Dearests,
To the Hong Kong skyline 'tis difficult to bid farewell, but minutes ago I bid so and wait now the morn and a flight to Tokyo - by which, of course, I mean a flight to Pittsburgh, as all is one and the same after boarding at 9:20 the first of three connecting. I took this rainy morning with umbrella in hand at a Christian retreat center atop a mountain in the New Territories of Hong Kong, praying in a labyrinth over my last two months and months to come. It was a fitting and energizing way to both close my time here and open my return, as well as a vivid and poignant spot to finish my Old Testament reading and open the New. This evening I bussed to Repulse Bay and went nightswimming in a dark-clouded summer storm, again praying over my time, reciting scripture, and asking for more faith, love, and wisdom to guide my return.
I thought this evening to hold a night's vigil, as has been my custom before overseas flights, so to more quickly align my internal clock with that of yours, United States, but my eyes fail me now. Then to close, seven hours before a twenty-minute rail ride to the airport: Thank you so sincerely to those who supported me during my stay and continue to uplift me through prayer, and also very appreciatively to those who financed my work, placing a confidence and trust in me that so humbled me during final examinations week last May at college, to the point that I trembled beneath the blessing of your gracious support, thinking myself unfit for this task - as then I knew not where I would travel nor what I would do after that first week in Thailand! But all by grace has fared well and instructed me more than I could have foreseen.
I've to be quick. A slow boat west then I'm home. Until then, my love, and a part of Psalm 27 that an Alaskan comrade with whom I prayer journeyed through Vietnam and Laos bade me memorize:
'The Lord is my light and my salvation - whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life - of whom shall I be afraid?
When evil-doers assail me to eat up my flesh, my adversaries and foes, it is they who will stumble and fall. Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war arise against me, yet I will remain confident.
One thing I ask of the Lord, that this I may seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple...
Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.'
For faith,
js
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Saturday, July 5, 2008
Sunday in Hong Kong
"Prudence: Do you not think sometimes of the country from whence you came?
Christian: Yes, but with much shame and detestation. 'Truly, if I had been mindful of that country from whence I came out, I might have had opportunity to have returned; but now I desire a better country, that is, an heavenly.'" (48 Pilgrim's Progress)
Lovers of mercy and grace,
It's now been a twice reoccuring trend for me to, when nearing an overseas flight home after months abroad, idolize and daydream of having a bed again, a change of clothes, the security of space I call my own, friends and family, a computer unlike this one on which I can type without nine middle-aged Asian birds looking over my shoulder and chirping on their cellphones, a bath, cereal, leisure. And last week, coming out of Cambodia and counting the days until home, I was swooned hard and seduced by thoughts like those listed above, so that I pictured each successive day upon my return filled with undeniable warmth and happiness - the English language, hugging people I know, real coffee, socks, a sense of belonging. I was lost in my daydreams!, and should have known better, as, when I returned two years ago after 10 months abroad, the tension of my expectations with the reality of home threw me for weeks into an awful mix-up.
But good comes out of loss, and God works all things good for those who profess his Son - even if they first write pithy blog entries about heartache coming from the loss of their phone in Cambodia! It was by grace two days ago that I was at first confronted and then uplifted by the thought that, until I daydream of heaven and life in my Lord's coming kingdom like I did so of home and seeing my friends and family again, all will inevitably come to a sigh, 'a chasing after the wind! meaningless, meaningless, meaningless.' And so while I yes long to be with you all in three days time, I've realigned what here I've called my daydreams to not manifest in the world - to not chase after the wind - but, by the yearning of my heart toward becoming Christlike, to take the God of Israel's kingdom as their backdrop.
My sister reminded me of as much just minutes ago:
"hey bro,
try not to get worked up about your phone
that's just satan working
it can be replaced.
see ya soon!
iloveyou
ash"
And I wish these typed words could outpour into you the joy that overcame me this morning in Hong Kong upon returning to church after Sundays away! Part of why I routed my flight home through Hong Kong was to return to a church located in a skyscraper on Hong Kong island called "The Vine," into which I was led two years ago after stumbling around mainland China for eight months. Two years ago, church at "The Vine" was my first English-speaking service after eight months of sitting in on Mandarin above-ground churches in mainland China. That Sunday morning sped my spirit, reviving it for the Spanish pilgrimage I then took up.
Yet all was even more this morning. I woke early and went to an Anglican service a short walk from my hostel, during which two of the songs that this summer I have continually woke to find singing in my head were sung - a special embrace, I think, from Him whom I love. I then quickly took the underground to make late service at "The Vine" - and I wish you all were there! I take refuge in worship, and, longing now for weeks to praise and be uplifted by a "corporate worship experience," the spirit-filled worship time at "The Vine" this morning was and will be reason, I think, to route every flight I take in the coming years through Hong Kong on a Sunday.
I've to run now, as soon my time on this computer will expire and the Asian birds behind me waiting for Internet I fear are plotting a coup. Until we meet next, perhaps my favorite two verses from a Psalm:
"Therefore let everyone who is godly
pray to you
while you may be found;
surely when the might waters rise,
they will not reach him.
You are my hiding place;
you will protect me from trouble
and surround me with songs of
deliverance." Psalm 32:6-7
Love,
js
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Heavy-Hearted in Bangkok
Friends,
While I am defeated and downtrodden this morning in wake of ten heart-wrenching days in Cambodia, a weight in my stomach that pulls to be home, and the morning's discovery that I lost my cellphone in Khmer lands, God remains good, and I'm trying to affirm that now and not dwell on else. I arrived in Bangkok from Phnom Penh yesterday morning, and I fly to China within hours.
So much of Cambodia was a tremendous blessing to me, witnessing and facilitating the Lord's work, and yet I keep coming back to my last day in the country, when I bicycled to the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng Prison of the Khmer Rouge. A Holocaust camp in the East: mass graves, horrors, the after-effect of Pol Pot's 1970s plot of genocide. My mind twists and turns around the motivations and deranged morality of those who killed, while my heart remains firm to remember that each skull not "once had" a soul but "now has" a soul.
I traveled most days with an adult Cambodian couple, their two daughters, and a microbiologist who has ministered in and out of China for the last 20 years. The five of them are all from my hometown. We scoped and considered opportunities to cultivate Godly growth in local areas over the next five years and distributed medicine to the ill and love to formerly enslaved teenage girls at a place called the Rapha House. I shared one morning what God is working in my life, pulling from, as usual, Luke 14: 25-27, Romans 12: 2, and 1 Thessolonians: 16-18. But most of my time was spent praying for the wisdom and leadership of the Cambodian man with whom I traveled as he shared daily the Gospel with his people, be they asking for money on the street or assigned to leadership positions within the Rapha House.
Both he and his wife escaped from the Khmer Rouge over the Thai border and fled to the US. Daily, as we drove to our work for the day, a sight of the land or people would cause them to tear-up with stories of their teenage flight from the Khmer Rouge. I'd listen.
I've yet no resolve or conclusion, no truths exacted from Cambodia and this heavy heart, except to continue in the Word and pray. I'm stalling my crusade through the Old Testament so to not start the New Testament until I land in the US. And reading John Piper's book, "Let the Nations Be Glad: The Supremacy of God in Missions", to be finished in two days so to start Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" before boarding a plane to Pittsburgh.
Oh, friends, I'm down, but that will pass. It's no mood in which to write you, but tonight I'm away to China in route to Hong Kong, and I fear our correspodence from now until the 9th will, when occuring, be brief, and soon enough draw to an end, as my summer's stay in Asia draws to an end. As I told my Dad last night when we spoke, I've learned so much this summer that has repositioned Christianity for me as not just a doctrine to understand and behavior to follow, but an alive and real seeking of God's will and face.
"And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy and
to walk humbly with your God" (Micah 6:8)
To love mercy,
js
While I am defeated and downtrodden this morning in wake of ten heart-wrenching days in Cambodia, a weight in my stomach that pulls to be home, and the morning's discovery that I lost my cellphone in Khmer lands, God remains good, and I'm trying to affirm that now and not dwell on else. I arrived in Bangkok from Phnom Penh yesterday morning, and I fly to China within hours.
So much of Cambodia was a tremendous blessing to me, witnessing and facilitating the Lord's work, and yet I keep coming back to my last day in the country, when I bicycled to the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng Prison of the Khmer Rouge. A Holocaust camp in the East: mass graves, horrors, the after-effect of Pol Pot's 1970s plot of genocide. My mind twists and turns around the motivations and deranged morality of those who killed, while my heart remains firm to remember that each skull not "once had" a soul but "now has" a soul.
I traveled most days with an adult Cambodian couple, their two daughters, and a microbiologist who has ministered in and out of China for the last 20 years. The five of them are all from my hometown. We scoped and considered opportunities to cultivate Godly growth in local areas over the next five years and distributed medicine to the ill and love to formerly enslaved teenage girls at a place called the Rapha House. I shared one morning what God is working in my life, pulling from, as usual, Luke 14: 25-27, Romans 12: 2, and 1 Thessolonians: 16-18. But most of my time was spent praying for the wisdom and leadership of the Cambodian man with whom I traveled as he shared daily the Gospel with his people, be they asking for money on the street or assigned to leadership positions within the Rapha House.
Both he and his wife escaped from the Khmer Rouge over the Thai border and fled to the US. Daily, as we drove to our work for the day, a sight of the land or people would cause them to tear-up with stories of their teenage flight from the Khmer Rouge. I'd listen.
I've yet no resolve or conclusion, no truths exacted from Cambodia and this heavy heart, except to continue in the Word and pray. I'm stalling my crusade through the Old Testament so to not start the New Testament until I land in the US. And reading John Piper's book, "Let the Nations Be Glad: The Supremacy of God in Missions", to be finished in two days so to start Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" before boarding a plane to Pittsburgh.
Oh, friends, I'm down, but that will pass. It's no mood in which to write you, but tonight I'm away to China in route to Hong Kong, and I fear our correspodence from now until the 9th will, when occuring, be brief, and soon enough draw to an end, as my summer's stay in Asia draws to an end. As I told my Dad last night when we spoke, I've learned so much this summer that has repositioned Christianity for me as not just a doctrine to understand and behavior to follow, but an alive and real seeking of God's will and face.
"And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy and
to walk humbly with your God" (Micah 6:8)
To love mercy,
js
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Charting Cambodia
Hi all,
I've only minutes before I must leave to the Bangkok airport but wanted to write quickly to say that from this afternoon until July 2nd I will be in Cambodia and thus will most likely not be with you via these letters. I'm meeting a Cambodian friend there who lives and works in my hometown and, from what I know now, which is slight, we will be traveling together while he continues the outreach and leadership training that he began many years ago.
I knew little of Cambodia until a week ago, when on a bus ride to a mountain village I read a series of articles I found online about the country's history over the last thirty years. For those interested, and I recommend the read, you can find those articles here: http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/banyan1.htm
A small preview - After the Khmer Rouge overthrew Lon Nol's regime and took the capital city, Phnom Penh, they issued the following ultimatum decrees, nationwide:
1. Evacuate people from all towns.
2. Abolish all markets.
3. Abolish Lon Nol regime currency, and withhold the revolutionary currency that had been printed.
4. Defrock all Buddhist monks, and put them to work growing rice.
5. Execute all leaders of the Lon Nol regime beginning with the top leaders.
6. Establish high-level cooperatives throughout the country, with communal eating.
7. Expel the entire Vietnamese minority population.
8. Dispatch troops to the borders, particularly the Vietnamese border.
That was just 32 years ago.
I've now to run off, grab a bag of sticky rice, and chart for the airport. I was last night outside the Prime Minister of Thailand's house with thousands of yellow-shirted and bandanna-ed Thai as they continued their nearly month-long protest against the Prime Minister and, from what a savvy businessman who studied at Skidmore College in PA told me as I took my street stall noodles on the bridge, his prostitution of Thailand's resources to foreign investors and resistance to the people's want of democracy and a say in their government. A grand time was had by all.
Until the 2nd,
js
I've only minutes before I must leave to the Bangkok airport but wanted to write quickly to say that from this afternoon until July 2nd I will be in Cambodia and thus will most likely not be with you via these letters. I'm meeting a Cambodian friend there who lives and works in my hometown and, from what I know now, which is slight, we will be traveling together while he continues the outreach and leadership training that he began many years ago.
I knew little of Cambodia until a week ago, when on a bus ride to a mountain village I read a series of articles I found online about the country's history over the last thirty years. For those interested, and I recommend the read, you can find those articles here: http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/banyan1.htm
A small preview - After the Khmer Rouge overthrew Lon Nol's regime and took the capital city, Phnom Penh, they issued the following ultimatum decrees, nationwide:
1. Evacuate people from all towns.
2. Abolish all markets.
3. Abolish Lon Nol regime currency, and withhold the revolutionary currency that had been printed.
4. Defrock all Buddhist monks, and put them to work growing rice.
5. Execute all leaders of the Lon Nol regime beginning with the top leaders.
6. Establish high-level cooperatives throughout the country, with communal eating.
7. Expel the entire Vietnamese minority population.
8. Dispatch troops to the borders, particularly the Vietnamese border.
That was just 32 years ago.
I've now to run off, grab a bag of sticky rice, and chart for the airport. I was last night outside the Prime Minister of Thailand's house with thousands of yellow-shirted and bandanna-ed Thai as they continued their nearly month-long protest against the Prime Minister and, from what a savvy businessman who studied at Skidmore College in PA told me as I took my street stall noodles on the bridge, his prostitution of Thailand's resources to foreign investors and resistance to the people's want of democracy and a say in their government. A grand time was had by all.
Until the 2nd,
js
Friday, June 20, 2008
Bangkok, Burma, and a Golden Crucifix
"Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus."
1 Thessalonians 2:16-18
My friends,
On an evening such as this, just writing you feels almost as if I were sitting beside you. I sit, though, in Bangkok, after a nine hour bus ride from the far northwest of Thailand to where I just read via Yahoo news is the happening site of a building two-week protest by Thai citizens outside the headquarters of their Prime Minister. Thailand parades its King on banners as far as the eye can see and curses its Prime Minister on his doostep. So it goes, and perhaps tomorrow morning I'll check the scene.
But this afternoon, an afternoon that dragged into the evening! I hurried bright-eyed off the bus as it came to a still, eager to find my hostel, toss my bags, and look to some sticky rice and hardboiled eggs for dinner, thinking I might wander the neighborhood streets as evening came and retire like usual with my reading before bed. Wander I did, for two hours, though not on my neighborhood streets and not after tossing my bags and sitting for dinner.
I left Mae Sot this morning in style - that is, without knowing where I would go upon arrival in Bangkok, as I forgot to write down the address or memorize directions to the hostel I booked last night. "No problem [in Thai: 'mae pen rai']," I thought. "I'll stumble upon an internet cafe, log simply into my email, write down directions to the hostel and be off."
To end quickly what I now see turning into a multi-paragraphed, digressive story, I ended up in no sight of an internet cafe but being befriended by a young Thai student who works at the Bangkok "Children's Discovery Musuem". She took my by subway to an internet cafe, loaned me her pen several times to write down directions as I sat at the computer, then led me again to the subway and pointed me on my way, gifting me her pen as she left: "I think you will need this other times."
I exited the subway knowing that my hostel, "Madras Hostel", was a short fifteen minute walk from the subway, but not knowing which way to walk. I walked, walked, double-backed and walked farther, and right at two hours after I left the Bangkok bus station, I looked up to see a bright yellow, white, and red glowing "Madras Hostel" sign, and my back almost broke as I went to kiss the ground. The hostess and her five-year old daughter greeted me warmly, and she, taking pity on my soiled brow, upgraded my room from a large ten person dorm to my own room with balcony and A/C, and my back almost broke as I went to kiss the ground. By grace, by grace.
--
But all of this is nothing in light of what I meant to write you last night but got lost in pages of personal emails and hostel bookings. I will start in yesterday morning, though what I really wish to write you of is the evening.
I woke my first morning in Mae Sot with plans to make my way to the Myanmar border, a mere six miles away, thinking I should go in for a one day visa and have a look at the country whose reckless military junta is oppressing the Karen people of whom I wrote you so fondly in my last letter. I rented the silver bike of a college-aged coffee shop owner, whose store I inaugurated with an espresso the afternoon previous, and made straight on the road that led without divergence to the Burmese border. A river separates the two countries - Thailand and Myanmar - and I could see it from a ways back before I got to it.
At the Thai departure I left my bicycle for the day - "Only walking!" - and trodded over the 400 meter "Friendship Bridge." The grandson of a WWII Burmese translator for the British army took me in conversation over the bridge, hoping I'd hire him for a tour guide once stepping foot in his country - I didn't, of course, but on the way over the bridge he mentioned to me 1) that he US was very good because the US is very powerful and 2) that he was especially interested in Israel, because Israel gained their independence in the same year as Burma gained its independence - 1948. This second comment was more interesting to me than the first, and it largely guided my thoughts that afternoon, as I tarried without aim down muddied and potholed dirt avenues and interacted with one too many armed and camouflage-jacketed Burmese army boys for my liking.
I saw that morning and afternoon three or four tinted-windowed and oversize-tired trucks with seven to eight camo-ed boys in the back, holding their rifles pointed to the sky. Right when I stepped into the Burmese Arrival office at Immigration, a whistle blew and the workers inside tossed on their helmets and darted out into the street. A Thai military captain was passing back into Thailand, and just five feet from me the road through the gate was clogged with flashing cameras and armed military men.
