Photo by Jonathan Kos-Read

By Tina Teng-Henson

Dear Reader,

I realize, I don’t really know you. I read your little bios at the bottom of your blog posts, and I remember bits and pieces of things you’ve shared over the years… but who are you really? And who the heck am I? 🙂 Our words take us a long way on this journey to know and be known – yet at their best, they are still an approximation.

It’s mid-January, 2015. I don’t have any formal ministry responsibilities lined up ahead of me. I have one class this quarter then one class next quarter — then I’m done with my MDiv. I am, Lord willing, going to give birth to our second baby this summer, but that’s about it.

Last night, our pastor’s wife read this short devotional article — and this was the essence of it: in the season of life ahead of us, “what is it that God wants to be for me now that he couldn’t be at any other time, in any other way?”

And “what is your vision of God? How you see him is how you see yourself… The way we live is profoundly shaped by our image of God.”

It’s been all too clear to me this week that God to me in the past 10 or so years has been an active, busy, high-capacity, high-impact shepherd of his people. And emulating him in this has characterized my career thus far of campus ministry, working at a church plant, and reaching out to neighbors and friends. And somehow, as I’m pregnant once again, finishing school, and scanning the mostly vacant horizons ahead of me, I realize I do need to see who and what else God is, I need to know him anew. The horizon ahead contains mostly playdates, Mothers-of-Preschoolers meetings, and a yucky glucose test that requires fasting beforehand. Lord? Who are you in all of that? Will you show yourself to me? Will I come to love you and love partnering with you in this new season of life as much as I did in my twenties? I find I miss you, and I miss me.

So there you go, dear reader, who I hope to someday meet for real. This is where I am today.

All the best,
Tina Teng-Henson

Tina Teng-Henson has been blessed to learn + grow alongside so many different people, in so many places: Long Island, NY — Harvard College + the South End of Boston — Nairobi, Kenya and Lanzhou, China.  She is working towards her Master of Divinity at Fuller‘s Northern California campus.