2 Corinthians 12:5-6

5 I will boast about a man like that, but I will not boast about myself, except about my weaknesses. 6 Even if I should choose to boast, I would not be a fool, because I would be speaking the truth. But I refrain, so no one will think more of me than is warranted by what I do or say.”

Apostle Paul could have boasted about his spiritual experiences, the visions he saw, the supernatural experience of being “caught up” to heaven, and there hearing “inexpressible things.” But he says that he will not boast about any of that. Why not? Because he did not want anyone to think more of him than is warranted by what he does or says. “What I do or say.” Apostle Paul wanted to be evaluated by those two criteria.

Often religious leaders can create a certain spiritual mystique around themselves. This can be done by reference to ordination—“I am the anointed of God, so people must listen to me”—or by mention of special spiritual experiences, or even of extraordinary spiritual disciplines like a 40-day fast–as odd as that might be given Jesus clear strictures in Matt. 6 regarding broadcasting your fasting. This kind of spiritual mystique can, in turn, lead to a heightened sense of spiritual authority. I think this is why some charismatic circles can sometimes have spiritual leaders who are “powerfully anointed,” who have an authority over those they lead that seems out of bounds.

Apostle Paul refrained from “boasting” about his supernatural experiences so that people will think of him only as much as his words and deeds warranted. Things that I say and do–these are publicly observable, objective and verifiable. I must be careful to not speak of special spiritual experiences in order to provide me an extra cloak of legitimacy as a spiritual leader. Nor, the fact of my title as a pastor. Like Apostle Paul, I must be sure that “no one will think more of me than is warranted by what I do or say.”

Ten years ago, William died in a drowing accident. He was a precious brother, one of our lay staff, and only 25 when he died. That day, I learned a new shade of meaning to the word “drown.” I realized that if you really resist it, you can drive a mental wedge between the word “drown” and the word “dead.” He might have drowned, but he’s still alive, I insisted during the long drive up to Shasta to comfort the students who had been with William. They had all been huddled away, crying and confused, to a nearby Christian camp. What I said to them, how I received the parents at the small airport near Shasta where I picked them up to go to the morgue to view the body that had just been recovered by the divers, what words of condolence and apology I muttered to them, what messages I gave back at church to an auditorium full of weeping, and bewildered people … it’s all really a blur. I don’t think there has been a stretch of 10 days in the past 10 years when I did not have some sharp, painful thought of William and his death, if only because every time some group goes on a trip to the mountains or to the oceans, pangs of pain and panic strike me.

I loved William dearly. I was intensely proud of him as a young man who had changed and matured in the Lord so much since his undergrad days. He had a huge impact on the younger men he led at our church, and an even greater impact through his death, as we all vowed to live out our commitment to the Lord with double measure of zeal to make up for what William would have wanted to do.

As people usually say of such periods, I don’t know how I got through that time. My wife, Kelly, recounted recently at our Gracepoint Monthly some of the ways God sustained us during that time. Here are some excerpts from her sharing.

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I want to share with you how God carried me during one of the most difficult times of my life. Exactly 10 years ago, William Lee died in a drowning accident on July 4th. I still remember getting a page that William drowned. “What do you mean he drowned? This must be a mistake. I just saw him two days ago leaving from the San Leandro parking lot with the rest of his group to Mount Shasta. How could this be?” That day started with a nice breakfast with a group of guys at my house and now my life was falling apart before my eyes.

We alerted the entire church and we all gathered at the church building, just crying out to God to do a miracle, and bring him back to life. I was still not giving up the idea that William is alive. I just cried out to God. I didn’t know what else to do. Ed drove up with Tony and others to Mount Shasta to get the body as well as to minister to the group who went up with him. We contacted his brother and his parents and they flew up the next morning. The parents were angry at us and the church. I didn’t know what else to do but to apologize to them. Although I was not responsible for his death, I felt so sorry to them. And then there were some who said that he died because of our arrogance and therefore we should repent. I regretted the day when we committed to go into full time ministry. I just wanted to die.

