Thanksgiving in Korea

Special kids deserve a special Chuseok. Help us out!
In Korea: 외환은행 (Korean Exchange Bank) 620-184095-562
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This is a dude whose thankfulness cannot be fully expressed. But let me show you something.

Last spring around Children's Day, I remember riding the bus back from the orphanage in Masan past the big Shinsegae Department Store. I saw the moms carrying, pushing and towing their kids in and out of the store's huge glass doors. The store is just a few blocks from AeYukWon, and I imagine the kids there see similar scenes just about every day. I wondered then how it felt to them, seeing something that to the rest of the world is mundane and expected -- shopping with Mom -- that they would never experience. To have that part of their lives missing. And I felt thankful for my family, who have given more than any family should have to, to put up with me.

Now it's September and the "Korean Thanksgiving Day" -- Chuseok -- is upon us. This is a time when Koreans all over the country travel to grandparents' houses and eat, play games and celebrate their family ties. For non-Christian Koreans, the holiday includes worship and incense at the burial sites of ancestors. But for everyone it's a time to be thankful for what they have because of those who have gone before. (It's also a time of MAMMOTH traffic jams, which makes me glad I'll be in the Philippines for this Chuseok.)

Some of the AeYukWon kids will visit family members they do have over Chuseok. But none of them will feel the full embrace of family the way I always did growing up. I can't replace that, but in the hope of making happy memories of their own, we're going to do something special this year.

Next Saturday, Sept. 25, we're having a barbecue picnic for the orphanage kids. It's the tail end of Chuseok holidays, when many of their friends will be traveling to or from grandma's house. So we're going to introduce them to a good old-fashioned North American barbecue: burgers, hot dogs, chips and cola, the whole thing. This should be really fun, because the kids love food, they love our visits, and they love doing new things. But it won't be cheap, which is why I'm bringing back the old "Donate" button up there. The AeYukWon doesn't have a grill, and while I'm hoping to borrow one or find one second-hand, there's still the matter of charcoal and all that meat. It's not that we can't do it without your help. But here's a chance for you to be part of making a holiday special for some really special kids. I know times are tough back in the U.S., but if you've got a spare five or ten bucks, I promise you that it will make a difference over here.

Thanks for everything, everybody. May God bless all your hearts and give you even more to be thankful for this year.

Epilogue

HyeonHo and I got together last night and hooked up the computer. It seems to work pretty well. Now we gotta get these kids some good games and educational software. Anybody got any suggestions?

Thanks for all your help, everybody. Here's where your donations went. Money well spent.

And now the fun part!

Guess I'm a runner now.

The race is over; the rainy riverside course was gentle enough to let me set a new personal record with 28 minutes, 34 seconds. The other runners were amazingly friendly and helpful, and even spoke English fairly well. They helped me figure out where to turn around and run back -- running in the rain means running without my glasses, so I couldn't read any signs.

Technically I guess I won; there were only two runners in the 5k today so there are no official results. But I was the first one back and I got a medal, so that's more than good enough for me!

The next step is gathering up all the donations and ordering the computer for the kids. I'll be doing that on Monday, and I'll post the final total then. Thanks everyone for taking part in this and for supporting me. In particular, thanks to Susan for getting out of bed insanely early twice to go up there, encourage, motivate, and take photos. If you don't have a Susan in your life, see if you can get one, because then you will run faster, work harder, believe stronger, wake up earlier and just generally be more awesome.

This was fun, guys! Let's do this again sometime and see if we can brighten some more days!

The outlook is bright

Sara just confirmed for me that I'm all signed up for tomorrow morning. I'm checking the location and time for the 50th time. The weather looks like it will clear up just in time. The race is on!

Seeeeeeeek

Talking to a friend this afternoon, I got to thinking about the times that life takes you right up to and past what you're able to handle. One anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, calls this a "limit of endurance," and suggests that it's one form of limit that religion helps people transcend.

I think we all have limits to our endurance, or at least we think we do. But then God takes you by the hand and walks you right up to that point and says, "we're going over there." You would never go by choice, but then you have to. Suddenly you are beyond what you can bear. What's going to hold you together at that point?

We all turn to something. Friends, family, denial, daydreams, alcohol, whatever. People who have some connection to God want to turn to him, but where is he? That makes it worse, when you need him more than ever and you can't find him. "Why have you forsaken me?"

Maybe God isn't showing up easily because we need him to be hard to find. Rich Mullins has a song called "Hard to Get," about being in utter despair and not finding God right there waiting for you. When you're in anguish, you're fixated on that thing that is killing you -- whether you're dwelling on it to try to solve it or trying with all your might to avoid or forget it. And the human mind doesn't handle a vacuum well, so you dwell and dwell and obsess and fuss and worry and this thing sinks its claws into you and hauls you off a cliff.

I think the important thing in those moments is to keep looking. Jeremiah 29:13 says "You will seek Me and find Me when you seek Me with all your heart." Seeking God is important even when things are horrible. And when things are amazing. All the mental energy that wells up inside you in moments of emotional pressure can have a productive outlet. Turn your attention from solving the problem to seeking the Provider. When the world tugs at your heart and wants you to worry, orient that hunger toward God himself. Seek him with all your heart and watch him show up.

