Lead, Kindly Light

(from 9/5/08)

I made it back to the United States about 36 hours ago. As I peered out the window of the plane as it hovered over the Left Coast, I looked down at the expanse of coastal land that met the ocean beneath me, and said to myself, “That’s U.S. soil.” There was something moving about returning back to this country, my own home country, after spending a full month away in the place that my ancestors called home.

I was so excited to be back that I took a picture of the sign that directed me to stand with other “U.S. Citizens,” and when I turned in my passport to the customs official, I hoped that I would hear the two words that I always long to hear when I re-enter this country: “Welcome home.” And, sure enough, the Department of Homeland Security did not disappoint. With a careful review of my documents and the sound of an affirmative stamp of approval, I was admitted back into the States, and the officer said, “Welcome back.” Close enough.

I’m spending this week in the Bay Area with a dear sister from law school. Right now, I’m sitting in the living room of her apartment, which has become my bedroom for the week. I’m sitting on the squishy red couch, opposite the beautiful collection of books lovingly and meticulously displayed on seven shelves. I spent the morning reading the first forty pages of Jonathan Kozol’s “Amazing Grace,” an incredible account of “The lives of children and the conscience of a nation.” Later today, we will bake a cake, visit her alma mater, do some shopping, go see “Wall-E,” and continue hanging out.

Even though I’ve technically been on vacation for the last six weeks, I finally feel like I’m getting a real rest now. The last 35 days were spent with dear friends, old and new, but a flurry of activity consumed every day. Beijing, especially, was good — but hectic and tiring. The time in Kunming, Lijiang, and Guilin was more leisurely, but emotionally and physically taxing at times. Hong Kong was the most relaxed stretch of my time overseas, since I was surrounded by the heavy and reassuring blanket of love of two dear brothers and a sister. My time in Hong Kong was also a rich period of growth and challenge; my oldest brother Chris strongly urged me to consider a particular way in which I might serve God and my community in the City when I finally start working and living there in October. And throughout the week, over dinners and a mid-week lunch and one last breakfast together, he served (again, as always) as a wise mentor to prepare me both for the difficulties and the enormously exciting opportunities that lie ahead. Before moving to HK, he also practiced in the City, so he had particularly valuable insights to share, and it all came from personal experience.

* * *

All of that, regardless of how rewarding or enriching, took lots of energy. But here, with C, there is no pressure or weight of any kind. Coming here is practically like coming home. She and her husband have allocated their entire living room to me, where they allow me to spread out my growing mound of belongings, and treat the space like my own private bedroom. Every morning, I wake up and have a cup of decaf coffee and a bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats — the same cereal that got me through 3L year and studying for the bar exam. Then I go through the day without much of a plan, read the Kozol book in my downtime, and leisurely do whatever, whenever. And a big part of this all feeling like home is that C (and her husband) really accepts me entirely as I am. There’s no need to be “up” or “on” at any given moment; everything is okay, just as I am. This sort of environment is very healing and rejuvenating for the spirit.

And yet — in spite of how comfortable this place is and these times are, I know that all of this is temporary. Right now I am physically and situationally far from where my “real” life will be in thirty-six days when I start working. I can see, now that I am at this midpoint in my ten weeks of vacation, how God is using this time to prepare me for the season that is fast approaching.

I entered the post-bar season with a feeling of ambivalence toward the “real life” I had lined up for myself. On one hand, I believed then (as I do now) that choosing the City was the right thing — at least for now. It will be a good starting place for my legal career, I’m excited about my firm and the opportunities it promises to provide, and I have plenty of friends in the City, so I won’t be (too) lonely (most of the time). I also was confident that I would enjoy at least some aspects of living in the City; I am blessed to even have landed a job there, and to have the chance to live there — the cultural capital of our nation. And yet, on the other hand, I felt the weight of many sacrifices that inevitably come into the calculation: sacrifices of time (insanely long hours!), money (high rent!), and relationships (far from my family and closest girlfriends, and… long hours = probably hard to meet Mr. Right). And I felt like the values of the City might threaten my spiritual devotion and growth.

