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WasaiWarrior
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Name: David
Country: United States
State: New Jersey
Gender: Male
Interests: A little bit of everything.
Expertise: Not enough.
Occupation: Student
Industry: Medical
Message: message meEmail: email me
Member Since:
9/18/2002
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| Written New Year's Eve 2007-2008:
Dear David,
This year has been a strange year. "Stubborn" may be the best way to describe it on many levels; "fearful" may be another. You're afraid to do or be a number of things, and so you just wait for life to carry you through. Is this the way it should be?
But how can you take a more forceful approach if life is so uncertain? It seems foolish, naive even. I think the problem is that you have no trust, either in yourself or in God, and that seems to be a very sad way to live through life... but you're not sure how to live it otherwise.
Perhaps you'll read this a year from now and laugh at how dismal & cynical you sound. That would be great, and I would feel very happy for you. But right now, from where I'm sitting, it's hard to see that happening.
Ambivalently yours,
-David D. Chen | | |
| [In commemoration of World AIDS Day, something I wrote about 5 years ago after a volunteer experience in an HIV clinic.]
In a roundabout sort of way, I think I've begun to understand why doctors and those who regularly deal with suffering seem less appalled by it. In some cases, possibly even most cases, it may be sheer indifference: defense mechanisms put in place to insulate and protect one's mind and occupation. But perhaps a continuing sense of horror and injustice and anger is unnecessary, maybe even detrimental, to compassion because suffering is, after all, only one aspect of a person's existence. True respect recognizes the places of beauty, joy, friendship, familiarity, and even the mundane in life. Those, like myself, who become preoccupied with suffering tend to harp on it because it remains their only point of contact; it reduces the complexity inherent to a person's humanity into a single dimension, and while this dimension may be the principal one in his or her life, it is not the only one. And again, I see how compassion focuses on the commonality of our existence: that evil reigns and grace overthrows.
Evil reigns and grace overthrows.
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| Don't say, "Happy Turkey Day," as if the holiday means nothing to you.
Say, "Happy Thanksgiving."
Don't spoil Thanksgiving dinner by obsessing about Black Friday.
Keep something sacred at the table.
Don't exploit the Native American genocide conversationally so that you can seem worldly and educated.
Give it the solemnity it deserves but also give thanks for the freedom you enjoy.
That is all.
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| [Note: originally posted on the R8 College Fellowship Blog.]
We grow accustomed to the smallness of things because we dwell in small places: a particular dorm room, a specific job, a well-defined family and a reasonably consistent group of friends. We develop habits and rituals that help to define the borders of such spaces and in that familiarity we find a deep and satisfying comfort.
But, as any one who struggles in life understands, such stability is an illusion. The domain of our control only stretches as far as the reach of our hands and it takes but the barest of intrusions to remind us that there is always something more powerful lurking about out there. A friend stabs you in the back. A boss rips into you for poor performance at work. A professor slaps you with a surprisingly awful grade. An accident tears you or someone you love to pieces.
A girl and I broke up once. That was devastating enough in itself, but what sent me spiraling into depression was the moment I knew she had begun dating someone else. Why? It was because that moment demolished any hope that I could do anything to restore the relationship to the way it was. A friend of mine died from leukemia. Despite having fallen out of touch for years, I was shocked and inexplicably bereaved by her unexpected death. Why? Death meant the definitive end to our friendship and the loss of any shared future experiences we might have had. Another friend committed suicide. My grades in medical school were slipping. Friendships I had once counted on suddenly seemed foreign and uncertain.
So whom could I blame but God? Who else was capable of bringing about such specific and timely personal disaster in my life? Was this the Sovereign Lord, the maker of heaven and earth? Was this how He chose to spend his time, the manner in which He wished to display authority? It all seemed too cruel and whimsical. The simple declarations by Christian friends that it was somehow "meant for good and God's glory" seemed trite. It let God off the hook too easily for such a gross violation of my desire and right to a normal, unperturbed life. Exactly who did God think He was that I should be given no say in the matters of my life?
