Jeff Chu

Kate Bowler: This is Everything Happens, and I’m Kate Bowler. What happens when a journalist turned seminarian turned farmer starts seeing theology in compost? Well, you get Jeff Chu, writer, editor, and accidental theologian of dirt and grace. Jeff is the kind of friend who will fly across the country with a rice cooker in his suitcase because hospitality, much like faith, should be completely excessive. Today, we talk about vocation and belonging, about what it means to love people who might not ever love us the way we wish, and about how sometimes the best theology lessons comes from a pile of rotting vegetables. If you’ve ever felt stuck in a story that no longer fits or wondered if small acts of love that you offer the world really matter, this conversation is for you. Jeffy, hey. This is your very favorite thing. I get to be nosy with you for a full hour.

Jeff Chu: I like asking the questions because I’m a journalist and I am super uncomfortable right now because I am completely at your mercy and I know you are cruel.

Kate: And I serve a cruel God, so let’s dig in.

Jeff: Good start.

Kate: Before I knew you, you had an entirely different life. You were a very fancy person with a fancy job in New York City.

Jeff: How far I’ve fallen.

Kate: This is really a story of decline. No, you decided to change everything and go back to school. I want to hear about that decision.

Jeff: I was a journalist in New York and before that I was even fancier because I was a journalist from London and I built my career at Time Magazine and Conde Nast and Fast Company. And at a certain point I felt sad. I felt sad because I had gotten into journalism to do stories that mattered. I had told myself the story of how I was going to investigate things and make the world a better place. and instead I was profiling fashion designers. And there’s nothing wrong with fashion. I like clothes, but it wasn’t the kind of story I wanted to tell. And more than that, I had questions about my own mattering. Where was my story in the midst of the stories that I was writing in the magazine? That led to an awful realization. I had to go back to school, and I had to, at the age of 39, take tests again. It was a journey into books, but also onto a farm, which I didn’t expect either.

Kate: It’s such like a undoing of like, okay, well now it’s books and notes and listening, but man, what a vocational upheaval to feel like your life can take a completely different turn. You and I both know seminary is not a, it’s not a… Being a pastor is not a high prestige profession anymore. People who go into that job know that, one, dentists will make more than them. And for that we resent them forever. And two, we won’t even necessarily get the respect of a dentist because people don’t really know what that job is anymore. So I wondered why in particular?

Jeff: It is a wild career move to choose something even less lucrative than journalism, and it shows my real business sense and my skill at charting a course for a worldly success. There is really no logic to it. I knew that I wanted to study sacred things, and I thought that would happen at seminary. The other thing is it was a calling, and that sounds really woo-woo, and that’s a word that I know makes some people uncomfortable, but I think I need to emphasize how stuck I felt in my life in New York. Not in my marriage, not in some of the personal aspects, but in my career, I felt stuck. And I think a lot of people can relate to ending up in a job that looks great on paper, but you can’t quite make sense of how you got there. And now that you’re there, it seems weird to choose a different path, but you know you need to do that for the of your soul, because there’s something eating away at you, these questions that need to be answered. And so you’re just gonna try something to find those answers because otherwise you’re gonna die a little bit every day in a way that is not like the resurrection kind of death. It’s just bad death.

Kate: Vocation is so strange that way. I mean, God’s call on us is very bad math, but it is really beautiful to see somebody in a process of becoming. This story for you, in another way, is a very family story. You come from a long lineage of Chinese immigrant ministers. But, I mean, for all kinds of reasons, that was probably not the path you could see for yourself.

Jeff: I never wanted to be in the family business. My grandfather was a preacher. My uncle still is. He also taught theology at a university in Hong Kong. I have another uncle who is a Baptist preacher in Australia. My grandmother was a primary school Bible teacher. This is the family business. There’s not a lot of room in that Baptist family business for a gay guy. I didn’t think there was room in the church for me for a long time. So that’s a part of my story too, that real narrative of unbelonging because people tell you that there’s an integral part of yourself that doesn’t fit. So part of my story is coming back to God or being told that maybe I had never left God’s arms in the first place. You can say that, but it’s a different thing than believing it. And I think the farm is where I began. In the soil with the sunflowers, cursing the hidden groundhog that kept digging holes, I found my place again, a little bit, just a little.