The days ensuing were like a long nightmare. I still could not accept the fact that William was dead. I had so many regrets. I felt the world was so unsafe. I felt so dark thinking that I could not protect anyone that I love from death. DEATH was so cruel. I looked at everyone that I love in my life – my husband, my children, my friends, the people in this church, etc. I was overcome with sadness that there isn’t anything I can do to protect them from death as death can suddenly take them away from my life and that they will be no more... continue reading

Among the assorted cruelties of teenage life, Valentine’s Day ranks up there.

I remember in 10th grade actually receiving a school candy gram (those little notes with a candy taped onto them which you could buy and send to your valentine). Cheerful student government classmates would come by to call out the names of those blessed few who were popular or pretty enough to get candy grams. I was always part of the vast forgotten majority. But wonder of wonders, I actually got one that year. I don’t remember the message on the card, but it was an anonymous note of some sort.

With my usual cool, analytical skills diminished at having received a note from a secret admirer, I overlooked a fact, which, if I tell you, would immediately seem obvious. My sister was a senior in the same high school. Maybe it becomes even clearer if I add that this particular sister was quite rascally. It was not a nice thing to do. She had fun with it, her and her giggling friends. It’s a cruel day, Valentine’s Day. An invention by confectioners and card makers, no doubt.

But there are more serious reasons why I don’t like Valentine’s Day. There’s a song called At Seventeen by Janis Ian that climbed to the top of the charts, and over a million copies of the album were sold. It obviously touched a nerve. I am sure you’ll see why when you read the lyrics.

At Seventeen
I learned the truth at seventeen
That love was meant for beauty queens
And high school girls with clear skinned smiles
Who married young and then retired

The valentines I never knew
The Friday night charades of youth
Were spent on one more beautiful
At seventeen I learned the truth

And those of us with ravaged faces
Lacking in the social graces
Desperately remained at home
Inventing lovers on the phone
Who called to say come dance with me
And murmured vague obscenities
It isn't all it seems
At seventeen

….

To those of us who know the pain
Of valentines that never came
And those whose names were never called
When choosing sides for basketball

It was long ago and far away
The world was younger than today
And dreams were all they gave for free
To ugly duckling girls like me

It’s sad that on a day set up to celebrate love, it’s only romantic love—with the aristocracy of beauty as the main criteria for determining its winners—that gets the limelight. So, I am glad to know that this Valentine’s Day, about 350 members of Gracepoint will be fanning out into the Bay Area to visit 17 different elderly homes, convalescent hospitals, homeless shelters, and women’s shelters to bring a different kind of Valentine’s Day message, with crafts, skits, song and dance, games and food.

This will be our second Valentine’s Day of Compassion, and we’ve been the more richly blessed by it, because it did not end with just one day. Throughout the year, we’ve been going back monthly to see the folks there, and experiencing our own hearts expanding, friendships forming across generations, and several elderly folks putting their faith in Christ as a result.

So, if you want to send a Valentine candy gram to one of our brothers or sisters, they won’t be available to receive it tonight. They won't be “desperately remain[ing] at home” waiting for “valentines that never came.” They’ll be bringing a new kind of Valentine’s Day to many of the forgotten of our area. Praise the Lord!

My earliest memories of America have to do with moving. We’d move from apartment to apartment, always in search for lower rent. I’d go to my elementary school and ask any new friend what they paid for rent, so I could come home and tell my mom about a place with lower rent somewhere. Most of them would not know what rent was.

One day when I was in 9th grade my dad found an abandoned house a few blocks from where we were living. The place had broken windows, and the large yard was fenced off and full of various potted plants. It turned out that the man who owned the property had a nursery, and he stored his inventory of plants on that yard. We got him to agree to rent us the 4 bedroom house for $200 a month! But we had to fix it up ourselves, he told us. These were days when I went to the bathroom with the lights off so we could save on electricity, so it really was going to be literally ourselves--me and my dad—who were going to do all the fixing for this “fixer-upper.”

