This semester of college—my final semester—can likened to a marathon. My senior class, about to graduate, collectively realized that the end was near, so together we made a final push to do as much as possible to strengthen our bonds with each other, invest in lower classes and future leaders, and reach out to those who didn’t know Jesus. It has been an exciting and thrilling time, and I’m glad for it, but now that graduation has ended and our degrees bestowed upon us, I’ve finally realized how weary I’ve been this whole time. Often, when you’ve been standing up for long periods of time, you don’t notice the strain it produces on your body. It’s only once you sit down that you feel how sore you’ve been. The loosening of the muscles reveals the intensity of the stress they’ve been released from.
This semester has been a microcosm of my college experience. College can be defined very simply in this way: it is the triumph of persistent extroversion over introversion, often to unhealthy extremes. It presents not only a variety of obligations: academics, work, and ministry, but a variety of pleasures: impromptu social events, late-night hangouts, and group meals at costly restaurants. The only thing lacking in this menagerie is healthy solitude. Compliance with such behavior is not enforced by saying “you must”, but rather by saying, “you ought to”, “you’ll regret not doing so”, and oh-so-often “it will be good for you spiritually”. Failure to comply is seen as being tantamount to heresy, and your friends instantly begin speculating as to what sort of personal or spiritual malady has befallen you that you should want to withdraw from their company. The choice is clear: run yourself ragged with the social scene or be branded a deviant by rumor and speculation.
At some point, this sort of extreme extroversion stops becoming something that others impose on you and becomes something that you impose on yourself. You internalize the values of socializing that you’ve been indoctrinated into and you become their foremost evangelist, proselytizing on their behalf to your friends. Glancing back, I now see how I created an environment for myself that was ever-increasingly public; the little private moments I set aside were like fledgling forts deep in enemy territory, easily picked off one-by-one. I came into college thinking that the ideal life was one where I was with my friends twenty-four seven. Now, after four years of college, two of which were spent in an apartment whose door was like the door to a sitcom apartment—constantly opening up to intruders who would bring in with them the next plot device, antic, or bit of community drama—I’ve learned my lesson about community. It too must be taken in moderation: too little and you become a recluse without communion to your fellow men; too much and your sense of self-identity and your identity in Christ get devoured by your identity with the group.
Now the events are over, the friends dispersed, and the race of college ministry completed. I have not been myself all semester; instead, I’ve tried to be someone else whom I was not. At long last, I have the chance to breath and regain the skill which I learned so acutely yet lost so quickly: the skill of solitude. Now I can sit alone by a bench, read a Psalm, alone with no one but God, and breathe in the sweet scent of God’s presence, which to me smells like freshly washed laundry. And that to me is the most beautiful aroma of all.
I made a vow to myself yesterday that I would look into the homosexuality issue that’s been raging recently. I made this vow because I realized that I had never really made a firm decision about it and that I seemed to have a chameleon opinion; I would say one thing to my Christian friends and another thing to my non-Christian friends. But I realized that this was too important of an issue not form an opinion. After all, I was tired of seeing Christians retreat from the public sphere and confine themselves purely to “spiritual” issues, and I didn’t want to be a hypocrite.
So today I sat down for several hours and started reading through a number of articles from various perspectives, Christian, non-Christian, pro-homosexuality, and anti-homosexuality. From the onset the research depressed me, because the atmosphere around this issue is filled with bitter antagonism: conservatives are quick to use harsh words and talk out of anger, while liberals are so quick to call anyone who disagrees with them a bigot or prejudiced (reinforcing the notion that they are just a bunch of elitist snobs). I came upon one particular article called “14 Steps That Will Evolve Your View on Gay Marriage” that was so passive-aggressive and made such a bad use of the bandwagon fallacy that it actually briefly incited me to be even more conservative in my stance. Logical fallacies abounded on both sides. I was pretty close to throwing up my hands and just giving up.
Then I stumbled upon something that was a breath of fresh air. Coming upon a website called the Gay Christian Network (a site devoted to helping homosexual Christians cope with the stresses they face), I found a pair of articles written on the site highlighting two Christian positions on homosexuality. Both were written by committed Christians who identified themselves as being homosexuals. One argued the point of what is called side A (homosexuality is okay in the context of a monogamous Christian marriage), and the other argued from the point of side B (homosexuality is wrong and homosexuals should be celibate).