I think he will keep just the right distance to make you seek him enough to find him right when you REALLY need him. And at that point finding him means so much more than it would have at the moment of crisis. This goes for delirium as well as despair. Don't focus on what's got you transfixed in this world. Seek him and find him. Then watch what he's got in mind for you on the other side of the trial.

Without a doubt

[I'm doing back-to-back posts today because this part has nothing to do with running.]

I'm learning a lot lately about patience, or more accurately about how I don't have any to speak of. Do you ever look at your life and say "Wow, God is doing something amazing here," and then you get so excited that you find you can't stand waiting to see what it's gonna be like? This is where I'm at right now.

And I've been here before. Back in January I was stuck in the hospital, waiting day after day for Gleevec to kick in and my white blood cell counts to go down. I was losing my mind. I wanted to get out of there and back to my job. I missed my kids. I missed the Sunday school. I missed feeling like a productive member of society. I missed my freedom and my privacy. And I was scared -- what if the medicine didn't work? What if my Philadelphia chromosome didn't respond? What if I never got back to work, never got my life back?

I think God was using that time to, among other things, wring that doubt out of me. I had to get past thinking "what if." I had to let go of being scared to be wrong. I had to stop being prepared for the worst and just trust God to do his thing. Aaron Shust showed up on my iPhone today and reminded me, "I am not skilled to understand / What God has willed, what God has planned / I only know at his right hand / Stands one who is my Savior." I had to stop preparing myself for the worst, stop trying to understand everything, and just see the face of someone who loves me more than himself, and know that person is standing before the God of the universe and pointing at me and taking care of things. The part of me that was simulating utter disappointment -- taking myself through the steps to be prepared to hear bad news -- that part had to die.

Not because things always work out the way we want. There are more than enough stories of good people suffering bad outcomes for me to know that endings aren't always ostensibly happy, even when you do trust God. But the response to that isn't to expect or prepare for the worst. It's just to trust and concentrate on that. If those horrible things you're worrying about come to pass, it's then that God steps in to take care of it. It's not for me to make backup plans for God. He has planned it, and he's all over it.

So one of the products of those 19 days in the hospital was that I kind of lost my ability to doubt reflexively. That's not to say I don't ever doubt; it's just that my cynical, knee-jerk "well this probably won't work out so get ready for it to fail" reflex was broken. Praise God for that -- there is so much more peace in my life now than there ever was before.

But lately I'm learning how much easier life is with doubt. My buddy Paul back home, who always fills me up with wisdom and good things, wrote a long time ago about how having faith is actually a harder, more vulnerable way to go through life. Some people say faith is a crutch that lets weak-minded people more comfortably tolerate a cruel, capricious universe. I'm telling you it's not so. Doubt is the crutch. Doubt is a cushion.

When you see God working, your heart soars. You dream dreams about how this is going to play out, how the world will change. You careen through delirious joy at God's grace and faithfulness and sheer cleverness in working things out. Doubt keeps you anchored in these times. It tempers that joy and puts a ceiling on your praise. You're thinking, "well, this may not happen, but wow if it does~!" And that's so much safer, because deep down you know if you're wrong, some part of you saw it coming all along. You feel like you'll be more ready for that time.

Without doubt, without cynicism you are totally exposed. The mystified sensation that comes from witnessing the utterly unbelievable is looking for a channel, and can't find one. It's kind of like watching a magic show, I guess -- it's fun and interesting and cool as long as some part of the back of your mind knows that what you're seeing is just a really clever trick. But if you lose that sense, if all of a sudden you're fully committed to the realization that you're watching real magic, it changes everything you thought you knew about the world. Without doubt, it's like that. You can't go back to your base assumption that there's a logical, acceptable, not-nearly-so-exciting explanation for all this.

This leads to a peace, most of the time, that can only be described as "extravagantly intense." Why, then, do people doubt? Wouldn't we have learned by now it's more peaceful and easier to just believe? Why is it so hard? I think that's because doubt gives you the ability to protect yourself. It's your one foot in the boat "just in case" while you're trying to learn to walk on water. It keeps you safe and keeps intact your "illusion of control" (as Nancy says). Life without doubt -- life lived by abject faith -- is actually a lot riskier and takes more effort.

A little more waiting

The race didn't work out.

I had the car rented, the gear packed, the training done; what I didn't do was confirm one more time exactly where the run was to take place. I was just sure that I was going to Daegu World Cup Stadium. And the navigation system I rented along with the car got me there, albeit along a circuitous route that nearly made me late. But when we got there, we couldn't find the starting line. Why? Well, it turns out that I had mistakenly signed up for a race in Seoul instead. Oops.

We had a great day in Daegu notwithstanding; the National Museum is well worth seeing even with the main exhibition halls closed for construction and the Daegu Arboretum is beautiful. Plus, it just turned into a fantastic day with the best of company. After touring Daegu for a bit, we went back to Masan and had a pizza party with the Aeyukwon kids, then barbecued in the park with more friends. By the end of the night, I had almost forgotten the epic failure that started the day. It was just that good.

I've made a new plan, too. There's another race, this one actually in Daegu, in two weeks. I signed up for it online, but the site's application system for foreigners is not working all that well, so I'm not sure whether I'm actually in or not. Assuming it worked, I'll be running on July 17th -- two days after my 33rd birthday. I'll post here as soon as it's officially set.