For Ben

My cousin Ben died in a car accident Saturday morning. I wrote this in honor of his memory. 

Ben lived a life led by his confidence in the promises of the future. 

When we were kids, everyone accused Ben and me of cheating at games, particularly at Settlers of Catan when I would trade Ben a resource “for free”. But here's the thing - Ben traded back a promise. The promise that when I needed a resource in the future, if he had it, it would be mine, no question. Some games I would cash in on that promise, other games I would not. It was a trade for his assurance that if I helped him build a city now, he was confident of receiving double resources in the future, half of which he'd return to me.

That kind of thinking carried Ben through most of his life. Ben often noted in our chats how sad he was that he was born too late to have been a part of the early Internet days, and to have missed the dot com boom. He was forever seeking the promising tech of the future, and pursued various opportunities with the never failing optimism that this next thing would pay off. His business major at Cedarville helped him learn how to articulate the potential behind these things more clearly, and surprising him by attending his college graduation - enjoying Lipton Brisk tea and a Red Lobster dinner before playing League of Legends in the hotel lobby together after the long drive to Ohio - is a treasured memory of mine. After graduation as he tried out different jobs, he attacked each role with the same passion: be it app development, NFTs or GenAI, Ben threw himself into the exciting promises of good things to come.

One future that Ben looked forward to was a future family. He was popular in college with many friends, but he always told me he was waiting for someone who was “a ten”, and when I laughed at him for being shallow and said nobody would ever call me a ten, he said very seriously that his ten wasn't based on physical appearance the way it was usually portrayed in popular media, but on a whole collection of attributes, and that he thought I should score highly on anyone's ranking list. And so, when I met my now husband and we got engaged, securing Ben to play the piano for my wedding march was important to me because I wanted Ben to see that I had found someone who valued the same things about me that he did, and for Ben to play a small role in setting up the promise of my future life as I embarked on it.

The summer he met Lisa, I called him to ask if he had met his ten and he said very seriously, “if she says yes, I'm going to marry her”. I think Lisa was the first time I saw Ben with maybe a little less confidence, admitting there was an if factor. Ben loved Lisa wholeheartedly, and the last time we spoke in person was at Lisa's baby shower before Jack was born, where Ben again painted a vision of a future he was anticipating with great joy. Jack is all his dad hoped for, and while I mourn the many dreams cut short by the abrupt ending of Ben's life, I praise God for the joy of the dream turned into reality in Ben's life from his five years with Lisa and one year with Jack.

And now I know Ben's faith in Jesus has led him to the final joy, that he's up in heaven hugging my dad and laughing that signature Ben laugh, and that while I'll never hear it again this side of heaven, I will one day hear him laughing in welcome, that I will see my beloved cousin smiling brightly, having achieved the ultimate future promise, an eternity with the Savior.

A Reflection About Heaven

 When I was a kid, my sisters and I choreographed a dance to the song “I can only imagine”, the hit Christian single on the mercyMe CD my dad had purchased. This was 2001 or 2002, and at 9 years old, I had absolutely no real concept of what I was singing - I never imagined heaven would be anything different from my idyllic childhood. Singing about being surrounded by Jesus’ glory was just something I did, not something I spent much time imagining. 

Now that I'm grown, I imagine heaven much more often, especially in the month of May, which is the anniversary of my dad's passing, and especially this year, when I've been hit personally by two different unexpected losses (my uncle to a heart attack and my cousin to a car accident). And also, the older I've gotten, the more I've had to come to terms with my own sin and brokenness, and with the sin and brokenness of the world.

There's a new song by Phil Wickham that better captures my thinking about heaven now. It too asks, “can you even imagine”, but the repeated refrain and title of this song is “Homesick for heaven”. 

Here are some of my favorite lyrics from the end of the song:

“No more fear, no more pain

Every tear wiped away

Crying Holy, Holy

Every knee on the floor

Every voice evermore

Crying Holy, Holy, yeah

Oh, I wanna go home

To see the ones I love, who've gone before

Where death is a memory and tears are no more

To hear the angels praise, can you even imagine”

The idea of no more fear, no more pain, in a world that, because of brokenness, feels full of more fear and pain than ever before, more than any one person can bear? And the longer I live, the more loved ones I know who have gone before. It would be so easy to long for heaven and not think about today, and indeed when I first started this post that is what was in my mind, except that I got the weekly world news in prayer email yesterday, which had the following intro:

—---

When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” – Acts 1:9-11

Holy and Living God,

Like the disciples in Acts, we confess that we are often tempted to stand still, looking toward heaven.

When the world feels too heavy,

when the news comes too quickly,

when war and rumors of war pile on top of political conflict, climate crisis, and human suffering, it is tempting to look away.

It is tempting to lift our eyes upward and hope that somehow faith will give us permission to escape the pain of the world.

But just as the angels spoke to the disciples, we hear the holy question again:

“Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”

So, God, turn our eyes back toward the earth you love.

—-------------

And so here I am. Left with my grief, sitting in between my dad's birthday and my Uncle Keith's birthday, missing them both. Shattered by the tragedy of my cousin’s life being cut short, by the fact that his one year old son won't remember how much his dad loved him, how much his dad rejoiced in him. Wondering how to turn my eyes back to earth.

