Thanksgivings

“The day of our ships arrival at the place assigned ... in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God."  - charter, London Company, 1619

"A day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favours of Almighty God." – George Washington proclaiming the first Thanksgiving holiday, 1789

Thanksgiving is a holiday for me that lives more in the historic past than in the recent past or present. It was the first break in the academic year, when we all came home to be together. We would set the dining table that we usually never used; there would be turkey and my sister and I would get the bones, skin and drippings. There would be sweet potatoes with marshmallows or cinnamon sticks, ham and pineapple for my other sister, green beans. There would be soft, pillowy Hachiya persimmons that my parents saved up for us. The next day there would be turkey congee. Along with Christmas, it encapsulated everything I liked best about traditions: rituals that created warmth and memory, centered around family. Years later, Thanksgiving was when Dave met my parents for the first time and when we started dating (memorable also for the year I had the chicken pox).

Somewhere along the line, that sort of nuclear warmth faded. We usually worked through Thanksgivings in residency. My sisters got married and stopped coming home to celebrate. I was in a post-partum haze for three Thanksgivings. The last few years in Virginia, we attended a potluck lunch with church friends which had that sort of festive quality that only lots of food and people crammed into a small rowhouse can have, and Dave enjoyed a bunch of traditional foods he usually didn’t get to eat. Then we’d go to my parents in the evening, when we would be too stuffed to eat much. Neither felt the same as those Thanksgivings past.

Here, it feels like I’m carving out (haha) the holiday anew. I never really can go back to those nuclear Thanksgivings, but now is when I make it our own—and I suppose every family does that at some point. Dave’s family doesn’t really celebrate holidays; they are joining into whatever we create. So I’m slogging through some amount of nostalgia and loneliness to ask myself: what do I want this holiday to mean for our family?

Well, food and atmosphere is important to me—I don’t know if my kids will feel the same, but I like the traditional dishes, the smell of turkey wafting through the house, everyone together as the table is set. And of course that means work (somehow holidays are more magical when someone else is doing all the work for you), so as I’m doing the whole meal, I’m aiming for what I think we’ll all enjoy without tiring myself out too much to enjoy it. We’re doing a turkey, our annual cranberry-sausage-apple stuffing for Dave. I’m trying a fancy mac-and-cheese recipe for Ellie as it may be the only thing she eats and we aren’t at a potluck where someone else is making it. I’m forgoing my usual pumpkin cheesecake in favor of an easier-to-make apple crisp. I’m making more vegetable dishes as I think Dave’s family will appreciate that and it’s healthier anyway.

I think the other element that’s special about this holiday is how we are all given a chance to stop everything else in life, and be intentionally thankful. So we did one activity where I put up a big piece of paper on the wall and we all wrote what we were thankful for. Ellie wrote a long litany of items ranging from pillows to people and asked if she could also write a separate letter decorated with a turkey to put on the wall too. Eric wrote, “I’m thankful for me (my name is Eric)” (okay, and some other stuff, like the cat and his brother). When asked, Elijah said he was thankful for his stuffed animals. When pressed further, his special rock. When asked, Esme said, “I don’t know” and was mostly upset she couldn’t scribble on the paper herself. Dave wrote, his snuffles bear. I wrote, our kids, this house, the weather.

I guess traditions, and holidays, are what we make of them in the end, and here at the beginning of our own holidays, this start is as good as any.

Hoping Without Expectation

“Only the Lord is perfect. Look to God as the source of all you want to see happen in your marriage, and don’t worry about how it will happen. It’s your responsibility to pray. It is God’s job to answer. Leave it in His hands.” – Stormie OMartian, Power of a Praying Wife

“… suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” – Romans 5:3-5

Let’s say there are ways you wish your husband could change. There are two potential responses: one, you keep the hope alive. You think about it and try to help, but if change doesn’t happen, it’s easy to fall into malcontent or nagging. Or two, you give up any expectation he can change. You don’t put pressure on him or think on it much, but it’s easy to fall into apathy, or deadlier yet, disengagement or disgust.

