Vagabond Disciple, Pt. 1

this is the first of a series of posts where I lovingly plagiarize excerpts from my own weekly journal (and occasionally Kurt Vonnegut) so that you may spectate on my life. (The internet is a creepy concept, when you think about it.)

As with all good beginnings, I suppose, it had to start with the inevitable procession of endings. Last one-on-one with Caleb, last lecture, last weekday lunch cooked by P'Get, last small group. The moments that were the hardest were the special moments with members of the other outreach team, knowing that the element that had founded our friendship would soon come to a close. And it's weird, how in those moments you come to really know what it meant all along, now that you don't have it there anymore to take for granted. Saying goodbye to Austin M. was the hardest, and I will miss our daily dialogues in thick Saskatchewan accents. So it goes, I suppose, in this as is with life. We had a "love-feast" on friday night, a hours-long dinner at Phil and Cindy Porter's house in which we ate actual mexican food and said all of the things we love about each other. (Why don't people do this all the time?) Nothing that was said or done that weekend was really all that important, it only gave greater significance to the months that preceded it.

And soon it too was gone, and the unwavering flow of God, Fate and the siamese wind that had brought me to bangkok began brushing us north to Chiang Rai. The bus drove all night across all of Thailand. While we were still in the northern skirts of Bangkok, stuck in an endless jam of traffic, we could see the standstill life-turned-upside-down that this year's floods had caused. Sections of raised highway had been turned into makeshift cities filled with tents and cars and people and stray dogs.

I sat next to steph, and we found out that doing so would assign us as logistical "buddies" for the weeks to come. She borrowed a few of my Tylenol PMs, and before things wound down for the long stretches of dark highway she went through the most wonderful loopy phase of hilariousness that perhaps only painkillers and emotional fatigue can bring. (Steph on painkillers is REALLY hilarious, even more so than normal. Shawn, if you're reading this, take note.) The attendant brought us water cups, the kind with a plastic lid that keeps it from spilling everywhere, but they forgot to pack straws. So it goes. Soon the traffic stopped and the night got dark and the road stretched on and took us far into the northern hills. We arrived in Chiang Rai at 10 in the morning. it was the pastor's day off, so we went about a fairly slow day of getting settled before going to Chiang Rai's famous market bazaar. (A trend I'm noticing is that every Thai city has a "famous" market to spend money at.)

There was a strange element of transition in the first few days. Life on outreach is slower than I'm now used to, both in the sense that there's less structure and also that there's less planned in general. Lots of time to do as I please. For me there's an element of frustration in that, because I'm a westerner who effectively speaks no Thai, and it's been a growing experience to have to come to the point of saying "Ok, God. I don't see your plan in all this, and I don't know why I'm here, and I feel like I'm completely ineffective and something of a consumer. But in the end, I trust you. I know that someday it will all make sense, but right now it just doesn't. I have a theory and a counter-theory, but no synthesis." And for all I know, that thought is enough. It'll have to work for a time. Getting to that point might be the whole reason I'm here. I don't know, but it's a hard thing to surrender this idea that I'm supposed to be able to constantly see the fruit of what I do. God seems to be implying that I'm still building for something that I'll be able to see later. I've been reading through the gospels again and it's something of a comfort to me that Jesus seems to insist over and over on choosing as disciples really incompetent and broken people, who will "get it" one minute and question everything the next.

On our second day we went on a prayer walk. We went to three places; the first was Wat Rong Khun. It's a buddhist temple that's currently in the process of being built, but already a visually striking piece of cultural art. It's filled with allegory; everything about it is white and glassy and ornate and the temple itself is a metaphor for the Buddhist conceptualization of the "narrow path to heaven." It was weird, and there was a sort of spiritual crookedness to the whole thing. Inside of the actual temple room there was a room-spanning mural, with Buddha on one side representing heaven and a large face of a dragon on the side representing earth and hell. On the face of the dragon were countless depictions of cultural references from the past decade: 9-11, oil, wars, superheroes and comic book charachters, movie references, celebrities who had died. There was an irony in it for me that a temple would contain depictions of things that are normally idolized more implicitly.

