year 2, day 1

One year ago today, I was a wide-eyed, hopeful candidate for mission service on my way to New York City to begin training to become a young adult missionary. I was walking away from six years of grad school. I had two engineering journal papers sitting on desks of editors, waiting to be approved. I still had a year left on my lease at my apartment and was hoping and praying for a subletter. I just had last meetings for ice cream, drinks, bike rides, and dinner with some of my greatest friends. I met brand new people and made connections. I had lots of conversations about wrapping things up, handing things off, and staying in touch.

I had never experienced such a feeling of living in the moment. There was no planning. All the plans had been made, and then was the time to execute. I had to fully trust in the Spirit to stay afloat.

I had no idea what I would encounter in the next three weeks during training. My brothers and sisters in mission, along with their hopes, dreams, experiences, and callings. The issues of justice, those hard and heavy topics that I never learned about in school. The leaders, going to bed later and getting up earlier than any of us to guide us through our transition. The city. The bagels with schmear. The farm. The fleas. The beets and kale. The complaining. The unity. The worship.

And then we were commissioned, sent as missionaries far and wide as agents of transformation who would be transformed in the process.

Things fell into place. I was able to sublease my apartment. I cleaned out and gave away lots of stuff. I packed up and moved home briefly. I finally found an apartment in DC, and I moved in a week later. I got down to business.

During my first several months, I felt myself grow a lot in many ways. I had a lot of responsibility due to some transitions in the director of my placement, which I loved. I learned more and more about all of the hidden craziness (both good and bad) going on in our world, and came to greater understanding of my own privilege and ways that others are privileged over me (the latter, admittedly, are fewer). Finding ways to keep in touch with people in far away places became even more of a priority for me. I started playing Frisbee on the National Mall.

It’s been a wild and amazing ride.

That brings me to today, the halfway point. I have 364 more days to live this life before my term is officially completed. Recently, I feel like I’ve plateaued in a lot of ways. I’ve now heard all of our regular speakers for the Seminar Program, though we are recruiting more. I’ve settled into the day-to-day planning and follow-up activities of our work. I’m not feeling as challenged as I was before. I’m hoping to come up with some new ways to stretch and grow, and I know listening to God is going to be key to that.

I’m also looking to the future. The biggest question still remains: what is God calling me to? Engineering? Ministry? Education? Seminary? Something else?

I don't have a nice bow to put on the end of this post, so I'll leave it here.

Prayer Requests:

• As I begin my second and final year of mission service, that God would speak to me, and that I would have ears to listen to God and all the things that God has placed in me.
• For my brothers and sisters in mission, that those who have been in transition would find peace and that we all would be renewed, ready to finish the race.
• For my family, who are dealing with health problems.

my most important question: what am i doing here?

On June 22, I got the honor of sharing part of my call story and a question that I've wrestled with at The District Church. Every year, TDC has a sermon series called My Most Important Question where people from the congregation are invited to share a question that they have dealt with or continue to deal with. I love the spirit of this series - it gives people an opportunity to tell their stories, celebrating the fact that the faith journey is not an easy journey and that our questions, our messy experiences, and our intimate encounters with God and people are critical to that journey.

In the audio below, Pastor Justin gives an intro to the series, and then three of us share our stories in sequence. I'm the second speaker, between my friends Laurie and Bethany. My part starts around 17 min 45 sec and lasts about 10 minutes, but you're welcome to listen to the other two, who also had great things to say!

Laurie spoke about her struggle of seeking approval, especially from her mother, but not finding it. She asks, "Do they not notice me?" My talk hinges around my moment of consciousness, when I realized that getting my Ph.D. in engineering wasn't where I was called to be. In that moment, I asked "What am I doing here?" Bethany describes her tough years with a bad marriage and divorce, along with the additional fear of the stigma the church may put on divorced people, as she asks, "Where is joy in my trials?"

Take a listen, and I hope you are blessed!

when did we stop playing?

How would you define imagination? When I asked my seminar participants this today, they used some of these words and phrases: Visioning. Dreams. Transcendent humor. Even Spongebob.

I followed that up by reading the creation story, Genesis 1:1 – 2:4, from the Message version of the Bible. While it’s really not what you want to use for serious Bible study or exegesis, I really like to pull out the Message once in a while for its fresh, earthy, and non-academic language. Through the scripture, it’s fun to watch, in your mind’s eye, the creation story unfold as God’s divine imagination becomes a reality. I like to think of God as an engineer (big surprise, right?). God imagined the universe, designed it, and then built it – speaking it into existence.

I can remember being young and climbing all over a fallen tree with my friends and my brother, pretending the tree was a spaceship. We’d land on alien planets, fire the lasers, and gather “crystals” (aka, bottles and jars we found in the dirt, filled with creek water) to power the ship. We would run around in the woods and play all day on those warm, summer days until it got dark and our parents made us come inside.

