I had intended for this to be a mid-year stock take but the whirlwind of my fortieth year so far has stumped me. If the past few years have been a reckoning of Who Am I? This year, between moving to a new city for the year and an intensive 8-week travel across three continents in the first half of 2025, the question hovering in my head is but Where Am I?
That, can of course be as cryptic or layered as you want to peel it apart.
It moved my heart deeply revisiting Copenhagen and UK that held much of my twenties.
Unlike my twenties where I could travel light, pack up and go almost instantaneously, with two little kids in tow today – traveling light is still possible! – but in as much as I practice attuned parenting then being child-focused in developing a secure attachment in a holistic robust caregiving sense takes hard work to establish a healthy village. (Very blessed to learn so much from their early childhood caregivers in the Bay Area in attuning to le kiddos!)
Letting the little children show the way
Both kids are still in-transit and have not given a firm verdict yet on this new city. Maise is especially fond of her Kindergarten teacher in Washington, though misses her Bay Area little best friends dearly. While Cruze is making his first best friends at his new preschool here, he was too young to remember the little friends he had met in the Bay Area. Though navigating the sheer amount of toddler transitions developmentally, too, is tough on him.
Neither do I have a firm verdict yet for myself as I continue to declutter my inner world.
I did had my milestone birthday of forty earlier this year and I’ve always valued the spiritual significance of forty, so there has been a heightened sense of spiritual attunement as well. In the past month alone, between completing my MA in Leadership and Innovation at Biola after four years, and a 9-month incubator and accelerator cohort with Missional Labs, I am in a holding position of where do I go or what the curious next move may be.
(Though Exodus 33 grounds it always.)
I will say I’ve gone quite deep into the innovation space and loving it, though I’m equally ever so nonchalant about all the “Founder” schmooze or its increasingly mainstream idea if you know the purist in me. If not grounded in a redemptive vision, I have a penchant for doing what nobody can or likes to do or going where nobody goes. More accurately, being first at [insert early adopter thing] then being the first to exit when it goes “mass market”.
There has to be a term for this if it isn’t some un-dealt with childhood trauma ha I digress.
For a lot of reasons, Eight Parables will be evolving quite significantly for the most part out of necessity for my fresh start but not departing from the 2018 reckoning I had of parables.
Eight Parables 2.0 or?
In fact, there are many aspects of what I had originally run with at the get-go, but tweaked through the last seven years rightly or wrongly that oddly, it’s all coming back full circle to. And let’s just say I am not mad about it. I am still working through this and I had just been calling it all “a new era” of Eight Parables, but if I am not who I was in 2018 given the last years of deep spiritual wrestling or reawakening and reconstruction, where does it land me?
In light of fresh starts, I may start it over re-naming and all, while retaining all of its history. I have been feeling an urge to shift after a recent series of unnerving work-related incidents.
Like that sobering hip-breaking reckoning when the Lord calls Jacob, Israel.
Or that very idea of reimagining 21st century missions Missional Labs (Tyler Prieb and his team caught something really special with this) have grounded my current new missional framework in what is God up to with The Great Commission — in real-time as the world evolves. And I have a lot of thoughts (or speculations) on Gen AI that I will not go into at present — but unlike Web2.0 or the digital and social media age, or maybe alike it, I have pretty peculiar views on it that there are maybe only a handful so far I align with, kind of.
However, unlike how being early adopter in Web2.0 had built me a successful career (and semi-fortune ha I mean it funded me church planting around the world and still have the absolute luxury of time today at forty to be writing while my two kids sleep), I’m playing a bit of a different (long) game with Gen AI and whatever else continues from this point on.
A slow and fast game
There was so much suspicion or disbelief around Web2.0 when they first descended in the early 2000s. I was talking to a good friend in tech recently of how the acceleration of Gen AI is probably out of the herd early adopters mentality, especially those who were late to the Web2.0 party. The irony may be that those who were early in Web2.0 are actually a lot more cautious of Gen AI to dive in the same way. (And that may be thanks to therapy ha.)
It may be because we learned how first and fast is not always better.
‘Move fast break things’ have led to irreparable costly consequences even as there can be fresh starts. That here I am at forty, in transit to my own. Transitions are full of tensions especially if you are one who had learned to embrace every season as it comes. Transition is then weird where it always begins with a reluctance (sign of the past season well-embraced) and build squarely on a faith that the said new season will indeed arrive just as anticipated.
So while I can’t say I am loving this in-transit to a fresh start with this mid-year stocktake as I have no idea where I am – in at least the literal sense of I have no idea what the second half of 2025 will look like at all, nor can I truly see the promised fresh start in the horizon.
I have however also learned deeply the beauty of slow living, live simply and surrendered in a way of having joy, joy and joy a plenty in the midst of the sorrow and the unknowns.
And of that invaluable unmistakable shalom I am holding fast.
honest & hygge 