only does a name describe who we are, a well-chosen name - a true name, as it were - prophecies (tells the truth) about who we will be. Names are not only references, but serve as stories - signifiers - prescriptions.

As a young, immature man seeking - seeking Christ, God, Grace, and Love - I think, ultimately, I and all others who are on a journey of faith are simply seeking our names. Our true, eternal, right names.



The long and short of it:
-3 blogs:

1. American Dream, Chinese Hero - an informal personal blog: photographs, personal updates, and my music.
   
2. Iason De Silentio - a formal ethnic studies blog, particularly touching on current events, Asian and Asian-American studies, hip-hop culture, and philosophy (primarily ethics) blog.
3. seeking my name - A reflective and contemplative faith and ministry blog, discussing Christian living, Evangelicalism, Scripture, and theology.

An exercise

"Jesus’ College is the only one in which God’s truth can be really learned; other schools may teach us what is to be believed, but Christ’s alone can show us how to believe it."
- Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening, Evening Jan. 19.

Recently, a friend lent me God in the Dock, a collected edition of C.S. Lewis' minor writings and shorter presentations. Among them is Meditation in a Toolshed, a brief piece in which Lewis speaks about the distinction between looking at and looking along. Reading tonight's Morning and Evening - a twice-daily devotional to which I have often turned in my quiet times of contemplation - I was struck by the parallel thrust of Spurgeon's rumination.

In Toolshed, Lewis distinguishes looking at from looking along along an experiential axis, similar to the research method distinction between, respectively, grounded theory and participant-observer strategies of data collection and interpretation. In short, the metaphor Lewis constructs is based on the familiar analogy of revelation as a source of light: envisioning a beam of light cast onto an object, looking at the ray grants information about the light itself, while looking along the light reveals knowledge about the source and target of the emission.

Lewis' privileging the latter over the former seems a priori, but I think that there are fair arguments to be made in support of looking along versus looking at. Both positions bear reasonable and seemingly non-trivial epistemic value. But what may grant us liberty to preference looking along over looking at is the existence of convincing order in the revelation.

That is to say, revelation, and specifically the Christian revelation, is itself ordered in an intuitively convincing manner: a beam of light hitting the blank wall of the toolshed may be dismissed as a random structural failure, while a beam of light illuminating a carving on the ground is not so easily dismissed. The question then is whether the information revealed by participating in the Christian process - looking along - is of the former or latter quality.

Adding to the difficulty of processing this information is the hypothesis that the results are biased through human intervention. After all, alternative beams of light exist, striking seemingly intentional points on the ground, and it seems a fairly foundational part of participating in looking along that looking along one source of revelation is mutually exclusive with others. So, one of the common claims of those looking along a particular light is that the other lights are false constructs, illuminating points (metaphysical/theological points, that is) that may seem appealing but are, in fact, only so because they are intended by human effort to be so rather than divine effort.

Spurgeon's quote is situated in similarly hairy territory. All the issues raised with Lewis' beliefs - and more - can apply here. It is interesting that both predicate "real learning" with participation: learning is distinguished from learning about. There is something about active, personal, engagement that is valuable to both authors - and it is very attractive to me, too. But it seems as though much post-Enlightenment/Rationalist thought has found itself striking an antagonistic position, claiming that personal investment in a situation has quite the opposite effect: rather than granting knowledge in a particularly valuable way, it taints what data is gathered. Is this an intractable disagreement? One wonders.


There are far more issues in this exploration than I can adequately here address. I like both the ideas expressed by Lewis and Spurgeon. In both cases, there is great intuitive appeal, but it is difficult to articulate the basis - defending the premises - of the appeal. Perhaps one either "feels it" or doesn't.

Merely an exercise in rigour.

truer words

"Give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares about what happens to you."

I love these words.

A thought

Arrogance has been on my mind a lot, recently.

I've been perusing some of the writings of Canadian Skeptic James Randi, listening to recordings of the aggressive Atheist debate of Richard Dawkins, and reading through weblogs self-identified with the freethought and Brights movements, in addition to exploring conversation with quite radically anti-religious persons (dialogue being altogether too bilateral a label for what I've experienced).

The standard rhetorical aesthetic of such fora of discussion seem to be a self-righteous anti-religiosity; transcending the boundaries of cheerily areligious belief, the new wave in modern atheism seems to have a bitterly antagonistic bent towards religion, a condescending, sneering sort of spite directed towards the faithful. In such systems, characterizations of theist beliefs often involves words and phrases such as the following: "magic," "imaginary friend," "arbitrary," "unfounded," &c.

