OVERLAPPING CHAPTERS — free as the sky

Yesterday (November 15th) marked an end of a chapter. I knew it was coming. Our neighbors to the east of us, with whom we have been neighbors for over 20 years, moved out. About a month ago while we were still in Korea, our neighbors to the west of us, who were there when we moved in 1998, moved out. Both are settling down in the lower San Gabriel Valley area. Both neighbors have been and still are part of the organization/community we’ve been part of for decades. While we weren’t extremely chummy chummy neighbors, we could count on them being good dependable neighbors. Hopefully, we’ve been good enough neighbors to them as well. Given all this, today feels eerily bare and strange. I know viscerally that this signifies a beginning of a new chapter in our life.

As of July of this year, our decades-long (since 1982 for me and 1975 for my wife) association and relationship with our home church came to an end amicably and without much fanfare, not that I wanted to let the world know. I would credit the decision as one of the fruits of pandemic-induced changes. While we remain extremely grateful from the nurturing when we were spiritual babies to the eventual “send off” as missionaries from our home church, this also marked a significant end to our long chapter.

At the end of last year (2021), I cleared out of my office, since our organization was downsizing its office footprint and communicated to us that only the “essential” office-related staff will be given office space in another part of Pasadena. While I loved the idea of decentralization and not needing to show up in the office setting, I was faced with the giant task of getting rid of books, files, conference materials, and other knick-knacks I had accumulated since 1988. Just the other day, I opened the closet door in my bedroom and stared at my “office” clothes that I wore during my office days and no longer need or want. I told my wife that I should probably chuck these clothes. That was a vivid reminder of what my normal days used to look like. I ended up donating most of my missions-related books as well as a few precious archival-type books to an institution in Africa. My office furniture, including a desk I had once salvaged from a dumpster, sanded down and refinished and thus rightfully had grown fond of, and other files and conference materials either got thrown out or got shredded. I know I can get sentimental, imbuing more meaning than necessary to things, but I was cold and brutal in throwing stuff out this time. My wife and my adult children were proud of me. All in all, the act of clearing out of the office space triggered a series of events that was an ending of a long significant chapter in my life.

Going further back to my sabbatical in 2020, which coincided with the beginning of the COVID pandemic, I spent the bulk of my time reflecting and reevaluating the first 30 years of my life and ministry. Looking back, what started as a divine and timely gift of rest and renewal during my sabbatical and other series of events continue to signal a decisive ending to my old way of seeing and doing.

And a new horizon is decidedly upon us. I have been sensing and discerning a new horizon for the last 2 years, which is becoming clearer and gets my blood pumping and my juices flowing. My wife and I are far more fixated on the future than on the past. The past “eternity stranded in time” is giving way to a future forging of our lives. I am grateful again that I was able to spend a wintery season of death and deconstruction which segued into a spring of desire during my sabbatical. The once dominant trajectory of my life is winding down while a new strand of trajectory is birthed and launched. Without the last big chapter of my life, there is no new chapter and there is no me. Exercising self-compassion in this regard is required of me as I realize it leads to others-compassion. All the more being grateful for the pause and grace of being in the liminal space of overlap of two lines on a graph where the old paradigm is waning and a new paradigm of doing life is waxing. . .