I'd nowhere to go that day, no map of the streets, but I did have my Bible and camera in my satchel, and, not being able to think of anywhere more active and interesting, walked along the river's edge that separated Thai from Burmese. Though I'll never admit it, I'm really very mischevious and troublesome in foreign lands, and so, when a wooden gate opened into an area manned by a who-couldn't-be-over-17-years-old Burmese boy and his wooden-butted rifle, I thought I'd try the charm of a foreigner and see if he'd let me pass. He did, kind of - though his hand waved "no", he had a smile on his face, so, donning a smile on my face, I walked on by with a grinning, "O.K.!" I sat, read, and prayed for ten minutes looking over the river before he came by my side and grinned another of his toothless grins with still that wooden-butted rifle on his shoulder. I rose - it then feeling very eerie - and left the riverside, four hours later hopping again on my bicycle and riding back to Mae Sot, "Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus."
1 Thessalonians 2:16-18
My friends,
On an evening such as this, just writing you feels almost as if I were sitting beside you. I sit, though, in Bangkok, after a nine hour bus ride from the far northwest of Thailand to where I just read via Yahoo news is the happening site of a building two-week protest by Thai citizens outside the headquarters of their Prime Minister. Thailand parades its King on banners as far as the eye can see and curses its Prime Minister on his doostep. So it goes, and perhaps tomorrow morning I'll check the scene.
But this afternoon, an afternoon that dragged into the evening! I hurried bright-eyed off the bus as it came to a still, eager to find my hostel, toss my bags, and look to some sticky rice and hardboiled eggs for dinner, thinking I might wander the neighborhood streets as evening came and retire like usual with my reading before bed. Wander I did, for two hours, though not on my neighborhood streets and not after tossing my bags and sitting for dinner.
I left Mae Sot this morning in style - that is, without knowing where I would go upon arrival in Bangkok, as I forgot to write down the address or memorize directions to the hostel I booked last night. "No problem [in Thai: 'mae pen rai']," I thought. "I'll stumble upon an internet cafe, log simply into my email, write down directions to the hostel and be off."
To end quickly what I now see turning into a multi-paragraphed, digressive story, I ended up in no sight of an internet cafe but being befriended by a young Thai student who works at the Bangkok "Children's Discovery Musuem". She took my by subway to an internet cafe, loaned me her pen several times to write down directions as I sat at the computer, then led me again to the subway and pointed me on my way, gifting me her pen as she left: "I think you will need this other times."
I exited the subway knowing that my hostel, "Madras Hostel", was a short fifteen minute walk from the subway, but not knowing which way to walk. I walked, walked, double-backed and walked farther, and right at two hours after I left the Bangkok bus station, I looked up to see a bright yellow, white, and red glowing "Madras Hostel" sign, and my back almost broke as I went to kiss the ground. The hostess and her five-year old daughter greeted me warmly, and she, taking pity on my soiled brow, upgraded my room from a large ten person dorm to my own room with balcony and A/C, and my back almost broke as I went to kiss the ground. By grace, by grace.
--
But all of this is nothing in light of what I meant to write you last night but got lost in pages of personal emails and hostel bookings. I will start in yesterday morning, though what I really wish to write you of is the evening.
I woke my first morning in Mae Sot with plans to make my way to the Myanmar border, a mere six miles away, thinking I should go in for a one day visa and have a look at the country whose reckless military junta is oppressing the Karen people of whom I wrote you so fondly in my last letter. I rented the silver bike of a college-aged coffee shop owner, whose store I inaugurated with an espresso the afternoon previous, and made straight on the road that led without divergence to the Burmese border. A river separates the two countries - Thailand and Myanmar - and I could see it from a ways back before I got to it.
At the Thai departure I left my bicycle for the day - "Only walking!" - and trodded over the 400 meter "Friendship Bridge." The grandson of a WWII Burmese translator for the British army took me in conversation over the bridge, hoping I'd hire him for a tour guide once stepping foot in his country - I didn't, of course, but on the way over the bridge he mentioned to me 1) that he US was very good because the US is very powerful and 2) that he was especially interested in Israel, because Israel gained their independence in the same year as Burma gained its independence - 1948. This second comment was more interesting to me than the first, and it largely guided my thoughts that afternoon, as I tarried without aim down muddied and potholed dirt avenues and interacted with one too many armed and camouflage-jacketed Burmese army boys for my liking.
I saw that morning and afternoon three or four tinted-windowed and oversize-tired trucks with seven to eight camo-ed boys in the back, holding their rifles pointed to the sky. Right when I stepped into the Burmese Arrival office at Immigration, a whistle blew and the workers inside tossed on their helmets and darted out into the street. A Thai military captain was passing back into Thailand, and just five feet from me the road through the gate was clogged with flashing cameras and armed military men.
I'd nowhere to go that day, no map of the streets, but I did have my Bible and camera in my satchel, and, not being able to think of anywhere more active and interesting, walked along the river's edge that separated Thai from Burmese. Though I'll never admit it, I'm really very mischevious and troublesome in foreign lands, and so, when a wooden gate opened into an area manned by a who-couldn't-be-over-17-years-old Burmese boy and his wooden-butted rifle, I thought I'd try the charm of a foreigner and see if he'd let me pass. He did, kind of - though his hand waved "no", he had a smile on his face, so, donning a smile on my face, I walked on by with a grinning, "O.K.!" I sat, read, and prayed for ten minutes looking over the river before he came by my side and grinned another of his toothless grins with still that wooden-butted rifle on his shoulder. I rose - it then feeling very eerie - and left the riverside, four hours later hopping again on my bicycle and riding back to Mae Sot, needing to shower before attending the art gallery opening of which I wrote you last time.
The store at which the art show was to be hosted functions as an aid to Karen refugees from Burma, selling the handiwork of Karen women and returning 80% of the profits to the women who weaved the crafts. I visited the store a few hours before the show opened and spoke again with whom I thought to be owner, who, unlike the day before, wore a gold crucifix around her neck.
This made me overjoyed, as right now I am doing little more than reading my Bible and praying all day, and I delight to be led by grace to others who love Him whom I love. But after speaking with her for ten minutes, I discoved the delight to be had was not really mine but hers - and because of this, my delight was all the more!
I told her I had been supporting missionaries and their work in Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos for the past month. She told me that she was Karen and became a Christian in Burma, her homeland - but then she said how much she envied and respected those who could talk about the Bible, because she couldn't do so very well, and that she was often scolded by her sister for not going to church when she had to work on Sundays. And when I left her minutes later, it hit me that I missed just the opportunity for which I live this summer: to encourage those in the faith in whatever way I can. So I hopped again on my silver bicycle, charted to the coffee shop, and minutes later with verses in mind, pen in hand, and espresso sitting to my right, prayed that the words to come in the letter to my friend would not speak with the reason that I used to craft them but would move by the Spirit to give her whatever it was she needed at that time.
To note that God desires obedience and a loving heart more than a person who grumbles but goes to church religiously every Sunday:
"Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the voice of the Lord? To obey is better than to sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams" (1 Samuel 15:22).
"The Lord detests the sacrifice of the wicked, but the prayer of the upright pleases him." (Proverbs 15:8)
And Luke 13:10-17, when Jesus one-ups the synagogue ruler and heals on the Sabbath.
--
I handed the letter, three pages torn out of my journal and folder, to her as I left, then bicycled the streets 'til sunset praying she might be uplifted and stand firm in the confidence of knowing Christ.
I'm off now - the moon is full, the night is young, and I read that Bangkok never sleeps: only kidding. I'll sleep, but hopefully not before finishing Isaiah. I had never read it before this morning, but man, it's good. I was reminded yesterday of my great love for Ecclesiastes and was awaken with a new fondness for a new book with this new morning. Things go well.
Now go check out Isaiah 44:6-23. My prayer group read it atop a mountain in Laos, meters from a golden temple, and I keep coming back to it in thought and prayer.
Yours,
js
1 Thessalonians 2:16-18
My friends,
On an evening such as this, just writing you feels almost as if I were sitting beside you. I sit, though, in Bangkok, after a nine hour bus ride from the far northwest of Thailand to where I just read via Yahoo news is the happening site of a building two-week protest by Thai citizens outside the headquarters of their Prime Minister. Thailand parades its King on banners as far as the eye can see and curses its Prime Minister on his doostep. So it goes, and perhaps tomorrow morning I'll check the scene.
But this afternoon, an afternoon that dragged into the evening! I hurried bright-eyed off the bus as it came to a still, eager to find my hostel, toss my bags, and look to some sticky rice and hardboiled eggs for dinner, thinking I might wander the neighborhood streets as evening came and retire like usual with my reading before bed. Wander I did, for two hours, though not on my neighborhood streets and not after tossing my bags and sitting for dinner.
I left Mae Sot this morning in style - that is, without knowing where I would go upon arrival in Bangkok, as I forgot to write down the address or memorize directions to the hostel I booked last night. "No problem [in Thai: 'mae pen rai']," I thought. "I'll stumble upon an internet cafe, log simply into my email, write down directions to the hostel and be off."
To end quickly what I now see turning into a multi-paragraphed, digressive story, I ended up in no sight of an internet cafe but being befriended by a young Thai student who works at the Bangkok "Children's Discovery Musuem". She took my by subway to an internet cafe, loaned me her pen several times to write down directions as I sat at the computer, then led me again to the subway and pointed me on my way, gifting me her pen as she left: "I think you will need this other times."
I exited the subway knowing that my hostel, "Madras Hostel", was a short fifteen minute walk from the subway, but not knowing which way to walk. I walked, walked, double-backed and walked farther, and right at two hours after I left the Bangkok bus station, I looked up to see a bright yellow, white, and red glowing "Madras Hostel" sign, and my back almost broke as I went to kiss the ground. The hostess and her five-year old daughter greeted me warmly, and she, taking pity on my soiled brow, upgraded my room from a large ten person dorm to my own room with balcony and A/C, and my back almost broke as I went to kiss the ground. By grace, by grace.
--
But all of this is nothing in light of what I meant to write you last night but got lost in pages of personal emails and hostel bookings. I will start in yesterday morning, though what I really wish to write you of is the evening.
I woke my first morning in Mae Sot with plans to make my way to the Myanmar border, a mere six miles away, thinking I should go in for a one day visa and have a look at the country whose reckless military junta is oppressing the Karen people of whom I wrote you so fondly in my last letter. I rented the silver bike of a college-aged coffee shop owner, whose store I inaugurated with an espresso the afternoon previous, and made straight on the road that led without divergence to the Burmese border. A river separates the two countries - Thailand and Myanmar - and I could see it from a ways back before I got to it.
At the Thai departure I left my bicycle for the day - "Only walking!" - and trodded over the 400 meter "Friendship Bridge." The grandson of a WWII Burmese translator for the British army took me in conversation over the bridge, hoping I'd hire him for a tour guide once stepping foot in his country - I didn't, of course, but on the way over the bridge he mentioned to me 1) that he US was very good because the US is very powerful and 2) that he was especially interested in Israel, because Israel gained their independence in the same year as Burma gained its independence - 1948. This second comment was more interesting to me than the first, and it largely guided my thoughts that afternoon, as I tarried without aim down muddied and potholed dirt avenues and interacted with one too many armed and camouflage-jacketed Burmese army boys for my liking.
I saw that morning and afternoon three or four tinted-windowed and oversize-tired trucks with seven to eight camo-ed boys in the back, holding their rifles pointed to the sky. Right when I stepped into the Burmese Arrival office at Immigration, a whistle blew and the workers inside tossed on their helmets and darted out into the street. A Thai military captain was passing back into Thailand, and just five feet from me the road through the gate was clogged with flashing cameras and armed military men.
I'd nowhere to go that day, no map of the streets, but I did have my Bible and camera in my satchel, and, not being able to think of anywhere more active and interesting, walked along the river's edge that separated Thai from Burmese. Though I'll never admit it, I'm really very mischevious and troublesome in foreign lands, and so, when a wooden gate opened into an area manned by a who-couldn't-be-over-17-years-old Burmese boy and his wooden-butted rifle, I thought I'd try the charm of a foreigner and see if he'd let me pass. He did, kind of - though his hand waved "no", he had a smile on his face, so, donning a smile on my face, I walked on by with a grinning, "O.K.!" I sat, read, and prayed for ten minutes looking over the river before he came by my side and grinned another of his toothless grins with still that wooden-butted rifle on his shoulder. I rose - it then feeling very eerie - and left the riverside, four hours later hopping again on my bicycle and riding back to Mae Sot, "Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus."
1 Thessalonians 2:16-18
My friends,
On an evening such as this, just writing you feels almost as if I were sitting beside you. I sit, though, in Bangkok, after a nine hour bus ride from the far northwest of Thailand to where I just read via Yahoo news is the happening site of a building two-week protest by Thai citizens outside the headquarters of their Prime Minister. Thailand parades its King on banners as far as the eye can see and curses its Prime Minister on his doostep. So it goes, and perhaps tomorrow morning I'll check the scene.
But this afternoon, an afternoon that dragged into the evening! I hurried bright-eyed off the bus as it came to a still, eager to find my hostel, toss my bags, and look to some sticky rice and hardboiled eggs for dinner, thinking I might wander the neighborhood streets as evening came and retire like usual with my reading before bed. Wander I did, for two hours, though not on my neighborhood streets and not after tossing my bags and sitting for dinner.
I left Mae Sot this morning in style - that is, without knowing where I would go upon arrival in Bangkok, as I forgot to write down the address or memorize directions to the hostel I booked last night. "No problem [in Thai: 'mae pen rai']," I thought. "I'll stumble upon an internet cafe, log simply into my email, write down directions to the hostel and be off."
To end quickly what I now see turning into a multi-paragraphed, digressive story, I ended up in no sight of an internet cafe but being befriended by a young Thai student who works at the Bangkok "Children's Discovery Musuem". She took my by subway to an internet cafe, loaned me her pen several times to write down directions as I sat at the computer, then led me again to the subway and pointed me on my way, gifting me her pen as she left: "I think you will need this other times."
I exited the subway knowing that my hostel, "Madras Hostel", was a short fifteen minute walk from the subway, but not knowing which way to walk. I walked, walked, double-backed and walked farther, and right at two hours after I left the Bangkok bus station, I looked up to see a bright yellow, white, and red glowing "Madras Hostel" sign, and my back almost broke as I went to kiss the ground. The hostess and her five-year old daughter greeted me warmly, and she, taking pity on my soiled brow, upgraded my room from a large ten person dorm to my own room with balcony and A/C, and my back almost broke as I went to kiss the ground. By grace, by grace.
--
But all of this is nothing in light of what I meant to write you last night but got lost in pages of personal emails and hostel bookings. I will start in yesterday morning, though what I really wish to write you of is the evening.
I woke my first morning in Mae Sot with plans to make my way to the Myanmar border, a mere six miles away, thinking I should go in for a one day visa and have a look at the country whose reckless military junta is oppressing the Karen people of whom I wrote you so fondly in my last letter. I rented the silver bike of a college-aged coffee shop owner, whose store I inaugurated with an espresso the afternoon previous, and made straight on the road that led without divergence to the Burmese border. A river separates the two countries - Thailand and Myanmar - and I could see it from a ways back before I got to it.
At the Thai departure I left my bicycle for the day - "Only walking!" - and trodded over the 400 meter "Friendship Bridge." The grandson of a WWII Burmese translator for the British army took me in conversation over the bridge, hoping I'd hire him for a tour guide once stepping foot in his country - I didn't, of course, but on the way over the bridge he mentioned to me 1) that he US was very good because the US is very powerful and 2) that he was especially interested in Israel, because Israel gained their independence in the same year as Burma gained its independence - 1948. This second comment was more interesting to me than the first, and it largely guided my thoughts that afternoon, as I tarried without aim down muddied and potholed dirt avenues and interacted with one too many armed and camouflage-jacketed Burmese army boys for my liking.
I saw that morning and afternoon three or four tinted-windowed and oversize-tired trucks with seven to eight camo-ed boys in the back, holding their rifles pointed to the sky. Right when I stepped into the Burmese Arrival office at Immigration, a whistle blew and the workers inside tossed on their helmets and darted out into the street. A Thai military captain was passing back into Thailand, and just five feet from me the road through the gate was clogged with flashing cameras and armed military men.
I'd nowhere to go that day, no map of the streets, but I did have my Bible and camera in my satchel, and, not being able to think of anywhere more active and interesting, walked along the river's edge that separated Thai from Burmese. Though I'll never admit it, I'm really very mischevious and troublesome in foreign lands, and so, when a wooden gate opened into an area manned by a who-couldn't-be-over-17-years-old Burmese boy and his wooden-butted rifle, I thought I'd try the charm of a foreigner and see if he'd let me pass. He did, kind of - though his hand waved "no", he had a smile on his face, so, donning a smile on my face, I walked on by with a grinning, "O.K.!" I sat, read, and prayed for ten minutes looking over the river before he came by my side and grinned another of his toothless grins with still that wooden-butted rifle on his shoulder. I rose - it then feeling very eerie - and left the riverside, four hours later hopping again on my bicycle and riding back to Mae Sot, needing to shower before attending the art gallery opening of which I wrote you last time.
The store at which the art show was to be hosted functions as an aid to Karen refugees from Burma, selling the handiwork of Karen women and returning 80% of the profits to the women who weaved the crafts. I visited the store a few hours before the show opened and spoke again with whom I thought to be owner, who, unlike the day before, wore a gold crucifix around her neck.
This made me overjoyed, as right now I am doing little more than reading my Bible and praying all day, and I delight to be led by grace to others who love Him whom I love. But after speaking with her for ten minutes, I discoved the delight to be had was not really mine but hers - and because of this, my delight was all the more!