How does one take a third, middle path—maintain a desire and vision for change, actively support and think for his best, yet let go of any timetable or ultimatum for how and when it happens, or whether it happens at all? How does one hope without expectation?

This is a question I think about for myself and my friends, because almost every marriage seems to have areas like this. Maybe it’s how he could speak more affirming words, lose weight, work less, be more involved in parenting, fight differently, relate sexually in a more fulfilling way, communicate more: these aren’t minor things, but deeply-rooted issues that often lead to either apathetic disengagement or nagging criticism, both of which shut off change, leading to a bad cycle. And it’s hard. When you’ve asked, and tried to help, but no change happens—when this occurs over years and years—then it’s hard to keep hoping.

I think the key to hoping without expectation for me lies in loving Dave first, then hoping for him second. In other words, my hope for him is a form of my love for him, and it is hope for him, not hope in him. My hope is in God, and this is not some kind of crutch: this is in fact the only way I am able to test and sustain my hopes for Dave, the only way I can hope at all in the right way, in a way that leads to life and not death, in a way that frees me from concrete outcomes or timetables.

One thing this means is that I examine my hopes for him. Why do I want him to change—is it for his best, for our best, or for selfish or superficial reasons? Dave is God’s son eternally and only my husband temporarily—is this a hope that God would want for him? Would it lead to God’s glory or fit him better for eternity? If this is a hope that relates to a need that I have in our marriage, which is certainly okay—am I willing to lay myself down in this area and love him unconditionally first?

Another thing this means is that I ought to pray for him, more than I analyze or act or anything else. Ultimately my expectation is not in Dave but in God, that he is able to work this change in Dave, or not, in his sovereignty and provision for me and for us, and that his timing is perfect. It’s like that saying: weak faith in a strong object is better than strong faith in a weak object. Better that I pray even if I barely believe God can do it, than heap up all my beliefs and expectations in Dave himself. Am I willing to do what it takes—to pray consistently for Dave, and ask God to strengthen my faith to keep doing so?

I have always liked that verse in Romans, because the end of that progression seems like such a non-sequitur. This hope Paul describes does not follow blissful breakthrough or an obvious trajectory of progress. This hope follows a suffering that lasts so long or goes so deep that one must learn endurance to a degree that it changes one’s very character. Why would this kind of suffering produce hope? Perhaps because it drives us to a deeper faith and knowledge of God, a God does not miserly mete out, but pours, his love into our hearts, into the seat of our emotions and minds and beings. This kind of God will withhold no good thing, will provide all that we need at the right time. This kind of God allows us to hope extravagantly and without shame, even in the midst of difficult circumstances.

Deep Friendships

I’ve been thinking lately about what it takes to make a deep friend. I don’t mean the kind of person you wave at in the school yard, or schedule the occasional coffee date with, or even have the rare long conversation over dinner with. I mean someone who checks in regularly to see how you are doing, who walks through your deepest struggles with you, who you can call if you really need to. Someone who will make their calendar open for you and for whom you would do the same. A keep-for-life friend.

Why are those so hard to find? I think for most people, those friends are born in the high school and college years, when it’s so easy to linger and live daily life together, to process formative experiences together—certainly that’s true for Dave. I really didn’t prioritize relationships at that stage in life, though, so most of my discovering deep community has come post-college. And that stage, the friends-after-thirty stage, is challenging. Relationships are transient with moves for school, training, early career development. Getting married and having kids is a threat on several levels: you have less time and energy for friendships at various stages of marriage and parenthood; the dynamic between your friend and your spouse has to be okay; and it can be harder to maintain friendships across different stages of life.