Kate: Princeton Theological Seminary, land of so many Presbyterians, has this beautiful piece of land where theology and agriculture… Why was that combination so especially meaningful, do you think?

Jeff: At first it wasn’t, this was just a practical decision for me at the age of 39, facing a full slate of classes and realizing that I might be really sad if all my classes were within regular classrooms. So I saw this one class at the Farminary and I was like, you know what? I’m gonna try that class. It was by application. And so I did what all faithful Christians do. I tried to bribe my way into the class. You had to write an essay. And in my essay, I used my limited space to offer the professors a home-cooked Chinese meal on the day of their choosing, if they would accept me into this class.

Kate: Oh my gosh, that’s so great.

Jeff: And they took me up on it eventually. They never confirmed or denied whether my bribery had to do with my acceptance. My first day I showed up completely overdressed. I’m very proud of that outfit. Button-down shirt, khakis.

Kate: That’s good.

Jeff: And beautiful navy blue hunter boots. And the professor took us out to the compost pile and told us to start digging. And it was a September day in New Jersey, it was ridiculously hot and humid, and I thought I had made a grave mistake until I saw the splatter of liquefying spinach on my classmates’ bare legs, and I thought, thank God for those hunter boots, which are preserving me right now. And so I’m standing there thinking about my clothes and the professor says, look for signs of life and death and resurrection in the compost pile. And I did take my attention off of myself long enough to realize that underneath all the rotting vegetables and the moldy fruit, the deeper you went, the closer you got to new soil. All that rot had been ,with the help of worms and microbes and air and moisture, slowly been transformed into good soil that we would then take out into the field and amend the garden with. And that was kind of a miraculous realization that this is something that happens in nature that we get to participate in.

Kate: Jeff, there’s a version of the argument where things transform that drives me crazy and you’re not making that argument. The version I hate is nothing is wasted. Everything is for something. There’s nothing lost in your life. If you put effort into something, don’t worry. It’s just going to come back to you in a different form. It’s like a transmogrifying kind of description, but you’re describing something much grittier. It has got a lot more decomposing in it than that sort of like very cheery like swap this for that kind of attitude.

Jeff: I will confess that my classmates and I at times liked to gloss over the reality of the compost pile, right? We liked to focus on the final product. But if you’re really going to study the compost, you can’t get around death. Death happens. Waste happens. There was a food bank nearby that would get these donations of beautiful vegetables that they couldn’t give away fast enough in the summertime, and so at least once a week, this box truck would show up and offload boxes and boxes and boxes of heirloom tomatoes and fennel and all these things that had many of them been grown overseas, shipped to the U.S., given away because it couldn’t be sold, and then trucked to the farm in an area because it couldn’t be given away. This is waste. These things died. There was labor that went into growing these vegetables that was for naught, right? And we like to skip over that. We like to skip over the costs of our consumption. We like skip over that fact that things died because we wanted to focus on the new life, right? As I’ve thought about the compost pile and its lessons, I’ve realized we need to stare death in the face. We need to acknowledge our losses. There’s an invitation in that to confront how we live. To be grateful for what we do have and to lament what we’re not doing well. The other part of it is there are no guarantees with the compost pile. We’re invited to participate, but we can screw things up too, right? We can have a hand in making good soil, but we get the balance wrong. We can not be attentive enough. And there’s a cost to that as well. So I have a very realist take on the compost file. It’s definitely not like a glossy postcard picture.

Kate: I just think it’s so you to have like a theology of compost where our faith is in the process of becoming something else. And in the end, we’re really deeply hopeful. What’s like the deep hope in a theology of compost?