Such discussions, and their underpinnings, truly sadden me for two reasons: (I) First, and primarily, as one who believes - intimately, personally - in the being of a loving, wonderful, perfectly fulfilling God who has created and does sustain all of existence, it saddens me that there are people who would so decisively and boldly cut away the possibility of a relationship with that loving God. All rhetorical flourishes aside, the loss of an inexhaustible source of infinite care and grace, even if only metaphysically so, seems as though it ought to bring grief in some degree.

For this reason, I don't feel quite the same way for those atheists who renounce God, but do so with a sense of the loss of the sweetness of what could have been: I can empathize with the humanness of loudly pronouncing, God is not; but, whispering, if only he were. But the point of view that I have recently encountered - rare, I think, in my postmodern surroundings - and that which has been grieving me, is the outright arrogant proclamation: God is not, and it's damn finer than if he were!

If God is not truth, but tale, might we at least admit the beauty of the story‽

(II), such discussions do elicit a fair degree of nervousness in myself: how much of such militant and callous opposition to the very concept of God is social karma for the past wrongs of "Christianity" [the sum of Christians-in-name] (or Christianity [the sum of Christians-in-truth, putatively distinct])? Was there an era - or manifold periods? - in Christian history where theologians, being found bearing the greater weight of authority in their respective societies, were found so overbearing, cocky, swaggering in their clerical roles, that they thus disparaged those honest dissenters in their midst?

Do I? Regularly, I'm sure. How often, in my own unthinking stagger through life, have I hurt, damaged, even spited others, and all while proclaiming, in my best Christian guise, to be an earthly representative of the all-loving Heavenly Father? Of course, I've spoken faithful testimony of being a "broken human being," to being a "sinner in constant need of grace". But has my life born witness to these truths? Or has my life reflected a know-it-all, condescending, self-proselytizing wretch content and happy to sow self-glorifying pride?

A thought.


[edit: 3:35 PM] And, to make it explicitly clear: The arrogance to which I'm referring does not fall exclusively within the atheist camp. My attention has been drawn, increasingly, to my own personal arrogance, theological, intellectual, and otherwise in nature, the pervasive reality of which is pretty challenging and self-perception-shattering (or perhaps, better put, is spurring me on towards redrawing my self-perception).

Prologue

I begin this work in 5 minutes. Time to get focused.

Our Father Who art in Heaven;

Guide my attitude, that I might not sin against these little ones.
Guide my words, that I might teach them well.

Sanctify my heart; purify my mind; enlighten my soul.

Ad maiorem Dei gloriam, Amen

Question on Lewis

Famously from Lewis's Weight of Glory:
"We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

What happens when mud pies become genuinely (though not necessarily actually) more attractive than a holiday at the sea?

对我妹妹很骄傲

I'm proud of my sister... she recently turned 20, but that's not the real salient point here... To commemorate her 20th year on top the earth she wrote a post summing up some thoughts & transformations that been going on in her mind-grapes:

"What Not Dating For 20 Years Has Taught Me About God

"It's an interesting feeling to be twenty and to have never dated anyone, and on purpose at that, LOL. God has made it amazing, and powerful, and wonderful. It's only scary when I'm not trusting God, which is always a powerful reminder to do so - one that I really need. I've felt God give me purpose and fulfillment and love and joy and peace, and been able to know that it's all from Him. So really, the title of this note should start off with "What God Has Taught Me." It's mostly interesting because I know that so far I've made the right choices as far as God's plan for me, and it's helped me personally honor God and grow in my relationship with Him.

"I just kind of wanted to reflect on what God's done after two decades. Cuz that's kind of a long time...."

(full public post here)

Christmas Songs in February

There's something right about listening to a Christmas song in February.

With the bout of advertisements and seasonal jingles ringing through the air, Christmas can be - has become? - passe by December. Christus missus est ("Christ has come"), but so have Toys 'R' Us, Wal*Mart, and Best Buy, for all his consumer children.

But in February, snow lies dense on the ground; it was a brisk day, a sharp day, a clear day. I'm a little tired, and I'm nursing a little bit of a cold. It's late enough in the semester for me to have made mistakes, and plenty; early enough that I'm still uncertain about the rest of the school year. What might Spring's warmth bring? What shape will this semester take?

