EileenKim

I remember waking up on my 24th birthday thinking to myself, “There is no way I’m going to survive this year.” 24 was hard. I found myself defeated for most of it. But I also found that you can’t taste victory until you face defeat. Unfortunately for me, 24 was the year the Enemy would bruise my heel. Unfortunately for him, 25 (and onwards) will be the years I will crush his head. Sorry, not sorry, Devil. Don’t say God didn’t warn you. He definitely prophesied it. Har har har.

The cool thing about God is that He always exceeds our expectations. I merely wished to survive. God made sure I thrived. There are kingdom principles that will never make any earthly sense to me. God has a way of redeeming stuff and working things out for good. 24 was not easy, but it was good. And since I am no longer young and energetic enough to spend my birthday partying it up, I will sit here and write a blog like an old person about things my Heavenly Father has taught me.

Uncertainty is an opportune time to renew your mind. It is harder to renew my mind when I think I know something. It is easier for God to renew my mind when my mind doesn’t know what to think. Uncertainty is transformative when we fill the gap in our mind with His thoughts instead of our own. Feeling uncertain? Yay. You’re well on your way to transformation.

Love is the goal. Everything else is a fruit of love. Want to grow in prophecy? Grow in love. Want to grow in healing? Grow in love. Want to grow in word of knowledge? Grow in love. Your impact will only ever be as great as your love.

Laughter leads to intimacy. Two things have brought me into greater intimacy with the Lord. (1) Crying to the Father. (2) Laughing with the Father. I love that intimacy isn’t just the intense moments of heart-checks, but also the moments when God says something silly or I do something dumb, and we both just laugh out loud about it.

Silence and presence can coexist. Many times, I’d call up my best friend to cry and she’d just sit silently on the other end of the line for hours. I learned that it’s the same with the Father. His silence doesn’t mean He’s absent. Oftentimes when I cry out to Him, He doesn’t say anything because like a best friend, He knows that sometimes His quiet presence will speak louder comfort than words. 

Do not eat spicy rice cakes and work out immediately after. You will regret every single delicious bite you took. It is not worth the heartburn. I repeat, it is not worth it!

The trick is not to get God to speak. The trick is to understand how God speaks to you. It took this year for me to learn some of the ways God speaks to me, like through random objects. One of the most profound words God gave me was through a traffic light. A TRAFFIC LIGHT!!! Had I not learned to keep my eyes open to hear Him speak, I would’ve easily continued on in life feeling like God doesn’t speak to me, and would’ve missed out on an incredible word!

You’ll get answers to who you are when you make it about Him. I found that when my prayers started with me asking God about myself (i.e. I’m hurt! I’m sad! Do you care?!), I eventually got too defeated to stick around long enough to focus on Him. But when I began my prayers focusing on Him (i.e. You are good, You are love, You are holy), He would reveal not only who He was, but who I am in light of those things. And it was impossible to feel defeated in prayer times like this.

If someone hurts you, thank them. Behind every hurt is a lie. Your offender most likely triggered a lie that you didn’t know was there. Their offense against you is an opportunity for promotion in the kingdom. Steward the hurt in a way that will bring you to greater freedom. Your offender is never the enemy. They will help jumpstart you on a journey to discovering truth, and that is the sweetest revenge you can have against the Enemy.  

Heaven’s grading system is based on obedience, not results. The cool thing about God is that He cares less about the outcome, and more about the heart. There’s room to make mistakes! If your YES to Him is 100%, but you completely flop in the attempt, you still get a standing ovation.

There’s freedom in knowing you don’t bring that much to the table. There’s no such thing as pressure in the kingdom. When I felt like I needed to be right, I was scared to do things. When I realized I had been made right, I felt so free to do things.

Acne isn’t just for adolescents. Le sigh. For those of you who thought you got through your teen years without acne, don’t celebrate too soon. Goodbye clear skin. Hello acne. I’M 25 YEARS OLD. GO AWAY.

Ask God what He thinks about you. Making this a daily habit has changed my life tremendously. When I know who I am, the Enemy stops wasting energy trying to deceive me.

Your job is to inspire. The Holy Spirit’s job is to transform. This helped me let go of having to make all the right decisions, have all the right answers or know all the right stuff. And it gave me space to just know my God and inspire people through my relationship with Him. Leave the big stuff to the Holy Spirit.

Ministry is mostly repainting a picture of who God is. I realized that most people just have a distorted image of God, which explains a lot of the poor decisions they make. The point is not to counsel them into making better decisions. The point is to repaint a more accurate picture of the Father for them. When they see Him for who He really is, they’ll begin to make good decisions because He is good!