But. God has used my last five weeks away to bring me thousands of miles away, far far far away from the place I had come to both love and fear. And there, in China and Hong Kong (and now on the Left Coast), He taught me to adopt a new and better perspective, one that looks toward the future with more hope and less doubt. I have been reminded of so many important things in the last 35 days —

• We are called to be imitators of God, and to live lives of love, as children of light. We are to sing in our hearts to God, at all times, and to give thanks.
• I have long struggled with my identity as an ABC. Through a long and emotional chain of events, I am learning to accept the fact that I probably won’t ever fully figure out this dual identity. And more importantly, the thing that really matters is that my most important identity is that which I have as God’s own child, saved and justified by the blood of Christ. This trumps everything, and releases me from other reasons to fear or seek approval from others.
• Even corporate lawyers need to observe the Sabbath. Including me.
• There are fantastic opportunities to be a witness for Christ in the workplace, especially in a work environment like mine, where we’re at work so many hours in a day/week. From the seniors to whom I report, to the secretary and paralegals who report to me, God desires that I share His love with all of my colleagues. He can help me do it well.
• I need to get involved in serving my community (i.e. the City) right away. Preferably, with friends.
• Perhaps I have a unique gift that God can and might want to use to keep a care group together. Caring and enthusiasm go a long way. Hopefully God will take us somewhere, and preserve the group, despite Big Brother’s departure.
• Dear friends don’t stop loving each other, even though they’re on opposite sides of the world. God has given me some of the best friends on Earth. No exaggeration.
• The whole worry about finding Mr. Right needn’t be such a cause for concern. My job is to do whatever God has called me to do at any particular moment. All the rest is up to Him. How can I trust my eternal salvation to God, and not also trust Him to provide a life partner (if He so wills)? This is one of the hardest things to chill out about, but I’m getting better…
• Getting rest (physically) and staying spiritually close to God will be my two biggest challenges in the City. If those can be maintained, everything else will fall into place.
• God is in control. Our lives with Him and in Him are an adventure, if we go through it alongside God and with our hands thrust into His.

This blog will likely remain silent for quite a while – my prediction is that, owing to extensive travel plans, I won’t have an opportunity to post here but once or twice (if at all) until the middle of September, so please check back then (or RSS)!

* * *

I wonder if I stepped outside of myself momentarily (or for a couple days), or if distraction got the best of me, or if I was curious about the power of power, or if I just felt like playing with fire might possibly be a palatable notion.

Perhaps what I long for most right now is a re-centering of my spiritual life. While I recognize that our sanctification in Jesus is a lifelong process, I also know that I can look at parts of my own life (including the part I’m thinking of right now) and see for myself that I’ve taken the crown from God’s head, unbended the previously-bowed knee in my heart, and proclaimed my own sovereignty in my life. And this is all incredibly, grossly, deeply and sadly wrong.

Our lives can only be performed but once. Every day, we make choices about how we react to the changes of scene and setting around us, and we choose at every moment whether to trust God as director, producer, and screenwriter of our lives — or whether we will usurp His authority and pursue our own agendas.

I know this from recent experience: that personal pursuit can feel so satisfying in the moment. It feels like freedom at last, and an unfettered reclamation of a previously-restrained order. And the power of power is alluring.

But… as the afterglow gives way to aftermath, and as we walk away from that glorious flicker of an exciting but seemingly harmless flame, things come into focus. Eventually, we realize that material harm has occurred, even though we can’t see it directly in the tangible or visible world. Disobedience or even simple disregard for God’s standards and desires have power to incur significant spiritual damage. It’s that from which I seek healing.

So… while I’ve been looking forward to this upcoming trip for many reasons, I’ve tacked this new one onto the list recently. This long trip — to foreign lands and entirely different environments that pose challenges departing radically from the present norm — is the ideal setting for serious soul-searching. It’s far away from the temptations I’d faced before, and I’ll surrounded by brothers and sisters in Christ, and confronted with a world possessing deeper and bigger problems than those in my own.

They don’t tell you, growing up, that love is like chewing gum. But it is.

For so long (off and on, but mostly on), I’d been aggravatingly and seemingly hopelessly stuck. Stuck like gum on the sole of a brand new dress shoe — stuck in my heart and stuck in my head on something I knew I couldn’t have. I scraped and scrubbed and tried to get the last of that gooey gunk off, but traces of that miraculously stubborn substance just refused to be gotten rid of.

After wrestling with this for months, I finally began to realize that life will not wait for us to solve these inexplicably complicated and vexingly heartrending mazes. The trick is, I found, to let it lie. And…. that didn’t mean playing mind games and pretending it wasn’t there. Nor did it mean attacking the shoe with every chemical substance known to man in order to obliterate each last trace of gum from the ridges of the sole … the soul … where it had wedged itself, seemingly for good.

No, the key was regaining perspective, resuming life’s mission, and continuing. Going. Walking, gum on shoe and all.

* * *

This morning, after hesitating for half of a blink of a barely-awakened eye, I called in a favor today, and it was only after the fact when I began to question whether I had overstepped my rights.Consequently, my double cousin and I engaged in a sharp analysis, volleyed in urgent whispers across sixteen inches of space in an otherwise silent room. The atmosphere of that cavernous library reading room was thick with the intellectual tension of minds desperately seeking to saturate their brain cells with reams of legal knowledge. In our little zone of debate, however, the bar exam was far from mind. Rules of motion practice, race-notice statutes, and hearsay exceptions were shoved to the outer corners of our psyches, as much more important matters pressed for immediate attention.

