Interview with E. Lily Yu

For All Saints Church Princeton Forum on Life& Faith, I got to interview one of the most exciting books on art and faith to have come out in recent years, "Break, Blow, Burn, and Make" by E. Lily Yu

Mako Fujimura interview with author E. Lily Yu for All Saints Forum of Faith and Life, at All Saints Church, Princeton, December 22, 2024.

This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Fr George: Gracious God, we thank You for Your mercies, which are new every morning. We thank You for this opportunity to gather in a warm space on a cold morning and to discuss creativity and how that brings us closer to You and a deeper understanding of Your creativity and Your love. We ask that You would deepen our understanding and our appreciation of Your goodness. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Mako: I'm delighted to have author E. Lily Yu here with us. I have two of her books, Break, Blow, Burn, and Make, and On Fragile Waves, in front of me. I got to know her through her books and her writing, and this is the first time we’ve met, so we’re just getting to know each other.

Welcome to the Forum on Faith and Life here at All Saints in Princeton!

Lily: Thank you for having me. It’s a little embarrassing because I think, with the wisdom of everyone in this room, the best thing I could do is be quiet and listen to you all.

[laughter]

Mako: I agree, but today, we're going to make an exception.

Lily: The funny thing is, my third book would not exist if it weren't for Mr. Fujimura's Art and Faith. I read that book, and it was incredibly beautiful and inspiring.

Mako: I did not know that.

Lily: I’d like to think that I have added one more brick to the building that we're both working on.

Mako: My friend Beth Adams [editor of Break, Blow, Burn, and Make], who told me about the manuscript that you were writing at the time, was part of our church movement in New York City. Tell us first about your background, how you got started in writing. You went to Princeton, I just found out.

Lily: Very local.

Mako: Yeah.

Lily: I grew up about twenty minutes away from here. I went to the public high school. If any of you remember the Princeton Summer Festival season that had Carmen and Man of La Mancha, a while ago, I was in the pit band for Man of La Mancha.

My parents are immigrants. They were also very devout Christians, of the type that thinks that art and writing and fiction are not good occupations for those who believe. They have since moderated their positions. I had to fight most of the time while I was growing up, which, it turns out, was preparatory work for the very hard business of being a writer and an artist in the world. I would not give up that training for anything. You need that kind of armor, that kind of stubbornness.

I went to Princeton [University]. It was close by. I was a physics major for three years [before switching to English].

I was in Australia for a computational physics internship at the Australian National University Research School for Earth Sciences. They called a snap federal election while I was there, and I was in Canberra, so I was going to all of these talks and all of these presentations. There was this one issue that I could not understand. It was the issue of asylum seekers, and it got under my skin. And nine years later, I finished writing this book, which came out of that internship—my apologies to the primary investigator whose team I was on.

Mako: Let's talk about this book, On Fragile Waves, which is your first novel. The New York Times reviewed this and said it’s “devastating and perfect.” An amazing response to this novel.

It takes place first in Afghanistan, and this asylum seeker is going to Australia. How did you get an inkling of the story that you ended up writing about?

Lily: When I see something that doesn’t make sense to me, I try to learn more about it. Usually there's a point where you think: I've learned enough. But there are some subjects that become fractal, where the more you look at it, the more complicated it gets. I did not think that how you would house ten thousand asylum seekers in Australia would involve G4S, a South African prison company, a company in Spain, and Wackenhut in Pennsylvania. There's this incredible international industry and complex that I had no idea about. You keep falling in. Things get under my skin, and I can only get them out by working through them.

I was never intending to go to Afghanistan. There was a point where I realized I had hit the limit of the research I could do without going. I had to face the fact that I could either go, and take all of the risks that that entailed, and potentially write something true and honest, or I could not go and write from not knowing, from imagination, from what other people said about it. It turns out to have been very good preparation for later things in my life. But at one point I said—okay, I'm going to go. Told almost no one, except for the people who absolutely needed to know, in terms of emergency preparedness. Made a lot of responsible mitigation plans. And I went for ten days and came back.

When I finished the manuscript, it was four whole drafts, handwritten in notebooks and then typed up. Every single publisher rejected it. My agent, when he got the book—he's lovely—he said: “My longest submission took six months. Let’s hope it doesn't take that long.”

