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
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