Recounting Blessings 5-09

Some singular experiences that have made my life so beautiful - I wrote these down in my journal this morning when I was recounting how blessed my day had been the day before, with so many good experiences and laugh-out-loud moments of joy.

(I have purposefully left out most of the names for various reasons, mostly just to be on the safe side)

-Playing Chess with my friend Dan, talking about everything under the sun
-Reading Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader to City of rest guys
-Helping with art class - drawing a dragon from The Dawn Treader, encouraging, giving ideas, my jaw dropping at some of the images or someone's creativity
-Saying "I love you" to Mama Gobe (the Pastor's wife at City of Rest) and eating her meals she offers me for free daily for working at the City
-Recounting game night, drinking Cream Soda with my friends while getting trounced in a game called Settler of Cattan and also chess
-Eating mango (nothing more be said)
-Inspiring others by playing music in the guitar, namely Sting and Shawn McDonald
-Teaching poetry and imagery, metaphor and simile to my friend, using ballads from Sting
-Forgiving someone who has hurt me then moving into friendship again - releasing wound-up feelings of grief and woundedness and separation
-Asking to be forgiven
-Watching Lighthouse girls give each other courage to stand-up and sing their musical creations
-Sharing a plate of fish and rice with Dan
-Sharing my day with my friend Katherine in a tightly packed poda-poda (the public transport buses) on the way home for the day
-Teaching someone guitar - over and over patiently bearing and correcting finger positions
-Watching a boy's eyes light up as I explain the story and imagery of the Chronicles of Narnia
-Clasping hands and greeting everyone at the City of Rest with a smile - even though there are those who don't acknowledge me
-Writing music with a woman and some other friends at the City
-Praying over a woman, with her hastily and unprofessionally attached IV bag, sleeping with high fever
-Seeing a man normally in complete psychosis smile back at me when I smile at him
-Playing my good friend in draft (a game very similar to checkers) ahnd watching him express himself in the only way that he can - through shadings and magnificent watercolors (I swear I'm going to set-up an art gallery in tribute to the man)
-Listening to Jazz
-Taking a cold shower after a long, hot day
-Kicking football around with a couple of boys from Lighthouse at the beach
-Watching the Zizer kids (the children of the family I live with) squeal in the break of a wave, threatening to knock them off their feet
-Laughing with hilarious abandon at my Lighthouse small group antics, especially with one of my friends (the loud Joseph for those who know him)
-Watching one of the goofier Lighthouse boys descend from his facade of seriousness into uncontrollable laughter snickering and then gut-wrenching laughter at the drop of a hat
-waking up to the sounds of birds and neighborhood life - not an alarm clock
-Coming home late to see the Zizer children passed out in any of the various positions they may have been in the midst of doing something
-Teaching a small boy at the City of Rest how to throw a paper airplane

...so many more blessings have been poured out on me while living and working here! god has made my life erupt with good things, if I can only live fully and lovingly for the rest of my weeks here... again, please pray for me

Update 5-02

Last week was completely taken up by a series of seminars about "Children in Crisis" which went into a lot of detail about exploitation and the effects of trauma and mental stress on children in post-war environments. It was very helpful but also heart-wrenching, because we are living here among a generation of war-torn personalities and mentalities. Life here is hard, not for myself in particular, but just really for everyone who lives here. As the weeks wind down (I have less than 7 weeks), I am wondering how I will react in my own lifestyle and attitude when I get back to the States. Some days I am just craving for comfort in things familiar, unfortunately the things that are so familiar to me in the states are video games, movies and all the creature comforts. I hope I dont retreat into my comfortable, apathetic lifestyle when I return or it will be better for me to have never to come here. I feel a great burden of responsibility on my shoulders, but my Christ says that his burden is light. And this may mean that I have simply to live and influence the world in the small things that I may, even though they seem insignificant in view of larger, harder problems.

Pray for me to live open-handedly and generously, its so easy to continually live life grasping for whats your own and trying for absolute sovereignty over a place and time that is not my own - even my own life is not my own! Day after day walking past the beggars, cripples and blind men led by their children really can bring me down. There is no way I can lift them up, even if I gave all my money away. I have determined to only contribute to those I am in true, sincere relationship in, but that is so hard when the needs are so widespread and problems so multi-faceted and layered. I long for the kingdom to come, along with its justice, and it is come in the small community that I have found here. But it seems as though the church and the world have such a long way to go.

Please pray for me. I am hard pressed some of these days to see life positively, and the point was long past when there were easy answers. Living with the poor is impossible for me, with the prospect of returning home to the states and securing safety with a US citizenship, but I must attempt to bring their voices out of the depths of obscurity and into the spotlight of the church. It's time to stop witnessing to a kingdom of apathy and greed and start witnessing to the upcoming kingdom of peace, justice and love.

Remember the parable about the two armies. One saw the other coming and the wise commander sent his envoy far ahead, as to parley and make peace before the stronger army could come and overtake them. Lets start making peace with the onward coming kingdom and stop sitting on the fence, cherishing our ignorance about injustice, standing aside with hands raised.

