In his book “Disappointment with God,” author Philip Yancey describes how God takes a great risk in manifesting His presence on earth through the Christian church.
“Delegation always entails risk, as any employer soon learns. When you turn over a job, you let go. And when God “makes his appeal through us”, he takes an awful risk: the risk that we will badly represent him…Yet God took that risk, and because he did so the world will know him primarily through Christians. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is the doctrine of “the church”: God living in us.
In many ways, allowing imperfect people to be Christ’s’ hands and feet can easily mar the image of Jesus, hence why so many Americans claim today that they are “disappointed” with God. Yet at the same time, Yancey argues that when the Spirit truly lives in us, the church can be a beautiful testimony of the immensity of God’s grace. And because of God’s grace in my own life, I can testify that this is true.
A little over a year ago, I visited Massachusetts for the first time in four years. I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area over six years ago for college, but I had spent the majority of my childhood in the Worcester area, thus I considered CGCM to be my home church. This visit occurred shortly after I had just graduated from five humbling years at UC Berkeley. Although I was looking forward to seeing old friends, I had no idea that God would use my short visit to refresh me with His grace once again.
Long story short, college had wrung me dry in many ways. As a young Asian American, I entered college believing my worth as an individual came through my accomplishments, but Berkeley for me just felt like failure after failure- as a student, musician, athlete, and even a servant at church. Although Sunday School and my Christian upbringing always taught me that my worth was found in what Christ did for me on the cross, I really did not understand what that meant. The concept of grace made sense on paper but it was far from my heart.
During my visit to CGCM in 2010, I don’t know how to even begin to describe what I experienced. From the moment I stepped off the plane, I was just floored by grace.
My friends drove me everywhere without complaining and provided me with places to stay and eat throughout my entire visit. On Sunday, I was able to visit both the Southborough and Worcester congregations, where familiar faces greeted me with warm hugs and genuine smiles. I will never forget one greeting in particular from Xiao Ma’s mom! She saw me, hugged me, and then… hugged me again because she couldn’t think of what to say. I was so surprised by love.
In Worcester, once the word started to spread that “Hain-Ling and Shu Chiung’s eldest daughter” was here, everyone swamped around me to take a picture with me, even though I didn’t even know who some of them were. Later that afternoon, a couple of the families who were closest friends with my parents threw together an impromptu delicious homecooked dinner and gathering for me. They weren’t even my peers- they were my parents’ friends!! It absolutely made no sense for them to treat me with such generous hospitality, but they did it with such joy and thanksgiving. As one of uncle’s prayed before the meal, the love of God that had been poured into my heart that day overflowed from my eyes in the form of tears.
Like I described earlier, I graduated from college feeling pretty ashamed and disappointed in myself. Yet in my brokenness that November after graduation, the family at CGCM loved me not because I had done anything good, but simply because they recognized me one of the mischievous kids that ran around church back in the day, as Hain-Ling and Shu-Chiung’s daughter, as God’s daughter, as part of the family in Christ. My identity was founded in the grace of Christ alone. Thus when I read Yancey’s book, I knew what he was talking about when he described the church as one of the most powerful vessels of the grace of God because CGCM is a living example in my own life.
To close, I just want to say thank you Chinese Gospel Church of Massachusetts. From the very depths of my heart, thank you for showing me what the grace of God is like-- the grace of God that comes to us in our weakness, our brokenness, when we don’t deserve it- but for some crazy reason, it comes in huge abundance. Your labor of love into even young kids like me is not in vain!! :)
