My daughter drew this a while ago, but it’s by far my favorite drawing. I like that she depicts herself as flying. Really captures her personality. Peyton told me the girl standing on the ground is mommy, and that she’s wearing purple because that’s mommy’s favorite color.
Every morning when I see this picture on the fridge as I leave for work, it reminds me to try to look for beauty in everything. I hope she & Brandon never lose that sense of wonder; I hope it only deepens in me.
It felt like absolutely nothing could drag me down. I was with my friend Kaley* driving around a bustling New York City on a cool, summer evening. Just a couple weeks prior I had received my bachelor’s degree, and I was still riding high on the euphoria graduation leaves in its wake. With seminary still months away, I knew the intervening summer would be filled with long naps, road trips through breathtaking landscapes, and late evenings of carefree conversations over drinks and pizza. While coasting along one of the avenues and with Erasure playing in the background, I felt a lightness that comes with knowing that I could toss all my cares to the wind. In fact, as I rolled down the window to take in the nostalgic smell of the city, I knew I actually didn’t have a care in the world. The world is my oyster, I thought. And I’m going to use this summer to crack it wide open. The worst case of senioritis can’t hold a candle to this.
That’s me in the middle.
Besides almost dying from cholera when I was one and getting my hand crushed by a large, steel door when I was three, the rest of my early childhood in Korea was mostly a time of innocence and fun. I do have that one memory where my mom is pumping breast milk for my sister into what seemed to me at the time a large basin, but I’m still not really sure what to make of that image, whether it traumatized me or simply surprised me. But other than that, it’s hard to recall anything remotely negative. All I see is a skinny, Korean boy playing in the stream trying to catch frogs and tadpoles; hiking and exploring the hillsides and woods (we visited the shigol [countryside] often); waiting around the corner, listening for the man with the pull cart to ring his bell so that I could buy and devour a newspaper cone full of bundaegi (roasted silk worm pupae), which, at the time, was by far the most delicious thing on the planet (today, I can’t go near the stuff); feeding cute, fluffy, yellow chicks with rice grains; throwing a hammer at my 
grandfather’s head; and running away from my three uncles after pouring a bucketful of soapy water into the well, our main source of drinking water (they had to empty the entire well and wait for the next rain to replenish the supply). Of course, I only remember bits and pieces, but from those fragments and the stories my folks share with me, it seems that I really was a rambunctious, happy, little kid who, unlike the current me, actually loved to dance. Continue reading
Posted in Family, Life, Psychology, Racism
Tagged childhood, counseling, psychology, racism, teachers, trauma
Over the summer in 2003, I served as one of the chaplains at Overlook Medical Center in Summit, NJ. I actually didn’t choose to do this voluntarily—one unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) is required for pastoral candidates to get ordained in my denomination. But despite it being forced upon me, I was looking forward to it. Among my friends, every pastor who completed the CPE requirement told me it would be life-changing. And, indeed, it was. Continue reading
It happened sometime during my years in junior high. I still remember it being a dark and dreary day. (Talk about a hackneyed beginning. Please forgive. ;p) I forgot why our family was on the road, but I remember thinking that I didn’t want to be in the car anymore. What made things worse was that our family was hungry. Not hungry in the sense that we were starving as a family, but hungry because it was time for dinner. But even this type of hunger makes things unbearable for me and those within my “killzone”. (My wife learned this lesson early on, the hard way.)
Anyway, I remember finally stopping somewhere to eat dinner. My dad parked the car, and the rest of us quickly followed him into the restaurant shielding ourselves from the drizzle.
I’m not sure which restaurant it was, but I can still see vividly the entire encounter unfold before my mind’s eye. My dad is walking up to the long, well-lit counter, he places an order, and then pulls out his wallet to pay for the meal. Continue reading
[As I do the Racism series, I will occasionally include off-topic posts as little breathers.]
Sometime during my years in elementary school, my dad was estranged from us. There was some issue with the status of his immigration visa, and it took over a year to resolve. For some, this might sound routine; however, for us, it was a very stressful and painful experience. Not only were we unsure if he would ever be able to come back to the States, but we were also not very well-off.
My mom suffered tremendously that year trying to put food on the table. Since the separation was unexpected, she had to scramble to find a job in a country where she could barely speak the language. Thankfully, a church friend offered my mom a wage for sewing little clothing pieces like socks and cuffs. But to make even a little money, she had to sew thousands of these things. My mom shares with me that she spent many sleepless nights sewing sock after sock; oftentimes, she fell asleep at the sewing machine exhausted. I still have many memories of my Continue reading
Posted in Family, Life, Theology
Tagged cessationism, continuationism, God's voice, john piper, miracles, prayer, theology