The second place we went to was a statue of one of the great northern kings of the past. The king is greatly revered, and the place is used as a shrine; many people of the city come to make merit with the king, burning incense and offering food. There were christians there, praying and reading scripture aloud as a means of spiritual warfare and evangelism. It was clear to us that this place was where the real battle for souls takes place; not hid away in the corners of temples but in the city center, not for territory but for the very hearts of the people.

Our final place was on a mountain overlooking the whole city and the pastures that surround it. On the mountaintop is a buddhist temple more ornate and glittery than any other I've seen. God seemed to be teaching me something through this comparison: "Look at man, at his feeble attempts at beauty. They try so hard. Everything is symmetrical and intricate and shiny, and much has been sacrificed in time and in resources to make it. Now look out into the beauty of creation. The mountains and rivers, the vast pastures, men and the wild coexisting. The world is vast, and yet the details are carved down to the tiniest detail: the kernels of rice ripening at the ends of each stalk, the lines on faces, and the way the mountains grow lighter in color as they sprawl out into the distance. All of this God has done effortlessly, through the writing of the laws that give earth substance: Biology, geology, physics, mathematics. And yet, look at these humans. they try to depend on themselves. They create beauty to call their own, like wind captured in a jar. And yet, see how their patterns are made plain in comparison to the majesty of God's creation."

At the end of that day we sat in on a small group that our pastor and his wife lead. All of the members are young thai women, so I felt more than a bit out of place in it all. The next day we went to pray and minister to patients in the ward of a local hospital. We were partnering with a local church and with the christian chaplain of the hospital. One mental note I made was that he mentioned that they had 1 MRI scanner, which was the only MRI for all of Chiang Rai. (200k people) We split into groups to pray over people; I went with a few of the older thai christians from the church. I couldn't understand them or the patients, so I followed their lead. This worked pretty well, except that they were taking turns being the one to pray aloud, and it soon became my turn. I was caught off-guard, and muttered a broken, inarticulate, short prayer. I found myself frustrated by that. I found comfort in the fact that, aside from nobody being able to understand me anyway, that God doesn't seem to care so much about our articulation as he does about our hearts. He doesn't need us to be perfect, he needs us to be willing. and at any rate, I'm new to a lot of this, newer and greener than I'd ever care to admit.

We did sports ministry at a local post-secondary school (something of a mix between a high school and a junior college.) It was communication-based ministry, so I was inherently frustrated. It's humbling being a person of words, made mute by language. I'm having to develop a new attitude, and new strategies for servanthood. Smile a lot, love a lot, pray a lot. show patience in everything. That's it. That's all I have to go on.

We spent wednesday night at Art's grandfather's funeral. He died late sunday night while we were on the bus. Art's family has been hit hard this moth, and I especially feel hurt for him and his brother and especially his father, a man who's lost his wife and his father in a span of three weeks. Art's family tree is losing leaves, and I wish I had better words to express empathy to him at his pain. God has done so much in him, and his life gives me hope. That funerals are a long affair, 5 days long. The wednesday night service was the third night, and was one of the more casual evenings of the service. We arrived early and helped set up, and shared a meal with his family. The night's proceedings included a sermon and a song in Thai by us. It was really thrown together, and the musical acts that followed blew us out of the water. God gives grace to the humble, and we must have a lot of grace coming our way at the rate we find ourselves humbled.

On thursday for lunch we celebrated American Thanksgiving. I pitched in with some of the western ingredients I had left over from my flood stockpile and what my mom had sent me. our main dish was spaghetti with velveeta-rotel sauce (a real thanksgiving staple, I know. I don't care, it's the most delicious thing ever). We broke out a few chocolate bars as well. For some it was the first time they had ever had cheese; a barren world made alive for the first time. The event brought my secret stash of chocolate down to six bars. (we have six women on our team and we're out here for more than a month. do the math, kids, and prepare accordingly. Be prepared, the motto of a true scout.)