In the end, our impromptu dissection of the situation yielded a relieving conclusion. Part one. In calling in the favor, I effectively communicated acceptance and forgiveness, for within the actual asking was this latent message: I trust you enough to tell you I need your help. Part two. In receiving the favor, I was given more than just the material benefit of my request — I also received proof of something deeper, a bond transcending the awkward dance we’d been tiptoedly two-stepping around our ill-fated past. We may not be what we were yesterday, but that doesn’t mean we have nothing today.

* * *

The timing for this healing is good. In two flips of a wall calendar, an ocean, a continent, and the mysterious power of time will divide us on many levels — and I think I’m ready for the change.

I’ve been walking, with the gum on my shoe, finally learning to just accept it as part of me. It bothers me less, as a consequence. There are days now when I don’t even realize that it’s there. As time passes, the pages are turning. The seasons are changing. The pieces are shifting. And I’m not going to go and check, but I’m pretty sure… the gum is unsticking.

This post is for all you fellow souls out there who are studying for (and panicking over) the bar exam.

We’re just a week away now, a mere seven days away from marching into some big convention center or other gigantic enclosed space to sit with hundreds (in some cases, over a thousand) of other people who collectively have a huge mass of legal knowledge crammed into their heads, just waiting to commence fourteen hours of strategic memory dump. It’s a daunting thought, I know.

And lest I give off the impression to anyone — least of all myself — that I’ve got it all together, I confess that I had my breakdown last night. It seems that every bar student has one, and yesterday (and this morning) I finally melted down. It wasn’t very pretty.

I went through my evening, thoroughly ticked off at the world, hating my lack of motivation, but utterly fed up with memorizing the maze of evidence rules (which are riddled with exceptions, each of which comes with its own wonderful assortment of exceptions-to-the-exception, and more exceptions-to-the-exceptions-of-the-exception — you law folk know I’m not exaggerating on this), mastering the seemingly endless nuances and minutiae of New York versus multi-state criminal law, digesting federal civil procedure rules that are so dry they make the Sahara seem like one gigantic wadi, and… doing everything else that is required to keep twenty-one separate legal subjects straight in my head. I haven’t been getting enough sleep, I’ve been popping more aspirin than the entire year put together, and I suppose the tension has just been slowly mounting all along. To make matters worse, my worries about the bar exploded and contaminated the rest of my mind, and I started to worry about life in general.

The worst thing about it was that talking to my parents only made things worse, and all my best girlfriends were not immediately available. What I needed/wanted was for someone to come over, hand me tissues, and give me a gigantic hug. But it just so happened that all my best girls are elsewhere — and some are very FAR elsewhere. Let’s see… one is in Chicago, one is in San Francisco, two are usually in New York but one was in Mexico and one was in South Africa, and another sister is permanently in Hong Kong. There was no way I was going to get the hug that I wanted.

In the end, I did end up talking to C on the phone (she’s the one in SF), and that was very helpful. And in the middle of that conversation, we zeroed in on the things that were bothering me, and in the middle of that conversation, I began to realize that I was being a bit ridiculous in being so miserable and cranky and annoyed. When we stopped focusing so much on the bar (she’s studying for the Cal bar), and instead started discussing the real passions that we share in life — the working for justice, the sharing the love of Christ, the building of God’s Kingdom on Earth, the strengthening of human relationships — the bar exam suddenly seemed trite in comparison.

The bar seemed trite on two levels. First, in the scheme of life, it is a relatively small thing — a two (or three) day exam that determines whether we get our law licenses or not. If we fail, we take the exam again. That stinks, and especially now in week nine or ten, we desperately despise the studying process. But really — it will pass.

Second, when we began to reflect on all those other things in life, the need for God’s intervention seemed so much more obvious. I mean, where am I going to get the wisdom to do justice on earth? Where is this sinful self going to get the capacity to love other people with the love of Christ? How do we expect to have the slightest idea of where to begin building the Kingdom of God, if not from God Himself and through His strong guidance? And human relationships, the fabric with which our lives are constructed, need Christ at the center in order to be strengthened and bonded. In all these things — the REAL issues in life, we need God desperately or else we can do nothing.

And the bar? Well… I started to realize that maybe that’s why I felt like the bar was such a burden — because I was starting to depend on just ME to pass the darn thing. And see, that makes no sense. Because if God is big enough and great enough and concerned enough to involve Himself in our lives for the big things (to wit, all the things I listed above, and more) — then… wouldn’t He also provide for little things, like … the bar exam? This isn’t to say that I don’t need to study and do my share of diligent work (which I’ve been doing! Eight to fourteen hours a day — I promise) … but it does mean that after I do that, it’s not about me anymore. And there’s relief in that.