Update 4-27

I am cheating today. I usually write out my blog entries beforehand on paper in order to make them worthwhile to read - today I'm simply going to include parts of an email I recently sent to my friend.

One thing that has changed in me that has turned my world inside out is daily meditation. I did this to a very small extent in TN but now those times listening in complete silence and stillness have grown to overwhelming proportions. Its much like physical exercise and everyday it is hard but I am able to do it for longer and with more concentration. It's an absolute necessity and I do it every morning from anywhere like 15min to maybe even and hour or more. Complete silence, complete stillness! It is nearly inconceivable in the States. The hardest part I feel is not making it a formula for "summoning" God on up or something, but instead bringing myself to absolute desperation for the Lord and then crying out for him. I want to tell you all of this because I want to encourage you to try it. Praying and speaking in my mind is also something that is not enough, my breakthroughs come from when I am actually listening with my whole spirit. Listening, not speaking! I can hardly find how it happens in my world of tasks and checklists. It is the hardest thing I have ever done. It has become something that has attached to my life and expanded.

I was at an island for a midterm retreat and sat in silence on these rocks where the sea was washing up, and I just sat and heard God's voice teaching me about everything, the connectedness of life and re-centering my thoughts, my desires, my tendencies and addictions. What is peace? Now that I have felt it, steady, constant, unmistakable for anything else, I now find how useless and superficial my earlier ideas about it were. Most of all God has taught me what love means and how to love. What an overloaded word it can be when it is one of the purest and most difficult tasks we can take on. We all talk of it, but how little do we know of it except to feel it on us? To love more fully and more purely, there is no end to how much we can love.

The Life God Wants

Cooking, teaching, singing, playing an instrument, reading a good book, listening to some lovely music - God is opening up to me the truly great things over the merely narcissistic ones. Absense of TVs, computers, and in general luxuries are opening up for me the true luxuries. God's luxuries: working hard and with integrity and love, enjoying beauty, maintaining silence and contemplation, enjoying food in the company of others, edifying talk, patient teaching - these good things arent rubbing off on me with no long-term effect. A life more than appointments and schedules, a life more than tasks and effeciency. A glimpse of the kingdom of God.

God, today help me to feel your presence in the midst of little external peace, help me to live freely in a world of many shackles and addictions, to work diligently in a place and time where work is hard and toilsome, to love others even as they fail to love us. Amen.

What can I say to you reading my blog? Pray for me.

Communion Meditation at Monday Retreat 4-7

So often within Word Made Flesh we hear that what is so important is being, even more than doing. Then the question becomes “What are we supposed to be, and how are we supposed to become it?” Here we find Christ’s words “Take of my body, become with it, drink of my blood, take it into yourself.” And these words come to us in a space. Not just any space, but in the space of a room, a room filled with the intimacy Christ shares with his disciples, in front of him and to his sides, leaning and laughing with him, sharing their lives with him and soon his death as well as resurrection.

As we sit here, having shared the day together, we find ourselves eating together, laughing together, sharing our sorrows and troubles. And as Christ says, “Do this in remembrance of me,” we slowly find that as we look to the left and right of us we not only find sons and daughters of God, but God himself. God himself laughs with us and suffers with us, God himself serves us and is served by us. We are in the presence of God himself. Here is where our life begins and where it ends.

And so we find that Communion is not something that we simply do, but the very reason we are. With it, all our hopes are confirmed and all our fears are relieved. Without it we have no room left to stand and each of us is a divided self, ready to fall.

As we serve one another the cup let us in recognition of what we do: being served and in turn serving others. Be served knowing that God himself serves you, serve knowing you serve God himself. We are the body of Christ, and as we take of the bread and wine we will be renewed, God coming through to us through one another.

Pictures 4-9

On the street walking home
(right)








GIANT tree on our way walking to a meeting,
th two tiny figures below it are my teammates giving the tree some perspective.
(below)
flowers at a retreat center
(below)



















Sierra Leonean Servant Team members
Noah and Florence

My Day

My average day. Wake up at about 6:30 to the sound of some native African birds, don’t know what their names are. They start at precisely 6:30 sharp; you could tell time by them! I am met by the noises of the morning neighborhood activities such as (most often heard) babies wakening and putting out an outright fit, hah. People in the tailor hut about 10 feet away from my window start these days with radios and washing and conversing about the day to come, all in thick Krio. I finally get up at about 7 and begin the day, most commonly sitting in meditation for the day’s events and tasks. I might write in my journal and I always read some of Thomas A Kempis’ Imitation of Christ. Then I suit op my backpack with the tutoring materials and any other supplies I might need. Every third day I am responsible for spending for food and transportation for my two housemates upstairs. Mondays I go to morning prayer in town, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays I go to Krio right after devotions. At about 10:30 the team heads out for town to go to out corresponding places for tutoring appointments at 11. At about 12:30 everyone has lunch and then I go to the City of Rest. My time there is highly variable depending on what has gone on before – maybe a few guitar lessons on a worn out old bunk bed or chess or draft on a bench. On Tuesdays and Thursdays we host an art class from 3:30-4:30 and that wraps up the day. Much of my time at the City of Rest is spent with a select few of the people who have been recommended to me by Helain – The Dutch woman in charge – identifying those who have very few friends and loving relationships . I get on a poda-poda (public transport) to get home in time for dinner either to make it or to buy it off the streets (usually an egg and cheese or banana and peanut-butter sandwich). Every dinner is different and demanding of itself, either cooking or simply deciding what to eat. We usually eat (me and my two teammates living together) at about 7-8, and at this time the sun has set so that we are eating by candlelight or completely in the dark. We make enough that we’re all usually stuffed with rice and some sort of sauce, and sometimes we top it off with a delicious mango. And then we’re exhausted so it’s time for sleep (where I hope there will be electricity for a fan to be on so that I don’t sleep coated in sweat, ugh). Then: a new day begins! Wow, what a life!