It seems like there's room for hope; and right now, with no holiday in sight, I feel readily the need for a Christmas (mas Cristo?) more than I did in December, December with its heady air of holiday and presents, home, finals, excitement.

So, you know, I listen to a Christmas song.

Praying hands.

[Image source: Microsoft Word Clipart]

Since my youth, I have long felt little connection to the many visual postures of prayer that often populate our Christian lives. The traditional image set forth of our pleas and petitions to God - two hands pressed lightly against each other, palms gently folded together in quietude and stillness of mind - was so thoroughly static, so devoid of vitality and vivacity, that it assailed even my young, malformed images of entering the Presence.

So it was that, even in my old listless dearth of faith, showing up to church with no pleas, no longings, and no desire for renewal, I began praying with fingers interwoven, hands clenched together, grasping at one another for support and mutual affirmation. Even as my heart and soul shrugged their way methodically, mechanically, through a yet-another (as in, "yet another Sunday service, prayer meeting, family prayer, etc."), at least my body found tension, dynamism, movement. But not growth.

Still, this manual configuration, of digits weaving and palms pressing, was the natural mold into which my hands fell even as I found - again, or for the first time, depending upon whose soteriology and ontology you lean - the brilliance and joy of a life lived in concert with that Holy Love (ἀγάπη τοῦ θεοῦ), the Divine Father, the Great Friend. As my soul began wrestling with Truth - with conflict, with the ideal-real disparity, with the weight and depth of my own sin (and the corresponding value and immensity of Grace) - the twists and turns of my hands were filled with new spiritual life, a physical metaphor of the incredibly more real spiritual struggle and discovery.

Recently, however, I've been rediscovering the classic posture of prayer. It's not that I've altogether abandoned my childhood or the ways of my younger Christian faith in favor of a mature devotion: that would be giving my contemporary practices far too much credit.

Rather, I've unearthed the traditional configuration of praying hands for what it ought to be: these hands are not destined to merely be soft planes joined palm-to-palm in silent, motionless repose. No, they push together, inwards. They splay together, forearms pressing, fingertips tensed against one another; they stand at rest, but not for lack of intensity. No, tension is in them; it may be inherent, or potential. There is potency in each half of a pair of praying hands; they are joined together not of convenience or aesthetic ease, but because the forcefulness of each plane, on its own, needs its twin. And yes, sometimes my joints slide past one another, and the digits interface; but when my hands interlock in this manner, it can often feel as though I have simply come to a conflicted standstill.

When my hands press and push against one another, though - as my thoughts do, as this world and God's Word do - then sometimes I feel my spirit rising up.
Knowing that conflict, even unresolved, does often stand as the breath of wind's currents, pushing up against me, prompting, provoking, pressuring me to less of me, more of You, God.

Weakness

O God, you chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise;
O God, you chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong!

Authority

"They went to Capernaum, and when the Sabbath came, Jesus went into the synagogue and began to teach. The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law."

(Mark 1:21-22)

Authority: "The power to enforce laws, exact obedience, command, determine, or judge", from French, autorite, "book or quotation that settles an argument," (c. 1230), from
Author: "One who sets forth written statements," from Latin, autor, "father", "one who causes to grow," from Latin, augere, "to increase".

So, authority, at least in some vague etymological degree, means the power or quality of the father. ehhhhh

Graf / Bust Out / Nun Fight

9/7 - 9/13/2008

Sunday9.7.2008


KVE/TBM sticker. Mailbox in front of HGS, York Street, New Haven.

Friday9.12.2008


Susie代表Bustout.

Saturday9.13.2008


Justin and I met for breakfast at Claire's, our first
meeting since his relocation to New Haven.

_Freshmen_Fun_Night_

Saturday evening was UCW's annual Freshmen Fun Night (aka
Bibimbap Night for the elderly out on the internets).


Or, to Esther Kang, a Freshmen Nun Fight.


Nuns(?) Fighting.


Bape sweater, Levi's 501 dry jeans, Vans Off the Wall
slip-ons.










Mikey came to visit.


First time meeting Taryn.


Mad food up ins.


x2.








Sandi also came through; mad graduates on the scene.






David.


Gong.


Lills.


half (?) of UCW '10.

you heard it here

I was doing some reading in the Bible this morning and came across this passage in Scripture... then looked at my calendar... then back at this verse.