* * *

To be honest, I didn’t finally get this clearer head until later today. Despite my good conversation with C, which brought up some good food for thought and fodder for the soul, I still went to bed feeling pretty lousy. To make matters worse, I got less than six hours of sleep before pulling myself up and out of bed to attend the six-hour simulated PMBR exam in the morning. I was still cranky and miserable when I got to the exam, but what do you know — somewhere in the middle of doing two hundred Evidence, Contracts, Torts, Criminal Law & Procedure, Constitutional Law, and Property questions, things slipped back into focus. I got my sanity back. And a greater measure of peace made its way back into my heart.

I don’t suspect that I’ll have another breakdown before the bar exam, or during it. Once was enough for me, and I’m glad it’s over. In hindsight, I can also say that I’m glad that it happened. Because maybe that’s what it took for me to realize in a much more obvious way that this isn’t just my game. This life isn’t wholly mine, and when God called me to live it for Him — He also accompanied that call with a promise to provide for me in it. He doesn’t just command; He also directs, protects, marches alongside, and — when necessary — even carries.

Today, L and B joined us for church again, which was really awesome. It was a great encouragement to me, to see that now — even eight days before the bar exam — these two guys (who probably didn’t go to church through all of law school) took several precious hours out of their study time to attend a worship service. Both seemed to appreciate the sermon as well, and B even mentioned that he would probably continue to attend church even when we all move to the City to start work in the fall. This is exciting news, and I hope that L will also join us as we hunt for a solid church. I wait and pray with great anticipation as we see where this all leads in the end.

Of course, it may lead nowhere — as I was bluntly reminded yesterday by a friend… I must try to believe he was speaking out of kindness and gentle warning, rather than pessimism about the fruits of evangelical pursuits. But as followers of Christ, I believe that the Gospel must be shared with everyone, even if it seems impossible (to us) that they might actually be saved in the end. The whether and when of people’s coming to know Jesus as their personal Savior is all our Boss’s business, the whole of which we cannot even begin to comprehend or grasp. So the only part we as followers are responsible for is obeying Him in His call for us to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God — and part of walking with Him involves sharing His truth and love with the people around us.

I think it’s also important that we expand our view of who constitutes “the people around us.” This was a hot topic of discussion in my Bible study on social justice this past year… I’ve heard a lot of Christians justify their corporate jobs by saying that God needs people ministering to the law firm partners, the Congressmen, the Supreme Court clerks, and other high-profile folks in the legal world. I entirely agree with them — but at the same time, if those are the only people we think of when we think of “people around us,” we are grossly mistaken. There are pages, paralegals, personal assistants, janitorial service people, cab drivers, bailiffs, and all sorts of other people “around us.” And for people going into the criminal law field like me, prisoners and their families, and victims and their families, as well as cops, are most often at the forefront of my mind. I think that they constitute my greatest mission field.

When I look into the future and I imagine what my career will end up looking like forty years from now, I often wonder how it will turn out. I find that when I write emails to update former college professors, high school teachers (yes, I still keep in touch with a few of them!), or old friends about what I’m up to now and where I’m going, I tend to talk about how I want to transition out of corporate work to do federal prosecution for a while, then teach criminal justice at a college, and become a juvenile court judge — because the juvenile justice system, in my opinion, is the single most important point of intervention in the criminal justice system. This is natural, of course, because it’s a fair prediction of the trajectory I’m on, and … well, that’s the sort of thing people are wanting to hear about.

But… once I finish rattling off the spiel, I still feel a sort of emptiness and anxiety inside. An inexplicable weight of dissatisfaction pervades, and internally I sink into a private bubble filled with heavy sighs and uneasy murmurs. This is because I know that a legal career can have the appearance of worldly success without having a single ounce of value for the Kingdom of God, which is what really matters, from now until in the end. I’m just now reminded of I Corinthians 13, in which Paul instructs that if we do all manners of great things — but do them without love — then whatever we do is as empty as a clanging cymbal. It just makes lots of noise and causes a ruckus, but has no real value. So it is with my legal career.

I desperately want my life to matter. More than anything else that I worry about (the big ones currently being: passing the bar exam, staying safe and healthy in China for 30 days, and making all my loan payments on time), I am anxious about whether — at my death, if at 30 or at 80 — I will have genuinely impacted lives around me in furtherance of the Kingdom of God.

Will it have made any difference at all, from an eternal perspective, whether or not I was in someone’s life? That’s the question that burns in my soul as I look to the future. This calls for prayer, for wisdom, humility, grace, and power from the Holy Spirit. I don’t know how many years I have on this Earth, and when I go to heaven, I want God to say that I did a good job with whatever He gave me in the way of talents, time, and opportunities.