Sojourner – Pilgrim – Traveler

Disillusionment can be such a gift – especially when it doesn’t lead you to cynicism, such as it often does. Humility, and so many other truths, often demands disillusionment. What else can dissipate those oh so well intended maxims of our early childhoods – the ones that so often build an ego that is only capable of crashing down later. How wonderful a disillusion when one realizes that no one culture can contain the gospel, truly understanding that the kingdom of God is so beyond what good infrastructure and available electricity may be in place. But the price of realizing the Kingdom is invisible and from God alone, bearing no flag and boasting no borders, is that I find myself craving for the presence of a Lord I so often cannot see and the presence of peace that evades so easily. One thing that amazes me is the omnipresence of God. I’m amazed because finding him can be so completely challenging. Even finding him in the stillness and carefully crafted silence can so often bring a sense of grasping for what can’t be grasped, squinting my eyes and ears for something without form and without sound.

The depths of human heart – the innermost courts of the Kingdom of God – so intimate and slippery a thing. The psalms speak over and over again about loving and pursuing God with your whole hearts, how ridiculous that’s seems in light of the how fractured my heart is and how little I know of it. And always the same issues exist for me: I’m in Africa talking about what is so much the same, so much the same questions still haunt me.

Would the comfort of an air-conditioned room and the 24/7 accessibility of movies and a surround sound stereo system erase my struggle with my spirit and the God it seeks after, sometimes so desperately, and sometimes so disparagingly? Jesus was sent from a place and has returned there, seated there even now. And so I have been sent, knowing so well and being so incessantly reminded of the pleasures and comforts I miss from the place I have been sent. The truth is that many times I can’t think of anything better than a cup of ice cream or an American pizza! But simply eating some ice cream or diving into a few hot slices of bread, cheese and pepperoni would not give me the home I desire. Family and friends are as close as home gets anymore, simply because I know even they cannot satisfy my heart’s deep homesickness. But I take heart knowing that home is in the God I have craved for even before I knew that I craved him. In this time in Africa I truly feel the weight of a pilgrim’s burden, the immutable urge to keeping taking steps to my destination: at the feet of my great Lord and King, Jesus Christ.

Pictures from Sierra Leone 4-6

Coming Up the Steps to My house (I live on the bottom floor)

Looking out the window of the living room

Coming back home from a retreat in a cab

Pigs in the muck and rubbish

Some Friends at the City of Rest

Playing Chess with My Friend Alpha at the City of Rest

Confessions

I feel the need to, in a way, console you about some of the things that I may write on this blog, and not to feel as if I have been discouraged beyond rescuing or depressed as I use this space to confess some of my innermost conflicts and convictions about my life here Sierra Leone. Life here is hard, it is very true, but the community that I forming around me is the strongest prescription against despair and discouragement, and that is the church! My community here only grows stronger here as we all go through our culture shocks, meet up with our breaking points, experience frustration and tiredness in any given day. The joys that we share among us are hedged and cemented in by our troubles and our difficulties. Who can truly experience joy when one hasn't discovered suffering? Who can find endurance and long-suffering if one isn't faced with trials? Don't be discouraged as I attempt a transparency here, attempt to make this a place of both my confession of hope and fear, and even fleeting moments of cynicism. How long can wounds and sadness be disguised and covered-over, only to become an infection of faithlessness and selfishness? Often the least cruel thing to do is lance the wound.

Psalm 55

Psalm 55
"Give ear to my prayer, O God,
and hide yourself not from my plea of mercy!
Attend to me, and answer me;
I am restless in my complaint and I moan,
because of the noise of the enemy,
because of the oppression of the wicked.
For they drop trouble upon me;
the terrors of death have fallen on me
Fear and trembling come over me,
and horror overwhelms me.
And I say "Oh that I had wings like a dove!"
I would fly away and be at rest;
yes, I would wander far away;
I would lodge myself in the wilderness."

