What Is Anxiety? Adam Young, a licensed clinical social worker and author of the podcast, The Place We Find Ourselves, describes anxiety as the experience…
Walking with Jesus in Asian American-ness
Category: #resource
I have to admit, I didn’t know anything about Mars Hill Church or Mark Driscoll before listening to “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hills“,…
This post is purely a shout-out to some of my friends. One of the things I aspired for this blog was to generate or spark…
Erwin McManus from Mosaic church in LA has been preaching a series on self mastery. Many Christians have a misconception that self mastery is the…
The church doesn’t talk about sex enough. And by talk about sex, I mean really talk about sex—not just warn young people against premarital sex,…
John Mark Comer from Bridgetown Church has a sermon entitled: “Different, Harder, Longer, Better” talking about dreams and visions from God, what role God plays…
I recently watched this highly inspiring TED talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian author and speaker, who talks about “the danger of a single story.” Stories have the power to influence and to shape. Stories inform our beliefs and they also shape perception of the truth. A single story, therefore, twists and misaligns reality to that single perspective and lands us with stereotype or incomplete “half-truths.” She describes several of her experiences from childhood as anecdotal evidence: growing up reading American and British stories in Nigeria, she heavily internalized the contents of those stories as representative of ALL stories.
I’ve been trying to read various different Christian books lately that are authored by people who are not white men. One of them is At Home In Exile, by Russell Jeung—Asian American Studies professor at SF State and incidentally, someone connected through the sister church that started my church, who has come to preach for us a couple of times. His book memoir details his narrative living in East Oakland’s “Murder Dubs” neighborhood, and finding solidarity and community with the Latino and Cambodian refugee families there. I found one particular passage particularly scintillating for me:
Has anyone ever noticed that God cares about justice? As I’ve been reading through the first couple books of the bible again (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and now Deuteronomy), I’ve been noticing just how much of the text by sheer volume is dedicated to societal laws. When Yahweh, the God of Israel, calls Moses to lead the Israelites out of Egypt so that they might live a different way of life, in worship of him, he calls them to be a radically different society from the one they were just in.
I have a rather pessimistic view on human nature as inherently selfish and sinful. Left to our own devices, I think humans tend to be self-absorbed. I wanted to take the opportunity to bring back two quotes, one from an article about performative allyship, and one from a conversation between Ryan Kwon, a Korean pastor, and Léonce Crump Jr., a Black pastor from Atlanta, Georgia about racial reconciliation. I’ll share both below and then give my own commentary and reflection.