On Calvin

My childhood impression of a missionaries was that they were completely sanctified, justified, righteousifed, and etc..  We met alot that either were or were really close. 

We, on the other hand, took our sin nature's with us to Africa.  And when we came home, we brought them back. (Just in case you were wondering.) 

What to do? What to do?

(Again, I resurrected this xanga about a couple entries back. If you like to read things in order...)

It's one thing to discover that there's something wrong with the world (you'd think all those years of reading newspapers would have taught me that) but it's quite another, as several of you pointed out, to know what to do about it.

The first thing we should do is break bottles of expensive perfume over the feet of Jesus. Our first obligation is NOT to fix the problems of the world. Our first obligation is to worship the living God. We should love Jesus and love him extravagantly.  I'm not going to resolve the biblical faith/works paradox in a xanga entry, but the resolution is not, "Believe and do good stuff. " The command is simply "Love." Not even "love and...," but just love.   Jesus is always telling us to obey, but the commands we have to obey are all about love.

Now as it happens, love bears consequences. When my wife was courting me (not a typo) my world was full of letters, and gifts, and invitations, and walks, and those things were nice, but  those things were not what had me smitten.   It's not the consequences of love that mattered to me (I can live w/o a giant heart shaped chocolate chip cookie and love letters written "serial killer style" [all the words cut out of magazines]. I still have them.  Should I post a few?)  Anyway, it wasn't the cookies, it was her and it was her love.

I don't mean to get mushy, I just mean to say that if you want to do something good for Africa, don't start by saying, "What can I do."  Start by asking God how you can love him.  I remember one time when Mother Teresa was on Johnny Carson.  Carson was really stymied because he wanted to talk about all the wonderful things she was doing in Calcutta and all she wanted to do was talk about Jesus!   

Oh, I suppose it doesn't take a Christian to be stunned by the needs of Africa. Good work is being done in Kenya by "good people" who don't know Jesus. And perhaps when the Hindu feeds the poor he is loving them in the love of Jesus (whether he knows it or not), but there are also people feeding in the name of political manipulation. There are all sorts of organizations, governments, and religious groups doing good works in the name of maximizing their access to power.   But I digress.

There are three powerful motivators to good works: shame, love, and discipline. I can tell you from personal experience that shame and guilt motivate well, but not usually for long.  And discipline can motivate too, but it can get hard, rote, and lifeless quickly.  Pretty soon God is hating your love feasts.   If you walk in relationship and love w/ the living God, the work of the Kingdom will flow out of you.  I don't say that as someone who is good at it, by the way.

I have told some of you that we were pretty scared when we got to Africa.  The guns, and walls, and security, and horror stories everybody told us made me think we had done something pretty stupid in going.  And one night as we lay in bed worrying about our own skin Ruth said, "How can we love these people if we are afraid of them?"  

Needless to say, our passion for Africa exists not because of the giraffes and the great weather.  Our passion is because we fell in love with Africans! We are excited about the work of Olive Branch because we fell in love with John and Dorcas Parit (and their family), and the women that are being helped.  We are excited about Beacon of Hope because we fell in love with Gayle Raddnich and Jane Withone and the weavers dying of AIDS and their children who will soon be orphaned.

Am I avoiding your question, Joy?  I'm no missions expert (or theologian), but here are some observations anyway (the nice thing about having no expertise is you're not really accountable for what you say). 

Get to know a mission and get to know it well.  You can't just send money to Africa -- you have to send it to an organization.  But send it to an organization in which you have relationship w/ the people.  Find an intelligent organization and one that's close to you and your church community.  Compassion International is nice, I'm sure, but my own denomination has a "sponsor a child" ministry in which a greater percentage of the funds we send actually go to the child and family.  We are really impressed by the Olive Branches and Beacon of Hopes of the ministry world that are trying to be self-sustaining.  It's too easy for people to develop a dependency and sense of entitlement and that's exactly what we combine money without accountability.  Sponsor as many kids as you possibly can.  It radically transforms their material situation.  You are not going to change world, but you can change the world for somebody.  Supporting a child is very simple love. 

Get your passport and keep it up-to-date. 

Appreciate short term missions trips for what they are -- "taste and see" vacations for wealthy Americans.  They can be transformative, but usually only for the people who go.  If you are spending as much time sightseeing as you are working, something is amiss.   There are lots of good programs in which longer, short term missions projects (6 months or more) are accompanied with training, discipleship, and  a sense of mission that is more sophisticated than evangelical mime (oy vey!).  If we spend $50,000 to get a team to Mexico to build a church that we could have employed natives to build (for $10,000!), then you've got to wonder how valuable it is.  And perhaps it would be a better use of our money to get people from Romania or Kenya or wherever HERE for the training they need. 

