I turned 60 recently. Friends said, this is a big one, you should celebrate. My wife and good friend made it happen. Somewhere along the way, knowing that I am reluctant to be the center of attention, I was asked, “Do you want to say something?” to the 50 people who would end up coming. I thought about it. I knew I wanted to say, “Thank you! Thank you for being part of my life all these years.” I did that. And I reflected on how I am entering the fourth “quarter” of my life.

Dividing my life into 20-year quarters is certainly arbitrary. What if I lived to 80? I’m open to that, but the frame still works. At 80, I would be going into “overtime”, like in a football game. Using this frame, my father passed away at the tail end of the third quarter; my mother passed in the middle of her fourth. So I don’t take it for granted that I’ll go into OT.

In this musing I’m going to briefly reflect on the three quarters that I have lived so far through the theme of “faith.”

Quarter One: My Parent’s Faith

I was raised by my grandmother, mother, and father. Their faiths varied. Grandma believed in the God of Heaven until she came to Jesus in her eighties. My mother was an atheist in China, but she took up Chinese ancestor practices, when I was 20, after my father died. Mom also prayed to Jesus in the last days of her life on earth. My dad was agnostic, but he looked to grandma to pray for him. Did he believe in luck, or himself, or something else when he brought our family out of China, to Hong Kong, and eventually to California?

From birth to 19, I was mostly the product of other people’s faith and work. I did not bring myself into this world. I did not make money to put food on the table. I did not buy the little 3-bedroom, 1-bath house that my parents, grandmother, and we three brothers lived in. I did not buy the new car that was given to me when I turned 16. I did not put myself through college. My parents paid for all that.

Whether my father believed in luck or himself, I don’t know. But he believed that we could have a better life outside the village. He was poor and fatherless. He went to Hong Kong on his own, borrowed money and started a business. My grandmother and mother joined him later. When my auntie in America was able to sponsor us to come to the States, he borrowed money to start a restaurant and opened three more by the time I left for college.

None of my parents were Christians in the first quarter of my life, but they taught me faith, to believe life could be better, to look to someone, something outside ourselves for help, that there was more to life in this world than what we can see on the surface. At the age of 19, my faith became Christian.

Quarter Two: Trust in the Lord

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding,” Proverbs 3:5.

I ended up taking five years to graduate from college. A big factor was my dad dying when I was 20. I was 22 when I graduated from Berkeley with an engineering degree. I was the first in my family to graduate from a four-year college. My grandma was at the graduation ceremony in a wheelchair. It would be one of her last big outings. She was not able to make it to my wedding. My mother, aunties, and some cousins were also there. It was a proud and happy moment for my mom.

What I chose to do after graduation, though, was a huge disappointment for her. I wasn’t looking for an engineering job. I was going to do Christian ministry. It pained me to tell her that, but I was learning to trust in the Lord and lean not on my own understanding. It doesn’t make sense to study engineering with the potential for good pay and then go into Christian ministry, where I would work part-time for pay, and full-time for no pay. My mother, with love, said to me, “After graduation, you will need to pay your own rent and provide for yourself.” She had paid my way through college. I had no debt, but it was time for me to support myself. Strangely, as I remember it, I was not afraid. Idealistic and naive, but not afraid.

I made three major transitions in the second quarter of my life. At the age of 24, I moved to the South Bay to work with InterVarsity at Stanford. When I was 28, I got married. Cindi and I moved to San Francisco to be part of Grace Fellowship. When I was 37, Cindi and I were sent with a core group to plant a church. Compared to my dad’s migration to California, my migration was only down and back within the 40 miles between the East Bay and the South Bay, but it also took faith.

