MANUAL WORK

On my last day of work last week, someone asked me if I was looking forward to kicking back this week and relaxing. I looked at him cross-eyed, as if to say, “What’s that?” But in all seriousness, I don’t know that I know how to relax. And besides, I already knew in my head that this week was going to be a busy one. Just with a different kind of schedule.

For the first time in many months, I have days stretched out in front of me with nothing on the calendar. But those days have been quite full, and will continue to be for at least a week. For I have a considerable amount of manual work on my agenda.

We’ve decided to tackle our hallways, in terms of prepping them to be painted and them painting them. Having painted two rooms in our first five years of homeownership, we did a third room in less than a week and are now tackling two floors’ worth of hallways. I can’t begin to tell you how much masking tape I’ve already used and how sore my fingers are from applying that tape to the oddest of nooks and crannies in our house. And those posts on your typical staircase? Taped and cleaned each and every one of them.

I have a newfound appreciation for the manual worker. For sitting in front of a computer in a nice, air-conditioned office seems like a veritable vacation compared to squatting, stretching, and straining in tight spaces, on a ladder, or even outdoors in the heat and humidity. I have consumed too much water and Gatorade to calculate, my whole body aches in areas I didn’t know I had muscles, and I think I’m starting to hallucinate about walls peeling and dripping.

But it’s not all bad. I can’t wait until the end and the satisfaction of completing a hard task. I think of our little one and how she will be able to look at nicely painted walls and ceilings as she explores her new home. And I sleep like, well, a baby. Besides, next week school starts up again and I’ll have plenty of time in front of a computer then.

LAST WEEK

Every couple of years or so, I document my schedule for a week, just to take a snapshot of a typical week in my life at different stages of my life. But this week has been no ordinary week. For today is my last day at work, after ten wonderful years. So for the sake of documentation, I want to record what this past week has been like.

Monday, August 22. I had a bunch of errands to run in the morning, so I ended up getting into work at 9:00am. I went out to lunch with a friend. And I left work at 5:00pm. For the last ten years, I’ve probably done one of these three things, on average, once a week. That day, I did all three. As I was walking home, I thought to myself, “So this is how most of the modern office workers do their days.”

Tuesday, August 23. Our training department is in transition, so we had the first of what will likely be several big-picture meetings. I also met with a couple of staffers who are taking on departments I used to run, to help orient them to their new responsibilities. I left the office around 6 to meet with a friend, but later that evening Kanye West held a concert in our event hall. I hear he’s pretty popular, so I guess it would’ve been nice to stick around and hear him perform, but frankly I think by the time he started I was already in bed.

Wednesday, August 24. In the morning, my boss and I met with a potential funding partner to discuss future possibilities for collaboration. And then in the afternoon, I put on my grant writer hat and plowed through as many foundation and corporation proposals as possible for our youth program. I left the office around 7 after a whirlwind of letters of inquiry, proposal cover sheets, and narratives.

Thursday, August 25. Our organization christened it “Lee Huang Day,” and treated me to a breakfast, lunch, and evening reception in my honor. It was funny to receive the same plaque at all three functions, and to give the same thank-you speech three times in a row. I was touched by a “hat” ceremony the staff did for me at lunch, where different people took turns putting a hat on me to signify the many roles I’ve played here. Best of all, my wife was able to join me at the evening reception and I was able to acknowledge her role in helping making the last ten years possible.

Friday, August 26. Last day, last walk to work. I took the time to soak in my surroundings on my four-block commute. Here’s what I see, in half-block increments. Locust to Walnut, on the left there is a chain of thrift stores and on the right some random businesses and residence. Walnut to Sansom, on the left there is an empty lot and a corner store and on the right a mosque. 45th and Sansom, I was told, has had a high rate of murders over the last ten years, as reported in the local paper, but this goes to show you how the neighborhood is changing: to the left and the right are recently renovated homes and on the corner is a new playground. Sansom to Chestnut, on the left is an apartment complex and on the right some residences and a business on the corner. Chestnut to Ludlow, there’s a Catholic high school on the left and on the right a row of burnt-out homes that is being renovated. Ludlow to Market, on the left is a complex of low- to moderate-income homes and on the right is some rowhouses and an auto body shop on the corner. As I turn the corner and head west on Market, I see the elevated train line to my right and my office building looming to the left. I swipe my access card, which I will turn in later today, and head into a nicely air-conditioned facility to start my last day at work.