More some other time. I'm tired.  Goodnight.

sound a moderate alarm

(note:  If you're checking in after a long while, you might want to go back and read starting w/ August 25th)

We have a new (to us), large, comfortable home and we enjoy it very much.  We have comfortable furniture, food to eat, computers and phones to use, musical instruments to play, most of the modern conveniences, and we know that it's a blessing from God.  But suppose we were sitting around the woodstove sipping hot cocoa enjoying our home and we heard screams coming from our yard.  If, looking outside, we saw a stranger being attacked by a wild animal or a poorly dressed child hiding under a tree, huddled against the cold , we wouldn't just stand at the window and watch.  We would do something.  We'd rush outside and stop the attack.  We'd get blankets and rush the child inside to the warmth of the stove.  We would have done that before we went to Africa.  You would to. 

But now when we look out our windows into our wonderful park-like 3 acres, we can't help but see the horrors and wretchedness of the 3rd world.  The world is full of disparity, hardship, abuse, sickness, poverty, emptiness, and pain, and now it's all standing in our back yard.  We see the faces wherever we go.   

In consequence, our priorities and our sense of obligation have been radically restructured. 

I can't help but see, for example, the American church as anything but a bloated, self-absorbed, "spiritual" glutton.  We have our Christian aerobics classes and contemporary Christian music, and our Christian magazines, and our paintball ministries, and our Christian retreats and cruises, and our 30K per year Christian schools, and we toss a few bucks to missionaries from time to time (actually, and these are old stats, American church goers give to missions about 10 cents for every $100 of income). 

I don't mean to invalidate local church ministry, but allow me another analogy.  If your good friend and neighbor were to ask you to help her build a deck in her back yard, going and helping would certainly be a good thing.   An honorable thing.  But if, while you worked, a stranger way down the block were fighting a house fire and trying to rescue his trapped children, you wouldn't keep working on the deck.  You would rush to the stranger's aid.  

After Africa, I can't help but think that the priorities and ministries of the American church are a lot like building a deck on a friend's house.  Christian music festivals are nice and all, but they seem so trivial -- even pointless --  when there are places in Kenya w/ 80% HIV infection rates, and a human being starves to death every time you exhale, and one of the leading causes of death in the developing world is just plain old diarrhea. Building a deck on someone's home seems almost mean when somebody nearby doesn't even have a home. I'm not sure how to help you take this reality seriously.  Tony Compolo used to do it this way:  "I have three things I'd like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don't give a shit. What's worse is that you're more upset with the fact that I said 'shit' than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night." 

William Lloyd Garrison, radical abolitionist from before the civil war was chided by upstanding citizens and respectable churchmen for making his his calls for the end of slavery intemperately.  Garrison retorted,  "I am aware, that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hand of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; -- but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present.

True, when I point out the distorted priorities of my own church, I also see the distorted priorities in my own life.  Ruth and I are driven to give and participate in missions like we never have.  I'm sure we could do more.

But it's a grim reality out there beyond the comfort of your nice American home and most of us seem plainly indifferent.  And I'm guilty too.  I can remember getting indignant at missionaries on furlough for making me feel bad about being American.  I am convinced our wealth is NOT something to be ashamed of -- it's certainly a blessing, but to whom much is given...

words and experiences

We say things like, "words cannot explain," or "this just has to be experienced," or "wait till you see this," or "you've just got to try it," or "just do it."  And the implication of these expressions (and many more) is that if words aren't completely powerless, then at least they are grossly inferior in their ability to "communicate" or teach.  Far better to see than to hear.  When we say, "a picture is worth a thousand words," we mean that a photo opens up as many different interpretations of the thing as there are people who view it.  "Talk is cheap."  "Put your money where your mouth is." 

But I refuse to accept these commonplaces.  I refuse to believe that experiencing and seeing hold sway over words and communication. 

And yet it has been nearly 3 months since we promised to write a "summation" entry about our trip to Africa (we did make it home from England, by the way).

I suppose I'm committed to the word for a couple of reasons -- the first, of course, is that I teach communication.  Shouldn't a communication professor "practice what he preaches" (there's another commonplace)?  I refuse to give up on the idea that one human being can enter into communion with another. Just because one person has done something and the other hasn't doesn't mean both can't share significant meaning.  Praise God that I learned to keep my hand off of the hot stove by the simple verbal instruction of my parents.  True, there was a time when mothers used to take their newly crawling infants and, as the child got close to the big open hearth, press the child's finger against a grate or a spit or a red hot iron pot.  The burn was, I'm sure, a fairly effective deterrent to playing near the fire, but no loving mother would deliberately torment their child if there was some other way to teach their prelinguistic child the danger of fire.  I also am convinced that the words and verbal metaphors we carry about in our heads (unconsciously, most of them) provide the narratives and structure that shape who we are, how we "see" things, how we react to things, and determine what is important to us and what is unimportant.  A picture is worth a thousand words?  Hardly.  Should I paint a fish you will see a fish.  But if I speak the word, "fish," the possibilities are infinite.  What it looks like, your attitude about it, how we should use it, react to it, attend to it, etc.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, than a word is worth untold millions of pictures.