Eighteen months later, I said, “Thank you so much for being my agent. You've done a wonderful job. I think it’s time to give up now.” And he said, no, no, I’ll keep sending it out.

There’s this brilliant editor, Liz Gorinsky, who had just founded a tiny little publishing house called Erewhon Books. I asked permission through a friend to send this book, even though it didn’t clearly fall into genre. It’s sort of uncategorizable. She said, send it. She read it. And she was brave enough to say, I’m willing to publish it, even though it was uncategorizable—it's unmarketable—you can't sell it through any sales [plan]—

Mako: Mhm.

Lily: Like your book, like some other writers I know—how do you even sell this [Art + Faith]?

Mako: A lot of times art and publishing are so much about marketing, right? So the first door you have to go through is not the editor’s door, but through marketing. Can the work be categorized as this type of work that guarantees sales, or guarantees a decent audience? That's how publishers and galleries make their decisions. Many times what we do, partly because what we have done is to create a world around our faith—there's a sense in which your motivation is different from the entire marketing team that wants to project sales and so forth.

Getting back to that moment when you're in Australia—what was that like? Do you remember how the story itself became alive in you? Do you recall that moment? Or is that something that happened gradually?

Lily: It was very gradual. I knew when I started the project that I was not a good enough writer to complete it the way I wanted to, but if I worked very hard for the next several years, I could possibly become that writer. I wrote the first draft. It was terrible. You feel a great deal of despair, and then you throw it away. You write the second draft, and it's a little bit better than the first draft. It's still terrible, but it's better than the first draft.

Alan (Audience Member): You don't edit the first one? You throw it away?

Lily: You look at it. But it was broken. It's like—you look at a very broken machine, and you say, this is too broken for me to go and polish up the metal. I needed new parts. There are things that survived from the first draft to the last, but I was not looking at the original draft. I redid the entire thing. Third draft: a little bit better. You can still see where it’s broken. Fourth draft—for some reason, I don't know why, it came together. It came together, and it worked, and it was alive, [by the] grace of God. I honestly don't know how else.

But this was after years. You throw yourself at the project year after year, and you’re not good enough. The project tells you you're not good enough. You finish the draft, and you say, This is not good enough. But you get better. And little by little—you’re being revised, you're being written into, even while you're writing—you get to a point where you say, this is good enough. Of course, you're wrong. You have to go do multiple rounds of edits after that. But you do hit that point where, if you're being honest with yourself about your capacity as a writer, with the work itself, you can actually say: this is good. You just have to suffer for eight years beforehand, saying: this is bad.

Mako: And then you go through this editing process, I assume, and then you finally have a book. What’s happening in that process?

Lily: The edit letter from Liz Gorinsky was brilliant. She found embarrassing errors that I fixed before anyone else ever saw them.

I was first told the book would come out in Fall 2020. This was before anything had happened. That imprint’s first book came out March 20, 2020, the day that New York City shut down. My book was delayed. They told me it would come out in December 2020. Then they told me it would come out in February 2021. There was then a six-week delay at the printer that meant that the book would not be in warehouses on the day it was released. My roof started leaking. A volunteer team I oversee at work was essentially laid off. This was all the day before the book came out.

The day the book came out, it was not in warehouses. There were two bookstores that had shipments because they were doing Zoom events with me. Everyone who pre-ordered the book from Amazon got an email saying: We don't know when this book will be in stock. Would you like to cancel your order? I was on Zoom in one room, with a line of bowls in my living room catching the water dripping through my ceiling. The beautiful thing is, there will never be a book launch as bad as that, ever again.

That was an incredibly difficult time, but it came out in the world. I was very grateful that it did. And then I thought nobody noticed it.

Mako: You don't know at that point. Is anybody going to read this book?

Lily: You don't know.

Mako: And then you started to get reviews, and these reviews are—

Lily: Very kind.

Mako: Astonishing, I would say, for a first-time writer, writing a challenging novel. I mean, this is very unique work. Somebody is reading it and being awed by your writing.

Lily: Grace of God, honestly.

John Fleming (Audience Member): Could you tell us a tiny bit about what is in your book?

Lily: There's a family of asylum seekers who make the decision to leave Kabul. They don't know what Australia is, but the people smugglers tell them, that’s a safe place for you. So they go on that route—it's a pretty well established route—and they wind up in Australia. They have to make a new life there. And that is a completely insufficient and inaccurate way of describing the book.

