I first heard the term “rapid unscheduled disassembly” (RUD)1 used in 2023 during the broadcast of a SpaceX starship launch. As my husband and I watched it explode over the Gulf of Mexico, I remarked, “Whoa, it just blew up!” But the SpaceX announcer who was covering the launch sounded utterly unbothered and stated something along the lines of, “As we can see, Flight 1 has experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly.” This line was repeated in SpaceX’s official tweet:

As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation.

I found the euphemism more amusing than most. What an impassive way to describe something so violent and destructive!

During some recent travel, I started playing around with the idea of using RUD to refer to cataclysmic life events like unemployment, incarceration, divorce, disillusionment, betrayal, serious illness, death, etc. I chose to experiment using the limerick as a device because of its singsongy nature and its historic function as a violator of taboos. I ended up using “rapid unplanned disassembly” instead of “rapid unscheduled disassembly” because the number of syllables worked better. The end result was this short collection of limericks.

I. 
Jane worked in factory assembly
Where her delicate hands toiled nimbly
     'Til one day it closed
     While complacents they dozed
'Twas a rapid unplanned disassembly

II.
Miranda and Dan wed in Wembley
Made a life for themselves in Lambley
     But Dan did a crime
     Twenty years was his time
'Twas a rapid unplanned disassembly

III.
Lou was a hero to Charlie
So smart, so gifted, so burly
     But this image of him
     Grew tragically dim
The moment Lou proved to be dodgy

IV.
There once was a tackler named Henry
Who had power and speed and agility
     Then his arm grew a tumor
     It wasn't a rumor
But a rapid unplanned disassembly

With love,

Judy

Being a deciduous tree, it dropped its leaves in the fall and went dormant for the winter. When spring arrived in full force last month, I looked forward to seeing its leaves return. But at the end of the first week of April, its branches remained bare. Trying to ignore twinges of worry, I walked away, hoping it was merely delayed in leafing out due to the wildly vacillating temperatures we had in February. But when I came back two weeks later, the willow was… GONE. Not even a stump remained. My heart sank. The loss felt extra heavy because it aligned closely with the timing of my dad’s death and funeral. Maybe that’s the reason why the sudden, unexpected absence of the willow tree had such a palpable quality to it. I felt it in my body the way I had felt my dad’s absence when I saw his lifeless body in the casket before he was transported to the crematorium. I had not been able to make it back to Houston in time to see him before he died.

So, I’ve written an ode to the fallen willow tree to process this loss and honor its life.

In spring of twenty twenty-five
You were so vibrant, so alive
You took my breath away,
You stirred my heart to play.
 
You burst onto the sunlit scene
Dressed in a gown of em’rald green
That flowed like angel hair
And sang like morning prayer.
 
Your leaves and catkins twirled and preened,
Their sound in wind like wisdom gleaned
A gentle laugh, a sigh
That needed no reply.
 
But then came twenty twenty-six
I thought my mind was playing tricks.
Or was it my own eyes
Seeing signs of your demise?
 
The spring had sprung in this here town,
But this year sans your green ball gown;
No crown of angel hair,
Your drooping branches bare.
 
I’d hoped it was a mere delay
That you were just on holiday.
I chose to wait unbent,
A fortnight came and went.
 
Upon return to your abode
My heartbeat skipped, my footsteps slowed
The place once filled with grace
Was now an empty space.
 
A cry caught in my throat, a yell
“I did not get to say farewell!
Before they cut you down
And pulled you from the ground.”
 
But I will always hold you near
In mind and heart, year after year
Whenever spring arrives
And hope again revives.
 

My father died on Easter Monday, April 6, 2026, right smack in the middle of spring. Considering how much psychological suffering he experienced in his lifetime, the date and season on/in which he fell asleep in the Lord felt like both a consolation and a promise. There are images of resurrection everywhere. Then, when the Lord paved the way for us to have his funeral and committal service on his birthday this past Friday, it felt like a Creator’s embrace—the date of his death and the day of his committal serving as divine bookends.

The 11 days between those bookends, however, were among the saddest ones I have ever experienced. The grief peaked on the Wednesday before the funeral as I was attempting to write my dad’s eulogy. It was crushing. For four decades, I had lived in a state of ambiguous loss around my dad’s existential pain and the way it affected our relationship. But when he died, all those decades of ambiguity transitioned at once into an enormous weight of concrete loss. In a condensed period of time, I was faced with having to make some kind of sense out of his 85 embattled years on earth and my own inextricably linked 52 years as his daughter. It was a tall order considering the fact that at different points along the way, I had been a powerless witness to, a victim of, a partial contributor to, an escapee from, and a trusted, comforting companion to my dad’s suffering. I had been the young child who cried, “How long, O Lord?” on my own behalf as well as the adult child who cried, “How long, O Lord?” on his behalf. On April 6^th, God answered both of those questions. Sometimes we wait a long time.