Who is our enemy? Who is the one we are saying this psalm to? Right now, sitting in my house in Freetown, and as I look out across the edge of the windowsills, I see that the enemy is ourselves, humanity. The streets of Freetown are trash-strewn and deteriorating underneath the feet of people who long for more, yet don't have time or energy to distract themselves on it, especially when simply living is so demanding. I wonder what this place looked like before the West came, equating shiny stones in the earth to billions of dollars to be used for the already rich, the already engorged. And I wonder what this place was like before the automobile came, demanding the paved roads that suffocate everything, as they spew their lungs of sulfur and smoke. The natural world here is vibrant, magnificent. There is a tree perched on a hill where we walk regularly to and from Krio lessons and meetings. It must be centuries old. The magnitude and vibrancy of that tree looks down on and laughs at the mad schemes for money, power, control, effeciency and even strife of the civilization that has grown up around it. When I think about America, with its form-cut paved roads and strip malls (may as well be strip-mining) I see the enemy humanity has become there also.

"Because of the noise of my enemies, because of the oppression of the wicked." We so often look so sharply for our enemies outside of our own selves that we fail to detect our growing affluence and despondancy to the natural world. I feel the noise and evil of our wicked selfishness on both sides of the ocean, East and West, and I long to fly away and I say "Oh that I had wings of a dove, I would fly away and be at rest, yes I would wander far way, I would lodge myself in the wilderness."

As I write this, bearing the burden of these thoughts, I prepare to go out amidst the slums, the trash-strewn streets and murky, coal waters, filled with the plastic scum of a people who have forgotten the place of God's earth in their lives. I go not with a sense of fatality or defeatism, but with the sense that however hard it may be, the gates of hell will not prevail against God's mercy and his beautiful creations. Amen to God.

3-1 + Cynicism

First day of March. Rain and wind wakes me up at 5 o'clock and precedes to rain like I have seen few times before. It is significantly cooler as I sit with the open wondow at my back with cool breeze entering in. The breeze is always welcome but this one comes without the humid air which often surrounds it, and with much less heat.

Reading the morning paper:
"AFRC Loses Appeal"
Alex Brima, Brima Kamara, Santigie Kanu, all convicted of mass murder, gang rape, child sioldiering, difigurement, and raiding villages. "The victims were babies, young children and mena and women of all ages." Sentence? 50, 45, and 50 years consecutively between them. Kidding me? Not even life sentences for some of the worst crimes in human history.

"Saving the Gongkoma forest from AK-47 Rifles"
At a village so isolated that it has seen its first automobile as the conservationists arrived has had problems with a specific tree being cut dowen for the production of AK-47 rifles. The forest had been untouched for a century and now good-for-nothing 20th and 21st century weapons are decimating it. War and the land can never co-exist, one is there at the cost of the other. People who have never seen a car before have regularly seen the most mass-made and brutal weapons. Yes, the world is growing smaller, but sometimes I am sorry that it is.

And then, the midst of a small West African newspaper are recorded the progress reports of the U.S. primaries in OH and TX. I feel so exasperated when the bias leans toward one egocentric nation. How can we stop thinking about our own small North American world if the rest of the world is so hell-bent on talking about us? Record holding events such as one of the first democratic elections in Sierra Leone ever are covered up with reports about a single car bomb in Iraq or new, daily, incessant reports about which Democratic candidate will the Democratic candidate. I feel like America is sleepwalking off a cliff of narcissism.

Forgive my negativity, it really was a good morning, one that I spent relaxing and writing. It just seems that some things always cut through anything good.

The City of Rest

The amount of new informationa and experiences that have come and gone here for me would be impossible to write about. Aside from an entirely new culture and language I have also had other sorts of responsibilities laid on my head, which are the basis for the rest of my time here until June. My interest specifically? My eyes have laid rest on a small community amoungst the bustling, trash-strewn streets of Freetown, known as the "City of Rest." It is a place for the mentally disabled and recovering drug addicts. When one thinks about these categories in the states one might think about spotless, white-washed anemic rooms, nurses coming to and fro, patients going through the program of rehibilitation. The "City of Rest" is something else entirely. It was started by one woman sent from Germany into the town after the Civil War. She was initially sent in order to do traditional mission work but found a special calling for herself in a building that had been set aside for another purpose but ultimately ended up in her hands. From her small amount of resources she engaged the community in the most loving way possible: by taking those stricken with mental diease off of the streets where they had been thrown, where they would remain in debilitating poverty, without friends or family. But the woman brought them in, one by one, using the rooms there to shelter them and her own friends from Freetown to watch over them and serve them. The staff is paid less than $30 a week in return for their full-time service and dedication to the "guests."

It is a small two-storied building with an enclosed compound area no bigger than a basketball court. In the rooms both d0wnstairs and up there are men and women (separately) in bunkbeds, cramming each room without reserve. The trick about the whole facility is that it has no medical staff. There is a severe lack of health professionals in Freetown and even if one could be acquired would be far too expensive to pay. A doctor does come when a new guest arrives and puts them on a non-specific cocktail of drugs to put the patient to sleep to wear off any drug-affects. After this there are no psychiatrists, no nurses, no therapists. The staff is composed of two pastors, the woman Helaina, and some other minimally paid workers.

