Rant of the Exiles

A friend at church and I were talking about dating. She met her current boyfriend on the dating app Coffee Meets Bagel. She observed there were a significant number of church members who had met each other on the app but had not previously met or gotten know one another through our church. She said: Men don’t initiate. Men are stupid.  I don’t think men are stupid. I don’t think people are stupid. I think people, for the most part, behave rationally. Let’s take a food analogy. Before processed food, people had to spend time making and preparing a roast beef sandwich for lunch. They needed fresh meat, bread, and condiments. And then they had to assemble and eat it the same day. Today, people eat a tremendous amount of processed food. For example, Lunchables are easy, convenient, and last forever. You don’t have to make them, you don’t have to package them, and they taste good. By many metrics, Lunchables are nutritious. However, it’s becoming increasingly apparent tha...

This post is different from what I usually blog about as I have many friends with loved ones who are experiencing serious medical issues. In these situations, besides being present, it’s hard to know how to be helpful, especially when sitting in on conversations with doctors. My brother , who has been a practicing physician for twelve years, recommended a book that I found incredibly useful for facilitating conversations between doctors and patients. So whether you’re a patient or the loved one of a patient, here are my takeaways on how to communicate with your doctor from Jerome Groopman’s How Doctors Think :  1) The doctor wants to help: People tend to have a polarized view of doctors. On one hand, I’ve noticed people who have a deep mistrust of health care providers. They’ve had a past negative experience that casts a long shadow. They believe doctors are lazy, dismissive, condescending, and withhold crucial information. However, one study suggests up to 83% of diagnoses...

Pastor, how do you handle the emotional weight of carrying people’s burdens? Stories are bullets Tearing through flesh, rending bone It’s my job to catch them And when hit, the kevlar takes the brunt Yet when people shoot stories And I emerge unscathed The gap between us remains A chasm of comfort divides I take off the vest, I put it down Bullets strike Loneliness, anxiety, and depression Stories of pain enter and stop I carry the weight of the sadness The slugs slacken my steps Exhaustion overwhelms I cannot contain this leaden load LORD, let the stories pass through me Let them penetrate my walls Let my borders be porous Let the stories enter and come out Let me be wounded twice  Hurt when I catch the story Hurt when I let it go Let m e feel the exit wound Stories begin with you Stories end with you In the middle, they may go through me But you hold and tell them all For you catch all the bullets...

I totally judge people. I’ve tried really hard most of my life not to judge people. I mean, Jesus said not to do it.  I've also seen so much unintentionally damaging effects of criticism and negative judgment. I’ve done it often myself. I know when I offer feedback I'm not setting out to condemn but that’s exactly how it’s experienced by the recipient.  Therefore, I want to share five steps I’ve learned to steer my observations and interpretations away from condemnation and criticism and towards encouragement and support. 1) Acknowledge your judgmental attitude and thoughts: After all these years of trying to suppress my feelings of judgment and condemnation, I now recognize it doesn’t work. Simply repeating “Stop judging” to myself doesn’t help. My judgmental thoughts don’t go away simply because I want them to. So I have learned to own them, acknowledge them, and confess them before God and it helps move beyond just hearing and being paralyzed by these negative and...

I hate silence Silence I hate it It is deafening To confront Selves  normally hidden Now disclosed by the Absence of noise Ego dreams haunt my waking Don’t leave me with me I would rather have sounds Of someone else  I drown in them The rising tide creeps upward Clinging to my throat And I can’t breathe Carnal ruminations  Hide deeper longing And this salacious hunger Swallows my imagination When outside volume turns down The inside volume blasts Thwarted by thoughts Murdered by musings Rage fantasies hem me in Circling like soldiers Prison guards approach Incarceration's thunder booms Silence I hate it It is deafening

God is big. However, in line with his gracious nature, he doesn’t always speak loudly, and hearing his voice can be difficult when I’m in the midst of fighting with myself. I have many voices going on in my head: the snarky contrarian, the positive Christian idealist, the relentless egomaniac, the compassionate shepherd, the curious adventurer, and more. But often the loudest voice is the inner moral critic. He’s a yeller. When I start to listen to some unhealthy streams - say the egomaniac's pining for public affirmation or the curious adventurer’s lust for exploration - and lose focus from whatever I was supposed to be doing, I stop myself, become aware of my wayward thoughts, and the shouts of the inner moral critic begin to escalate. The argument goes something like this: Curious Adventurer [watching Youtube cat fail videos]: Oh my gosh. Either these cats are really dumb or they’re totally being set up by their owners. I need to research this more. Positive ...