The house was actually one of those handsome old homes with a lot of built in cabinets and shelves, with hardwood floor throughout. But it had been abandoned, so it was pretty awful inside. When my dad and I went to take a look for the first time, there were melted candles on the floor, and strange graffiti on the walls, also written with melted candle wax. But things got even stranger when we turned into one of the bedrooms. There were dead bees piled up on the floor covering about half the room, with dead bees about 5 inches deep against the wall, and tapering off steadily to about the midpoint of the room. We figured the bees came from the outside, and went out the back, and turned toward the narrow side yard where that room was. I still remember the sound of the bees when we turned that corner. It was more than buzzing. I actually felt pressure on my eardrums. The small piece of sky above the sideyard was darkened by the crisscrossing of a thousand bees. The ground was scattered with dead bee bodies. I vaguely remembered hearing that bees execute wayward members of their colony—a factoid that turned out not to be true—and that room full of dead bees seemed downright sinister.

Well, obviously we were not about to be deterred from our new $200-a-month house because of these bees. So, my dad had me put on a thick sweatshirt in the summer and a hat. (He always had me do things; all of the do-it-yourself projects we did consisted of him telling me to do things, and standing around half concerned and half frustrated as I did them, because he was not very handy, but he was very frugal). Then, we taped up all the openings—the pant legs, the sleeves—and got some window screen material and draped it over the hat, and taped it down onto my sweatshirt. Thus armored against the bees, looking somewhat like a space man, I slowly mounted the ladder with my can of Raid toward the crack in the wood shingles on the exterior wall where the bees seemed to be flying in and out. As I got closer, I could actually hear the bees getting angry. The sound of the bees, which had been an intimidating, palpable low buzz became a higher pitched whizzing sound as thousands of bees flew furiously around me. I pointed the nozzle of the spray against the crack in the shingle and sprayed away. Bees came out by the hundreds and immediately fell, either poisoned by the insecticide or just knocked out of the sky by the force of the spray.

My dad, at a safe distance away, directed the action from the ground, and while backing up stumbled and fell, but as he put out his hand to break his fall, got stung by one of the dead bees on the ground who, I guess, had its stinger pointing up. I didn’t laugh though. I was tense from all the carnage, and plagued with thoughts of bees penetrating my sweatshirt, screen and tape defenses.

I guess the idea was that if we bothered them enough, they would leave. But the next day, the bees were there again in full force. My dad remembered hearing about beekeepers using smoke to subdue bees, so we put some rags in an empty metal paint can, and set the rags on fire next to the wall. But the smoke just wafted upward in rather random fashion, and we realized that we probably needed to somehow direct the smoke. But while we were nudging the can in vain attempts to get the smoke to zero in on the opening in the shingles, the fire department came and rebuked us and left.

That weekend, we got our uncle to come over. Our uncle was omnipotent. He had been to Vietnam as a diesel engine mechanic, and he could fix anything around the house. After the usual scorn and contempt over our ineptitude, he actually began removing the shingles from the wall, exposing the stud frame underneath. There, across several studs, were neatly stacked horizontal shelves of beehives, some white and fresh, others a bit more brown and dry, full of honey. Suddenly, the theme changed from “lets get these bees out of here so we can move in,” to “wow, here’s wild honey not even available at stores!” That’s when the ladies got involved. My mom and aunt brought out large Kimchee jars, and we started to gingerly remove these flat white loafs, heavy with honey, with thousands of octagonal shaped cells perfectly arranged, many of them with the end of a dead bee sticking out of them. I don’t know how many jars we filled with the honey, but I do remember bee body parts at the bottom of them, like tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. I also remember how hot the honey felt going down my throat, and how chunks of beehive felt like chewing gum when you chewed on it. We gave some of the honey to our pastor, and some relatives.

The bees left after that. I saw the bees, in a large clump, many layers deep, flying away eerily slow, looking like some strange comet. They looked majestic, in a way, and I remember feeling a tinge of guilt, having displaced them like that. But the house was $200 a month.

There’s a saying my dad would often repeat that goes something like: “Suffering—you can’t even buy it with money.” It was that valuable, in other words. I used to think that it was one of those parent-isms used to keep us kids from complaining. But, looking back on it, that little bit of “suffering” was one of a kind.

Happy New Year 2007!

From the Kang Family

(Left to right: Isaiah, Kelly, Pastor Ed, Anna & Noah)

Some people told me that Mary was not portrayed very well. “Too passive and expressionless,” they said. But after I saw the movie, I felt that the portrayal of Mary was done just right.

The movie portrayed well the powerlessness of the life of the ancient poor. Especially as a peasant-class girl in a small rural village, Mary’s life does not consist of many rights. A personal sense of entitlement would be completely alien to her. No one consults her opinions about anything. If she has preferences, no one ever asks her what they are, nor does she ever express them. She has very little control over her destiny, and the very idea that she can, by her choices, map out a certain path for her life is not a part of her world. Things just happen to Mary, including when and who she will marry.

During the first half of the movie, Mary seems undefined. We don’t see her acting particularly pious. The movie does not show her praying, or taking care of the sick, or possessing some radiant spirituality that draws children or the birds and squirrels. There is no close-up to a particularly meaningful expression on her face, accompanied by dramatic music that hints of a hidden spiritual quality underneath the apparent ordinariness. She is shown only in an entirely ordinary way, and her reactions and expressions are quite plain. The audience can figure out very little of her character, her emotions, her disappointments, fears, or dreams.

The annunciation scene, too, is handled in this understated way. Mary’s amazing statement, “I am the Lord’s servant. May it be done to me as you have said,” too, is given without hardly any display of emotion. Even here, at this extraordinary moment, Mary seems utterly plain, even vacant. She remains ill-defined as a character.

All of this resolves in one brief, powerful moment in the movie. When Mary goes to visit Elizabeth, Elizabeth utters the words that define for the audience who Mary is: “Blessed is she who has believed that what the Lord has said to her will be accomplished!” This was the most moving moment in the movie for me, as I suddenly realized the beauty of Mary’s character. She believed the Lord’s words. That’s who she is. That is the entirety of it.

We are used to thinking of ourselves as unique individuals with unique set of thoughts, opinions, and preferences, with personality and life bursting to the surface in some quirky, interesting, bold, special way. So we prefer screen portrayals of characters with character. The contrasting portrait of what seems like Mary’s passivity is really a beautiful picture of yieldedness, the powerful expressionlessness of a surrendered person. When we think about the concept of “servanthood,” what it involves is really very difficult to grasp. When Mary said to the angel, “I am the Lord’s servant,” she was not reaching for some higher level spiritual language; she was speaking out of her reality. Servanthood is her daily life. Her servanthood is simple, unadorned, and therefore, undramatic in sharp contrast to our complicated “servanthood” in which we are aware of so many rights we need to give up in order take on the life of a servant—the right to a good reputation, the right to personal choices, the right to be heard, consulted, to control my own destiny and forge for myself a preferred future, the right to a certain quality of life, and a certain level of physical comfort.

The entirely ordinary Mary, who so undramatically and quietly yields to the Lord’s activity in her life served as a huge rebuke to the notions of autonomy and self-rule that I find myself taking for granted. The daily grind of the peasant-girl’s life in ancient Israel, daily yielding to the claims of family, village and others, is a far superior training ground for the kind of faith Mary displayed than the modern choice-rich, rights-rich life. On the other hand this kind of training for servanthood is not beyond the reach of modern life. We, too, can yield daily to others, allowing the claims of church, family and friends to come before my own personal agenda, and receiving with humility and grace the setbacks, frustrations and inconveniences life throws at us. It’s not a life imposed on us by our society or station in life; but we can choose it, and intentionally seek it. I pray that we will value such a life and the quality of yieldedness it produces in our hearts--the readiness to say: “I am the Lord’s servant. May it be to me as you have said.”

My mom loved oranges. We all did.

Every Saturday morning my dad would wake me up early, and we’d head out to the morning produce market near Santee and Maple in downtown LA. There, we’d go to buy our supply of fruit. Mostly, it was oranges. The Sunkists had thicker rinds, were easier to peel, and more expensive. The Californias were smaller, harder to peel, but juicier, and cheaper. They were about $3 per box sometimes. We’d always get several boxes of the Californias.

Then, when we got home, our entire family would sit down to feast on the oranges. As recent immigrants, this was a real treat. Mom would grab the big cutting board, and we’d just slice them into about half-inch cross sections, open them up, and go at it. This is the best way to eat juicy oranges fast. My mom would go through about 10 oranges.

But I did not tell you all this to tell you about oranges, how much they were in the mid- 70s, and how many my mom could eat in one sitting. I told you all this to tell you this next thing, which is that in the middle of eating the oranges my mom would burst out thanking America. “Thank you America!” is what she would say to no one in particular, which, of course, makes sense, since it was America she was thanking, and America was everywhere around us. She would do this on a regular basis, not only when we were eating oranges, but when she got her driver’s license, or when I got into college and received plenty of grant money to help with the costs. She would regularly break out in direct address to America, thanking America for being such a generous and kind country. She would occasionally also mix in “I luh-bu America!”

This would embarass the Kang kids, who were rapidly getting proficient in English, and, with it, sophistication (we thought) and a sense that we belong here, and there’s no call for thanking America which is just simply our country. Besides, for me, the illogical aspect of her outbursts of joyful gratitude bothered me. I mean, America did not intend to give us cheap oranges, which back in the old country we would get only if we were really sick. America is just this big and plentiful country, and there’s nothing personal about America’s granting college admission to a son of an immigrant family, and helping to pay for his tuition.

But my mom took it personally. For her it did not matter if America just was the land of plenty; that America never actually personally intended for her to get all these oranges on the cheap, or that any applicant that qualifies—not just her son--gets the funds. She found these factors quite beside the point.

Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate my mom’s style of gratitude. I guess the thing that’s admirable about her gratitude is that she chose to be thankful regardless of whether it was specially meant for her. Often we do not feel very grateful toward things that people get in the normal course of life. The sun, clean water, freedom from plagues, relative safety, cheap oranges. Just having the Bible there for us to read any time we choose to. People who put up with us. A church to belong to. For many of us, we feel grateful based not on what we receive, but on whether the giver “meant it just for me, and me only.” It seems that only when we are singled out, when our egos get stroked with the message “you are special,” that we experience an emotional connection sufficient to feel thankful. But this leaves out so much of life; this misses so much of our God’s goodness to us.

But unlike “America,” God is a real Person and delights in our gratitude joyfully offered to him for all his bounty to us. It would be entirely appropriate for us to burst out “Thank you God!” for cheap oranges, for people to love, and, with the way we all used to drive, for just being alive and in one piece.

Psalm 100:3-4, "Know that the LORD is God. It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, the sheep of his pasture. 4 Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name."

It was 1973. Earlier that year we had landed in LAX, dressed in our tacky best, ready to be good new citizens of America. By October 31, our family had moved twice, seeking lower rent with each move. So there we were on the second floor of an apartment building on the corner of Magnolia and 12th, on Halloween night, 1973, when the first trick-or-treaters arrived.

It caught the Kang family entirely by surprise. I think we did notice in the weeks prior that something was up. The pumpkins, the sudden abundance of candy on the store shelves… but none of us knew about the “giving away candy” tradition. We were eager, as new immigrants often are, to be good Americans (or, not being “ugly Koreans” as my mom would say). But as we stood there staring at the monsters on our doorstep with their bags open, not having candy to give them, it was an immigrant faux paux of major proportions.

One of us was immediately dispatched to the local supermarket, only to find that the market’s storehouse of candy had been cleaned out. So my mom quickly put a grocery bag over my head, cut out two holes and sent me out. Hurrying, I ran from house to house collecting candy so I could run back to deposit it back at home where my mom was giving it to trick-or-treaters as fast as I could replenish our supply. I don’t know how many trips I made, but by the end of the night I was exhausted.

Don’t feel sorry for me. While other 9 year olds were going house to house greedily amassing sweets for themselves, I was out there salvaging my family’s honor. I may have been running around with a brown paper Safeway bag over my face, but I was not ashamed.

I wish I could say that the next Halloween we were ready with candy for the inevitable stream of trick-or-treaters at our door. But, alas, my parents were not about to actually pay money to buy candy—not when the neighbors were perfectly willing to give it out for free. That year, however, I at least had a real mask.

Nowadays, when the trick-or-treaters come around, I refuse to hand out a mere two pieces of candy per child. No, I give them fistfuls. Just in case one of the poor trick-or-treaters has to run back to his home. And when it’s time for me to leave for Joyland Festival (a Halloween program put on by our children’s ministry) I just leave the bucket of candy outside.

We’re bombarded with advice to “Just Do It” because “You Can,” to “Be all you can be,” and, ultimately, just “Believe.” Believe in what? In ourselves, of course, and to have “confidence in confidence itself.” It seems to be decent advice. With all the uncertainty life brings, perhaps believing in ourselves will provide that extra bounce to get us over life’s many hurdles.