Several things surprised me about this pair of articles. First, the authors knew from personal experience what the struggle of homosexuality looks like because they had experienced it personally. Second, they were gracious and humble to each other and their opponents, even going so far as to admit that they could be wrong. This sort of kindness and humility is missing from most public debate, where it’s basically your job to convince your audience that you are a paragon of virtue while your opponent is the spawn of Satan. Moreover, it was clear that the authors treated each other this way because they were Christians who took seriously the importance of humility and kindness. The authors were not some liberal “Christians” evoking the name of Jesus merely for dramatic effect; they both clearly loved Jesus and made every effort to discern the truth through the Holy Spirit. Finally, their treatment of Scripture was thoughtful and in-depth; they weren’t simply trying to offer prooftexts, but really tried to wrestle with what each passage meant in its context. I flipped through each article (they’re both very long), and in the end, I still came down closer to the position of the side B people (homosexuality is a sin), but something had changed for me because I had seen a firsthand account of this issue that forced me to consider the implications our decisions have on real people.
One argument commonly applied to controversy is that only those who experience a situation have a right to make decisions about that situation. Therefore, only women can make choices about abortion, homosexuals make laws about homosexuality, drug users make drug regulations etc. This is actually a very stupid argument because if we followed this logic then society would not be able to function and because those who have experienced a situation can’t help but be biased. But I would like to revise this argument to something that makes sense: you can’t fully understand or have a mature opinion about a situation until you’ve either personally experienced or been exposed to a firsthand account of someone who has gone through that issue. In the case of homosexuality, you will never have a fully mature and loving opinion until you’ve gotten a firsthand look at the life of a homosexual, the struggles they face, and choices they have to make. Until you do that, homosexuality will just be an abstract theoretical concept. It will not be about real people and their lives. But once you see real human beings struggling with this issue, you discover that you really really really need to be sure you are right before you take a stance. You are now dealing with real human beings, not abstract concepts, so you better make sure that your stance is one that is thoughtful and loving, otherwise you will hurt others.
The problem is that most Christians have never encountered the lives of homosexuals, so they think they are being loving when they are simply deluding themselves. They say things like “love the sinner, hate the sin” and satisfy their own egos without realizing that they’ve actually deeply hurt those who struggle with these issues by saying those things. Don’t be a delusional do-gooder. Seek first to understand.
Why did I write this post? Well, because right now lots of pastors are saying lots of things about homosexuality. John Piper has done so, Mark Driscoll must definitely be railing right now, and I know that Matt Carter is saying stuff as well. I don’t know what they’re saying, and for all I know, it could be absolutely right, but I will say this: they can have all the theological knowledge and all the Scriptural truth that they want, but if they’ve never made the effort of seeking to understand the position, the story, the life of a homosexual, then there’s an integral part of this issue that they’ve failed to understand. Remember that there are two ways to get at truth: the first is through logical deliberation and argumentation and the second is through love and empathy. As Christians, we are called to do both.
If you would like to tangibly live out what I’m advocating, here are links to the two articles:
http://www.gaychristian.net/justins_view.php
http://www.gaychristian.net/rons_view.php
Christus Victor,
James
The letter “L” shall be the alliteration for this post, aptly named:
Lesson’s learned from “Love’s Labours Lost”
In high school, I once watched a comedy show in class that poked fun at Shakespeare. When they reached the part about Shakespeare’s comedies, the joke was that they all had the same plot. Then performers then proceeded to act out a satirical version of all of Shakespeare’s comedies combined into a single play. It was pretty funny. It’s also very true. Most Shakespeare comedies involve a set of mismatched couples who spend most of their time bumbling through high-verse, harebrained schemes, and mistaken identities, however, in the end, they all end up together, typically through some sort of plot devised by the comic relief side-characters. Although “Love’s Labours Lost” has much of these elements in it, it doesn’t have a typically Shakespearean happy ending. Instead, it ends up a very bittersweet note, which I suppose, is much more realistic.
I definitely left the play confused as to what the moral of the story was, seeing as it ended the way it did. After some thought, I came up with three important lessons about life to be drawn from the play:
1. Things never go the way you expect: the King and the Lords swear off women for three years, only to instantly find themselves head over heels for four charming ladies. They try to court the women seriously, only to find their seriousness taken as jest and repaid with mockery. When the ladies finally respond to their affections, tragedy strikes and the princess is forced to return to her country and take her entourage along with her to mourn for a year. Life is messy. Our plans never work out exactly how they want them to.
