Good Eats and Thoughts of a Contemplative Feeler

I wrote this little piece for our church's advent devotional this year. My prayer is that it brings you a little bit of hope and peace during this crazy, unexpected year. Thanks for reading! “See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch.  2  But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall.  3  And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says the Lord of hosts. 4  Remember the teaching of my servant Moses, the statutes and ordinances that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel. 5  Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.  6  He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of chi

  Year 30 has been a whirlwind for me. If someone would have told me most of it would be spent trying to navigate through a pandemic, I would have laughed internally at them. Nevertheless, 2020 has given me a lot of time to reflect on my life and the lessons I have learned. I attempted to compile a list of 31 lessons I've learned so far...but the process involved a bit more rigor than I wanted to put forth haha. Therefore, I decided it would be a lot easier to share 31 songs that have impacted my life in some shape or form over the years and just might contain some of the lessons I've learned. With that said, in no particular order, here we go! "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" by U2 I've always loved this song, but it deeply impacted me when I realized that the theological transformation I had undergone during seminary made me incompatible with the conservative culture and convictions of my previous church. This was when I knew it was time for

*Author Note: Thank you for taking the time to read this post. As a pastor/ministry leader, I always feel the pressure to make my posts explicitly theological and/or biblical. In this particular post, I had to give myself permission to not explicitly address the theology at risk or relevant biblical passages. These are simply thoughts and feelings that have been generating inside of me, particularly in regards how to my experience in the evangelical church and my Asian American background relates to justice issues for the Black community. Here we go! Five years ago, I wrote a blog post about why #blacklivesmatter to me, which I discovered was not received well by a number of people in the white evangelical context I was working in at the time. If you want to read the original post, you can click here . Three years ago, I invited Chris Pennywell to share with my previous high school students about his personal experience as a Black man in the Central Valley and how his Afri