While I don't talk much about my relationship with my parents, it is overall a pretty good one. I am not the most obedient, patient or submissive son. I have done the wrong of overstepping the God-given freedom my parents grant me, which sometimes becomes undue disrespect. But overall, I think that generally things are pretty good between us. But even so, I do not miss them often. As a prime specimen of exemplary boarding school experience, I almost never get homesick. So to feel lately that I miss them is somewhat rare. Although really it’s more than missing them. It’s something clearly more profound. Maybe I’m finding what it means to be their son despite what I feel has been a summer of feeling apart, disconnected, ill-fitting; this summer I argued with Mom about how I felt let down as a son in terms of spiritual formation and guidance from them. I told her that I felt like being home was surreal. I’m not sure what I think of that now. But I think that as I am/they are getting older, I am figuring out that I and they are flawed and limited, and if I don’t love us for what we are, then I’ll probably wake up and wonder where my parents are and find they’re gone and that I've loved too late. I wouldn’t want that.

One problem I have is that I think their life at home is static. This is absolutely false. Both work very hard and long hours. Dad pulls long days at the hospital and part time at a private clinic. Mom works part time at a private firm in the city and does her own cases too. Maybe you’ve seen my house and think we’re loaded - I’d like to point out that our mortgage is considerable, that the house is large so that we can host and welcome people, that my parents make up a really inordinate portion of the giving at our home church, that Mom could find a job with considerably more pay but values freedom/time to serve at church and foregoes it, and that her income covers the tuition (and even then, not entirely). So let it not be said that their hard work is for us alone.

They are also overworked at the church - I could rail at length on what I think of other leaders or lack thereof but I will not be accused of slander - in their serving/leading roles (and others they are not supposed to be responsible for). Mom is chair of the deacon board. Dad is an elder, who also preaches at our home church and other churches in the area without pastors. So though I think of them as static sometimes, they’re really as dynamic and frantic as me.

I think that this more-than-missing them has come from hearing what they’ve been up to lately in their various modes of ministry. Despite my frustrations of detachedness and feelings of being misplaced in the family, I am somehow finding that we are not so different. Like father/mother, like son?

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Mom’s week:
Not only is my Mom the chair of the deacon board, she’s also basically in charge of the Sisters’ Fellowship, which meets every other Tuesday, has many mothers and even more elderly women. My Mom has always had a gift for loving the elderly, partly because she possesses great quantities of love, compassion and patience together. She has always counted it very important to love and serve them well - I think that I in my brash youth cannot comprehend this fully.
This past Tuesday was the annual fall outing for the Sisters' Fellowship. Each year they head outdoors to some park or whatnot to enjoy a day in the sun, with picnic etc. The past two years the weather’s been less than perfect - a bit cold for the elderly really. And the Sisters' Fellowship has grown so large that my Mom was concerned about getting everybody to the park at all. She wrote me before the event asking me to pray for rides and weather, which I did.
When she called me on Saturday, she told me that it was a total success. The weather was absolutely perfect, and they had somehow scrambled enough drivers together. All the sisters with cars and almost every staff member in the church (secretary, both Chinese pastors, and youth pastor!) loaded up the sisters and headed out. While I cannot understand her great passion and compassion for the elderly, I could hear in her voice how happy she was about it. I (almost?) had tears in my eyes as she told me about it - just the week before, I had similarly been at least obtusely related to the frenzy of organizing rides for IV's New Student Retreat for the freshmen and new upperclassmen, and asking God to give us excellent weather for the beach (which God did for us also). She serving the old, and I serving the youngest - a bizarre and perfect parallel. I know I cannot understand her love for the elderly, but I felt for even a flash an absolutely sameness with her, her joy being found in serving them wholly. Maybe my relentless drive comes from her.