Mako: What happens? As you can see, I'm about halfway done. I'm a slow reader, but your writing style forces you to slow down. You have very refined, poetic lines and short, compressed chapters, so I can't read as fast. I was trying to finish it for this interview, but I haven't been able to.

Lily: That means you can't give away the ending. That’s great.

Mako: That's right. Even then, I'm about halfway through, and I'm realizing this journey of this family from Afghanistan to Australia as asylum seekers, is very bleak, honest—it's devastating to read what happens to these cohorts of people who are trying to make it to Australia. It is, to me, a book about this navigation that we're going through as a culture, right? There is this transition that we're in, whatever the future holds, we all can identify with these characters in some way.

Lily: I would also say it's funny. I think that’s one of the things that most reviewers missed. It's a very funny book—

Mako: It is.

Lily: —in the same way that Alexei Navalny's memoir, Patriot, is very funny. It has to be. There's this failsafe in human nature, where, when it gets very dark, one of the ways we survive is by laughing. And that was the only way I could write the book.

Alan: I think if the laugh is [from] fear, that's not a good deal.

Lily: I think there is this vein of gold in every single human being, where if you can genuinely find what's really funny in the very darkest moment, you'll survive, one way or another. That's a kind of courage, and you can inspire other people that way. I don't think enough reviewers... It can only be as strong as it is because it's funny.

Mako: Right. The way I was introduced to your writing was through this book: Break, Blow, Burn and Make: A Writer's Thoughts on Creation. What I was astonished by, having not read this [On Fragile Waves], is how much your writing has such transparency and ability to talk about this journey of a young artist of faith.

(to the audience) When I was reading this, I not only identified myself in Lily's journey, but there was, again, a sense of navigation that we are going through as a culture. All of us find ourselves not fitting into the categorical areas of—how faith fits into culture. When we speak about our faith, there's always some kind of a pushback, in every direction. We sense this very keenly as artists, because we're projecting something, or making something, into the world, that does not fit into a category. But we as human beings have to navigate that well. Many times, as a believer, we don't know how to bring our faith into the workplace, or into our typical everyday life, even if you’re not an author.

(To Lily) The publishing world seems to be a world in which this divide [between faith and art] is accentuated in many, many ways. This writing about faith, in this way, very openly—what's that like? What was that process like?

Lily: Brutal. I never wanted to write that book. It's a bit of an emergency work, in that there was a need, and there was no one else I could see who was there to meet the need. I think in a better, healthier culture, in a better, healthier society, there would be critics talking about some of the things that I was seeing, there would be Christians talking about some of the things that I was seeing, and I could sit back and write fiction.

But I was hitting a point in my reading, in my work, in my conversations with other artists, where I said, there’s a massive problem here, and I do not see anyone who’s willing to fight these particular fights. And I don’t want to be that person, I do not want to do this, but I can also see how I am possibly the best remaining person who is willing to do this.

And the difficulty of being a Christian is that your job is—not to say we’re good at it, I fail quite a bit—to say yes to God. That's the entire definition. Simone Weil says, it will happen whether you say yes or not. But what faith allows you to do is to assent to God’s plan. I’m not very good at doing this, especially the first time He asks. I do wish somebody else could have done it.

Mako: Because you're standing in the gap, right? And somebody has to do it.

Lily: It's usually the last thing I want. I usually figure out it’s what God wants because I’m sitting there saying, No, absolutely not. And there's a very quiet voice that says, yes, absolutely you. And you're like—no, anybody else. Anybody else.

Mako: Let me read a paragraph, because this is an exquisite paragraph.

You write: “Suffering and loss are inescapable, no matter what one chooses to do, or how one lives. But although I have enumerated the costs of this particular vocation, the rewards far exceed them. A hammer in the hand of a carpenter is fulfilling the purpose for which it was made. Through it, houses, beehives, and dinner tables come into the world. It strikes each blow with satisfaction. An artist, put to the use for which he is made, experiences the same deep satisfaction and fulfillment. There is also pure joy in reaching, after prolonged exertion, a creative breakthrough.”

The sentence, “It strikes each blow with satisfaction”—there's an echo throughout your writing. The title is from Elizabeth Browning—

Lily: John Donne. The epigraph is from Browning, you’re correct.