The basic program for drug addicts is to let them go to personal counciling sessions for a certain prescribed periods of time, usually months. These recovering addicts cannot leave the building or the compound their entire time of rehabilitation. For patients with serious mental problems it is even worse. Some have been living inside the facility for years, with few or none opportunites to be outside. Programs? Not enough money or resources. Relationships? These people are outcasts from their families and friends because of their special needs. Counceling? The woman Helaina and the two other pastors are overworked and have responsibilites also outside the compound. Psychiatric medicine? Those specific kinds of meds are not available in-country and cannot be shipped in with current international trade laws. It is all that can be done to simply take these people in and feed them, provide them a space to live in off of the lonely streets.

As I entered into the compound with my teammates in order to be briefed on the needs there there was a flock of people, ready and desperate for new friends, new relationships. They need someone simply to talk to, simply to tell their story to. They need music, laughter, love and a listening ear. In the States I have these things and more, comfort with my family and wealth, complete with dependable air conditioning and ice cream (it is reported that with all the money that Americans spend on ice cream each year, you could cure world poverty). But here there is no reprieve for those born in the streets of Sierra Leone. Within that compound Jesus lives there, forgotten and passed by, the poor suffering man who knows brokenness and true humility.

Do I have the arrogance to pass Christ by, as he sits in his overpopulated room craving some semblance of friendship and connection with the outside world? Surely it can't be so. I have spent my time thinking and praying, and here is where I will attempt to act and be Christ for someone else. These people have weighed heavily on my heart and mind, a weight that will only get heavier as I go amidst them and experience brokenness and rejection, even maybe their rejection of me.

I think my music may have a place here among those who have the least cause to sing. We'll see if a guitar can help, I am not sure. What else can I do but invest my meager talents where there is the least to go round? Please be praying for me as you read this, and understand that people are suffering in ways that we have walked passed in disdain and ignorance. I feel that the service I offer here will only cause me to be broken as well, humble before God as I find that I may not be so different than the "poor" that I serve.

Nothing New Under the Sun

Sometimes there’s nothing as significant as simply raking the leaves on a wind-swept day with your grandmother. She simply came up to me on Sunday morning, right after a lovely sermon, as I stood catching up with an old friend. It was in this setting of warm fellowship, within the familiarity of the church and church friends, that her idea bloomed up to me. And it did require going up, from her form their peering beseechingly to my stratosphere at above 6'3" altitude. The majority of the people are obliged to crane their necks to converse with my high lean figure, so this wasn't disrupting the expected. It had occurred to her in that atmosphere of reflected and deflected utterances of Christian love, rooted from everything spoke and mentioned in that high-steepled place, to accept the compellent nature of God's love and be compelled. To what end? To rake.

The next day I found myself waiting in the church parking lot: rake, jacket, gloves, complete with bagged lunch; all in hand for the days work. Talk was sparked with some comics between us, then pragmatics, everything else following and falling in between. The sharp notes of our voices rose and fell with every moment, noting the work to be done and cares of the moment, slowly weaving through to the level of the mundane lives lead from moment to moment, day to day. Yes, mundane, steady, expected, and yet completely magnificent. The magnificence of the everyday in and out, up and down, within and without. Her aged demeanor drove carefully and deliberately on the highways and low roads until we arrived at our first destination, my uncle's mother's small plot in the maze of American suburbia. We arrived, unloaded, and began the day's long work.

The initial fury of our sweeps and stows at the depthless leaves soon gave way to the rhythm of burying our hands into the piles to bring the remnants of last summer to the light of day, only to be plunged back again into the dark plastic wrap. As any work with the land demands, the work undulated with breaks for breathers and additional sacks for the flowing heaps of leaves. A glass of water and brown sugar oatmeal square later we had completely revealed the cold semblance of a lawn. We had both decided that a before and an after picture would have brought the full justice of the act but the conspiracy for good that day wasn't to be hampered by obeying the haughty regulations of PR work. Publicity and humility don't often agree.

As we pushed our meager tools and shuffling bodies back into the car and headed toward the next target for my grandmother's cunning campaign of unprovoked service. Unprovoked and unsolicited, she had set out that day to commit the terrible mystery of selfless charity, and the day would not leave that motive unquenched. The next task proved more difficult and by sight more intimidating, but it was to submit to the vigilance of our efforts all the same.

It was in the hindsight of that day, as the muted cascades of houses and trees passed my mind and the regular rhythm of the day had done its work, that I saw what great nobility and treacherousness belonged to it. Mundane work, a mundane day, everyday service, the everyday sacrifice that courts it. The wondrous damage of the gospel on the world commits itself in the most subservient, quiet ways imaginable. And the work of the day had not so much to do with doing, but in fact being. Being diligent, being charitable, being in prayer, being in love. The truth of the matter is that life is mundane, and is much of the time not anything but regular, rhythmic, earthly. The writer of Ecclesiastes lived dictated by the agricultural world, the world of farms and farming. The sun rises, sets, the earth turns, seasons come and go. What always remains is the work to be done.