Jeff: So one of the things that I am most hopeful about is that in the compost pile and at the farm, I kind of learned about appropriate smallness. So we live in a world that wants everyone to be a shining star and everyone to be big. I even feel it, you know that Mary Oliver poem, Saint Mary Oliver, right? What will you do with your one wild and precious life? Well, frankly, Mary Oliver, I’m not going to lie down in the grass like you did because I have to do my own laundry and there are grass stains. And I’ve struggled with a lot of these ideas that we should be bold and win and be wonderful, and the farm and the compost pile taught me about this appropriate smallness, this kind of right sizing of expectations of who I am and what I can do and what I control and what I ought to surrender. And I think that’s what I want for my own life and what I hope for in other people’s lives, which is this understanding of the beauty of being small in a world that is so enormous and wondrous and full of possibility. We’re in the middle of Lent, which I love. And I’ve decided that Ash Wednesday is probably my favorite liturgical occasion because we get that reminder, that humbling reminder, that we’re all going to die. And it doesn’t get obscured by the whole other bit of liturgy. It’s just right there, unadulterated, from dust you came and to dust you shall return. And then you smear the dust on your face and it’s weird. And whenever I impose ashes, I always add, beloved child of God, beloved Child of God from dust you came, and to you shall return. Because yes, we’re all going to die and we’re part of thi. cosmic story, and I don’t want you ever to leave without remembering that love is there for you. And you get to be a part of something more awe-inspiring than you could ever imagine. That’s what I mean by appropriate smallness. There is such a big love out there and we get to taste a tiny bit of it and hope that it transforms something in and around us.

Kate: There’s something I hear a lot from people who, especially when their lives are full of small acts of love that are, but there’s a million of them and they don’t get to feel very grand about it. They just have to run around taking care of other people’s needs, taking care of their own needs, managing their physical and mental illnesses, you know, just like all the daily stuff of containing our humanness. I think that they feel sort of poisoned sometimes by the feeling that life is supposed to be so profoundly meaningful and that they’re supposed to feel their own, I guess maybe you say like largeness in the world. Appropriate smallness would probably just feel like a relief, like maybe everything is a little easier to carry in a world where it wasn’t supposed to be quite so big.

Jeff: I love small and ordinary graces. One of the gifts you give me is the occasional text message that has nothing to do with anything, but reminds me that I’m alive and I get to be your friend. I think it’s the small and the ordinary graced that create belonging for each other. And instead of building community, we spend so much time and energy trying to optimize other things and dream big and flail in search of revolution. And I think it’s the small and ordinary acts of love that we need to build the community that are going to make the world better. It’s together. It’s not one person striking out on their own and being the hero. I think the hero’s story is a false story.

Kate: I like that. One of the lovely people on my team, Iris, she had a birthday yesterday and I was like, what did you do? And other people, I tend to get very existential on my birthdays. Something huge needs to happen or else I’m like, wait, what am I doing with my life? And she’s like, well, I had tea and cake with the church ladies. It was about the sweetest, loveliest, most grounded thing I had heard in a long time. And that made a really lovely birthday. People who are able to focus on moments of friendship, moments of connection, I think maybe might get further than some of us who are like leaping around.

Jeff: I mean, imagine the contagious hope that she and the church ladies created together. For just a few minutes around tea and cake, they could experience a sense of belonging that you hope they’ll take out of that space with them and maybe create a little belonging for someone else. Recently, I was at a conference and this really lovely lady asked during the Q&A time, what are you doing for self-care?

Kate: Did you hate that the most?

