By Melanie Mar Chow

In thy presence is the fulness of joy… Psalm 16:11

Did you know that joy is a gift from God?  It is something that is not pursued, but it is understood as God intended for us, His people, to have His joy.  As we look at the gifts of the Spirit in Galatians, we learn that these are also called the fruit of the Spirit.  Fruit is the product or the result when a person receives and uses these gifts in their lives to better live as God designed, and more importantly to share with others in community.

The uniqueness of gift-giving is important to understand how much God loves us and wants to provide Himself to us not just once, but daily.  For example, when you receive a gift, one reaction is to ponder, What in the world is this gift?  Those who do not have an inquisitive spirit will put the gift aside and not pursue the gift further.  But in the context of my Asian American family context, opening gifts among family benefits the group.  Most likely someone will ask “where are the directions?” in an immediate desire to put the gift to use.  We have countless hours, after the thank you’s are written, to try it out and make it work its purpose.

I’ve been recently attentive to the YouTube Short influencer, Honeysuckle, who demonstrates new “stuff” not only for how it works, but also whether they serve additional purposes.  She then rates them and then we the viewers can decide whether or not to buy. For me, as a gift giver/bargain hunter, my goal is to gain the joy from blessing others with quality gifts for lesser pricing and more value.

Among God’s people, no two people have the same gift mix and each person can employ their gifts unique to who they are.  God just asks that it be used — and often used in many different ways — but all the results bring honor to God (Ephesians 4). Utilizing God’s gifts is guaranteed to make life easier, with God’s design and fullness.

We cannot fabricate or manifest joy by ourselves.  Joy comes as a gift that is valued for its purpose, and it is a gift to be used.  It must be said here that oftentimes, people mistake joy for happiness.  Happiness is something that we strive for ourselves.  “To be happy” is often the response when someone is asked, Tell me what you aspire towards.

How else is joy a gift?  Joy can be given to us in the community of others where those around us verify or value gifts given and then thank the giver.  Back to the example of my family gift-giving time, when we aren’t sure of what the gift is or does, we give lukewarm thanks. But in experiencing the Christian community at work, there is joy when you see people using their gifts that emulate Christ-like values! 

How then, can we experience the fullness of joy?  We see people using their gifts while we use ours and then recognize that this could only happen because of God in action to guide people towards Him.  We don’t have to work for it; God just makes joy happen in a response to Himself and what He does. How?

·      Seeing people worship God by affirming what we know about God.
·      Experiencing nature by hearing sounds of God’s creation (flowing rivers, birds chirping, a baby’s yawn)
·      Laughing heartily at a funny statement or joke
·      Watching a baby beginning to walk
·      Seeing people enjoy something special or precious to them, like savoring a good cup of coffee,
·      Offering a hug for someone when words aren’t enough

One way to experience God’s joy in its fullness is to give appreciation.  In this day and age, it is rare to hear people truly thankful.   Thanking God is important to connect with the person who thought enough of us to give a gift.  This embodies the joy only God designed and intended to be experienced. 

Rev. Melanie Mar Chow serves God through Asian American Christian Fellowship, the campus ministry division of the Japanese Evangelical Missionary Society (JEMS). She has been an ordained American Baptist minister since 2004. A Pacific Northwest native, she currently lives with her husband and daughter in Southern California.

By April Yamasaki

From Desolation . . . to Joy! Together, these four words sum up the Easter story. From the darkness and desolation of Good Friday to the light and joy of Resurrection Sunday. From the anguish and misery of Jesus’ suffering on the cross to his ultimate triumph over sin and suffering and death. 

“From Desolation . . . to Joy” is also a fitting title for Psalm 22. The psalm begins with words of lament: “My God, my God, Why have you abandoned me? You seem far from saving me, far away from my groans” (v. 1).

Psalm 22 and many other psalms in the Bible are subtitled “A Psalm of David.” The subtitle means that these psalms were either written by David — the shepherd who became a king — or they were written in the spirit of David, out of David’s life circumstances, when he felt threatened by enemies, when his life was in danger.

By Ajung Sojwal

Over the years, my understanding of love has gone through several revisions. From experiencing love from my parents, siblings and extended family as a child to a place where I have had to examine and revisit my love for my husband, my children, my extended family, friends, the church and God, again and again. Suffice to say, I have begun to see love as more than an emotion. Today, love for me is more like a teacher, or maybe a sculptor, and maybe, it is the Advocate Jesus was talking about in his farewell discourse with his disciples. 

The call to love as a spiritual discipline and an act of faith is embedded in all of Jesus’ life and teachings. In many ways, my faith walk has been all about unlearning and learning what love entails. In the process, I have wrestled a great deal with my own motives and priorities when it comes to understanding genuine love, which has meant letting go of my own imaginations of love and being fully present in the moment with someone where they are. It is the stuff of incarnational love, the kind that changes you. I suspect, Paul had to do a lot of unlearning to come to the place where he could pen that glorious description of love in 1 Corinthians 13. That kind of love does not come easy nor is it discovered in all its fullness in some corner of  my heart. It is nothing short of cultivation that calls for intentionality, practice, discipline, courage, and hope that I and the other in all my relationships are being cared for and changed in the hands of a loving God. 

