Category / Personal Stuffs

by Kevin

Marriage Amidst COVID-19

Have you ever watched something come back alive?

Back in February I remembered getting asked nonstop how wedding planning was going. I was really tired of answering that question to be honest, but I felt like we were fine. We had a Trello board(highly recommend for all your project planing needs) with tasks broken down by party and due dates. It definitely was a lot of work, but we were doing it! Really the only thing we didn’t take into account was a global pandemic happening.

It was sort of a slow burn for me. I remember hearing whispers of some kind of outbreak in China late last year and then in February when I caught the flu I saw signs in the urgent care center about getting tested(back when there were tests available when you wanted them). Then we had state-wide orders to work from home if you were able. I still don’t think I realized the magnitude of what was happening at this point or what plans wouldn’t survive in the wake. I remember assuring Amy, “I mean, worst case is some people might not travel all the way to California.” Oh early March Kevin, how naive you were.

I can honestly say it was the worst week of my life. Not only were we told that there just wasn’t a possible way to still do our wedding event, but each of the back up plans also were impossible to pull off too. I feel sort of silly for how much of a emotional toll the cancellation took on me. We were healthy, had jobs we could work from home, and still in love, but just unable to have that big expensive ceremony with flowers and food – first world problems, am I right? I think I was mostly frustrated because I knew these things ultimately didn’t matter. We each received text message after text message about “It’s really your love that is the important part”. Yes. We knew that. It wasn’t really our desire to have a giant party so much as it was us wanting to celebrate with our friends and family. Every single person invited to our wedding(and of course others, but guest list limits) had left their mark on each of lives, turning us into who we were and who we would become together. We wanted that community to know and feel their part in our marriage. That’s what we lost.

Have you ever watched something come back alive? We did. That community that we thought wasn’t going to get to play a part showed up in force. Family dropped everything they were doing to take care of anything they could handle in our place. Dear friends sent us flowers. Our premarital pastors fed us and provided space to process loss. People still bought gifts for us despite being told there would be no ceremony they could come to. We got invited to virtual happy hours to talk and play games to take or minds of everything. We felt their love. We felt your love. It calmed us in the midst of the chaos. It made us smile before the tears had finished drying. It reminded us that you all still are an integral part of our story and that you feel valued. Wedding reception or not.

We’re still getting married tomorrow, as planned. Not at the venue. Not with a room full of guests. But with a ceremony that will celebrate who we were becoming and all the people that got us there.

Still having chicken and waffles though. That was a must-have.

by Kevin

Some Thoughts on Rain

Rain makes me appreciate the sunny days more. I find that when summer finally rolls around with a streak of sunny days in the high 90°s, I enjoy it(at least at the beginning). That warm temperature feeling is welcome because it isn’t going to last. It allows us to have float parties at Greenlake, go hiking more often, and see a long reaching view from a vantage point. Having something you enjoy disappear for a bit can allow you to appreciate other things. Not that I’m glad the rain I love is gone, but it being gone has given me a new space or time I wouldn’t otherwise have.

Rain forces me to slow down. This is true in both a literal and figurative sense. Traveling while in the rain I find myself moving slower, the wet ground can be slippery so extra care needs to be taken. I’m not sure if the idea of going outside is less attractive in the rain or that staying inside snuggling up with a blanket is more so, but I usually always find myself curled up in my reading nook. Rainstorms in Seattle also tend to come with a decent amount of power outages, I guess it’s all the trees falling on power lines. And yea, a power outage can blow when you just want to binge watch Stranger Things, but with the power gone it also gives way to lying in bed way longer then necessary, day dreaming those deep thoughts alone or with a friend, or finally picking up that theology book to read. When I am forced to slow down I am reminded of the things I usually leave behind when I’m too busy hopping from one thing to the next.