Dreaming about providence
And whether mice or men have second tries
Maybe we’ve been livin’ with our eyes half open
Maybe we’re bent and broken, broken

We want more than this world’s got to offer
We want more than this world’s got to offer
We want more than the wars of our fathers
And everything inside screams for second life
-Switchfoot

I really miss Pastor Chris, my college pastor. Thank goodness for modern technology, though… I can upload his sermons off the internet and listen to them on my ipod when I go to the gym.

The sermon I listened to this morning was about Gideon and how he laid out the fleece and questioned God and His plan multiple times, even after hearing God’s voice and encountering God in more tangible ways than the average human being.  Even in the face of having actually conversations with God and receiving God’s assurance after reassurance of His plan for Israel, Gideon doubted.

Gideon reminds me of me. Not that I’ve had face-to-face encounters with God, but I most certainly have had ample reason to believe in Him and trust Him because He has delivered me from so many things, and changed my life in powerful ways from childhood until now. And yet … still, the “But God, what if” questions still linger. And I still tug at my Lord’s sleeve and ask, “God, are you sure…?”

Then I saw this cartoon on xkcd (see original here), and …  I shook my head again. My relationship with God is a lot like this sometimes. Good thing God is the Lord of love, and He is so patient with His doubting, fearful, and needy creation.

The bar exam is only thirteen days away, and I’ve been starting to stress out a lot more this past week. Though I had kept it at bay as long as possible, one inevitable question began appearing in my conversations — “What if I fail?”

The answers I received to that question varied greatly depending on who I asked. When I asked my dear friends who are also studying for the bar with me, the question launched a detailed and heated series of conjectures about whether our firms would retain us, what our chances of passing the second time around were, and the odds of actually failing the first time. When I expressed my worries to friends and family outside of the world of Bar/Bri, though, I was met mostly with shrugs. “So your pride gets hurt,” my dad said. A college friend replied, “You take it again and pass. No problem.”

It wasn’t easy to accept the latter responses, or to take them seriously. I immediately thought — surely failing the bar exam has more serious consequences than a simple blow to pride (which, I might add, is no small thing!), and the situation must call for something more complex than just whipping out my number-two pencils again in February 2009 and passing it the next time around! … At the same time, I knew there was a lot of truth in what I’d been told — especially since both reactions came from people who really care about me. And the hard part about that was admitting to myself that maybe I’ve been blowing things out of proportion and losing some perspective.

This morning, my college friend sent me a Hallmark e-card — the same one, incidentally, that my best friend sent to me before I took my LSAT exam over four years ago. In it, I read this message: “‘Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight.’ – Prv. 3:5-6 This has helped keep me sane and I thought I’d pass it along. God has gifted you in amazing ways and he is faithful. I’ll keep praying for peace and memory and confidence for you, and some sanity too.”

We were on our second break in this morning’s 4-1/2 hour long bar class when I read the e-card, and the impact of its message has been huge. In particular, that old familiar verse from Proverbs has played and replayed in my mind all day, and I have felt a much greater peace about the exam. I must remember that it’s my job to study and to prepare for this exam, and it’s my duty to work hard. And by studying eight to twelve hours a day (sometimes more, like today) , every day, I’m fulfilling that duty. Beyond this, however, it’s up to God to work things out for me.

And the thing is — how small must my faith be, if I think that He is going to lead me all the way from a poor public school, to a state college, to a great law school, and a fantastic employment opportunity in the city — just to have me fail the New York bar exam. I mean, come on. Even as I type the words on the screen, it sounds absurd to me. No wonder the verse says, “Lean not on your own understanding“!

Furthermore, even if I do fail (which I don’t intend to do), I will pass the next time. And life will move on — and that blip on the screen will not change the long and short of the bigger picture and the things that really matter. Now and at all times, the point remains that it’s all about trusting in God for all things in life — from the bar exam, to keeping a job in an economic downturn to finding a life partner, to having opportunities to impact other people’s lives, all the way to eternal security and salvation.

The bottom line is — and the lesson of the day is — if I keep my eyes on the real prize, and my trust and hope thrusted Godward, it will all work itself out in the end. Or rather, God will work all things out in the end. And that’s the best place I could possibly be — because only heaven knows how straight the paths can be when God is leading the way.

Today was an exciting day.

Two of my “unchurched” friends from school agreed to join us (meaning another three of us who regularly go to church together) for church. As the pastor spoke, I prayed fervently for the two of them, L and B, praying that God would speak to their hearts, show them His love and goodness and power, and His desire to know them as His children. I prayed that their hearts would be open to receive His word, that His Spirit would flow to their souls and help them to realize that He is the very One that their hearts have been longing for all along. No one can fulfill us in the way that God can.