Dad’s week:
Not many people know, but my Dad has actually been in China and Hong Kong the last two weeks. He went as part of a team of Chinese professionals organized to help support the workers in the earthquake-affected areas of China (Szechuan, etc.). Dad is a psychiatrist, published and rather well-known actually, and was going to help train some local workers to help victims with trauma and coping and other things like that. My Dad confessed to me before he left that he really wasn’t sure what on earth he was going to do or teach them; he’d never worked with natural disasters or their victims before. I suppose this was an indication that my father was afraid or at least daunted by the massive task at hand. How does one stare into mountains of rubble and chasms and know what to do after all? He mentioned that "clearly there are many who are suffering but I see and heard many examples of real strength and optimism." He relayed to me one very sad account. In his words:
"The saddest story is that of a mother who held the hands of her trapped dying 9 yo daughter who when near death bit her finger and wrote in blood on her textbook " Ma Ma, I love you" and died. I wonder how the mother can recover from the trauma." My father is not always a very open or emotional man. What he shared with me is by my best guess his admission of helplessness.
After his teaching regimen in China, he was set to return to Hong Kong to do some preaching and teaching in Hong Kong churches. I didn’t know till maybe two years ago, but my father is quite well-known in the Hong Kong Christian community (apparently, So Wing You, the pastor of HK’s biggest church, is a disciple of my fathers, one of many). As a Christian and psychiatrist, he has often considered and taught on issues of mental illness and faith. His two topics of late have been "How Can a Christian Become Depressed?" and "Mental Illness and Demon Possession." My cousin informed my father however that many of his views on mental illness etc. were actually the "target of much severe criticism." My father was "surprised." It may seem little worth as I am his son, but Dad’s views on these issues are markedly cogent, balanced between the realities of faith and of medicine. Some clearly disagree.
I think that despite my father’s sometimes frustrating quietness (though to be honest, he is bounds ahead of most Chinese fathers), I understand something about him and myself, our common self and fate, when I hear about his past week. Thrust into a seemingly incomprehensible and unanswerable place of need, only half-suited to the task at hand but knowing he was called to go, my father felt confusion, maybe shell-shock, maybe helplessness. And even when returning "home" to teach and lead to some degree, he found himself under heavy fire; I can imagine him defiant in the stinging hurt and face of disagreement. My life isn’t really different any. My warzones may not be the earthquake of Szechuan, nor my topic mental illness, but these same pains sound so undeniably familiar.
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I do not know what exactly this is supposed to mean. Maybe I will show this to them to explain that, despite my impetuous and frustrated outbursts of youthful/ungrateful independence, despite my inability to understand how I so far away am supposed to be when I come home for the summer, I am faintly beginning to comprehend that we are the same cloth after all, with the same kinds of stitching and patterns woven in. The same heartbeats, the same persistence to serve, lead, make… As I am their pride and joy, maybe I am learning to see them as mine.

"Children's children are a crown to the aged, & parents are the pride of their children." [Proverbs 17:6]

In the face of extreme opposition, the absence of sustenance, and destruction of self, one is given three options: die, lie, or defy.

To die is be defeated, to fall apart, whether literally or figuratively. To die is to be crushed and let the shattered pieces stay as they are. The one who dies accepts the present but admits that there is nothing else but it. The one who dies forgets.

To lie is to pretend that nothing is wrong, that all things are just as they should be and that there is no struggle and there is no pain. To lie is to craft fantasy and imagination as a means to fool oneself and all others. The one who lies tears integrity and internal sanctity to pieces in search of an external placidity. The one who lies destroys himself.

To defy is to struggle, fight, and force oneself through the maelstrom of the temporary supplied only by the remembrance of the Permanent. The one who defies says things that are no longer wholly true or easy for him to say, believe or see in his life, but stands unswervingly on the fact that they are True even if they are invisible. The one who defies endures.

There are but three choices. In the jaws of death, beneath the engulfing palm of hopelessness, inside the howling gale of obscurity, one must choose to die, lie or defy. Is what one sees the truth, or is the Truth just what it claims to be - the truth? Despite a constant death, and a swirl of lies that tempt doubt I have chosen to defy. Defy. Defy. Defy. Do not go gentle into that good night. Defy. Defy. Defy.


Various acts of literal & symbolic defiance.