Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, I don't play with my phone and last night I thought maybe I don't play with it enough: there must be something good, something better that I can do with it. So I found myself an app to identify plants, went into my photo album to do precisely that, surprised by how it actually worked, wasted 30 mins in sort of a good way. And I thought, Yeah, if I can do school all over again, this is the kind of thing that would interest me.  There are stuffs you put in your head because you need to use them, and there are others just for the joy and pleasure of their being revealed.  Somewhere in between exists a tenuous dance of the realistic and romantic, I suppose, if one doesn't mind the obscenity of such arbitrary sorting. Now I used the word "sort" twice already this morning, a word I don't often use.  There are 20 stand-ins lining up to deputize but I let the stranger stay.  I determined to do something I didn't even know the reason for an...

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, I usually don't hunt for stuffs to write about and they'd just come to me when I walk up the hill with Sumi.  Nothing in my head is that interesting compared to all the things happening out there. Like this morning: There was sun; there was breeze.  Then the breeze became wind and the sun no more, and with that came a sudden shower.  I tried to connect the events and misunderstood--the shower was from a lawn sprinkler.  Sumi grunted. Always be wary of a man who thinks a world only out of his head and means it only out of his heart--even his whole heart.  He's a magician; he shows what seems to be interesting but hides what's even more interesting.  Soon he forgets where he hides his truly interesting things and becomes a true illusionist. " First this: God created the Heavens and Earth—all you see, all you don’t see ," your translation of the very first words in the Bible. The words are not giving us a "scientific" account....

Dear Eugene, Do you think we will be surprised after we died and finally know what is on "the other side"? (To say there is nothing beyond this life is as wild a guess as saying there is.  So let's be an equal-opportunist and go with the latter to play along.) I imagine whatever we are going to "know" then is going to be strangely familiar, yet unlike anything we've ever "known" before. Less than a week ago I declared myself a failed father.  I said I have not done enough to engage my kids in a life of giving and now they are growing up with not the DNA of sacrificial generosity in their blood.  My bad blood flows in them, and it is squarely my fault. I was right, and I still am--from the perspective I chose to know myself. But this past weekend God revealed the fuller truth, something I knew all along and have been clever enough to pass myself off as living under its light. You are a failed father because you have not loved enough...

Dear Eugene, Yesterday afternoon the moment I stepped out of my front door to walk Sumi I heard a voice calling my name.  It was from the other side of the street, two houses down, where my neighbor whom I had visited only this past weekend resides. Only that it was not his voice.  And he is definitely not the yell-across-the-street-two-houses-up type. Hey Alex, have you seen the coyo(te)?   It's the whistling postman.  I don't know if it's the beard that made him look jolly or his bright whistling indeed carefree; he has a Christmas presence.  I could never make out the song he whistles, sometimes so loud that you could hear from the other side of a street, like a moving pin on a Google map that you could pinpoint which house he was at without seeing him. Of course he knows my name , I murmured, Of course!  He's the mail man, duh! But I didn't expect him to call me by my very name.  He could have just said, Hey, there! But why not? ...

Dear Eugene, The morning is soft and gentle.  It need not be, certainly not for Vancouver, not in September. I feel secure and easy this morning, like a rich man. A rich man who knows no God would say to himself, This is nice, how can I keep it nice longer?  Forever?  For myself, my kids, for as many generations after me as I can live to see? He forgets the others in this world.  He forgets his neighbors who do not feel secure and easy, who might never be rich like him.  He reads the newspaper and sees numbing statistic, reads his neighbors' face and sees blank paper.  He knows no one, not even himself, most of all not God.  He thinks about his next meal shortly after the last, but shall never be satisfied.  He lusts after his next weekend, his next getaway, his next moment of pleasure and relaxation, but shall forever find no rest.  Anxiety and fear shall never leave him.  He wants to kiss someone, anyone, and feels ashamed and...

Dear Eugene, "Is it me?  Please be honest and tell me, because I really cannot identify it!"  For the longest time that's how I've been pleading to my wife. I just couldn't figure out what it is about churches that suffocated me, time and again nipped my already-small flame in its bud.  I wanted to get along with people, move along the production line of God's Kingdom business, ride along the high tide of spirituality to reach high heaven.  But all I got was a bad case of sinusitis that lasted all seasons. "Could it be because it's a Chinese church?"  I didn't expect my wife to give me deep insight and sure enough she didn't. Later I came to realize, Yes, it might have something to do with culture, but, really, it goes much deeper and pervasive than that.  I am not a stranger to my culture's patriarchal, ham-fisted ways, but just because manhandling is carried out by another culture with more outward democracy, debonair finess...

Dear Eugene, What is a father?  What is a leader?  What is a man? Just because I am doing all the things that people expect me to do, it does not make me any of these by default.  There is always a vocation to ascend to. Thinking and doing, knowing and living, they can't do without one another.  I am trying to put things in very simple terms here, but the reality is far from being simple.  Volumes can be written, and in fact were written, about the great gulf between what we claim to believe and how we actually live.  Ephesians would be one. Walker Percy also asked the same question, in form of the many subtitles he gave to his book "Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book": or The Strange Case of the Self, your Self, the Ghost which Haunts the Cosmos or How you can survive in the Cosmos about which you know more and more while knowing less and less about yourself, this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 psychotherapists, and 100 millio...

Dear Eugene, After all these years I still shudder. I shudder at the thought of the kind of pompous soapbox orator I was on track to become if not for your kicking the soapbox from underneath me.  You are a gentle, most patient pastor, but you kick hard.  You have Jesus strength. I was interested in theology from very early on, gobbling up stuffs from all over the buffet table, not wanting to miss a thing, on a mission, with no time to waste.  I didn't notice signs of indigestion, even though what came out of me looked disgusting and certain stank to high heaven--in more senses than one. No one can claim to be on The Way that is Jesus without doing things, living life, in the Jesus way; you taught me.  You didn't say it in only so many words but in thousands more and a hundred different ways.  That's when I first knew what a true pastor, a true shepherd is.  I was very disillusioned about the whole church thing then. “ I want to develop discernme...

Dear Eugene, I am a father who could never stop talking and hates himself for it.  My kids know my passive-aggressive silence is usually short-lived, an aberration that does not even try to disguise as a remotely possible paradigm shift. One day this all shall cease, I told them, meaning my death.  I wonder if they know there are more than one ways for me to shut up.  The other would be when I cease to love.  One is often tempted to make such care-less mistake.  I wonder if they know how big and often a temptation this is to me. I wrestled my son a few days ago, quite literally.  A tussle became a scuffle and ended with a wrestle.  The urge came out of nowhere for me and probably for him and before we knew it we were hitting the ground.  Quick and dirty as it was, Bellow's "Henderson the Rain King" flashed over the celestial of my confusion, Costello's "I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down" rang between my ears. Then the strangest thing happe...