Rain cleans and refreshes. Not too long-ago Seattle had a really bad smoke problem. All this smoke from forest fires was being blown into our air space and it got so bad you could honestly stare at the sun and not hurt your eyes. It hurt to breathe and waking up in the morning your throat felt dry. After a week or two of this terrible air quality, the smoke was cleansed from our sky by a little bit of rain. That was all it took to become clear again! I don’t think I had been that happy for rain to arrive in a long time. It’s honestly an incredible gift whenever it falls from the heavens and rinses the world around us. The air smells different, plants become greener, and everything feels fresh.

Living in Seattle now for close to five years(whoa!) rain has become a more common part of my life. Seattle doesn’t get the most rain in the country but it is up there for most rainy days. Growing up in Southern California I wasn’t a stranger to rain. El Niño* brought plenty of to my elementary school, typically getting recess cancelled because the playground would flood. But when the rain stopped I knew it would be many months before it returned. I always looked forward to those spring days when the clouds would open up, the trees and bushes would ripple underneath the watery cascade, and the soft taps on the roof and windows would lull me to sleep.

*I just found out El Niño actually makes the Northwest hotter and drier while the Southwest gets all that rain, weather is neat!

by Kevin

I’m Bad at Checklists

Sometimes I have high ambitions for myself and decide to do something other than play PUBG all night after getting home from work. At the start of this year I made myself a checklist of things I wanted to accomplish by the end of January. Most of those items were things I wanted to accomplish by the end of 2017 but this time I was serious!

I went on an amazing Iceland trip back in March 2017 with three friends and I have hundreds of pictures and videos of the trip I want to share. I used to blog semi-regularly about tech stuffs, personal stuffs, and game stuffs in order to get myself into a creator mindset and not just a consumer. And lastly I have been working on a Windows10 application to help tabletop GMs to keep digital homebrew files organized. I have over 2 gigabytes of files on my computer detailing homebrew adventures, monsters, and items in a loose folder structure that I’ve realized is almost unsearchable on its own, so I set out to create a program to help me find a cool piece of magical treasure on the fly.

And I really was serious, I wanted to do these tasks! And I did work on them…a little bit. But I didn’t finish by February. I still haven’t finished them all and now it’s well into April! I have uploaded the Iceland pictures, I have made progress on my HomebrewDB app but it isn’t ready for the release, and this will be my first blog post in over two years. I’d hardly call that close to completion. I’ve always enjoyed finishing goals so much that when I don’t I end up agonizing about what went wrong. Was it my planning? Was it my competence? Was the goal too unrealistic? Did I not train enough to summit that peak? Or maybe I didn’t bring the correct equipment? I should have bought those new shoes, then I would have made it!

The guilt and anxiety we take upon ourselves for failing is not healthy. So, one of the things that I like doing instead is taking a look back and see what I DID accomplish, outside of the original goals. Many times, there are things that were still great accomplishments, took a lot of work, or had a great pay off that I can still be proud of. These aren’t excuses for not completing the original goals (still gotta do those!) but rather to prove that I’m not incompetent. Sometimes the literal goal is what you need to accomplish (a task at work or cleaning the bathroom) but sometimes a goal just gets you moving towards action!

So here are some other things I am proud to have accomplished:

  • My sister and I decided to book a trip to Great Britain within 3 hours, planned the whole trip in less than a month, AND pulled it off effortlessly. It was a blast traveling with my sister and we had never been to Scotland and Wales before!
  • I’ve launched a new homebrew D&D campaign that I’m very proud of. I’ve done a bit of world building and crafted adventures before, but this is the first entire setting I’ve written myself with it’s own nations and factions. Play sessions are going good so far!
  • I’ve been running an AirBnB, successfully too I think! I’ve also found out that I don’t want to be running an AirBnB for much longer…it’s been a lot of effort and time for less payoff than I’m getting out of it.
  • I worked on a chrome extension that calculates some fun statistics based off players’ dice rolls inside Roll20.
by Kevin

Easter 2017

It has been over five years and I am again brought back to N.T. Wright’s thoughts on Easter each time we gather to celebrate.

