Short Poem

When I go to heaven, I will have this tightly held in my fist, and I will have a million co-authors write ahmen:

I called to God for help;
and when it came,
I had no idea
it would look like that.

At the beginning of the new year, Jamie and I were upset. We were going to a seeker-friendly church downtown called Willow Chicago, and we had settled on this church after several months of fruitless searching, even once visiting a unitarian universalist church by accident. Willow met at the Auditorium Theater, a famous concert house underneath my school, and had some thousand-plus members and visitors each Sunday. It was nearly impossible to see the same face twice, and though a desire to serve weighed heavily on my heart (I really wanted to use my writing and teaching talents to serve others), I kept meeting obstacles. Also, we both had agreed we wanted to take some sort of Biblical finances class so we could have a better grasp of Godly principles for our money, but Willow had no such programs. But the worst thing was that Willow's structure is predicated around the supposition that members can find a small group to plug into, to get deeper fellowship and deeper study; but the combination of our class schedules had prevented us from joining any groups in 2009. And so, when our schedules continued to conflict when the new, 2010 class schedules came out, we began to suspect this was a sign.

***
On a Saturday in January, sitting in our fading-yellow, sunset-lit apartment, I admitted to Jamie that I felt God was leading us elsewhere. It was a realization that neither of us wanted to admit because searching for a church had been so difficult and unpleasant.

Some nights later, I had a dream. In this dream, I found a church -- just a little bit south of our apartment -- that openly welcomed me (in the dream, I was alone at first, but knew that Jamie was following soon). This church had a need for teachers, and I was able to help fill the need perfectly and be a blessing. In the dream, I walked a about block north with a man who loved hearing my story, and he led me to the place where I could teach. At that time and in that place, I realized God had been faithful to Jamie and I and had answered our prayer.

Later that week, I decided to check Google maps one more time. I had used Google maps before, but to no great effect. This time, instead of all the fancy special searches, I just typed "church." Then, I did something I hadn't tried before: I moved the map south, to Chinatown. One of the first results to appear was for the Chinese Christian Union Church in the heart of Chinatown. It had a website, so I thought: "What the heck; I'll give it a shot."

I didn't tell Jamie that I was doing any of this, nor did I tell her I had downloaded a sermon onto my Sansa. Listening to the sermon, I played a game of Madden to guise the fact I had my headphones on. I don't really know why I went to such lengths of secrecy; I think it just had to do with the often heart-breaking endeavour of church-seeking: always going scared to a new place, doing our best to meet people, and sometimes squirming through awkward or even heretical sermons. It's really a rough ride. So, if this CCUC church didn't work out, if the sermon included snake-handling or relativist Christianity, I didn't want Jamie to have to worry about it. I did not realize it then, but I was inadvertantly fulfilling the first part of the dream (investigating the church alone, without Jamie).

Well, the sermon turned out to be pretty good, so I told Jamie about it. The next Sunday, we took the Red Line to Chinatown and ambled down streets crowded with Chinese signs and smells. In my typical fashion, I had studied satellite images and street-views of the area, so we found the church pretty quickly. At first, though, we didn't know which door to go through (there are three entrances at the front of the building, none of them with English signs), so we just kind of guessed. Inside, we quickly discovered we had guessed correctly because people almost instantly surrounded, asking us where we from, how we found CCUC, how long we had been in Chicago, and where we went to school. From the moment we walked in, to the moment we left for the Red Line (nearly 4 hours later), someone was sitting beside us, asking us questions. At the conclusion of the sermon, a bunch of new people came to us and invited us to join them at the "Nexus" young married couples group that met right after the service. They were in the middle of a Godly finances study.

Also, Jamie and I noticed in the bulletin something that instantly made my chest flutter with excitement: the English as a second language (ESL) program at the Pui Tak* Center needed volunteers. Adding to the almost eerie coincidences: the Pui Tak center is just a block north of the church, just like it was in my dream.

*pronounced like "poy tawk"

After the Nexus meeting, and after we had told our life stories some 15 times, the group invited us to a local Chinese restaurant where we ate authentic, delishous Chinese food, and talked about any- and everything.

Now, less than a month later, I am at at the Pui Tak Center twice a week, tutoring immigrants or training to teach an English pronunciations classes, and Jamie is often visiting our new friends, doing things like baking a huge cake for a Valentines party or meeting them for lunch.

When I had that dream, I had in no way expected that we would become a part of the Chinatown Christian community, that we would be an ethnic minority in our new church, or that we could make such great friends so quickly; but God takes pleasure in confounding our perceptions and exceeding the limits our expectations.

-Brad

I also recently wrote a summary of what happened to my forehead last week. You can read it here at Cubs Stats.

Here is the Pui Tak Center: