May is hard to remember in my head. We got back from Europe on the 15th, spent the next week or so jet lagged and waking up early for runs and walks, and then there was the last week that was kinda nondescript. There’s no real point in putting on a facade - this wasn’t one of my best months.

Suzi

As I mentioned briefly in the April recap, Europe was hard. It showed me that Suzi and I still have a lot of work to do in our relationship and that I still have a lot of maturing I need to do. I caught some pretty serious glimpses of how ugly I can be, how hypocritically untrusting, selfish, and closed off I can be. I’d like to say that it was isolated to travels in a foreign country, but I caught myself doing it just this past week as well.

When I get mad, I basically stalemate the conversation. I don’t verbally engage in arguments… I’m not very good at arguing or thinking/processing in a timely manner. I kind of give up.

When I get frustrated, I kind of passive-aggressively mope around until Suzi can determine that something’s wrong and she gives me the attention I should have just asked for in the first place.

… I’m not too good at talking or listening, to be honest. Sometimes I am foolishly too interested in getting sleep or thinking about programming than to confide, and be confided in, by my wife.

All of these things happened when we were in Europe, but they also happened that last week of May as well. Suzi would ask me questions and I just wouldn’t answer them. I was kind of a ball of subconscious emotion and confusion that I couldn’t decode - that, and the unwillingness to own my emotions and let them out at the risk of hurting a feeling or influencing a decision. So kind of a rough time, to be honest. I’d like to say it’s better because it doesn’t seem like it happens that often, but I think we have more of a tendency to bury conflict than address it in the times that it emerges.

Spirituality

In terms of explicitly spiritual things, I still felt like I was able to experience or learn from God, which is honestly surprising, because my friends in college would typically ask me “What has God been teaching you?” and I used to have nothing to say. Being gone for 3 weeks, I realize how easy it is to just stop believing and just do whatever you want when you’re on your own. For the first time in a long time, I was on my own in a foreign country - and if I didn’t want to go to church or read my Bible or even believe in God, I didn’t have to. I realize that I am lucky to have found the church I did and to be a part of a community that will fight for me to maintain my relationship with God.

In May, I thought about focusing on Romans. Maybe some of it had to do with us visiting Rome. I got about 75% through memorizing Romans 8 and spent an unusually long time studying Romans 7. It was one of those times where I felt a greater depth of theology led to a greater awe and appreciation of Christ - there are some things I know at some level, but diving deeper results in a much more vivid and accurate understanding of God, and me, and this human situation.

So it was actually kind of exhilarating. From the first 7 verses in Romans 7, I found that I needed to understand Romans 6 and then Galatians 2. And when I started listening to a John Piper series on those first 7 verses, I realized he was looking at Romans 1-6, and Galatians 2 and 3, and 2 Corinthians, and Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. So after that, I started to see this Romans 7 law-Spirit relationship in everything. Everything in the law and the prophets and the New Testament is pointing towards Christ, freeing us from the law and giving us His Spirit.

I was talking to Chris about how I wasn’t too sure about a year ago that the Trinity was a doctrine I ever would have come up with if I was on a desert isle and all I had was the Bible, but I can see why we believe in the Trinity after studying those middle chapters in Romans and realizing what a huge emphasis is put on the Spirit.

When we got back home, we were plagued by jet lag. One night, I even went to sleep at midnight, but still woke up at 4am. It was awesome though - that first week and a half or so, I had enough time to go on early morning runs or walks with Suzi basically every day. It was actually very helpful because I could go out, be the only one on the trails, and use that time to preach the gospel to myself, pray, and humble myself for the rest of the day. It was honestly pretty refreshing, and it seemed a good way to wake up, since I would otherwise just wake myself up by going on my computer.

Work/Other Tech

Work was pretty okay once we got back from Europe. It took me about a week to get back into the programming mindset… I had forgotten all sorts of file paths and git commands and some small tasks took frustratingly long to execute, but I eventually got back into the swing of things. We had some infrastructure problems that last week of May, so that kind of threw me off, but that was basically the first time in 11 months since I started that we’ve even had issues with infrastructure.

I can’t say that I did too much work or anything really notable. As a company, HasOffers announced they had opened offices in Seoul and New York City, and we also won Geekiest Office Space at the Geekwire Awards (they’re like the Pacific Northwest tech startup news company).

The one thing I did on the side for tech was write a simple AST parser that is meant to run on Angular apps to generate statistics for you (“here are all of your modules, directives, services, controllers, etc”). So that’s up here: https://github.com/davidchang/ng-stats

Other Just Random Stuff

And honestly, that’s about it. I can’t think of anything else that happened in May. If you got this far, thanks for reading. It means a lot, and I hope it encourages you to know that Christ is worth treasuring.