Despite a thousand Easter hymns and a million Easter sermons, the resurrection narratives in the gospels never, ever say anything like, “Jesus is raised, therefore there is a life after death,” let alone, “Jesus is raised, therefore we shall go to heaven when we die.” Nor even, in a more authentic first-century Christian way, do they say, “Jesus is raised, therefore we shall be raised from the dead after the sleep of death.” No. Insofar as the event is interpreted, Easter has a very this-worldly, present-age meaning: Jesus is raised, so he is the Messiah, and therefore he is the world’s true Lord; Jesus is raised, so God’s new creation has begun—and we, his followers, have a job to do! Jesus is raised, so we must act as his heralds, announcing his lordship to the entire world, making his kingdom come on earth as in heaven!

― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

How do we make His kingdom on earth as in heaven? By loving others. By caring for those in need. By campaigning for justice. By keeping your integrity. By taking care of the environment. By building hospitals and digging wells. By preaching, painting, singing, and sewing.

What we do with our lives in the now matters greatly because with them we are literally making earth more like heaven, or less like it.

by Kevin

Airplane Movie Reviews

I took a vacation for two weeks in New Zealand which involved flying over the Pacific Ocean-there and back again.  I usually enjoy plane rides long or short since I can finish off a book, sleep most of the way, or pass the time with free movies.  Virgin Airlines usually has a great choice of movies to watch for free.  My flight over I didn’t watch that many since I wanted to get myself on the proper sleep schedule.  Coming back I had the unfortunate middle seat along with people seated directly behind and in front of me who made it their mission to keep me from sleeping at all, so all I did was watch film after film.  Anyway, here is what I watched and what I thought about them.

  • Frozen – 4/5
    • Yes, I know I’m late to this party. I thought Frozen was a great Disney movie. Fun plot, funny characters, good sing-a-long songs, and a happy ending. Tangled was better.
  • Monsters University – 3.5/5
    • I’ll be honest, I only watched this for Nathan Fillion, and he was awesome! A nifty prequel with your typical underdog plot.
  • Despicable Me – 5/5
    • Somehow, I missed this when it came out and never got around to watching it. Well, I’m really glad I caught it on the flight back because I was blown away. The animation was brilliant, the acting was top notch, and I was not expecting to have my emotions pulled out at 30,000 miles in the air!  After it was over, I just sat there feeling so happy for Gru.
  • Fifth Estate – 4/5
    • A cyber thriller telling the debated story of Wikileaks and its creator Julian Assange, comes with a healthy dose of Benedict Cumberbatch. If you like journalistic, uncover the truth, race against authority thrillers then you’ll probably enjoy this. The film is probably more of a 3/5, it lagged for me at times. But I’ve always found the whole Wikileaks story very interesting and could follow along with my own knowledge, so that might have made it more enjoyable for me.
  • Now You See Me – 3.5/5
    • A band of magicians start to rob banks during their live performances and the FBI is after them. Super fun to see the magic get executed, FBI outsmarted, and watch the plot twist and turn further.
  • Act of Valor – ?/5
    • I more or less collapsed in my seat from exhaustion halfway through this one, finally thwarting the sleep barons surrounding me. I am assuming this is probably a 2/5 at best if I had to predict what the score would be. It felt like they came up with the idea, “Hey let’s use real a real Navy SEAL team as the action stars” and didn’t take it much further.
by Kevin

Offering Too Much Advice

One of the things I tend to do is give advice when others share a problem or concern. Sometimes I give advice when people don’t even ask for it, I just start listing out possible solutions. Sometimes I’ll talk too much trying to explain my advice when they don’t particularly care or they already understand it and I end up annoying them. ‘Mainsplaining’ is the term used when men feel the freedom to do this to others without considering their expertise.

