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