Why Do I Write?

                             

                                                          (Smithsonian Magazine)

Why do I write? What is the point? Why this dialogue? That question was posed to me by a trusted and completely well-meaning family member, and I'm glad it was posed. It gives me the opportunity to clarify what perhaps has not been clear and thus bring more credence to what I speak.

I write because this is my voice, and for much of my life, I have felt I was not allowed to speak. For much of my life I did not feel heard when I tried to speak. I felt there was not space for me to possess a voice or have feelings if what I said or felt contradicted the thoughts and opinions of those who held authority or rank over me. In my home, I did not feel seen. I did not feel respected. I did not feel I was allowed even to feel or express the emotions I had. I always wrote as a survival tool, in my bedroom, in the living room, at the old white piano with my back safely to the rest of the family and the world. I don't harbor anger or bitterness toward any family member with whom I grew up. We were all in the midst of our journeys toward God. We were all trying our best. We were all struggling toward healing, wringing our hands, writhing in our pain....my parents...their parents, my siblings, all of us; nonetheless, this is how I felt, and I've learned it is allowed that I felt at all. But I have had to grow into my voice, into believing I mattered enough to feel how I felt and think what I thought, into believing I mattered enough to allow myself to exist and take up space, literally take up space more than 100 lbs. I didn't grow up believing I had worth. God taught me I had worth. God took what satan meant for evil and used it for good. I see God's redemption in my family, in the lives of the individuals, in my life, and I have learned how to speak. Thus I speak, freely, because God deemed I should and put sound in my throat and taught me how to form words. 

Why do I write about THIS specific topic? Because this is what I see, and because it is a topic of an unheard people. Because Martin Luther King said a riot is the language of the unheard. I write because I first started encountering a different world when I moved away to college, and that world multiplied exponentially and grew wide when I traveled to Hong Kong, and God has continued enlarging it for me piece-by-piece for the past 19 years. I write because apparently I can. Apparently I am good at it. I did not know that until college, when I was given a writing award by professors who took time to notice me and tell me the different gifts I had apart from being able to sing. I didn't know I could be smart. I didn't know I could write. They told me I wrote well. 

"What? ME? Who? Wait? I write well? I'm not smart-  I'm confused!" 

"Just write Megin, just write..." .people kept saying, through the years. I didn't understand it, but I listened until eventually I caught on... 

"Oh. I'm a writer. This is a gift. This is part of ME," I thought and protested, "I hadn't understood...I didn't know I was allowed to..."

"It's okay Megin-" God cuts me off. "Write, my child. Write." 

I write because I knew early on that God called me to be a disciple and to "go from [my] country[b] and [my] kindred and [my] father's house to the land that [God would] show [me], (Genesis 12:1), and it has been hard. I have traveled, suitcases in hand, through tears, leaving what was familiar and trusting God would take care of me. And God has opened my eyes to the plight of others, and I have sensed the call to be a voice for others unheard. Early on I knew I was called to use my own experiences as fuel that enabled me to hear the unheard and feel their pain and stand with them when the majority could not or would not. That is my passion given to me by my Creator. This is my purpose. It expressed itself through teaching English in China when I was in college, through journeying to Boston to a seminary which my dear mentors from the Christianity department at Mercer did not want me to go because it was not academic enough for me, the girl they felt had such potential and into whom they'd spent countless hours pouring their heart and wisdom. But my call persisted, to study world religions, different cultures, and how Christianity and the Gospel took root in THOSE contexts, contexts apart from our Westernized understood. This was my call. I had to follow it. 

My call expressed itself through moving to New York when I really just wanted to raise my sister's new baby, but God was asking me to seek out young lives, to mentor young teens, hoping to share with them the lessons I learned in my 20's but would have benefited from learning at 13-years-old. And now, it expresses itself through raising my children, and being a wife to my husband, and a pastor's wife in our congregation, and a voice to the people in my community, friends, who have been unheard, friends like Jennifer Reynoso-Ng who has taught me more about life than I ever dreamed a girl who is actually younger than my baby brother could ever teach me! We started off kids, riding in my dad's car, on the way home from a Christmas pageant in Staten Island, trapped in the midst of about 15 to 20 vans with giant menorahs on their roofs that we ignorantly deemed a Hanukkah parade, and me listening to her get up the nerve to tell me a secret, that she was dating this other kid from our church, a Chinese boy, even though I already knew her secret because the Chinese boy's older sister had told me before we went to the pageant! And now we are married to the boys we liked back then and raising our children together in Lower Manhattan, learning what it means to be disciples of Christ in a changing church culture of 2020, the year of the apocalypse. I write in solidarity because this is where God has put me, and this is my reality. 

I don't write with some grudge or ax to grind. I don't write to convert the masses, (like I could really do that anyway). I don't even write to solicit a certain number of clicks, (I would probably get more page views if I wrote less). I write because God has asked me to write. That I believe. And this is my call. And so if you want to know me and have me as a part of your life, I would venture to say you are going to have to be able to put up with this because I can't not be this and still continue to be. If I can't speak of this, then I don't have anything else of which to speak really... this is my ministry. This is my heart. For better or worse. 

I will seek to be respectful, and I will seek to calm. I will seek to be peaceful until a time when I cannot be and should not be. I will not seek to belittle you or shut you down if you indeed want to dialogue and share of your life and your experience. But I don't know what else to do but have these conversations and speak about what is around me when I exit the shelter of my privileged apartment. 

I will make mistakes, but I will persevere. I will seek to be humble. I will pledge to continue learning. I will not be perfect. I will mess up, but I hope to get it right more often than I get it wrong, by God's grace.

And a word about pain: I think sometimes we face the challenge of navigating how to validate the oppression and pain of others and the masses when we feel our own pains and oppression have not been validated. Perhaps I can enter into heralding others pains because I have felt God address so many of my own. He has given me wise counselors and mentors through the years, literally multiple actual counselors that I have paid, and numerous ones I have not, who have validated my pain and helped me explore the injustices done to me. I have grieved them and felt they mattered to God. And I have been able to let them go and not need them validated and seen by the world at large. And in that freedom, I am free to champion others who are in pain, letting go of my losses, the ways I have been nearly more than once nearly raped and certainly silenced, molested and abused. I have found a way to grieve and forgive and raise my eyes in thanksgiving ALL BY GOD'S GRACE and not by any strength of my own. God has seen fit to heal me; PRAISE GOD; thus I am able to stand, though my knees may wobble, and herald the pain and injustice of others, and help them find God and find hearing and find their own voice. So if you have pain and feel unheard, please do not tell me not to speak; rather, TELL ME YOUR PAIN. I will champion your pain and listen to YOU. I will speak of the injustice done to YOU because YOU DESERVE VALIDATION AS WELL. Everyone does. None of God's creatures made in God's image deserve abuse. No sexism, racism, chauvinism, or any oppression shall stand in God's presence! All shall be cast down to the pit of hell. In my everyday life, the things about which I write are what is present to me; however, if you present your pains to me, those will then become that which I herald and love and take before God... God has called me to mend the brokenhearted, to seek justice for the oppressed, whether they are oppressed because of their race, their age, their sex, their different abilities or simply because they are growing up in the midst of an abusive home. God has taught me how to have a voice when I have felt I did not deserve a voice, and so I will seek to walk with anyone who needs a voice and is put in my path by God... 

My first call is to discipleship. I write because I am God's, and God puts words into my soul, a cracked jar of clay..and out through the tips of my fingers and the sounds of sometimes raspy voice, weathered to use. Because I live, I write. Because I write, I live. Because Jesus lives, I live, and God's words are spoken, heard, and read...  and I write.