Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, Summer morning, feeling something is missing is not the proper feeling for a day like today, right? Melancholy should be reserved and preserved for the rainy season, which will surely come, soon enough.  Getting sad too quickly is drinking hard on your youth; you empty your bottle to prophesy about emptiness. Now I need hardcore theology, I think, words that poke right into the wound of it all.  This Thomas is at the right place to give the finger. It's strange, if I stop to think about it, when I am really ready to get down and dirty about stuffs, of all the things I've read, science, literature, politics, history, it is theology that I would reach for. Everything is only partially true, even theology, but great theology allows, invites, and encourages the greatest impartiality to all partial truths. I pity those whose theology doesn't do that.  To poke around soft wound with hardened heart is a hell of a melancholy. Yours, Alex

Dear Eugene, Four big men are working on my trees now.  I admire big man doing big thing with big hands. I served them water; I gave them smiles and many thanks before even the first fell; I will pay them more than what they've asked for.  But what else can I do?  What else can I do for them to know I really appreciate them, that they look like demigods on their Adamic quest to answer to God's call, to carry out the vocation of human with blood, sweat and tears?  And what a sight it is--they are--to behold? I took one picture of one man at work, very discreetly, from my daughter's bedroom window, just for my own, my memory.  That's all; I won't take any more.  They must hate it in this day of cellphone and instantaneous sharing, putting in honest effort under the scorching sun and against bitter gust only to finally be spoken about like zoo animal, captured by a tiny furtive press on a little timid screen, maybe with a few thoughtless words of nega...

Dear Eugene, There is this button we all wish we have.  And if we do have we would use it frequently.  We might even lay a stone on it to ensure it never pops back up and disrupts our desired autopilot status quo. The button does many things, eventually, but does only one thing.  It changes the mind. The mind of the other person. It's really simple to use and goes like this.  Say, you want strawberry milkshake but your friend wants chocolate.  Both of you know neither can (or should) finish one full shake on your own.  You know the way to go is to share.  You don't want chocolate in your strawberry and your friend feels the same but works his wish from the polar opposite.  It's either-or. So you, secretly, press the button, which is convenient and inconspicuous enough, because the button is on your right thumb nail.  You raise your right arm, wrap the left around your belly to have the left palm support the right elbow, and then...

Dear Eugene, My daughter passed her driving road test yesterday. She is a cool cat, playing her guitar, singing, right before the test, song of trust, trusting God, I heard.  I hope I know how to stay chilled like her when it gets hot. During the one-year journey leading up to yesterday, this father was feeding on words of encouragement and wisdom from friends and family, even strangers.  Even the night before the test. I first got the idea of not putting her through formal driving class from a family, five kids, a father, a mother, all down-to-earth.  A few months before my daughter was ready for her written test, I asked this father, It must have cost you a fortune to put all your kids, one after one, behind the wheel?  He said No, I taught them all. There I saw a possibility that the rest of the world-- my little world--was insisting on its nonexistence.  So I followed the lead of this father, inspired to see new things, to try old ways. It w...

Dear Eugene, What if every time I am About to take in a morsel of food I would remember someone who has No morsel of food to take in And plead to God Ask Jesus to    Pray through me    Act through me    Live through me to--I don't know... ...break the morsel and give one half                                                                 away? Would that not be a miracle To multiply morsel                         morsel                               morsel To mu               ti                    late this diseased heart? Yours, Alex

Dear Eugene, Can a person yearn for God without compassion in his heart?  Can a person go through a day without agonizing about the suffering of others, restoration of a broken creation, and still think somehow God would fit in the picture? Some theology tells us compassion has nothing to do with it.  Not that we don't talk about God is love, but being "in the right" with God is all about God's "choosing."  Choosing me , of course. The conclusion is, it is important to care for others (especially when getting closer to Christmas), but not essential for a person to "make it" to "heaven."  What marks a person out is her "conversion" experience, "saying yes to Jesus," and the rest (such as loving others, even our enemies) we can work on it, at times in earnest, but certainly no need to be the first thought in the morning.  What I need is to hold on to the blessed assurance that God has chosen me, and everything e...

