My twelve year-old niece Aimee emailed me recently. She has to do a presentation in class on someone who's successful. So I was a little bit surprised and very honored that she chose me! In fact, one of the first questions was, "What is your most successful achievement?" And that had me stumped.

I'm not really sure what my most successful achievement would be. Maybe the fact that I moved half the world away from my family when I was 15, but then lots of people move and adjust to new environments nowadays. Maybe the fact that I'm a musician with his own music video? But then, there are millions of better known and more talented and more published artists. Maybe the fact that I've collected four degrees in nine years of higher education? Then again, I certainly wasn't a child prodigy, and I'm certainly not the smartest person in the world!

Thinking about it more, I think my most successful achievement is figuring out what success really is, realizing that success isn't necessarily about beating everyone in a competition or in a race, or about getting better grades than everyone else.

Success is being a good human being, a good person. Success is loving God, loving your neighbors, and loving your enemies. Success is figuring out who you are, figuring out what you're good at, and being the best that you can be—the best that God created you to be—and knowing that that is enough, and that that is all that God asks of you. Success is helping those in need, speaking up for those who can't speak for themselves, protecting the weak and the marginalized. Success is showing patience, kindness, grace, humility, mercy, joy, faithfulness, and love in all of our relationships. Success is being faithful and hopeful and loving in spite of all the challenges that the world and life throw at us.

In the process of learning, I've had many experiences that have made me question myself, my abilities, my talents, even my worth as a person. I've suffered disappointments in my work, felt unable to produce anything good—both in terms of music and in life in general—and known heartbreak and letdowns in relationships.

We live in a culture that measures success by comparing us to other people, and so one of the big challenges for me was realizing (and continually reminding myself) that I don't need to compare myself to other people. All I need to do is the best that I can do; all I need to be is the best that I can be.

And ultimately … any success I may have is only by the grace of God. I suppose the way that I try to live out this kind of success is to be first grounded in God, to know what he says about me, to know that he loves me no matter what, to know that my family and my friends love me no matter what. There's a freedom that comes with being secure in friendships and relationships, that allows us to be and do all that we can be and do.

So that's been my success: understanding success as I think God sees it, and then living in the light and truth of that.

Here's the video and transcript from my little speech at Commencement last Saturday:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. And love your neighbor as yourself (Luke 10:27). “Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked” (Ps. 82:3-4). “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream” (Amos 5:24). Feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, take care of the sick, visit those in prison, for “just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me” (Matt. 25:31-46). For all humanity is made in the image of God—male and female he created them (Gen. 1:27).

These verses have come to mean a lot to me. You see, it was during my time at Fuller that God lit a fire in me—a passion, a vision, a calling to do justice, to see justice done. I began my time at Fuller in Fall 2006 in the Master of Divinity program, thinking that I would follow in the footsteps of my two brothers and go into fulltime pastoral ministry. But in the years since, through the classes I took, through the friends I made, and through the conversations and encounters I had, God tweaked that a little. And so, about a year and a half through, I switched to the dual MA in Theology and Cross-Cultural Studies, realizing that while I maintain a love for and interest in seeing the church impassioned and empowered to do justice, I also have a calling to see this justice done outside the church, to work in conjunction with non-Christians as well as Christians toward seeing the kingdom of God here on earth.

It was at Fuller that I began to ask questions like, what does this justice look like when over 45 million people in the United States alone are without health insurance? What does this justice look like when there are twenty-seven million slaves around the world today in bonded labor or in forced prostitution? What does this justice look like when there are still a billion people in the world living in extreme poverty? What does this justice look like?

This fall, I’ll be moving to Washington, DC to begin a year-long internship with the social justice organization Sojourners. It’s an opportunity rich with potential and promise, and I’m excited to see the things I’ve learned here at Fuller worked out in practice and in policy. To work out what biblical justice—God’s justice—looks like, and to see it done. To work out what it looks like to be our brother’s keeper and our sister’s keeper. To be a voice for the voiceless, an advocate for and a friend to those whom Jesus called the least of these. Because as the prophet Micah reminds us, “What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?”

I’m sad to leave Fuller, but I’m excited because while the challenges to seeing this justice done are great, God is already at work in our world, doing what he does. And me? I’m with him.

Being at seminary can tend to lend itself to a certain cynicism, fueled by intellectual detachment from the realities of life, a dispassion built upon having to dissect, critique and deconstruct everything. Combined with an enervation resulting from trying to balance too many hours of school, too many hours of work, and too many other things, this world-weariness can often manifest itself in negativity or pessimism (apologists might prefer to call this “realism”). Living in the West in the 21st century, bombarded as we are with millions of images, words, sounds, and messages, it is similarly easy to develop a tough exterior of ennui in order to protect oneself. Unfortunately, in trying to shut out the bad, the negative, or simply trying to defend against the deluge, we can also shut out appreciation of the good, the joyful, and the uplifting.

