Blueprints By Don Ng |
If my father had his wish, I would be an electrical engineer! When he returned home from serving the U.S. Army during World War II in Germany, he knew how difficult it would be to have a working knowledge of the English language. He didn’t have it and didn’t need it during the war years. All he needed to know was whose side he was on and how to aim and shoot. I still cherish the little pin that he received as a sharpshooter when he was in the Army.
I was told that the field of electrical engineering used the international language of numbers. It didn’t really matter what language you spoke; as long as you knew mathematics, you would succeed. I grew up playing with dry cells and learning how to hook up wires to little motors that spun and whirled. One of my annual science projects was building a steam engine. And when I attended Boston Technical High School, I was on my way to becoming a “double E” major.
At “Tech,” every student was required to take mechanical drawing or drafting every year. On large sheets of yellow paper, using 4H pencils and erasers, we would draw views of three-dimensional objects: front, end, and top views. Any edges not seen would be represented by dotted lines. Spherical surfaces would require careful shading. I learned how to read blueprints. And I learned from drafting to print capital letters uniformly. But during my years at “Tech,” I was also involved in the BYF (Baptist Youth Fellowship), the youth group at my church, the First Baptist Church of Boston.
By the time I was a teenager, practically all of the youth at our church were Chinese Americans, whose first-generation American fathers had served in the U.S. military during World War II. We were American-born Chinese. What was not available to our fathers was more readily available to us—going to school, playing sports, volunteering at the Jr. Red Cross, Scouts, Junior Achievement, and going to church. At First Baptist, Boston, we were very active in the youth group—planning programs, going on field trips, and “taking over the worship” on Youth Sunday. One of the main emphases of the youth program was to explore the many God-given gifts that we have. We published a youth newsletter that provided us an opportunity to write. The annual Youth Sunday gave a “poor soul” a chance to exegete a text and shout, “Youth are the church of today, not tomorrow!” By the time I was about ready to enter college, I was betwixt and between becoming an electrical engineer, or possibly an architect, and something that I discovered that gave me deeper meaning at church.
When God creates, God endows each of us with many gifts. God’s creativity and diversity can be seen everywhere we look. It’s not surprising to see that each one of us is then blessed with a number of gifts that can lead us to a number of vocations and careers. We often have choices to make. I could have been an engineer, or an architect, or a minister.
The disciples were fishermen first. When Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew going about their jobs as fishermen. Jesus said to them, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people” (Mark 1:17 NRSV). The disciples knew they had the abilities to cast their nets, haul in the fish, prepare the fish for market, and make a decent living. But in Jesus’ eyes, these fishermen also had gifts to become his disciples. And after learning from the Good Teacher, the disciples became evangelists, preachers, teachers, missionaries, and pastors.
After entering college, I soon realized that Christian ministry, rather than engineering or architecture, was the direction God was leading me. Out of the past 29 years of full-time Christian ministry, I have spent the last five years at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco. When I was called as the Senior Pastor in 1998, I was challenged with the responsibility of retrofitting and renovating an un-reinforced brick building, constructed in 1908, to comply with the city’s earthquake-related seismic-safety codes. I had never experienced such a task before. And, in retrospect, my seminary didn’t offer a course on building construction either. Our successful completion of a $1.6-million-dollar retrofit and renovation project was the result of others who have been blessed with all the necessary gifts to do the job. We had a renowned retired soil engineer who taught at UC Berkeley, an architect, a contractor who owns his own business, a lighting specialist, a lawyer who could read the fine print in the contracts, and an employee in the city’s planning department who was able to get our applications through quickly. About all that was missing were the pastors who provided prayer, encouragement, and vision to reassure ourselves of the reason for the project in the first place.
To seismically retrofit a building, the procedure is first to drive steel posts down into the bedrock. With these posts firmly in the earth, each floor of the building was tied to these posts with steel bars. These long steel bars had rods that bolted the old bricks on the inside as well as on the outside. Since the outside bricks would now have metal plates holding these rods, we decided to install decorative washers to make the outside appearance more attractive. The decorative washers appeared to look like a raindrop when positioned in a particular way. One of my few contributions to our retrofit project was to suggest that the installed washers should remind us of the Song of Moses,
Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak;
let the earth hear the words of my mouth.
May my teaching drop like rain,
my speech condense like dew;
like gentle rain on grass;
like showers on new growth
(Deut. 32:1-2 NRSV).
Now, every time I look up at our sacred building and lead people to see what our project was like, I always point out the decorative washers that are becoming a visible symbol of the importance of teaching God’s word in the world. Now our church building is encircled with the “raindrops” of God’s teachings.
God gives us many gifts for ministry. Each one of us could have chosen a career other than full-time Christian work. I might have been a pretty good engineer or an architect. But when I heard God calling me to Christian ministry, I followed Jesus to be his disciple. But what is amazing is that I never lost my interest in how things work, and when it came time for me, along with others on the retrofit committee, to read the blueprints for our church building, I was able to do that too. All those days playing with a dry cell battery or doing mechanical drawings had not been wasted when I committed myself to ministry. These interests and skills are also the blueprints in my ministry today.
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The Reverend Donald Ng serves as the Senior Pastor of the First Chinese Baptist Church, in San Francisco, California.
