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. 

The Golden Rule

We are studying Romans in BSF this year: two weeks in, and we are reading the second half of chapter one in the bay area, a completely different experience somehow than how I’m sure it would feel if we were still in Virginia. Someone told me about a fifteen year-old boy, who was not a Christian but had enjoyed going through the study of John previously. After he listened to the lecture on Romans chapter one, he didn’t think he could come back. “I think everyone should be who they want to be,” he said.

Somehow, he put into words exactly what I feel is the golden tenant here. Everyone should be who they want to be. It’s right if it’s right for you. You should not only support, but celebrate the choices others make about their lifestyle and gender; if you don’t, you are ignorant at best, prejudiced and evil at worst. It is self-determinism enlarged into a near-religion, and it leaves me with a sense of dissonance. On one hand, I do want to love and understand those who are marginalized because of any choice they make or feeling they have; on the other hand, I think it is something else to say I cannot consider those choices wrong, to say self-deterministic and relativistic values should be raised to the level of absolutism and taught as such to my children.

What would the gospel have to say to this statement?

I think part of the statement is saying, “you can’t say there is an absolute right or wrong”—and the Bible would say, well, there is absolute truth; there is right and wrong, but it is not just born of arbitrary or personal opinion, but of God, who created us and knows what we are meant for far better than we do. Part of the statement is saying “you can’t limit someone’s freedom; you can’t impose right or wrong upon others”—but the more you love someone, the more you care what they choose. It is not freedom in determining our own moral standards that leads to being fully human; it is understanding who we are, and following those constraints, that leads to true freedom.

In the end, I don’t always follow because I understand why it is right or wrong; I do it because I love God. And the more I follow God in ways that are hard, the more I realize that he is about something bigger than just the moral surface. He is unearthing deeper things in me to work on. He is showing me in a fuller way about himself; his designs are ultimately to reveal himself and his nature to me, because to know Him is more important than anything else I am about in life.

It’s difficult figuring out how to navigate these cultural waters, but perhaps unlike other more Christian-friendly places we have lived in, it’s impossible not to engage, to consider with some gravity why I believe what I do, how completely I believe it, and how it should be lived out in my life, which in the end is a good thing.