In this quarter of my life, I aspired to radical faith. When I was doing student ministry, I learned about Hudson Taylor, missionary to China, who famously said, “God’s work done God’s way will never lack God’s supply.” If you respond to God’s call and “go”, God will supply what you need. In this quarter of my life, I tried to do what Jesus said to the rich young ruler, “Sell your possessions and give to the poor, you will have treasure in heaven, then come, follow me.” I didn’t have much money in the bank. For some years, I didn’t have health insurance. After receiving a modest inheritance, Cindi and I felt called to give a bunch of it away for affordable housing. Looking back, we were young and idealistic, but God did provide, and we learned to live by faith. These experiences give me confidence today to face an unknown future.

Quarter Three: Focus and Loss

Shortly before entering my second quarter, my father passed, and shortly before entering my third quarter, my mother passed. At the same convalescent home where my grandmother died, I was with my mom on her final days. It would not be long. You can tell by the breathing. But it was long enough that I couldn’t be in her room the whole time. I was at her house, working on a sermon, when I got the call from the convalescent home that mom had breathed her last breath. Looking back, I think it might strike some as strange that I was working on a sermon while my mom was dying, and yes, I preached the Sunday after she died.

That was my life for over 20 years. Cindi and I pastored a church in Bayview Hunters Point, San Francisco. The third quarter of my life was one of incredible focus–focus on the local church, focus on being pastors, and focus on the neighborhoods in which we lived, worked and worshiped. Cindi and I, and our kids also embraced it. We were called to San Francisco, called to Redeemer Community Church, and called to Bayview. Our friends, our school mates, our neighborhood partners were all a part of this close circle in Bayview where our church was and in the Excelsior neighborhood where our house was. Richness was not in traveling and living all over the world, but it was in giving, loving, and investing in one place with one community over the long-haul. It was a good vision. We were joining Jesus, who in his continuing incarnation, had moved into the neighborhood. In light of God’s great love for us and for our world, we were doing our part to join what God was already doing to make a better world, to usher in God’s kingdom. It was a rich life.

We started the church in May 2002. We were planting our church in the shadow of 9/11. Two months after the church started, my mom passed a year after being diagnosed with liver cancer. In the world around us and in our personal lives, we suffered loss in this third quarter of my life. I don’t know if this is true for others, but for me every loss is layered upon the ones that came before. You never fully get over the losses. You attend a funeral for a friend, and you remember others who have gone before them. You groan for the evil that is happening today, recognizing the patterns of similar evils from the past. The idealism of the first quarter has given way to the brutal realities of the third quarter.

Toward the end of the third quarter, Cindi lost both her step-mom and her father. As Cindi’s father became frail, and he went to more funerals, he said something that continues to stick with me, “getting old ain’t for sissies.” It takes courage to face aging and death. It takes courage to face how broken our world is, and how broken we ourselves are.

Quarter Four: Strength to Carry On

The rich and full life centered in the mission and community of Redeemer came to an end in the third quarter. Because my life and my calling had been so clear and so focused for so long, I really felt lost. I am no longer as young, nor as naive, but I would like to think that I still live by faith. My calling is not as focused on being a pastor or in a specific neighborhood in San Francisco. Cindi is much more clear on her call to be a pastor. There have been so many ways in which that calling has been confirmed. I look forward to following her to the congregation and a community, to which God will send us. I don’t know what pastoring will look like for me, but I have hope that it will be good.

As I begin my fourth quarter, a lot of patterns that have been set for so long are no longer. Those patterns were largely set by our church community, and by our kids’ schooling. Our two older children are young adults. Our youngest is in his senior year in high school. We are entering a new life stage together. There is much that is wide open. Would we remain in San Francisco? Would we find a church in which we can flourish?

At my 60th birthday party, I said that it was tempting to think, the first three quarters have been so rich, I don’t need any more to be content. That was genuine in that I am very grateful for my life and for the family and friends with whom I have already shared so much. But I also wonder if I am afraid that the fourth quarter could not be as good as what I have experienced so far. Am I afraid to hope for more? On the days that I feel broken, when I lack motivation, when I have no vision, I wonder if I have the strength to face the unknown. I am grateful that in these moments, there is something deep within me, and the Spirit nearby calling to me, that gives me hope. By faith I have come this far. By faith I will journey on.