But there's another line in the homesick for heaven song that sticks with me:

“I wanna see my children run into Your arms

And worship the Savior who wears my scars

There's an ache in my heart

I'm homesick for Heaven”

And I look at my own two children, and I think how I want them to be in heaven with me. I hear my young neighbor ask me “what does ‘he is risen’ mean?” as she looks at our family Easter photo on my phone lock screen. And while there's an ache in my heart, I pray that someway, somehow, God uses this ache to make me more of a mirror of his grace, his goodness, his steadfast love, that instead of this breaking me, it makes me a better arrow pointing to him as the only hope. I don't know how he can do that, because I'm just so broken down by it all today. But I pray that he will.

On Dim Sum and Love - an Uncle Keith Memorial Post

There is a famous grief quote that says “Food is symbolic of love when words are inadequate”. As my mind has dwelt on the memories of Uncle Keith since his unexpected passing, food has played a significant role in those memories.

It is a well known stereotype that Asian families struggle to say “I love you” out loud. And my maternal grandmother certainly seemed to fit this stereotype - English wasn't her strongest language, and I can't remember a time that she said “I love you”, though I never doubted that she loved me, largely because of the delicious food she cooked whenever we visited her house when I was little.

Popo, Uncle Keith and a baby me in front of their house

She lived in that house with my Uncle Keith, who filled both a fun uncle and grandfatherly role in my mind at the time. He let us play on his computer and video game consoles (the fun uncle side), and I can recall hours of fun with my sisters and cousins repeatedly playing the first level of Super Mario Bros, the tutorial maze in Lara Croft’s Tomb Raider mansion, laughing repeatedly at the animation of Crash Bandicoot being crushed by a rolling boulder, and watching villagers pick berries for a pixelated William Wallace in the Age of Empires 2 tutorial level on the computer. And when we were finally told enough on screen time (usually because we were squabbling about who's turn it was), there was an old copy of Clue to play, or the cozy coupe and big wheel tricycle that Uncle Keith kept in his garage between our visits, or the laundry basket full of special toys that lived at his house for us.

I purchased a remastered copy of Tomb Raider as an adult so I could relive this iconic experience of locking the butler in the freezer with my son.

But on the grandfatherly side, it was Uncle Keith who told me stories about how my mother had behaved as a little girl, and showed me pictures of her or told me about her report cards. Their dad died when my mom was just 3, and my Uncle Keith at 15 stepped in to parent his younger siblings, a story I knew by heart as a kid, but didn't come to recognize as an act of great love until I was grown. 

Like my grandmother, Uncle Keith used food to express to his nieces how much he looked forward to our visits. When we arrived he had always acquired a huge box of donuts from Shoppers, my favorite being the Boston cream donut bigger than my hand, or a huge bag of puffy Cheetos. To this day when I see Chester Cheetah printed on a bag in the grocery store, I think of Uncle Keith. But by far his favorite thing was to take us for dim sum. Dim sum was my chance to impress Uncle Keith by being brave enough to try new things. He would occasionally make up the dare - for example, he told me lap cheong in sticky rice was made of monkey meat - but I loved trying to rise to the challenge. 

But no matter how brave I got with food, Uncle Keith was always braver. I don't remember when this particular memory occurred, but I recall one Chinese restaurant served roast duck with the head on the platter, bill and all, and my own horror watching Uncle Keith grab that duck bill and chomp down on the head. 

Eventually Uncle Keith moved to the Pacific Northwest, and visits from him became a more infrequent treat. But he'd call us regularly, and in my mind I can still hear his low baritone voice saying “Em-uh-ly, pick up the phone”, because he knew that if I was in charge, I screened calls on the family landline before answering, and he would often leave messages starting that way, in case I picked up.

 When I was in college, I interviewed for a summer internship with Microsoft, which flew me out to Seattle. Uncle Keith picked me up from the airport at 10 PM (so close to 1 AM to my East Coast brain), and immediately insisted on taking me to his favorite 24 hour dim sum location so that I could try the char siu bao bun with bolo bao topping, a combination he hadn't found on the East Coast. The next day, my interviews were in the late afternoon, so he took me to Pike Place Market that morning, with a long list of tourist goods to taste, the best of which was Beecher's mac and cheese. After my interview we drove out to a Chinese restaurant for a feast with several of his and Aunt Molly’s friends, where Uncle Keith bragged not only about my Microsoft interview, but also about the fact that I was comfortably eating the bitter melon dish they had ordered. My lifetime of food bravery had paid off, and I'd succeeded in making him proud. 

I don't have any photos of me and Uncle Keith from my Seattle Microsoft interview, but I do have a photo of the food we ate, showing what I thought was important versus what I took for granted.

Uncle Keith visited us last in March of 2025. My husband had started making his own pizza from scratch, and Uncle Keith was eager to try the “famous” Ryan homemade pizza. It was a love filled family dinner, and Uncle Keith ended it saying “until next time”. How bittersweet it is now to think that when that next time comes, we will be in the presence of God together. Until then, the smell, taste, and texture of my favorite dim sum dishes will serve as a symbol to my children of their Chinese heritage and of how much I miss Uncle Keith’s role in my life. 

Love you forever, Uncle Keith.