I told her I had been supporting missionaries and their work in Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos for the past month. She told me that she was Karen and became a Christian in Burma, her homeland - but then she said how much she envied and respected those who could talk about the Bible, because she couldn't do so very well, and that she was often scolded by her sister for not going to church when she had to work on Sundays. And when I left her minutes later, it hit me that I missed just the opportunity for which I live this summer: to encourage those in the faith in whatever way I can. So I hopped again on my silver bicycle, charted to the coffee shop, and minutes later with verses in mind, pen in hand, and espresso sitting to my right, prayed that the words to come in the letter to my friend would not speak with the reason that I used to craft them but would move by the Spirit to give her whatever it was she needed at that time.
To note that God desires obedience and a loving heart more than a person who grumbles but goes to church religiously every Sunday:
"Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the voice of the Lord? To obey is better than to sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams" (1 Samuel 15:22).
"The Lord detests the sacrifice of the wicked, but the prayer of the upright pleases him." (Proverbs 15:8)
And Luke 13:10-17, when Jesus one-ups the synagogue ruler and heals on the Sabbath.
--
I handed the letter, three pages torn out of my journal and folder, to her as I left, then bicycled the streets 'til sunset praying she might be uplifted and stand firm in the confidence of knowing Christ.
I'm off now - the moon is full, the night is young, and I read that Bangkok never sleeps: only kidding. I'll sleep, but hopefully not before finishing Isaiah. I had never read it before this morning, but man, it's good. I was reminded yesterday of my great love for Ecclesiastes and was awaken with a new fondness for a new book with this new morning. Things go well.
Now go check out Isaiah 44:6-23. My prayer group read it atop a mountain in Laos, meters from a golden temple, and I keep coming back to it in thought and prayer.
Yours,
js
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Two Psalms and the Karen
"Blessed are those whose strength is in you,
who have set their hearts on pilgrimage."
Psalm 84:5
I woke with a start this morning, as I woke last morning and the morning before, my body not able to sleep past six hours on the night. My watch read 6:40 a.m., one of my bus options for the day was due to leave at 7:00, so by 6:50 I had left my key with the grey haired fellow at reception and set course for the bus station, scanning the sidewalks for a boiled egg vendor so as not to start the six hour bus trek down the Thai - Myanmar without my day's keep.
The bus - not a bus at all, really, but a truck converted into a taxi with benches running the length of its bed - waited near a monk and the green-shirted driver, who welcomed me kindly and told me that we weren't due to leave until 8:00. I slung my knapsack - not a knapsack at all, really, but the term is more rustic and of a wanderer, I think, than "backpack" - on the rear seat, so I could once we left city limits easily hop up and hang off the rail on the roof a la garbage man, and trod to the morning market for breakfast.
Breakfast, a mug of peanut milk and six or so fried peanut-sized dough balls, came and went at a Muslim family's food stall, and soon after we - the orange-robed monk, green-shirted driver, and I - were off in route to the border town from where I now write you, Mae Sot, Thailand. The monk was duly granted the front seat in the cabin, and I was quickly standing and hanging off the rails, a real sore sight amid the jungle background of our route - but I hadn't much of a better choice, as before we departed the town we loaded a motorbike into the bed of the truck, into what would be the leg room of ten or so migrant farmers and village peasants as they boarded on and boarded off during our full morning and early afternoon's journey.
I was full of joy the moment I woke today - perhaps due to knowing I would for half the day be hanging off the back of a converted pickup truck-taxi as it snaked over mountains and aside rivers that separate Thailand and Myanmar; perhaps due to my now being in the Psalms of King David on my summer's commission of reading the Bible from page 1 to (my edition) page 964 (at Psalm 107, I'm now on page 474); perhaps due to, after finishing St. John of the Cross's "Dark Night of the Soul" yesterday, I'm now with an anonymous Russian peasant's "The Way of a Pilgrim", which I'll write more of soon - but more likely due to, ever since coming back from the ten-day prayer journey through Vietnam and Laos, I've been blessed to feel convicted and find joy in prayer and keeping mindful of the glory of God in nearly every - or, I try for nearly every - moment of my days, whether that manifests in praying for the Karen refugees who ride beside me or really trying to get in tune with what my Russian peasant's book calls "knowledge of the speech of created things" but is more accurately described as the sighing of all creation to glorify God and unite with Him.
"Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be
glad;
let the sea resound, andall that is in it;
let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them.
Then all the trees of the forest will sing for joy;
they will sing before the Lord, for he comes,
he comes to judge the earth." Psalm 96: 11-13
So often we think, "Alas! if I don't praise God, the rocks might sing of his magnifence, and how awful that would be!" when instead we might think of joining in the singing of all creation that ascribes to the Lord the glory due His name. The Psalms are full of such references, and my Russian peasant, as well as Miguel Unamuno, seem to think similarly.
But this is not at all what I planned to write you this evening. I could write you all evening - yes, gladly - but I've dinner soon to fetch and pushups too to do before bed, keeping on the schedule of my comrades in Chiang Mai. So on with it.
After farmers and villagers came and went, nearly four and a half hours into the journey and during one of the times when I alone was in the back of the truck, a camouflage-jacketed middle-aged Thai man jumped on with his fatigued-green knapsack (knapsack! not backpack!) at one of the many police checkpoints, designed, I witnessed later, to ensure those traveling are registered Thai citizens or visa-ed travelers and not escapees from forested Myanmar. He wore a U.S. Marines jacket and spoke a fair bit of English, enough to let me onto his now ten year's mission and occupation.
Since 1997, he has served as 2nd Lieutenant in the Karen National Union, a type of vigilante armed force to protect the Karen people, against whom the Burmese government has for the last fighty-eight years waged a ruthless attempt at genocide. He spoke five words very well - "kill you", "Burma", "Thailand", and "border"- and through these was able to communicate that his position is to patrol the border, along which I had been traveling for the last four and a half hours, and, if a situation so arises, shoot at the Burmese junta and defend Karen refugees.
The Karen (pronounced "Cah-ren", not like the English name "Care-ren") are the people with whom I have lived almost a week of my time this summer in a village outside of Chiang Mai. I've taught them English, gave my testimony to them, led them in prayer, and daily when living with them was uplifted with their rising voices in worship, which each night where I stayed would start at sunset and last until 9:00 PM, a call in the mountains to recognize the glory of our King. They gifted me a cloth shoulder bag which I cherish, and are, if I may so generalize, both the most joyous and tragic southeastern Asian people group of those of which I've been informed or with whom I've come into contact this summer. Most of the Karen now living in Thailand fled at one point from the Burmese government and crossed into Thailand as refugees with naught but a pair of secondhand rubber flipflops and probably a cloth shoulder bag like the one I carry daily and now sits on the desk aside my Bible and this computer. They've a special pull on my heart, and I pray for them daily. Like early Israel, they are a nation dispossesed and on the run, and, like early Israel, my prayers are that God moves among them in very real and concrete ways - dreams, visions, prophets - so to show His sovereignty and give their lives hope and purpose.
My 2nd Lieutenant friend jumped off at the Karen refugee camp outside of Mae Sot, a sprawling cliffside valley community of, I estimate, nearly three thousand thatched huts and one or two elephants. Before entering and exiting the stretch of road that spans the refugee camp, armed Thai guards stopped our truck and checked the identification cards of those they thought suspicious. As we were exiting, they asked for the papers of a dark-skinned and raggedly-clothed grey-haired man, who neither spoke much of the language in which the guards addressed him nor had any papers. They took him off the truck, and away we went.
What are you to do when born into a country that doesn't want you?
These are the fatherless, those without cloaks or shelter, of our time.
I arrived in Mae Sot, only six kilometers from the Myanmar border, at half past two. Stumbled onto a store called Borderline in the early evening, which sells the handwoven goods of Burmese and Karen refugees and returns the profits to the villages who crafted the knapsacks, coin pouches, blankets, cloth coasters. Whom I took for the owner invited me to the opening of "an exhibition of prints by Burmese and Scottish children" tomorrow night in the upstair's art gallery, titled "Looking East, Looking West." I will go there at 6:00 PM and will go now to find something from a street stall for dinner.
With the love that is in Christ,
js
who have set their hearts on pilgrimage."
Psalm 84:5
I woke with a start this morning, as I woke last morning and the morning before, my body not able to sleep past six hours on the night. My watch read 6:40 a.m., one of my bus options for the day was due to leave at 7:00, so by 6:50 I had left my key with the grey haired fellow at reception and set course for the bus station, scanning the sidewalks for a boiled egg vendor so as not to start the six hour bus trek down the Thai - Myanmar without my day's keep.
The bus - not a bus at all, really, but a truck converted into a taxi with benches running the length of its bed - waited near a monk and the green-shirted driver, who welcomed me kindly and told me that we weren't due to leave until 8:00. I slung my knapsack - not a knapsack at all, really, but the term is more rustic and of a wanderer, I think, than "backpack" - on the rear seat, so I could once we left city limits easily hop up and hang off the rail on the roof a la garbage man, and trod to the morning market for breakfast.
Breakfast, a mug of peanut milk and six or so fried peanut-sized dough balls, came and went at a Muslim family's food stall, and soon after we - the orange-robed monk, green-shirted driver, and I - were off in route to the border town from where I now write you, Mae Sot, Thailand. The monk was duly granted the front seat in the cabin, and I was quickly standing and hanging off the rails, a real sore sight amid the jungle background of our route - but I hadn't much of a better choice, as before we departed the town we loaded a motorbike into the bed of the truck, into what would be the leg room of ten or so migrant farmers and village peasants as they boarded on and boarded off during our full morning and early afternoon's journey.
I was full of joy the moment I woke today - perhaps due to knowing I would for half the day be hanging off the back of a converted pickup truck-taxi as it snaked over mountains and aside rivers that separate Thailand and Myanmar; perhaps due to my now being in the Psalms of King David on my summer's commission of reading the Bible from page 1 to (my edition) page 964 (at Psalm 107, I'm now on page 474); perhaps due to, after finishing St. John of the Cross's "Dark Night of the Soul" yesterday, I'm now with an anonymous Russian peasant's "The Way of a Pilgrim", which I'll write more of soon - but more likely due to, ever since coming back from the ten-day prayer journey through Vietnam and Laos, I've been blessed to feel convicted and find joy in prayer and keeping mindful of the glory of God in nearly every - or, I try for nearly every - moment of my days, whether that manifests in praying for the Karen refugees who ride beside me or really trying to get in tune with what my Russian peasant's book calls "knowledge of the speech of created things" but is more accurately described as the sighing of all creation to glorify God and unite with Him.
"Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be
glad;
let the sea resound, andall that is in it;
let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them.
Then all the trees of the forest will sing for joy;
they will sing before the Lord, for he comes,
he comes to judge the earth." Psalm 96: 11-13
So often we think, "Alas! if I don't praise God, the rocks might sing of his magnifence, and how awful that would be!" when instead we might think of joining in the singing of all creation that ascribes to the Lord the glory due His name. The Psalms are full of such references, and my Russian peasant, as well as Miguel Unamuno, seem to think similarly.
But this is not at all what I planned to write you this evening. I could write you all evening - yes, gladly - but I've dinner soon to fetch and pushups too to do before bed, keeping on the schedule of my comrades in Chiang Mai. So on with it.
After farmers and villagers came and went, nearly four and a half hours into the journey and during one of the times when I alone was in the back of the truck, a camouflage-jacketed middle-aged Thai man jumped on with his fatigued-green knapsack (knapsack! not backpack!) at one of the many police checkpoints, designed, I witnessed later, to ensure those traveling are registered Thai citizens or visa-ed travelers and not escapees from forested Myanmar. He wore a U.S. Marines jacket and spoke a fair bit of English, enough to let me onto his now ten year's mission and occupation.
Since 1997, he has served as 2nd Lieutenant in the Karen National Union, a type of vigilante armed force to protect the Karen people, against whom the Burmese government has for the last fighty-eight years waged a ruthless attempt at genocide. He spoke five words very well - "kill you", "Burma", "Thailand", and "border"- and through these was able to communicate that his position is to patrol the border, along which I had been traveling for the last four and a half hours, and, if a situation so arises, shoot at the Burmese junta and defend Karen refugees.
The Karen (pronounced "Cah-ren", not like the English name "Care-ren") are the people with whom I have lived almost a week of my time this summer in a village outside of Chiang Mai. I've taught them English, gave my testimony to them, led them in prayer, and daily when living with them was uplifted with their rising voices in worship, which each night where I stayed would start at sunset and last until 9:00 PM, a call in the mountains to recognize the glory of our King. They gifted me a cloth shoulder bag which I cherish, and are, if I may so generalize, both the most joyous and tragic southeastern Asian people group of those of which I've been informed or with whom I've come into contact this summer. Most of the Karen now living in Thailand fled at one point from the Burmese government and crossed into Thailand as refugees with naught but a pair of secondhand rubber flipflops and probably a cloth shoulder bag like the one I carry daily and now sits on the desk aside my Bible and this computer. They've a special pull on my heart, and I pray for them daily. Like early Israel, they are a nation dispossesed and on the run, and, like early Israel, my prayers are that God moves among them in very real and concrete ways - dreams, visions, prophets - so to show His sovereignty and give their lives hope and purpose.
My 2nd Lieutenant friend jumped off at the Karen refugee camp outside of Mae Sot, a sprawling cliffside valley community of, I estimate, nearly three thousand thatched huts and one or two elephants. Before entering and exiting the stretch of road that spans the refugee camp, armed Thai guards stopped our truck and checked the identification cards of those they thought suspicious. As we were exiting, they asked for the papers of a dark-skinned and raggedly-clothed grey-haired man, who neither spoke much of the language in which the guards addressed him nor had any papers. They took him off the truck, and away we went.
What are you to do when born into a country that doesn't want you?
These are the fatherless, those without cloaks or shelter, of our time.
I arrived in Mae Sot, only six kilometers from the Myanmar border, at half past two. Stumbled onto a store called Borderline in the early evening, which sells the handwoven goods of Burmese and Karen refugees and returns the profits to the villages who crafted the knapsacks, coin pouches, blankets, cloth coasters. Whom I took for the owner invited me to the opening of "an exhibition of prints by Burmese and Scottish children" tomorrow night in the upstair's art gallery, titled "Looking East, Looking West." I will go there at 6:00 PM and will go now to find something from a street stall for dinner.
With the love that is in Christ,
js
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Farewell Chiang Mai, Final Weeks, and Mass
Evening friends. As has been the plague of our summer, I've alltogether too much to say and neither have plotted my points nor asked the Thai girl who mans this Internet cafe if, once these two young kids leave me alone in the rows of computers, I'll be kicked out or allowed to stay. A quick aside - if Chinese Internet cafes were the back alleyways that mothers warned their children not to walk at night (and they very well are, hazy with cigarette smoke), Thai Internet cafes would be the manicured public squares in front of civic centers or community buildings. They're not so bad.
Two quick things: my health has returned, and my passport holds a Chinese visa.
This morning I left the city where I was based in the times between village excursions and the prayer journey to Vietnam and Laos on a five hour bus ride to very near the Myanmar border. I didn't expect or plan to make friends this summer, expecting rather that I would be frequently on the move and often with book in hand, but, in one of the small twists God made to my plans, I was blessed to find two wiser-than-I and weathered fellows in Chiang Mai with whom I passed more than a few nights on downtown motorbikes and in discusson of a Christian's peacemaker responsibility during times of immediate and life-threatening violence (which isn't so far of a reality in lands very near), mainstream Christianity's seeming surrender to what most men think is inescapable lust, and how to frame Christianity to fit an Eastern mind and ethos - usually all over a game of cards and a tub of glaringly artificial strawberry plastic "icecream". We've adopted as a group the routine of one "red bull" of an Alaskan's pushup and situp program and just did our final set together last night aside the baby crib of the five-month old boy of one theologically and home church-minded of a Floridan. I said goodbye to both of them this morning, after I sat and they prayed over me and my time past and to-come in Asia this summer. I left with and in a real sense of peace, which carried me to where I now write you and still wraps around me tight. We should all sit and pray for eachother - intentionally, specifically, and in the spirit - more often!
Now it is 9:46 PM on the 17th of June, and as of 9:16 PM I have booked my final airplane ticket to carry me to and from across Asia and very soon across a few oceans in route to what I read on drudgereport.com is a flooded Midwestern USA. What follows below is my planned itinerary up to a much anticipated flight from Hong Kong on July 9th.
18 / 6 - 22 / 6: Snake down the Myanmar border in route to Bangkok, from where I will fly on...
22 / 6: to Pnom Penh, Cambodia, to meet and work with a Cambodian friend and his family until...
2 / 7: when I will return to Bangkok from Pnom Penh, only to catch a flight on...
3 / 7: to Shenzhen, China, in route to Hong Kong from where I will fly on...
9 / 7: to Pittsburgh, PA to spend a week with my best friend Mr. David Kita before flying on...
18 / 7: to Denver, CO to meet my hometown church for Youth Quake, a week-long camping retreat in the Colorado mountains, before then joining their caravan back to Oklahoma on the 26th of July.
Thus all dates are set, and all flights are booked, and now before fleeing to bed I've to tell you quickly of the Catholic Mass I went to this evening.
As my bus from Chiang Mai pulled into town, I noticed a stark-white Catholic Church that I then, after tossing my bags in a trucker's stop of a hotel room for the night, spent the rest of the afternoon trying to relocate. I managed across it about 5:00 PM. After praying in front of the outside altar and what I suppose is a relic, I found the front office door unlocked and, kicking off my sandals at the door, met Mr. "Teh-phil", which means, he told me after this evening's Mass, "lover of God" in a language I do not know. Born in a nearby village and ordained as a priest six years ago, he was quick to ask me if I was Catholic and what I thought of 1. Hillary 2. Obama and 3. McCain, followed by an invitation to join him, a Thai Catholic priest, and his friend for an afternoon's football (soccer) match. Wanting to read and dine, I declined, but said maybe I would see him at Mass.
