Tough times

This past month's hiatus was intentional. We have been navigating a painful family crisis, and internet space wasn't where I planned to process anything. We're out of the acute, immediate, fighting for each day phase, but unwinding all this will take a while.

So here are some general reflections on the past month:

1. Choosing to not hide allowed us to experience a lot of love and grace from many directions.
2. I did not always know what I needed, but I was needy.
3. The crisis was big enough to be clearly not fixable, and this was freeing.
4. When the abiding presence of a loving God was all I could hold on to, it was enough.

Getting to know Grace

Grace and Mom, 1994

In my earliest memories, I lived in a small bubble of Chinese families in a Southern town. But when I was eight, my parents went off the reservation, and we started attending a large, mostly white church. One lady that befriended us all in that lonely transition was Grace Mutzabaugh. As a child, I thought she was old as dirt with her deep criss-cross of wrinkles, but she would have been 60ish when we met. She loved games and at a time when I threw temper tantrums if I thought I were losing, she helped me stay the course through rounds of Parcheesi.

I remember in middle school, she returned from a trip to South America with a gift for me, a bird made out of animal horn. I remember liking the bird, but really marveling that she had thought of me while traveling.

When I was in high school, she tutored my mom in English. I don't remember anyone else spending time with my mom like that. They were dear friends, taking walks and praying together for many years.

Miss Mutzabaugh was the never-married founder of the National Institute of Learning Disabilities which worked closely with the church and Christian school I attended. She traveled to other countries to help missionary parents with learning disabled children have the skills to help their child and stay on the field. She was my example of a woman doing big things outside of home life. But more importantly, she embodied the Jesus-life and showed me what it was like to see people and not projects, to see people and not see labels and expectations.

But I was thick and even though I grew up in a Christian home, in a church, with Grace in my life, it wasn't until I got to college that I understood God's grace. Somewhere between the lovely community of believers I met and the books I read, it finally sank in that there was nothing I could do to make God love me more (and nothing I could do to make God love me less).

As a black-and-white perfectionist, this was revolutionary and deflating. I could not try harder, collect more achievements, do anything to increase the love of God for me. But the primary orientation of my life up to then had been precisely doing more, doing better. So once you can't do anything to earn God's love, what do you do? The doing is what is called discipleship, it's training to “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (II Peter 3:18).

Some time after I left home, Grace developed Alzheimer's and had to be moved out of her house. Many of her books came to our house, and maybe a dozen or so are with me now. Looking over those titles, I got a glimpse of how this friend chose to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in a lifeling process of letting God be Lord over all that she was, heart, soul, mind, and strength.

What Grace chose to read, how far she chose to travel, or how she chose to love my family did not earn her a place a heaven. But these were part of an ongoing habit in her life to entrust herself to God. This is discipleship; this is what we do in grace; this is what it means to say yes to Jesus. We apply the strength we have to move in the direction of the will of God and trust in the power of the Holy Spirit for the rest.

Suffering: Taking up our cross

And [Jesus] said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. ~Luke 9:23

We're wrapping up Good Friday when we remember Jesus carrying his cross to Calvary where he was nailed to it and upon which he died though he was innocent in every way. So it is fitting that we consider the sufferings that come from taking up our own cross as we obey and imitate Christ.

For the past several posts, I have not addressed the sufferings that come from our choices. Sometimes, as mentioned here talking about the roots of suffering, we make sinful choices which have consequences. But sometimes we make the right choice, and there's pain. We choose Jesus over our own way and instead of glory there is suffering. That's a really bitter pill to swallow.

I remember at one point in my singleness being super mad at God. "I'm doing my best to live in a way that pleases you, God, and I'm out of my mind lonely." Others in following Jesus suffer small indignities and large. Some are looked down on, seen as foolish, aren't hired, aren't promoted, get reassigned. Others lose friends, lose livelihoods, lose their freedom, lose their life. And it's not fair, and it's no surprise. Such is what we are promised as followers. Love cost Christ his life. We are called to love, and it will require no less of us. And that's frankly scary.

Reynoso ("Formed through suffering" in The Kingdom Life) has this encouragement:

Because we know that obeying God and living by kingdom values will cause us to pay a price, sometimes we choose to avoid suffering and settle for less than God has intended for us. In doing so, we miss out on experiencing the powerful reality of Paul's words, "that I may know Him...and the fellowship of His sufferings" (Philippians 3:10, NASB).

In the garden of Eden, we see a perfect relationship between God and Adam and Eve. One of the main threads of the whole Bible is God's work through history to bring reconciliation between himself and his people, to make the relationship whole. On this side of heaven, while we still live in the fallout of sin, everything that brings us nearer to God has a sweetness to it. So sharing in the suffering of Christ has a promised sweetness in the midst of the pain.