Dear Eugene, Do you like writing?  You must, I am sure.  But it's the kind of thing that you truly like that makes you truly suffer, isn't it? Well, I love writing, but hate the things I need to do to get myself to write.  I don't hate them for what they are, but for being the price I must pay to enjoy a luxury I can't afford but now that I can't find a way to disafford the luxury I must pay the price. This morning I almost forgot to kick my son out of bed and I was 5 minutes late and that makes a difference cos he is taking the bus to volunteer.  Guess who's to blame if he misses his bus? I opened the blinds of his bedroom window and said, Get up now and I am late waking you.  He looked at the clock and proclaimed, Wow, 5 minutes, what luxury!  And that word, luxury, brought out a deep resentment in me, like magma waiting all its life to burst out to give the world a hell of an apocalyptic party. The word might be his feeble attempt at early-m...

Dear Eugene, I am getting ready for Christmas. Yesterday morning I woke to the vision to bring someone home to our Father, someone I don't know yet, someone I know God has already named but waiting for my obedience to turn a page in his/her homecoming story. It's obvious my vision was brought to bear also by an act of obedience, my pastor preaching on (and living!) what he called "the happiest chapter of the Bible," Luke 15 , the Story of the Lost Sheep in particular.  Lost and found.  Lost then found. I am now living right in the very tension of the unveiling then .  It feels weird.  My heart is happy, but there is a faint pain somewhere in my guts. I can't see the person's face yet; almost, but not yet.  But the person is close and I can feel that.  I am seeing through a glass darkly but there is for sure a shape. I need to get ready, that's all I know, that's the only thing I heard, a voice that came with the vision, and the vision h...

Dear Eugene, Why write in verse?  Why poetry? Cos God does that, right from the get go, Genesis words. Cos things are often gleefully obvious, like the mystery of a tiny smear of berry sauce landed on my t-shirt right at the belly that perplexed me for a good half of yesterday and forgotten soon after my hesitant unsmearing, finally demystified today at 6:58 when for the second time in an hour I laid jam on bread like I did for many yestermorns.  God hides in the Garden, but does it like a child, means to be found.  Peekaboo! Cos honest emotions are pretty direct and presumptuous about a ready and willing recipient. Take, say, the story of  Mary and Martha .  I don't know how many times I've heard different iteration of a false dichotomy, pitching work against leisure, task-oriented Type-A against relational Type-B, working-my-ass-off-for-my-Lord vs. chillin'-on-the-beach-with-my-best-pal-JC. Well, it is a short story and there are not too many li...

Dear Eugene, I got into an argument again with my son last night and wrote this: I dive into a different layer Swim with no sound To not disturb you-- No, not again , I say    Never again If I C an I Ever again Swim in a wavelength of       freedom           guilelessness                                        grace            solitude                  and all the clichés of once being young Like you? Yours, Alex

Dear Eugene, I pressed veggie against Dry paper for daughter's lunch in A close future with Forest in My mind Merry-go-round The dampness could have gone in A spinner like little delinquents pushed against Wall to squash truth out of Them as an answer adequate to Gravitational pull My mind Forest in A close future with daughter's lunch in Dry paper for I pressed veggie against My knowing Yours, Alex

Dear Eugene, Cave Children, resurfaced I wonder what they have seen? Deep darkness, deep truth     shallowed again What you see is what you get is what you see: Life full of promises, propositions--     true possibilities? The light is strong, the sun true;     the farmers, where? They've prayed their way out of Garden     to play somewhere else     encrusted by the surface of things     waiting for a message From the Cave Children. Yours, Alex

Dear Eugene, This morning I thought whoever repainted my kitchen window sill didn't do a good job, for there is a sliver of very thin brush stroke that is of a different shade of white than the uniformity of everything else. I held out my right index finger, to touch the texture of the sliver, to feel the mistake that it is.  The sliver, like a little worm, crawled its way above my fingernail, instantaneously gave it a different shade just as it did to the window sill. The "thin brush stroke" turned out to be a very faint shred of reflected light cast on the sill, and now my fingernail, its source obscure and doesn't matter to me anyway; for all I needed to know is it was no "mistake" at all. My painter was a great craftsman, and that paint job was done a few years ago when he rebuilt my kitchen.  Since then under many different shades of light I've been looking at the same sill every morning and found no off-color artifact on it. Yet all it to...