Even if you feel it may be a way of expressing you care, you still need to be mindful of how others take it.

by Kevin

What ‘A Child Called It’ Taught Me About Stories

I read a book called A Child Called It during Highschool.  It’s a first hand account written from someone who was beaten and starved as a child by his abusive mother and played torturous games with him, or at least that’s what the author says.  I didn’t really think twice about the story’s exact validity because the point of the story was about how terrifying and real child abuse is.  A few months ago I read an article about how the story is under suspicion of being exaggerated, profiting off of the abuse story, or completely false.  I don’t know if the guy made it all up, apparently one of his brothers says he did while another one says it was all real.  That is one of the scary realities of this situation, a lot of child abuse goes on and we don’t know about it.  His own brothers can’t even agree if it happened.

But the point is that whether this particular story is true or false, the message of the story is still valid…child abuse happens; it is real; it is terrifying.  So what does that have to do with Story?  Two things I’ve been pondering in my head for a bit were brought out while I was thinking about this.

  1. Just because a story isn’t real doesn’t mean the point of the story is worthless
  2. I think we need to look into a story before touting it as 100% factual reality

Many times I see stories get thrown around to simply illustrate an idea.  If the point of a story isn’t that it actually happened but that it makes you think, it being a reality or not shouldn’t phase you.  Maybe you have heard some of those famous cheesy chain mail letters about the student who countered his professor’s proof that God doesn’t exist or that God is evil(and sometimes the kid conveniently turns out to be Albert Einstein).  Or parts of the Old Testament seem to be more metaphor or Hebrew allegory than factual history(or so I’ve been told be people more versed in this area).  In either of these cases I have encountered a lot of hostile reactions in two opposite directions: 1) they assert that since the story is “just made up” then it is not worthwhile or, 2) they try to prove that isn’t made up, is factual history, and therefore worthwhile.  I think both of these approaches are incorrect in the sense that they both hinge its worth on whether the story is real or not.  The addition to the end of the student-challenging-his-professor story about the kid being Einstein is actually an addition to prove its worth.  Since the kid is Einstein, a very smart man that actually existed, the story must be real and therefore worthwhile.  But this addition hinges the story’s worth on the fact that it is a reality, problematic!

Worthwhile stories do not have to be true.  Take Lord of the Rings for example, Aragorn never actually existed but there is so much truth we can learn from them about our world, desires, doing what is right, and love.

by Kevin

Easter 2013

In the beginning of this year, I believe God taught me a very important lesson that I couldn’t have grasped by myself. About six months prior I remember swearing to myself that this particular experience could not make any sense, I would never understand, and it was stupid. Yet here I am now, thankful for my newly learned lesson. It’s hard not to see the mystical side of life when something used to hurt can now be used to heal. I’m not talking about a wound healing itself over time, but a wound provoking healing beyond what was initially damaged. Things that used to be signs of suffering, sadness, and loneliness can be used to help bring goodness, life, and hope.

Sometimes it is the little things that make it so evident to me that Heaven is actively crashing into, interacting with, and forever changing our world. But we aren’t just supposed to sit here and watch it happen either, we are called to grasp ahold of Heaven’s tendrils and help pull it in.

…left to ourselves we lapse into a kind of collusion with entrophy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there’s nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong. Our task in the present…is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.

― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

Easter blog posts

by Kevin

Ever Watched Something Come Back To Life?

I was remembering the Blue Like Jazz movie resurrection story the other day, I’m still blown away that we pulled it all off.

  • Donald Miller writes a well-received book called Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality.  It gets pretty popular among 20/30-somethings for how personable Miller’s writing style is and his honest takes on Christianity.
  • Steve Taylor approaches Miller to make a movie out of Blue Like Jazz. They find investors for it to happen.
  • The day before pre-production, an investor backs out. Miller announces on his blog that the movie is seemingly dead for now.
  • A band of fans got together and decided that this wasn’t going to stop this movie from happening.  We’d heard about it, read about it, and now we were going to save it. The Blue Like Jazz Kickstarter was born.
  • Ten days later the Kickstarter campaign passes its $125k minimum to fund the movie. We did it.  Blue Like Jazz was to be the first major release American movie to be crowd sourced, and I, along with quite a few others, was now an “Executive Producer”. The campaign continued to raise money the next 20 days which helped afford better production. Taylor and Miller were stunned at how quickly this happened and got back to work on it immediately.
  • The movie was finally released in April 2012, and I rather enjoyed it.