As you might imagine, I’ve had a lot of time and many occasions to develop a theology of suffering. I think this passage from Eugene Peterson’s Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work (p.114) encapsulates it best for me:

The biblical revelation neither explains nor eliminates suffering. It shows, rather, God entering into the life of suffering humanity, accepting and sharing the suffering. Scripture is not a lecture from God, pointing the finger at unfortunate sufferers and saying, “I told you so: here and here and here is where you went wrong; now you are paying for it.” Nor is it a program from God providing, step by step, for the gradual elimination of suffering in a series of five-year plans (or, on a grander scale, dispensations). There is no progress from more to less suffering from Egyptian bondage to wilderness wandering, to kingless anarchy, to Assyrian siege, to Babylonian captivity, to Roman crucifixion, to Neronian/Domitian holocaust. The suffering is there, and where the sufferer is, God is. “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” (Isa. 53:4)

I’m happy to report that in the end, through the prayers of many people, the ministry of angels, and the power of the Holy Spirit, my heart settled and the sentences for the eulogy came together. The following is the eulogy I delivered at my dad’s funeral on April 17th, lightly edited for publication here.

A Eulogy for my Dad

When someone we love dies, we’re often left holding many different truths about that person—truths that generate many different feelings at once. Because people—and life—are complicated. That’s certainly the case for me as I remember my dad.

One of those truths is that he was a genuinely sweet and loving father. When I was little, one of my favorite bedtime routines was his carrying me to my room on his shoulders while he sang “Huǒ chē kuài fēi,” which, roughly translated, means “The Train Flies Fast.” I can still hear his voice in my head.

   火  車    快    飛,  火    車    快  飛   [The train flies fast, the train flies fast]
Huǒchē kuài fēi, huǒchē kuài fēi
 飛    過   高    山,     越    過   小   溪  [Over tall mountains, over small streams]
Fēi guò gāo shān, yuè guò xiǎo xī
不   知   走  了幾 百 里      [Who knows how many hundreds of miles it’s gone]
Bù zhī zǒu le jǐ bǎi lǐ
  快     到  家 裡, 快     到  家 裡    [Almost home, almost home]
Kuài dào jiā lǐ, kuài dào jiā lǐ
  媽  媽 看   了   真      歡 喜       [Mom is so happy to see that]
Māma kàn le zhēn huānxǐ

Once I was in bed, we’d rub noses, he’d pull the covers up to my chin, and we’d say goodnight. It’s one of my favorite memories from childhood.

My dad was absolutely the kind of father who would go the extra mile to make us happy. His own childhood had been characterized by extreme poverty and deprivation, so it was truly a dream for him to be able to do nice things for us. When “Return of the Jedi” came out in 1983—I was ten and David was six-and-a-half at the time—he got up early in the morning on opening day (I think it was still dark outside) to go stand in a ridiculously long line at the box office that wrapped around the building several times. Hours later, he returned home smiling from ear to ear, holding up four tickets to the next day’s show. We were caught up in a fever, a cultural moment, and Dad delivered. Getting to watch that movie on its opening weekend is still to this day the most exciting movie-going experience I have ever had.

Another truth about my dad is that he was brilliant in a mad genius sort of way. His head was so constantly filled with scientific thoughts that he figured everyone else’s must be too. If you gave him an opening, and even if you didn’t, you could very well find yourself in the middle of a discussion about a new flash tank design for the current slurry loop reactor… or the safest way to add ethylene oxide—a very volatile substance—in polymerization reactions if you want to increase the synthesis of polyether polyols by 25%. He would often go to sleep thinking about an engineering problem and wake up in the middle of the night with sudden insight about how to solve it.

But he also had this childlike ability to find pure delight in simple things: a scoop of ice cream, a perfectly ripe pineapple, a really comfortable pair of socks, a soft T-shirt, a phone call from a friend, chocolate.

Outwardly, my dad’s life looked like a classic rags-to-riches story. He was born into a world at war that then became a society shaken up by political instability. It forced his father to have to travel extensively to find employment, which plunged his family of six into extreme poverty. Back then, if you didn’t have money, your education stopped at elementary school. But because my dad showed exceptional aptitude in school, a distant cousin who operated a pharmacy offered to help pay for his middle-school and high-school education. From then on, it seemed like all the lights changed from red to green.

He developed a strong friend group in school and was so well-liked by his peers that he was voted class president almost every year. He got into a top-tier college, which by then he was able to pay for by working as a tutor. He graduated college at the top of his class. And then, as if the dream could only get bigger and better, he was offered a full scholarship to the graduate program in the engineering school at the University of Houston, where he eventually got a PhD in chemical engineering. Five years later, he was earning a good salary at an engineering firm, was married with two children, living in his own house in the suburbs of Houston, Texas, and standing in a long line to buy tickets for the most anticipated movie of the year. If that doesn’t fit the definition of the American dream, I don’t know what does.

What people didn’t see was the real cost he paid to leave behind his home country, his family of origin, and his deep sense of belonging. In significant ways, he never recovered from this relocation and the changes that came with it. For him, who possessed a beautifully sensitive soul, the move to America was far more than a geographic change. It was a tectonic shift that resulted in a permanent state of disorientation. He lived with deep anxiety and with intrusive thoughts that caused him constant distress. These challenges affected our family, as you can imagine. There were numerous moments that were confusing, overwhelming, and painful. None of us knew where to turn for help.