Where is God in suffering?

We envision God as the source of life, light, and goodness as is claimed in the Bible, and when we encounter death, darkness, and despair, our logical conclusion is that God has turned his back on us. This only adds to our misery.

Yet when we go back to scripture, we see time after time God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit moved and bowed in the face of suffering. I do not understand how this works, but this is a pattern in scripture.

God the Father
Nobody reads Ezekiel; it's a weird book tucked in an obscure part of the Old Testament, but it gives the most amazing description of the heart of God.

In chapter 16, God explains his relationship to his special people, the Israelites, with a story about an abandoned newborn he found in a field and saves. She grows up but is still fragile and in need of care and he cleans her, marries her, takes care of her, lavishing her with jewelry, clothes, and fine dining. She becomes famous across the world for her beauty.

But she begins to trust in this beauty, and the love story begins to unravel. She starts sleeping around eventually not taking money for it, but giving money for it. She takes the riches she had been given and uses them to make idols. Then, she sacrifices her children to them. What wickedness, ugliness, and profanity!

Far from abandoning her in her sin, God takes it in the chin like a rejected father and cuckold husband. Then he allows her to reap what she has sown. And there is verse after verse of his howling pain and anger, descriptions of the results of sin. Israel suffers the consequences of her betrayal, and God the Father suffers right there with her.

God the Son
In Jesus, the infinite God squeezed himself into human flesh and lived among us. That's what we celebrate at Christmas.

God physically enters our world and experiences it from first to last breath--experiences sunburns and mosquito bites, making new friends, losing old friends, family members dying, new births, weddings, physical exhaustion, hunger, and longing. Jesus lived in a minority group in a mighty empire, was born as a refugee on the run from a tyrant, was a brilliant adolescent apprenticed to become a blue collar carpenter. But more remarkably, this Friday we remember his ultimate suffering on the cross, a cruel, publically humiliating way to die slowly.

In the life of Jesus, we can be sure that not only does the great God the Father feel the fallout of sin in mysterious, supernatural ways, but God the Son fully understands our human sufferings.

Isaiah prophesied this about Jesus' sufferings (chapter 53):
...He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
    nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
    a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
    he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
Surely he took up our pain
    and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
    stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
    he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
    and by his wounds we are healed.

In life, Jesus experienced what we humans experience. In death, out of love, he took on the compounded, sin-upon-sin of all people and it "pierced" him, it "crushed" him. Far from abandoning us to the suffering caused by sin, Jesus in his crucifixion faced the ultimate suffering, the collective wages of sin.

God the Holy Spirit
The Holy Spirit, promised to us our comforter and guide also knows pain and grief.

In this next passage, we see the love of Jesus in action, our sin, and a grieved Holy Spirit:

...In all their troubles,
    he was troubled, too.
He didn’t send someone else to help them.
    He did it himself, in person.
Out of his own love and pity
    he redeemed them.
He rescued them and carried them along
    for a long, long time.
But they turned on him;
    they grieved his Holy Spirit.
Isaiah 63 (The Message)

While the Holy Spirit may be generally grieved by sin, we are told he is personally grieved as he accompanies us in our suffering:
In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.
Romans 8:26

This interceding is a emotional pleading that the Spirit does with us as we pray in our weakness, in our need, in our desperation.

So what?
We expect God to be far from suffering in general, from our suffering in particular. But scripture does not read that way. Instead, we have a God intimately acquainted with suffering in all ways. Whatever we may feel in our pain, God is not indifferent to our suffering, and we are not alone. His back is not turned, his face is upon us and he weeps with us.

Treasure!

Something I've documented here is that my transition to mom-life has been rocky. But in a recent conversation with a new mom, I realized how far along I've come. I see my children as treasure, not stumbled-acrossed treasure, but hunted treasure.

The kids are now 4 and 2 and I'd say it took three years to come to this. I think a lot of it was sleep deprivation. We spent most of those first three years crazy tired. Another part of it was the radical shift for me from academic life to home life. And another piece was the developmental stage my kids were at.

At their current age, my kids are able to express themselves; their wants, needs, their highs and their lows. With practice, I'm better at listening, but they have also grown into better communicating. They are becoming their own persons with their own personalities which are distinct and different.

They are so much more independent. I have to make excuses to pick them up because their fine on their own two feet. Fine and FAST. They can and do find things to amuse themselves and for extended periods of time. And they can be more or less trusted not to kill themselves. They have the sensibility that outlets are not for play, that little pieces shouldn't go in the mouth, running in the street is a bad idea -- what a relief.

The bickering they get into drives me around the bend, but I can empathize. I sure did a lot of fighting with my own siblings in my day.

