Does anyone know where I can borrow two Houston Rockets jerseys?  June and I want to, um, make a music video…

The above picture was linked from an article in The Economist, if you can believe that!

The only time I’ve ever lost my keys was once when they were in my jacket pocket.  I was biking home from school in the rain, and I was rushing to get back to change and get my car to pick up a date for a concert.  I got to the front door, realized I didn’t have my keys, and totally panicked.  Fortunately my landlady was home and let me in.  I had spare car keys, so we made it to the concert.  But the next day (still raining), I walked the whole route, looking for my keys, and putting up reward signs.  Nada.

A few years before that, I lost my wallet from my jacket pocket.  I was also biking this time — so maybe the combination of biking and jacket pockets is a really bad idea.  I was riding back from a deserted pier of some sort, realized I lost my wallet, and headed back.  Some guy had picked it up, identified me from my ID, and gave it back to me, refusing any kind of reward.  What a nice guy!

About a month ago, lcshih lost his wallet walking from his car to his apartment.  He realized it the next day and checked the route unsuccessfully.  But later in the day he found the wallet in his mailbox with all the cash missing.  At least they didn’t take the blank checks…

This past weekend June and I were taking pictures at a dark campsite while sitting around a bonfire.  When we left, June put the camera in her sweater/jacket pocket.  But somehow it fell out at the campground or the retreat center in the dark.  The next day we looked over the center and the campground, and we left a message with the office.  Since then, we sent email to the conference attendees, and also called the office, to no avail.  It’s sad because it was June’s birthday gift only a year ago, and we used it all the time.    I guess I won’t be posting pictures for a while.

All this to say: Be warned!  The only things that belong in your jacket pockets are your hands.

Some thoughts on last weekend:

Fellowship of the Ring

On Saturday night we put our chairs in a BIG circle (70 people?) and
did this exercise.  Different race and gender groups stood up talked
about their issues.  Now this sounds like it could be as dangerous as hosting the next
World Cup in England, right?  Well, the organizers had prepped us ahead
of time by handing out a list of questions and guidelines.  So straight
from the course notes of Conflict Resolution 101, we were all primed to
say “I” statements.  For example:

• Bad: You are a sexist pig!

• Good: I feel invalidated by the derogatory statements which I believe
  originate from your male hegemony paradigm.

The latter is much less offensive, partly because the intended porcine
audience will not understand the big words.

It was neat to hear different people tell about their backgrounds and
experiences.  There were quite a few people who identified with more
than one racial/ethnic group, but unfortunately no transgenders or
hermaphrodites who identified with more than one gender group.  What
about male third-wave feminists?

Taste of Heaven

After the diversity exercise, we drove out to a campsite where mjpark
and his peeps had prepared a sumptuous feast.  There I had the best
Korean BBQ of my entire life.  It joins my list of best foods ever:

Best Fish: Tandoori Sea Bass @ Raj’s, Berkeley (now closed)

Best Lasagne: @ Cite des Sciences et de l’Industrie, Paris

Best Chicken: Roast Chicken @ Hammersleys Bistro, Boston

Best Steak: Delmonico End Cut @ Grill 23, Boston

Best Korean BBQ: Mike Park’s BBQ @ CCFC Retreat 2006, Jeffrey, NH

I would post pictures, but unfortunately June and I lost our digital
camera there.  If anyone picked it up (Canon Elph SD200), please let me
know!

Church Decision

It’s true — June and I have committed to CCFC.  The deciding factors?  Our commitments to people and ministries within Cambridge, which led to a reluctance to get involved with the city of Arlington.  A year ago,
we were
both in the thick of church ministry and hoping the other would come to
our church.  Now after some months of marriage and stepping back
(decompressing), we’re trying to figure out church and community
again. 

I think one problem is that we both carry some “good baggage” as in
close friends and memorable
experiences.  Whenever I leave a community, whether it be a church,
smallgroup, ministry, living situation, or just relationships, I find
it hard to let go of some ties.  So I have friends from all
different eras of my past 10 years in Boston.  And it’s hard to keep up
with everyone while investing in marriage and also making new friends
at a new church.

“I never want to hear this again:”

the phrase “our church is in transition.”  Because I get it by now. 
When the senior pastor leaves, along with key people on the board,
admin board, and worship team, the word “transition” seems kinda weak
sauce.  Some possible alternatives: tsunami, cataclysm, hullabaloo, sea
change.  But June and I are tired of farewells, so in reaction we’re throwing
a “Staying in Boston” party, maybe sometime in late July / early
August.  Now if we can only get the BBQ recipe from Mike…

from thinkgeek.com linked off Penny Arcade.

I have a friend from Ohio.  She’s friendly and talkative and
has all these funny stories about her interactions with guys.  For
example, she once met an IT guy at her office who asked her out to lunch
after meeting her twice.  Now the guy knew that she was married and had
also told her he had a girlfriend for the past 10 years.  He had just
joined the office a few months prior, so maybe he was just looking for
friends at the office?  She agreed, but had second thoughts afterwards,
especially when he said he was sick of cafeteria food and suggested
driving her to lunch at a restaurant about a mile away.  Concerns:

• Maybe he was a criminal, and he would assault and murder her once she
  got in his car?  After all, who knows what kind of criminal background
  checks they do on new employees…

• Should she pack heat (a gun), or a knife or mace in her purse?  She regretted not taking martial arts training.

• Or maybe he was just looking for an affair, or a one-night (one-day?) stand?

What do you think?  By the way, if you want to do any racial profiling,
both of them are American-Born Chinese.  Post your thoughts, and I’ll
add the eventual real outcome of the story.

