Prospectus

Remember college viewbooks? Those glossy marketing pitches that schools mailed to you junior and senior year after PSAT's and state tests.

Come and see, they beckon. 

Hear what our own have to say about us!

Join us and this is what you'll become.

Join our mission! Catch our vision!

Ah, enlightenment.

So you apply yourself.

The university prospectus.

* * *

I remember viewbooks. How religiously I read them.

I collected them. Fascinating, pretty things of hope, promise, life, future, and identity to me. Tantalizing.

I was sold. Somewhere in a basement in Naperville, there are still 30 some viewbooks fileboxed away.

* * *

Such appeal.

They were an appeal to your freedom and choice.

An appeal to your wallet. All this bang for your buck! Or 50,000 bucks yearly. Worth it!

An appeal to your time. In just four years, they promise, we'll make you youer than you! A difference of a lifetime!

An appeal to your imagination. To become one of those Brooks Brothers-clad souls, walking, laughing, books in hand, a leather messenger slung cross-body, under towering stately oaks and flying stone buttresses. Imagine! the life! the access! the privilege! Join the aristocracy!

(all images above adapted from apply.jhu.edu)

An appeal to your affections.

* * *

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth,

where moth and rust destroy...

but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven...

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

// Matthew 6.19-21

"It's obvious, isn't it?" says Eugene Peterson. "The place where your treasure is, is the place you will most want to be, and end up being."

* * *

The prospectus, appealing to your heart, shows you who you'll become.

And in your choice, your priority, it reveals to you who you already are.

Where you aim your heart, where you set your sights,

There. is your reward, your heaven.

It will dominate your vision, hold your imagination,

warp time and experience,pull your whole life to itself.

Yet once more I will shake not only the earth,

but also the heavens...

in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain.

Therefore let us be grateful

for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken...

August 8, 2007

for our God is a consuming fire.

// Hebrews 12.26-29

i was H-bound.
hopkins-bound. hell-bound.

Christ had mercy on me.

He loves me.

Volleyball

This year, the year I learned to love team sports, was the year that I began letting go of all that my parents had never done for me, and all that they'd done to me. They didn't let me play even when I made the cuts in high school.

So props to the bros who first believed and took a chance on my noobness. A first taste of playing like a team and playing to win. And later, a stark glimpse of what it costs to not trust and cover each other and play as one.

Growing up means mom and dad can't be excuses anymore, for me not going for it or anything. Walking on to the team that season and having to earn my place--it was the year I began unlearning Mom's insistence that raw talent was all that mattered. Sugar and gold and clay alike need grueling. Working my way off the bench into the starting lineup, earning that white jersey, man, I had the time of my life! It was a godsend, a healthy distraction, the blessing of busyness, to keep me forward facing and forward moving. I believe in team sports! ... Bullieve? :)

So CUNY's athletic program, like its academic program, is a total joke. So we were a ridiculously large, ragtag rookie team. But in Division III we played--with Heart. The mental toughness you had to muster in order to be in that gym, for those hours--such a gift. A safe space. A sweet mercy for that season. If I flaked or was late to stay in bed and cry, they ran suicides.

No, you man up. You never turn your back on your teammates. And if they turn, you don't let their jealous hate sabotage you.  The ones who execute, not the ones who try, are gonna be the ones in the game. If coach and captain say you stay, stay. See what a long way you have to go, and know that learning this, too, is progress. Persevere.

Know irrelevant voices from the voices you should listen to. Leaders are those who went before you, who brought you on seeing who they could make you, who you would become. Trust them. Do the discipline of forsaking entanglements for now to fight, and play, and practice. Worries will wait. The coach who dug down deep to draw out diligence and competition. The value of now. This point. This play. Grace for yourself and for your family; it is, after all, a game moved along by mistakes. Don't think yourself above errors.

You never rise to the occasion, you only fall back on your training. So bring yourself, your whole self, your mind your strength your game, to the table. Every time.

my cute lil Pokemon

There is more, much more, that volleyball tangibly taught me. But asked why I give my Saturdays now, I say, you only can give what you've first received.

Heritage

When I'm traveling in Japan, people think I am Taiwanese.
When I'm traveling in Taiwan, people think I am Japanese or of one of the tribes.

In the states a lot of people think I'm mixed or halfie, or when I say my family is Taiwanese they wonder if there is any indigenous or Dutch/Portuguese heritage.

Here are some fun DNA Microarray answers from 23andMe.

The rain, it's here.

In this world you will be rejected.

Today I read letters from parents who truly meticulously Love.

Today I feel carefully loved, today I remember having been loved that way in all my yesterdays.

Today I'm tucking away these letters for the days of forgetting. For tomorrow's storms.

Child, study your sorrows and lean into how Accepted, how Provided For you are.

Study the way you are feeling today. Because I love you, I ask this of you: lean into your “otherness” – learn the contours of its face, feel out the steady grip of its hand. Because I intend it to be your lifelong companion. It is a truer friend than those who surround you now. More than I want your comfort I want you to be an alien and a stranger. . . that not-fitting, that dissonant chord, that unease in the midst of ease that has been the faithful travel companion of the children of God for millenia. . . 

Here is what you must come to see: what the lunch table calls your enemy I call your friend. “Otherness” is a sensation not to be dulled or diminished but to be cultivated and cherished. So though it goes against every mothering instinct, I will not pull the thorn from your flesh, not because I want to withhold comfort, but because there is no true comfort in a lie. This world is not our home. We are sojourners, travelers on our way to the only true comfort the human heart can know. I will not help you populate your life with things that lessen your grip on this reality. 

Because I love you, yes. 

// "Otherness" (Jen Wilkin).

Darling,
What the world calls your enemy I call your friend.
The pain, it was provision. Not a curse.
He does not curse His children.

The rules and boundaries... are not to bind you, but to keep you safe... instructions, so that you will know which way to go... a trellis, so you will be able to climb and find the sun.

// "In the Sun" (Irene).