Before you water a plant, make sure to double check to see if it’s real or not. This is not a profound analogy. Thank you, Anna for the birthday plant. I now know that I’ve been watering a fake plant for quite some time.

It is impossible to be hurt or offended when you know love. God met me with love. It was crazy. Since that moment, I have found it impossible to be hurt or offended by someone I love. I can hurt for them, but I am not hurt by them. Love really keeps no record of wrongs. It’s crazy how true this really is.

Learning God’s voice is not just knowing what He says, but familiarizing yourself with His tone. For example, the Enemy and the Lord will both reveal sin. The Enemy will speak in an accusing tone that will lead to shame and condemnation. The Lord will speak in a kind tone that will lead to repentance. Discerning the tone will help you know whether or not to pay attention to the voice, no matter how “true” it may be seem. 

The call to following Jesus is heavy but it is not burdensome. His yoke is easy. His burden is light. If following Jesus feels too weighty, it is most likely that the weight is you still carrying your old man. Jesus commanded us to deny ourselves and pick up the cross. Something tells me Jesus figured we were much heavier than the cross, so He made sure to notify us not to bring ourselves on the journey. He knew it would only ever weigh us down. 

It really is possible to pay off your student loans. You just have to be okay with never ever seeing a paycheck, ever. But THANK YOU, LORD. I am almost done and debt-free!  

Find people who believe in you and for you. These are gems everyone needs to find and never lose. Surround yourself with individuals who have a vision for you and refuse you to settle for anything less. They are what will bridge you from being good to great.

The best way to fight the Devil is to ignore him. My greatest battles against the Enemy are not the ones where I warred into the night against him. My greatest battles against the Enemy have been the ones where I didn’t even give him one second of my attention. He is an attention seeker, and I win the moment I refuse to give him any.  

You can fall deeply in love in your singleness. I love that God is jealous for me, and it was in my singleness that I realized how much He was willing to fight for me to know and understand love fully. He refused to sell me short of the love that He paid for. It was in this revelation that I fell deeply in love with Him, with myself, and with others. 

Hunger is contagious. The greatest thing you can do in an environment seemingly complacent is to remain steadfast in your hunger. The main reason people don’t hunger for more is because they don’t know there’s more to hunger for. Your hunger is an invitation for them to go after what they never knew was there.

God doesn’t give love as a gift. He gives Himself because He is love. It made a big difference when I learned that love was not a feeling but a person. Because even on days that felt crummy, I knew He was with me and that was more than enough. 

I am a daughter. This is the identity that Jesus restored to me. I am no longer a servant, a sinner or a slave. I am a daughter who serves because I am loved, and no longer a servant who serves to be loved.

We are in constant battle, and grace is just as much our haven of rest as it is our resolve to fight.

Grace cheers for you, roots for you, and receives you again and again: with a direction and momentum that says you’re better than this.

Grace will confront the sin like a surgeon’s tool and work through it to the messy end.

Grace does not excuse or absolve sin, but acknowledges the reality of our great desperate need as sinners.  It’s not merely comfort, but healing.

Grace is a cross, a substitution, an atonement, a victory over the grave — a handful of gritty truths wrapped in flesh that breathed the air and dirt of this earth.

It’s a beautiful, wonderful, furious, unchanging, heart-stopping love that cannot be shaken no matter what.

Jesus: he is our rest, our fight.

It was all I needed to remember. In that tiny compact parcel of a second, I replayed every terrible, awful, humiliating moment of self-indulgent excess in a nauseating loop, both the ways I used people and was used, and then: shame. Drowning shame. That awful sick-stomach feeling of tendrils racing up my gut, a stench that begins at the back of the throat to the tip of my nostrils, like choking in reverse.

A Christian might call this “condemnation.” I also call it “standing naked in town hall with every hurtful thing you’ve ever done on the wall, and also it’s very cold in there.”

Slipping, I reached for something in my head, fingernails scratching through a narrowing stone tunnel, spinning, up now down, the verdict pressing in, chains tightening. I felt like that guy on the news who has microphones shoved in his face after a scandal; you know, the carnival games were rigged the whole time, how dare you, you monster. Voices crowded in, the chorus shouting, “You’re not any different, you haven’t changed, I know who you really are"—and somewhere in that mess of lies, I found it.

It’s sort of trite maybe, and one of those moments I groan at during an inspirational Sunday service. But I thought of the verse: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come.”

I remember researching this once, and Paul was so excited when he wrote this verse that he skipped all the verbs. Which was very unlike the eloquent Paul. So it actually says, “Therefore anyone Christ, he new creation; old gone, new here.”

