denver destroyed me, i never wish to return.
my bladder went out of control, my abdomen was constantly in pain. i felt like collapsing.
exceedingly cold, dry, dull, and white. utterly uninteresting and culture-less.
i am glad to be back in the bay, i am exceedingly grateful to live in one of the best places in the world.
in denver i feel mild discomfort 24/7.
needless to say i really don’t enjoy it here.
i feel a constant pain in my abdomen and cold almost always.
it feels bland here and i can’t wait to go home
and be closer to the sea level and my bbgg
I made it to the end. I didn’t think I could make it, I didn’t think I could last. Every week that I worked, I felt more out of place, more incompetent, more stressed, more wary. Yet, it seemed so hard to find another job.
Today was my last day at work. I praise God for leaving on genuinely good terms with my supervisor and the other staff. I feel good about leaving, I feel there is peace.
Today was my first day meeting the team of my new job, located in East Oakland. The neighborhood is different, the team is different, the feel is different.
Where the challenge before was to master excel, statistical softwares, problem solving in datasets, the challenge now is working within a community where I can only come from a place of humility. I have never worked with the native population before and learning their history confronts me with injustices I don’t know how to respond to.
I got this job unexpectedly and sporadically and it was the same job I had applied to roughly 11 months ago. I notice that the way God works in my life is to meet me in my own internal free-flowing and muddled random-ness with his clear Randomness. In the same way that Nathan came/left/came into my life, in the same way that I ended up working with high school youth, in the same way I broke from the narrative that my parents crafted for me and moved to East Oakland for another trajectory – I see the handiwork of God in yet another random unplanned and unexpected life thing. To paint a portrait, I think it’s like me trying to have a kid or something and in the end, all of a sudden one day someone’s aunt calls my mom and is like “hey can someone adopt my baby?” and then that would definitely be another example of how I’ve been seeing God work in my life. I think a real example that I just thought of is once when I really needed a parking spot and my friend gave me her UCLA employer badge that she kept even after she left working at UCLA. After feeling good about it, I felt awful and returned the badge though did not have a parking spot anymore. One day, I noticed a really old man crossing the street trying to pick up his glasses, I got off my bike to pick up his glasses for him and we walked to his house. I would stop by and say hi and he gave me chocolate bars that his kids gave him and also bottled water. One day he asked if I would like to park in his spot since he had some space in his driveway. That was a crazy story of God! HOW COME HE IS CRAZY?!?!
Lastly, to further demonstrate his abundance, today I got to meet up with an old mentor of mine who I partnered with me (by letting me teach her class once a week) and empowered me in many ways. She happened to be in SF and I happened to have time in this two day lull between leaving my current job and starting the new one. So many layers of relationships through work meshed together today, past/present/future. A reminder of God’s blessing.
Out of Darkness 