As we consider ways to draw near to one another and to God this Lent, I invite you to listen in on a series of dinner conversations among pairs of Asian Americans at ECV. The series kicks off this Wednesday, March 10 @ 7:30pm on Zoom, featuring Michelle Ting & David de Leon. Join with your dinner and come ready to listen! In this series of intimate dinner conversations, pairs or trios of Asian Americans at ECV will SPEAK NEARBY, but not necessarily “about” being Asian Americans. So often, when asked to speak to our experiences in terms of identity, we are tempted to speak in essentialist or reductive terms. What can be spoken when we are not educating an audience, or answering to an anonymous gaze, but rather responding to a real person? What can be heard when we listen in on such intimate conversations? Think not so much moderated panel, but more mukbang-podcast-ASMR-travel food TV show…this intimate format aims to release speakers from serving as assumed representatives or “insiders” of a racial or ethnic group, freeing folks up to be multitudes, nuanced, ambivalent, fragmented, questioning, complex, and vulnerable with regards to racialization, transnational identity, ethnic identity, Asian American identity/community, multiethnic community, migration histories, colonialism, the church, and so much more. At the same time, opening up these conversations to the broader ECV community sets a table for folks to LISTEN IN—to draw near with a posture of L-shaped listening (hearing from God while hearing from people) and pay attention to what the Spirit is doing, without demanding excessive interpretation or expecting full access to sacred lives and stories. In the way God is always revealing himself to us out of generosity and a costly love, with the desire to enfold the far-off into Kingdom kinship, the speakers share of themselves even as others only partially see and know, even at the risk of being misunderstood.