After Singapore, we flew back through Hong Kong and spent two days sight-seeing.  Derek Dieu and Judy Kim accompanied us, who were also a part of the college group.  We saw a lot of Hong Kong in a short period of time.  Here we are crammed into Judy’s hotel room.

This week, the Evangelical Covenant Church is holding its Annual Meeting in St. Paul.  Covenant pastors from all over the country have come to town for the meeting.  It’s at this meeting that all the denomination’s business happens as well as the ordination of new pastors and the acceptance of new church plants.  A bunch of pastors that I worked with or have become friends with during Covenant events came to town earlier in the week and we all went up to my parent’s cabin for a few days.  We had a blast.  One of the fun things the kids got to do was fish…not with a pole, but with a net.  They would just scoop the sunfish right out of the water and then they stored them in this huge Tupperware container.

Mary’s mom came into town today, and I get ordained tomorrow.  It’s been a busy but fun June.  I’m looking forward to having things settle down again so that I can get back into our church routine, but I’m also very thankful for good friends and time to relax!

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So Mary’s pregnant.  She just returned from the doctor today, and they told her that she will likely deliver early next winter.  She also came home with some ultrasound pictures.  The baby is 3.9 cm long.  You can see his/her little arms and legs and head.  Crazy.

Mary and I think we have the most fantastic kids, and we can’t wait to have another one join our family.  I’m so thankful for them.  I believe that one of the most powerful kingdom impacts we can make is in the way that we raise our kids.  There are no other people in the world on whom we will have greater influence.  For better or worse, they will end up looking a lot like us.  I also believe that our family system is a ministry in and of itself.  The way we love our kids and open our home is a great way for us to do ministry.

I can’t wait for the next little March.  When we ask Josiah and Mercy whether they want a little brother or sister, we get two different responses.  Mercy wants a brother.  Josiah wants a sister with a mustache.   What a joker!

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” ~ Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

This, the opening line to Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina, is packed full of meaning, and the rest of the book expounds in story form what he means.   We read of one miserable family owing its pain to the self-absorption of the husband.  In another, it’s because of the internal angst of a middle-aged wife that drives her into the arms of a young man.  In another, it’s the insatiable desire for success of the politician husband.  Each family is truly uniquely miserable in its own way.

But is it true that all happy families are alike?  Is it true that there is a model for how to be a family, and the degree to which a family resembles that model dictates the level of happiness the family will experience?

My hunch is that Tolstoy is correct.  I believe that God has created families to relate in a certain way.  Happy families relate to one another the way the Godhead relates to itself.  Happy families love one another the way God loves others.  They are full of sacrificial love and concern for the well being of the each other.  Their relationships are rooted in commitment, and the culture is one of honesty and grace.  In these systems, health, not perfection, is possible, and happiness can emerge.

The problem that Tolstoy so eloquently highlights through his story-telling is that the “happy-family” model is unnatural for us.  We don’t just fall into it.  We have to work at it.  Monogamy is a commitment we have to stick to, and it requires the disciplining of our passions.  Sacrificial service towards our spouses and our children is inconvenient and at times demands the delaying of our dreams.  Love often times looks more like death than it does like lust.  Following the “happy-family” model is hard work and it takes discipline.

But as I read through Anna Karenina and see the truth about families in its pages, it’s obvious that this hard work is well worth it.  Whenever we veer from God’s path of familial happiness, the pain is inevitable, if sometimes delayed.

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This past weekend was the big move.   We moved three whole blocks, but we might as well have been moving to a different state.  We still had to box everything up, and we hired movers because we’ve got some really heavy items.  In honor of our move, I thought I’d put together a top 10 list of things I hate about moving:

10. Other people get to see all the junk you’ve never thrown away
9. Between the trips to Home Depot and hiring movers, it is really expensive
8. It’s a reminder that I’m not very organized
7. Scratched walls
6. Lots of snow the day before we moved means lots of muddy feet on the carpet
5. You have to clean a house you will never live in again
4. Inevitable back pain
3. Losing the coffee maker in some random box stacked somewhere in my basement
2. Taking trips to Starbucks in a 15′ Budget truck
1. “Discussions” with my wife about what we will keep and what we will toss

Even though there are all these things to hate about moving, we are still pretty happy.  We love our new house.  I believe it will help us accomplish our mission really well, and it’s just fun to own our own place.

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Two days ago my kids sneaked off with a box of strawberry cake batter mix from our pantry.  They ran to their room and opened it with the intention of eating the mix.  Not surprisingly, when they opened the bag some of the mix began to spill on the floor.  This became a game for them.  They took turns taking handfuls of this powdered sugar mix and flinging it into the air like confetti watching it rain down on top of everything in their room.  That’s when my wife discovered them.  They had been left alone for about 90 seconds, and they had covered their room with cake mix.

She came and got me.  Their mess was too good to keep to herself.  When I saw the mess, I was momentarily amused and then distraught.  The reality of cleaning up the equivalent of a half-pound of sugar sprayed all over their cloths, toys, and beds was disheartening.  Mary and I both have so much else to do that I just became angry.  This was an interruption I could not accept.

So I sternly chastised them and told them they needed to clean it up and I closed the door.  My rationale was that a part of their punishment would be to keep them in their room with the mess until they became annoyed by the mess themselves.  I thought if they were kept in their long enough they would naturally become remorseful for the mess they made.  I was wrong.