And I did. Two "sisters" (nuns), a man and his wife who attend to the priests' quarters and tidy the church, and I kneeled on the wooden floor while my friend, "Teh-phil", assisted the elder priest in adminstering the Mass. I read through the Psalms of King David and prayed, but afterward the two priests and I stood cackling on the church's doorstep as the younger priest fumbled with English phrases and idioms. Before I left, he made sure to entreat, "If you see me again, do not remember me!", meaning, of course, that I shouldn't forget his name or face if we meet again. A few more quick comments about the U.S.'s running presidential race and the King of Thailand, and I was back to the sidewalks.
Now the two kids have been gone for the last ten minutes and I've finished the complimentary hot chocolate the Thai girl brought to my computer. I expect she has sat trying to muster up the English and courage to suggest I might get out here, and I'm going to try to leave before she goes through with it.
All best,
js
Two quick things: my health has returned, and my passport holds a Chinese visa.
This morning I left the city where I was based in the times between village excursions and the prayer journey to Vietnam and Laos on a five hour bus ride to very near the Myanmar border. I didn't expect or plan to make friends this summer, expecting rather that I would be frequently on the move and often with book in hand, but, in one of the small twists God made to my plans, I was blessed to find two wiser-than-I and weathered fellows in Chiang Mai with whom I passed more than a few nights on downtown motorbikes and in discusson of a Christian's peacemaker responsibility during times of immediate and life-threatening violence (which isn't so far of a reality in lands very near), mainstream Christianity's seeming surrender to what most men think is inescapable lust, and how to frame Christianity to fit an Eastern mind and ethos - usually all over a game of cards and a tub of glaringly artificial strawberry plastic "icecream". We've adopted as a group the routine of one "red bull" of an Alaskan's pushup and situp program and just did our final set together last night aside the baby crib of the five-month old boy of one theologically and home church-minded of a Floridan. I said goodbye to both of them this morning, after I sat and they prayed over me and my time past and to-come in Asia this summer. I left with and in a real sense of peace, which carried me to where I now write you and still wraps around me tight. We should all sit and pray for eachother - intentionally, specifically, and in the spirit - more often!
Now it is 9:46 PM on the 17th of June, and as of 9:16 PM I have booked my final airplane ticket to carry me to and from across Asia and very soon across a few oceans in route to what I read on drudgereport.com is a flooded Midwestern USA. What follows below is my planned itinerary up to a much anticipated flight from Hong Kong on July 9th.
18 / 6 - 22 / 6: Snake down the Myanmar border in route to Bangkok, from where I will fly on...
22 / 6: to Pnom Penh, Cambodia, to meet and work with a Cambodian friend and his family until...
2 / 7: when I will return to Bangkok from Pnom Penh, only to catch a flight on...
3 / 7: to Shenzhen, China, in route to Hong Kong from where I will fly on...
9 / 7: to Pittsburgh, PA to spend a week with my best friend Mr. David Kita before flying on...
18 / 7: to Denver, CO to meet my hometown church for Youth Quake, a week-long camping retreat in the Colorado mountains, before then joining their caravan back to Oklahoma on the 26th of July.
Thus all dates are set, and all flights are booked, and now before fleeing to bed I've to tell you quickly of the Catholic Mass I went to this evening.
As my bus from Chiang Mai pulled into town, I noticed a stark-white Catholic Church that I then, after tossing my bags in a trucker's stop of a hotel room for the night, spent the rest of the afternoon trying to relocate. I managed across it about 5:00 PM. After praying in front of the outside altar and what I suppose is a relic, I found the front office door unlocked and, kicking off my sandals at the door, met Mr. "Teh-phil", which means, he told me after this evening's Mass, "lover of God" in a language I do not know. Born in a nearby village and ordained as a priest six years ago, he was quick to ask me if I was Catholic and what I thought of 1. Hillary 2. Obama and 3. McCain, followed by an invitation to join him, a Thai Catholic priest, and his friend for an afternoon's football (soccer) match. Wanting to read and dine, I declined, but said maybe I would see him at Mass.
And I did. Two "sisters" (nuns), a man and his wife who attend to the priests' quarters and tidy the church, and I kneeled on the wooden floor while my friend, "Teh-phil", assisted the elder priest in adminstering the Mass. I read through the Psalms of King David and prayed, but afterward the two priests and I stood cackling on the church's doorstep as the younger priest fumbled with English phrases and idioms. Before I left, he made sure to entreat, "If you see me again, do not remember me!", meaning, of course, that I shouldn't forget his name or face if we meet again. A few more quick comments about the U.S.'s running presidential race and the King of Thailand, and I was back to the sidewalks.
Now the two kids have been gone for the last ten minutes and I've finished the complimentary hot chocolate the Thai girl brought to my computer. I expect she has sat trying to muster up the English and courage to suggest I might get out here, and I'm going to try to leave before she goes through with it.
All best,
js
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Vietnam, Laos, and Thank God, God Doesn't Make Sense
Good evening to you in the West and morning in the East. I've since returning at midnight on Sunday from Vietnam and Laos been engaged in somewhat defeating battles with the Chinese Embassy and a one-two allergy and fever combo, but mercies renew every morning, so with this morning I look to success on both fronts. Winning the first battle will require a sly bit of imitation, and the second a few more Thai allergy pills and healing prayers. Both are on their way.
I've two weeks of prayer journeying to write you, forty minutes until I must go to the Embassy, and six hours until I board a bus to a mountain village. Onward.
If I didn't explain it thoroughly enough in my last letter (and I know I did not), the concept of prayer journeying is, in an advertised pre-packaged slogan, as follows: praying on sight with insight, which means that by traveling to locations and interacting with the local people, your prayers are better able to avoid pre-packaged prayer slogans and become more specific and engaged with the community around you. Thus instead of praying that God move among a Tai people group while on your knees before your thick-mattressed bed, you pray for the Tai woman who just walked past you carrying a week's load of firewood on her back as you tarry down the potholed dirt road of her village.
And in full confession, I admit the concept of the trip was something foreign to me when I set out on it. In my latest kick of Christianity, heavily influenced by Catholic theology and a last semester's twenty-page research paper on asceticism, I had somewhat unknowingly repositioned the God of my youth as distant, impersonal, and forever separate in the full splendor of his "omni-s". And this perception of God is not without benefits - the impersonal, the rational conception of God lends very well to writing analytical papers on the nature of His character. Once you define Him as a categorized variable, you then can rearrange your formula however you like and observe the "divine" results. It was something new to me, coming from a non-denominational, evangelical "tradition", and it largely energized my decision to throw away this prayer-before-bed and Sunday morning Christianity and seek something else, as well as spend my summer abroad in Asia seeking Him - for that I am thankful, but I am more thankful for the friends here I have met and the experiences I have had that have guided me out of that theological abyss.
One of those experiences was the prayer journey, during which our sole purpose and aim of every day was to plead to God on behalf of the people around us for their well-being and salvation. Plead to God? Plead to Him who is outside of time and thus immutable and thus never changes His mind and can we even say He has a mind? My perception of Him had to change quickly - rather, it had to be realigned quickly, and it was so after reflecting on passages from the Old Testament (Abraham groaning for the sparing of Sodom and Gomorrah comes to mind - "What if only ten can be found there?" Gen. 18:16-33).
This was paired in effect with my current reading of Miguel Unamuno's Tragic Sense of Life, which aims partly to show that God is great not because he reasons better than anyone else ever but because He is, yes, all-powerful, but also very much irrational and thus in-touch with our core being, which yearns for life after death though our reasoning mind always jumps in to say how foolish and weak that wish is. And so it dawned on me that, ever since tiring or maturing out of the "Repent and Be Saved!" Christianity and becoming bored with Sunday mornings, I had measured up the Bible and its teachings against other philosophies and religions to see which made the most sense or was, really, the smartest. It was always troublesome for me when the Bible seemed intellectually simple - I wanted something with which I could wrestle, like Jacob at the riverside (Gen. 32:22-31), not something that sounded the same every Sunday and always came to the same conclusion, that you had to "rely on Jesus", whatever that meant.
But this trip and my reading made me realize that it isn't because Christ's teachings and the Bible make the most sense that I profess my faith (and, moreover, that this shouldn't be the reason), but that I do so because the God I worship is the One, true and living. There's no way around that. What is real is real, and what isn't, well, is made of stone and wood and set up in the Buddhist temples around town (2 Kings 19:14-19).
And with that I must leave you to hop a motorbike quickly to the Chinese Consulate. For those further interested, ask me come July about any of the thoughts above or how I felt God on the trip, because I've much to share. Or, for those of you that like traveling stories, ask about the 7-hour bus rides across Vietnam's unpaved and washed-out mountain roads, or the Vietnamese kids who ran circles around my friend and me in an evening's soccer match.
A super quick scenery sum-up:
1. Vietnamese nature is, next to idyllic English countryside and the Galicean lands of northwest Spain, the prettiest I've seen. But it feels so much like commie China.
2. Laos is overly relaxed, threatened by major deforestation, and almost as friendly as Thailand.
Peace and love,
js
I've two weeks of prayer journeying to write you, forty minutes until I must go to the Embassy, and six hours until I board a bus to a mountain village. Onward.
If I didn't explain it thoroughly enough in my last letter (and I know I did not), the concept of prayer journeying is, in an advertised pre-packaged slogan, as follows: praying on sight with insight, which means that by traveling to locations and interacting with the local people, your prayers are better able to avoid pre-packaged prayer slogans and become more specific and engaged with the community around you. Thus instead of praying that God move among a Tai people group while on your knees before your thick-mattressed bed, you pray for the Tai woman who just walked past you carrying a week's load of firewood on her back as you tarry down the potholed dirt road of her village.
And in full confession, I admit the concept of the trip was something foreign to me when I set out on it. In my latest kick of Christianity, heavily influenced by Catholic theology and a last semester's twenty-page research paper on asceticism, I had somewhat unknowingly repositioned the God of my youth as distant, impersonal, and forever separate in the full splendor of his "omni-s". And this perception of God is not without benefits - the impersonal, the rational conception of God lends very well to writing analytical papers on the nature of His character. Once you define Him as a categorized variable, you then can rearrange your formula however you like and observe the "divine" results. It was something new to me, coming from a non-denominational, evangelical "tradition", and it largely energized my decision to throw away this prayer-before-bed and Sunday morning Christianity and seek something else, as well as spend my summer abroad in Asia seeking Him - for that I am thankful, but I am more thankful for the friends here I have met and the experiences I have had that have guided me out of that theological abyss.
One of those experiences was the prayer journey, during which our sole purpose and aim of every day was to plead to God on behalf of the people around us for their well-being and salvation. Plead to God? Plead to Him who is outside of time and thus immutable and thus never changes His mind and can we even say He has a mind? My perception of Him had to change quickly - rather, it had to be realigned quickly, and it was so after reflecting on passages from the Old Testament (Abraham groaning for the sparing of Sodom and Gomorrah comes to mind - "What if only ten can be found there?" Gen. 18:16-33).
This was paired in effect with my current reading of Miguel Unamuno's Tragic Sense of Life, which aims partly to show that God is great not because he reasons better than anyone else ever but because He is, yes, all-powerful, but also very much irrational and thus in-touch with our core being, which yearns for life after death though our reasoning mind always jumps in to say how foolish and weak that wish is. And so it dawned on me that, ever since tiring or maturing out of the "Repent and Be Saved!" Christianity and becoming bored with Sunday mornings, I had measured up the Bible and its teachings against other philosophies and religions to see which made the most sense or was, really, the smartest. It was always troublesome for me when the Bible seemed intellectually simple - I wanted something with which I could wrestle, like Jacob at the riverside (Gen. 32:22-31), not something that sounded the same every Sunday and always came to the same conclusion, that you had to "rely on Jesus", whatever that meant.
But this trip and my reading made me realize that it isn't because Christ's teachings and the Bible make the most sense that I profess my faith (and, moreover, that this shouldn't be the reason), but that I do so because the God I worship is the One, true and living. There's no way around that. What is real is real, and what isn't, well, is made of stone and wood and set up in the Buddhist temples around town (2 Kings 19:14-19).
And with that I must leave you to hop a motorbike quickly to the Chinese Consulate. For those further interested, ask me come July about any of the thoughts above or how I felt God on the trip, because I've much to share. Or, for those of you that like traveling stories, ask about the 7-hour bus rides across Vietnam's unpaved and washed-out mountain roads, or the Vietnamese kids who ran circles around my friend and me in an evening's soccer match.
A super quick scenery sum-up:
1. Vietnamese nature is, next to idyllic English countryside and the Galicean lands of northwest Spain, the prettiest I've seen. But it feels so much like commie China.
2. Laos is overly relaxed, threatened by major deforestation, and almost as friendly as Thailand.
Peace and love,
js
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
A Week and Days
Here, friends, is now the problem I anticipated you and I would have: a week and days of exploits without a word yet sending them Stateside. I left you somewhere in the thick of May and now June stands on the doorstep. We've all together too much to say.
Not this Monday but the last I gathered my books and never-ending packets of instant coffee and boarded a yellow open-backed-and-sided van that really is a bus that really is a taxi, which travels straight along the straight stretch of road that connects where I now write you - the haven that is the Mekong Center - to where I tarried last week - a village atop Thailand's highest mountain. Threw my large pack on the luggage rack and with a few pushes of a few buttons convinced Bob Dylan to sing me sweetly all the way. I shunned the seats - red benches lined along the sides of the van-taxi-bus - and hung off the back like the trash man I wanted as a child to be when I 'grew up,' solely so that I could hang off the back of the truck. You can imagine the soreness of the sight amid passing green flora and Thai motorbikes - me, a ragged and sunglassed American boy, purple-shirted and hanging wildly off the back of a rickety yellow van-bus-taxi, while seven or eight young and old Thai sit docilely where I also should have been sitting.
We made it, though, and soon I was with the Bob Marley fan of a Christian renegade of whom I wrote you a week and days ago. On the way to his home we talked of the religion of evolution, denominational Christianity, and the first time we each heard Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" (a time, not-too regrettably, I forget, though I substituted the memory for the first time I heard Hendrix's "Hey Joe", a session with my old bebopper of a bass guitar instructor, Hank, who slyly changed the lyrics from "where you goin' with that gun in your hand" to "where you goin' with that Bible in your hand").
For security reasons I can't say too much here or flood you with the details I want to throw at you. Walking around these parts (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, China) with a "Bible in your hand" is akin to walking around our parts with "a gun in your hand", and my friend the renegade was recently sought after by one, the one made typically of steel, for wielding the other, typically made of paper with some sentences highlighted in red.
I can tell you, though (and show you pictures upon our grand reunion) that while I tarried at his home and welcomed each early 6:30 a.m. morning with the ginger soup his wife made that cleared my very clogged sinuses I in the mornings post-breakfast and afternoons pre-dinner 1) repaired a pigsty 2) planed boards for a house soon-to-be built 3) logged firewood with a bucksaw 4) constructed a terrace for wild ivy 5) learned so much. He and I took coffee after each meal and during this time I learned of his work, which functions by radio broadcast of faith segments to the surrounding areas and peoples in hostile countries. The radio programs are structured chronologically so that, instead of wrapping John 3:16 blankets around the listeners and presenting a fragmented account of Christianity, the Bible and our faith is revealed according to how it was first revealed to the world - God creates; becomes powerful among the Israelites, his people whom he loves; they fall, then come back, then fall, then come back; in order for Christ to come and extend the Christian faith to all peoples, which in turn allowed we Gentile fellows to come to know the God we do.
It makes sense, I think, to present a complete and chronological account of God's dealings and illuminations of Himself with man instead of pick-and-choosing New Testament prescriptions on what is sin and how to avoid it. I've never read all of the Bible, and I was baptized at age 8. That's twelve years of professed Christianity without ever having gone much further than a hop and a skip around the major Old Testament stories, several readings of Ecclesiastes, a chance flip to a Psalm, a week or two of a few Proverbs a day, an avoidance like the plague of the Prophets, and some Gospels, sure, along with whatever book of Paul's sounded best on the hour. This is, I now think, reason for great shame and despair, but I'm sure the description above applies not only to me. It presents us a proper pause for reflection on why those of us who know the Bible by hops and skips and still profess our faith have failed to think it absolutely crucial that we read it like the storybook of our God, which is not to be started in the middle or opened to a chance passage each time we sit but to be taken in its context and framework as the complete revelation of salvation and Christianity to men. (I'm now in 1 Kings after a few weeks ago being convicted to read the Bible in its entirety and proper order, which will mean a rearrangement of Paul's letters from an order according to length to one according to the date of their authorship. I urge each of you who like me has yet to read from Genesis to Revelation to start the good fight today, and if you still see reason to wait or not do so, send me an email and let me convince you of its necessity.)
And so mornings and afternoons of work in the fields came and went with my friend the renegade (who is a Reverend, I discovered by a chance look at one of his books, and once lived in a Christian community somewhere outside of Plano). One night we skipped our coffee and went straight to his studio, which upon entering immediately transports you from the middle of a rural and simple mountaintop village without water filtering or central heating or houses made of brick to a professional recording studio somewhere in a God-fearing land, and watched footage of Hendrix live at Woodstock, Stevie Ray Vaughan live at El Mocombo, Joe Satriana, and a few acts from Eric Clapton's Crossroads festival.