Dear Eugene, There is no bad photographer in this day and age. Or there shouldn't be any. I don't know if you have a camera phone and had done this before: You took a picture without you knowing, pressed the screen by mistake as your arm swung.  And by the time you witnessed the result of the accident you said to yourself, Hey, that doesn't look too bad at all . In fact, it was downright beautiful. So I have a good phone, you said, with a good camera, high definition, great detail, automated luminosity balancing and color enhancement, all these, working together, and a fleeting, lucky happenstance.  You said. I said. What I failed to say is the (much) more obvious: That this world is just downright beautiful.  (And my camera just happened to call me out of my unawareness and forgetfulness.) And if the result of my many "accidents" looks purposeless or meaningless or lifeless, all it takes is a little reframing, cutting off distracting elements f...

Dear Eugene, Paper and pen, I suppose I know how they work.  I wrote a note and put it in the fridge, to indicate to my daughter which lunch is hers.  The lunch is fresh and well preserved, but my idea of paper and pen, notes and words might not be. As compared to when?  When I first knew them. The power of doodling, a child knows that.  Pen goes around in circle, never ending: nothing on paper makes sense; everything is made sense on the paper.  Like the secret of oneself is somewhere hidden in the layers of overlapping circles.  Parents often claim their four-year-old can paint a Pollock .  Well, maybe they did. Maybe we did. Maybe there was a time when we were free to give away a part of us without fear and shame and couldn't see why the Other , the receiver of, the witness to our giving would refuse our gift or take it to mean something else. It's childish, of course, to expect that, we then grow to understand. To believe there is ...

Dear Eugene, The Bible...like, how do we even read this thing? How I wish the church would be honest enough to ask this question out loud, because then at least there is an awareness to seek a way out. A river brings joy to the city of our God,      the sacred home of the Most High. 5  God dwells in that city; it cannot be destroyed.         From the very break of day, God will protect it. From the very break of day , our life tells of a story unbiblical, often anti-Gospel, frequently downright Jesus-hating.  River, joy , city , home , none of these word resonates in our head, for our heart is full of a gigantic Nothing and all day long we struggle to find a way to do Something to and about this Nothing.  Sometimes we would throw out-of-context Bible verses into the gigantic Nothing and wish the wishing-well won't eat our coin and leave us a penny less. I've never led worship at church, and if I ever get a ch...

Dear Eugene, This morning I met some beautiful Hydrangea Macrophylla on the roadside and I asked Hey beautiful how did you get there? and she replied None of your business . 朝花夕拾 (Morning flower; evening gather). Beautiful she is now but not for long.  I know where she came from, the other side of the road, a big family of shrub. Now she is free but rootless, looking timeless yet aging like a time-lapse, exposing the banality of her surrounding by opening wide to the exploitation of every not-so-humdrum element.  I shall walk the same path tonight at around sunset and it will be a funeral procession for her. Yes I know , she said, but I would rather die this way. No compromise?  I tried again.  No in-between? I don't fit in, where I came from. What do you mean by that?  You look just like everyone else from where you came... Well, that's the point .  (She paused)  I don't want to live and die like everyone else. So I let her be...

Dear Eugene, Last night at a picnic I sat quietly by a friend I've known for years, not wanting this or that, both of us taking in the same sea breeze and fading sun warmth, both of us in a world of our own.  Then she turned to me and started to tell me her life story, her deepest pain, things I did not expect to hear then or ever. She kept saying no one could ever understand her but she talked as if I would.  She said the only person she could truly converse with is an inner voice when she is alone and finally do away with all the daylight bullshits to stay alive on the exterior of things.  Last night I was her inner voice, and I did not make a sound. Her opening line of the night was, "Ah Yee (my Chinese name), I can tell you are a real person--" Not much in life was real to her, not the sea breeze, not the sunset, not the things she has given her whole life for.  Even the one thing people know her for being an enthusiast of she confessed she had never ...