Mako: Yes, “Break, blow, burn and make [me new].” There's a sense in which her writing repeats this theme. Yet each paragraph has this precise language about the transparentness of your sentences. Reading this made me really encouraged that anything we do, including our writing or our art, can be just as true. You're describing your journey, but it seems universal to me.

Lily: Brother Lawrence, in the 1600s, writing about rolling wine barrels with that love for Christ in his heart. There was somebody who wrote about washing dishes as if you were—who was that?

Mako: Brother Lawrence.

Lily: Washing dishes as if you were washing Christ as a child. If you can bring that degree of love, of attention to God, into what you’re doing, whatever you're doing—I am not good at this, I can do this maybe once a week—it’s a different way of living.

Mako: You're being faithful here [in Break, Blow, Burn, & Make] in describing that.

Lily: Trying to.

Mako: I think you succeeded. I highly recommend this book. It's a very simple thing to wash dishes as a service of worship, but we don't think about it that way. When we wash our hands—they recommend twenty seconds—I learned during the pandemic that’s just the right amount for saying the Lord’s Prayer.

Lily: I should apologize to everyone in this room for the presumptuousness of that paragraph. You have much more life experience than I do. I’m asking myself, what am I doing here?

Alan: Well, there are leaders, and there are followers. There are no age limits.

Lily: I still think I have so much to learn from everyone in this room.

Mako: Let's open this up. I’d love to hear...

Doty (Audience Member): Lily, I have a question. What, for you, is the thread from the first to the third book? That’s not out yet, right?

Lily: This [Break, Blow, Burn, & Make] is the third book. The second book is a story collection.

Doty: But is there a thread for you, that you're starting to realize, through doing all of this? You’re a physicist, but on top of that, you're an author.

Lily: I'm a lapsed physics student.

[laughter]

Lily: You turn back, after you walk through a snowy wood, and you see your footsteps behind you, and they make a line. That's about the best that I can see right now. There may be a better pattern. There may be a stronger pattern. I have not seen it yet.

Doty: What is that pattern here?

Lily: I think I've walked on the way that I was supposed to go. That's about everything I know right now.

Alan: One of the Christian writers of whom I'm fond is Richard Rohr. I attended, remotely, a seven-week seminar on Francis. The very first paragraph in the very first lecture described his version of Christianity being necessarily experiential. And that can be gradual, it can be a falling off a horse on your way, or a donkey, whatever you were doing on your way to Damascus. Did you have any of that? Or was this Christianity just sort of, not bred, but instilled in you by your childhood?

Bernadette (Audience Member): That's a great question.

Lily: There's a favorite story I have about Teresa of Ávila, probably apocryphal, where she's on her way to found another monastery, fords a river, falls off her horse into the river, says to God—why do you set so many obstacles in our paths? And God says: It is thus ever with my friends. To which she retorts: That's why you have so few!

I love that. I don't know if it's true, but that is such a beautiful portrait of the Christian life in relationship to God, and of His sense of humor. I was—this is a very long story—at one point I was unemployed. I ended up in Nairobi. I went to the house of Karen Blixen [Isak Dineson]. I had not yet read Out of Africa, which is a beautiful book.

Mako: She's the author of Babette's Feast.

Lily: I went to her former home, and I spoke to two artists in residence who were there, who turned out to be devout Christians, and we talked about what it was like to be an artist with faith in Christ. And I talked about how I had been running away for a very long time. One of the artists said to me: it is like we're puppies running around, and God will gently pick us up and put us back in the right place. And then we go run around again.

I would say I turned my back on God for over four years, mostly because of the way I was raised, because I was told a very shallow version of God, made in the image of the men who were telling me about God. The difficulty is that we are supposed to understand that we are made in the image of God, as opposed to making God in our own image, making Him understandable, making Him small—as opposed to understanding that He is completely uncontainable, completely indescribable.

It took me a couple years after that, and a lot of time spent in a church where people—where some people in that church deeply loved God. They were shining so brightly... You could not look at them and say, this is not what a Christian is. This is not a Christian life. Which was the objection I had for a very long time.

There is something about that light in people that draws you back to God, that causes you to know how much you are loved, the quality of that love, and how different it is from the very flawed love that we have for each other as human beings. So I was drawn. I was doing my best to run away.