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life . . . Therefore do not be anxious . . .Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself - Jesus (Matthew 6:25, 31, 34) No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. - Eleanor Roosevelt Tommy Jarrett, big rig driver, began his bid for the victimhood Olympics on June 8th, 2004. During a vicious morning downpour outside Columbia, Missouri, his truck hit Michael and Amanda Jones’ car and their 3-year old daughter Mikayla was killed. The Jones’ car had lost control in the rain and slid into the opposing lane of Tommy’s truck.  These lines from Invisibilia Season Two Episode One sum it up well:  ROSIN: Their daughter Makayla had died. And yet, they were the ones who got sued. A year after the accident, Tommy Jarrett sued the Joneses for emotional distress. I'm going to repeat that. Tommy Jarrett, the truck driver who walked away from the accident wit...

*Spoiler alert” This review is full of spoilers. Watch the movie first. Sometimes you watch a movie and it feels like coming home. No, not coming home to the palatial mansion Nick Young spent his childhood in but the familiar refuge of people who get you - who understand and accept your idiosyncrasies and love you regardless.  What makes Jon M. Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians movie so enjoyable is the subtle and over-the-top ways it captures the diversity and nuance of Chinese culture. Nothing speaks home more than food and music. Cuisine plays a pivotal role in the film, and though most of the characters are absurdly affluent, the night market food scene and dumpling-making scene resonated strongly with me. Those moments were relatable on many levels. Asians of all socioeconomic classes are familiar with night markets and sitting around a table making dumplings. Food is comfort and the ultimate nostalgia. I’m reminded of Pixar’s Ratatouille, when callous food critic Anton Ego ...

I disagreed with my previous post even as I was writing it. It was something of a thought experiment. I was reading Weike Wang’s short story and thinking “Wow, her writing is amazing and she’s Chinese American. How come most Chinese American guys I know don’t communicate like this? Oh and it’s about dating a white guy and it’s about power dynamics. And oh, she’s married to a white guy in real life. Let’s write a provocative post about the intersection of all these ideas”. Oops.  I’m now aware of the numerous problems with my opinion piece starting with the misleading, clickbait title. I don’t actually think Asian American (AA) women have more “courage”, nor is the post really about courage. I couldn’t come up with a word that captures the specific aspect of EQ that involves verbal emotional expression, but Brene Brown’s concept of vulnerability came to mind and that’s how courage came about. I made unsubstantiated negative generalizations about AA women, AA men, and whi...

Update: What I learned after writing this.  What does the outsized willingness of Asian American women to date interracially reveal about courage vis-a-vis their male counterparts? It’s well-documented that Asian American women date and marry outside their race far more often than their male counterparts. Most estimate around a 2:1 ratio but I’ve read up to 4:1.   Weike Wang’s New Yorker short story perfectly captures the power asymmetry in Asian female-white male dating relationships with this memorable line: "So it was settled. The big question of why he was dating her was out of the way. Her Chineseness was not a factor. They were merely one out of a billion or so Asian girl–white guy couples walking around on this earth.” ONE BILLION Asian girl - white guy couples. That’s certainly what it feels like in the San Francisco bay area and other urban centers like New York City, where her story is set. It’s a trend I observed in my high school over two de...

[Spoiler alert - no major plot twists revealed but I quote from the book. I haven’t seen the show] My wife cautioned me when I picked it up. “It’s really feminist.” She told me a couple times. I hadn’t read a Margaret Atwood book yet but heard she was an amazing writer and the TV show was getting press.  The Handmaid’s Tale is a great novel. It accomplishes exactly what dystopian fiction is meant to do - to imagine contemporary culture, twisted in one particular way so that its corresponding ripple effect reverberates throughout every aspect of society. The prose is brilliant, the images evocative, but most of all, it’s haunting. There’s a sense of dread that accompanies the main character, Offred, throughout the story. The narrative is told solely from Offred’s perspective, as if you’re reading her diary. There are moments when the storm clouds of dread momentarily clear and rays of light peek through. The tension keeps ratcheting up, with brief episodes of dissipation. Al...

Sometimes ideas linger in the back of one’s mind like dirt at the bottom of a swimming pool - dormant, unnoticed yet hiding in plain sight. They are left lying at the edge of one’s consciousness for years because they’re too unsettling and difficult to articulate. Only when a cleaning implement rustles them that one becomes aware of how filthy the environment really is.  For decades, I had suspected an affair might exist but the fact of it eluded me until a recent disruption. The problem with this tryst  is that it ’ s hidden from one of the partners. The relationship functions at the subconscious level. The rustling started with conversations some friends and I had about race, ethnicity, and culture. This dialogue birthed a desire to read a book or study a curriculum together on the topic. One friend recommended Daniel Hill’s White Awake , a book about diagnosing the hidden cancer of white supremacy in American evangelicalism. Earlier this week some members o...