Superficially, Calvinism excuses God to do as He pleases at the expense of our liberty and convenience. I fear a loss of control, but not because I challenge God's right to sovereignty. No, I challenge His right to Goodness. And that is why I am so easily content to be a Christian when all is well: because God's definitions of Goodness happen, at the time, to coincide with my own conceptions of it. I make no complaint of sovereignty when blessings and abundance flow my way. But when God's will comes into conflict with my own, my apparent indignation is more easily expressed in terms of God's right to act rather than His right to being Right.
So we throw Calvinism under the bus. I did, for a while. I thought I was refusing to believe that God was sovereign, but what I really refused to believe was that God was good. But over the course of a year, I slowly came to realize that, if God wasn't good, nothing was. I gave in more easily to my baser instincts. I saw my selfishness, wounded pride, and cynicism well up in my heart like bile, poisoning my sentiments and sensibilities with bitterness and a deep dissatisfaction. I found that it wasn't God who had taken control away from me; rather, I never really had control over myself to begin with. Denying God's control over this world didn't bring people back from the dead and it didn't stop the world from being a crappy place. All it did was take away any true or deeper meaning to the madness and pathology that I continued to observe around and within.
It began to dawn on me that I could not have it both ways. I could not take good without evil, God's companionship without his authority. The universe simply wasn't made to be that way. So I gave in.
Did things get better? Nah. But I could dare to believe that God was Good. In the end, Calvinism is really about hope: the belief that God knows what he's doing. It means that even evil itself is subject to his authority, that our groanings are the language of our yearnings for a place beyond, that such things are but shadows of a brighter land in which the object of our hope and affection, the author and perfector of our faith, waits with absolute certainty and power.
Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised— who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, "For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered."
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. - Romans 8 | | |
| I grew up with a mother who never took a gift... just half of an exchange. I remember watching, with horrified amusement, a lady try to give my mom a bag of mangoes. My mom chased her down and literally threw the bag into the open window of the car as it drove away. My dad is sometimes guilty of the same thing, fighting for the dinner check and the honor to be "gracious".
But is it really grace? Is the "politeness" of Chinese culture truly a reflection of divinity?
My high school years were dreadfully awkward. I rarely hung out with friends outside of school or church related activities which made college a bewildering world that clashed strongly with my sheltered and under-socialized life. I had a 9PM curfew most of my freshman year and spent weekends at home. I learned from friends that the spoon served with your spaghetti isn't for the sauce but is meant to hold the pasta in place as you wind it up with the fork. I learned that people from Malaysia don't eat bugs and swing from tree to tree. And I learned that I was terribly insecure. I bent over backwards to make people happy, taking extreme precautions to avoid offending others. I gave people gifts to show that I liked them, cleaned up messes that weren't mine, was overly-polite, and tried to overwhelm friends with signs of affection.
Then people started to treat me the same way. They started to give me stuff. I mean, they took me out to dinner and baked me cookies. They visited me when I was lonely and frustrated. They did kind things for me and other things to show me love. So I refused it all. I insisted on paying for dinner. I wouldn't take the cookies. I tried to compensate for their kindness with more kindness of my own. And I couldn't figure out why they seemed hurt or offended as a consequence. I couldn't figure out what was going on and why everything seemed so wrong, even though I was doing the "right" thing.
This was the time I began to understand grace.
I had grown up with the faulty impression that the correct way to honor a gift was through the exchange of one with equal or greater value. I thought that love was a two-way street, where affection grew out of mutual reciprocations over time. But what I learned is that this concept is a subtle but insidious expression of pride. It is oriented around the self. It makes an estimate of self-worth, matches that to the value of the gift, and then attempts to reconcile the difference with an equivalent exchange.