What can we say back to the writer of Ecclesiastes, who tells us with such morbid fatality that “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun; Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something new’? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time” (Ecclesiastes 1:9-10). There is truly nothing new under the sun for those who work toward good, and this certainty gives us great truth and trepidation, but also the possibility for great thankfulness. How long will the leaves stay off of the land? How long will the grass be cut and the weeds be pulled? How long will there be fear and violence, pain and separation? In the same moment that we catch sight of our urgent longing for goodness to come, and to stay, we find that it does come, and to our surprise, stays. The love of God has come, is come, and will come. It is often seen in the regular, the rhythmic, the earthly. God's love is nothing new under the sun, but it cannot grow old either, and it cannot die. The heartbeat of God's love turns on us with a breathing persistence, steady and sure. Yes, there is nothing new under the sun, and how much peace that may grant us! Let us give thanks for the steady beat of God's love in every moment.

Feel Good Music

There are a million movies out there to watch, and my family makes a good effort at seeing all of them. I would say movie-watching is my family's favorite past time, if it can beat eating food. Movies come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but one common denominator in any movie that has any challenge to be overcome is what I call the the "progress soundtrack." Take Remember the Titans. Classic case of progress soundtrack. Names like Lynard Skynard, the Doobie Brothers, James Brown and Three Dog Night are often implicated in it. Its the Gospel music of any cinematic soundtrack. Its "feel good" music, its make-the-world-a-better-place music. Whoa, they're out of training, they're winning it, they're on their way! One of my favorites of all time is Angels in the Outfield. Disney is a huge fan of the progress soundtrack. The same goes for Glory Road and almost any other sports movie. Change is in the air, the season for success is upon them. And it isn't just a cinematic phenomenon. A fleeting glance at the Civil Rights Movement instantly roots that make-the-world-a-better-place music into the real.

But here's something else I catch myself wondering: will there ever be a time in my future ministry when I will hear those "feel good" chimes sounding off in my mind? It's been tough so far because I simply haven't been at one place on the globe long enough for even the beginning credits to get rolling. It seems as though that there is always a breaking point for any place, any job, and that once the ice had been chipped up a bit things should build some momentum, right? Or at least I hope so.

Or maybe that time will never come. Maybe there will not ever be a time for that far predictable moment, often seen and always heard in the movies, for a progress soundtrack. And maybe I hope it never does come. Maybe speeding through the middle of life with a good tune rolling over the finer details is the last thing I want. But maybe, maybe, I'll never know what I want until I get there. These days I just hope I can hold fast until I hit through the ice.

Dreamer

I am a dreamer. I spend a lot of my time dreaming, and one of the very first thing that comes into my mind when I enter a new place or start some new thing is dream about what I could become, dream about how things could be. But so often these dreams I have are so far from ever becoming realized. I read a passage from a prophet named Isaiah which attracted my eyes to it in its brilliant poeticism. It reads:

"as when a hungry dreams that he is eating,
but he awakens, and his hunger remains;
as when a thirsty man dreams that he is drinking,
but he awakens faint, with his thirst unquenched."

It seems that there are times when I grow so desperate about the dreams I sometimes have, so weary of waking up to find that the things I desire cannot be mine or will not be mine. And on another level entirely, the passage resounds with great truth about my quest for God, my desire to be holy. In my prayer and in the dreams that run their course in my mind, I find that many times it seems that the things which are good are so desperately out of my grasp. There is more to being holy then just aligning what God says is good and what you think is good, more to doing good than just wanting to do good. Dreams cannot be realized by simply dreaming them. I am a dreamer, but if I could only do half of what I dream...

It seems that pinning my dreams down to the ground is my ordeal at the moment. But even more dangerous is when I am in danger of losing the capacity to dream entirely. The danger of becoming a realist is the chance of becoming a skeptic, and God knows we don't need another one of those!

Challenging Lyrics

Here are some lyrics that have been caught inside my head recently with Derek Webb's song "This Too Shall Be Made Right" on his new album, The Ringing Bell.

people love you the most for the things you hate
and hate you for loving the things you cant keep straight
people judge you on a curve
and tell you you're getting what you deserve
and this too shall be made right

children cannot learn when children cannot eat
stack them like lumber when children cannot sleep
they dream of drinking wells that can quench all the fires of hell.
and this too shall be made right

the earth and the sky and sea are all holding their breath
wars and abuses have nature groaning with death
we say were just trying to stay alive, it looks so much like another way to die
and this too shall be made right

theres a time for peace, theres a time for war
theres a time to forgive and time to settle the score
a time for babies to lose their lives
a time for hunger and genocide
and this too shall be made right

i don't know the suffering of people out my front door
and i join the oppressors of those we choose to ignore
i am trading comfort for human lives
thats not just murder its suicide

Despair

I have dealt with depression for the majority of my life. Chronic depression is a part of my family history. I can't run away from it, its a tendency that will stay with me the rest of my life. But...