About twelve years ago, when my mom went through a lengthy debilitating illness, my dad came to live with me and my family for three months. During that time, I asked him what had kept him going all these years amid his psychological pain. He matter-of-factly said, “You kids. I knew I had to find a way to keep going for you and David and your mom, no matter what.” When I responded, “I’m sorry it’s been so hard for you,” he shrugged and said, “Eh, that’s life.” What could I do but stare at him in wonder? That’s selfless, sacrificial love and longsuffering in its purest form.

When I was young, I thought of his mental health struggles and his gentle, non-assertive personality as indicators of weakness. But now it’s obvious to me that he is the strongest person I have ever known and probably will ever know.

My dad suffered a devastating traumatic brain injury in June of 2023, complicated by progressive dementia. As a result, he spent the last 2-½ years of his life in memory care. What’s remarkable about this period is that similar to the first 82 years of his life, the simple outward story—in this case it was “the poor elderly man who fell and became disabled”—did not reflect the truer, deeper story that was taking place below the surface. The brain injury, as horrible as it was, relieved him of the intrusive thoughts that had plagued him for decades, but somehow without altering his basic loving personality or his core memories. Sure, there were significant impairments as well as alterations to the way he recalled details, but for a good while he was still able to tell funny stories, access shared memories, laugh at people’s jokes, and enjoy the company of his family members and peers. He cried tears of joy and empathy whenever he was moved (which was often) and showed appreciation to his caregivers. At one point, he said to my mom, “Do you know… I live like a king here. People prepare my meals, which magically appear before me. I never have to cook. People clean my room. They change my bed linens. They dress and undress me. They bathe me. They do my laundry.” I thought, “Wow, I hadn’t really thought about it that way. I mean, I guess that IS the way kings used to live!”

He never once felt sorry for himself. Not for one minute.

Today, I celebrate my dad and his enduring legacy. I’m so proud of who he was. I love him, I will miss him, and I look forward to seeing him again some day. For now, I rejoice that he is finally at rest in the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ. Happy birthday, Dad.

what do I write in the fog of war
while saving the world
from inside my door?

a strain-the-brain treatise
with an overwrought thesis?

or a manifesto on 
        ammo
        furlough
        joe blow
        sourdough
               bigotry
               inequality
               liturgy
               the DOD

a comedy
   a tragedy
      a policy
         DOXOLOGY

i write
a droplet of mist
easily missed
in the virtual tsunami of           
            story
            theory
            malady
            mp3
                  hot takes
                  outbreaks
                  missed takes
                  and mistakes

The above poem is a reworked version of one that I published on April 6, 2020 in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The vivid colors of autumn on the many deciduous trees where I live are so beautiful that I wish they could look like that all year round. I’m so happy to be back in a part of the country where trees look like this in the fall. It was one of my favorite parts of living in Atlanta from 2010-2019.

While a few trees are still looking magnificent, we’re now at the tail end of the season when over half the leaves around town have turned or are turning brown or have fallen off. The very same leaves we looked up at, admired, and praised for weeks are now an ongoing shower of decaying plant matter that collects on the ground and generates countless hours of yard work. All day long, I hear the sound of leaf blowers operating around my neighborhood. Lamenting the change as we were driving home yesterday, my daughter said, “It’s sad.” She was, I think, expressing something universal about the human experience. When dazzling beauty like that fades, it provokes an ache inside the soul.

In recent years, though, maybe because I’m getting older, that ache is now mixed with a kind of wonder as I’ve started to notice the more subtle forms of beauty that appear in the spaces left behind by the fallen leaves. The branches I once thought of as bare are not really bare at all. They contain leaf and flower buds all along them—buds designed to survive subfreezing temperatures and open up in the spring. I love that they appear before the trees go dormant for the winter. They bear witness to the reality that there’s plenty of life happening under the surface, even in the presence of so much death and decay. It feels like a promise: decay and barrenness today will be replaced by new life and resurrection after a set number of tomorrows.

Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you. Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world. And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. To him be the dominion forever and ever. Amen. - 1 Peter 5:6-10

Dear readers and subscribers,

I wanted to let you all know that I’m pausing all Substack subscription billing, effective immediately and indefinitely. The main thing this action accomplishes is that new subscribers will not be invited to pay, and current paying subscribers will no longer be billed or charged. It doesn’t cancel any subscriptions, it just makes every subscriber a free subscriber by default.

I’ve chosen to do this because I can finally admit to myself and others—without any sense of sadness—that I’m not trying to make a living as a writer right now. When I launched this Substack page in March of 2021, my plan was to try to make a living as a public writer. I had every intention of writing and publishing fresh essays on a biweekly basis. Well, that plan got derailed rather quickly not only by some major life situations but also by what has turned out to be a prolonged (ongoing) season of deep, difficult soul work—the kind that doesn’t necessarily prevent me from doing any public writing but does place significant limits on how much of it I can do and how often.

I know with certainty that there will be an end to this season. I just don’t know when that end will come. For now, the right thing to do is to release every paying subscriber (i.e., patron) from further charges. I’m beyond grateful for every dollar my patrons have given me over the past 4.5 years. Thank you.