I’m imagining how liberating and heart-rending this was for Paul, who once killed Christians for a living and was probably serving at churches where there were family members of people he had persecuted. I’m imagining his nightmares and the regret over people he hurt. I’m envisioning his tears and apologies and humility for these families, only for them to say, “You’ve been re-made, Paul. You’re not who you were. You’re new.” I’m thinking of how much this tenderized him and galvanized him.

That’s what Christians call “grace.” It’s the hope of an undeserved love so that we can bear to be vulnerable in honesty and intimacy. It’s what we crave most and what we’re least willing to give. Yet God, we’re told, is willing to give it freely, at a cost to Himself, wave after wave of that stuff, like galaxies in a cup.

It doesn’t mean we’re not accountable or that everything is just fine. Of course, there must be reparations and reconciliation. But it does mean we’re no longer imprisoned to compensating for the shame of the “old-me.” I’m not bound to paying off my record by faking some kind of head-hanging modesty. The old-me is dead. The old-you is gone. It takes no less than the piercing love of God to put it to death, to die. It takes no less than the restoring love of God to give us breath, to make us alive. That’s the only thing I know that keeps me humble and fills me with confidence at the same time. It’s how we stop tumbling, and stand.

In Christ, no one is ever the same person they were before. It means that I don’t forget where I came from, but I can’t forget where I’m going.

The shame lifted then. Not all the way. Maybe enough to breathe a little. Maybe enough to fight back the voices. Maybe enough to still the past, and reach for hope, for a memory of the future. And that was enough.

I’ve been grieving over the reactionary microcosm of social media. The fiery rhetoric. The click-baiting. The “experts.” Beirut, Paris, Syria, the two earthquakes in Nepal, the ISIL threat, the US shootings, the protests in South Korea, racial tension, the political circus, the same celebrity drama.

I’ve been expecting the same predictable cycles at every headline: the outrage, the outrage against the outrage, the ever-loving trolls, the escalating comment sections, and the sudden silence when the bandwagon has moved on. I’ve been thinking how easy it is to lose sight of the real outrage, when we truly have the right to be offended amidst the “crying wolf,” and how unfortunate it is that true pain gets drowned in the viral-seeking echo chambers that never reach across the divide, but choir-preach with buzzwords and snarky flashy lines.

I’ve been wondering if we’re really this crazy. If we’re really this hateful. If we’re finally in the burning wreckage of a dying age. If we’re really this angry about the wrong things and silent about the right things. If we’re really this lost.

I’ve been thinking about how we can get better, or if we’re beyond recovery. That maybe I should give up, and give in to the cynicism, because it’s easier.

I was with a patient in the hospital who had a blood condition. “Derrick” suffered debilitating physical pain his entire life. His knees were twisted in circles, his fingers into claws, his body turned sideways, his eyes burned with baggage. He didn’t have much longer to live. It hurt him to talk, but he wanted to talk so badly. We were face to face, and he spoke about his illness, his dreams, his hopes, his insecurities, his faith, his fears, his family. We didn’t break eye contact for over an hour.

The news was on TV and there was another awful headline. The ticker-tape was scrolling at the bottom, one thing after another. The TV caught Derrick’s eye.

He said, “I don’t understand. I don’t get how we’re still fighting. I don’t understand how we’re still so mad. I’m hurting every second, and I see the news, and people still want to hurt each other. When is it enough? I can’t even play with my kids; I can’t hold them long; I can’t work or run or laugh too loud. If I just … if I could just walk without falling into a heap, the things I would do. The things we could do, you know, and we choose this instead.”

He tried to point to the television but he barely got his arm up.

“I’ll never get better. Physically, I mean. I’m at the end of my time here. But we can get better, you know, in the way that matters. I think if we knew … if we knew we’re all hurting somehow, we might be better. We might reach for each other.”

I looked over at Derrick and he was weeping. For the world. For himself. For me. For you. For us to get better.

And I wept, too. I knew that sort of pain, that desperate burden for healing and connection. To reach across the divide.

Derrick looked at me and said, “This is what matters. Right here. You and me, this is it. Can you stay with me? Can you pray with me? Can you pray for me and the hurting people?”

Through tears, we prayed. At the end, all I could really think to say was, “God—give us hope.”

I prayed for hope against the cynicism. Hope to make the best of it. Hope to hold on in the burning wreckage. Hope that there’s still good in us. Hope that we’ll make it. Hope that we’d find each other with our tiny little time on earth.

Matthew 13

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and hid; and for joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls, who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it.”

The pearl of great price is my favorite parable, ever. I probably revisit this passage at least once a month. And it still moves me every single time.

When I initially read the two parables together, the first one made a lot of sense. A guy finds a treasure. He hides it in a field. Sells all he has. Buys the field. And ends up with the field AND the treasure. It’s a win-win. The man loses all he owns, but gains twice at much. I think the kingdom is like that. When we feel like we’re losing something, the kingdom is actually doubling our portion, if not more.