Both of them also had minor but significant health scares in their first couple years. Significant in that these issues had to be attended to. Minor in that we weren't dealing with cancer or something more nebulous requiring loads of doctor and therapist visits. So on this side of things where we have their health sorted out and are adjusted to their various food restrictions, wow are they precious to us. Wow are we grateful for good health.

We have two healthy children who run around and do kid things, who marvel at the world, play with passion, cry with greater passion, who fight and hug and kiss and make up, who jump up and down in excitement about anticipated wonders like grandma and grandpa visiting and waffles and going to the park.

People talk about loving their spouse more after many years together, but somehow mothers are supposed to fall in love with their child the first moment the lay eyes on them. I'm sure it happens for some, but for me, I am much more able to cherish my kids today than when I got them. They are treasure to us.

Unfailing

I came across this saying in Proverbs as if for the first time:

What a person desires is unfailing love (Proverbs, chpt 19)

As our neighborhood shepherds one of our own through spousal abandonment, this notion of unfailing love has clanged around in my heart and head for the past several weeks.

I think about the life-shattering pain of having a friend and partner of 25+ years walk out, and I think about the contrast with unfailing love. I think about my relationship with my parents and my kids. While my parents have loved me well, I'm coming to terms with the fact that they are in the last leg of their race, nearing their finish line. Death with bring their love to an end (in many ways, but not all perhaps.) When I look at my kids, I wonder if they know that I want to love them despite what they do because Jesus loves me despite what I do? I'm not very good at it, mine is a very much failing love.

Upon reflection, so many things in life remind me of this thirst for unfailing love, an insatiable thirst. Except in Jesus. Now that I've been meditating on unfailing love, I'm finding that the Bible refers to the unfailing love of God all the time. The Jesus Storybook Bible calls it something like God's "never failing, never giving up, always and forever love".

Anyways, I'll keep writing on this periodically, I think. It's been a very fruitful couple weeks thinking about this.

Snapshot

One of those wish-I-had-a-camera moments:

My sweet daughter stretched out like banana across the recliner eschewing breakfast to read a book.

There are many things I don't "get" about her, but I get this and I love it for her.

Jesus for stupid people

Some times life is life, stress is stress and pain is pain.

There's always been a part of me that wants to logic things out, to know causes and their effects, to solve problems, to understand. Over the years and just right now, I'm learning that sometimes what people most need is a hug.

Jesus is for stupid people, for that woman at the well who had 5 husbands, for Thomas who wouldn't believe until he poked his fingers in Jesus' scars, for Peter who denied being Jesus' friend when the going got tough.

My daughter is in a difficult three-year-old phase where she says no to stuff that she likes and is good for her. And by saying no, I mean turns into a screaming banshee curled up on the floor. Where I want to run away and wait for it to blow over, I'm learning to stick by her until she's in a better place.

Sometimes people make financial or relationship decisions that I think are dumb, dumb, dumb. But who cares? I'm learning who cares that it's their own fault they are stressed and crying their guts out? Jesus is for stupid people. He's been for me when I've been tres stupido and I can be for these friends too.

Thank God Jesus is for stupid people. If Jesus only hung out with people who always had it together and always made the right decision, and never made the dumb choice, he'd be kickin' it out in space with the Father and Holy Ghost.

Here in the US, it's another election season and I think this is applicable. Hey, y'all, Jesus is for stupid people. You know, the folk on the other side, the folk who have earned your scorn. I don't know that this would change a vote, but this should change our hearts. We are one of the stupid, loved by God and thus compelled to love our stupid neighbors, the ones with that bumper sticker.

Jesus for 'special' people

My husband and I met at University Presbyterian Church just off the UCLA campus. It was a really different church from the ones I had grown up in. Being oriented to the college campus, most congregants were undergraduate or graduate students with a few people who stuck around after graduation and even fewer who had no affiliation with the university.  Having a Korean pastor, most of the congregation was also Asian; fresh-off-the-boat international students and US-born Asian-Americans. So picture a congregation between 18-35 years old, mostly Asian, with elite university-educated minds.

Nevertheless, what strikes me about my time there is what a motley crew of 'special' people we were. When I say 'special' I think I actually mean odd & needy. I arrived at the church in culture shock after having spent a year overseas; I had very little financial means; I was skeptical of the value of the formal church setting; and I'd had a really bad roommate experience while overseas. I was a mess. And as I think of all the friends at that church, I think about what a mess they were too. Individual, messy stories.