"From this day on, from this twenty-fourth day of the ninth month, give careful thought to the day when the foundation of the LORD's temple was laid." (Haggai 2:18)

Real Talk. 9/24.

Prostitutes and tax collectors.

[Adapted from correspondence]

At my church this morning, our associate pastor gave a really moving (well, it moved me) sermon about...

OK. To be honest, I was not paying attention during a massive portion of the sermon, because I got like 4 hours of sleep last night during a sleepover at Adam Y-V's house (4 Christian brothers = hallelujah, a Godly confraternity!). I did gather, in between desperate attempts to at least appear attentive, that, in general, the pastor was talking about the salvific power of Christ: how He can reach anybody, regardless of where they are coming from or located at in their lives. A good topic, one with which I'm sure we are all more or less generally familiar. Good stuff, good stuff... but not really one (at least when broadly approached) likely to be provoking a lot of introspection for me (this is a sad truth, and more likely just about my own foolishness than the weightiness of the topic).

But, towards the end of the sermon, the preacher started talking about how the depths of sin from which God had saved him. He is an ex-gangster/drug dealer/adulterer/etc. He's been jailed multiple times. But the point that he kept hammering home was that God had always walked there beside him and before him (that is why we call Him a God that is previous). When he was dealing drugs, God was there with him. When he was sleeping with whoever, God was with him. When he was putting a needle in his arm for drugs, God was there with him. Kanye West might say that Jesus walks... but the truth is, He does so in such thorough ways that we got no clue.

And then the pastor drew a parallel between Jesus' always being with us (even to the end of the age) and Jesus going to be in tax collectors' houses, down to be with them after - and while - they partied. Tax collectors, prostitutes, these were basically the two sides of the "immoral" coin: few men could be more despised than a tax collector, and few women regarded as more shameful or less worthy of respect in that culture. (And of course, we could talk on and on about gender roles in 1st-century Israel/Judea and what it means and signifies that a man would become a tax collector or a woman a prostitute.)

Now, as he started talking about these people with whom Jesus associated himself, my mind started wandering again... but, this time, I think it was a Godly wandering; less a loss of focus than a purposeful redirection of it.

I began recollecting how, so often, I have held a sanitized view of Jesus. About how I intellectually assent to the fact that Jesus hung out with "bad people", but I somehow disengage those "bad people" from their "bad acts" while Jesus was with them. As though He existed in a little bubble of goodness and moral rectitude that somehow charmed the corrupt moral fibre of those around Himself into marginal and temporary sanitation.

But the thing that I realized today was... nope. Basically: the parties to which Jesus went to were not saintly affairs. Jesus hung out with tax collectors. And prostitutes. Let's run over that again:
-Tax collectors (i.e. men who, by virtue of their corruption or/and low moral standards, had a lot of money).
-And prostitutes (i.e. women who, for whatever reason, did... things... in exchange for money).

And ummm... I'm sure that those tax collectors and prostitutes were not just getting together to chill and read the news. While I'm sure that they might have felt ashamed by His presence there - or, more likely, odd and a little weirded out (all ay yo who is that dude hanging out outside talking to everybody but not coming into the party? why isnt he gettin down with the ladies; he shy or gay or somethin?) - but I'm also fairly sure that His presence didn't change all that much of their behavior, and certainly all their behaviors (Isaiah 53:3 - "He was despised, and we esteemed him not").

So this is our God. Going back to a devotional I wrote a little while back, this is our real Hosea: our Christ. He loved each and every one of those people in those parties more than anyone we have ever loved, and he was there to watch them forsake Him for cheap, quick, objectifying lustiness. And He was, so much, Loving Grace, that, instead of fleeing from the scene, unable to handle it, He remained with those people, utterly in love with them.

Can we do this?? I can still remember the dread heartache I felt this one time in high school, when I was dating some girl and she basically started falling for this other guy. I could see it coming, I could hear it on the phone; and she probably could, too. I can still recall so vividly well the sinking emptiness of love taken and rejected; or worse, a love accepted but left without reciprocation.

To use a gross term: love abused.

It's the same feeling you get (well, I do anyhow) when you see that girl (or guy, though I wouldn't know about that.... im guessing it's the same) you have a crush on, or even just sort of fancy, talking a little too closely with some other person, or coming to the party with them, or (ha ha here do I give too much away?) going back and forth avidly from facebook wall to wall with a few too many ;)'s and =)'s for comfort (yeah that was a little of a stalker-ish example. I don't actually do that, promise).

