My older daughter has a new rule she learned at school: “Be kind.” She says it often—to her sister, to her friends, to me. Her younger sister has picked it up too.
On a recent afternoon, I found myself yelling at my kids—the kind of yelling born from sheer exhaustion and the chaos of parenthood. I had just yelled at them to “be kind,” and I felt terrible about it. My younger daughter looked up at me through tears and said, with full conviction, “Umma, you be kind too!!!”
I stopped. I laughed. And then I felt something too real to name cleanly. Embarrassment, yes. But also joy and pride. The sense that something true had just been spoken into the room.
Shinbaram, a Korean term, names a kind of ecstatic, Spirit-filled joy that rises from the resilience of those who have had to endure. It is not the tidy joy we perform in church on Sunday mornings. It breaks through, uninvited in exuberance, laughter, and the unfiltered truth-telling of a four-year-old who has had enough. While not originally a theological term, I use shinbaram to name “divine wind”—shin (spirit or the divine) and baram (wind).
In John 3:8, Jesus says that the Spirit blows where she wills. You hear her sound, but you do not know where she comes from or where she goes. She does not wait for me to be composed. She does not require a sanctuary. She shows up through my child’s tears, in the middle of my mess.
Hagar knew this. An enslaved Egyptian cast into the wilderness with her son, she is the first person in the Hebrew Bible to name God. Not a priest or a prophet, but someone society had discarded. In her most desperate moment, she encountered the divine and called God El-Roi, the God who sees. The Spirit met her exactly where she was and called it holy.
Mary knew this too. Her breathtaking song in Luke 1 does not come from comfort or power. It erupts from a young woman who had just received an impossible, life-altering call, and she sings of a world turned upside down: that the mighty will be brought low, the humble lifted up, the hungry filled. This is shinbaram—joy breaking through suffering, truth spoken from the margins, the Spirit moving through the ones the world overlooks.
AANHPI Month can feel complicated for those of us who hold both han (unresolved grief from injustice) and shinbaram (“divine wind”) at once—the weight of oppression, trauma, and erasure alongside the irrepressible joy that breaks forth from our communities and cultures. We do not all share the same stories, but we know what it is to be misread, overlooked, or positioned in ways that serve someone else’s narrative. We know what it is to carry deep wounds shaped by histories larger than ourselves—and to find the Spirit showing up anyway in a song, in a meal, in collective protest, in a child’s tearful retort.
As we conclude AANHPI Month, I invite you to pay attention. Where is the Spirit blowing unexpectedly around you? Where is joy breaking through from unlikely places—perhaps from the margins, from the small and overlooked, from the last place you expect? Where is your four-year-old looking up at you through tears and speaking truth into the room?
Perhaps the work—especially for those of us who are AANHPI—is not to prove that we belong within existing systems but to discern, bear witness to, and shed light on where the Spirit is already moving among us.
Sometimes the Spirit speaks most clearly through a four-year-old.
A version of this article first appeared in Freedom Friday from Love Mercy Do Justice.