But when I read the second parable, it made absolutely NO sense. A guy finds a pearl. Sees that it has value. Sells all that he has. Buys the pearl. And what does he get? Nothing but a tiny, little pearl, which probably doesn’t even equal the value of all his previous belongings.  My first thought: This guy is crazy. My second thought: If this is true, who would want any part in the kingdom?

It didn’t make sense to me because I don’t think the kingdom is like a pearl. God doesn’t rob us or offer us an unfair trade… does He?

I reread the passage over and over again to make sense of it until the Lord highlighted something that blew my mind:

The kingdom of God is like a merchant. Not a pearl.

I got an MRI a couple of weeks ago. For those of you who don’t know the process, it’s not fun. You’re stuck in this tiny, claustrophobic tunnel, and also surrounded by an overwhelming, constant noise the entire time. Not a small buzz, but loud banging and clashing and thrashing that even shakes you. It’s pretty scary.

Before I went into the tunnel, the man asked me if I wanted to listen to any music to help make the experience a little friendlier. I requested the Housefires album. I have been listening to Housefires every single day, to and from work, on repeat for 2 hours a day, for the past 3 months. So it was only natural that it was the first thing I thought of.

Once the MRI started, the banging and clashing and shaking started. And I could hear the faint voices, singing in the distant “You’re a good, good father. It’s who you are…” I was pretty frustrated at first because I couldn’t hear the music. “What’s the point of even playing music?” I thought to myself. “I can’t hear anything.” The MRI was way too loud. But a few minutes into it, I closed my eyes and began to focus on the song. Even though I could barely hear it, I began to hum along since I knew the tune so well. And even though I couldn’t hear the lyrics, the music was just audible enough, to where I could hear familiar parts of the song cue me to start singing the lyrics that I have grown to know so well.  

And just as I was singing, “…and I’m loved by you. It’s who I am…” the Lord brought me to a new revelation:

What if our ability to hear God’s voice, especially in tough seasons, is not about how loud and clear He is? What if instead, it’s about our choosing to drown out chaotic, contrary voices and focus on His, no matter how quiet it seems to be? Because we have grown so familiar to His voice in seasons past…Because we have spent so much time talking to Him in our day to day routine…

I used to evaluate intimacy with the Lord with my ability to hear His voice loud and clear in tough seasons. When I could hear Him, it would reassure me that God and I were “tight.” And when I couldn’t, I would get frustrated with myself, and Him, and my relationship with Him.

I’m realizing that intimacy with the Lord doesn’t just take place in the moments when His voice is like, BAM! (which is also pretty awesome). But increasing intimacy takes place in the everyday, mundane things. When I talk to Him during my commute. When I dialogue with Him in my journal. When I say good morning, thanks for the meal, and good night. It’s in these moments that I grow familiar to His voice, maybe without even knowing it…without dramatic proof of the difference that it’s making. So that when I enter seasons that have voices coming at me from every angle, His voice is still so familiar, and it cues me, guides me, leads me through shaking seasons.  

it says in the bible that God dances over us. well..i figured the best way to improve in the art is to learn from the one who created it in the first place. so… i’ve been asking God to teach me how to dance. I think subconsciously I was just expecting Him to just kind of lay a creative hand over me or something & “blind” people’s eyes with favor to just suddenly make me good. haha. how ignorant of me, right? But Dad has better plans. He always does. & not always in the way that I expect. so..He has recently been taking me into a new season of acceleration in dance through none other than: freestyle. Through exposing myself to it more and more, I’m learning how to be more comfortable in my skin and dancing alone in the middle of cyphers. But today, God asked me the most important question of all:

“why have you been afraid all this time?”

and the second He asked me this question, tons of fears i never knew i had came flooding out.

“well, Dad, i have fear of control in dance. I don’t want to freestyle because I’m allowing myself to be vulnerable to my natural body movements without being able to control what comes next. it’s fear that i have limited creativity to draw from, that eventually I will run out; i’m drawing from earthly resources, not heavenly ones. fear in time: believing the lie that i will be more creative if i have more time to perfect it (ex. choreo). i am believing a lie that creativity takes time. fear of intimacy: freestyle means freedom, but it also means vulnerability. fear of judgment: that people won’t think i’m that good.”

wow. i was being such an orphan. i thought i dealt with all those fears in my life. but i guess not in ALL the areas of my life. so then Holy Spirit just totally owns me & tells me that fear in freestyle translates to a lot of personal fears in character, which is why building your character translates into your dancing. the moment you find breakthrough in character you will find breakthrough in your dance. that’s why it’s a switch you flip; it’s a mental switch not a physical one.