But the other, and perhaps more significant reason that I refuse to debase the word is because my theology won't let me.  Words are not cheap, according to scripture.  In fact, scripture teaches over and over that not only is saying critically important, but that God is Word.  God speaks and without the power of magic and potions and instrumental incantations, he creates.  Indeed, God's essence is not only love, but word: "In the beginning was the Word," and word left his throne and became flesh and blood, like you and me.   John didn't say, "In the beginning was the Spirit," or "In the beginning..." and then describe what God looked like. 

And because I believe so powerfully in the significance of the word, I have been afraid to write a final entry.  The photos we took of Africa are not Africa, but the words I use to describe Africa may also constrain your understanding of something too rich and wonderful.  Ruth was asked to capture Africa in one word and she said, "Cuticle."  When asked for a profound elaboration she said, "You can't sum up Africa in one word!"  Still...

I believe our time in Africa can be captured, but it can be captured best in words and only by those willing to commit to the complicated and eternal task of speaking. 

And besides, if experience is so powerful and you went to Africa you wouldn't learn about my experiences -- you'd have your own. 

So I'm off to work now, but I will try to communicate the fullness of Africa and the fullness of our time there.  The complex process of communication places a tremendous burden on the listener, too.  We have probably already lost most of you (from our long delay) but if you only want a sound bite or a "picture" of Africa, you'll not appreciate our "experience." 

London England

London is jooo$t looverly.  Indeed.  Quite $o.  Brilliant.  $imply $plendid.  We have spent three days at the Foreign Missions Club (like a large bed and breakfast for those in full-time Christian service -- the only thing in London that doesn't cost an arm and a leg). So if you have a few pounds, we recommend it.  If you think I'm kidding, it cost us £160 (pounds) to get a taxi from the airport.  That's about $300 and we still have to get back tomorrow.  Blimey (apologies if that word is offensive and I just don't know it).

But guess what we did first?  Correct, Dad -- we went shopping!  And where did we go?  Again, Dad wins!  The Salvation Army!  Where else?!  Reminds me of the time in Williamsburg, VA as I heard some guy mumbling and grumbling behind his wife as she walked from store to store, "1350 miles just to go shopping."  But I suppose I bought something too.

Mostly, we walked.  London is quite nice for walking -- especially if you like walking in biting winds, heavy rains, and down to the bone cold and damp.  We saw the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace (in the rain), took pictures of Trafalgar Square (in the rain), walked around Big Ben (in the rain -- it's much smaller in person), and spent a few hours in the British Gallery (to get out of the rain).  Sid was pretty impressed that those Impressionist he studied in co-op were right there in real life: "Water Lilies," by Monet -- "Sunflowers," by Van Gogh right there hanging on the wall.  

Today, we walked to the Camden Market (yes, in the rain) to see what was for sale in the world of punk rock and goth fashion.  More body piercing establishments per capita than any place on earth, I'm sure.  Thanks for the recommendation, Clara Giebel!  To cleanse ourselves we walked to Westminster Abbey and attended Evensong!  Breathtaking!  The boy's choir, the meditation, the readings, and the cathedral itself, of course, all combine to manifest a glorious worship offering.  So much of what we evangelicals declare "worship" is really performance or display -- a show put on for the benefit of the congregation.  I know that boy's choirs and erudite sermons can become display, too, but the whole service was directed up, not out. We were there not to be "ministered to," but to actually DO the worshipping.  Oh, high church liturgical has its problems too, but certainly we can give God more than inch deep praise choruses and "clap offerings." But I'd better stop cause I'm going to get myself in trouble.

The walking was not w/o sacrifice.  We racked up 9 miles today (probably that much yesterday) and while none of the kids complained, we got home and found Joanna trying to wash the blood out of her shoes (from a nasty blister/sore).  We did get to ride on those cool double-decker red buses.  The people over here speak with an English accent -- did you know that?  Everywhere you go it sounds like PBS.  We saw a Homer Simpson t-shirt (Homer standing in front of the Union Jack) in which he says,  "English?  Why do I need to study that?  I'm not going to England."         

 By the by, did you know Charles Darwin is buried at Westminster Abby?  Humpfh!  I didn't.  And Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and Dryden, and a bunch of kings, and etc.  

Coming home tomorrow (Monday).  See you soon!