You enter a stage where deep friendships are more important than ever, yet are harder to find than ever. Sometimes it feels like friend-dating, gauging how much energy and time to invest into a potentially deeper friendship. Maybe first a coffee date, then a dinner date, then go over to each others’ houses? Is meeting with this person worth paying for childcare? Does this person communicate best by phone, text, email, or in person? How much is okay to share, how soon? Sometimes you’ll invest significant time and resources only to find the commitment level is not mutual, or the friendship is too full of gossip and negativity. Or the hurdles come earlier, because the person doesn’t have an opening in their schedule for two months.

For what it’s worth, I think these keep-for-life kind of friendships are rare. We live in an age where people have hundreds of Facebook “friends” and Twitter followers, where you make nice conversation during playdates and soccer practices, but how many truly deep friends do any of us have? I would say most people have a wide circle of acquaintances, maybe 5-10 mid-level friendships, but you’d be lucky to have one or two deep friendships.

What does it take to form these deep friendships? One NPR piece says: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting conducive to letting your guard down. My sister’s pastor says: tenacity, authenticity, and vulnerability.

When I was younger, I would have said common interests and values, like C. S. Lewis writes in The Four Loves: “Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; friends hardly ever about their friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest.” And I think that spark has to be there—an ability to communicate well, similar hobbies or values or experiences.

But the older I get, the more I feel like what it really takes is something much harder to come by: mutual, unwavering, unconditional commitment. I have moved into a land where it is not difficult to find other people like me. But it is just as hard (and may be harder) to find someone who is willing to commit.

And what is most mysterious and maddening about it all of course is that these types of friendships are impossible to orchestrate. They are often unpredictable and always take time. I think about the very few friends I have like this, and they each arose and evolved in an unexpected way. They each took different trajectories, took months or years to solidify. Those friendships are like gold to me now, and having experienced them, it’s hard to settle for less, hard not to compare what I don’t have yet here to what I had before, but that’s just the nature of moving—grieving or adjusting to the loss of old friendships while feeling out the new.

So for now, I am keeping my eyes open, orienting my life so I am open to what may develop, intentionally initiating when I feel prompted to. But in the waiting I am also trying to press in closer to God, choosing to believe he provides all I need, realizing to wait in the not-yet is still a form of worship. How much would I like to speed along the process! But then, how many of us long for a type of intimacy or relationship that we do not yet have? How many of us still choose to walk forward day-by-day in faith and contentment?

Buckets of Community

In Virginia, the people we knew and hung out with were all from church: those were the people in our small group, who came over for playdates, who we met with for meals out, who we played disc golf or fantasy sports with. The one exception were my parents; we hung out at their house when dropping the kids off, went out to the park or beach, met with them after the kids were in bed for conversation. But those were our two buckets: church, and parents. We never hung out with people from work, BSF, or school.

Here, people seem to have many buckets of community, and we are no exception. I counted eight: school, Sunday-morning church, small group, one friend, one family, neighborhood families, guy friends, and BSF. In each of these buckets, we have spent significant time investing in relationships, and sense a need, desire or opportunity to go deeper. Take school—community is huge. I get three emails a week about events going on; there are constantly one or two playdates each kid is asking me to arrange; we have met regularly with one or two families. Take church—the people in our small group go to a different branch than where we go for Sunday mornings, but we are committed to both and have met individually and communally with families in both groups. We meet regularly with a family or two in the neighborhood. The guys get together every week for game night and basketball.

The amazing thing is, people seem open to hanging out. Folks here are typically known to be busy and detached, but we sense people are lonely, that few have true, deep friends, that many are interested in building relationships if asked or if we make ourselves available.

People are open to community: so, there are buckets. But the interesting thing is that very few of them overlap. I kept trying to merge them at first: to find believers at school (no luck), or neighborhood-school attenders at church (no luck), or BSF group members at church (no luck). I have one friend who is a bucket all her own; I know her from the past and we meet regularly to share and pray, but our families share no common involvements.