To avoid any misunderstanding, I want to say it’s my general belief that people who do the hard work of writing as their primary way of contributing to the good of the world should be paid for their labor and the fruits of that labor. I know people get grumpy about hitting paywalls. But a lot of that has to do with the fact that the internet has enabled us to feel entitled to free content, so much so that we often don’t do a good job of discriminating between the kind of content that can be fired off without much effort and the kind of content that takes real craftsmanship. Good craftsmanship is always worth paying for. Besides, most writers I know are thoughtful about balancing their own interests as creatives (i.e., having to make a living) and the interests of faithful readers who fall into a wide range of financial situations. Many writers offer gift subscriptions to readers who communicate a genuine interest in their work but are not in a financial position to afford anything but bare necessities. Please financially support the work of hard-working writers and content creators as you are able!

You can still expect me to publish the occasional long-form essay, essay series, or poem here. I’m still planning to finish the final installment of “How We Know What We Know” at some point.

Two weeks after the 2016 election—nearly nine years ago now (!)—I stood on my back deck and wept while my family members were inside the house getting ready for Thanksgiving. I was outside trying to process the unexpected and disorienting sense of alienation I felt from some of them.

Five years earlier, we had all pretty much been in sync. We read the same authors and theologians, admired the same political pundits, and echoed each other’s opinions on social issues. But God had begun using a series of major life events to resurrect long-buried aspects of my story and sense of self. In the process, I had come to see the world very differently from the way some of my family members did—and had even come to see them as something like wrong-headed adversaries.

As I struggled to make sense of my predicament, Jesus’ cryptic warning to his disciples came to mind: “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn ‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household’” (Matt. 10:34-36).

A passage that once seemed abstract suddenly felt very concrete.

It seems ironic at first that Jesus, whom we hail as the Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6), announced that he would disturb the peace. But in recent years, I’ve learned that the kind of peace he disturbs is an artificial one achieved through conformity and uniformity—foundational characteristics of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-4). Since it depends on establishing and maintaining sameness, it’s not a peace that can offer a violent and divided world healing, redemption, or reconciliation, not even when it’s embraced by people who happen to identify as Christ followers.

Divine Disruption

Before God disrupted the uniformity of my household, I had been comfortable identifying as a respectable “model minority” who fit in well with white, upper-middle-class, politically conservative evangelicals. I was satisfied with a sense of self divorced from my Taiwanese heritage, satisfied with being a second-generation American who had achieved the American dream. In fact, I very much wanted to fit into this demographic. A significant part of the reason why is because I had had a traumatic childhood and adolescence that had caused me to form strong negative associations with my parents’ culture. I responded by trying to create as much distance as I could between my identity and theirs.

In 2014, a period of medical and mental health crises involving my family of origin resulted in a two-year journey that closed that distance, helping me uncover the historical roots of my family’s brokenness. I learned that generations of my family had endured oppression and trauma, including Japanese imperialism, ethnic segregation, U.S. air raids, radical regime change, land and asset theft by people in power, mass murder, a lengthy period of violent political repression known as the White Terror, and decades of martial law. But in previous generations, my own ancestors had themselves been colonizers, part of a mass migration of Han Chinese from Fujian province who, seeking relief from grinding poverty and food shortages, settled on an island (now known as Taiwan) that Austronesian aboriginal tribes had inhabited for several millennia. Their arrival resulted in large-scale loss of language and cultural identity for a number of aboriginal tribes.

These revelations impacted me in many ways, some of which I have written about previously, not the least of which is that they caused me to read the scriptures with a new set of eyes. For the first time, I saw my parents, grandparents, and even the Taiwanese aborigines reflected in the masses of first-century, peasant-class Jews struggling to survive under both oppressive Roman imperialism and the corrupt practices of their wealthier, more powerful Jewish counterparts. I began reading Jesus’ teachings from the perspective of downtrodden people who longed for deliverance, justice, and relief from the powers that be, rather than from the perspective of a comfortable American pursuing personal spiritual development.

This shift in perspective pulled me toward the helpless and harassed (Matthew 9:36) in my own city: people experiencing housing insecurity and homelessness, immigrants in anxious mixed-status families, traumatized refugees seeking asylum, entire neighborhoods still suffering the lingering economic effects of Jim Crow and white flight. As I connected with these people, I came to believe they were the people whose treatment Jesus used as a litmus test for determining who his true followers were (Matthew 25:31-46).

My relationship with these neighbors brought an entirely different level of spiritual accountability into my life. I started to realize the ways I had hoarded wealth or indulged in hedonism, practices so common among Christians in the socioeconomic class I was a part of that their appropriateness was rarely questioned.1 My new friends’ faith in the face of daily, seemingly insurmountable obstacles rebuked my habit of complaining about trivial things. I felt convicted about my racial prejudice (John 4:9), classism (James 2:3,4), and sectarianism (1 Cor. 3:3-9). It seems nothing in my life came out clean.

New Politics, Old Dilemma

These relationships proved to be the tipping point that changed my politics. I don’t mean that I transferred my allegiance from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party or that I dumped conservatism for liberalism. All I knew was that the politics I had espoused for several decades didn’t address my marginalized friends’ urgent concerns. These were people with legitimate grievances against the governing authorities and dominant groups insensitive to their plight—people who, as Howard Thurman described in Jesus and the Disinherited (1949), stood with their backs against the wall. Not only did my former political framework not address their concerns, it tended to place them squarely in the category of a troublesome, inferior people who deserved scorn, suppression, or expulsion. Now that I knew and loved them, I realized they weren’t primarily interested in causing trouble; they longed for deliverance, justice, hope, relief, and freedom—much like my own family once did.