I wish I could say more, but I shouldn't. Perhaps someone unfriendly, to say the very least, to the very purpose and hope of our lives reads along with you now. Persecution is real. Vietnam hasn't religious freedom. That's a joke. Nor does Laos, Cambodia, China, or Burma. And so it is now as it was for Paul in Asia (2 Corinthians 1: 8-11).
I bused back to Chiang Mai on Saturday, then left early Sunday morning to another village six hours away, from where I returned yesterday. I went with a grey-haired missionary couple from Switzerland who has poured twenty five years of ministry into their people group. They've organized the construction of what could be called a Christian center right outside of town, a plot of land on which sits a Bible school, a Christian boarding home for children from villages where schools are not (and most villages lack schools), and a simple wooden house where I, the two missionaries and two other Americans stayed during our visit. We were to paint pictures that illustrate chronologically the major events of the Bible. The Bible school uses the pictures to teach the nineteen and twenty year olds who attend the month-long Bible programs the school hosts. It's difficult for the students to come, as they're tied to the land of their families and are needed to work the fields. Yet they come and study morning, afternoon and night the story of Christianity from creation to revelation to Christ in a set-up similar to one of our Christian summer camps, except the school doesn't break in the afternoon for white-water rafting or tourist town shopping. They start at 6:30 a.m. with an hour long prayer meeting and end at 8:30 p.m. after a music lesson or evening prayer session. One evening I was asked to give my 'testimony,' so I did, and it was translated sentence by sentence by the male Swiss missionary. I spoke of how I was baptized at age 8 but never saw Christianity as the defining purpose to my life - that which I am to breathe each moment from waking breath to falling breath - until just last semester at college. I challenged them by stating that a prayer before bed and Sunday morning Christianity isn't Christianity at all and pulled a few thoughts from Luke 14: 25-27.
Painted pictures the entire next day, morning to night, then taught an English lesson to the boarding school students. I joked afterward that if my Chinese students of two years ago were as lovely as these boarding school students that I would have never left. Was a grand time. Everyone should teach English to Asia once or twice. Really warms you up.
And so tomorrow noon I fly off with six others to Hanoi, Vietnam for a prayer journey through northwestern Vietnam into Laos before recrossing into Thailand. Our days will be spent in prayer for a certain people group, the group to whom our leader, a linguist specialist from the U.S. who looks to Bible translation, has committed his efforts. We will also 'distribute literature' to the believers in these areas - fairy tales of a basket-born child parting the sea, city walls that crumbled at the chorus of trumpets, and a homeless man who spoke of sparrows and mustard seeds. We'll return June 9th or so.
I wish I could sit and write you so much more, more than just an outline of the days! But that would mean forfeiting time with the people, and really I'm to be with them. Send your prayers with Moolah, a Burmese exile who now evangelizes to and supports the Karen people. And with the groaning of the Tai Dam in Vietnam and Laos who yearn to see Christianity thrive and live without threat. You can read more about them here: http://www.infomekong.com/taidam.htm
With hugs sent tied to the circling moon,
js
Not this Monday but the last I gathered my books and never-ending packets of instant coffee and boarded a yellow open-backed-and-sided van that really is a bus that really is a taxi, which travels straight along the straight stretch of road that connects where I now write you - the haven that is the Mekong Center - to where I tarried last week - a village atop Thailand's highest mountain. Threw my large pack on the luggage rack and with a few pushes of a few buttons convinced Bob Dylan to sing me sweetly all the way. I shunned the seats - red benches lined along the sides of the van-taxi-bus - and hung off the back like the trash man I wanted as a child to be when I 'grew up,' solely so that I could hang off the back of the truck. You can imagine the soreness of the sight amid passing green flora and Thai motorbikes - me, a ragged and sunglassed American boy, purple-shirted and hanging wildly off the back of a rickety yellow van-bus-taxi, while seven or eight young and old Thai sit docilely where I also should have been sitting.
We made it, though, and soon I was with the Bob Marley fan of a Christian renegade of whom I wrote you a week and days ago. On the way to his home we talked of the religion of evolution, denominational Christianity, and the first time we each heard Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" (a time, not-too regrettably, I forget, though I substituted the memory for the first time I heard Hendrix's "Hey Joe", a session with my old bebopper of a bass guitar instructor, Hank, who slyly changed the lyrics from "where you goin' with that gun in your hand" to "where you goin' with that Bible in your hand").
For security reasons I can't say too much here or flood you with the details I want to throw at you. Walking around these parts (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, China) with a "Bible in your hand" is akin to walking around our parts with "a gun in your hand", and my friend the renegade was recently sought after by one, the one made typically of steel, for wielding the other, typically made of paper with some sentences highlighted in red.
I can tell you, though (and show you pictures upon our grand reunion) that while I tarried at his home and welcomed each early 6:30 a.m. morning with the ginger soup his wife made that cleared my very clogged sinuses I in the mornings post-breakfast and afternoons pre-dinner 1) repaired a pigsty 2) planed boards for a house soon-to-be built 3) logged firewood with a bucksaw 4) constructed a terrace for wild ivy 5) learned so much. He and I took coffee after each meal and during this time I learned of his work, which functions by radio broadcast of faith segments to the surrounding areas and peoples in hostile countries. The radio programs are structured chronologically so that, instead of wrapping John 3:16 blankets around the listeners and presenting a fragmented account of Christianity, the Bible and our faith is revealed according to how it was first revealed to the world - God creates; becomes powerful among the Israelites, his people whom he loves; they fall, then come back, then fall, then come back; in order for Christ to come and extend the Christian faith to all peoples, which in turn allowed we Gentile fellows to come to know the God we do.
It makes sense, I think, to present a complete and chronological account of God's dealings and illuminations of Himself with man instead of pick-and-choosing New Testament prescriptions on what is sin and how to avoid it. I've never read all of the Bible, and I was baptized at age 8. That's twelve years of professed Christianity without ever having gone much further than a hop and a skip around the major Old Testament stories, several readings of Ecclesiastes, a chance flip to a Psalm, a week or two of a few Proverbs a day, an avoidance like the plague of the Prophets, and some Gospels, sure, along with whatever book of Paul's sounded best on the hour. This is, I now think, reason for great shame and despair, but I'm sure the description above applies not only to me. It presents us a proper pause for reflection on why those of us who know the Bible by hops and skips and still profess our faith have failed to think it absolutely crucial that we read it like the storybook of our God, which is not to be started in the middle or opened to a chance passage each time we sit but to be taken in its context and framework as the complete revelation of salvation and Christianity to men. (I'm now in 1 Kings after a few weeks ago being convicted to read the Bible in its entirety and proper order, which will mean a rearrangement of Paul's letters from an order according to length to one according to the date of their authorship. I urge each of you who like me has yet to read from Genesis to Revelation to start the good fight today, and if you still see reason to wait or not do so, send me an email and let me convince you of its necessity.)
And so mornings and afternoons of work in the fields came and went with my friend the renegade (who is a Reverend, I discovered by a chance look at one of his books, and once lived in a Christian community somewhere outside of Plano). One night we skipped our coffee and went straight to his studio, which upon entering immediately transports you from the middle of a rural and simple mountaintop village without water filtering or central heating or houses made of brick to a professional recording studio somewhere in a God-fearing land, and watched footage of Hendrix live at Woodstock, Stevie Ray Vaughan live at El Mocombo, Joe Satriana, and a few acts from Eric Clapton's Crossroads festival.
I wish I could say more, but I shouldn't. Perhaps someone unfriendly, to say the very least, to the very purpose and hope of our lives reads along with you now. Persecution is real. Vietnam hasn't religious freedom. That's a joke. Nor does Laos, Cambodia, China, or Burma. And so it is now as it was for Paul in Asia (2 Corinthians 1: 8-11).
I bused back to Chiang Mai on Saturday, then left early Sunday morning to another village six hours away, from where I returned yesterday. I went with a grey-haired missionary couple from Switzerland who has poured twenty five years of ministry into their people group. They've organized the construction of what could be called a Christian center right outside of town, a plot of land on which sits a Bible school, a Christian boarding home for children from villages where schools are not (and most villages lack schools), and a simple wooden house where I, the two missionaries and two other Americans stayed during our visit. We were to paint pictures that illustrate chronologically the major events of the Bible. The Bible school uses the pictures to teach the nineteen and twenty year olds who attend the month-long Bible programs the school hosts. It's difficult for the students to come, as they're tied to the land of their families and are needed to work the fields. Yet they come and study morning, afternoon and night the story of Christianity from creation to revelation to Christ in a set-up similar to one of our Christian summer camps, except the school doesn't break in the afternoon for white-water rafting or tourist town shopping. They start at 6:30 a.m. with an hour long prayer meeting and end at 8:30 p.m. after a music lesson or evening prayer session. One evening I was asked to give my 'testimony,' so I did, and it was translated sentence by sentence by the male Swiss missionary. I spoke of how I was baptized at age 8 but never saw Christianity as the defining purpose to my life - that which I am to breathe each moment from waking breath to falling breath - until just last semester at college. I challenged them by stating that a prayer before bed and Sunday morning Christianity isn't Christianity at all and pulled a few thoughts from Luke 14: 25-27.
Painted pictures the entire next day, morning to night, then taught an English lesson to the boarding school students. I joked afterward that if my Chinese students of two years ago were as lovely as these boarding school students that I would have never left. Was a grand time. Everyone should teach English to Asia once or twice. Really warms you up.
And so tomorrow noon I fly off with six others to Hanoi, Vietnam for a prayer journey through northwestern Vietnam into Laos before recrossing into Thailand. Our days will be spent in prayer for a certain people group, the group to whom our leader, a linguist specialist from the U.S. who looks to Bible translation, has committed his efforts. We will also 'distribute literature' to the believers in these areas - fairy tales of a basket-born child parting the sea, city walls that crumbled at the chorus of trumpets, and a homeless man who spoke of sparrows and mustard seeds. We'll return June 9th or so.
I wish I could sit and write you so much more, more than just an outline of the days! But that would mean forfeiting time with the people, and really I'm to be with them. Send your prayers with Moolah, a Burmese exile who now evangelizes to and supports the Karen people. And with the groaning of the Tai Dam in Vietnam and Laos who yearn to see Christianity thrive and live without threat. You can read more about them here: http://www.infomekong.com/taidam.htm
With hugs sent tied to the circling moon,
js
Saturday, May 24, 2008
7:41 a.m.
Dear,
A bus leaves in ten minutes, and I'm to be on it. So I'll be quick: Thank you for your prayers. I'm so humbled when I read emails that mention prayers sailing the Atlantic with my name somewhere in them. Please keep praying. Pray for those Christians last week kicked out of their homes in Vietnam. Pray for those Christians last week poisoned in China. Pray for illumination among the hill tribes. And without ceasing for the tragedies in Myanmar and China.
I'll write you on Wednesday.
"Onward, Christian Soldiers..."
js
A bus leaves in ten minutes, and I'm to be on it. So I'll be quick: Thank you for your prayers. I'm so humbled when I read emails that mention prayers sailing the Atlantic with my name somewhere in them. Please keep praying. Pray for those Christians last week kicked out of their homes in Vietnam. Pray for those Christians last week poisoned in China. Pray for illumination among the hill tribes. And without ceasing for the tragedies in Myanmar and China.
I'll write you on Wednesday.
"Onward, Christian Soldiers..."
js
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Redemption Song
OH I wish you were all here so that instead of looking through a glass very darkly you too could see the warfare that is Christianity in Southeast Asia. Daily I meet Christian soldiers: a former citizen of a Christian commune and a Bob Marley fan who just weeks ago ran away on foot through jungle from the Vietnamese government; a single, forty-year-old German woman who has lived in Myanmar (Burma) since 2001, spreading the Gospel and love in a country that kills you for either one; two German doctors who today were, with foreheads scrunched and hands holding their chins, speculating on how much medicine they could pack in their cargo bags without looking suspicious and being detected by the Burmese police; a scraggly, grey-haired man who wears a lanyard around his neck that holds Christian tracts in the Thai language and has been kicked out of China more than thrice.
They're like people from the Bible. Faith in action.
Today I compiled a report on the current situation in Myanmar to send to the team leaders of faithful efforts in Myanmar, who will then forward it along to both missionaries here and Christians elsewhere in an effort to mobilize informed and pinpointed prayer. I've tried to paste it into a blog entry, but the formatting errs and loses text. If you'd like me to email it to you, leave a comment with your email address. For now, browse this site when you feel like some direction for your prayer time: http://www.irrawaddy.org. Asia is wrecked right now, and Myanmar has received the worst of it. Let's not have ours be a generation that 'does not mourn when we hear a dirge' (Matthew 11: 16-17). 150,000 people have thus far died, and the Red Cross estimates 2.5 million have been affected. That's 83 times the population of Owasso, Oklahoma, my hometown.
Tomorrow morning I leave for a mountaintop village to live a week with the family of the Bob Marley-loving Christian soldier I mentioned above. I'll mainly help with logging trees and building a house, but if I'm lucky might also get to gather tea leaves and teach an English lesson or two. He works with a people group who have since he first immigrated with Christianity to their village turned to the Lord quickly and in great number. Must be the Bob Marley t-shirts and his acoustic guitar that makes them see the Light. Tim, do me and this Christian soldier a favor, and next Sunday throw up "Redemption Song" to lead FCC's offering call. Ah ha! I'll sing via Skype.
Should return the 26th or so of May to Chiang Mai but then will fly off to Hanoi, Vietnam on the 28th for a two-week prayer journey trekking by land across Vietnam and Laos.
"How long shall they kill our prophets, While we stand aside and look?
Some say its just a part of it: We've got to fulfil de book.
Won't you help to sing, These songs of freedom? -
'Cause all I ever have: Redemption songs."
With love,
js
They're like people from the Bible. Faith in action.
Today I compiled a report on the current situation in Myanmar to send to the team leaders of faithful efforts in Myanmar, who will then forward it along to both missionaries here and Christians elsewhere in an effort to mobilize informed and pinpointed prayer. I've tried to paste it into a blog entry, but the formatting errs and loses text. If you'd like me to email it to you, leave a comment with your email address. For now, browse this site when you feel like some direction for your prayer time: http://www.irrawaddy.org. Asia is wrecked right now, and Myanmar has received the worst of it. Let's not have ours be a generation that 'does not mourn when we hear a dirge' (Matthew 11: 16-17). 150,000 people have thus far died, and the Red Cross estimates 2.5 million have been affected. That's 83 times the population of Owasso, Oklahoma, my hometown.
Tomorrow morning I leave for a mountaintop village to live a week with the family of the Bob Marley-loving Christian soldier I mentioned above. I'll mainly help with logging trees and building a house, but if I'm lucky might also get to gather tea leaves and teach an English lesson or two. He works with a people group who have since he first immigrated with Christianity to their village turned to the Lord quickly and in great number. Must be the Bob Marley t-shirts and his acoustic guitar that makes them see the Light. Tim, do me and this Christian soldier a favor, and next Sunday throw up "Redemption Song" to lead FCC's offering call. Ah ha! I'll sing via Skype.
Should return the 26th or so of May to Chiang Mai but then will fly off to Hanoi, Vietnam on the 28th for a two-week prayer journey trekking by land across Vietnam and Laos.
"How long shall they kill our prophets, While we stand aside and look?
Some say its just a part of it: We've got to fulfil de book.
Won't you help to sing, These songs of freedom? -
'Cause all I ever have: Redemption songs."
With love,
js
Friday, May 16, 2008
Bud's Ice Cream
This morning I met with a theology professor and 43 year expatriate of Kansas City, Missouri at the city's theological seminary. He opened their library to me, and we talked some of the conflict between dispensational and systematic theology - whatever those are. But more on that and his mission later. For now and as I leave soon for bed hear of Young and the payoff of his AP Economics test.
Young was in my small group last week at Reunion. His hair is long, and he wears glasses, listens to All American Rejects, and plays a very competent guitar. During the talent show at Reunion, he performed Hillsong's "One Way" with the accompaniment of his youngest brother on keyboard, his second youngest brother on bass, his third youngest brother on drums, and his mom and dad singing with the lyrics clasped in their hands. Before they began the song, Young asked if he could say something into the mic that he later used for singing, and he went on to tell how his mom and dad put him and his brothers up to performing the song, but that as they were already on stage, they were just going to make the best of it. The whole conference hall laughed, and his dad, laughing, said into the mic he was thankful he had such an obedient son.
Young is thinking of law, of economics, of how to make sense of the role Christ played in his upbringing. He reminded me of myself last week at Reunion when often he excused himself to go away and study for his AP Economics test that he would take a few days after Reunion ended.
After Reunion, Tim and I hung around the Mekong Center for a bit - the missionary compound from where I now write you - and there was Young with economics book open, slaving away at understanding cost-benefit analysis and flow charts. Tim and I tried to coax him out with us on motorbikes - "Young, we'll slick our hair back, wear sunglasses, tighten our shoes, and hit the road! We three, man! Cruising the night!" - but Young stayed back and studied.
He's the son of a missionary, a Korean student with ties to the U.S. but lives with his family in China. And for the past three nights that I stayed here he has calmly and consistently resisted my offers to take him out on the town - he sat instead with his economics book.
Yesterday he took the test. He wrote me yesterday afternoon and said he thought it was boring, which to him was a good sign because that meant it was easy, which in turn probably meant he knew everything. So, of course, I promised him ice cream to celebrate.
We went this afternoon. He had some syrupy chocolate concoction, and I two scoops of peanut butter delight and espresso. Two other high school students from my small group last week joined us. So did about twenty giddy Thai high school girls, but they sat at a different table.