When I was visiting the Seminar Program in New York City last fall, one of the speakers, a theater guy, asked us to pretend we were in all kinds of interesting situations: walking through honey, hurrying somewhere on the coldest day of the year, on your way to your first date with the girl/guy of your dreams. At the end of all this, he asked a question that hit me like a ton of bricks.

When did we stop playing?

Whoa. The more I think about it, the more I realize that I/we haven’t completely stopped playing, but it really isn’t something that happens on a daily basis. I remember a few weeks ago, a few friends and I were hanging out, and we pulled out some Nerf guns (sorry pacifists) and ran around the house marking each other in good fun! For others, playing looks like finding creative ways to make running a mile more challenging.

This kind of playing is all good fun (depending on who you are) and can be a needed escape from reality, but others still have found more humanitarian ways to play and exercise imagination. At Capitol Hill UMC, we have begun a sermon series promoting the UMC Imagine No Malaria campaign. It’s all about visioning and moving toward a world where malaria, a disease that claims a life every 60 seconds, is no longer a reality. We want to eradicate it worldwide, just like we did in the US in the 1950s. Simple preventative measures, such as a $10 bed net, along with education on how and why to use it, can protect a family from malaria-carrying mosquitoes while they sleep, the time when people are most vulnerable to bites and subsequent infections. Think about ways you might get involved in this, or something else that inspires your passion and sparks your imagination.

As I write this, I come to this thought: aren’t the times we feel most alive also the times when we are playing, brainstorming, and letting our imaginations soar? I hope you get a chance to get outside and play today.

Newsletter Issue 2: Catching Up

Finally, I got another newsletter to the presses! Take a peek, and I hope you enjoy. Please let me know if you'd like to get on my email or postal mailing lists to recieve a copy by either of those means next time around.

Stay blessed!

Prayer requests:

• Next Tuesday, I speak at the 60th annual Missions Conference at Lanes Mills UMC, my home church where I grew up! I'm excited and nervous, but hope to deliver something good!
• My Grandma Elsie (97 years young) recently needed to be placed in a nursing home. It's been a hard transition for her and for the rest of the family, so your prayers are welcomed.
• Thank God for spring warmth and sunshine!

reblogged: crazy, driven, hard-workin' believers

So I decided to reblog myself. Trendsetter, I know. This is guest blog I wrote for The Book of Fellows, the blog for United Methodists Young Adult Missionaries. Check it out and see what my peers are up to and thinking about. Thanks to all who dialoged with me about the video below and for some great insight from sermons at The District Church. Enjoy!

How does this commercial make you feel? What do you think about it?

I’ve mulled this one over with a number of friends, and typically one of two responses arise. One affirms the commercial. Work hard! It’s the pathway to success, achievement, and fulfillment.

The other is usually some kind of shock or repulsion. People with this reaction are the folks who have worked hard, but haven’t moved upward. Others with this response have climbed to the top, or at least near enough to see that more hard work is all that awaits them. Still others have experienced the lives of those who have no choice but to work hard. I think of my friend Emmanuel, a high school student in Liberia. His daily routine: run to school, take a quick shower at the pump, learn and absorb in class, buy a cup of rice at the market, cook it, eat half, save the other half for breakfast, study, and sleep. That’s a hard day’s work.

Hard work is a virtue for sure, but does not necessarily correlate with accomplishment, success, or even being able to meet one’s own basic human needs. Of course, these basic needs do not come without some elbow grease. They also don’t typically come without some degree of privilege. I think this is the component the “work hard” community often misses.

For a long time, I thought my academic success was due to my hard work. Later, I realized that I actually worked a lot less than most of my peers! I definitely put in the necessary effort, but the gifts God gave me allowed me to excel. Now when people discover I studied engineering and praise my smarts, I have to be honest and say I’m just gifted and would fail miserably in other fields!

But there is another component we should also consider as people of faith:

He said to me, ‘This is the word of the Lord to Zerubbabel: Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, says the Lord of hosts.’
Zechariah 4:6 NRSV

Zerubbabel, governor of Judah after the exile, oversaw the rebuilding of the Temple, which was gutted and destroyed when Israel was conquered. Rebuilding such a significant edifice was a tremendous task, compounded by neighboring nations’ opposition and by Israel’s pursuit of “the good life.” Hard work was needed, but so was a reliance on the power of God’s Spirit to have the right heart attitude, sufficient strength, and the willpower to stand against the naysayers. Anything of lasting value is done in community and is done by the power of God’s Spirit.

Treat yourself to a quick exercise: reread the scripture above, but this time, replace Zerubbabel with your name. Do you perceive the Lord of hosts speaking this into any area of your life right now?

Here is my challenge: work in earnest, be cognizant of privilege, and enter into the work of the Lord. This is the pathway to success, achievement, and fulfillment before God. At the end of the day, I hope we stand before Jesus and hear, “Well done, good and faithful servants.”

So – what kind of crazy, driven, hard-workin’ believer are you going to be?

a brief sketch of my journey so far

This article will appear at a later date in the General Board of Church and Society's Faith in Action Newsletter as part of a series of staff profiles. About a year ago was when I firmly decided it was time for a change in my situation, and now seems like an opportune time to revisit this here.

