I hate moving

so many objects that have meanings attached to them

I’m a hoarder.

I keep getting overwhelmed and sleeping on the floor in the middle of all these objects.

full of meaning.

God wisdom

God, give me wisdom on how to handle this situation. I am talking to a woman and she called the cops on her husband because he physically and verbally abused her. they are Taiwanese, their accent reminds me of my parents. They have three kids. The man abused his wife and went to jail and is back. Now the police are here and I’m on the line. 

Can I just say DAMN.

Joy

  

Picture from Germany. The guy on the left, Nate, was one of our base camp leaders. I love this photo. The man on the right is from Syria. He went through hell in his home country and went through more hell to get to Germany. He accepted Christ into his heart as savior and King. I love how he identifies with Jesus’s victory over sin and this photo captures that joy that triumphs through the mourning. 

I want to kidnap these babies

I’m at my friend’s baby dedication. All these Latino babies. cuteness overload.

  

it is so hot here. no ac. i cannot bear the scorching summers in LA.

some thoughts

My job requires that I travel. Working at CPAF, a mid-sized non-profit, requires wearing different hats and that requires traveling to different sites. I love what I do but driving around LA and Orange County makes me want to return to the East Bay, where there are real trees (palm trees are not real trees, more like giant grasses) and less hectic-ness, where it isn’t an unbearably arid land that doesn’t support life. The East Bay, where roads are more narrow and where one can travel via public transportation without wanting to scream from unbearable inefficiency. The number of cars on the road here are like ants swarming around crumbs, the number is overwhelming. I do despise driving here.

I can’t imagine parting with my church community though.

My job is amazing and my coworkers are so supportive, though I feel a constant level of stress for having to juggle so many different tasks in a week. It’s making my gingivitis worse and if there’s one thing I won’t have much of by the time I’m 40, it’s probably my gums.

Today, I went to the shelter to help translate for mandarin-speaking clients. I prayed before going that I’d have supernatural ability to translate and God gave me an amazing ability to recall vocabulary words I rarely speak-that I won’t be able to recall as I blog. I think the mandarin clients like when I translate because at the end, they start speaking more in English, as they see me scrambling to speak Chinese and realize that their English ability is much better than they think.

 

 

 

on black lives matter

The talk on BLM seems to pit black folks against the cops. If the cops were less brutal, less militaristic, less racist, than less black lives would be lost = the thinking.

I’m starting to think this thing we’re seeing with cops shooting black folks on the basis of them being black is really the symptom of a deeper problem that is entrenched into our society. That problem is one that results in the thought experiment that if we replaced the cop who shot Philando with ourselves, the scenario would have played out similarly. The cops don’t start their day thinking they will shoot an unarmed black man, they are doing their jobs and responding to snap judgments. The deeper problem has to do with racism and the way we view black men in our society-which leads to certain snap judgments. 

Similar to the Occupy movement, we’re dealing with something deeper, that can’t be eradicated so easily with policy. Occupy pitted the enemy as big banks, but really the enemy was more insidious- it was greed. The force behind police brutality has more to do with historically entrenched racism that affects our perception of black men than police brutality. There’s something weird when we associate a certain kind of dress and language with a certain kind of people and designate all of that as being dangerous and bad.

all of this had the markings of sin and its consequences written all over it and the solution again and again is based in the heart- it is the gospel. 

learning

something I really appreciate about my job is the fact that it is a small non-profit where all the staff have to take on leadership roles. part of me dreads it but I know I can grow here in the directions that are the most painful for me- which is the direction of leading people. 

I have never really had experience with facilitation at day long events and today I got to step into facilitating a group. am I naturally good at leading people? nope. am I good at projecting my voice? nope. do I feel awkward? yup. but still, got by with others showing me lot’s of grace. 

 

pause

Is there a pause button? And perhaps a manual on how to live this life?

Slow down everyone you’re moving to fast / frames can’t catch you when you’re moving like that 

on genocide

I remember hearing about Oscar Grant and how the police shot him in 2009 on his way home from a New Years celebration. The dragged him out and shot him execution style at Fruitvale Bart. The cop who shot him confused his gun for a taser so he says and got a light sentence- more like a slap on the wrist than a felony murder charge. What a retarded and power hungry cop. What a flawed legal system. One time event though I thought.

I was pissed. When Trayvon got shot, I was pissed too. Ferguson. Then I lost track. Police keep getting away with slaps on the wrist. It’s 2016 and history seems to be repeating itself over and over again. In fact, things are more tense now between police and the black community. There is even greater distrust, especially after 5 cops were shot by a very angry and very hurt man. 

Part of me has become dead to this because it’s been normalized and this conversation actually happened yesterday over small talk:

did you hear about the shooting?

no, did another cop kill a black man?

yeah. 

*waitress comes by*

are you ready to order?

yeah.

and then we ate dinner.

What The Fuck.