It was impossible not to empathize as I listened to their stories. Their deprivations became my personal concerns; their enemies became my enemies. Those who openly mocked or dismissed their grief and outrage over their unjust treatment received my stinging criticism. I crusaded on social media and at the dinner table, cheered on by a new network of people who felt the same. I became good at denouncing things.

Soon, my passionate about-face incited friction with family members and longtime friends. Some of them sent scathing messages. Others withdrew from my life. There were moments when it felt like even my husband and my mother-in-law had become enemies—the kind whose fundamentally different sympathies and allegiances seemed to create an unbridgeable chasm, despite our shared faith in Christ.

As the tension became untenable, I began to realize that I had fallen under the spell of self-righteousness. I hadn’t abandoned the practice of sorting people into us and them categories after all; I had merely changed the criteria I used to do it. Even though much had changed in me, I still considered certain people deserving of scorn, suppression, or expulsion; they were just different people.

Jesus’ Third Way: Enemy Love

Many things about the Christian faith are a mystery, but not how we’re supposed to treat our enemies:

You have heard that it was said, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:43-48)

But why would we love people who seem to work hard to earn our hatred? It feels natural to despise, exclude, and wage war against people who do harm to us or the ones we love, especially when they do so from positions of power. Hatred can even feel like a weapon of righteousness defending people who are being crushed, or a tool that helps the dispossessed hold onto a sense of dignity. It’s not difficult to understand why people in Jesus’ day parsed the word neighbor in Leviticus 19:18 to justify nurturing contempt toward or doing violence to their oppressors (Matt. 5:43).

The unavoidable truth, though, is that the cost of not loving our enemies is far greater. Over the past nine years, as I’ve observed the effects of mounting tribalism in my life and in the world, I’ve recognized that Jesus was imparting an ancient wisdom—one that applies to both playground disputes and high-stakes conflicts.

When my daughter was eight years old, she had a classmate who often (almost daily) provoked her through harsh words and unfounded accusations. My daughter found her unbearable. As we talked through how this girl made her feel, my daughter kept proposing snarky comebacks and asking me, “That would be a good burn, wouldn’t it?” The impulse to retaliate in response to offense is present in us from childhood, but I’ve never seen it lead to relational restoration.

French philosopher René Girard wrote about a great paradox that occurs in human conflict. In I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, a study of violence in human societies, he identified a pattern: as antagonism between rivals becomes embittered, people on opposing sides begin to look more alike than different. Take ethnic conflict, for example. Non-dominant groups are often beset with a sense of perpetual frustration, disempowerment, and fear, all of which breed anger and resentment. When that resentment hardens, it’s common to hear a battle cry that sounds like, “For the sake of our lives, we have to bring down these racist/fascist/elitist pigs and expel them from our midst!” In reaction, dominant groups who hold power will rally around the sentiment, “For the sake of preserving peace and civil order, we have to crush these despicable, lawless rabble-rousers/race baiters/anarchists!” Although both sides hail their own virtues and denounce the vices of their opponents, their escalating mutual hatred causes them to become more and more alike until they are equally obsessed with eradicating one another.

Walter Wink explained this tendency in Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way: “Every outer evil inevitably attracts from our own depths parts of ourselves that resemble it… the person or system that we call enemy also evokes the evil within.” And Eugene Peterson warned in Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer (1989), “[Hate] can quickly and easily metamorphose into the evil that provokes it.”

Loving our enemies, then, is the only way to avoid taking on the very characteristics we hate about them. It’s the only way to interrupt the world’s chronic pattern of escalating hatred. Jesus instructs us to love our enemies and pray for our persecutors precisely because loving and respecting only those who love and respect us and honoring the God-given dignity of only those who honor it in us leave a violent and chaotic world unchanged. Preferential love can motivate one tribe to defeat its enemies and bring about a rearrangement of who’s in power, but it cannot interrupt the cycle of violence, exclusion, and oppression. Only enemy love can do that. Martin Luther King, Jr. understood this well when he wrote in Strength to Love,

Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. So when Jesus says ‘Love your enemies,’ he is setting forth a profound and ultimately inescapable admonition. Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies – or else? The chain reaction of evil – hate begetting hate, wars producing wars – must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

Furthermore, hatred is not merely socially destructive; it eats away at our bodies and our souls, compounding the harm that is being or has been done to us. Howard Thurman, whose grandmother was born into slavery, wrote that “hatred destroys finally the core of the life of the hater” (Jesus and the Disinherited, p.76). And in an article that appeared in Guideposts in 1972, Ravensbruck concentration camp survivor Corrie Ten Boom wrote, “Since the end of the war I had had a home in Holland for victims of Nazi brutality. Those who were able to forgive their former enemies were able also to return to the outside world and rebuild their lives, no matter what the physical scars. Those who nursed their bitterness remained invalids. It was as simple and as horrible as that.”

But How?