As this was all going on, I realized also that I have a heavy burden in my heart for my unsaved friends, and for unsaved people in general. I wish more people knew and could accept the Word of God as true and real, and that they could see and understand that the Creator of the universe also is the Creator of each of them — and that He loves them infinitely much, and so strongly desires that they would come to Him.

Our God is great, indeed, and He is mighty to save — so much so, that He sent His Son Jesus to die on the cross to pay the price for all of our sins. For God, being a God of justice, could not simply let our wrongdoings go unpunished. But God, being a loving God, also wanted to spare US from having to pay the price ourselves. So He made His Son take the fall for us, and that is why it is through Jesus that we are saved from our sins. It is because of Jesus’s sacrifice that God can look at us as forgiven people, if we believe in Jesus as our Savior.

I was reminded again today of how beautiful the Gospel really is. God Almighty is generous, righteous, and absolutely holy. And He is huge — yet He still deigns to contend with us, his sinful creation. And He doesn’t just condescend to us; He walks with us and among us, and alongside us. Could there be any more real or moving example of compassion than that which God extends to us? My spirit is overcome at this moment as I reflect on the beauty of who God is, and His incredible, unimaginable demonstration of true love toward mankind.

I want my friends to know this joy, this overwhelming sense of worship for a supreme and loving God. I so deeply wish that God would claim each of them for His own, and sooner rather than later. And not just my friends — I also long for entire communities, and entire nations, to skip out on the empty lives that they otherwise would lead, and follow Jesus and serve Him into eternity.

It starts right here, though — and right around me. I may not have power to affect entire communities, let alone entire nations. But I can be a witness of the greatest gospel ever told to my friends and to the people in my immediate vicinity. That’s why I was SO excited when L and B agreed to go to church this weekend. I spend almost the entirety of every day with B while we’re studying for the bar, and L and I have been good friends ever since we met last summer. Next year, we’ll all be working at firms in the City, and doubtless meeting up from time to time… or maybe they’ll keep going to church!

Well…one step at a time. For now, suffice it to say that I again feel a renewed sense of purpose. Originally, I had planned to go home for the summer to study for the bar. Now, I am so very glad that I ended up staying here. It has provided more opportunities to share the gospel, more chances to develop and deepen relationships through which the love of Christ can be shared, and … none of this would be possible if I were at home.

Looking ahead to the next step, sometimes I worry about the implications of the route I’ve chosen. I wholeheartedly believe that I’m going down the road to which God has led me, but there are definitely moments when I question whether I’ll truly be happy down this road — or whether it will just be an act of sacrifice and obedience. Today I have renewed hope and joy in the belief that there is no better or safer or happier place to be, than that place to which God has called me to be. There may be rough patches along the way, tough adjustments to make, surprises in both good and bad form, but in the end — true fulfillment is only possible in the place of obedience.

Last night before bed, I took some time to journal — and I also looked back on past entries, dating back all the way to last September, a very different place in my life. I reread a lot of the prayer requests I extended throughout the fall and winter, and marveled at how now, in the middle of summer, I can see how a good number of those prayers were answered already. There are still some requests that remain open, obviously, but having seen the goodness of God’s faithfulness in other things was a big encouragement.

So I wrote a new entry last night, an ebenezer of sorts. In the way of background, in the Old Testament, Samuel raised a stone and named it Ebenezer (which literally in Hebrew means “Stone of Help”) to honor the Lord after Israel defeated the Philistines. Samuel raised the stone, saying, “Thus far the Lord has helped us.” In the same way, I made a list last night of all the major ways in which God has helped me through the last year. It was a long list.

Now, as I finish the bar exam and open a new chapter of life, I have a new starting point. With it, I have a new list of things that I desire and pray for — I list them here, as a public testimony of God’s power … for in the months ahead, I expect I shall have opportunity to see (and you, through this blog, may also see) how God answers in His good and perfect time. Reciting from a May 2008 entry, outlining a litany of requests for the phase ahead —

“Lord, thank You for Your great faithfulness to me. Please help me to remember and KNOW in my heart that You love me, and that You have all things, including my life, in Your control. Please help me to trust in you, and hold fast to You, love You, walk in Your ways, obey You, and serve You with my heart and soul.

“Please guide my future into the city and beyond. Please let me to a good solid church where I will grow and find a loving community; a good apartment that will be a suitable haven; and a good relationship with P (my roommate); a prison ministry in which I can regularly engage; friends, and friends like family; opportunities to serve You at work and show Your love to my co-workers; and clear direction re: career path; mentors at work and at church; health, for me and for my family; and patience for a life partner.

“I pray most of all that my heart would be devoted to You, that You would hang onto me, and grow me in Your grace and wisdom.”
Amen and amen, let it be so.

I’m realizing, sometimes to my surprise and occasionally to my chagrin, that I can be quite stubborn. The stubbornness is rarely publicly displayed among my friends and family, and even when it appears, it is most likely in the context of some spirited debate on substantive issues — rather than through general interpersonal stubbornness.