The song “Beautiful” was birthed one sunny London day in the summer of 2006. I provide this background since it directly impacted the writing of the song. As you may know, sunny days in England are a dime a dozen, so my appreciation of this meteorological phenomenon was particularly heightened. My aim in beginning to write this song was to respond to this reminder of the grace and beauty of God’s creation. And my aim in choosing to rework it for class (Theology & Culture with Barry Taylor) was to combat both the overwhelming cynicism of the surrounding culture and my own tendency towards disinterestedness and dispassion as a tired, final-year seminarian.

I don’t like to be overly prescriptive with the meaning or interpretation of the words of the songs I write. I like making room in my songs for some ambiguity in order that they may mean different things to different people at different times (though I wouldn’t advocate this approach for congregational worship songs). Even for myself, I have found occasion to appreciate this song at different times and in different contexts. All that I will say about the words of the song is that, in writing them, in using the words I did, I was hoping to encourage the listener to open him- or herself up to the beauty, the grace, the God in life.

For the video itself, I turned for inspiration to other songs and music videos that I had found uplifting and inspiring, in particular, Lifehouse’s “Spin” and U2’s “Beautiful Day”, two songs that similarly extolled the beauty in life. In both, there is a sense of winsomeness, a sense of both holding on to life lightly enough and yet being grounded deeply enough that we can appreciate the good in the face of the hard.

To that end, I settled on filming scenes from life, and especially those moments that remind me that life is beautiful. Obviously, as this is my engagement with and response to culture, the moments which are displayed demonstrate some of the things that I find uplifting: two people in love, a family at play, enjoying the company of friends over coffee and basketball, digging into a good book, and being able to express oneself creatively with the gifts God has bestowed. I interspersed this with shots of landscape, of city, and of beach—all of which are part of my life in California, and in all of which I am particularly able to see God’s fingerprints. Others might (and probably would) frame things differently, or show different moments.

My three years at Fuller were simultaneously the toughest and the best of my twenty-seven years, and one of the reasons for the latter was that I was able to seek and find God in it all. Even in the hardest of times, he was revealing himself and the traces of his grace were evident if I would only look and see. Even though I might not have understood what was going on with my life or my future or whatever I may have been struggling with at the time, even though I might not have been able to comprehend why certain things were happening or not happening, I was fortunate to be able to recognize (or perhaps the Spirit was insistent enough to remind me) that God was still there, that beauty and grace and love were still there. Thus, what began as a simple appreciation of and expression of gratitude for a beautiful day became a metaphor and analogy for life, and for the oftentimes-inexplicable movement and work of God.

Feel the sunlight on your skin
Take a deep breath, take it in
Oh my, what a beautiful day
See the clouds swim in the sky
Close your eyes and let it take you high
What a beautiful day

Though you don’t understand
And this grace you can’t comprehend
You know it’s a beautiful day
It’s a beautiful day

This is beauty, can’t look away
And your tears, they fall and fade away
On this beautiful day
Reach out, darling, heaven’s here
It’s all around, it’s coming near
Oh my, it’s a beautiful day

Though you don’t understand
And this grace you can’t comprehend
You know it’s a beautiful day
It’s a beautiful day

Flood the senses
Overwhelm your defenses
Let love teach you how to love again

A time for life, a time for death
A time to run, a time to catch your breath
On this beautiful day
A time to hurt, a time to heal
A time to hold your tears, a time to feel
On this beautiful day

Though you don’t understand
And this grace you can’t comprehend
You know it’s a beautiful day
It’s a beautiful day
It’s a beautiful day
It’s a beautiful day

[From Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, 2004.]

Spring break is almost over—class starts tomorrow, in fact, on what will most likely be the busiest quarter of my three years at Fuller (following closely on the heels of last quarter, which was the busiest quarter of my three years at Fuller). I’ll be taking four classes (Theology & Culture; Theology, Politics & Modern Society; Culture & Transformation; and Teamwork & Leadership) and working part time as the All-Seminary Council (ASC) Vice-President. I’m excited about this coming quarter, but boy, is it gonna be busy!

Anyway, this past week has been a great one. Notwithstanding the whole not-eating thing (four days to go!), I’ve been able to chill out here and recover from the craziness of the last quarter, watching movies, sleeping, hanging out with friends, napping, and probably most importantly, reading.

Reading is sort of an occupational hazard when you’re a grad student, and one can become jaded towards the whole endeavor of reading when you have to read books for school anyway (and on a timetable to boot). I usually try to be reading at least one non-school book so as to keep me sane, but often this gets squeezed out by the sheer volume of pages I have to digest per week.