MY WIFE RESPONDS TO THE PAT ROBERTSON SITUATION

Well I wouldn't go so far as to say that I support Pat Robertson and I certainly would not defend him, although this has less to do with his comment about the assassination of Hugo Chavez. He says stupid things all the time, things that I believe are more inflammatory and hurtful then the Chavez comment. I was watching a segment from the 700 club the other day and he was talking about the homosexuals (can't you just hear the southern accent) and he characterised "them" using words such as depraved and narcissistic. I am wondering why no one is blogging about this. Yes, the assassination comment was ridiculous and ill timed but hardly worthy of all the time, energy, and publicity it is getting. I am more concerned with the way Pat Robertson and friends portray Christianity as indignant, self-righteous, and without compassion. Perhaps the flurry around the assassination comment is because many of us secretly think things such as this, he is just dumb enough to say it out loud on a national program. Also there is something delicious at catching a "holier than thou" saying something so obviously and delightfully sinful. As I see it, the only damage control that needs to be done is to make sure George W doesn't mistaken this comment as sound foreign policy advice. So what the heck, I say forgive Mr. Robertson, I mean WWJD?

HE WAS A SHADOW OF HIS FUTURE SELF

This morning’s sermon was on the hope that we as Christians should have as await Jesus’ return, and how that hope should transform the way we live in the present day. Our pastor used a phrase that I found apt: “We are a shadow of our future selves.” What a wonderful thought, I thought, that there is so much more to come.

We usually conclude our morning service with a hymn right after the sermon, and usually the hymn is related to the sermon topic. As the organ fired up for this morning’s closing hymn, I looked in the bulletin and saw that the hymn was “My Hope is Built on Nothing Less.” My heart leapt. Here is a hymn that I can rarely get through without shedding a tear or two, how wonderful does it describe the hope that we as Christians have in Jesus Christ.

The hymn took on special significance last December, when my good friend Glenn passed away suddenly at the age of 29. It was a favorite hymn of his, too, and I can still remember all the times we sang the hymn together or referenced it in our conversations, usually when one or both of us were going through some tribulation that required a reminder of the hope we can hold fast to in hard times.

We sung the hymn at Glenn’s funeral, on a dreary winter morning. I can still remember the organist firing up the first chords and me absolutely losing it, thinking of all the significance of this song to Glenn’s life and to my friendship with him. I can still remember his mother, who is an accomplished soloist, soulfully belting out the song at the top of her lungs, to the point that even though there were about 400 people in the sanctuary at the time, her voice distinctly rang out. If it is possible to start crying harder in the midst of crying as hard as I thought I could, I was doing it at that moment.

And so as the organist played and the congregation sang, I thought about my friend Glenn, and in light of this morning’s sermon, how during the time I knew him, he was indeed a shadow of his future self. For as much as Glenn loved life and was full of life, that was just a faint representation of his present and future place of glory. My friend Ian told me the morning after Glenn’s passing that he (Ian) awoke, even in deep sadness, with a smile on his face because he had an image of Glenn dancing in his rumbling, ska-like way in heaven right now. I recalled that image this morning, and wept at the thought of my friend in glory, far happier and far fuller than even his happy and full life here on earth.

Our pastor exhorted us in his sermon with the dazzling possibility that there is so much more in store for us, in terms of fullness of life and experience of glory, of our lives bringing even greater glory in the future than we can possibly image in the present, and how that great hope can drive us to great works. And so as we sang that closing hymn and I thought of my friend, I could not help but be moved: saddened that I am without my friend and that his life was so short, but comforted that for all the ways he experienced and glorified God in his life, he is experiencing and glorifying so much more now.

WHAT IS WORTH ALL OUR TIME

After not having any Christian speaking engagements for awhile, I will possibly have three in the next two weeks. In all three, I am marinating on Jesus’ story about how the kingdom of God is like a man who, having found in a field a treasure of incomparable worth, sells all he has to buy it. I’d like to talk about how we invest our resources, and whether it syncs up with the fact that we too have encountered something of incomparable worth, which (who) demands all we have in response. And since I’ll be speaking to college students and young adults in all three cases, I’ll focus less on money and more on another, more valuable resource: time.

We live in a day and age, particularly in our elite academic institutions, where people are busier than ever. We are constantly juggling school and work and friends and family, maxed out on extra-curricular activities and never without two or three things on the side to entertain us if we have even a second of breathing room. Maybe we’re the children of a baby boomer generation that shuttled us from karate practice to swim lessons, and this is the only speed we know. Maybe we’re in an ever-accelerating rat race, and feel we have to keep up. Maybe (as my friend JD conjectures) we’re living in a post-modern society in which life is truly meaningless, and the thought is so depressing that we’ll do anything to keep ourselves preoccupied, lest we stop for a minute to consider the sheer hopelessness of it all.

