Kevan w/ an A was how my mom spelled it. It was never a source of great pain, although many people thought it must be. I suppose it was such an odd rendering that even middle-school kids, in the prime of their caustic ferocity, didn’t know what to do with it.

In a similar way, I suppose, I sometimes don’t know what to do w/ myself. And that prompts deep gratitude for a book that tells me a lot about who I am, what I was meant to be, and how I should live this one life that I have. That one book, the bible, which feels irrelevant in the modern American ethos saturated with media, internet, iPhones, Skype, and R8s, somehow still proves remarkably resilient to its critics, and manages to reach out through time in a rather timeless way to speak quite clearly not merely to my impoverished soul, but to the everyday moments of my bumpy jaunt through life.

The place I call my spiritual home is Gracepoint in Berkeley, led by Pastor Ed and Kelly Kang, two people who mean a whole lot to me. The place I call real home is wherever Jenny and Abigail are, and the wider community of our friends who’ve become for us over the years, brothers and sisters. I’m lucky enough to be a part of the college campus, not so much vocationally (which is really boring), but as campus staff for Koinonia Berkeley, watching people’s hearts and minds transform as they encounter this small, not inconsequential thing called the Gospel.