By Angela Ryo

Among all of Jesus’ teachings, probably one of the most challenging sayings to follow is “love your enemies.” Recently, the term, “non-complementary behavior” helped me to understand what it might mean to love my enemies. The term was first coined by a psychologist from Eastern Michigan University, Christopher Hopwood. Our behaviors are usually complementary: when someone approaches us with a broad smile and kind words, we tend to do the same toward that person.  On the other hand, if someone is hostile toward us, we instinctively react likewise.  But it’s when we act in a non-complementary way, an unexpected way, it completely shakes up the other person and produces a different outcome.  

It’s like this — if an animal is biting you, what should you do?  Your instinct is to pull away. But if you do pull away, you’ll be really hurt.  The way to get out of a bite is to FEED the bite— this means act counterintuitively and push into the bite. When you do so, you loosen the jaw and then you’ll be able to pull away without further harm. (I just hope that the animal is a squirrel or a chipmunk and not a lion or a tiger…) 

By Leona Chen-Wong

TJ, now 15 months old, triggers memories of my earliest AAWOL blog, written when he was just born. Back then, I wasn’t prepared for the overwhelming flood of motherly love or the fear of missing out on his growth. Each passing day, week, and month reveals subtle changes in him. My parents-in-law often reassure me, “Just wait, kids only get cuter.” Skeptical at first, I now understand what they meant as I witness TJ’s development. The once helpless baby now grasps more of his surroundings and communicates without words, leaving me in awe of God’s intricate design even in infancy. I am humbled and embarrassed by how much I underestimated how God created human development, even in babies. At the same time, I am relearning so much about life and simple relationships that are correlated with love.

In recent years, I heard a preacher emphasizing to his congregation that the fruit of the spirit is singular, not plural fruits. In a way, there is also a sense of making all of the characteristics of the fruit of the spirit equal in weight without a particular order. As I experience God and watch how my son responds to our love for him, I strongly believe Apostle Paul deliberately lists out the fruit of the spirit in that order, and maybe just as he mentioned in 1 Corinthians, the greatest of faith, hope, love — love being the greatest of them all. Among the fruit of the spirit, though all represent God and his manifestation through us, love is the first and foremost, foundational aspect of who God is. As a result, the first overflowing characteristic of followers of Jesus would be love. And love can be found as the baseline for all the following lists of the fruit of the Spirit.

By Charissa Kim Allen

–>To read part I of “Love: Healing our Wounded Identities”

Just like we courageously journey to label the deeply personal core messages about ourselves in pain, we also journey to discover the deeply personal corrective truths about our identity. And just like our pain messages are scattered throughout our past, our corrective truths are also scattered within our already-lived lives. Contrary to what we may have learned about only looking outwards and upwards to find a sense of love, we can also look into and back at our messy, earthly realities to find the same answer. 

In therapeutic treatment, this looks like asking questions like:

• “Growing up, in the midst of all these violations of love, who and where did you go to for comfort?” 
• “When you look at your life, where did you experience the exception to your primary pain message?” 
• “When did you know you were truly loved, worthy, cherished, and significant?” 

By Charissa Kim Allen

My work as a therapist is anchored in the modality of Restoration Therapy, where I conceptualize each client’s story in two organizing camps: love and safety. Here, I will only focus on this first camp, love. In my conceptualizing, the love each client did or did not experience throughout their lives, especially in their formative years, informs their basic identity. This basic identity is best expressed in terms of uniqueness, worthiness, and desirability. When a person experiences violations in the camp of love, they hold a wounded sense of identity. 

In treatment, I walk alongside clients as they explore the violations of love that have informed their wounded identity. More than just emotions (mad, bad, glad, sad), I help clients understand the primary messages to their identity that they thematically act upon, even if unconscious. Primary messages are those “I am” statements about ourselves that surface in pain. Here are some examples: “I am…unloved, unworthy, insignificant, alone, worthless, inadequate, unacceptable, unwanted, defective, not measuring up.”

By Eunhyey Lok

The Kingdom of God — what can I say or write about this that hasn’t already been written and said? And yet, it has been at the center of why being a Christian means so much to me.

Having been raised in a Korean immigrant church, North American evangelical teachings shaped my theological lens through an emphasis on personal piety — individual salvation from my sins through the sacrifice of Jesus. While I never stopped believing in the necessity of that part of the gospel, in my 30’s I hit a wall in which I couldn’t connect to why it mattered. What I didn’t understand then is that this gospel for my own individual soul felt hollow because it was not the whole gospel. Jesus’s gospel about the Kingdom of God being at hand included more than just my salvation from sin.

By Yuri Yamamoto

“But she is my mom… Why does she reject me?” Cried a grown white man hidden under a white hospital blanket. I met the man only once and don’t remember much about him. But he was suffering far away from home and expressed his loneliness and desolation. I tried to see him later, but he never wanted to see me again and soon left the hospital.

It was a long time ago. I was still new to the chaplain training and was awkwardly navigating my way around raw human emotions of others and my own.

By Sarah D. Park

Boxes of baby clothes that will span the first full year of my son’s life, donated by friends and friends of friends.

A ride-or-die bestie who flew in from another city to sleep train my baby so that I could rest.

Enough friends and family to fill 3 months as they rotated staying in our guest room, helping out as I healed from giving birth.

Food I did not have to cook myself. Praise God.