So it’s been with great pleasure that I’ve dived back into reading these last few days. Currently, I’m reading Tom Wright’s The Challenge of Jesus, Muhammad Yunus’ Creating a World without Poverty: Social Business and the Nature of Capitalism, and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

And I just finished The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems, by Van Jones, who’s Barack Obama’s new Green Czar, also known as the Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council for Environmental Quality. I highly recommend it—the last time I was so struck by a writer’s honesty and inspired by a writer’s vision was when I read Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope, and we all know what happened after that. ☺ Anyway, highlights from the book:

“our entire economy was designed to function in a world where fossil fuels are forever abundant and forever cheap. Today, as those fuels—and especially oil—become increasingly scarce, prices are rising to reflect that reality” (2).

“The United States is the world’s biggest polluter. To avoid eco-apocalypse [both environmental and economic collapse], Congress will have to do more than pass a cap-and-trade bill. And Americans will have to do more than stick in better lightbulbs. To pull off this ecological U-turn, we will have to fundamentally restructure the U.S. economy. We will need to “green” whole cities. We will have to build thousands of wind farms, install tens of millions of solar panels, and retrofit millions of buildings. We will have to retire our car, truck, and bus fleets, which are based on combustion engines and oil, and replace them with plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles powered by a clean-energy grid” (58).

“History teaches us that it is impossible to guide a complex series of deep changes in culture, economics, and law without first grounding efforts in a set of unchanging ideals,” (65) and Jones puts forward the three principles of

(1) equal protection for all: “there are some dangers that are too big for any individual to overcome, especially the most vulnerable among us. So in an age of floods, we must reject any philosophy that would tempt us to tell people in wheelchairs to ‘sink or swim.’ We must embrace, instead, the principle that says: ‘We are all in this together—come what may’” (70).

(2) equal opportunity for all: “We are one human family. So on a good day, we should not leave anyone out. And on a bad day, we should not leave anyone behind. We should not accept a world where people of color and low-income people are always first in line for everything bad and then are left to benefit last and least when it comes to anything good” (73).

(3) reverence for all creation: “we don’t have any throwaway species or resources. We don’t have any throwaway children, throwaway neighborhoods, or throwaway nations either. Therefore, the green economy must do more than reclaim thrown-away stuff. It must also reclaim thrown-away lives and thrown-away places. And it must reclaim the thrown-away values that insist we are all members of one human family, with sacred obligations to each other” (74).

He advocates what he calls Noah principles (as in Noah from the Bible; but go read the book for more) in creating the kind of politics through which we can get things done:

(1) Fewer “issues,” more solutions; that is, focusing on the things that we are working towards rather than focusing on the things we are against.

(2) Fewer “demands,” more goals: “Goals can be shared—even by people who disagree on many points. Demands can never be shared. One party makes them; the other party must either deny them or capitulate” (107).

(3) Fewer “targets,” more partners: “In this age, our main job is to seek out friends wherever we can, not just to defeat enemies” (109).

(4) Less “accusation,” more confession: “We would be better off confessing our own weaknesses, our fears, our needs. Doing so will let others see the gaps more quickly, find their rightful places around the growing circle—and come to the campfire with fewer pretenses themselves” (111).

(5) Less “cheap patriotism,” more deep patriotism: “Some of us still believe in ‘a more perfect union’—and in making it more perfect every day. Some of us still believe in ‘America the beautiful’—and in defending its beauty from the clear-cutters and despoilers. Some of us still believe in ‘one nation, indivisible’—and in opposing those who profit by keeping us needlessly divided. Some of us still believe in ‘liberty and justice for all,’ and we won’t stop until that classroom pledge is honored from shore to shore” (113).

Van makes the point, well-known by many now, that though the United States makes up only about 4% of the world’s population, we emit 25% of greenhouse gases (not good), and are home to 25% of the world’s incarcerated population (also not good). It is clear that something must be done, and something can be done. Once again, this is not situation where we sit helpless and hopeless as the economy collapses and the environment deteriorates—things can be done to change things, but once again, a grassroots movement made of individual citizens, businesses, organizations, non-profits, and governments will be the driving force for change. It will require change on all levels, from recycling, reusing, and being more environmentally friendly to contributing to green job training, retrofitting and weatherizing buildings, and setting up a clean energy grid that will lay the groundwork for the next generation.

Such a green economy will be as expansive and enveloping (in a good way) as the current economy (in a bad way), comprising all five of the major subsystems of sustainability: energy, food, waste, water, and transportation. And already, the grassroots movement is beginning: people, organizations, businesses, and governments are all getting involved. Moreover, we have a ‘Green President,’ as Jones describes him, in the White House: in Barack Obama’s budget for the current year, there is a clear recognition that the way forward is to invest in the present and the future of renewable clean energies and climate-friendly jobs; see here for the White House fact sheet.

And go check out Green For All, the organization founded by Jones.

Yes, we can. Again.