There is a difference between hope and hoping. I prefer using the active form “hoping”, rather than the static noun, for its present, continuous form; hoping is a mode of resisting the oppressor’s marginalizations from without as well as resisting the personal forces from within. Institutional, cultural, and economic systems are in a continuous dialogue with the internal dynamics, thereby making liberations more challenging.

When I announced I was leaving my last job for a new one, one of my colleagues asked, “What is your favorite Bible verse?” I thought about it, as I don’t do single verses, having long been resistant to anything that smacks of eisegesis. “I don’t really have one. But I love the book of Ecclesiastes.”

Just like the aggressive profile one gets from the heat of the chili peppers or the funkiness from the fermented soybeans with a sweetness that comes at the end of every taste of gochujang, one can find parallels in the Korean diaspora and the flavor profiles that come with it. One serving of rice provides a taste of comfort, but also highlights the Han — the bitter notes of emotional pain, injustice, and a sense of incompleteness — and the Jeong — the bright notes of hope, love, loyalty, compassion, and emotional attachment.

I don’t know much about my great-grandmother other than that she was an immigrant from Japan, born somewhere in the south near Fukuoka or Yamaguchi-ken. She married my great-grandfather, a second-generation Japanese American born in Hawaiʻi. He wasn’t a particularly nice guy nor successful in business, and was possibly abusive. She gave birth to one son and six daughters. She died young, suffering from kidney failure and perhaps poverty. She may also have been the first Christian in our family.

Growing up in a conservative Christian household, I saw Hell as the final punishment of a long escalating list of discplinary options. To hear my evangelical Chinese American parents tell it, a fiery eternity was the greatest argument to keep a young kid in line and out of trouble.

A few years ago, I took a Hawaiian language class at Hawaiʻi Community College. In the fourth and final semester of the two years of ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi that the school offered, I journeyed with a cohort of students under our amazing kumu (teacher) Kuʻulei Kanahele. Our class consisted of Native Hawaiian and Japanese students; I was the only non-Hawaiian student who was born and raised in Hawaiʻi.

In 2013, I painted a mural on the walls of a school in a slum on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya. It felt like an act of prayer, done on my knees, with the near-reverent sound of children’s voices reciting lessons in the background.

I am a 1.5 generation Hmong American who spent nearly thirty years of my life in southeastern Wisconsin. The memories of racial aggressions I experienced during those years have not escaped me. When I was a young boy in Fond du Lac, someone vandalized our garage door with racially charged graffiti. Another time, I went over to a white friend’s house and his grandmother kept referring to me as “brown boy”.

Across the ocean on a small island; on the shelf of a small seminary library, I came across the book "Black Theology & Black Power" (I still believe the ghosts of my ancestors guided my path that day). I read the preface with the intent of just skimming and going on to the next, more common theological literature used in the Pacific, such as Barth, Tillich or Process theologians like John Cobb. In contrast, I had almost finished reading the entire book when the librarian turned the lights out to close. I rushed downstairs and begged her to let me check it out to finish reading it later that evening.

In 2011, I found myself having to defend the argument that race still matters while attending one of the most ethnically diverse evangelical seminaries in the nation. Don’t get me wrong: Students and faculty alike openly discussed ethnic and cultural differences. And although all were unanimous that racism was bad and diversity was good, when it came to more explicit discussions of institutionalized racism or white supremacy, there tended to be choirs of crickets.

In the seventh grade, I saw a video of a Tongan man, Matangi Tai, who was brutally attacked by police in Arizona. He later died due to a suspicious “unknown cause”. The lack of transparency regarding the cause of his death, along with the physical abuse he experienced prior to his arrest, were both alarming factors to my community when considering the history of terror between people of color and police.

For the past few years, I’ve been a pastor in search of a home. As a Filipino American, the idea of home is unclear to me. The Philippines is my ancestral home and I feel close to my roots and relatives there. My theological lineage can also be traced back to specific people, churches, seminaries, and American denominations in the Philippines. But many of my concerns are markedly American, even though I was born in Canada. Despite having lived in the States for most of my life, I get regular reminders of my foreignness, especially here in the Midwest.