Whatever the reason, Jesus offers an alternative, another way of living that is so encompassing that it can be compared to something that someone would sell everything to buy. And so the question for anyone who is paying attention in the 21^st century is: what could possibly be worth all my time? It is that question, by God’s grace, I hope to answer.

SO UN-AMERICAN

The local news radio station has been running a story on how gas just went past the $2.50 per gallon mark in the area. It has been interviewing local drivers about their take on this situation, and many of them have expressed their outrage over the fact that it now takes sixty to seventy dollars to fill up their cars. The reporter notes that some have gone to websites to find where gas is cheapest in their neighborhood, and concludes – finally – with how some resourceful drivers have found ways to minimize the number of trips they make.

At last, a coherent thought. These reports have infuriated me because they belie an American sense of entitlement over cheap gas and thoughtless freedom. We imagine that we deserve cheap gas, and deem it unacceptable that gas has gotten so expensive. Never mind that we still pay much less for our gas than most of the developed world. That what drivers pay for their gas dwarfs what they cost our society in the form of pollution, wear and tear on roads, and time lost to congestion. That we made the decision, individually and corporately, to accept a higher gas bill when we allowed gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles to abide by different fuel economy standards and then bought them in the millions. And that in economic terms, gas is like any other product in the world, in that when its price goes up, people decide either to spend more of their money on it or they make choices to use less of it.

But, you might argue, gas isn’t like goods that are easily replaced, like when coffee goes up so you just buy more tea. “I need to be able to drive; I don’t have any choice.” Perhaps it is easy for me to say this, since I live in a big city and I walk four blocks to work, but there is still choice in travel. You can choose alternate forms of transportation besides the car, or at least residential and vocational options that minimize your use of a car.

But car travel is inseparable from the American way of life, for it empowers us to move on our terms and to live further and further away from one another. To be beholden to a bus schedule or to be denied the opportunity to live in a house with a white picket fence hundreds of miles from a city center seems unseemingly restricting, certainly not the kind of freedom that we Americans pride ourselves in enjoying. Never mind that our individuality is destroying the environment without suitable compensation (we pay too little for our gas compared to what we wreak with our driving). That new developments remote from our urban centers strain our governments’ physical and financial resources (it is expensive to build out public infrastructure to such far-flung places). And that most car trips could actually be eliminated if people gave a second thought to planning ahead and bundling errands (which would happen a lot more if gas was priced correctly and people understood it for the scarce resource it is).

Please understand that I am not a tree-hugging, kumbaya-singing liberal who thinks everyone should live in a commune, share all their possessions, and live off the land. I am a blue-blooded, free-market, fiscal conservative. In fact, my rant against peoples’ attitude towards gas is straight out of my Wharton upbringing, out of my belief in Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” People have it all wrong when they complain about the high price of gas but don’t make any life changes in response. If gas costed more, and/or if people responded to the current price in a more economically rational way, people and communities and governments would work better, better in terms of quality of life, financial efficiency, and environmental stewardship. But it seems that won’t happen, because that would be so un-American.

WORLDS COLLIDE

Fact: since I was six, I have devoted a disproportionate amount of time rooting for the Oakland A’s: celebrating their successes, feeling the pain of their failures, and never too far away from thinking of the team.

Fact: since May, I have devoted a disproportionate amount of time working on my independent study: learning about transit-oriented development, talking with local officials and neighborhood residents, and never too far away from working on the paper.

Today, these two worlds collided. For the owner of the A’s has unveiled a plan for a new ballpark village, which will not just be a baseball stadium but a mixed-use development with condos and retail. All he wants from the city of Oakland is the land – any land near a transit stop. They’re looking at an industrial location near the current stadium, and have promised to pay fair market for anyone who they’ll have to buy out.

Land use issues? Development near transit? My beloved A’s? A brand new ballpark? I can’t help but keep one eye on this story.

THE INDIVIDUAL’S CHOICE TO SIN

Lately, I’ve been contemplating the perspective that the Christian life is not this set of tenets and actions that individuals choose to believe or not believe, but a shared experience within a larger body of believers. The sermon this past Sunday was on this very topic, and both the book I’m studying with the men in my church on Wednesdays (Romans) and the one I’m studying by myself in the mornings (1 Corinthians) are, like almost all epistles in the New Testament, letters from Paul to a group of Christians (i.e. not an individual message to individual people).

This sense of individuality is a very modern and Western notion, and it is a frame of reference that many modern Western Christians (including myself, more often that not) read the Bible and live the Christian life. The road to discipleship, while we understand the value of authentic relationships along the way, is one that we individually choose into, and as part of that, make thousands of individual choices daily, to sin or to be holy.

