Ah, sometimes I remember why I love(d) IV

Last night I went to the Bay Urban Project Open House in Oakland and ate a yummy dinner, talked with college students in the midst of an intense summer project, heard students share their ethnic testimonies in spoken word form, and listened to my friend and former mentor Pauline Chen Fong speak passionately about "the cloud of witnesses" that have gone before us in acting out God's justice for the world and His people.

Ah, nights like that it all comes back to me - why I loved IV as a student, why I eagerly went on staff, how I loved seeing students change, how I loved working with students who wanted to change, how those precious four years where people are open and their hearts and minds are soft are so much fun and inspiring to work with, how much I loved God's call to staff for me and how much there was in it for me too.

(I never did OakUP or BAyUP but I did experience an influential freshman two-week plunge in Rockridge/Oakland back in 1997. A few memorable experiences include working at Habitat for Humanity, being scared to death of doing evangelism on BART but doing it anyway and having great discussions with people, and engaged in my first deep ah-ha discussion/process about race and me being white. I had talked a lot about race and ethnicity with friends my first college year including protesting against Prop 209 at the Campanile but I hadn't stopped and considered my own race and what that meant for me.)

Ben C. "dared" me earlier to write about people who have influenced me. As I sat last night in the pew listening to Pauline talk, I kept smiling as I thought about how much she has influenced me. It feels a bit strange to write so admiringly about a current person but when I think about who has affected and helped me in my journey, she comes up a lot. In so many direct conversations and words, but also in just watching her be the strong single woman staffworker when I was a student, and now the strong but tired mother of two IV staff who has increasingly taken on more leadership in IV. She helped me during some pretty rough times when I was on staff and I am eternally grateful to her. There are so many stories I could tell about her but let me summarize. If I am a person of prayer, it has a lot to do with Pauline. If I am a person that loves the world and missions, it has been nurtured by her. If I am a person who is ok with my own ethnicity, it is has been helped by her intentional and thoughtful words to me about developing my own white identity and also by walking with her in her Taiwanese-American identity. If I am someone who looks thoughtfully and asks the hard questions of myself and others, it is definitely because of Pauline's presence in my life. If I am at all someone who looks out to mentor others and live with compassion and generosity and be real with her own struggles, it has been modeled after her. Pauline, thank you.

I have had the great privilige of being taught and mentored by, and worked with, some of the most humble, inspiring, real, funny, in love with Jesus, risky, brave, passionate, willing to walk against the stream's flow, caring people during my time in InterVarsity, esp staff. Some people I worked with mainly in groups and have had only a few deeply memorable conversations with here and there but they were incredibly inspiring and are still very welcoming when I run into them now (Phil and Leslie Bowling-Dyer to name a few). Some people were peers and friends and I learned and received so much from walking with them (Christie de Leon, Mark Afram).

I think the only person that comes second to Pauline in shaping me from IV has been Jon Paris. He led our overall small group as staff when I was a bright-eyed freshman and I later got to work alongside him as staff in San Francisco. He influenced a lot of people including me but when I got the chance to live with him and his wife in SF, his influence on me really kicked up a notch. He really asked caring but hard questions and got me to rethink a lot of things from car ownership to dating to financial stewardship. He didn't just sympathize when fundraising was hard, he took action and got in the trenches with me. There's a lot more but let me just say, thanks Jon. And yes, I still have a book of yours! sorry :)

Thanks, faithful people of IV. It has sometimes been really tough, disappointing, hurtful, and painful and I've wanted nothing more to do with any of y'all! Then I go to something like last night and I remember the good stuff too. God, thanks for bringing me into that group and for leading me always.