My family attended church like normal following the presidential election of 2016, but nothing about the service felt normal. Beloved church members who had voted for Donald Trump were worshiping God in the same room as other beloved church members threatened by Trump’s victory, including Dreamers and American-citizen children of undocumented immigrants. Within those walls, happiness and relief mingled with dread and grief. Despite the longstanding cordiality and even affection between these groups in our church, it was apparent that the vastly different political interests and allegiances represented in the room that day pitted people against one another. It was a tangible representation of something Eugene Peterson wrote in Reversed Thunder, his commentary on Revelation:

There is no avoiding politics. The moment one life impinges upon another, politics begins. And our lives do impinge on others whether we will it or not… No action or belief is private. The more religious or value-charged, the less private. Matters associated with Christ and Antichrist are, then, the least private and therefore the most political of all. Everything we think gets out of our skulls and everything we do goes beyond our skins, entering into a crisscrossing network of complex interaction. (pp. 131-132)

My pastor acknowledged the situation that Sunday with these words: “Church is a community of enemies learning to love one another.” As I’ve indicated already, sometimes even family can feel like a community of enemies learning to love one another. Just as I was desperate to understand how to practice enemy love on the home front without having to take on a false self, I was eager to understand how enemy love might work in a faith community divided by different political interests, different existential concerns.

While studying the gospels, I found Jesus’ answer demonstrated in his selection of his twelve disciples.2

Normally, when people form church planting teams, they begin from a place of uniformity. They select those who are 100 percent onboard with the specific mission of the future congregation. Not Jesus. He called members of enemy groups to form his most intimate group of followers. Four of the disciples—Simon the Canaanite, Judas Thaddeus, James the Younger, and Judas Iscariot—belonged to or heavily sympathized with the Zealots, a political movement whose all-consuming passion for liberation from Roman rule led them to commit murder and acts of terrorism not only against Roman authorities but also against fellow Jews friendly with Rome. They had a particular hatred for tax collectors, Jews who served the pagan empire and often acquired wealth by extorting money from their own people. Six of the disciples—James the Elder, John, Simon Peter, Thomas, Andrew, and Philip—were poor fishermen living at a subsistence level, subjected to exploitative taxes and tolls. It was not uncommon for people of their class to be reduced to beggars and outlaws by members of the Jewish nobility who knew how to work the legal and economic systems to secure their own wealth, often to the detriment of the peasant class. Jesus undoubtedly stupefied them all when he chose a tax collector, Matthew/Levi, to join their ranks (Luke 5:27-32), and then again when he chose Bartholomew/Nathanael, a man of noble birth, to be his twelfth disciple.

To say these men were sharply divided is an understatement. Some had suffered from the actions of the groups that others represented. And at least four of them would not have been philosophically opposed to expressing their disapproval through violence toward Matthew or Bartholomew. Perhaps that’s why Jesus began his public ministry with acts of mercy that eased suffering—healing diseases, casting out demons, and alleviating chronic pain (Matt. 4:23-25)—and then followed up immediately with a message that not only recognized the people’s experience of poverty, disenfranchisement, grief, hunger, conflict, and rejection, but also promised comfort, fullness, inheritance, mercy, peace, and belonging (Matthew 5:3-12).

Consider the enormity of Jesus’ disciple selection. He welcomed militant nationalists from an oppressed class and someone who would have been considered a race traitor. He welcomed people born into wealth and people living hand-to-mouth. By calling them into the same inner circle, he created a community that would demand something from everyone, something that would represent a cross for each person to bear. As the disciples faced each other day after day, those from privileged classes were challenged to repent of their indifference toward the oppressed; greedy opportunists were challenged to repent of their self-serving greed and make reparation to people they had defrauded;3 embittered victims were challenged to forgive and humanize their oppressors; and people who lived by the sword were required to lay down both their weapons and their violent rhetoric.

These were not merely ideological requirements. They were relational requirements that enabled the disciples to live in community and continue to follow Jesus together, the only ways they could have fulfilled the law of love (John 13:34,35). Yes, they continued to have disputes over which of them was the greatest and presumably also which of them was the worst (Mark 9:33,34; Luke 22:24), but had each of them not been willing to change at a fundamental level, they would have missed out on being with Jesus. The same is true for us.

Loving Our Enemies: Prayer and the Role of the Imagination

In Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster describes prayer as the primary process through which we’re enabled to see people and situations from God’s point of view, to desire the same things God desires, and to love the things God loves. But quite often, our biased hearts, corrupted reasoning, baser instincts, and ungodly desires make it difficult for us to even get started. A scripturally informed imagination can help. One such tool that has helped guide my prayers in this area is imagining being seated at a table with the following people, all preparing to receive bread and wine from Jesus before his journey to the cross: 1) people being actively harmed by the policies of whatever the current administration happens to be, 2) brothers and sisters who support that regime and its policies, 3) anti-racist activists, 4) people who shrug off racism; 5) white supremacists; 6) people who have committed acts of violence, 7) people who have been victimized by those acts of violence; 8) people who reject me for my ideas/values/beliefs; and 9) others as needed.

I still ache over the anguish of some and the bigotry of others, but this discipline has chipped away at the parts of me tempted to reduce, write off, or wage war on some of those at the table. It has helped me surrender my personal agenda to Christ’s agenda—quite distinct from promoting my own agenda in the name of Christ. Prayer has helped me become better at discerning when to speak and when to be silent, what I should say and how I should say it. It has enabled me to walk better in my sacred role as a member of the royal priesthood (1 Peter 2:9) instead of walking in the tribal patterns of the world.

