神在呼召，
我已回应

I was born on the longest day of the year — the summer solstice. On that day, the light lingers longest, and the dark arrives latest. I have come to think of it as the first metaphor God gave me: "Your whole life, you will chase the light — and you will keep some of it for those still waiting for dawn."

I grew up in the hometown of Confucius — a land built on reverence, on learning, on the quiet weight of the word "honorable." And from my earliest years, one question held me, the kind that makes grown-ups laugh: "Where do I come from?" No one could answer me. It lay in my heart like a seed, buried for many years.

In my youth, I walked into a long, dark tunnel — depression came quietly. For those years, the child born on the longest day lived in the deepest night. I read many books, traveled to many places, yet nothing could fill the hollow inside me. I thought I was searching for an answer; only later did I understand that Someone had been searching for me all along.

Then one day, God met me in a small house church. Someone taught me the Lord's Prayer — I heard it once, and it was already mine. As if those words had been written on my heart long ago, waiting only to be recognized again. That was the first ray of the light I had searched for so long.

"I came from God, and to God I will return." The child who once stood in the hometown of Confucius, looking up and asking, finally had a whole answer. I have walked with God for nearly thirty years since. The seed, buried for so long, had broken into bloom.

The child who once stood in the hometown of Confucius asking "where do I come from?" grew up and crossed half the world to Canada. For many years I worked inside the world's finest companies, until "excellence" became second nature. But the voice within grew clearer and clearer: "This is not where you are meant to end up." So I laid down everything safe and certain, and walked into Trinity College, University of Toronto, to become a student again — this time learning not how to win the world, but how to know God and serve people.

In my final year of seminary, I served in Clinical Pastoral Education at a hospital — in the maternity ward and the ICU, at the two ends of life: birth and death. I held the trembling hands behind a newborn's first cry, and I sat through the small hours beside a soul about to leave, listening as the machines fell quiet, one by one. In those moments with no words, only tears, I learned the deepest lesson: presence itself is a kind of love. So often, what a person needs is not an answer, but someone who will not leave.

But what truly brought me to my knees was a scorching summer last year. Our little white cat, Rice Noodle, vanished one night — for twenty-one whole days. We knocked on door after door, kept vigil through the small hours in the car with neighbors we had never met; I even whispered to the stray cats at the corner: "If you see Rice Noodle, tell him to come home."

At dawn on the twenty-first day, Rice Noodle stepped into the trap we had set. Click — the smallest, loudest sound I have ever heard in my life. Those twenty-one days and nights taught me, in my body, what I had only known in my head: prayer is not a button that makes the world do what I ask. It is a door that lets God into the room where I am already sitting in the dark. And in that dark, God planted Grace Companion in my heart. I saw countless souls far from home, sitting in their own dark rooms — they, too, need a door.

The one I most long to serve is God — not users, not the market, not the numbers.

A hundred years from now, if Grace Companion still stands, I hope it will remain a place like this: when a weary soul far from home wakes at three in the morning, heart pounding with fear — they open Grace, read a single line, receive a single letter, and the tears come quietly — and then they are able to sleep again.

I was born on the longest day of the year. And slowly I have come to understand: the little extra light God gave me was never for myself — it was for those still in the dark, still waiting for the dawn. I want to become the door in someone else's night.

I do not know how far this road will go, or how many will walk through it. But this I know: if one soul is gently touched by God through this place, even once, the whole of it is worth it. This is what I want to do with the rest of my life — and what I would be glad to have carved on my grave.