You know that feeling? That hollowness which shakes you in your very heart and to the pit of your stomach? Your very essence of being?

Now imagine Christ - Lover and Husband and Knower of every individual person - not only not avoiding that feeling (magnified by an infinity of comprehension, I'm sure), but seeking it out.

Desiring to give us grace so much that, instead of fleeing when we adulterers approach Him, instead of simply standing still and waiting for us to come to Him, loving these sinners - we prostitutes and we tax collectors - so much that He actually sought them (us!) out, even in the midst of their (our!!) very moment of consummated adultery?

That's a God I can cry out to. That the God whose grace can (and did) bring me to my knees during worship after the sermon, literally crying out for His Cross to be mine. And I hope - I think - that my tears might be the same as those of Mary Magdalene (also a woman with a sordid past... as are we all [not women. Having sordid pasts.]), which watered His sore feet.

This is the God who is seeking me out, to embrace me, as I go to Internet sites that I shouldn't go to, or talk to girls that I don't really need to be talking to, in ways that I don't really need to be talking, about things that don't really deserve discussion.
This is the God who is desiring me, when I'm obsessing over clothes, or money, or sneakers, or any of a thousand other things which could be good but are too-often idols.
This is the God who loves me when I commit adultery with the manifold succubi of my own creation;
and one day, one day soon, one day already, this is the God whose love will be so greatly and obviously revealed to me that I will finally turn back and fall in love with that God once and for all.

Reflections on the Seoul morning.

(Adapted from correspondence)

A thought at 6:40 AM.

Just a quick thought, not really a devotional.

I was just walking along the street this morning alternately praying and singing quietly. The 6 AM street in my corner of Seoul is bright - a touch hazy - quiet and cool. Older men and women wander the streets, but I live in a low-traffic suburb so, by and large, I was alone with my thoughts and my God.

Walking along, I was struck by the way that God has constantly been using ongoing relationships between myself and non-Christian friends to continually draw me closer to Him.

It can be incredibly frustrating to see close friends go through recurring struggles with sin. But I can't help but be awed and astonished at how uniquely God reveals Himself through seeing my friends' struggles with themselves and their compulsive needs to rely on inadequate sources of succor. I see truth occasionally breaking through in moments of honesty and reflection, and this must be exactly the same way that God sees me struggling with myself and my foolish, contemptible pride.

The life of the Old Testament prophet Hosea is one of my favorite stories in the Bible, hands down. Dude was a prophet and God had him marry a mad um loose woman. Why? "The people in this land have acted like prostitutes and abandoned the Lord." Burned.

God had Hosea go out and marry an unfaithful woman precisely so that he would have a personal experience of sin, from the other side. So often we sin and see the grievous marks it leaves on our own souls and lives; sometimes, even, we get a glimpse of what it means to grieve God or the Spirit, and we get a jolt of repentance and humility from that. But to understand Sin, even if only briefly and vaguely, from the point of the person pursuing the lost, rather than being pursued as the lost, is also a great (and terrible) gift.

I'm not advocating going out and trying to fall in love with/marry/invest in the most tragic person you can, simply to have an experience of what it's like to be God. That sounds vaguely blasphemous, if not explicitly foolish.

But I think God does sometimes put us in situations where He desires to teach us some specific lesson about what it means to Trust Him and, yes, even to Be Him (this is the same reason that the "Dark Night of the Soul" and the stigmata are considered gifts in various Christian traditions: they are experiences that allow us to partake in Christ's suffering and share a deeper understanding of His spirit).

I've heard multiple sermons about how difficult it can be to raise children without the assurance that they will follow after the Lord.

In the same way, it can be incredibly difficult to be so deeply invested in a person, without any assurance that they will be able to bring themselves to care about their own future. There is a lot that I have seen friends do, see them continue to do, and know that they will do that grieves me personally and spiritually; and I can only imagine how deeply it grieves our Maker.

But if I myself have sinned as much as I have, and yet God loves me; and yet He loves me; and yet again He loves me; then who am I to not extend that same forgiveness? And, in extending it, I feel some of the joy - and deep tragedy - of what it means to love an as-yet unregenerate soul; I can only imagine what it is to be really in love with every one of those souls. I know I couldn't bear it.