I think the merging is tough because of the sheer number and diversity of opportunities for involvement here. There isn’t just one big city, with a few big elementary schools; there are tons of small cities in each county, and a different neighborhood school every few blocks. Commuting from one city to another is common. There are activities tailored to meet any conceivable interest, need, or demographic preference. And people do involve themselves in a high number of them. Even if you want to be intentional about not spreading yourself too thin, it seems hard to establish community outside of this framework—you are unlikely to find natural, comprehensive overlaps between buckets, and while people are open to community, it is rare to find a friend who is willing to give up a bucket for the sake of merging lives.

And that’s what I wonder: deepening community can be inconvenient, and I wonder if it may involve forsaking or merging buckets to better walk through life together. That’s what I hope for: to walk through life with another family or couple or two, with shared vision and values, with mutually sacrificial commitment and deep vulnerability and understanding. On one hand, that kind of friendship is a gift, not necessarily something you can orchestrate, more organic than devised. On the other hand, being overcommitted with shallow buckets makes it hard to have the margin and space to discover or grow those friendships (and we haven’t even added any extracurriculars for our kids—ha!).

For now, we are figuring out what it looks like to be intentional about relationships where we live. I’m accepting there is no family exactly like us, no family naturally in all the same buckets. We’re functionally living the eight-bucket community life. But I’m also trying to not be too constrained at heart by that, to let relationships drive activity sometimes rather than activities drive relationships. It’s early; we are yet at the cusp of our time here. We’ll see how it goes.

Global City

A few weeks ago, we were playing at a popular neighborhood park next to the library, and suddenly it hit me how many languages I was hearing. There was, of course, Mandarin, which I seem to hear everywhere. Some Cantonese, a South Asian language—Hindustani? Bengali? I heard French and some type of Eastern European language—Russian or Czech? And of course Spanish.

This place is truly international, probably because of the tech industry and Stanford drawing global talent, and that still feels strange to me. How many places in the country are like this? Someone who looks black is as likely to be African as African-American; someone who looks white could be from Israel or Italy, as two of Eric’s classmates are. Someone who looks Asian—well, the possibilities there are endless. Back in Virginia, people either assumed we were foreigners (“can she speak English?”) or just like them (“what is an Asian grocery store and why would you go there?”). Most people didn’t know the difference between Filipino (which Dave often got pegged as), Korean (which I got pegged as), Chinese, or Taiwanese.

Here, of course, there are not only different types of Asians, but different generations; you are as likely to meet a first-generation as a fourth-generation immigrant, and the values, languages, customs and stereotypes of each are widely different. Sometimes when I’m not driving my best I wonder if someone pegs me for some bad first-generation Asian driver (is that terrible to admit? I really can drive in this country; it’s only that I just moved here and am getting lost again because the GPS-route constantly changes to accommodate time-of-day traffic!). As a second-generation immigrant raised in the American south by parents who were themselves Chinese second-generation immigrants to Taiwan before becoming first-generation immigrants to the U.S., I can feel more affinity with a Caucasian than an Asian, or with a first-generation person from Taipei than from Beijing.

I feel more dissonance between how I look and who I am inside here than I did in Virginia, where people assumed I was mostly culturally white like them—oddly enough, having a more homogenous majority made conformity easier. Especially when I grew up in that homogeneity. My gut reaction is to find the diversity here jarring. It’s a bit disturbing to be around so many Asians, to sift through all the geographical and generational distinctions. I feel unnerved by my own ignorance of various countries, customs and languages. I miss being around more white people. I feel pressured into speaking Mandarin to my kids, not that that’s a bad thing.

But I think it’s good to be stretched in a place of global diversity. It forces me out of cultural ignorance. It makes me care more about what’s going on outside of our country. It allows me a new measure of ethnic freedom. It helps me see what assumed mindsets or values are actually ethnic or cultural mores. It brings those things to my kids. It prepares me for heaven, where the diversity emphasized isn’t political or socioeconomic as much as ethnic. Ultimately, it reveals more of God, because each of us, from wherever we or our parents came from in the world, reflect his image and something different of his glory.