Two Psalms and the Karen

"Blessed are those whose strength is in you,
who have set their hearts on pilgrimage."
Psalm 84:5

I woke with a start this morning, as I woke last morning and the morning before, my body not able to sleep past six hours on the night. My watch read 6:40 a.m., one of my bus options for the day was due to leave at 7:00, so by 6:50 I had left my key with the grey haired fellow at reception and set course for the bus station, scanning the sidewalks for a boiled egg vendor so as not to start the six hour bus trek down the Thai - Myanmar without my day's keep.

The bus - not a bus at all, really, but a truck converted into a taxi with benches running the length of its bed - waited near a monk and the green-shirted driver, who welcomed me kindly and told me that we weren't due to leave until 8:00. I slung my knapsack - not a knapsack at all, really, but the term is more rustic and of a wanderer, I think, than "backpack" - on the rear seat, so I could once we left city limits easily hop up and hang off the rail on the roof a la garbage man, and trod to the morning market for breakfast.

Breakfast, a mug of peanut milk and six or so fried peanut-sized dough balls, came and went at a Muslim family's food stall, and soon after we - the orange-robed monk, green-shirted driver, and I - were off in route to the border town from where I now write you, Mae Sot, Thailand. The monk was duly granted the front seat in the cabin, and I was quickly standing and hanging off the rails, a real sore sight amid the jungle background of our route - but I hadn't much of a better choice, as before we departed the town we loaded a motorbike into the bed of the truck, into what would be the leg room of ten or so migrant farmers and village peasants as they boarded on and boarded off during our full morning and early afternoon's journey.

I was full of joy the moment I woke today - perhaps due to knowing I would for half the day be hanging off the back of a converted pickup truck-taxi as it snaked over mountains and aside rivers that separate Thailand and Myanmar; perhaps due to my now being in the Psalms of King David on my summer's commission of reading the Bible from page 1 to (my edition) page 964 (at Psalm 107, I'm now on page 474); perhaps due to, after finishing St. John of the Cross's "Dark Night of the Soul" yesterday, I'm now with an anonymous Russian peasant's "The Way of a Pilgrim", which I'll write more of soon - but more likely due to, ever since coming back from the ten-day prayer journey through Vietnam and Laos, I've been blessed to feel convicted and find joy in prayer and keeping mindful of the glory of God in nearly every - or, I try for nearly every - moment of my days, whether that manifests in praying for the Karen refugees who ride beside me or really trying to get in tune with what my Russian peasant's book calls "knowledge of the speech of created things" but is more accurately described as the sighing of all creation to glorify God and unite with Him.

"Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be
glad;
let the sea resound, andall that is in it;
let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them.
Then all the trees of the forest will sing for joy;
they will sing before the Lord, for he comes,
he comes to judge the earth." Psalm 96: 11-13

So often we think, "Alas! if I don't praise God, the rocks might sing of his magnifence, and how awful that would be!" when instead we might think of joining in the singing of all creation that ascribes to the Lord the glory due His name. The Psalms are full of such references, and my Russian peasant, as well as Miguel Unamuno, seem to think similarly.

But this is not at all what I planned to write you this evening. I could write you all evening - yes, gladly - but I've dinner soon to fetch and pushups too to do before bed, keeping on the schedule of my comrades in Chiang Mai. So on with it.

After farmers and villagers came and went, nearly four and a half hours into the journey and during one of the times when I alone was in the back of the truck, a camouflage-jacketed middle-aged Thai man jumped on with his fatigued-green knapsack (knapsack! not backpack!) at one of the many police checkpoints, designed, I witnessed later, to ensure those traveling are registered Thai citizens or visa-ed travelers and not escapees from forested Myanmar. He wore a U.S. Marines jacket and spoke a fair bit of English, enough to let me onto his now ten year's mission and occupation.

Since 1997, he has served as 2nd Lieutenant in the Karen National Union, a type of vigilante armed force to protect the Karen people, against whom the Burmese government has for the last fighty-eight years waged a ruthless attempt at genocide. He spoke five words very well - "kill you", "Burma", "Thailand", and "border"- and through these was able to communicate that his position is to patrol the border, along which I had been traveling for the last four and a half hours, and, if a situation so arises, shoot at the Burmese junta and defend Karen refugees.

The Karen (pronounced "Cah-ren", not like the English name "Care-ren") are the people with whom I have lived almost a week of my time this summer in a village outside of Chiang Mai. I've taught them English, gave my testimony to them, led them in prayer, and daily when living with them was uplifted with their rising voices in worship, which each night where I stayed would start at sunset and last until 9:00 PM, a call in the mountains to recognize the glory of our King. They gifted me a cloth shoulder bag which I cherish, and are, if I may so generalize, both the most joyous and tragic southeastern Asian people group of those of which I've been informed or with whom I've come into contact this summer. Most of the Karen now living in Thailand fled at one point from the Burmese government and crossed into Thailand as refugees with naught but a pair of secondhand rubber flipflops and probably a cloth shoulder bag like the one I carry daily and now sits on the desk aside my Bible and this computer. They've a special pull on my heart, and I pray for them daily. Like early Israel, they are a nation dispossesed and on the run, and, like early Israel, my prayers are that God moves among them in very real and concrete ways - dreams, visions, prophets - so to show His sovereignty and give their lives hope and purpose.

My 2nd Lieutenant friend jumped off at the Karen refugee camp outside of Mae Sot, a sprawling cliffside valley community of, I estimate, nearly three thousand thatched huts and one or two elephants. Before entering and exiting the stretch of road that spans the refugee camp, armed Thai guards stopped our truck and checked the identification cards of those they thought suspicious. As we were exiting, they asked for the papers of a dark-skinned and raggedly-clothed grey-haired man, who neither spoke much of the language in which the guards addressed him nor had any papers. They took him off the truck, and away we went.

What are you to do when born into a country that doesn't want you?
These are the fatherless, those without cloaks or shelter, of our time.

I arrived in Mae Sot, only six kilometers from the Myanmar border, at half past two. Stumbled onto a store called Borderline in the early evening, which sells the handwoven goods of Burmese and Karen refugees and returns the profits to the villages who crafted the knapsacks, coin pouches, blankets, cloth coasters. Whom I took for the owner invited me to the opening of "an exhibition of prints by Burmese and Scottish children" tomorrow night in the upstair's art gallery, titled "Looking East, Looking West." I will go there at 6:00 PM and will go now to find something from a street stall for dinner.

With the love that is in Christ,
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