improv situation

So it is noticeable that my blogging frequency has taken a nose-dive in the past two months. I refuse to say that my life has become busier. Even more, I dismiss any usage of aphoristic cliche as my excuse, like, I've just had my plate full. I was never meant to finish everything on it anyway, at least not by myself.

What I will say is this. My life is now something completely different. When I got married, this was the case. (To my single brothers: married life is not single life + a roommate who happens to be a girl.) It wasn't that my plate got piled on with more of the same; it was instead a whole new etiquette, a whole new menu, and the table was certainly larger.

But now, not only am I married (and happily so for 1 year and five months), I am now a foster parent to three teenaged children. Just to tell you about them would require another whole season of blogging. Maybe I will just do that. So the table has become quite a bit bigger and more multicultural. Now we have Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese being spoken in the house.

And all of this just happened so quickly. Which reminds me of what a professor mine told me when I broke the news to him. He said that Christians need to know how to improvise. We know the script (the Word), and we've done some rehearsing, but when something unexpected happens, how do we respond?

Who knows. Maybe when you're done reading this post, something or someone may come your way, your chance to entertain angels/angles.

yaking about yakima fruit market

I meant to compose this when the Yakima Fruit Market (YFM) in Bothell was still open. It is closed from November to March because the weather is too frigid to sell produce outside.

But let me minute-rave about YFM.

Just as you round the Bothell-Everett Highway on the north end of Lake Washington, almost out of nowhere, Yakima Fruit Market appears like an oasis. It is difficult to find good parking because it's right next to the road, but any space will do. There are two parts to the market: an uncovered portion and a covered portion. The uncovered space usually displays the market's seasonal items, including locally grown prize pumpkins, Washington Christmas trees, Easter decorations, and the like. It is an airy foyer to the main goods of the place. The products advertise themselves.

Then you venture into the covered part of YFM where there are rows and rows of local apples, berries, garlic, squash, fennel, leeks, etc. The whole panoply of produce is on the display, of course, in local quantities and without much of the wax that is used in grocery stores. Candy logs, honey sticks, and the usual dried fruit and canned goods are located further back. And the entire place has the faint sweet smell of a waking orchard. These are free range fruits and vegetables, uncaged and vegetarian-fed.

But what I appreciate most about the market is the people who work there. I cannot remember their names, but their presence is a familiar and comforting one. They have the presence of nurses in a, well, nursery ward: incredibly knowledgeable about each of their patients, busy, but never too busy to stop and tell you a good story or joke. I remember this one young lady with strong arms, tattoos fading, who shared that her favorite apple variety was Jonagold. It was she who informed me that Jonagolds have the color and tartness of a Jonathan apple and the starchiness and sweetness of a Golden Delicious. Hence, Jonagold! I didn't even know Jonathan apples existed. (And where, then, are the David apples? They need to make a cameo appearance...) She knew what she was talking about, and by her frame, I could tell that she probably had picked many of these apples herself.

YFM is one reason why I love local. They're so connected to what they do, from starch to finish. They have a rootedness, and they give life to those who come. When you buy from YFM, you're not just bringing home delicious produce at decent prices. You've entered a context. You know what has come before. You know where you are. You know where it's going. You bring home more of what it is: home.

what is a church for?

I'm no Wendell Berry or Alice Waters, but I sometimes wish I could be the Korean American male version of some hybrid of both. I think it is time that we stop seeing the church as a place to go and more of a mode of being. In short, I want a real local church.

There is enough distancing and disintegration in our lives. The weekdays from the weekend. The friends from the co-workers. The inner from the outer life. Not that boundaries aren't important, but what is it that holds a life together?

If church is the vessel through which people meet God, grasp the gospel, find fellowship, team up together, what are we saying when we say, "I go to church"? Is there a point where you don't? I mean, in its essence? What has happened, I believe and lament, is that our churches have become too disconnected from our neighborhoods and our communities. My fellow pastor-friend Ben Park said something to the effect, "we must guard against our churches becoming country clubs." Church is not a country club. It is neither a kind of separatist country that secludes itself until the End, nor is it a club used to beat moral sense into society. My church shall not be an escape pod from planet Earth.

Nor shall I countenance a church that sanctimoniously sanctions the status quo. (Ooh. A church in tension: intention?)

But I will be a part of a church that serves, lives, and dies for the people around it, the locals, the natives. I will be a part of a church that has real good news, and it will be right under our noses.

When there is no vision, the people perish. But when there is a vision, the people parish.

songs sung when you can't sing

singe the wick

of my candlestick

when there is no more tallow

sneak in the oil

your secret toil

when I feel shallow

shear these limbs

for your whims

or let me lie fallow

sore throat

The cold rain of Seattle

Lack of sleep due to trip to Portland

+ General sense of fatigue this past month

______________________________________

An unexpected reminder of my frailty,

which, when I subtract my strengths anyway,

there is still a kind of bonus that doesn't add up.

Even on this side of equilibrium,

I am being given the gift of myself,

a dissolution of the divisions of my life.

I am bread and fish broken, but

in order to be fruitful and multiply.

As I sip on this derivative of ginseng

to ease my throat, being full of phlegm,

I wonder at how sickness sometimes sucks

dry my moistened ambition and makes

me more integral, whole, and greater than

by being less than all this.

the art of justice

I recently ate at a buffet in Lynnwood and had to roll myself out of the double doors. Thinking back on it, I had to blame, if not myself, then the food. The food was just so good-looking and tasty.

Which got me thinking about basic necessities.

If someone who was poor was given everything he needed in order to survive--that is, food and shelter, even some company--but it did not include something called beauty, would his existence truly be human? If his food came to him in some paper bag, all mashed up into one blob of grub, yes, we could still say that he is being sustained, but would that be justice? We could give him a roof over his head and clothe him in the most holey of holeys, but would he have any standing among us?

In other words, justice and mercy cannot just mean the meanest of a livelihood, the bare scraps to scrape through the day. Justice is wedded to dignity and beauty--the opportunity to share. I think it unconscionable to practice the art of justice without the luscious brushstrokes of jubilee. Justice without beauty is like painting the rainbow with only black and white.