But these modern mantras of self-reliance often ring empty against the reality of our actual helplessness: our vulnerability as we confront disease, calamity, and crime; our inability to control our own emotions and bodies; our powerlessness to protect loved ones from the poison of our own sins as much as the sins of the world.

Ultimately, believing in myself means I have only my own meager self to tackle life’s challenges. To prop up this same meager self to the task of attempting the mission God has given every believer seems an even more bleak and lonely prospect. But for those who’ve trained themselves to believe in the self, there is no other option. Pride, it seems, just has to lead to despair.

However, to acknowledge my powerlessness, to admit that there really is, after all, not a lot of hidden potential or strength within me—to be humble, in other words—this opens up my life to receive help external to myself. When I refuse the call to look to myself first and last, I can look to others, if not for help, at least to just let them know that I feel weak, that I can’t do it on my own, that I need them. I can find camaraderie in my weakness. I can pray for God’s abiding presence. I can look up and begin to find hope for a power beyond my own. I can join the ranks of the foolish who shame the wise, and the weak who shame the strong. Not that shaming is the point. The point is that the humble often discover the joy of hope, of connection to God and to others, while the proud keep trying to believe in themselves, which becomes increasingly harder to do--the only grace of which may be that it can eventually lead to humility (a loop I’ve been on many a time).

Humility is not just a nice virtue; it’s really the only way to live.

1 Corinthians 1:27, “But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.”

Of all the memorable lines from the Lord of the Rings, King Theoden’s final words stirs me most: “I go to my fathers, in whose mighty company I will not now be ashamed.” Honoring an ancient pledge of friendship, Theoden musters his Rohirrim to the aid of Minas Tirith knowing full well that he will most likely perish in the battle against the hordes of Mordor. At the time of his dying, the outcome of the battle is uncertain. Yet, he has achieved a personal victory—that of placing his friends and his own oaths higher than self-preservation—and departs in peace. He will not now be ashamed to enter the halls of the mighty kings of Rohan before him.

Today, our fascination with the horizontal plane makes it easy to lose touch with this vertical sense of responsibility toward our spiritual forebears. We seem ever intent on measuring ourselves by ourselves, as if the question of what it means to be faithful today can be settled by ourselves, or by surveying our contemporaries. With information technology, the best current practices propagate faster—which is good—but there is also a sense of a flattening of our standards for what constitutes being Christ’s body on earth.

Referring to himself as “a lesser son of great sires,” Theoden seems to have been ever mindful of the great deeds of his mighty fathers. We, too, have a “great cloud of witnesses” from the past. To aspire to their heights, to identify ourselves as part of an ancient people that spans the generations, to claim the Apostle Paul, St. Augustine, John Wesley, William Wilberforce, and Nate Saint as our forefathers, in whose company we strive to one day not be ashamed … this seems to me to be a good goal for all of us.

Heb 12:1, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”

Thinking about the topic of our current series, The Misunderstood God, I started to reflect on the sometimes complicated nature of relationships.

I noticed, for example, that my love for my children is something I instinctively want to hide from them. The immensity and intensity of it makes it somehow too much to reveal, if only for their own protection. How can my son even begin to comprehend that I love him more than life itself? How will he deal with the truth that even when I am acting nonchalant and busy, in the corner of my eyes, I am constantly aware of his every move, sensitive to every shift in the tone of his voice, that even as I act restrained, his triumphs engulf me in joy far greater than any joy I've known from my own triumphs, and that his setbacks burn a painful hole into my heart?

For his own protection, for his own autonomy and emotional space, I need to veil my love for him, hide it, make it a matter of his own searching. This seems to me to be the appropriate way for fallen man to express love, the oblique way in which we must handle love, or anything else sacred and bright.

Maybe this is why God's love for us can't be fully known this side of heaven. Maybe God's love, to fallen man, is too much to know directly and all at once. Maybe it has to remain like an unexplored wilderness--the vastness and depth of which we know only through imagination, only through faith, only through humble exploration, mapping out our winding trails through small portions of that endless forest.

1 Corinthians 13:12, "Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known."