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
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
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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