But I have identified something within this tendency toward depression that is completely demonic: despair. I have felt despair a lot in my life, because the awareness that I am not very smart, strong, funny, successful or even disciplined turns my mind constantly to the fact that I am not good enough. Not good enough in so, so many ways. Sometimes my mind is stricken with regret of something foolish, or an opportunity run afoul because of me. It can take just one of many memories to make me wince about the things I have done or failed to do.

But despair goes so far past beyond this, and the reason I have gotten past my depression is because I have been taught to see despair for what it is: sinful. Sadness and despair is the difference of having no faith in oneself and having no faith in anything. I was reading a fantastic excerpt from a spiritual classic by Johannes Baptist Metz called Poverty of Spirit. Like many spiritual classics it is short but far too much to take in the first few readings. I have just begun to meditate on the meaning of one chapter titled "The Innate Poverty of Humanity." In it Metz says that we're all beggars in front of God. He says that if we realize how much we need, then "It condemns us to a restless pilgrimage in search of a final satisfaction, an "Amen," which the poor know is theirs only in the kingdom of heaven." When we are beggars we see that there is something that we need, and that it doesn't come from us. Despair stands strong in its own concession that there is absolutely nothing to fill up our need, nor the world's need. It's a beggar, putting us on our knees not in humility but in self-will. It's the opposite of belief, faith, and dying to oneself. It's the opposite of grace. Grace quenches the needs and the desires that we feel, it is the bread and meat of life. Despair leaves us feeling empty, hungry without the desire to search for anything real, it's the cheap soda that fills us up in lieu of real sustenance. It's atrophy, it's apathy, it's nihilism.

Simply put, despair is hell.

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." The key here is not asking who is poor and who is not, it's about realizing that all humans are poor. Jesus himself was poor. Now Luke's version focuses on the poor as a socio-economic condition, and that isn't to be taken lightly, but for right now Matthews' version of the beatitudes will do. The kingdom of heaven is the answer to being poor. It is at once peace and war. Peace to ourselves, within ourselves who accept it, but to those who relish despair it wreaks murderous destruction, denies them any room in which to stand.

In the story about the feast in heaven Jesus tells of the Master sending out for all his guests in a city for his great celebration. However all of those who had filled themselves with a fatalistic contempt for hope couldn't find the will or desire to come. In the end he was forced to send out his servants again, this time to invite the beggars off the streets. We are all beggars, I just hope that we can realize that.

Sadness

The truth is, I am a complete masochist. That's because I love sadness. I'm drawn to tragedy. I love sad movies, sad books, sad music. Recently a movie that I have been positively dying to see is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and it is one of the mellowest movies ever made. In it, Jim Carrey is the opposite of a comedian. But sadness and loneliness are things no one should look forward to and shouldn't be seen as fulfilling realities, right?

I recently have read a book called the Wounded Healer by Henri J. M. Nouwen, a man who has, through his ministry, connected with others' intimate weakness, frailty and sadness. He worked on a completely volunteer basis with a society called L'Arche, a community of mentally and physically disabled. He didn't just "treat" them, he lived with them in complete friendship. I heard a sermon directed toward the Village Church titled "Brokenness." It cited scripture many different times about God's love of the broken, the depressed and the lowly. I ran across a verse in Isaiah about God requiring Israel's contriteness of heart for repentance. All of these voices tell me that sadness cannot be avoided, brokenness and heartache are inevitable.

Now that I have stated the obvious, let me now try and say something a little less so. Pain and suffering are a part of God's plan, not apart from it. Tragedy, desperateness, loss and sorrow are part and parcel to experiencing salvation. One of the biggest, fattest false promises that I heard people make is that Christianity rewards its members with an ever-present happiness. The truth is that followers of the Way are faced with two realities, two worlds, a duality that some try to ignore. We have to take two things seriously: that there is a kingdom that is becoming present, and that that same kingdom has not yet arrived. In other words there are two "orders" of things. One is the ordering that we now live with, where things are how they are. Ultimately those things are completely screwed up, disheveled, uproarious and rife with bad intentions and good intentions gone wrong. When I tell people about missions in the Two-Thirds World, decreasing AIDS, eliminating global poverty, maintaining the environment, weeding out tyranny, creating peace in fought out regions, one of the responses that I hear quite often is that "this is the world we live in," "things are the way they are," "be a realist," "it's an imperfect world, deal with it." They think I'm an idealist, someone who hasn't lived long enough or experienced enough to understand the facts of life: that the world is cold and hard and inhospitable and nothing ever changes.

But what is "real" and just "ideal" is a matter of perspective, they come from a particular point of view. And for the Christian there is another point from which we are viewing things, and that is the kingdom that is here yet not here. It's the kingdom of God. Reading over Jesus' words, it is obvious that he was obsessed with this coming kingdom. His stories revolved around it, his blessings all centered on it. Most of all Jesus made this distant, intangible, "ideal," kingdom something near, even intrusive, a reality that couldn't be ignored or discarded.