Jeff: I responded more off the cuff than I usually like to, because I’m a Chinese kid and a Chinese kid always wants to get the A+, right? I said I’m terrible at self-care, and I intend to keep being terrible at self-care. Because here’s the thing, self- care is only necessary when communal care has failed. I wanna get better at learning to be cared for and learning to care for others. I don’t wanna make fried rice for myself. No self-respecting Chinese person makes fried rice for one. I wanna share fried rice with other people. I don’t wanna send a text message to myself. I wanna text a friend and check in on them. I don’t grow vegetables in my garden to eat by myself while I’m binging Netflix. That’s sad. I wanna cook them and share them at my table or pack them in a suitcase and bring them a thousand miles in the most inefficient way possible to a friend’s house. Because that’s how I remind them that they matter, right? So I do wanna be terrible at self-care.

Kate: That’s really sweet, Jeff. I love that. We’re going to be right back after a break to hear from our sponsors. Don’t go anywhere. I really, really like farm friends because when I hear their stories, it always involves somebody else. Somebody borrowed something, they’re trying to bring it back, somebody broke something, somebody attached a motor to something. And it’s so much more stitched in to neighbors and other people’s lives than my life is. One of the things I guess that the farms introduce is ecologies.

Jeff: It’s a real deep sense of interdependence that your life is woven together, not just with your neighbors, but also with the rain and the sunshine and these elements you can’t control and with the ancestors, right? Cause it was probably grandpa who taught you how to do what you know how to. And that really, I think resonated with me when I got to the farm, even though I grew up in cities and suburbs. After our first chicken slaughter, my mom came to visit. My mom grew up in Hong Kong, which is probably the most urban environment you could imagine. And as we were cooking one of the chickens that I’d helped to raise and then slaughtered, I learned things about my mom’s upbringing that they had kept pigeons on their apartment balcony. That our agrarian roots weren’t actually that far away, and that what I was doing was somehow connected with my ancestors in a way that I hadn’t even realized. And I think all of us have these stories in us. It’s not that far from the surface. We are more interdependent than we even realize, but we only know it if we’re curious and ask the questions and receive the story.

Kate: And I like too that doing something with someone else tends to open up a story in a way that if you just tried to spitball it, it probably wouldn’t.

Jeff: I mean, what was I gonna say to my mom? Tell me a story about farming in your life.

Kate: Do you know pigeons in a different way than I know pigeons?

Jeff: I would never have thought to, but as we were preparing this chicken, the story started coming out.

Kate: Being in a relationship with your parents has not been an easy road. They come from a more conservative background. They have been, it’s been very complicated, to say the least, with you being married to a wonderful man. I wonder what that’s been like navigating those differences.

Jeff: It sucks. I am like a lot of kids, I think, in that I had this idea of what, for instance, my wedding would be like. And let’s be honest, when I was a kid, I didn’t imagine that there would be a really cute Texan boy. We all have to grieve our own illusions, right? But when it came time to get married, I was so in love with Tristan, am still so in-love with Tristian, and it was a deep grief that my parents weren’t there. And I’ve had to learn to build my life apart from their expectations while making room for them to grief the story that they had already written for my life. That’s a real grief. I think it’s a kind of grief that a lot of us don’t feel comfortable naming, but it’s real. And I don’t think we need to rank our griefs, right? I don’t think that my grief about a relationship with my parents that isn’t whole and blissful in the way I wish it be, I don’t think I need to say, oh, that grief is bigger than their grief about their son whose life didn’t turn out the way they wanted. They both are. They both exist. They both need room for processing and for grieving. Unexpectedly, so often it’s been my husband who has reminded me what I claim to believe. Because I say I believe in grace, and I say I believe in a love that is bigger than us, that can hold complication. And he’s the one who’s reminded me, yeah, you can go have lunch with your parents. Yes, go spend time with your dad, even though my dad won’t spend time with him. And one of the most beautiful things he said to me, it was graduation day, my parents unexpectedly came to my seminary graduation. They sat on one side of the chapel. My husband sat on the other. They wouldn’t meet. And he gave me a hug and he said, I’ll see you after.

Kate: Just giving you to your parents in that beautiful moment.