The stubbornness reveals itself in my own quiet and private company far more often, and I am just beginning to understand some implications of this newfound revelation. For instance, last week I had a severe headache, starting in the mid-afternoon, just as rays of sunshine were beginning to shine through the long columns of windows on the west side of the library. The headache grew steadily worse as the sun cast longer and longer shadows, but I pressed on with my work and mentally waved away the pain. I went through dinner with my double cousin, and an entire evening of studying at home, all the while feeling worse and worse — until finally I went to bed (at the usual time, and not a minute earlier).

I woke up at several points during the night because my head hurt so badly, and only when I got up in the morning did I finally dig out a bottle of aspirin and throw back two small white tablets. The medicine took a while to kick in, and in the meantime, I went on with my morning routine and went to the gym to run several miles. My head hurt like it hadn’t hurt in months, and as I made my way to the gym, I wondered to myself — why am I going to the gym instead of sleeping this headache away? Why didn’t I take medicine last night, or yesterday afternoon? Why did I repeat the exact same mistakes I made the last time I had a headache like this?

Surely no one paid attention to me as I plodded along the sidewalk that morning; the street was relatively empty at such an early hour, and I was a bleary-eyed, unshowered, miserable sight to be seen anyway. So no one saw me blush to myself as I pondered these things — as I mulled over my curious habit of avoiding self-help whenever headaches strike. This is a stupid, senseless habit of mine, and necessarily a product of nothing other than pure stubbornness. But every time I get a severe headache, I suffer through the night and when I inevitably wake up with a head that has since acquired a built-in jackhammer overnight, I finally break down and take medicine. Then I marvel, just half an hour later, at how much better I feel. And I wonder what took me so long — and why I didn’t just pop the aspirin sooner. It sure would have saved a good twelve or sixteen hours of misery. And then I move past wonderment and I contemplate my stupidity in letting history repeat itself, over and over again.

It’s not just my headaches. Last fall (over a year ago!), I developed a rash on my wrist that itched like no tomorrow. Over the months, it got worse and worse, but instead of going to a doctor, I just … kept scratching. There were many times when the scratches would produce tears in my skin and subsequent welts. And those hurt! The rash spread until the entire region of my wrist was affected. In the meantime, I didn’t go see a doctor; I asked my dad what he thought it might be, but he’s not a doctor, so he didn’t know… and instead of scheduling an appointment, I just lived with it.

In the spring, the rash expanded to other parts of my hand, and as spring gave way into summer I realized something was definitely wrong with my skin. Only after multiple urgings from friends did I finally go see the doctor. By the time I saw her, I had had this skin problem for about nine months. That’s about 270 days of itching, scratching, rubbing, hurting, sometimes bleeding. And it took her all of five seconds to tell me it was eczema. Within five minutes, I had a prescription for ointment all ready to go.

Of course, then — it wasn’t enough to have a diagnosis; my stubborn self took an entire two weeks to get itself to the pharmacy to fill the prescription. It wasn’t because I’m lazy. I just tried to convince myself that I would be okay; I just kept praying that the thing would go away (the same prayer…for nine months), because I didn’t want to need the meds. Don’t ask my why; I don’t know why I’m like this. I just am. Anyways, after two weeks, the eczema continued to spread and I realized that whatever I was doing (or more like, whatever I wasn’t doing) wasn’t working.

I went to the pharmacy, got the meds, and… heh. Just like I marvel at aspirin’s power to take away pain in my head, I’ve been amazed by the magical powers of this ointment to draw down the effects of eczema within just days. Already I can feel my skin gaining a far more normal texture — something I haven’t seen or felt in almost a year. And I see how ridiculous my stubbornness is. I mean, really. I’ve been stupid.

I do wonder about why I’m so stubborn, and I’m curious as to where that comes from —  is it some feeling of power or strength, or independence, or… what? And at the same time, I surprise myself at my strange approach of non-care for these physical ailments, since all the while I have learned (the hard way) not to be stubborn in non-care for their emotional/mental corollaries.

* * *

During my first year in college, I became very ill during the last week of October. I distinctly remember going to a Halloween party dressed up as a ghost, and then sleeping through my alarm the next day. My friend Erik went to my dorm room to retrieve me for church, but when I answered the door, I couldn’t speak. Random rasps came out, but all he heard was the occasional syllable that managed to survive the vocal static that emanated from my throat. It was the weirdest thing, and I thought it would pass.

And sure, over the next week, my voice came back, but my health did not. Instead, my health declined significantly — I developed a persistent and severe cough that wracked my body through day and night and was audible all the way across the hallway, through closed doors. Weeks passed before I finally bothered to make an appointment, and I cried when the doctors wouldn’t let me leave, because that meant I would have to miss class. In the end, that class ended up being the only one I missed all semester, because I just kept fighting, even though I was severely ill.