And that's not really spreading the Gospel to lost tribes, but I think it counts for something, if only that their small group leader who fled here from the States and loves Jesus cares enough to take time from his afternoon and baht from his wallet and celebrate a completed exam with a couple of scoops of ice cream. You've to build relationships before you can really impact lives, and ice cream does a fine job of laying a firm (and tasty) foundation.
Now to bed. I reaffirm my wish that all of you were here and witnessing Christianity in a land that doesn't know it. If you were, Young and I would treat you to ice cream.
js
Young was in my small group last week at Reunion. His hair is long, and he wears glasses, listens to All American Rejects, and plays a very competent guitar. During the talent show at Reunion, he performed Hillsong's "One Way" with the accompaniment of his youngest brother on keyboard, his second youngest brother on bass, his third youngest brother on drums, and his mom and dad singing with the lyrics clasped in their hands. Before they began the song, Young asked if he could say something into the mic that he later used for singing, and he went on to tell how his mom and dad put him and his brothers up to performing the song, but that as they were already on stage, they were just going to make the best of it. The whole conference hall laughed, and his dad, laughing, said into the mic he was thankful he had such an obedient son.
Young is thinking of law, of economics, of how to make sense of the role Christ played in his upbringing. He reminded me of myself last week at Reunion when often he excused himself to go away and study for his AP Economics test that he would take a few days after Reunion ended.
After Reunion, Tim and I hung around the Mekong Center for a bit - the missionary compound from where I now write you - and there was Young with economics book open, slaving away at understanding cost-benefit analysis and flow charts. Tim and I tried to coax him out with us on motorbikes - "Young, we'll slick our hair back, wear sunglasses, tighten our shoes, and hit the road! We three, man! Cruising the night!" - but Young stayed back and studied.
He's the son of a missionary, a Korean student with ties to the U.S. but lives with his family in China. And for the past three nights that I stayed here he has calmly and consistently resisted my offers to take him out on the town - he sat instead with his economics book.
Yesterday he took the test. He wrote me yesterday afternoon and said he thought it was boring, which to him was a good sign because that meant it was easy, which in turn probably meant he knew everything. So, of course, I promised him ice cream to celebrate.
We went this afternoon. He had some syrupy chocolate concoction, and I two scoops of peanut butter delight and espresso. Two other high school students from my small group last week joined us. So did about twenty giddy Thai high school girls, but they sat at a different table.
And that's not really spreading the Gospel to lost tribes, but I think it counts for something, if only that their small group leader who fled here from the States and loves Jesus cares enough to take time from his afternoon and baht from his wallet and celebrate a completed exam with a couple of scoops of ice cream. You've to build relationships before you can really impact lives, and ice cream does a fine job of laying a firm (and tasty) foundation.
Now to bed. I reaffirm my wish that all of you were here and witnessing Christianity in a land that doesn't know it. If you were, Young and I would treat you to ice cream.
js
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Humming Hymns
Had dinner this evening at the Mekong Center. Pot-luck on the open fourth floor. Pad Thai - fried noodles, egg, tofu. Culturally comparable, I think, to the hamburger in America. Every restaurant offers it.
The Center hosts the pot-luck dinner every Thursday on the fourth floor for those staying in their rooms and those missionaries living in the city. It precedes the Thursday prayer meeting that lasts from 6:30 to 8:00. I sat with three parents of high school students with whom I worked last week at Reunion and a lovely gray-haired English lady. We talked of New Testament Greek and the tragedy in Myanmar.
Following dinner I helped wash dishes and clean up with the German mother of a girl who was in my small group last week. I hummed a song by The Innocence Mission until she started humming a hymn. I forget the name of it, but we hummed it together once she started.
Then to the prayer meeting. A group of eight of us in a circle of blue plastic chairs: two teachers from a theological seminary in the city, four missionaries, one Bible translator, and me. We sang hymns acapella from a white paper hymnal before reflecting on the tragedies that have wrecked Asia in the past few days. Then we prayed specifically for Myanmar, for the approval of visas to aid workers, for the safety of those we know serving God there, for softening of the hearts of the Burmese government and people. And then for China. And then for the prayer requests offered by those in the group. The focus on a community of prayer and Christian union and support modeled for the first time for me an example of what I've been hearing called a "home church," a gathering of Christians not within stained-glass-windowed walls but at the homes of close and like-minded friends. I hope to start something akin to this next semester at college. It showed me that "church" doesn't have to be a production and really can be more intimate with God and soul-searching when it is small and led by those who aren't 'church professionals.' We pleaded for God to move in Myanmar. It reminded me of Abraham pleading with God to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if only ten righteous men were found living there.
Afterward I sat in an empty conference room with a married German young man who, already having earned his masters in divinity in Germany, finished his masters in linguistics just recently in Thailand and now works translating the Bible into a dialect of the Laos language for a people group of 500,000. The people group hasn't a translation of the Bible in their native tongue. They are without the Gospels. My friend sits with the original Hebrew and Greek texts and a Laos man who speaks the dialect of the people group and translates. He said maybe they worked at a pace of six verses per hour, but often their rate was closer to three verses per hour. The team of two just finished Titus and are now on the 12th chapter of Proverbs. They're part of a larger team of translators who estimate the completion of the Bible into the language of this Laos minority group occurring in 2017. They started in 2002. Fifteen years of Bible translation. Pray for them. How heavy a burden to carry, translating the most important words in the world into a language that is not your own for a people who have not before heard or read it.
He grabbed me, this young German Bible translator, quickly after the prayer meeting because he heard I was studying classical Greek and soon New Testament Greek in university and thought perhaps I was called to Bible translation. I had never considered it before, and received his invitation with polite distance until he showed me a chart of just a small fraction of Asian people groups who are without a translation of the Bible into their native tongue. One people group had 7.3 million people, almost the size of New York City.
We talked of linguistics and New Testament ethics.
Tomorrow I meet with a professor at the theological seminary down the street.
Goodnight,
js
The Center hosts the pot-luck dinner every Thursday on the fourth floor for those staying in their rooms and those missionaries living in the city. It precedes the Thursday prayer meeting that lasts from 6:30 to 8:00. I sat with three parents of high school students with whom I worked last week at Reunion and a lovely gray-haired English lady. We talked of New Testament Greek and the tragedy in Myanmar.
Following dinner I helped wash dishes and clean up with the German mother of a girl who was in my small group last week. I hummed a song by The Innocence Mission until she started humming a hymn. I forget the name of it, but we hummed it together once she started.
Then to the prayer meeting. A group of eight of us in a circle of blue plastic chairs: two teachers from a theological seminary in the city, four missionaries, one Bible translator, and me. We sang hymns acapella from a white paper hymnal before reflecting on the tragedies that have wrecked Asia in the past few days. Then we prayed specifically for Myanmar, for the approval of visas to aid workers, for the safety of those we know serving God there, for softening of the hearts of the Burmese government and people. And then for China. And then for the prayer requests offered by those in the group. The focus on a community of prayer and Christian union and support modeled for the first time for me an example of what I've been hearing called a "home church," a gathering of Christians not within stained-glass-windowed walls but at the homes of close and like-minded friends. I hope to start something akin to this next semester at college. It showed me that "church" doesn't have to be a production and really can be more intimate with God and soul-searching when it is small and led by those who aren't 'church professionals.' We pleaded for God to move in Myanmar. It reminded me of Abraham pleading with God to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if only ten righteous men were found living there.
Afterward I sat in an empty conference room with a married German young man who, already having earned his masters in divinity in Germany, finished his masters in linguistics just recently in Thailand and now works translating the Bible into a dialect of the Laos language for a people group of 500,000. The people group hasn't a translation of the Bible in their native tongue. They are without the Gospels. My friend sits with the original Hebrew and Greek texts and a Laos man who speaks the dialect of the people group and translates. He said maybe they worked at a pace of six verses per hour, but often their rate was closer to three verses per hour. The team of two just finished Titus and are now on the 12th chapter of Proverbs. They're part of a larger team of translators who estimate the completion of the Bible into the language of this Laos minority group occurring in 2017. They started in 2002. Fifteen years of Bible translation. Pray for them. How heavy a burden to carry, translating the most important words in the world into a language that is not your own for a people who have not before heard or read it.
He grabbed me, this young German Bible translator, quickly after the prayer meeting because he heard I was studying classical Greek and soon New Testament Greek in university and thought perhaps I was called to Bible translation. I had never considered it before, and received his invitation with polite distance until he showed me a chart of just a small fraction of Asian people groups who are without a translation of the Bible into their native tongue. One people group had 7.3 million people, almost the size of New York City.
We talked of linguistics and New Testament ethics.
Tomorrow I meet with a professor at the theological seminary down the street.
Goodnight,
js
Reunion Pt. 2
Quickly, in the spirit I meant to adopt yesterday of telling stories from last week and not digressing with small preaching quips:
My first morning in Thailand, after our team of volunteers took toast and watermelon and migrated from the guesthouse where we stayed to the headquarters of OMF International's Southeastern Asian efforts, dubbed the "Mekong Center", I was introduced to the phenomenon whom I would be serving and with whom I would be working the next week at Reunion: the "TCK". I heard the term a few times before the mystery of its acronym was dispelled for me and grouped it with other impersonal abbreviations like "MIA", "FBI", and "KFC" until I learned whom it represented: "Third Culture Kids", who (picture here a red circle that partly overlaps a blue circle so that a purple area is made distinct from the red and blue), having been born to Western parents but raised in the East, felt not at home in either the East or West but were, while being conflicted in the tension between the red and blue cultures, mostly jumbled in the melting pot of these two cultures, the purple zone, if you will. Such is how the "TCK" was explained to me. A great sociological wonder that lived in the far reaches of ... and on and on.
As much as I teased the term, though, these were the teenagers I worked with and those I hope tomorrow night will go with me to take ice cream to the child beggars and flowers to the street prostitutes. Their parents, called from their family, friends, and home lands to follow Christ in the East, are "missionaries", in a very occupational sense of the word. The daily task of their parents is to show Christ's light in the darkness that is unreached Asia - they are paid for it, they are in a network of like-minded colleagues, and they have sons and daughters who without choosing were born into these occupational Christianity homes and quickly figured out they were foreigners in a strange land, both foreign by (usually) skin color and ideology. And why were they foreign and displaced? Because of the God of their parents, who also happens to be the God of mine, and the God of Abraham.
Perhaps you can then imagine the animosity and rebellion against God that so tempts these teenagers. That temptation is only greater when most of the students leave their homes at an early age, their parents wanting a better education for them than the schools in the villages or developing cities where they are stationed can offer. Most are sent to international boarding schools in a different country than their parents and siblings for nine months out of the year. But further, because of the nature of their parents' occupation, under contract by The Great Commission, the students tend to see Christianity as something "unreached people groups" need to hear, something that can help and inspire the poor and downtrodden, that is, relief for the weary village farmer - not for them, not for missionary kids who study in international boarding schools.
I was convicted then early in the week, as were Katrin and Tim, to reposition Christianity for these students, most of whom knew the stories and teachings of the Bible much better than my friends and me and if quizzed on memory verses would enter Final Jeopardy without have to risk a penny and still trump the other players by tenfold. They were brilliant students. Most of my small group, aged 16-19, had largely, even as recently as the past month, made sense of their upbringing in light of their own Christian faith. Thank God, truly - if God can speak out of Balaam's donkey, then He can use these kids to lead nations for him. Their younger brothers and sisters were going through a tougher time, but, confident in the stories that were related to me from the super cool YWAM students who led the other small groups, I think we helped them out a lot.
But I felt my high school students, even having made sense of their radical Christian upbringing, still saw Christianity in the same way that I saw Christianity for so many years of my life, as a religion that I could seamlessly integrate with secular success and worldly popularity. So I challenged them. Hard. The Gospels aren't ambiguous, nor do they say that only those who have a strange affinity for eating locusts and wild honey should sell all they have and give it to the poor, but that all those who seek treasure in heaven must do this and follow Christ. And to those who convert but still have ties to the world, Christ said, "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God." It's not easy to live as a Christian, but by some sure trick of the devil we've made Christianity into a country club event on Sundays with refreshments before and after service. Coffee and cookies for all who believe!
And this, I don't believe, is what my generation of Christians wants - we aren't looking for an easy way of life or an easy Christianity. We don't want to just find a good job, a pretty spouse, and settle down somewhere to live comfortably. We want challenge, we want to be held to our commitments, we want to be presented with something difficult and strive to overcome all obstacles that bar our way. I really don't believe the Gospel that so appealed (so I'm told) to our parents' generation and their parents' generation, full of the "Believe and Be Saved!" message, is our Gospel. I think we side more (or would side more if it were ever what we heard from the country clubs on Sunday mornings!) with Luke 9: 57-62 and Luke 14: 25-34, and so these were the main passages with which I challenged my small group. "If anyone would come after me," Christ said, "he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me." (Luke 9:23) How much harder is that than taking an AP exam! Than earning six, seven figures a year! Than being baptized and joining a church. We've made Christianity too easy, and as a result have estranged brilliant students who need and want challenges that might just turn their lives upside down.
That was my commission for the week: to position Christianity so that if you were to live it as Christ lived it and meant for His followers to live it your world would be turned upside down. And the kids got it. They really did.
It was different, though. Tim and I are products of the polished and bright light Youth Quake craze: the mountaintop retreats with three to four hundred high school students, the blaring electric guitars and chorus of voices during worship times, the tears of the altar calls shed by repentant teenage heartthrobs. We knew to connect with these "TCK" (ehhh..) high school students we had to present something different, and after the first few sessions of super dull and unresponsive worship (worship that, no doubt, would have led three hundred American teenagers to the throne of God), we, by grace, got a bit better. No more fast and lyrically-shallow worship songs, no more ultra-happy Christianity, no more "You've just got to stop listening to heathen music and believe!" - the students needed a religion to inspire a purpose in their lives, something powerful and of Someone loyal, not to be told over and over again that sex, drugs, and rap music is bad, bad, bad.
That doesn't resolve, but I've to run quick to the boarding home of my good friend Sophie, who so graciously baked heartwarming brownies for the YWAM students and I two days ago, and see when we will next sit with the other boarding school students and their dorm 'auntie' and play this super silly German card game called "Bohnanza." You grow beans and sell them for gold coins. It's nuts, but the kids are a joy. Little elementary school Clara won last time, and I've to regain bean-growing glory.
Following that, the Mekong Center where I stay and from where I now write you will be hosting a pot-luck dinner this evening at 5:30 p.m. for the missionaries in town, followed by a prayer meeting from 6:30 to 8:00 in the prayer room on the far side of floor two, opposite from the room where I sleep, room number three. You're all invited!
My first morning in Thailand, after our team of volunteers took toast and watermelon and migrated from the guesthouse where we stayed to the headquarters of OMF International's Southeastern Asian efforts, dubbed the "Mekong Center", I was introduced to the phenomenon whom I would be serving and with whom I would be working the next week at Reunion: the "TCK". I heard the term a few times before the mystery of its acronym was dispelled for me and grouped it with other impersonal abbreviations like "MIA", "FBI", and "KFC" until I learned whom it represented: "Third Culture Kids", who (picture here a red circle that partly overlaps a blue circle so that a purple area is made distinct from the red and blue), having been born to Western parents but raised in the East, felt not at home in either the East or West but were, while being conflicted in the tension between the red and blue cultures, mostly jumbled in the melting pot of these two cultures, the purple zone, if you will. Such is how the "TCK" was explained to me. A great sociological wonder that lived in the far reaches of ... and on and on.
As much as I teased the term, though, these were the teenagers I worked with and those I hope tomorrow night will go with me to take ice cream to the child beggars and flowers to the street prostitutes. Their parents, called from their family, friends, and home lands to follow Christ in the East, are "missionaries", in a very occupational sense of the word. The daily task of their parents is to show Christ's light in the darkness that is unreached Asia - they are paid for it, they are in a network of like-minded colleagues, and they have sons and daughters who without choosing were born into these occupational Christianity homes and quickly figured out they were foreigners in a strange land, both foreign by (usually) skin color and ideology. And why were they foreign and displaced? Because of the God of their parents, who also happens to be the God of mine, and the God of Abraham.
Perhaps you can then imagine the animosity and rebellion against God that so tempts these teenagers. That temptation is only greater when most of the students leave their homes at an early age, their parents wanting a better education for them than the schools in the villages or developing cities where they are stationed can offer. Most are sent to international boarding schools in a different country than their parents and siblings for nine months out of the year. But further, because of the nature of their parents' occupation, under contract by The Great Commission, the students tend to see Christianity as something "unreached people groups" need to hear, something that can help and inspire the poor and downtrodden, that is, relief for the weary village farmer - not for them, not for missionary kids who study in international boarding schools.
I was convicted then early in the week, as were Katrin and Tim, to reposition Christianity for these students, most of whom knew the stories and teachings of the Bible much better than my friends and me and if quizzed on memory verses would enter Final Jeopardy without have to risk a penny and still trump the other players by tenfold. They were brilliant students. Most of my small group, aged 16-19, had largely, even as recently as the past month, made sense of their upbringing in light of their own Christian faith. Thank God, truly - if God can speak out of Balaam's donkey, then He can use these kids to lead nations for him. Their younger brothers and sisters were going through a tougher time, but, confident in the stories that were related to me from the super cool YWAM students who led the other small groups, I think we helped them out a lot.