[inaudible question]

When you are told your entire life that you cannot do things because God created you as a woman, that you are less worthy of respect, that you shouldn’t be reading novels, that you shouldn’t be enjoying art—and God created you to be an artist—like hell you're going to run away.

[laughter]

Mako: We all may have experienced that ourselves.

Lily: I think that may have been a common thread in many churches.

Alan: It was. But some were worse than others.

Lily: But the thing is, when you are made in a certain way—I've known since I was a child that I would be a writer. My parents are immigrants. They said: you must have a day job that will pay the bills. Which was very wise and very useful.

Alan: Once a physicist, not always a physicist...

Lily: When everything you're being told about God is in complete opposition to what you know you are being called to, there is an irreconcilable conflict there that only was resolved through the love of other Christians in the church and through the love of God. I had to go run for a while, before—

Alan: Before He picked you up gently.

Lily: —before He picked me up.

Doty: How do you choose a church, or how important is church attendance or fellowship? Because you seem to have learned a lot of these things in solitude.

Lily: There have been long periods of solitude. I would say I have been in one church or another since my early twenties. I'm currently with a non-denominational church. My previous one was Presbyterian. I don't call myself anything. Beth Adams, my editor on this book—I had to ask her for some clarification on terms. And she said, I have no idea what you are. Which is... I have no idea what I am.

Mako: Good answer.

Doty: You said that you felt like you knew you were going to be a writer. You felt the passion for it? Were you starting to write when you were young? Something compelled you.

Lily: I've been reading since [I was] three. I think my parents taught me in self-defense.

[laughter]

Lily: I was writing from the third grade. When I go back and look at it, it’s perfectly good prose. I just didn't know how to put together a story.

Mako: You were always a writer, in that sense.

Reg (Audience Member): I have a question. Writing software and writing books, how does that work? The one thing that I can really relate to is the question about drafts. I write software. You write your first draft of the code. You don't try to polish it. You probably go back and read it, but...

Lily: I would say there's a comparable phenomenon in math, physics, I think in programming as well, and art, where the simplicity and beauty of a particular solution is often the best argument for its being a valid solution. The most beautiful equations in math have something very much in common with when you have solved an artistic problem in the best way possible. You look at it, and there's something compelling about how beautiful that expression of a mathematical truth is, that is completely analogous to how beautiful your expression is of a particular artistic truth.

Alan: You got lucky though. Folks bought your breakthrough. I've been on a journey for twenty years—a huge breakthrough, and that's been very helpful, just today—and I'm still looking for commercial traction.

Lily: You’re very kind. Makoto is very kind in having me here. I am not a commercially successful writer.

John: I’d hope not!

Alan: I just want my idea to be published. I tried twenty times, and—no dice.

Mako: When you're faithful to your craft, oftentimes you expect the world not to understand.

Lily: You remember the story of Kepler, when he understood the movement of the planets, and understood that God had waited, in his words, six thousand years for this to be understood by a human being. He could wait another few years for another human being to understand him.

Bernadette: My question is pretty daring. Would you have been a writer without your faith? That's what really intrigues me.

Lily: I think so. Yes. I did not understand how closely the two were tied, I think—

Bernadette: That's very interesting.

Lily: —for a very long time. I do not think I would have been as good of a writer.

Mako: We were talking about this beforehand, but because faith is so central to what you do... Even though this is not a “Christian novel”—that would be a category that would be marketable!—it does something to you when you read about these characters who are walking through this impossible journey. When you land at the Promised Land, that is not necessarily a promised land. So there are a series of challenges. You go through layers of experiences, of setbacks and frustrations, and, really, breakdowns, and then you—then what? Then what happens? What kicks in, what keeps you going, what allows you to keep going, even though nobody else may understand?

Lily: I think the other creative problem—it’s a technical and creative problem—is: when you’re a Christian, you are called to a worldview that says every single person is beloved of their Creator. However much you dislike them, however terrible their actions are, they are loved by the Person who created them. You’re being challenged to love them. And if I didn’t have that injunction, it would be easy to discard people, to discard characters, to harden your heart and say—I am right, they are wrong.

Alan: Oh. You’ve got to write about them.

Bernadette: This is fascinating to me.

Lily: I think I would have been a much worse writer. I think I might have taken the easy way out in some instances. I hope not. I hope not. But there is an imperative there, when you are Christian, to rise to that challenge.

Mako: So you're talking about not just a person that you know, but a character.

