This has been a process. I’m talking, a really long process! More than six years to be exact.
I’ve been trying to articulate my twenty years of experience on the mission field in Southeast Asia, and throughout the years, my writing “voice” has changed a lot. Thank God I did not publish my previous writings as I have matured in my writing style.
But now it’s here! The first chapter of my book in progress, The memories I Made Up. And you can get it absolutely free simply by subscribing to my mailing list on the right or below.
Here’s a little snippet of what you’ll get:
Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.
Who I am today has been constructed from my quondam experiences, chiseled by the slap on the cheek I received from a Chinese customs official while smuggling Bibles into China. I have been fashioned by midnight interrogations in sugarcane fields, police stations, and shoddy rural hotels. A metamorphosis took place within me as one-hundred United Wa State Army child soldiers carrying AK-47s caught me sneaking into the Myanmar border while translating for Time Magazine. The course of my life was altered by the ethnic Wa grandmother who cradled me like an infant after my back went out in the former head-hunting village of Dadong. Her boney fingers lovingly brushed my forehead as we jerked and trembled over rugged, rural pathways in the rear wagon of a handheld tractor. I have been shaped in large part by the pig brains and cat soup and grub worms and homemade moonshine I sampled in unreached Asian villages. I have been fabricated by superfluous tragedy and concrete joy, molded by faith, hope, and love.
Who I am today is arduous for me to define. I am a mixture of courage and fear, compassion and anger, hope and uncertainty. I am a missionary, though that title instills within me negative notions of antipathy. I rather resonate with the anti-hero missionary, fatigued by the façade of Christian pedestals. I call myself, instead, a missional starter and an artistic creative.
So sign up now and download the first chapter! I think you’ll like it.