Now how does this lead at all to why sadness is so necessary, so planned and used by God? Christians must live in the kingdom that Jesus made real, a kingdom that has no rhyme or reason in the current way of things. When we look back and forth from the kingdom of God and the way things "just are the way they are," we must make a choice between them. And both seeing the way things are, and contrasting the difference between them and the kingdom, invite sadness and mourning. If sadness isn't a part of your life you aren't looking to the way things could be, viewing the kingdom, or you just aren't looking at all.

It is only through compassion that we can be saved. The definition of compassion?: To suffer with. Compassion and Jesus Christ go hand in hand; there is no separating them from one another. He shows compassion by suffering with us. Compassion for others is the only way that we can save ourselves. Its not by trying to salvage ourselves from the wrecks and wreckages of our hurts and our wounds that we can be saved, that we can be new. Its only by tossing ourselves in with others' plight that we are free to love anyone, even ourselves. The truth is that Jesus tossed himself with us; just by being who he was he couldn't hold himself aloft. No one can say enough about the Incarnation, about him coming to us. Sorrow is the inviolable effect of the incarnation, sadness was planned, the tool God used that made Jesus the Savior.

Reality Check

Poverty is here
1.5 billion live on less than a dollar
more than a billion have no clean water
6 million children die of malnutrition before the age of 6
60% of africans suffer from water-born disease
800 million go to bed hungry, 300 million are children
300 million children are hungry, not from famine but from chronic malnutrition

The Gospel and Fear

The gospel brings many things with it: forgiveness, reconciliation, life, hope. People have spent their whole lives on communicating all of the marvelous things that come with the gospel. The opposite from the gospel, however, is fear. Even a proper "fear of God" is one cultivated out of a relationship of love and respect. Fear is as far from the gospel as the East is from the West. Despite all this we have come up with some clever ways to put ourselves right in the midst of fear, making it the center of our attention. Even when we are aware that fear has no place in our lives, we at numerous times spend extraordinary amounts of time and energy grappling with it anyway. It has the capacity to paralyze us, keep us from moving forward. Fear, despite its demise on the cross, has still been successful in sprouting like a weed in the gardens of our lives. It can happen to the extent that many actually start refocusing the importance of that garden to the weeds themselves, again making them the center of attention. Fear can be of many things, and fear culminates itself in many ways. Fear of failure, fear of not being self-fulfilled, fear of loneliness, fear of disrespect, to say just a few.

For Christians it can even be a fear of sin. Hating sin and pursuing holiness does not equate with fearing sin. If we are to affirm the cross then we must affirm the resurrection. The resurrection is the answer to the potency of sin, the answer to everything that we fear. The very nature of the resurrection and all that it brings: hope, peace, unity, mercy, compassion; all eat up fear. The resurrection has turned the tables on sin and death, making them powerless and in fact making a mockery out of their supposed power.

An incredibly powerful voice on the subject of fear was the contemplative Thomas Merton. He writes a chapter in his book The New Seeds of Contemplation named The Moral Theology of the Devil. "According to the devil, the first that was created was really hell - as if everything else were, in some sense, for the sake of hell." For many the avoidance of hell, and thus the fear of it, has become the center of attention. I have heard sermons based on fear as a motivator. Indeed fear is an awesome - if not to say awful - mover and shaker. Preaching "hellfire and brimstone" is a saying closely associated with preachers who testify to the power and grasp of hell as the motivator for salvation. But there are other, more subtle examples of how fear can infiltrate our lives. I personally have felt a great amount of anxiety for things I know I should let go of. The past tense of anxiety is regret, and I don't think I am the only one to struggle with that sensation either.

The process of consumerization, that is getting in line with the predominant consumer-capitalism culture of America, also has much to do with creating and controlling fear. Within the space of a 30 second commercial we are given cause to fear, and the remedy? To partake in the following prescription for a new credit card, car, alcoholic beverage, tooth brush, facial cleanser, etc. Or else! Or else we won't have security, peace of mind, success, livelihood, and more.

The entire promotion of the nation-state is one based on fear; a tenaciously fed and well managed xenophobia of other states, cultures, ethnicities and ideologies. The book "State of Fear" by Michael Crichton gives some amazing insight into this. Within history the formation of every nation-state, the U.S. included, has rested on conflict. The U.S. came into being only after the Revolutionary War. There always needs to be solidification against a category sociologists call "the other." Nation-states arise in the midst of conflict, and by touting victory of the nation-state against all our "enemies" (please see the "war on terror") it provides us a soteriology other than a bible's. In other words it provides us with a salvation separate and besides the one of the gospel.

I said earlier that the gospel brings with it the destruction of fear, the end to the totalitarian state of the devil. We are given the cure to not only the monstrous fears, but also to everyday anxiety and worrisomeness. It all links with the idea of stewardship and the fact that God has the entire world in his hands. All the resources in the world are already God's, including all of nature, our possessions, and our very bodies. Stewardship is just recognizing this and submitting those resources to that reality. Hope and faith also stem from recognizing the absolute sovereignty of God. With everything in God's hands, and we as heirs to Christ, what do we have to fear? Nothing! Our difficult task is simply realizing what is real.