Lily: That is something I've been struggling with in a lot of the books I’ve been reading. That’s part of why I was sort of forced to write this book. To say, wait a minute, you can't create—you cannot create people so that you can destroy them in contempt. That is not how creation works. That is not how creation is meant to work. That is not what art is calling you to.

Joan Fleming (Audience Member): I wanted to hear a little about your time in Afghanistan. You spent time there—

Lily: Ten days. That's much as I could afford the insurance for.

Joan: When were you there?

Lily: January 2014. It was a very stripping kind of experience to realize how naive, how inexperienced, how small of a human being you are. To go to the poorest country in the world and have some of the poorest people in the world offer you hospitality and to understand how incredibly naked and insufficient you are in comparison.

There was one particular failure. I had a translator there, and at one point he said... He was a father of two small children and a husband. At one point he said, Oh, don’t worry. If anything happens, I will die first. And I was very young, and I was terrified. I didn’t say anything. I still regret that. I still wish I had said: absolutely not, you will not do that. But I wasn’t mature enough to say that. I wasn't brave enough to say that.

Mako: That comes through in your book, what you just said.

Lily: The failures, I think.

Mako: There’s a scene where the girl is being hosted by somebody who serves her tea, right? The poorest tent. It's a beautiful book. Okay, final question, then we have to... Go ahead.

John: Are there American or British writers in whom you found—I would say inspiration—who seem to you to be dealing in a serious and mature way with the religious questions that are engaging you?

Lily: There are writers who talk about religion directly: George MacDonald, Chesterton following George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis. Annie Dillard, when she's writing about writing. There's also the question of fiction.

John: I was really thinking of that.

Lily: The thing is, in the greatest testimony of faith in fiction, very often the issue or the problem of religion or faith does not come up. It’s in the work itself as a whole, as a burning fire. When you read a book, and it sets you on fire with the beauty of its vision for what humanity is, for how deeply humanity is loved, for every single person and every single part being a component of this gorgeous whole—whether or not the question is explicitly addressed, that has always been to me the most convincing argument for this thing that we call faith, for this thing that we call God.

Mark Twain wrote some very despairing things near the end of his life. But I have the sense that his Recollections of Joan of Arc, which he called his best book, seems to have been very strongly influenced by his friend George MacDonald. That is the closest I think Mark Twain ever comes to God in his work. And I'm entirely different for having read that book.

Alan: Well, look at how many years it took him.

Bernadette: So it’s the compassion that you praise going into the writing, compassion towards humanity and your character, that would redeem, I think, the quality of the writing to me.

Lily: I don’t think it’s merely compassion, certainly not in the human sense. It’s the compassion of God, which is more total, more brilliant, and deeper than we can understand. When I have compassion towards someone who is suffering, I want to end their suffering. God has the kind of compassion that looks at the suffering and says, I will let you suffer for ten more years so that you can become the person I want you to be. I hate that. I hate that.

But sometimes that vision, that vision for the totality of the work—not the compassion of the moment, but the compassion of the ages, the compassion of eternity—the God who looks from eternity on us and has compassion for us in our smallness, in our briefness, in our weakness, and sometimes allows terrible things to happen—there’s that perspective.

Bernadette: Could you find this in fiction, in theory, outside faith? Or you can't.

Lily: I don't necessarily connect a book to a person's faith. I think people have touched God in their writing who would not acknowledge God in their daily life. There’s plenty of people who claim to be Christian and then write terrible books. I don't think there's a one-to-one connection.

John: Read George Eliot.

Lily: Middlemarch.

John: The villain being, in my opinion, the dull ass of an Anglican priest, who’s married to this wonderful [woman]—

Lily: It’s beautiful. And yet—it’s the act of her [Dorothea’s] love that redeems him. There’s no villain in that book. There’s tragedy, there’s loss, there’s waste. There’s so much waste. But at the end of the book, her tomb... There's a verse in the Bible about a husband being redeemed by his wife. And as much as you detest her husband throughout the book, you understand that at the end, he was redeemed by her love, even if he wasn’t worthy of it.

Mako: One last question is: how can we be praying for you?

Lily: For strength and courage to do what God is asking of me, and for His love, because I am very short of His love—I run out every day. And for all of us to be built together into one kingdom and one vision.

Mako: Lily, thank you for being part of this conversation.