Update: a version of this article has been published in Faith in Action on July 11, 2014.

Photo credit: Wayne Rhodes

“You’re doing ok, but you still have a ways to go. I don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel yet.” This was not what I wanted to hear from my academic advisor as I neared the end of my sixth year in grad school. A Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering at the time, I was growing weary of research and academia, and I longed for something more purposeful. Also growing at the time was my Christian faith, and throughout grad school, I struggled to connect faith, my aptitude for science and math, and an awareness of the brokenness in the world. While my advisor's comments really cut to the heart, it was his honest assessment of my progress and it was a talk that was long overdue. That conversation lead me to begin an earnest search for something new.

Through a series of connections, I landed on the US-2 Young Adult Missions Program of the UMC (now known as the Generation Transformation Global Mission Fellows Program). After an extremely thorough application and a couple interviews by online video chat, I was accepted into the program, trained, commissioned, and finally placed at the General Board of Church and Society with the UM Seminar Program.

It’s hard for me to imagine a more perfect placement. Since I spent ten years studying engineering, I only had some cursory exposure to social issues. Here, I am surrounded by experts in a variety of areas. Through the Seminar Program, we invite these and many other authorities to share their work with our groups, and I get to learn right alongside them. Teaching and tutoring have been longtime interests of mine, but haven’t felt the pull to formally study education. Being on staff at the UM Seminar Program gives me opportunities to hone my skills in facilitation, education, and curriculum design. Most importantly, this place gives me room to listen for and discern my calling with the support and guidance of a wonderful and wise staff.

Working with my Seminar Program groups is inspiring. Some of my seminar groups are full of knowledge. My first group, a youth group Morrow Memorial UMC in New Jersey, could name all eight Millennium Development Goals while most people have never even heard of them.  Some groups come with a wealth of experience. Groups of Habitat for Humanity AmeriCorps Volunteers brought frontline accounts of affordable housing and neighborhood revitalization. All groups, at least so far in my brief tenure here, have come with cups, ready to be filled with more knowledge and more experience, and be sent into the world. They are so much more than just vessels to be filled, though. These groups also come with a sense of adventure, ready to be challenged both intellectually and emotionally, truly engaging in topics that many have the choice and privilege to ignore.

The work challenges me to understand the current state of the world and how we move to the way God intends for us to live. How do we balance personal choice and free agency with social responsibility and the common good? How can providing immediate aid (mercy) and addressing root causes of societal problems (justice) work synergistically instead of one or the other having preference? What is the government’s role in these? What is the church’s role in these? What is my role in these? Many tough questions, no easy answers. Fortunately, I’ve always enjoyed a challenge.

After years of feeling vocationally disjointed, I’m now gifted to be abiding in a place of growth, purpose, and challenge. Where will God lead me next? Many people ask me if I will return to school and finish my Ph.D. At the moment, I don’t feel called to do so. I have a few other ideas, but I also have time to discern and decide.

reblogged: reversing the foster care waitlist in dc

I know what you're thinking. "Hold up - it's Tuesday, why is there a new post here?" I do what I want. And this is posted before Wednesday. And it's timely. And it's reblogging, which comes with it's own set of rules which I make up as I go.

Actually, before I reblog, I'm going to do a little writing, but feel free to skip my hot air and go straight to the links at the bottom.

I wanted to share a couple blog posts from an organization called DC127, a brainchild (maybe heartchild?) of some folks from The District Church, an awesome faith community in DC of which I'm a part.

The name DC127 is based on James 1:27 and the mission is uniting to reverse the foster care waitlist in Washington, DC. In other words, we want more families in line to care for a child than there are children waiting for a family.

As a sciency/mathy kind of guy, to me, the idea is as intriguing as it is joyful. It's like a chemical reaction. Reactants A (kids waiting for care) and B (families who are willing to provide care) combine to create Product AB (a full family). Right now, we have an excess of Reactant A, so we need to mix in more of Reactant B if we want to eliminate A and arrive at the desired product AB, hopefully with a stoichiometric excess of B.

With me?

Ok, maybe that brought back nightmares of high school chemistry for some of you. But trust me, it's a good idea.

My purpose for reblogging this is twofold.

One, I want to raise awareness of the issue. Kids need a stable place to grow up if they are going to recognize their true worth and have the best shot at all the good things that God has created and planned for us. 400,000 kids are in the US foster care system, and about 1,300 of those are in DC. That's a lot of people, but I'd say the DC127 mission is realistic. What do you think?

Two, DC127 is in a campaign to find 46 regular donors to support the work. Why 46? The average child waits 46.7 months, almost 4 of their most formative years, to find a family. If you feel called, I hope you'll reach out and see how you could support, even for $10 per month.

So take a peek at the following well-written articles and let me know what you think.

Exactly where we should be

The cost of doing nothing