2. Any good we receive is a mercy given to us by God: the men in the play were bumbling idiots. In the first place, they were foolish enough to swear away “the cause why [they] were born” as if it were as easy as just saying it. Then, they concoct a harebrained plan to disguise themselves as Russian dancers and amuse the women, as if that would make up for the insult of treating them so curtly earlier in the play. Finally, as their plan unravels, they lose their composure and their pleas become desperate and honest. And somehow their pleading works, not because of how convincing it was, but because of the some grand mercy that we cannot comprehend.
3. Hope is something you have to fight for, not something you sit around waiting for: the one consolation of the story is that love is not lost forever, only for a short period of time. If the men swear to go into seclusion from the world for a year and a day, then the women will agree to marry them. It will be a hard year, but if they persevere, then there’s victory for them on the other side. I guess a real-world corollary is that in real-life, we can achieve a modicum of success so long as we look past the trouble of the present with an eye for the glory of the future. In Romans, St. Paul writes “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18). So often, adversity is about the fight between feelings and thoughts. We know that if we act prudently now, then in the future we will reap the benefits, but in the present we just cannot bring our hearts to do it, because the emotions against it are too strong. In those times, it seems like perseverance amounts to a submission of the heart to the head, knowing that the head will lead us true in the end.
-blog
-update/stay updated with my friends regularly
-practice the daily offices
-cultivate the discipline of the mind
-Sabbath regularly
Liturgy is about routine, and it occurred to me that we as evangelicals despise routine (if you’re a member of a campus ministry, you’re probably an evangelical, even if you don’t know what that word means). We find routine to be fake or contrived, so we either abhor things like liturgies or are at least highly suspicious of them. We tend to make use of them in moderation, probably because we think that if we make use of too much liturgy, we’ll suddenly transform into Pharisees. No doubt this comes from our roots in the Protestant movement, which was often rabidly paranoid of anything that smelled even vaguely of tradition.
In place of routine, we tend to set spontaneity up as an idol so much that now, in order for something to be authentic, it must be made up on the spot, impromptu, and unplanned. There’s a few problems with this. First of all, we tend to forget that spontaneity is often an excuse for laziness and an aversion to planning. Moreover, spontaneous prayer can be just as insincere as planned prayer: I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people try to pray impromptu style only to fall back on the hackneyed Christian lingo-phrases that permeate the lexicon of campus ministries.
Try as we may however, we cannot root out routine from our lives. And we shouldn’t want to, for it permeates our lives and provides structure and order for our days. Spontaneity often keeps us from following through with long-term goals, and often goes hand-in-hand with disorganization and chaos. Moreover, when Jesus speaks about prayer, he seems to advocate a sort of routine. He first starts by telling his disciplines not to “heap up empty phrases like to Gentiles do” (Matthew 6:7). Then he teaches them a specific prayer which is still said today. Several things are interesting about this prayer. It is concise, with all of the words carefully deliberated; Jesus uses no superfluous language here. It is rooted in tradition, having been inspired by age-old Jewish prayers. And finally, it is routine, meant to be repeated daily. In this way, Jesus prayed in a manner that was in harmony with what another famous Jewish thinker had said centuries earlier about praying with care and reverence. “God is in heaven and you are on earth”, says the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, “so let your words be few”.
When we consider it carefully, it seems like the debate is really not between routine and spontaneity, but of good and bad routine. Used improperly and without heart, routine becomes lifeless, but used with the right heart, it can actually be life-giving.
To some people, it may seem morbid to keep a list of your regrets. To me it makes perfect sense, because for me, a list of regrets is a road map for how I can live differently in the future. And in a semi-public forum like a blog, an element of accountability emerges as well that can’t necessarily be gained through merely journaling my thoughts. I don’t know if I will make other entries after this, but I think that it’s right to be honest about these sorts of things with myself and others.
When I reflect back on my four years in college and ministry, one of my biggest regrets was not practicing emotional transparency with my trusted friends. All my life, I’ve grown up with the unhealthy mentality that I need to fix everything on my own. So whenever I face stress or adversity, my mind becomes an inner warzone between the thoughts that other people would release by talking to their friends about it. But my view of the problem is biased and limited, so I find my mind looping in circles. As the great Catholic apologist GK Chesterton described it, I get “trapped in the well-lit prison of one idea… sharpened to one painful point.” Nor is this option particularly effective. I am a profoundly uncreative and conventional person and my answers to my own problems typically consist of something like, “do more of what you are currently doing but with more effort”.