Our leaving LA coincided with our feeling that it was time to move on from that  church. So I'm not saying it was a perfect church. But a distinguishing feature of that community is loving messy people and loving messy people who are supposed to be ok. University elites are supposed to ok, to have succeeded in the past and to succeed on into the future. What I got to participate in for myself and with others was Jesus loving the little child in each of us; the child that we'd hidden away but was scared nonetheless, was hurt and confused.

Now that I've had some time away, I think how small my dissatisfactions were compared to the privilege of being with a pastor and church committed to loving 'special' people.

Weakness as gift

My mom is visiting her mom after having spent 5 weeks with us as we welcomed baby DW into our lives. So this week is the first time we've been left truly alone with our kiddos. One thing I've enjoyed is all the cuddle time with both my children. L, who has always been very independent, has wanted and enjoyed hugs and kisses more in this time of transition. And DW just patently prefers being held to pretty much anything else at this point. And I'm happy to accommodate.

But I was thinking back to my early 20s when I did a fair amount of living overseas for months at a time. This was pre-skype, pre-convenient email. And I suffered from intense bouts of loneliness. It did not help that I traveled to countries with little sunlight and lots of foul weather. During one of those trips, I read the book Five Love Languages. This book proposes that different people have different love languages and if you try to "speak" a language that another doesn't understand, they won't see your actions as love. The "languages" were quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service, physical touch and receiving gifts. Quality time and physical touch resonated with me as languages I understood.

But there I was, on some distant continent, far from people I cared about and I wanted to throw a bat through a window. It seemed extremely unfair to have physical touch be a love language when I was extremely single. At the time, I had never dated anyone and would not have known how even if the opportunity presented itself to me. And then there was the whole deal about how God designed sex for marriage and man, if dating felt far off for me, marriage really felt far off. Basically, I felt cursed to have an empty love tank. Ultimately, living a healthy life in my body would be a struggle the rest of my singleness. It was something I managed by God's grace--I took up more athletic endeavors in my mid-20s--with alternating bouts of peace and torment.

Now, I'm writing this as my newborn sleeps in my lap. Those days seem very far off. As the mother of young ones, I'm constantly touching and being touched. Books sometimes warn parents that moms can be worn out from constant touching and want alone time away from her husband. Maybe it will come to that someday, but that day certainly hasn't come yet for me. I love the sweetness of our current phase. My daughter will sit in my lap and rest her head on me while describing the most mundane realities of life. "Daddy blue eyes,""Baby DW sleeping,""Red bowl,""Blue shirt,""Stacky blocks all-fall-down." My son loves being held and petted. I could do without the wailing parts, but really the rest is great.

What once seemed like a curse has now become a gift. I have hugs for my kids all day and when my husband gets home I've got plenty more snuggles left for him too.

Love, Actually

On this Valentine's weekend, I want to discuss why I find myself mostly watching action flicks. Well, first, my husband has a big DVD collection from his single days. Going through our pre-paid entertainment collection means that we watch guy-oriented, action-flicks a fair amount. This was initally annoying. However, the more I'm married the more I find that watching the alternative and what I used to watch, chick-flicks, doesn't do anything for me. Now that I'm in a real live, flesh-and-blood relationship, I can hardly stand to watch what passes for one on screen. At its best, an on-screen relationship is like eating cotton candy; a sweet carnival treat that isn't filling. But really, most of the time, I think to myself, "But you guys actually suck as people and have no idea how to survive as a couple long term."

I've been thinking about love lately because I am recognizing how UNloving part of me is. That's the part that feels, "I want what I want and that's what I should get." But I'm also observing that I'm getting Holy Spirit nudges, more like sharp elbows, to consider, "What is best for him/her?" And as I work out what is best for another person and move in that direction, I find that it comes at a cost to me. But I'm paying that cost and I can pay that cost because Jesus paid the ultimate price for me.

My objection to fantasy, Hollywood relationships is that it sells love as a feeling. So I feel cheated when love has me awake early taking care of my child while my husband sleeps in. But when I look to Jesus, what I see is someone who claimed to love people and demonstrated it by dying in their place so they could be rescued from eternal death. When I look away from Hollywood toward Jesus, love is hardly a feeling. It is sacrificial action for the good of another. In that context, it becomes important to me that my husband gets the sleep he needs and I can gladly (most of the time) take kid duty.

I have seen long-term marriages that seem to thrive while neither party are believers. That's amazing to me and maybe I don't know the ins and outs of those relationships. But in my marriage, my parent-child relationships, my sibling relationships, my friend to friend relationships, the model of Jesus's sacrificial love and the promise that God will help me actually love others--that's what makes love possible in my life. Maybe I'm a particularly crappy person, but being honest here, without that, I'm a pretty selfish person who couldn't give a rip about how anyone else is doing.

Sacrificial action on behalf of another modeled after Jesus's life; that's love, actually.