Last night June and I presented our third Threshold assignment: create
a piece of art (no words) to describe your current relationship with
God.  I drew a man (stick figure) walking out of the mountains into a
valley of fog.  The clouds came from far above the mountains and
descended into the fog.  The man holds an oversized compass, pointing
to true North.

June put together a collage on a backdrop of arctic thaw with mountains
in the distance.  Added on were pictures of community, love, good food,
and walking with a friend through tough times.

Scott and Louise pointed out how similar our pictures were, despite us
having worked on them independently.  I guess we’ve both come down from
mountaintop experiences to meet in the plains.  My mountainous
experiences were shaped at CBCGB and Highrock.  At both churches I
developed a very modernist, causal (not casual), seek-and-find approach
to faith.  Just like climbing a mountain: you take one step at a time,
sometimes up and sometimes down, with an upward trend.  But this past
year or two I’ve been feeling God calling me down into the valley. 
Clearly I was to meet June there, but I don’t know what else.

The plains are a strange and somewhat scary place to me.  I was born
and built to climb, partially from American and Asian American cultural
values of success.  Without church ministry to anchor my sense of
purpose, and with my vocational job also in a holding pattern, I feel
starved for climbing.  WoW is a meager substitute — but at least it
has multiple ladders and clear rules of advancement.

Another question that was brought up: do I have any creative outlets
now?  (Reference: The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron — has anyone read
this?)  I enjoyed entertaining people with Loren and Beata’s wedding
slideshow… but opportunities like that are rare.  June thinks I
should xanga more often, since there I can both teach and entertain. 
Maybe it’s time to dust off my collection of half-written posts…

For Loren’s WoW buddies, I also posted on those forums here.

Last night June and I went to our second Threshold Project session. 
Our assignment for this session was to map out our spiritual journey
with God in any form we wanted.  Some of the suggestions were an
elevation map, a road map, or a treasure map.  To me, life is a game
where you have to figure out the rules, so I drew up a variation on the
board game of Life:

It was useful in itself — the exercise of introspection and drawing
things out.  I learned that I was partly responsible for my
expectations of a Christian life.  Because as an extremist, I tended to
hear and remember only the extremes that appealed to me.  I heard Moses
facing down Pharoh, but forgot about his earlier 40 years in the desert.

The actual session interaction was also good.  It took a surprisingly
long time to tell my stories.  Surprising because I think of myself as
a fast talker and efficient communicator.  (Favorite party game:
Taboo!)  But there was a lot of content.  And yes, I talked about my
feelings, too.  =P  The Walkers asked some good questions, such as
making me list concrete examples of my abstract thoughts.  They also
pointed out a tension in my life: between being measured/restrained and
wanting to go all out.

Sabbath was another topic that came up.  Altoz had once given me a book
on the topic.  I think it’s a good idea (resting one out of seven days,
and one out of seven years), but often I don’t get around to it. 
There’s so much to do, so much in which I derive pleasure and value. 
It’s hard to let go of the wheel and let God do the driving.

The session reminded me of Pansy Patch, a men’s group that daveswaim and
cephasung used to run at Highrock.  Fortunately that DNA spread throughout
the church, and now many groups have the same feel.  That’s a good
thing.

What does all of this have to do with career and calling?  I’m not sure
yet.  It’s laying some groundwork for understanding myself, and helping
June and the Walkers understand me better too.  And hopefully in the
coming months it will give me clarity into God’s will, my own nature,
and wise choices about my future directions.

What should we do with our lives?  That’s a question June and I have been asking ourselves and each other a lot these days.  Since both of us have taken a big step back from church ministries for a while, we’re trying to figure out how school / vocation / career / church / community / purpose / calling tie together in our lifes.  Yeah, it’s a big long question.  And we’re pretty short on answers.

So tonight in a few hours we’re embarking on a new thing: The Threshold Project.  Some CCFC’ers have done it before in a smallgroup context.  As far as I can tell, it’s a married couple, Scott and Louise Walker, who do vocational counseling with a Christian viewpoint.  We had an intro meeting a few weeks ago, and tonight’s first session begins with our life stories.  They suggested writing the most formative influences in a series of short stories, in the following categories: family, relationships, school, recreation, work, spiritual.  I combined school and work because I lump them in the same category of “things you have to do.”  I also added “girls” as a whole section in itself.    And I added a section on “race” because I think June would like me to look into it.

True to self, I used PowerPoint to draw a 7×8 table with those column headings, and rows corresponding to different eras in my life.  And I filled in most of those 56 boxes with 8-point text summarizing memorable events.  So you can look at a single page and see my life defined by themes and times.  It’s kind of freaky!  (Did you know in college I once went on a date with Axl Rose’s girlfriend’s sister?)  Also, it was tiring to think through it all.  I’m a person who tends to let go of the past and look to the future, and I only did this as an exercise to better inform the Walkers so they can understand and analyze me better.  High bandwidth, baby!

The whole experience runs through a series of 9 exercises, of which this life story sharing is the first.  I wonder if by the end, they tell me I should find a career in PowerPoint.  Next slide, please.

Update: they mentioned a few books: “Joy at Work” as similar to my “Play defines my life” philosophy, and “The Eighth Habit” since I had mentioned “7 Habits” as being one of the most influential books in my spiritual life.  Also, they said that both June and I were “measured” and “controlled” people, and that made me wonder about the downsides, like not letting each other see our raw emotions.  It gave us a lot of stuff to talk about.  Next session Monday.