But I felt my high school students, even having made sense of their radical Christian upbringing, still saw Christianity in the same way that I saw Christianity for so many years of my life, as a religion that I could seamlessly integrate with secular success and worldly popularity. So I challenged them. Hard. The Gospels aren't ambiguous, nor do they say that only those who have a strange affinity for eating locusts and wild honey should sell all they have and give it to the poor, but that all those who seek treasure in heaven must do this and follow Christ. And to those who convert but still have ties to the world, Christ said, "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God." It's not easy to live as a Christian, but by some sure trick of the devil we've made Christianity into a country club event on Sundays with refreshments before and after service. Coffee and cookies for all who believe!
And this, I don't believe, is what my generation of Christians wants - we aren't looking for an easy way of life or an easy Christianity. We don't want to just find a good job, a pretty spouse, and settle down somewhere to live comfortably. We want challenge, we want to be held to our commitments, we want to be presented with something difficult and strive to overcome all obstacles that bar our way. I really don't believe the Gospel that so appealed (so I'm told) to our parents' generation and their parents' generation, full of the "Believe and Be Saved!" message, is our Gospel. I think we side more (or would side more if it were ever what we heard from the country clubs on Sunday mornings!) with Luke 9: 57-62 and Luke 14: 25-34, and so these were the main passages with which I challenged my small group. "If anyone would come after me," Christ said, "he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me." (Luke 9:23) How much harder is that than taking an AP exam! Than earning six, seven figures a year! Than being baptized and joining a church. We've made Christianity too easy, and as a result have estranged brilliant students who need and want challenges that might just turn their lives upside down.
That was my commission for the week: to position Christianity so that if you were to live it as Christ lived it and meant for His followers to live it your world would be turned upside down. And the kids got it. They really did.
It was different, though. Tim and I are products of the polished and bright light Youth Quake craze: the mountaintop retreats with three to four hundred high school students, the blaring electric guitars and chorus of voices during worship times, the tears of the altar calls shed by repentant teenage heartthrobs. We knew to connect with these "TCK" (ehhh..) high school students we had to present something different, and after the first few sessions of super dull and unresponsive worship (worship that, no doubt, would have led three hundred American teenagers to the throne of God), we, by grace, got a bit better. No more fast and lyrically-shallow worship songs, no more ultra-happy Christianity, no more "You've just got to stop listening to heathen music and believe!" - the students needed a religion to inspire a purpose in their lives, something powerful and of Someone loyal, not to be told over and over again that sex, drugs, and rap music is bad, bad, bad.
That doesn't resolve, but I've to run quick to the boarding home of my good friend Sophie, who so graciously baked heartwarming brownies for the YWAM students and I two days ago, and see when we will next sit with the other boarding school students and their dorm 'auntie' and play this super silly German card game called "Bohnanza." You grow beans and sell them for gold coins. It's nuts, but the kids are a joy. Little elementary school Clara won last time, and I've to regain bean-growing glory.
Following that, the Mekong Center where I stay and from where I now write you will be hosting a pot-luck dinner this evening at 5:30 p.m. for the missionaries in town, followed by a prayer meeting from 6:30 to 8:00 in the prayer room on the far side of floor two, opposite from the room where I sleep, room number three. You're all invited!
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Reunion Pt. 1
In the words of Paul,
'To the church of God in Oklahoma, together with all the saints throughout America:
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.'
And in mine,
Hello hello all. I've days and weeks to write to you of how God is moving in the Mekong River area and what He is saying to the workers in His field, but I must begin by saying that I'd really love to hop a jet plane tomorrow and be home for breakfast in two days time, to see all of you again and get Hawaiian shaved ice cones when evening starts to set, to wake early and take Ashley to school - to be home! - but I've not been called or seen it fit to set these months aside for me, but for someone and something greater, so for now I look not to comfort but to very intentional Christian living in Asia, the land about which Paul wrote:
"We do not want you to be informed, brothers, about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death" (2 Corinthians 1:8-9). I found that passage not last winter but the one before last on a cold evening in Changchun, China, and I remembered it on the plane ride to Thailand. The antagonism of Asia to Christianity, reported in Paul's writings, spans time, I think, so that, like the Israelites who have something mystical to them, so are the Asians whose history has, very unlike our own, not been turned on its head by Christ's death. Not in comparison to the West, anyway.
But I'm rambling and embellishing when really I've so many stories and hard facts to account. And they start with the Reunion that I mentioned in my last letter, the cause of my invitation to Thailand and the occupation of my last week and a half. It's over now. I wish it wasn't.
The team of 'childcare' volunteers - the YWAM (Youth With A Mission) students, the Australian ladies, the Fong family, a few jolly English, three Korean girls - departed from the city where we had orientation last, oh, Saturday? and fled to the resort where the Reunion would occur. We settled in slowly, having two days before our main duties were to begin. The first morning we toured the different rooms of the resort where youth programs were to be held - a room for the babies, for the toddlers, for the 7-9s, for the 10-12s, and for the teenagers - and prayed for the corresponding students, who were yet to come, and leaders, members of our international volunteer team, in each one. We prayed as a group, each with head bowed and hands folded, seeking and beseeching God's will for the week, but at the same time prayed aloud, so that whenever a person felt called to lead the group in audible prayer he broke his prayerful silence and prayed aloud. This would be the format of each of our team prayers. They usually lasted from ten to fifteen minutes, during which three or four of us would pray before Gill, our team leader, closed us in a summation and "Amen." They were often the highlights of my days (though I so often missed our morning prayer meetings while running around to organize worship music for the teenager's 8:15 a.m. session! Apologies, apologies, fellow team members.)
After the tour and prayers, Katrin, a delightful German twenty-year-old girl and the YWAM student who joined Tim and I to work with the teenagers, set with me to preparing the teenage room. The next day Tim would arrive and, two hours after he was scheduled to arrive, we would hold our first program for the teenagers that evening.
Weeks before, Tim, who planned and organized the schedule and theme of the teens' week, asked if each morning I would open our devotion with a talk following worship. He left me to choose my own scriptures and conduct it as I saw fit, as well as with a God-sent encouragement that he saw the opportunity to give each morning's devotional talk as a great chance for me to grow in my Christian walk and mentoring. He was right, and I'm thankful for his trust and encouragement, but I wasn't quite so peppy when I read his first email that commissioned me for the job. I was fresh off a twenty-page religion research paper on St. Therese of Lisieux and the theology of asceticism that portrayed my summer's service to me as something more low-key and humbling. I wanted to sweep floors for Christ, to wash dishes for His servants, to pray alone for His harvest - to serve with endurance, not by performance. But God led me elsewhere, and so each morning at Reunion before breakfast and after throwing my Bible and notepad in my backpack I headed with sandaled-feet and raggedy hair to a wooden bench on the far side of the gardens and prayed and studied for my lesson that day. Tim was speaking on the New Testament in the afternoons, so I thought to mirror his scripture with corresponding stories from the Old Testament. That worked one or two times, but on the other days I flipped mainly through Genesis and Exodus until God told me to stop at a passage, and the ones we selected together tended to be those that most confused or frustrated me during my high school years. I want to detail these briefly before moving on to something else.
Morning One: Genesis 19: 16-19, right after God and Moses free the Israelites from Egypt, and directly before God gives Moses and the Israelites the Ten Commandments, one of the most revolutionary moves in the history of Christianity, second perhaps only to the bite of the apple in the Garden. The passage isn't much: God speaks to Moses via thunder, but it opened up a week-long conversation on how God speaks to us and what we must do, if anything, to be receptive to God's voice. How easy and resolute it would be to hear God's voice in the thunder! I sometimes - well, quite often really - say that I wish I was a Jew because then my faith and religion would be already completely, specifically, and resolutely spelled out for me in the laws of the Old Testament. To be righteous I would only need to follow them. Yet I'm not a Jew, and Christ came, so becoming righteous and living for God is a bit tougher than following a step-by-step prescription. (I admit and allow here all your accusations that I'm summing up the Jewish faith and religious practices with overwhelming faults and inaccuracies, and I'd probably agree with you if you got them to me somehow. But the distinction still stands - the Old Testament Law is largely an exact prescription for righteousness, where Christ's teachings are a bit more subtle yet integral and intended to be integrated into our every thought, word and action.) To contrast God speaking via thunder, I then turned to 1 Kings 19: 11-13, where God speaks to Elijah the prophet in a whisper, and said that this is the God that I know, who speaks to us in the stillness and quiet, when we're alone and seeking His heart - but how I always pray God would speak via thunder! So that thunderstorms then would be like a light-show conversation with God, every word distinct, no chance of doubt or confusion.
And on the second morning, God said, 'Let the students of the Mekong River area missionaries meditate on the confounding story of how I told Abraham to sacrifice to Me his son Isaac and how I then stopped him and provided a ram. Then let there be evening, and morning...' I had read the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard's "Panegyric On Abraham" on a bus two years ago in Hong Kong, and for the second morning it seemed fitting with our day's theme of "When God Changes Directions," a feat that really seems incompatible with a God who is omniscient and, because outside of time (eternal), immutable, who is all-good, who 'doesn't make mistakes.' Why then would He tell Abraham to kill Isaac then stop Abraham when he proved faithful? We first considered, with Kierkegaard, the extreme doubt and anxiety Abraham must have faced when he first heard God's command to kill Isaac - "Was that God's voice? Was he talking to me? Did God really say to kill my son? Did he really mean it?" - before inquiring into what might make God act so strangely. Tim said something related to this one afternoon as we walked back to the room that we shared. Commenting on my recent decision to give up all thoughts of dating or girlfriend relationships for two years, he joked that because I was willing to give it up dating for the sake of my Christian walk and relationship to Christ, God would give it back to me with the reward of a brilliant and lovely Christian girl who also drinks too much coffee and wants dreadlocks by next summer. Perhaps perhaps, but his comment, a joke and not-a-joke simultaneously, prompted a 'rite of passage' consideration that my small group also discussed during one of our many examinations of just how a Christian should live in light of a Gospel that commands us to sell all we have and give to the poor, to become "the servant of all", to leave our father, mother, brother, sister, and friends behind and "take up our cross daily". Perhaps once we humans realize we've to give up, to sacrifice something - romantic relationships, wealth, bodily comforts, spiritual comforts, a summer of fun, secular success, GPA, our reputation, our ambitions - for the sake of our faith, of our walk with Christ, God accepts our sacrifice, takes it as pleasing, then blesses us sevenfold in return for it. After all, because Abraham was willing (and more than willing! He almost did kill Isaac!) to sacrifice his son, God blessed him with descendants so numerous as the sand pebbles on all the beaches of all the coasts of all the world. So look out, all you brilliant and lovely Christian girls who drink too much coffee and plan for dreadlocks by next summer, God might be sending you to Oklahoma or Indiana, depending on wherever His servant toils. Ha!
The third morning, conforming to the day's theme of "When God Changes The World", I spoke on the Tower of Babel story in the eleventh chapter of Genesis, which, as I told the students, always 'pissed me off' because God confused our languages when He saw that nothing would be impossible for us to accomplish. It was as if a mathematics teacher stopped teaching his students calculus when he saw that they would be able to write a formula to predict the world, or if a violin instructor were to halt giving lessons to a young virtuoso when he saw that his young student would someday compose music that would make even the birds and beasts stop in awe and listen. I admitted to the students that one of my biggest struggles and personal obstacles to overcome in my Christian life is being completely self-reliant and banking always on my abilities and talents. They've worked so far and gotten me to where I am now, and they show promise of making me successful in the future - why shouldn't I use them? Why shouldn't I strive every moment to become great, to become successful, to gain power and a favorable reputation? Why shouldn't I build a castle to the heavens? Why not call it the Tower of Babel?
Because, as Christians, we're not called to be great, to be successful, to be powerful and to be liked. 'Blessed are the poor,' Christ said, 'blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek' - 'For theirs is the kingdom of heaven, for they will be comforted, for they will inherit the earth!' Imagine if our Gospel read, 'Blessed are the successful, the powerful, those who make good grades, those who get promoted in their jobs, those who make money, those who look good, those who live comfortably, those whose worries are few and little, those who go to churches that reach like towers to the heavens, those who live away and apart from suffering and tragedy, those who don't have to think of being poor or the poor.' It wouldn't be Christ's teaching, but it'd be darn easy to follow, because it would align with what we are taught to do and what comes so naturally to us, the drive to succeed, the ambition to build towers of Babel. It's what up to now I've based and banked my life on, but I'm starting to think a lot of it is maybe incompatible with a Gospel of radical men who ate locusts and wore clothes made of camel's hair, of a man who wandered Galilee without a place to rest his head, of a few friends who left their jobs and possessions to follow a homeless Jewish boy who talked of sparrows, poverty and lilies.
The small group I led, consisting of students aged 16-19, largely discussed all week that thought: how are we to make sense of our lives in light of those what one student called "crazy religious loons" of the Bible, of Christ instructing us that 'unless we change and become like little children, we will never enter the kingdom of heaven' (Matthew 18: 2-4) - how are we to make sense of our nations (how are you and I to make sense of the American military!) when we are taught by Christ to 'love our enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.' Too bad Christ didn't say - "Profess to love your enemies, convince yourself that if they were begging for food at your doorstep, you would give them bread, but hesitate not to bomb their capital cities whenever they crash your buildings." We'd have that commandment down.
I'm preaching, though, when really I should be writing praises and portrayals of the teenage students whom I befriended and who befriended me last week (who, we hope, will ride motorbikes together to a forested mountain in two days' time and have a picnic together at sunset), of the blessing God gave me of being welcomed into the pure and heartfelt family of the YWAM students who flew away this morning for Malaysia in route to Philippines, of the prayer journey I am slated to walk in two weeks' time, of the oh-geez moments on motorbikes that Tim and I had Monday afternoon as we weaved through lawless Thai traffic, of the missionary compound where I now stay and write you, of what I've learned and how more alive in Christ I feel here than that lifeless last semester at college, of all the, oh, love! Maybe tomorrow, if you'll be here? Now I've to rouse a Korean friend of mine, Young, to go search for two guitars with me so we can play hymns into the night. Oh I wish you all were here!
xo,
js
'To the church of God in Oklahoma, together with all the saints throughout America:
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.'
And in mine,
Hello hello all. I've days and weeks to write to you of how God is moving in the Mekong River area and what He is saying to the workers in His field, but I must begin by saying that I'd really love to hop a jet plane tomorrow and be home for breakfast in two days time, to see all of you again and get Hawaiian shaved ice cones when evening starts to set, to wake early and take Ashley to school - to be home! - but I've not been called or seen it fit to set these months aside for me, but for someone and something greater, so for now I look not to comfort but to very intentional Christian living in Asia, the land about which Paul wrote:
"We do not want you to be informed, brothers, about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death" (2 Corinthians 1:8-9). I found that passage not last winter but the one before last on a cold evening in Changchun, China, and I remembered it on the plane ride to Thailand. The antagonism of Asia to Christianity, reported in Paul's writings, spans time, I think, so that, like the Israelites who have something mystical to them, so are the Asians whose history has, very unlike our own, not been turned on its head by Christ's death. Not in comparison to the West, anyway.
But I'm rambling and embellishing when really I've so many stories and hard facts to account. And they start with the Reunion that I mentioned in my last letter, the cause of my invitation to Thailand and the occupation of my last week and a half. It's over now. I wish it wasn't.
The team of 'childcare' volunteers - the YWAM (Youth With A Mission) students, the Australian ladies, the Fong family, a few jolly English, three Korean girls - departed from the city where we had orientation last, oh, Saturday? and fled to the resort where the Reunion would occur. We settled in slowly, having two days before our main duties were to begin. The first morning we toured the different rooms of the resort where youth programs were to be held - a room for the babies, for the toddlers, for the 7-9s, for the 10-12s, and for the teenagers - and prayed for the corresponding students, who were yet to come, and leaders, members of our international volunteer team, in each one. We prayed as a group, each with head bowed and hands folded, seeking and beseeching God's will for the week, but at the same time prayed aloud, so that whenever a person felt called to lead the group in audible prayer he broke his prayerful silence and prayed aloud. This would be the format of each of our team prayers. They usually lasted from ten to fifteen minutes, during which three or four of us would pray before Gill, our team leader, closed us in a summation and "Amen." They were often the highlights of my days (though I so often missed our morning prayer meetings while running around to organize worship music for the teenager's 8:15 a.m. session! Apologies, apologies, fellow team members.)
After the tour and prayers, Katrin, a delightful German twenty-year-old girl and the YWAM student who joined Tim and I to work with the teenagers, set with me to preparing the teenage room. The next day Tim would arrive and, two hours after he was scheduled to arrive, we would hold our first program for the teenagers that evening.
Weeks before, Tim, who planned and organized the schedule and theme of the teens' week, asked if each morning I would open our devotion with a talk following worship. He left me to choose my own scriptures and conduct it as I saw fit, as well as with a God-sent encouragement that he saw the opportunity to give each morning's devotional talk as a great chance for me to grow in my Christian walk and mentoring. He was right, and I'm thankful for his trust and encouragement, but I wasn't quite so peppy when I read his first email that commissioned me for the job. I was fresh off a twenty-page religion research paper on St. Therese of Lisieux and the theology of asceticism that portrayed my summer's service to me as something more low-key and humbling. I wanted to sweep floors for Christ, to wash dishes for His servants, to pray alone for His harvest - to serve with endurance, not by performance. But God led me elsewhere, and so each morning at Reunion before breakfast and after throwing my Bible and notepad in my backpack I headed with sandaled-feet and raggedy hair to a wooden bench on the far side of the gardens and prayed and studied for my lesson that day. Tim was speaking on the New Testament in the afternoons, so I thought to mirror his scripture with corresponding stories from the Old Testament. That worked one or two times, but on the other days I flipped mainly through Genesis and Exodus until God told me to stop at a passage, and the ones we selected together tended to be those that most confused or frustrated me during my high school years. I want to detail these briefly before moving on to something else.