The doctors wouldn’t let me leave that first time, because their tests showed that my lung capacity was so detrimentally affected by the illness that I wasn’t getting enough air. They pumped steroids into my lungs and subjected me to a battery of breathing tests through the afternoon until they were satisfied that my lungs were feeding me enough oxygen so that I could leave.

That wasn’t the end; I was seen by two pulmonary specialists at the clinic at least seven times in the next three months, but I was a medical mystery to them. They couldn’t figure me out — their tests revealed that my lungs were clogged in a manner too severe to be bronchitis, and both were clogged too globally to be pneumonia, which is usually local. What I had was worse — but they didn’t know how to help me. We tried treatment after treatment, and all the while — I kept going to class. In lectures of 500, I would wheeze throughout the class, and people must have thought I had some loathsome disease (and boy, did I), but so it went… that was life.

November and December came and went.  One night in late January, as I was home on break, I lay in bed at my parents’ house, and the wheezing was worse than ever before. I recall lying there, and having intermittent moments of inability to breathe at all. Rather than panicking, though — I just gave up. I remember thinking to myself, well — I guess this is how I’m going to go. I won’t make it through the night like this; this is the end. And… I was okay with that. I had my eternal security in Jesus, and I was tired of being sick all the time, and… really, I didn’t think that much apart from that. Nor did I get up and try to seek any help from my parents.The next morning, I was still alive. My breathing had improved through the night, and I slept enough to get me through the day — during which my brother drove me back to school, and I saw the doctor there again. I explained what had happened the night before, and as she took a listen to my lungs, she shook her head — Dr. Wilson just didn’t know what was going on with me. She put me back on the Advair discus again, even though it had failed to help the first time around, but she didn’t know what else to do.

Seven days later, I was completely well.

Dr. Wilson literally laughed and cried when she heard me breathe in and out, in and out, in and out again! Do it again!, she cried. And she called me a miracle child. After three months of trying to solve my medical mystery, she finally heard through her stethoscope what she had been hoping to hear all along. We were all in amazement, and filled with thanks. To this day, we still don’t know what exactly I had — or how, or why, it healed so quickly. Only God knows. Before I graduated from college three years later, I visited Dr. Wilson and brought her flowers, to thank her for taking care of me when I was so sick at the start of my college career.

That wonderful week of healing was not the end, though. Around the same time that I recovered from whatever-that-was, I developed serious sleeping problems. At night, I couldn’t fall sleep, and when I finally did, I woke up ridiculously early. Soon, I was surviving on only three or four hours of sleep a night, for weeks on end. Naps did no good, and I sat through classes feeling as though the world were spinning around me.

As a result, I was miserable, and slipped into a deep funk. Finally, one night, I couldn’t take it anymore. As I battled another sleepless night, I crawled up to my brother’s dorm room (three floors above mine), and knocked weakly at his door. It was past midnight, and God bless his roommate — Chris — who was so kind as to admit my sorry self and wake my brother up for me…

My brother, God bless him, was ever the strong support at my side. At that late hour, I sat on my brother’s bed and he sat beside me, and I told him that I was going to quit college. My health obviously could not withstand the pressures, the homework, the whatever — so I was ready to quit. I told him that three months had passed, and I no longer knew what it was like to be healthy. I was desperate to be well, and willing to give up higher education if need be. I just wanted my life back.

Mom soon caught wind of the degree of my troubles, and forced me to see a psychiatrist over spring break. I cried and cried, not wanting to have to see a “shrink,” and not wanting to believe that I needed any sort of intervention from mental health professionals. I wasn’t crazy, and I wasn’t mentally ill. I didn’t want therapy.

It wasn’t about what I wanted, though. In the end, I was taught to take what I needed — and like it or not, I did need therapy. I only went to the psychiatrist that one time (and he confirmed what I already knew — that I was mentally just fine), but after months of reluctance, I finally signed up for a therapy appointment at the end of the school year. It was so hard to drag my trampled pride into the office every other week to talk and inevitably to cry. I was ashamed to need this kind of help … or maybe I was ashamed to need any help.

I realized soon enough, however, that therapy was a necessary evil. And… gradually I came to understand that it wasn’t an evil at all. So for the next six years, I kept going to therapy. Through it, I was able to work through many problems; to sort through emotions that I didn’t realize beleaguered me; to address and finally put to rest a host of underlying troubles that manifested themselves in destructive ways.

My life is so much better for it — and I count myself extremely blessed to have been put through that rigorous wringer so early in life. I’m glad that I learned, relatively early in life, that it’s not a weakness to need help; it takes strength and courage to realize that we can’t do life on our own.