So, it's a good thing that I don't have to; not alone, anyways.

A thousand times I've failed;
still, your mercy remains;
Should I stumble again,
still, I'm caught in your grace.

Everlasting, your light will shine when all else fades
Never ending, your glory goes beyond all fame

This is LOVE!

(adapted from correspondence)

There is one thing that has weighed heavy on my mind over the last day or two, even though it's actually fairly silly: having arriving in Korea, surveying my schedule and financial situation, and weighing the costs and benefits, I am looking into going to Beijing/北京 for the week after I finish my job, to catch up with my rap crew and also several other close friends.

However, for several reasons (needing to move my initial flight from Seoul to the States back one week, needing to get a Chinese tourist visa, the costs of international flight, the stupid OLYMPICS [ugh], etc. ad infinitum), this is an incredibly painstaking endeavor. But God has been really using this intensity to teach me something. And this is it.


This is God's mercy and grace: if I lose all I possibly could, I would still have more than I could ever discover.


And this is why I've been thinking about this.

Making travel plans sucks, especially for me. I am a pretty frugal guy - some might say stingy, and they wouldn't be wrong - and when I get into the details of visa fees, airport taxes, scheduling flights, application paperwork, comparative shopping, et cetera., et cetera., et cetera., I am able to grow thoroughly obsessed with saving $10 here or $30 there. I hate spending money that I don’t need to: sometimes it seems that my absolute greatest nightmare would be to find out that, for instance, I booked a flight too late, and wasted $200 that didn’t need to be spent. So, for all of my free time today*, I was calling, researching, and emailing travel agents to find out who could get me the absolute lowest price on an air ticket. (*I used my phone so much that I ran out of prepaid minutes… adding another stress: wasting $18)

And it was thoroughly unhealthy. Why was I doing this? Not because I wanted to save money for God's kingdom: because I was, in a very real way, making an idol of money. The thought of spending $20 that I didn't need to began to seem like blasphemy to me.

For those who haven't seen me when I get really anxious or concerned about something, I grow amazingly obsessive about that matter, until it is either resolved or has passed (side note: these issues ALWAYS resolve, and always in my favor. God's track record in my life is something on the order of 13241451:0).

In such cases, I am a perfect antithesis of Matthew 6:25:

"Do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food?"

OK. I'm usually not particularly obsessed about food. But this is the nature of anxiety: when you are anxious about something, that one thing becomes the single most important focus of your life.

Imagine a man starving in the wilderness. His life, his survival, his continued existence, is reduced to one factor: food. If he finds food, even one morsel, he will continue to live; if he fails to do so, he will surely cease to be.

The psychology of anxiety, at least speaking for me, is such that, if I am anxious about something, it consumes my mind in this very same way (and I suspect it is so for many of us). I focus on it to the exclusion of all else: success or failure in this one arena becomes the be-all and end-all of who I am. It becomes, in a real way, my identity: have I beaten this problem, or have I been vanquished by it?

Isn't that idolatry? Yes, and I'm sure there are whole books to be written on that, indicting us for our blasphemy of God. But this is not what I am concerned with here; this is what I find so urgent in this situation:


If I truly love God, this anxiety is foundless! It has no basis.


I grow anxious over things - money, friends, a job, travel plans, etc. - because I begin to think, without this, I cannot proceed with my life. Why does someone worry when they might get kicked out of a house? Because life requires a place to live! Why worry when you feel that you don't have a single friend? Because life without friends is not worth living!


But this is the miracle of God's love: If I have it, and it alone, I still have more than I could ever know.


And neither life, nor death, nor things present, nor things to come, nor things in heaven, nor things on earth, not ANYTHING can take God's love from me! (paraphrasing Romans 8:38)

Ms. Joshu I Sky AKA elee AKA esta! posted a quote on her blog (sorry to blow up ya spot est) a while ago, from German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer: "The darkest of dark cannot extinguish the light of a single flame."

-So what if I don't get a ticket to China?

-So what if, for whatever reason, I get ripped off and lose all the money I worked all summer to earn?

-So what, actually, if I die, and never return to the States?

If my love for Christ is like a "single flame," then these darknesses will pass over it and never disturb the one thing that matters, matters more than I can understand!


This is God's love: was I to lose all I ever could, I would still have more than I could ever know.


Is that not great?

