just bc

i miss u nathan

shout-out to costco in hawthorne, ca

of all the costcos i’ve been to, none rival the one in hawthorne. you are a friendly place with quick check-out lines and easy access to the 405. you are all that i could want of a costco.

but alas, the sad truth is that you make the culture of consumerism and waste that much easier to live out and your economies of scale alway favors those who have more bargaining power and squash out those who have less.

but oh your $4.99 rotisserie chicken is glorious.

the moral dilemmas of every day life!

strong women

I haven’t read much about the founders of the BLM movement and finally got around to watching a TED talk they gave today. They’re inspiring.

discouraged. feelings

I feel discouraged bc no youth showed up for the summer outreach youth group today in long beach. It’s not a major set-back and I was able to debrief with our partner agency staff, but it still feels sad when you think you’re putting together this awesome thing and no one comes to the party.

But, until the budget runs out, we’ll still keep trying. 

Recruiting youth into a new program is an area where I can use some major learning. 

Luke 16

Luke 16 is one of the most bizarre parables ever. I was always confused by it. Ugh ok I’m going to eat a garlic and chive pita chip even though the last time I binged on chips, my right jaw started hurting and it still hurts. DAMN IT. CHIPS. AHHH. Ok, I’m back. Those chips are from Sprouts and they are amazing. Someone left it on the check-stand area – it hadn’t even made it on the black conveyer belt thing and I couldn’t resist and bought it. Ok. Parable.

Luke 16 is one of the most bizarre parables ever because the master commends a questionable manager for being shrewd. I just looked up shrewd and it does not have such as negative connotation as I thought. Ok.

The master no longer trusts the manager with his property and in the midst of the firing process, the manager thinks of ways to make it after he has no job. It is the kind of thinking that reality tv stars in the united states adopt to prolong their five seconds of fame because they can’t handle performing actual work and are too ashamed to return to the fame-less world of mere mortals.

The manager thinks of a way to settle accounts with all the people who owe the master money in a way that ensures he will be welcomed into their homes after he gets fired.

And in the end, the master commends the manager for acting on self-interest.

Perplexing things:

-the master still doesn’t acquire all of his possessions in the end because people who borrowed from him only paid back a portion of what they owed…?

-if I were the manager, I would have said I was sorry and tried at least to get the master’s debtors to pay back the full 100% of what they owed.

-if I were a shrewd manager using my definition of shrewd, I would have confronted all the master’s debtors and gotten them to pay back what they owed PLUS interest and I’d then pocket the interest and keep that as cushion money for when I had no job.

Perhaps the shrewd manager in the parable was acting shrewdly with self-interest mixed with generosity because he wanted to gain friends who would house him. And he did that by canceling some of the debt.

And he was commended for that.

In conclusion, this parable confuses me and I would love to be enlightened on its implications.

The Parable of the Shrewd Manager

16 Jesus told his disciples: “There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. ² So he called him in and asked him, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.’

³ “The manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg— ⁴ I know what I’ll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses.’

⁵ “So he called in each one of his master’s debtors. He asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’

⁶ “‘Nine hundred gallons^[a] of olive oil,’ he replied.

“The manager told him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred and fifty.’

⁷ “Then he asked the second, ‘And how much do you owe?’

“‘A thousand bushels^[b] of wheat,’ he replied.

“He told him, ‘Take your bill and make it eight hundred.’

⁸ “The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light. ⁹ I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.

¹⁰ “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much. ¹¹ So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches? ¹² And if you have not been trustworthy with someone else’s property, who will give you property of your own?

¹³ “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”

¹⁴ The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all this and were sneering at Jesus.¹⁵ He said to them, “You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of others, but God knows your hearts. What people value highly is detestable in God’s sight.

personal narrative

a lot of the work my org does in long beach with youth involves diving into personal narrative and exploring the histories of youth whose parents or families were refugees from cambodia or vietnam.  obviously there is a lot of unaddressed PTSD from the khmer rouge in cambodia and pol pot’s regime in vietnam- not to mention the effect of war in general on a society. 

i think about the strength and the burden these youth and adults carry from their personal narratives and i hear about it in spoken word pieces performed.

i think about my own personal narrative, how so much is unknown or kept secret because it is shameful  or not-normal and my family is all about saving face. 

the chinese civil war circa 1949 tore up families who lived in china and that’s something that flows into my parent’s generation who reside in Taiwan because their political party lost the war and flows into my narrative. 