Not only do I find this way of thinking to be incomplete at best and flat-out wrong at worst, but it just isn’t nearly as effective in terms of living the righteous life. For ever since I saw a picture of my daughter, who we will be meeting for the first time next month, I understand that I am not just an individual accountable for myself but a father who has a connection with another human being for whom I will be responsible.

And this sense of being connected to someone else has made it easier for me to say no to sin and yes to Christian obedience. For I get into trouble when it comes to sinful behavior when I convince myself that I am my own person, free to make my own choices and face the consequences accordingly. But I am not my own person now; I am a father, and I just can’t bring myself to want to act in any sort of way that I could not justify to my daughter.

The funny thing is that before we knew we were adopting a baby girl, I was already a connected person. I am married, and have covenanted before God and family to be one flesh with this other person. I am connected to a larger body of believers, and as a body part among other body parts, I ought to rejoice when others rejoice and suffer when others suffer. And ultimately, I am connected to God and accountable before Him, now and on Judgment Day.

Becoming a dad doesn’t replace all of these other connections, obviously; but what it has done is focused these other connections. Indeed I am connected all over the place. To sin now isn’t just about me making an individual decision, nor is to be holy; but doing both, I now see more clearly, has an effect on others and on my connection to others. This sense of connectedness, and not an individualistic relationship between me and God, is what I believe to be more proper, and as I mentioned above, more effective in living the righteous life.

GET OUT OF THE CAR

My wife and I went to Queen Village this afternoon to meet with our pediatrician. We were deciding between whether to drive and have to deal with traffic and parking, or to take public transportation and deal with transfers or long walks. We decided on the latter.

As we walked and talked, I couldn’t help but look around and take in the scenery. Philadelphia is a city of neighborhoods, and it was fascinating to walk from neighborhood to neighborhood and pick up on the unique flavors and textures. Some areas were nicer, and others were more rundown. As we walked from our house to the closest subway station, I told Amy about some of the things going on in West Philadelphia from a real estate standpoint, pointing out new projects along the way.

We got off on 8^th and Market Streets. It’s a busy intersection, with a large mall and several major retail stores. As we headed southward, we passed Jewelers Row, where I bought Amy her engagement ring. We walked through parts of Society Hill, a really pricey neighborhood, and I marveled at the cobblestone roads and historic houses.

Everywhere we turned, there was something interesting to see: ornate architecture, teens clustered together enjoying their last days of summer freedom, world-class medical institutions. That, and the wonderful company I was keeping, made for such an enjoyable walk, that even though it was a good ten blocks from the subway stop to the pediatrician’s office, I kind of wished we could have walked longer.

It got me thinking, that if we had driven, we would have missed all of this texture. One of the things I love about Philadelphia is just how walkable it is. Because it is so dense, you can easily walk to anywhere you want to go. But there’s more to walkability than convenience. It also helps that there are so many interesting things to look at. Not something you can do when you’re driving from Point A to Point B.

WHAT A DIFFERENCE EIGHT CAMPS MAKE

Well, our five-day intensive training camp for young entrepreneurs is over. It was my eighth and final such camp, and especially since we had three speakers back this year who I first met at our first camp in 1998, I thought a lot about that very first camp.

A lot has happened in seven years. Our youth program is now more fully-formed, and I leave it in the sure hands of our new director, who I am sure will take it to new heights. Our camp, which had eighty participants in its first year and then swelled to upwards of 220 at its peak, is now back down to that manageable number of 80. Our speakers are better, our production tighter, and our messages and media both much more technological.

What’s interesting isn’t how much has changed, though, but how much has stayed the same. I’m not just speaking of the logistics of planning and hosting the event, although there are some interesting parallels there. But what I mean is in terms of content. Since we first started this camp series in 1998, we’ve changed over from a Democrat to a Republican in the White House, fought two wars, and had a dot-com boom and bust.

But the core business messages our speakers have been bringing to our kids has been the same. Have a vision. Network like crazy. Be a salesperson. Know your technology. And always give back. It’s nice to know good lessons never go out of style.

THANKFUL FOR GOOD FINANCIAL (MANAGEMENT) UPBRINGING

Having lived in an inner city setting for the past ten years, I’ve often been thankful for my family’s relative wealth. I never considered myself rich growing up, but the fact that I was able to go to PENN, live in a house in the ‘burbs, and travel a lot means that I’ve had privileges most others haven’t.

Lately, though, I’ve been feeling grateful more often, not about my good financial upbringing, but about my good financial management upbringing. In other words, my parents not only had decent money to provide for me, but they also provided me with decent money management principles.