Jeff: Making space for people who couldn’t make space for him. I think that’s a beautiful lesson in love. And I know there are folks who will say, because they’ve said it to my face, the right thing for you to do would be to not make space in your life for your parents until they’ve made space for your husband. And I believe that might be the right choice for some people. It’s not the right choice for us. What we’ve chosen to do, it’s hard and we feel like it aligns with who we wanna be in the world. Our table will always be a place of welcome. Our home will always a place welcome. They make their choices about where their boundaries are, but we’re gonna be as open and openhearted as we can be.

Kate: That’s so moving. That’s deeply moving. In every word, you can hear the cost to you. I guess the other character in this is God, is your closeness to God, believing that you can be not just a wonderful Christian, but an incredible pastor. You’ve been a beautiful pastor to me and to so many people I know. But like, letting God be the center of your belongingness in all of this, in all the characters involved.

Jeff: The thing that hasn’t changed for me is my conviction in a love that is bigger than us. And if I really believe that love is true, this is what I can’t get around. If I really believed that huge and wondrous and amazing love is really true, how dare I let smaller, pettier hatreds take precedence over that love? What often happens when I am not my best self is I go chasing after the love of people who can never love me the way I want or need or deserve to be loved. My religious convictions tell me that there is an all-encompassing, all-holding love. Why would I let that small love that I’m chasing out shout that bigger love that I say I believe in? That’s who I want to be when I am my best self. And most of the time I am not that person.

Kate: Well, I want everybody’s love and I want their love to reflect back to me, my own sense of worthiness, and I want it to happen consistently. Is that arrangeable?

Jeff: Sure, for $29.99 plus shipping and handling, I will get that in the mail to you.

Kate: You know what you do give me that’s probably a little bit more than $29.99 is you send me enormous boxes of the ridiculous foreign potato chips that I want. You do it so regularly. I eat them, I mean, like within eyesight, I can see chips that you have sent me, which I save for difficult days. But it is like, when I don’t feel, when I chase after small loves that don’t love me back, when I don’t feel my own belovedness, man, I struggle so much with shame. It’s just like, it feels like it’s just a button. Every day it just gets like pushed. I spend the rest of the time trying to like unpop that button. But like, it does make me feel deeply known and then that makes me feel loved. I just really do think these small things kind of like reconstitute us.

Jeff: I think love expressed in potato chips is excellent.

Kate: I agree.

Jeff: I think the world needs more love expressed in gummy bears and potato chips and text messages and tea and cakes and the small gestures that make people feel known and cared for.

Kate: We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back. I’m just thinking of all the versions where like I couldn’t get out of my own head until I did something for someone else. It’s also good advice, Lisa DeMore, one of my very favorite psychologists she gives about teenagers is when they’re going through a difficult time, she’s like service. Service rechannels some of that energy. And I just think that’s a very deeply practicable, not very convenient, super effective.

Jeff: Community is the only way we’re gonna survive this cruel world. It’s the only way I’ve gotten this far. And I am not exaggerating when I say that community has saved my life. So yeah, maybe it’s potato chips. Maybe it’s a postcard from a stranger or to a stranger. Maybe it is a cup of coffee. Maybe a flower that you plucked from your lawn and handed to a neighbor. I don’t want us to underestimate the power of small graces. And it’s paradoxical, right? Selfishly go love someone else today. For your own sake, go love someone else today.

Kate: Well, and you’re so good about this with cooking. You’re like, I will serve you. I will make this gorgeous, ridiculous, elaborate meal. I think when you cooked for me, it took like 275 hours and you brought all the stuff.

Jeff: Folks don’t know that I flew to your house, right, with my rice cooker.

Kate: With your rice cooker, yes. I really like how often you go way over the top, which is like it’s something my dad always used to say about Christmas, which I really believe is over the top is never over the top. It’s the right amount. You went grocery shopping. You brought every single recipe. It took a million years to make. You like made a million different dishes, like you do this regularly for people. And it’s the, I think it’s my favorite thing about feasting is it’s not like here’s a mac and cheese, which is also great, but like the more than enoughness creates this really intense feeling between people that they are something special all of a sudden.