Meesh tells me about a conversation they had with a friend, reveling about the solar eclipse. “It is such a beautiful natural event. With technology, we know when it’s happening, why it’s happening, and where it’s going to be. But we wondered, what if we looked at this thing 100 years ago, and didn’t know what it was? Would we still think it’s beautiful? Would we be scared of it? Would we think the world is ending?”

When my mom and dad were dating, my Filipina mother told my white U.S.-American father that she would be returning to the Philippines to continue her work there after they graduated from seminary in California. She felt a strong calling to serve her people, and it would be up to him if he wanted to follow her there and continue their relationship.

They actually laughed at me when I finally showed them my Zoloft prescription. “You can’t be depressed if you’re a strong Christian!” Mama exclaimed. “Everyone is depressed. You should be able to get over being ‘sad’ without medication,” Baba mocked.

What does it mean to be a queer Asian disciple of Christ? That is, what gifts might openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Asian Christians bring to the larger Body of Christ? I came out to my Mom some 25 years ago. I still remember that day as if it were yesterday. It was my senior year of college, and my Mom was visiting me in my dorm room.

I am a first generation American. Throughout my lifetime, immigration has been treated as an issue by the media and general public, but it is much more personal to me. My parents are immigrants from Southeast Asia. My father was born the second of 11 siblings in Indonesia, when the country was still recuperating from World War II. My father’s family was relatively poor, but surviving.

Crap. She friended me. “She” is Sofia, from my English class. I like her a lot. She’s funny, talented, intelligent, and I want to be her friend. It’s my second year at Amherst College, a small liberal arts school in western Massachusetts, and despite its small population of just under 2,000 students, I’ve found it difficult to forge deep, genuine relationships here — friendships that go beyond remembering birthdays on Facebook, a follow-back on Instagram, and a few pictures on feeds that remind each other that the other still exists.

Growing up in the church is a hard thing to do. I should know, because I am the daughter of a pastor. Whether it was joining youth group or participating in Bible study, you name it and I was there. I grew up with and continue to attend Epic, a progressive American Baptist church that is predominantly Asian-American.

I remember hearing about Columbine growing up — not really much, just tidbits here and there. Then in my seventh grade Media Communications class, a few weeks before Christmas, our teacher walked in with a grave face and told us that an elementary school had been, for a lack of better phrase, “shot up”. The following days were a flurry of lockdown drills and teachers telling us what to do in case of an “emergency” — but refusing to address the word “shooting”, as if by not speaking of what had happened, it would disappear. That elementary school was Sandy Hook.

Like most young immigrants, I came to the United States for reasons outside of my control. At 9, my family moved to California from Singapore with every intention of moving back within a few years. In fact, my mother had paid next year’s school fees in advance to reserve my spot, and even purchased some of the textbooks for the next year so I could work through them while overseas (I was an impressively industrious student at the time).

At the height of the Great Depression, my grandfather left his brothers and moved with his wife and first newborn child from Oakland to Los Angeles. He wanted to be in Hollywood movies.

My immigrant story begins a little differently from most Asian Americans: My parents migrated to America from Malaysia in order to start a church. They belonged to a church-planting network that began in Thailand; its leaders felt that America was too depraved and in need of a spiritual revival. And so they sent over the Ngus.

“Mom, I have something to tell you.” I wonder how many families have been impacted — positively or negatively — by those words and the words that came after. For our family, our lives would forever be changed in ways that we never could have imagined in that moment: when our youngest 16-year-old child came out to us as transgender in October 2015.

Christianity and whiteness have become synonymous in America. It is something reinforced and perpetuated in our political landscape today. In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidential election, largely due to the support of white, evangelical Christian voters. According to the Pew Research Center, as of September 2016, 35 percent of the Republican Party are white evangelicals, with 83 percent of Republicans identifying as “Christian” in the broad sense.