The way of the cross invites us to die. It is the entry point into a living kingdom this world does not know but desperately needs. It’s not merely an ethic, either; it’s a power, and it’s available only because Jesus made the humiliating, torturous journey to the cross, took our judgment upon himself, died, and then was resurrected. In doing so, he rewrote the story of Adam. “For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!” (Romans 5:17) Fleming Rutledge writes that God has actual “power to make right all that has been wrong throughout the entire sorry history of ‘Adam,’” and that his rectifying power “is a recapturing of the entire history of the created order and a remaking of it.” Precisely “because he has rewritten the story, we are no longer prisoners of our worst selves, nor of the evil powers that would destroy us.”4 By his wounds, there is now power to heal our divisions (Isa. 53:5).

When I sat down to write this sonnet, I was simply wanting to process my own pain and misery. As I started crafting it, though, I immediately became aware that there are others out there like me. I imagine that together, we form an invisible society—an unseen house—created through a particular flavor of suffering. I hope these words will help someone feel less alone. I’ve included an audio recitation for this one. You can find it at the top of the post.

Belong do I to one quite unseen house
Of souls much bruised by malady of mind
That dwells within a parent, child, or spouse
Or someone else with whom they’re intertwined.

Day in, day out, the battle carries on
In ev’ry interaction all day long;
Unfazed by reason, season, dusk, or dawn,
Since what is false is somehow never wrong.

No words can possibly convey the deep
fatigue of treading water so by lies
defined—that even if I were to sleep
for years, I still might want to shut my eyes.

We eat, we breathe absurdity and grief;
We have our dreams but mostly want relief. 

A few weeks ago, I wrote the poem “Flowers When They Come, and Flowers When They Go” as a way to process the sense of sadness, even dread, I feel whenever flowers fade. Of course, that sadness wasn’t just about the fading of flowers. It was about the melancholy that washes over me when anything I happen to like, love, or care about—a relationship, a church, a way of life, my health, a career, organizational or legal policies, a cause, etc.—goes away or changes in ways that are difficult to accept. The poem ended with a prayer for grace to delight in good things while they’re present but also to release them when they go away.

My family went to church this morning. We celebrated Jesus’ resurrection and its cosmic implications alongside a few hundred others. It dawned on me that it was the first Easter Sunday in four years that we had been at church. It was good to be there. In fact, I’m grateful to be back in a season of being there every Sunday and connected to the rhythms of corporate worship, confession, prayer, Scripture reading, and communion. It’s been restorative.

As we arrived back home and pulled into our driveway, I noticed that quite a few of our azaleas were at the tail end of their bloom. It was especially apparent on the white azalea bushes. It’s amazing how quickly things that were bright and dazzlingly beautiful for weeks suddenly become unsightly when they fade. So, after we ate lunch, I decided to do some deadheading. I put on my work clothes, went outside, and started pulling off faded flowers.

There are several reasons to deadhead. The most obvious one is that it improves aesthetics and keeps the garden looking tidy. But deadheading also helps the plant redirect energy toward new growth that can ensure a healthy blooming season next year.

Next year!

I suppose it has to do with the fact that I had resurrection on my mind today, but I felt something that resembled a quickening as I thought about what I was doing: engaging with deadness as an investment in the hidden process that will produce something beautiful quite a ways from today. Isn’t that what we Christians are called to do? We’re called to engage with things that are fading, broken, or passing away as a means of preparing for the Resurrection and renewal of all things—when God will unite Heaven and Earth again.

Engaging with dead things is painful and tedious. It often involves loss and grief. Let’s be honest—there are an awful lot of battles we just don’t win. But we don’t need to, nor should we, remain in a perpetual state of lament. We can engage with hope. Why? Because we know that death—whether it’s physical death or the death of an institution or the end of a good thing in general—is not the end of the story. Not by a long shot. Everything we do in Jesus’ name is part of the hidden process by which the Kingdom of God will burst forth in perfect life, love, justice, health, restoration, redemption, and reconciliation one day. We are “God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” (Ephesians 2:10). Fortunately for us, that good work does not include being saviors of anything, not even proxy saviors. There is only one Savior, and His name is Jesus.

In reality, I don’t have to deadhead at all. Azaleas will eventually shed their spent flowers without any intervention. And although they will spend a considerable amount of energy and utilize quite a few nutrients forming seeds, they will likely survive and do fine next year. But deadheading (and other things like pruning, fertilizing, weeding) does work in me. The labor I do elevates me from the role of mere consumer and passive recipient of beauty to an active steward of that beauty. Likewise, we are not mere recipients of salvation and the Kingdom of God. We are their stewards.

two hundred million meters per second—
the rate at which
opinion, news, the scandalous,
        art, music, and hot-take analysis
travel from someone's loose lips
       to the world wide web,
               from the world wide web
       to your fingertips
a whirlwind in the palm of your hand
with the power to reduce
rainforest to scrubland
and mountains to sand;
nevertheless,
the Lord is not in the wind.

two hundred meters per second—
the speed at which
a seismic wave might travel
through silty clay
and unwittingly pave the way
for Something Something LLC,
Holdings, Homes, or Properties,
those movers of gravel,
those transfigurators,
to modify, commodify, and gentrify;
nevertheless,
the Lord is not in the earthquake.

