Vietnam, Laos, and Thank God, God Doesn't Make Sense

Good evening to you in the West and morning in the East. I've since returning at midnight on Sunday from Vietnam and Laos been engaged in somewhat defeating battles with the Chinese Embassy and a one-two allergy and fever combo, but mercies renew every morning, so with this morning I look to success on both fronts. Winning the first battle will require a sly bit of imitation, and the second a few more Thai allergy pills and healing prayers. Both are on their way.

I've two weeks of prayer journeying to write you, forty minutes until I must go to the Embassy, and six hours until I board a bus to a mountain village. Onward.

If I didn't explain it thoroughly enough in my last letter (and I know I did not), the concept of prayer journeying is, in an advertised pre-packaged slogan, as follows: praying on sight with insight, which means that by traveling to locations and interacting with the local people, your prayers are better able to avoid pre-packaged prayer slogans and become more specific and engaged with the community around you. Thus instead of praying that God move among a Tai people group while on your knees before your thick-mattressed bed, you pray for the Tai woman who just walked past you carrying a week's load of firewood on her back as you tarry down the potholed dirt road of her village.

And in full confession, I admit the concept of the trip was something foreign to me when I set out on it. In my latest kick of Christianity, heavily influenced by Catholic theology and a last semester's twenty-page research paper on asceticism, I had somewhat unknowingly repositioned the God of my youth as distant, impersonal, and forever separate in the full splendor of his "omni-s". And this perception of God is not without benefits - the impersonal, the rational conception of God lends very well to writing analytical papers on the nature of His character. Once you define Him as a categorized variable, you then can rearrange your formula however you like and observe the "divine" results. It was something new to me, coming from a non-denominational, evangelical "tradition", and it largely energized my decision to throw away this prayer-before-bed and Sunday morning Christianity and seek something else, as well as spend my summer abroad in Asia seeking Him - for that I am thankful, but I am more thankful for the friends here I have met and the experiences I have had that have guided me out of that theological abyss.

One of those experiences was the prayer journey, during which our sole purpose and aim of every day was to plead to God on behalf of the people around us for their well-being and salvation. Plead to God? Plead to Him who is outside of time and thus immutable and thus never changes His mind and can we even say He has a mind? My perception of Him had to change quickly - rather, it had to be realigned quickly, and it was so after reflecting on passages from the Old Testament (Abraham groaning for the sparing of Sodom and Gomorrah comes to mind - "What if only ten can be found there?" Gen. 18:16-33).

This was paired in effect with my current reading of Miguel Unamuno's Tragic Sense of Life, which aims partly to show that God is great not because he reasons better than anyone else ever but because He is, yes, all-powerful, but also very much irrational and thus in-touch with our core being, which yearns for life after death though our reasoning mind always jumps in to say how foolish and weak that wish is. And so it dawned on me that, ever since tiring or maturing out of the "Repent and Be Saved!" Christianity and becoming bored with Sunday mornings, I had measured up the Bible and its teachings against other philosophies and religions to see which made the most sense or was, really, the smartest. It was always troublesome for me when the Bible seemed intellectually simple - I wanted something with which I could wrestle, like Jacob at the riverside (Gen. 32:22-31), not something that sounded the same every Sunday and always came to the same conclusion, that you had to "rely on Jesus", whatever that meant.

But this trip and my reading made me realize that it isn't because Christ's teachings and the Bible make the most sense that I profess my faith (and, moreover, that this shouldn't be the reason), but that I do so because the God I worship is the One, true and living. There's no way around that. What is real is real, and what isn't, well, is made of stone and wood and set up in the Buddhist temples around town (2 Kings 19:14-19).

And with that I must leave you to hop a motorbike quickly to the Chinese Consulate. For those further interested, ask me come July about any of the thoughts above or how I felt God on the trip, because I've much to share. Or, for those of you that like traveling stories, ask about the 7-hour bus rides across Vietnam's unpaved and washed-out mountain roads, or the Vietnamese kids who ran circles around my friend and me in an evening's soccer match.

A super quick scenery sum-up:

1. Vietnamese nature is, next to idyllic English countryside and the Galicean lands of northwest Spain, the prettiest I've seen. But it feels so much like commie China.
2. Laos is overly relaxed, threatened by major deforestation, and almost as friendly as Thailand.

Peace and love,
js