Over the next fifteen minutes or so, Mary and I heard squeals of delight coming from their room — always a bad sign.  I decided to go and see what was happening.  They had removed every article of clothing from each of their bureaus and created a mound of clothing more than a foot tall and a few feet in diameter in the middle of their room.  Mixed into the pile was the cake mix.  They had exponentially increased the mess by adding to the number of soiled items that would need to be cleaned.

What I’m coming to see is that their motivation for this behavior is rooted in their desire for attention, and part of my response of anger is rooted in my inability to give it.  I don’t have time to be with them as much as they want, so they created a mess that necessitated I make the time, which just made me angry.  My anger is rooted in my desire to control life.  My kids revolt against this.  They won’t be put off or ignored for any extended period of time.  When they feel neglected, they throw a tantrum or they toss cake mix.

I can’t stop them from acting this way, but I can change my response.  My anger did not spring up because of my frustration with what they did.  I can easily imagine how throwing cake mix into the air would actually be a lot of fun.  I’m not inherently against cake mix tossing.  They weren’t acting maliciously, just messily.  My anger happened because I wanted to control things — people, time, and my productivity.  I do this because I need to accomplish stuff to feel good about myself.  The source of my anger is in my own sense of worthlessness that I’m desperately trying to overcome in my busy working.  This cake mix incident has been yet another challenge from my kids for me to become a healthier person.  If I can become more secure in God’s depth of love for me, I will better be able to love my kids and anyone else who interrupts me.  And hopefully, I will continue to erase my response of anger from my life.

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Mary and I have decided to buy a house.  Neither of us have ever bought a house before, and it’s a big decision.  I’ve been struck by how little the church talks about what principles should guide our thinking when we are buying a house.  Where should you live?  How much should you spend?  What type of mortgage should you  choose?  What sort of features should we be focusing on?  These are questions facing us now.  And while there are no concrete answers to these questions that would uniformly apply to every prospective home buyer, I think there are some principles for buying a house that could help us to make the decision in good faith.

I’d like to explore some of those principles over a few blog posts.  But first, I’d love to hear from anyone who has any ideas as to what some of these principles might be.  Any suggestions or recommendations about what to look for or think about in the house-hunting, mortgage shopping process would be helpful!

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Today is my wife’s birthday, so I thought I’d take a moment to honor her here with a list of top ten things I love about Mary:

10. She is a wonderful cook.  There is nothing like one of Mary’s homecooked Korean meals!
9. She is empathetic.  She has a tremendous capacity to feel the pain other people are experiencing and walk with them through their struggles.
8. She is wise.  As we venture out on this church planting adventure, I’ve already come to appreciate her wise and thoughtful counseling.
7. She loves people faithfully.  She has many deep friendships because she is committed to people through thick and thin.
6. She is thoughtful.  She sees other people’s needs and she takes the initiative to meet them.
5. She is a great mom.  Being a mom is pretty much the hardest job in the world.  She does it with excellence, and my kids adore her.
4. She is a servant.  She is willing to do things that are unpleasant for the benefit of other people.
3. She is safe.  People feel comfortable sharing the hard parts of their life with Mary.  People recognize in her someone who won’t judge them if they share a part of their broken lives.
2. She isn’t vain.  She doesn’t obsess over possessions or need to have the trendiest things just so she can feel good about herself.
1. She loves God.  She wants to walk with God and live for God in every aspect of her life.

I love my wife!  Happy Birthday!

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The bottom pictures were taken from our hotel room of ground zero.  We were directly across the street from it, and we looked down on all the construction activity.  It was cool to see how big the foot print was, and I was captured by the engineering complexity of coordinating the construction of such a massive project.

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We just got back from a great vacation down in Sanibel, FL.  My parents spend some time down their every year, and they invited us to join them for a little while.  Mary spent about a week down there, and I was down there for about three days.  Not as long as I would have liked, but still extremely restful and relaxing.  

Some of the highlights:

• Spending time with family. I got to spend a lot of time playing with my kids, and we had some extended family down there that we got to enjoy as well.  My uncle took us out on a boat, and Josiah got to play with his (sort of) cousin, Jackson, who he idolizes.  He’s the one in the picture above–they’re playing in the cabin of the boat.
• Taking a boat ride.  We went out for a two hour boat ride around the island.  It was a beautiful day.  We were able to take in the scenery and see some dolphins.
• A morning at the beach.  I’m not really a beach person.  The combination of salt, sand, and sun really does my skin in.  But, I enjoyed seeing Josiah and Jackson playing in the water and building sand castles together.
• Randomly meeting up with my roommate from seminary.  One of my closest friends from seminary is a missionary in Mexico City, and he also has parents who visit Sanibel.  They just happened to be visiting them at the same time as us!  I had a blast spending a few hours getting together with his family and mine.  We had fun reconnecting after not seeing each other for a year and a half.

In all, it was a great few days, and I was reminded how good rest is for the soul.  I look forward to the next time we get to visit Sanibel.  It is truly a special place.

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Complaint Letter

NOTE: I’ve blacked out our address and the offending Deputy’s name.  I’m posting this so that we can continue to tell the story, not because we want to smear his name.

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