Thank you Pastor Doug, Bill, Mark, Linda, JJ, Sylvia, Xiaochun, Olivia, Theresa, all family and friends, our loving congregation, and everyone who loves Sen but couldn’t be here today.

One of the many things that I missed about Sen, was his love of hiking. There is this popular phone app, in which your list of contacts can see how many steps you’ve walked in a day. Last year when Sen was going through chemo in Hong Kong, I often got this frantic message from my sister in-laws, asking me - “why has Sen already walked 12,000 steps today? Hasn’t he just finished a chemo yesterday? Stop him now! He needs rest.” What can I do? That is just who he is. That is just his way to deal with cancer.

Indeed we’ve hiked, travelled, and moved around, for many years. Among the 45 years of Sen’s life on earth, 30 of them were intertwined with mine. I remember waking up one early morning, 15 years ago, after a whole day of mountain hiking in the remote Yunan province, extremely hungry but too sore to get up, hearing Sen’s voice from next door, obviously up for a while, thanking the owner of the inn for the best congee he ever had, and asking, enthusiastically, where to find the best steamed bun in town.

His friends knew what a foodie he had always been. Back in college in Beijing, we’d ride our bicycles all over the place to sample the best street food. But it wasn’t always about the quality of the food. In a short article he wrote for his alumni’s foodie circle a couple of years ago, he said, and I quote, “Usually we have our breakfast at home on Sundays. Both of the boys are perfectionists. My younger one had trouble trying to crack open a boiled egg, and was yelling, ‘mom, mom, I want to open a different one.’ My older one was busy making his own breakfast. Occasionally he popped his head out of the kitchen and said, ‘Dad, I messed up my fried egg again. Could you eat it?’ Thus I had my third fried egg of this morning, and nothing gets better than it.”

I thought his frequent colds and fatigue were from overwork, from those stressful travels. He was never sick after all. After the day he was diagnosed, for a long, long time, waking up in the morning felt like being hit by a truck.

It was faith that opened my eyes to the blessings. And they are everywhere.

Among all the perceivable ways that he could have been taken suddenly, he lived a total 610 days after the diagnosis. We were together for every single one of those days. Long enough to pick ourselves up from the wreckage, to become comrades in battle against cancer, to figure out who we really are, what really matters, what kind of life we really want to live. Never give up, no matter how little the odd is to survive, but always be prepared, should there be only one year, one month, or just one day to live. Every single one of those days is priceless.

And so many new friends. Back in Hong Kong. Here in Seattle. All over the world. I am convinced that some are truly angels on earth, sent to us from heaven. What has always amazed me about Sen is, instead of shutting himself off, being consumed by self-pity, Sen actually opened himself up. He made more new friends in these 600 some days, than in a long decade.

 

And he found his faith. At Bethany. I witnessed his whole journey. Many of you have as well. This faith transformed him. When he left us on December 1st , he was kinder, more open minded, more capable to learn, more forgiving, more supportive, a better husband, a better brother, a better father. He redefined himself through faith. A new person.

When the boys and I said our final goodbye to Sen this past Wednesday, as he was lying in the casket, we each read our favorite part of Bible to him.

Edmund started with Genesis. And it was very good. Sen’s and my own cultural background did not prepare us well for our faith. Years ago, we stumbled across it, but not being able to get much further from the Genesis. We have two future paleontologists at home. When Edmund recently changed his career goal to a more competitive field, Sebastian took up the torch. There is this huge Tree of Life poster at home, starting with the origin of life. There were constant questions from the boys, but I was never able to answer any of those most fundamental ones, in the beginning of the tree, in which direction will those branches grow, or where do Homo sapiens fit in this big picture. Sen has been reading Eugene Peterson’s As Kingfishers Catch Fire, recommended by Doug. He would resonate so well, when he read “that science and religion are opposites, the way your thumb and forefinger are opposites; if you are going to get a grip on things, you need them both.” Thank you Edmund!

Sebastian read from the children’s Bible, the story about Christmas, the three wise men who saw the star, and came all the way to find that the Christ was born. Sen would have loved to hear the story. Both of the boys were born in the Christmas season. When the doctors called off all treatments and stopped the hydration on November 25 th , he was not expected to live for more than a couple of days. Guess what, he made it to December 1st, the month of the Christ, the month of your birthdays. Thank you Sebastian!

I read Romans 5 to Sen because Paul’s words was the catalyst to Sen’s faith. He took constant inspiration from them, that “…suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope…”, and he lived every word till his last breath. As his body got weaker, his spirit got stronger. On his last day, when Edmund and I walked into his hospital room, Sen rallied up his energy one more time, after lingering by a thin thread through the night. When the doctor asked him how he felt that morning, Sen said with a big cheek to cheek smile, “I feel great. I hope to get up and walk around a few laps today.”

When we were in high school, Sen told me that instead following his family’s tradition to engineering, he’d much prefer to study philosophy. In the past year, this was getting real. He hoped to study theology as soon as he was able to. And I hope that is all what he is doing in heaven. He probably already started by now.

 

Thank you so much for being here today.