It was an amazing experience watching something we cared about come back to life after it had been declared dead.  I couple things I learned from this adventure:

  1. If you care about something enough, try to make it happen! A few of us got over 3,000 people to join in and raise $125k.
  2. Institutions, precepts, and ‘The Man’ don’t have to be accepted blindly. If people want to see something change, they should, and can, step up and change it themselves. There’s a reason labor unions are effective at what they do.
  3. I find honest discussions about Christianity get taken much more seriously in our culture than bible thumping or Christian fantasy movies like Fireproof.
by Kevin

Two More of My Favorite Christmas Songs

Since I had two posts about Christmas music, I felt I needed to close it out with a third and final one.  I have two songs this time!  This first song finishes the loose narrative my last two posts kinda-sorta-connected together on: 1) Israel(and us) craves for Emmanuel to come, 2) Emmanuel did come, and 3) because of this, everything has changed.

In Like A Lion(Always Winter) is also by Relient K and is about Narnia’s ill weather.  I think that it was supposed to be on the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe movie soundtrack.  If it wasn’t then I really think it should have been…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksDBJIpqV1k&w=420&h=315]

Personally, I love winter.  I love the colder weather.  I enjoy the rain(for the most part) or snow when visiting the mountains.  I enjoy Pumpkin Spice Lattes.  I really enjoy bundling up and reading a book by the fire or window during the rain.  But, like most things, usually near the end of it am ready for winter to end and spring to show through.  Narnia(prior to Lucy Pevensie stumbling through the wardrobe) has been suffering a one hundred year long winter but never Christmas.  Some of the animals living in Narnia did not know what spring or a Christmas was.  It was a foreign concept to them.  Something wasn’t right.  Note that winter is not bad or evil.  Winter is just one part of the cycle that comes then goes and is just as important as summer, but something had abused winter’s purpose.

And then Aslan returns and sets the world right.  The green grass returns, the leaves begin to grow, Narnia is returning to as it should be.  As it was intended to be.

That is what Jesus’ mission was, to facilitate the restoration of His creation.  Throughout His life we were shown what this meant.  What truly living as God’s creation looks like.  Christmas is such an important event because of what happened afterwards.  If nothing happened after Christmas, if nothing changed, or if Aslan returned but the witch and her winter continued, there is no reason to celebrate.  With Jesus’ death we were allowed passage back to connect with God, this was the answer to Israel’s cries of O Come O Come Emmanuel.

 

I’m sorry if you’re tired of Relient K(not sorry), but they wrote a really good Christmas album.  This last song is entitled Merry Christmas, Here’s To Many More.  I’m not going to write too much about this one, I think the lyrics and pretty straight forward.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE0s2cGVF10&w=420&h=315]

This last year hasn’t been the easiest for me.  A lot of changes, some ups, more downs, even more plateaus, and a whole lot of lets-just-get-through-this-Kevin.  When I sing I made it through the year and I did not even collapse, gotta say ‘Thank God for that’, I really mean it.  So here I am at Christmas, I made it!  Every year I think we all look back and think if we handled that we can handle anything, but it really sticks with you after a rough one.  I know I could not have gotten through this year without God shining through such great friends or family in my life(if you’re reading this then you probably fall under one of these).  He has provided me safe thoughts when I was alone, brilliant friends to hangout with, and a family to take care of me.  And He has promised me that He won’t leave.

So, from me to you, Merry Christmas and here’s to many more.