Love and grace are entirely different. Love is really the alignment of two one-way streets where people are compelled towards each other by an unknowable and unmitigable force. It doesn't earn its meaning by the value of what is sacrificed but by the satisfaction, happiness, and pleasure of its object. It gives gifts purely as an expression of selflessness with no anticipation of reciprocation and no calculations of social obligations. It gives simply to honor and pleasure the recipient.
And the reason I had such difficulty accepting this was because I didn't believe that I was worth it. I had deep issues of shame and self-doubt. I had this internal mismatch between the value I saw in myself and what others wanted to give me. I believed that I had to earn the affection and respect of others, that unless I had a right to what they offered, I had no right to receive anything from them. I couldn't come to terms with the attention and affection set before me that I craved but felt undeserving of.
But that is exactly what grace is: a cascade of undeserved blessing. I readily accepted the doctrine of sin and justice in my life. Growing up in a shame-based culture, it was easy for me to accept the teaching that I was less than worthless, that I was a vile sort of thing in the eyes of a holy God. But it made it nearly impossible to believe that the same God loved me with a furious and jealous and overwhelming desire to see me... happy. Satisfied. Pleased. Content. Brimming with joy.
What happened to me was very similar to what happened to Don Miller, as described in one of my favorite books, Blue Like Jazz:
"Things got worse with the girl. We would spend hours on the phone working through the math of our relationship, but nothing added up, which I received as only a sign of my incompetence, and this made me more sad than before.
Then she did it; she decided we didn't need to be in touch anymore. She broke it off. She sent me a letter saying that I didn't love myself and could not receive love from her. There was nothing she could do about it, and it was killing her. I wandered around the house for an hour just looking at the blank walls, making coffee or cleaning the bathroom, not sure when my body was going to explode in sobs and tears. I was scrubbing the toilet when the voices began. I'd listened to them so often before, but on this day they were shouting. They were telling me that I was as disgusting as the urine on the wall around the toilet.
And then the sentiment occurred. I am certain it was the voice of God because it was accompanied by such a strong epiphany like a movement in a symphony or something. The sentiment was simple: Love your neighbor as yourself.
And I thought about that for a second and wondered why God would put that phrase so strongly in my mind. I thought about our neighbor Mark, who is tall and skinny and gay, and I wondered whether God was telling me I was gay, which was odd because I had never felt gay, but then it hit me that God was not telling me I was gay. He was saying I would never talk to my neighbor the way I talked to myself, and that somehow I had come to believe it was wrong to kick other people around but it was okay to do it to myself. It was as if God had put me in a plane and flown me over myself so I could see how I was connected, all the neighborhoods that were falling apart because I would not let myself receive love from myself, from others, or from God. And I wouldn't receive love because it felt so wrong. It didn't feel humble, and I knew I was supposed to be humble. But that was all crap, and it didn't make any sense. If it is wrong for me to receive love, then it is also wrong for me to give it because by giving it I am causing somebody else to receive it, which I had pre-supposed was the wrong thing to do. So I stopped. And I mean that. I stopped hating myself. It no longer felt right."
So things changed. I started accepting things from other people. In fact, it became an unspoken but beautiful habit to do that sort of stuff all the time: a whimsical treat to a meal here or there, a small gift or present for no particular reason at all. It became a true exchange of gifts and not merely a tabulation of collective debts. Instead of arguing and bickering over my self-worth, I actually thanked people and let myself be happy... because I knew that that's what they wanted all along.
I mean, that's all I want for you.
So when I offer to pay for your dinner or give you a bag of mangoes, I'm not trying to repay you for some debt I owe. I'm not asking for some future favor in kind. I just want you to enjoy the moment. I want to share with you an inkling of how much God loves you and longs to lavish you with mercy and blessing. Forgive me if I'm still awkward at doing it, if the timing seems weird and I send all the wrong messages and stutter and look embarrassed and try to make excuses for it. I'm a little rusty these days and am still as under-socialized as ever. So help me out. Take it. Enjoy it. Release the temptation to feel guilty, just this once, and simply let yourself be saturated with grace.
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