I wandered home from work today with a head full of neurotic wonderings: If I move my Saturday lunch appointment from 11 AM to 10 AM, I can be in Hongik by 1 PM, talk to the travel agent… If I work 3 extra 40-minute shifts for each remaining week, I will earn 3 shifts * 30 dollars/shift * 7 weeks more, which will subsidize X amount of travel… If I… and if I… and if I….

But then God nudged me: Who are you, to accomplish anything?

Yes, I hope to go to Beijing, and this hope requires me to be diligent in researching and understanding my options. But this endless speculation, this iterated mulling over of financial matters, this is not diligence: this is self-absorbed “chasing after the wind” (Ecclesiastes 1:17).

Ultimately, I will probably wind up finding a flight to Beijing for a fair price (also, a fare price.... get it? a ha ha.), going, having a good time, traveling smoothly back to Seoul, and returning to the States in time for the first week at Yale.

But what if every one of those steps goes wrong?


My life would still be fuller and better than I deserve, than I know, that my human hopes could encompass.


.


I love you all. Surrender to God. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and your journeys will be impossibly beautiful.

Your brother,
-jglc

Congratulations Mr. and Mrs.... somebody?

My buddy Adam's coworker was getting married, doing it big (I been
saying this a lot recently, I think my students got no clue what I mean
by that... I don't fully know what I mean by that), Korean style.

(Maybe it has something to do with Big Willie Style?)

Anyways, what better did I have to do on a Friday night in Seoul other than
crash a wedding?

(All pictures stolen from my homeboy Gabe, whom Adam introduced
to me that night. They both go to the church in Seoul I've been
attending the last 2 Sundays.)


When Koreans do it big they go big... this can be a ridiculous country
(I will likely go on at length in my next post about how if I see
one more Louis bag on the subway I am fin'na go upside someone
head.)




Again: they go big.


To repeat: Big.

The interesting thing was, it's all one big performance. Guests
(especially those guests who have absolutely no direct relationship
or shared family tree with the happy couple...) were directed
downstairs to eat, with our choice of Chinese or Western food. The
upstairs level (where the ceremony was taking place) was for
lookies, not touchies.

I was truly straight with that though. Those of you who know me
well know that I am all about chilling with a Few Good Men [||].
So Adam, Gabe, and I followed a Ritz-Carlton worker downstairs
to their 四川饭馆儿 and kicked it while they brought us mad courses
of... Chinese food?



I saw another table getting a polaroid taken (old-school, Andre
3Stacks' "Shake it like a Polaroid picture" style), so I artlessly, as
the hostess passed our table holding the camera, totally blurted out
to Adam: "AY YO WE OUGHTA GET OUR PICTURE TOOK".

Turns out, the other table was celebrating a 1st wedding
anniversary. My bad.

Still, she was far too polite/courteous to turn down the blatant
request from the guests that had been sitting in their dining room
for TWO AND A HALF HOURS, so we got our picture took.


Then took a picture with our took picture.

Side note: I love how Gabe's camera focused very obviously on
the Polaroid, with complete abandonment (and blurring) of any
actual human subject. Real recognize real, I guess.


干杯.








Rest of the story is that, after we left the wedding, Adam and I
decided to kick it in a Burger King near the Gangnam subway
station for a while, talking about spiritual matters (specifically,
the relative merits of theologies of salvation from and salvation
to)... and by the time we rolled out, it was too late for me to catch
the last train back to Ilsan, the suburb where I live. So I wound
up spending the night in his host house in Gwacheon, then riding
back to Ilsan the next morning, heading into work to pick up some
tests, teaching a bunch of 9-year-olds a lesson I was highly
unqualified to teach, then getting back to my place around noon on
Saturday.

This is what it is on the weekend in Korea.


BOWLIN!!!

Satisfaction

Satisfaction.

From where does it arise?
Fulfillment of our purpose.

What is our purpose?
To glorify God.

How do we glorify God?
By showing Him to be worthy.

What is worthy?
God Himself is worthy.

So how do we glorify God?
We show Him to be precisely Who He Is.

How do we do this?
We surrender.
-He desires to make us into His Word - the very image of Christ, who is also "the image of the invisible God"

And so this is the greatest exercise of free will: to surrender our freedom to choose to sin, and to take up the freedom of being used by God

So this, then, is satisfaction: To surrender our very being up as God's instrument.