my grandpa joined the nationalist party in his youth, with no idea that he’d end up in taiwan never to see his family again. my other grandpa was a scholar who studied in japan (circa Japanese rule in china) and returned from japan to china to fight for the nationalist party for whatever reason- pride, duty, loyalty. my grandmas were farmers and other bits and pieces are unclear. everyone was poor at the time so i suppose being poor was just the norm. in one generation they rebuilt up a life after war and built a foundation for my parents generation to make a better future for themselves in the US.

everyone has a story of how he or she or they ended up in the US that usually involves some kind of toil somewhere down the line.

i think knowing both our spiritual and genetic heredity can help us flesh out our identity and that somehow is always good. 

crossword

i finished a crossword puzzle that someone else started today. i remember asking anna in 2006 or 2007 how she did crossword puzzles and she said they got easier once yu got used to them. i never understood how to do them. but today is a new day!

  

worst article i’ve ever read

https://www.google.com/amp/elitedaily.com/dating/10-things-feel-when-found-man-should-marry/1991702/amp/
the above link leads you to the most awful article i’ve ever read, promoting a worldview that is utterly disastrous and indicative of the deeper problem of how our society idolizes an unrealistic and self-indulgent vision of romantic love.

approaching relationships with the attitude of finding fulfillment or being fulfilled sets one up for failure. feelings are fickle and ought not to be used as the sole gauge of whether to marry someone or not. if i had kids, i would tell them this article and the views it promotes belongs in a trashy romance novel that they can read but should consider throwing in the trash.

love involves action and choice, not a passive receptivity of neurological hits of endorphin. and a marriage founded upon passive receptivity will never be anything beyond vacuous, vapid, and vain. today you make me feel good so i adore you. many tomorrows later, when sexual and physical attraction gives way to the mundane quotidian of no-make up, sweaty, fart human life, something more than emotions is needed to keep the relationship going.

this article should be renamed “10 perspectives that promote a worldview that will prevent you from having a lasting marriage”

—

the article was posted on fb by a nice person i met at church so i’m avoiding posting this on my fb wall. i don’t want to hurt her feelings.

kewl beans

it’s so hot right now and i’m listening to 5 hours of super mario music. i don’t handle heat very well and my brain is getting fried. i have no energy to do anything and even doing nothing is exhausting. but that is neither here nor there.

something interesting happened this week, all the animosity i had been feeling with my boss has dissolved and i felt this camaraderie with my office coworkers, serving this larger cause of intervening or preventing relationship abuse.

another neat thing happened this week and I celebrate getting to experience this. there’s someone in my office who i seem always to say the wrong thing to and when she responds to me, i feel that she’s purposely making me feel dumb and then i’ll say something in poopy tone. and so the cycle continues.

this last week i realized i could choose not to respond to her own cycles of feeling offended and lashing out, even if that offended me.

i realized it was possible to exit the cycle!

and at the end of the week, she actually walked over to my desk to talk to me about something.

SHALOM WINS!

this will be very awkward if she ever reads this post. oh well.

SHALOM WINS!

 

today was a good day

today was a good day.

i woke up to a sweet good morning message from nathan. i felt blessed to be in a relationship with him.

then later, adeline and I carpooled to the heskett’s place and i felt moved by the heskett’s hospitality in serving their neighbors. Neighbor-folk would stop by, skeptical at first, but then eat a burger or hot dog and stay around to chat. Some received prayer as well. There’s something very sweet about holding hands with someone you don’t know very well and others who you know well, praying together. by far my favorite thing to do was to wave to all the passer-byers, who aside from a few, would wave back. i think being in community with church family gave us the fearlessness to let down our walls.

one family in particular told us that they hadn’t eaten since morning and that they had 3 hours left to drive. they said they were hungry but didn’t have enough money to stop by and pick up something to eat.

a man who said he lived in the building for 20 years walked over and gave us an unopened bottle of rum from Barbados because he was so touched.

another man said that he had never seen anything like this and said a blessing over us, left, and then returned with some cash. He wanted to get behind whatever it was we were doing to bless others.

people would look confused when they saw the “free burgers” sign and shirley would respond cheerfully “freely we received and freely we give”

i think if i could sum up what i want to be the mantra of my life, it would be that sentence.

---

 

after the bbq, adeline and i headed over to another church fam’s place to get-together.

I love my church family.