My friend Jason Coker is hosting a great blog series over at Pastoralia called “3 Questions About Jesus.”

The idea is to ask different people how they would explain Jesus Christ to someone who had heard about him, but really knew nothing about Christianity. Their questions are:

Who is Jesus the Christ?

What has he done?

Why does it matter?

You can read my guest post over at Jason’s blog — I’ve also cross-posted it below:

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Jesus is the most remarkable person I’ve ever known.

In him, everything that has gone wrong is being put back together, in all the most important relationships we know — with God, others, ourselves, and the world. For many years, because of my disconnected sense of identity, I sought escape. The longer I have followed Jesus, though, the more I have come to see that he offers something better than escape: in him is genuine hope.  That which is lost, broken, and dead is found, restored, and made alive in Jesus.

Before Jesus found me, I struggled with a sense of being “neither/nor” as an Asian American — neither fully accepted as “American” nor fitting in a “home” culture to which we never belonged. In, through, and because of Jesus, I am learning to see another way forward. “Both/and” people learn to navigate fluidly between worlds and cultures, with empathy for those at the margins. Jesus is not obliterating my ethnic identity; rather, he is restoring it and freeing me to embrace it for the sake of loving God and people more fully.

On one day recently, I sent my daughter off to her first day of school, prayed at a funeral service, and visited a family in the hospital who was celebrating the birth of their child.  Life, death, new beginnings – everything all at once.  Days like those remind me of why I love and follow Jesus: the world we long for, which requires the courage, compassion, and creativity he fills our lives with, is already here and is on its way.