Jeff: For a Chinese person, if there are not abundant leftovers, that means you didn’t cook enough. The table has to be overflowing when you’re cooking for other people. I don’t want to give you just enough love to get through the day. What kind of a friend is that? So yeah, for four of us, I cooked like eight dishes. That’s the way it should be.

Kate: You come by this food as a love language, honestly, your mom is equally obsessed with.

Jeff: My mom is the one who taught me this. And I think it’s a reflection of both Chinese culture, but also hope. Hope in abundance, right? Hope in a story that is possibility we can’t imagine. I wanna believe that’s true. And so if I can give you just a little taste of it, here and now, that’s amazing. And also, I don’t know how to cook rice without a rice cooker. I’ve heard that it can be done on the stove and I don’t know how.

Kate: When your mom came to cook for you and Tristan, did it feel like the food said, I love you? The food said we’re together?

Jeff: I’ve had to learn how to say I love you out loud, because it’s not something my people traditionally do in words, right? I can say it to my friends now, the ones I actually really love. I can say it. But my mom communicates so much through the physical labor of preparing a meal that she can’t in words. I think I’ve inherited a little bit of that and I’m grateful for it because now I feel like I’m multilingual. I can speak Cantonese and I can  speak English and I can also speak food, and I think that’s a real gift that she gave.

Kate: I knew that I had made it into Tobin’s family when his grandma, who was always like the matriarch in charge of all these elaborate, and they weren’t like fancy, but there was just a ton of homemade food on these fold-out tables. And then all the pies went on the ping pong table. But I knew, that I’d made it in to her love economy when I got my very own place card in her handwriting with my name on it. And then she put it down in pen instead of pencil. But I was like a literal place at the table was how I knew at 14 years old that I would have to be a child bride into that family.

Jeff: Because pencil, who knows who would be there next time?

Kate: Any girlfriend.

Jeff: But here’s the thing, right? Tobin comes from a Mennonite family. The Mennonites and the Chinese, we’ve been through some stuff. And yet, feasting is so important, right. I think there’s a logic and a lesson in that, that yeah, life is going to throw you a lot of pain and grief and hard work and suffering. And in the moments when you can, you gotta feast.

Kate: Jeff, yours is a story of choosing to be changed. You’ve chosen to be changed by love, by career, in grief, in hope, in dirt, in compost, and in your belief, very, very stubborn belief in God. And I feel so lucky to be your friend and also just to be able to talk to you today. This was a great gift to me.

Jeff: Thanks for choosing me to be your friend, Kate Bowler.

Kate: I love you!

Jeff: I love you too.

Kate: Jeff reminds us that sometimes hope looks like compost, slow, surprising, quietly transforming what was into what could be. So maybe the best we can do is let ourselves be changed by love, by grief, by dirt under our fingernails, and by small, ordinary acts of grace. So, wherever you are today, may you remember that your smallness is not insignificance, that love really is fundamentally expressed in potato chips and text messages and a place at the table. It is all still love. And that belonging is not something we earn, it’s something we practice over and over and over again. So bless you my dears. If you want a companion for this season of Lent, come join us. It’s never, ever too late. Grab a free download at katebowler.com. Before I go, would you mind giving us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts? I know it’s so annoying to do those kinds of things, but it makes a really big difference for how people find the show. And really, thank you so much. An enormous thank you goes to our funding partners, Lily Endowment, The Duke Endowment and Duke Divinity School, and to the team behind everything happening and Everything Happens. Jess Ritchie, Harriet Putman, Keith Weston, Baiz Hoen, Gwen Heginbotham, Brenda Thompson, Iris Green, Hailie Durrett, Anne Herring, Hope Anderson, Kristen Balzer, Elia Zario, Katherine Smith, and Megan Crunkleton. Thank you. This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.