I think part of the reason that I do this is because of my natural introversion. Another is my desire not to be judged. Also, there’s the general Asian mentality of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Another reason is more coincidental. I was not involved in an AACM small group my freshman year, and after freshman year, I applied for leadership, so for all my time in this fellowship, I’ve had the bad mentality that so many leaders fall into: that I am the person with the answers, and that it’s the people whom I’m leading who need space to express their feelings. But not me. Nuh-uh.
But if I could go back, I would do it differently. 1 John 1:7 says “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.” In other words, if we take the risk of being vulnerable with others whom we trust about our feelings on a continual basis, the result is a sort of peace of mind consisting not only of unity with other Christians but also unity with God. In other words, this passage is profoundly psychological because it provides a Biblical basis for Christians to process through their thoughts openly with each other (as opposed to the oppressive sort of thought control that some campus ministries and churches at UT practice).
In fact, emotional transparency and honesty should be the defining characteristics of a Christian community, because that’s exactly where Christian community ought to excel. How, you might ask? Let’s think about this from a purely utilitarian perspective: Christian community is one of the few places in our daily lives where we can go and vent to a bunch of people and expect them to listen and sympathize without strings attached. Try that at a party and you’ll just come off as weird. With a counselor, you get something close to this, but counselors are paid and aren’t available to you 24/7. In Christian community, you can expect people to listen to you: half of them out of love and the other half out of well-intentioned obligation. In other words, you have a captive audience. Why not take advantage of it?
But it’s not in our nature as Asians to be vulnerable. We try to fix our own problems. I tried to do the same all the way up until this semester, when the struggles became too much for me to bear alone and I finally gave in. but even now I don’t do it well. Moreover, I see so many ways in which my college years might have turned out differently if I had just been honest with others about my life. Perhaps that in itself will be reason enough for me to start doing something different.
[I wrote this one after hearing a friend tell me how crazy girls can be.]
“I entreat Euodia and I entreat Syntyche to agree in the Lord. Yes, I ask you also, true companion, help these women…” St. Paul
Woman is Unmade
In the garden of creation,
Man leaned by the Tree,
folding his hands over two complete sets of twelve ribs.
Under the perfect stars of the night,
he moaned and sighed. God saw.
Putting one glorified hand on Man’s shoulder,
He told him to “snap out of it”
and go back to naming his animals.
Breaks are always hard for me. I’ve never been able to figure out why. I hope this list will shed light on the answer and help me to avoid problems in the future:
1. I am more extroverted than I used to think. I used to think I was highly introverted, but now I realize that I feed off of people. Meaningful conversations invigorate me and give me the energy to work. When I am alone all day and my thoughts become my only companion, I get exhausted and frazzled.
2. My idols and their manifestations are as follows:
- wanting to be significant —> committing to too many goals or trying to develop too many skills at once during break
- unrealistic expectations of myself —> getting paralyzed by deadlines; feeling guilty when I don’t get things done on the timetable that I set for myself
- pride —> trying to do everything myself instead of asking for help
3. I’m a night person; It’s very hard for me to concentrate during the morning. As much as I want and try to be a morning person because I think that it’s a more responsible lifestyle choice, it just doesn’t work for me.
4. I need to have structure in my day; giving me carte blanche to do whatever I want to do during the day is just asking for me to dive into a vicious cycle of procrastination and anxiety.
5. I can’t juggle multiple responsibilities at once.
My ideal schedule looks something like this:
Every day:
- check emails (20 minutes)
- write essay (1 hour)
- work on Servant Partners fundraising (30 minutes)
- practice drawing (1 hour)
- practice singing (30 minutes)
But my real schedule looks more like this:
Monday-Tuesday: finish support letter
Wednesday-Friday: write essay
Saturday: miscellaneous
More crude, not as pretty or efficient, but actually doable.
6. When I do have to juggle responsibilities, it’s better for me to shotgun it than try to be thorough. I suck at multi-tasking. I simply can’t hold more than 1-2 obligations in my mind at a time without becoming overwhelmed. The best I can do is to get a bit of substantive work completed on each task so that I have something to work on later and will therefore be more willing to return to it.
7. Home is a terrible place for me to try and get work done.
8. Community feels more precious to me when it’s harder to come by. Bible studies, prayer meetings, dinners etc. don’t seem that important when they seem to be happening every day (like in college), but when I don’t expect to see other Christians more than once or twice a week, I really learn to cherish those moments and to want commit to those activities wholeheartedly.
9. I work hard when I ought to work smart. I think that in order to do well with something, I must put in x number of grueling hours into it, but it’s not about brute-forcing a task by throwing time at it, but rather, how I go about doing it. I could gain much from learning to work strategically.
