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."