Morning One: Genesis 19: 16-19, right after God and Moses free the Israelites from Egypt, and directly before God gives Moses and the Israelites the Ten Commandments, one of the most revolutionary moves in the history of Christianity, second perhaps only to the bite of the apple in the Garden. The passage isn't much: God speaks to Moses via thunder, but it opened up a week-long conversation on how God speaks to us and what we must do, if anything, to be receptive to God's voice. How easy and resolute it would be to hear God's voice in the thunder! I sometimes - well, quite often really - say that I wish I was a Jew because then my faith and religion would be already completely, specifically, and resolutely spelled out for me in the laws of the Old Testament. To be righteous I would only need to follow them. Yet I'm not a Jew, and Christ came, so becoming righteous and living for God is a bit tougher than following a step-by-step prescription. (I admit and allow here all your accusations that I'm summing up the Jewish faith and religious practices with overwhelming faults and inaccuracies, and I'd probably agree with you if you got them to me somehow. But the distinction still stands - the Old Testament Law is largely an exact prescription for righteousness, where Christ's teachings are a bit more subtle yet integral and intended to be integrated into our every thought, word and action.) To contrast God speaking via thunder, I then turned to 1 Kings 19: 11-13, where God speaks to Elijah the prophet in a whisper, and said that this is the God that I know, who speaks to us in the stillness and quiet, when we're alone and seeking His heart - but how I always pray God would speak via thunder! So that thunderstorms then would be like a light-show conversation with God, every word distinct, no chance of doubt or confusion.
And on the second morning, God said, 'Let the students of the Mekong River area missionaries meditate on the confounding story of how I told Abraham to sacrifice to Me his son Isaac and how I then stopped him and provided a ram. Then let there be evening, and morning...' I had read the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard's "Panegyric On Abraham" on a bus two years ago in Hong Kong, and for the second morning it seemed fitting with our day's theme of "When God Changes Directions," a feat that really seems incompatible with a God who is omniscient and, because outside of time (eternal), immutable, who is all-good, who 'doesn't make mistakes.' Why then would He tell Abraham to kill Isaac then stop Abraham when he proved faithful? We first considered, with Kierkegaard, the extreme doubt and anxiety Abraham must have faced when he first heard God's command to kill Isaac - "Was that God's voice? Was he talking to me? Did God really say to kill my son? Did he really mean it?" - before inquiring into what might make God act so strangely. Tim said something related to this one afternoon as we walked back to the room that we shared. Commenting on my recent decision to give up all thoughts of dating or girlfriend relationships for two years, he joked that because I was willing to give it up dating for the sake of my Christian walk and relationship to Christ, God would give it back to me with the reward of a brilliant and lovely Christian girl who also drinks too much coffee and wants dreadlocks by next summer. Perhaps perhaps, but his comment, a joke and not-a-joke simultaneously, prompted a 'rite of passage' consideration that my small group also discussed during one of our many examinations of just how a Christian should live in light of a Gospel that commands us to sell all we have and give to the poor, to become "the servant of all", to leave our father, mother, brother, sister, and friends behind and "take up our cross daily". Perhaps once we humans realize we've to give up, to sacrifice something - romantic relationships, wealth, bodily comforts, spiritual comforts, a summer of fun, secular success, GPA, our reputation, our ambitions - for the sake of our faith, of our walk with Christ, God accepts our sacrifice, takes it as pleasing, then blesses us sevenfold in return for it. After all, because Abraham was willing (and more than willing! He almost did kill Isaac!) to sacrifice his son, God blessed him with descendants so numerous as the sand pebbles on all the beaches of all the coasts of all the world. So look out, all you brilliant and lovely Christian girls who drink too much coffee and plan for dreadlocks by next summer, God might be sending you to Oklahoma or Indiana, depending on wherever His servant toils. Ha!
The third morning, conforming to the day's theme of "When God Changes The World", I spoke on the Tower of Babel story in the eleventh chapter of Genesis, which, as I told the students, always 'pissed me off' because God confused our languages when He saw that nothing would be impossible for us to accomplish. It was as if a mathematics teacher stopped teaching his students calculus when he saw that they would be able to write a formula to predict the world, or if a violin instructor were to halt giving lessons to a young virtuoso when he saw that his young student would someday compose music that would make even the birds and beasts stop in awe and listen. I admitted to the students that one of my biggest struggles and personal obstacles to overcome in my Christian life is being completely self-reliant and banking always on my abilities and talents. They've worked so far and gotten me to where I am now, and they show promise of making me successful in the future - why shouldn't I use them? Why shouldn't I strive every moment to become great, to become successful, to gain power and a favorable reputation? Why shouldn't I build a castle to the heavens? Why not call it the Tower of Babel?
Because, as Christians, we're not called to be great, to be successful, to be powerful and to be liked. 'Blessed are the poor,' Christ said, 'blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek' - 'For theirs is the kingdom of heaven, for they will be comforted, for they will inherit the earth!' Imagine if our Gospel read, 'Blessed are the successful, the powerful, those who make good grades, those who get promoted in their jobs, those who make money, those who look good, those who live comfortably, those whose worries are few and little, those who go to churches that reach like towers to the heavens, those who live away and apart from suffering and tragedy, those who don't have to think of being poor or the poor.' It wouldn't be Christ's teaching, but it'd be darn easy to follow, because it would align with what we are taught to do and what comes so naturally to us, the drive to succeed, the ambition to build towers of Babel. It's what up to now I've based and banked my life on, but I'm starting to think a lot of it is maybe incompatible with a Gospel of radical men who ate locusts and wore clothes made of camel's hair, of a man who wandered Galilee without a place to rest his head, of a few friends who left their jobs and possessions to follow a homeless Jewish boy who talked of sparrows, poverty and lilies.
The small group I led, consisting of students aged 16-19, largely discussed all week that thought: how are we to make sense of our lives in light of those what one student called "crazy religious loons" of the Bible, of Christ instructing us that 'unless we change and become like little children, we will never enter the kingdom of heaven' (Matthew 18: 2-4) - how are we to make sense of our nations (how are you and I to make sense of the American military!) when we are taught by Christ to 'love our enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.' Too bad Christ didn't say - "Profess to love your enemies, convince yourself that if they were begging for food at your doorstep, you would give them bread, but hesitate not to bomb their capital cities whenever they crash your buildings." We'd have that commandment down.
I'm preaching, though, when really I should be writing praises and portrayals of the teenage students whom I befriended and who befriended me last week (who, we hope, will ride motorbikes together to a forested mountain in two days' time and have a picnic together at sunset), of the blessing God gave me of being welcomed into the pure and heartfelt family of the YWAM students who flew away this morning for Malaysia in route to Philippines, of the prayer journey I am slated to walk in two weeks' time, of the oh-geez moments on motorbikes that Tim and I had Monday afternoon as we weaved through lawless Thai traffic, of the missionary compound where I now stay and write you, of what I've learned and how more alive in Christ I feel here than that lifeless last semester at college, of all the, oh, love! Maybe tomorrow, if you'll be here? Now I've to rouse a Korean friend of mine, Young, to go search for two guitars with me so we can play hymns into the night. Oh I wish you all were here!
xo,
js
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Sparrows and Poverty and Lilies
"Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don't be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows." Matthew 10: 29-31
I was invited to Thailand, but I do not well accept an invitation and attend its event without first judging the promised situation. I'm a slave to efficiency, productivity, and self-improvement, and those of my classmates and close friends reading this will have nodded in affirmation at the confession. In that same spirit, I confess I was invited to Thailand, but I judged the invitation.
It starts with Luke, so I'll start with Luke. I was a student of Luke the last four months in a dimly lit room of my fraternity house, debating the ethical teachings of Jesus with a budding Buddhist, and lamenting the complacency of Christianity, of which I foremost and North America are guilty together, with an inspired Methodist, accosting ourselves and eachother with adoring the Cross without taking up our crosses, without following. To adore the Cross but not to follow Christ - how painstaking and agonizing it is to realize and be convicted of this fault. To love God, to utmost thank Him for Christ, to sing lovely hymns and feel lovely inside with the congregation in chorus lifting melodic sacrifices to the one heavenly Father, to put Him on our postcards and in lockets around our necks, glorify Him in dramatic colors on stain-glassed windows: to adore the Cross. I adore the Cross. And then to read Luke 14: 25-33, "The Cost of Being a Disciple": 'Anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. Any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.' I began to imagine carrying my cross was something different than adoring the Cross.
And Luke 9:58 - "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head."And Luke 9:60, and 62: "Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God," "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God." These were the verses by which I judged my invitation to Thailand. I would serve, I thought, but also be thrown into an opportunity to take the Gospels literally. It's easier here, without America, to surrender. That was the incentive with which I received my invitation, and in light of the aforementioned verses in Luke, and a growing disillusionment with what I've termed "PowerPointProtestantism", I came to Thailand and sit here now, Bible to my right, an empty coffee cup to my left, and ahead of me a bridge and river that connects to 65 million Thai people: 62 million Buddhists, and less than 450,000 Christians, or, 1/16th the population of NYC.
But I'm of little aid to the Thai people, except as a shining light of the love of God, my person a lampshade to the divine and living light of God inside me (and what if the lampshade were to forget itself and not block any of the divine light!). And so I've come not to convert but to encourage and pray, to serve those here who work with the Thai. To serve the six people - the three couples - who are the only Christian missionaries working with the 7 million Thai Yuen (sp), a people group in the north of Thailand and southern parts of China. Six candles among 7 million. Think of six Christians among the 8 million people of NYC - only six. This is the situation with the Thai Yuen.
Yet, in the spirit with which I began this letter, I've come to learn. I've a backpack, one pair of sandals, a few white v-neck t-shirts, faith in God's care for the sparrows and the lilies of the field (Matthew 6: 28-34), and six books, descriptions of which I will not elaborate further, but I feel the need to list them, if only to serve me many years later as reminders of what words weighed on my heart during the heavy and rainy summer in Thailand of 2008. I list them in order as I plan to read them.
1. Irresistible Revolution- Shane Claiborne
2. The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux: Story of a Soul
3. Dark Night of the Soul - St. John of the Cross
4. Tragic Sense of Life - Miguel de Unamuno
5. The Way of a Pilgrim - Unknown
6. The Pilgrim's Progress - John Bunyan
7. Mortal Beauty, God's Grace: Major Poems and Spiritual Writings of Gerard Manly Hopkins
As I wrote to most of those reading this in my letter, for these first two weeks I will work with the teenage children of missionaries from across southeastern Asia: China, Lao, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar (Bhurma). I'll be giving morning talks and leading small groups and worship music with my close friend Tim Tibbles, the worship minister at First Christian Church in Owasso, Oklahoma. We two and about fifteen others from all over the world - Germany, Korea, Singapore, USA, Canada, China - form the team of volunteers who will support, pray for, encourage and teach the missionary children, many of whom feel estranged from both their home culture and the culture in which they live (and were perhaps born), as well as removed from a purposeful and revolutionary Christianity - Christianity, the occupation of their parents, being the reason for their removal from their home culture and departure to (in most cases) boarding school.
I am praying for opportunities to serve in Thailand, Laos, or Cambodia after the first two weeks at Reunion, and have already been blessed with encouragement and support from those I've met here. God moves.
To those who supported me financially and continue to support me with their prayers: Thank You, and I pray also for you. Together we form the Church, separate and alone we form not. Your contributions far surpassed my expectations, and I now travel under the serious responsibility of being a steward for the money of God's people. As I've told some of you, and tell you now quite bluntly, I've received more money than I could ever spend during three months in Thailand. I hope to use it to serve God's children here - food for the poor and suffering, support for missionaries - but expect to return home with much remaining. Every dollar I spend not on myself, every luxury I go without, is an extra blessing to God's people in the Mekong area, and so I will live simply and ascetically, as, ever since my pilgrimage on El Camino de Santiago in Spain, I have felt convited to do.
I will be writing. I've no schedule for writing, so some days you might find a verse, some days a reflection from my studies, and other days a portrait of those serving God in Thailand and those selling bread on the street corners. I hope to both give voice to my convictions in this blog and relate to those back home the Christian situation in what the missionaries with whom I am now serving call the Mekong area, those people groups who live near or have ties to the lands surrounding the Mekong river, that great snake of a river that crawls between Laos and Thailand and splits in two the fields of Cambodia.
"So don't be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows."
I was invited to Thailand, but I do not well accept an invitation and attend its event without first judging the promised situation. I'm a slave to efficiency, productivity, and self-improvement, and those of my classmates and close friends reading this will have nodded in affirmation at the confession. In that same spirit, I confess I was invited to Thailand, but I judged the invitation.
It starts with Luke, so I'll start with Luke. I was a student of Luke the last four months in a dimly lit room of my fraternity house, debating the ethical teachings of Jesus with a budding Buddhist, and lamenting the complacency of Christianity, of which I foremost and North America are guilty together, with an inspired Methodist, accosting ourselves and eachother with adoring the Cross without taking up our crosses, without following. To adore the Cross but not to follow Christ - how painstaking and agonizing it is to realize and be convicted of this fault. To love God, to utmost thank Him for Christ, to sing lovely hymns and feel lovely inside with the congregation in chorus lifting melodic sacrifices to the one heavenly Father, to put Him on our postcards and in lockets around our necks, glorify Him in dramatic colors on stain-glassed windows: to adore the Cross. I adore the Cross. And then to read Luke 14: 25-33, "The Cost of Being a Disciple": 'Anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. Any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.' I began to imagine carrying my cross was something different than adoring the Cross.
And Luke 9:58 - "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head."And Luke 9:60, and 62: "Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God," "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God." These were the verses by which I judged my invitation to Thailand. I would serve, I thought, but also be thrown into an opportunity to take the Gospels literally. It's easier here, without America, to surrender. That was the incentive with which I received my invitation, and in light of the aforementioned verses in Luke, and a growing disillusionment with what I've termed "PowerPointProtestantism", I came to Thailand and sit here now, Bible to my right, an empty coffee cup to my left, and ahead of me a bridge and river that connects to 65 million Thai people: 62 million Buddhists, and less than 450,000 Christians, or, 1/16th the population of NYC.
But I'm of little aid to the Thai people, except as a shining light of the love of God, my person a lampshade to the divine and living light of God inside me (and what if the lampshade were to forget itself and not block any of the divine light!). And so I've come not to convert but to encourage and pray, to serve those here who work with the Thai. To serve the six people - the three couples - who are the only Christian missionaries working with the 7 million Thai Yuen (sp), a people group in the north of Thailand and southern parts of China. Six candles among 7 million. Think of six Christians among the 8 million people of NYC - only six. This is the situation with the Thai Yuen.
Yet, in the spirit with which I began this letter, I've come to learn. I've a backpack, one pair of sandals, a few white v-neck t-shirts, faith in God's care for the sparrows and the lilies of the field (Matthew 6: 28-34), and six books, descriptions of which I will not elaborate further, but I feel the need to list them, if only to serve me many years later as reminders of what words weighed on my heart during the heavy and rainy summer in Thailand of 2008. I list them in order as I plan to read them.
1. Irresistible Revolution- Shane Claiborne
2. The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux: Story of a Soul
3. Dark Night of the Soul - St. John of the Cross
4. Tragic Sense of Life - Miguel de Unamuno
5. The Way of a Pilgrim - Unknown
6. The Pilgrim's Progress - John Bunyan
7. Mortal Beauty, God's Grace: Major Poems and Spiritual Writings of Gerard Manly Hopkins
As I wrote to most of those reading this in my letter, for these first two weeks I will work with the teenage children of missionaries from across southeastern Asia: China, Lao, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar (Bhurma). I'll be giving morning talks and leading small groups and worship music with my close friend Tim Tibbles, the worship minister at First Christian Church in Owasso, Oklahoma. We two and about fifteen others from all over the world - Germany, Korea, Singapore, USA, Canada, China - form the team of volunteers who will support, pray for, encourage and teach the missionary children, many of whom feel estranged from both their home culture and the culture in which they live (and were perhaps born), as well as removed from a purposeful and revolutionary Christianity - Christianity, the occupation of their parents, being the reason for their removal from their home culture and departure to (in most cases) boarding school.
I am praying for opportunities to serve in Thailand, Laos, or Cambodia after the first two weeks at Reunion, and have already been blessed with encouragement and support from those I've met here. God moves.
To those who supported me financially and continue to support me with their prayers: Thank You, and I pray also for you. Together we form the Church, separate and alone we form not. Your contributions far surpassed my expectations, and I now travel under the serious responsibility of being a steward for the money of God's people. As I've told some of you, and tell you now quite bluntly, I've received more money than I could ever spend during three months in Thailand. I hope to use it to serve God's children here - food for the poor and suffering, support for missionaries - but expect to return home with much remaining. Every dollar I spend not on myself, every luxury I go without, is an extra blessing to God's people in the Mekong area, and so I will live simply and ascetically, as, ever since my pilgrimage on El Camino de Santiago in Spain, I have felt convited to do.
I will be writing. I've no schedule for writing, so some days you might find a verse, some days a reflection from my studies, and other days a portrait of those serving God in Thailand and those selling bread on the street corners. I hope to both give voice to my convictions in this blog and relate to those back home the Christian situation in what the missionaries with whom I am now serving call the Mekong area, those people groups who live near or have ties to the lands surrounding the Mekong river, that great snake of a river that crawls between Laos and Thailand and splits in two the fields of Cambodia.
"So don't be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows."
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