seven meters per second—
how fast a wildfire can spread,
like ideals let loose and turned
into a purification ritual,
intense in heat yet casual
about who and what are burned
or to dust and ash returned;
this is no word from Malachi,
the Lord's not in the fire.

one meter per second—
the rate at which I walk
through the woods and around the block,
the speed at which I'm able to see
pink and white blooms on the crabapple tree,
Hank planting parsnip
despite pain in his hip,
pale cow-hair moss
looking like green candyfloss,
turkey-tail and ruffle lichens
feasting on old tree remains,
Jorge busking in the market lot
'cause rent is due, job or not;
it's where I hear the soft voice say,
"Here I am, this is the way
to be, to feed, to love, to live,
to weep, to grieve, rejoice, forgive";
this is the unexpected speed,
the speed of God incarnate.

Bible references:
1 Kings 19:11-13
Malachi 3:1-3
Matthew 25:14-46
Philippians 2:3-11

Anyway, my first thought was, Wow, some people REALLY hate poetry! I pictured a percentage of readers seeing one of my new posts in their inbox going, “If it’s another freaking poem, I’m gonna lose my mind!” My second thought was, Maybe my poems suck! Then I pictured those readers going, “Who’s going to tell her?”

I have no idea if this is what’s going on, and I’m not planning to investigate. But, it did make me realize that I provided no introduction or explanation about my latest “shifting of gears.” Actually, I did so superficially on Substack Notes, but that announcement probably reached only a percentage of the few readers who even use the Substack app. Therefore, to most of you, it probably looks like I abandoned the series I began in October (“How We Know What We Know”) and started randomly writing poems for no reason. Belatedly, I will now provide an introduction to my Lenten poetry series by way of an explanation.

I tried for months to write Part 3 of the “How We Know What We Know” series but struggled to get traction. I would write, delete, rewrite, edit, walk away… wash, rinse, repeat. The difficulty of the process took me by surprise because when I started the series, I considered it a straightforward project. I knew exactly where that series was going and how it would conclude. I needed only to write out the details of the narrative involving the 2.5 months that my dad, who suffers from delusional disorder, lived with me and my family in 2014. The funny thing is that the simple outline I had in my mind didn’t end up matching the details I rediscovered when I went back and reviewed my own journal entries plus S.O.S. emails I sent to out to friends during that time. When I finished reading through all that, I thought, “Holy $*#%?! That was awful, complicated, miserable, sorrow-filled, traumatic. And SO EXHAUSTING.” I had, to a degree, forgotten—not like an amnesiac but more like a post-surgical patient who was given a nerve block.

I guess you could say that rereading my own records caused the nerve block to wear off and full sensation to return. Unfortunately, this flood of negative emotional memory was coupled with the heightened stress and conflict in the general population over the election and its outcomes in November (which my series is meant to address), then followed by the frenzied hustle and bustle of the holidays. More significantly, my aging mother who also suffers from mental health issues is in a difficult, high-needs season of life and requires emotional and logistical support on a daily basis, even from afar. Did I mention also that my daughter is now a teenager learning how to drive and how to navigate a whole new set of friendships?

Needless to say, it doesn’t take much for me to run out of RAM.

On Ash Wednesday (February 26th), I was messaging back and forth about this struggle with my friend Susanne, a nature photographer and contemplative writer. She proposed an exercise: photographing my emotions and unpacking them indirectly by discussing the photographs. The suggestion resonated with me immediately. I tried it the very next day. When I sat down to write about the photo, I found that poetry was far more accessible than prose. Trying to write prose, even about a photograph, still felt like tedious labor, whereas poetry felt more like breathing. I breathed out my first poem.

After that I thought, Why don’t I just turn this into a Lenten practice? As I walked my neighborhood and started paying attention to the things I saw, I felt a strong release of creative energy to explore all kinds of emotions and themes: sorrow, fear, beauty and ugliness juxtaposed, maintaining faith in the face of overwhelming obstacles, hope against hope, injury, envy, insecurity, disappointment, the power of perspective, struggle, becoming Christlike through suffering.

I’m now processing a lot of things I didn’t expect to process. Looking back, I’m able to see that the short season of hosting my dad ended in a very difficult place for me. There was so much I couldn’t change about him, about the family system, about the amount of suffering that people I loved could inflict on one another because of their respective fixed beliefs. And I felt profoundly pained and damaged by that powerlessness. It wasn’t long after that experience that I began to throw myself whole-heartedly into even more intense ministry work involving marginalized people and a whole lot of writing in the social justice activist space. I needed to feel like I could make something in the world better. And in that most tender period, I found my way into a world in which friends, acquaintances, and strangers constantly told me that I was indeed making the world better. It was a balm to my soul. Until it wasn’t. But that’s a story for another time.

For the remainder of Lent, which ends on April 17th, I’ll be poetically reflecting on both the lovely and hard aspects of being human in a world that, until Jesus returns, continues to ache for redemption, deliverance, and renewal. I hope it blesses you all in surprising ways, even if poetry might not be your thing. I fully intend to return to the other series after Lent. I have a feeling I’ll be in a different place then.