For example, I can recall my dad teaching me how to keep a cash ledger when I was six. I got two cents each Monday night for rounding up all the plastic trash bags in the house and bringing them to the outside garbage can, and my dad made me record that in my ledger. Cash gifts from my grandparents, tooth fairy money, even loose change I found in the streets got recorded in that ledger. When my piggy bank got to be $40 or so, we’d go down to the bank and we’d deposit that money there.

My dad taught me about the stock market, too. Before you could use the Internet to set up a page to track all the stocks you owned, my dad would sit me in front of the TV during a business show and give me a list of ticker symbols and tell me to write down the prices and how much they went up or down that day. In retrospect, I suppose he could’ve just waited until the next morning’s paper, but at the time I watched that scrolling bar like our family’s financial future depended on it.

I’m realizing that not everyone was fortunate to have this kind of upbringing. Principles that come natural to me – start saving early, don’t get too deep in debt, build good credit – are foreign concepts to others. With a baby on the way, I strategize over things like 403(b)’s and 529’s, and I’m much more comfortable because of the foundation my parents laid for me.

So I was doubly blessed growing up: we had money, and we managed it well. Although the more I think about it, if I had to choose between one or the other, I’d have to now go with the latter.

WHAT IS THE SOUND OF TEENS LEARNING

The first full week of August the past eight years, our organization has hosted a business “boot camp” for teen entrepreneurs. In initiating this annual activity, I’m proud to say we were ahead of the curve on a couple of trends that have appeared over the past few years: 1) organizations holding “boot camps” for whatever specialty they can create an intensive training event for, and 2) Apprentice-style “challenges” involving actual companies who get great product placement and consumer-driven ideas for their sponsorship.

But that’s not the subject of this post. What I think is noteworthy is the tone of this year’s camp. In years past, we’ve had as many as 220 participants in attendance, and we’ve admitted students as young as 12 (and in reality, much younger; witness the one young man who was “12” for three straight years). We also accepted every applicant: if you turned in the form, you were in.

This year, we decided to have an interview process. Not a rigorous one, mind you, but enough that 1) anyone who wasn’t really serious about attending wasn’t going to apply in the first place, and 2) anyone whose mom signed them up who really didn’t want to go now had an easy out for not having to go. At least this is what we hoped.

Guess what? It’s worked, like a charm. On the first day, we had almost zero behavioral issues. By and large, the students were quiet, well-behaved, and attentive. Distractions were at a minimum. If this makes any sense, the silence was deafening.

This silence that I was “hearing” at first had me worried, because it was such a foreign “sound.” My mind immediately jumped to the conclusion that something was wrong, until I identified the “sound” as that of teens learning. So this is what it sounds like. Sign me up for four more days of that.

UNDESERVING

Whether you want to chastise me or blame my parents (or the Republicans), I believe strongly that people should work hard for the good stuff they get. I’m not a big fan of undeserved favor, whether you’re talking about a national and theoretical level (arguing socialism versus capitalism, for example) or a local and practical level (deciding how to divvy out rewards to the students in my class, for example).

Of course, there’s a lot to our relationship with God that falls in the category of undeserved favor. But to be honest with you, while I understand the theological mechanics of free grace and have a deep sense of gratitude for God’s love for me, I sometimes struggle to want to be deemed worthy through something I’ve done. Whether it is being moral, hard-working, or selfless, I prefer being able to feel like I’m at least a little deserving of good stuff. I know it’s doctrinally wrong, but this is where I’m coming from.

Which is why experiences of undeserved favor are so healthy for me to receive. For they remind me that I have not merited God’s goodness, and could not ever merit such a goodness. In church this past weekend, as the congregation sang songs of worship to God for His goodness to us, I was overcome with just such a realization of undeserved favor.

As I sang, I felt like a cup that was overflowing, so happy I was for all the ways God is blessing me: a lovely wife, a beautiful baby on the way, all sorts of interesting things going on with work and school. And all things not just good things but direct answers to direct prayers I had prayed over the years, direct testimonies of God’s work in my life and on my behalf.

And my happiness was co-mingled with a deep sense of unworthiness, a sense that there were so many ways in which I was not right with God. I had brushed off such things before as excusable in light of all my positive attributes, but now I owned them for what they really were: offenses in the sight of a just and good God. Where there were stanzas about being thankful for God’s forgiveness, I sung them with meaning, for that meant something to me: yes I need to be forgiven, and yes God has forgiven me.

No matter how moral, hard-working, or selfless we strive to be, we are all undeserving of God’s love and provision. That we can still receive it, that is good news, good news we can experience more deeply when we let go of needing to be deserving on our own.