We returned friday morning for the final day of the funeral; it was a more serious day and included the actual procession in which the casket is hand-carried from the open-air sanctuary to the cemetery in the back of the church. I brought my journal this time, which helped fill gaps and keep me occupied for long parts of all-thai proceedings. I was never told that we were expected to sing, so I was caught off-guard when we were pulled up onto the stage. I had about 15 seconds of mental prep before singing. Thank heaven, we had chosen an english song, "above all powers." The ultimate rule of vagabond discipleship seems to be "always be ready to roll with it. Life is your adventure." When they brought the casket to the gravesite, they brought out all the sympathy wreaths that had been donated and they broke them apart, giving each person a flower to pile on to the already flower-adorned casket. Us farong didn't have any idea what was going on or being said, but we were able to maneuver nicely by following others' leads and sawatdee'ing every single person. 


When we got back from the funeral on friday, I had a really regrettable 26 hour stretch that I'm still kind of ashamed of. Something small happened that hurt my feelings, and it's like there was this click in my head that chose to be really really hurt and offended. It's like this whole other wounded side of me came out that I thought was gone. Instead of dealing with the problem, I bottled it up, and took it out by going on long walks where I was essentially whining at God for all the uncertainty in my life. The next morning I woke up holding all the anger and hurt, and took it out by closing myself off from people I care about a lot. The sock-puppet problems I created for myself were built up by my long inner monologues, and prevented me from showing any expression of joy, goodness, kindness or care. It was really gross, and I still feel pretty bad thinking about it. and then, I actually dealt with it with the people. and all of these problems that I had built up for myself fell apart, leaving me feeling foolish, realizing that it was all really nothing. Things got better quickly, like a weight lifted, a demon gone.

Sunday started off with morning service. we did one of our plays and the girls did their thai dance. Ribka gave her testimony, and so did one of the men from the church, a man who had a developmental disability who came to trust God when he had no food and god used people to provide for him. We did the same stuff in a service that night at the junior college, and then shared a meal with the pastor and his family and the young women who are in the small group we attended on tuesday night.

And that brings us to today, which I have spent blogging and doing laundry. Read my previous post about the laundry, I could combine the posts but I don't feel like it, we'll cross that bridge when this becomes a sprawling, un-concise and meandering book that doesn't seem to have any thesis at all.

Other random pictures for good measure:

the most beautiful thing that's ever happened to anyone ever.

Ok, Fine, you win, internet.

You see, with most of the wonderful and altogether eventful happenings of my life, I usually make a note of it in a journal to save for later. Very rarely does something happen that my first thought is literally "I have to blog about this." And today it happened.

Tomorrow morning we're heading off into the hills for a few days, so laundry is a priority for everyone. our one faucet stall was occupied when I woke up, so I sat my clothes in a bin and decided to go running while I waited. When I got back it was still occupied, this time by the pastor's wife, who had clearly set aside a better part of the morning to doing her own family's laundry. For a split second I showed that inevitable language-barrier-crossing look on one's face that seemed to say, "ohhhhhhh I'll be waiting a while.." So I went to my room and picked up my book, came back and sat down and started reading in hopes that when she finished I would be able to pounce upon the open faucet.

A few minutes pass. She finishes her current tub of soapy clothes, rinses it, and hangs it up to dry. Then she motions to me to seperate the shirts from the other clothes. I do so, and she starts hand-washing my laundry. And I have to admit that it took me a minute to compose myself and begin to pitch in, because that is the most beautiful, humble act of service anyone's ever done to anyone. Seriously, you guys, my dirty underwear is my own business, and she knows full well that I should be expected to clean it. But to her, that was completely beside the point. In the 20 minutes it took for us to scrub at my clothes, She talked in her broken english and I talked in my very broken thai about our families and about thailand and america and other little things about life. In general I've noticed that conversation isn't nearly about what is said as it's about the fact that to each of us, the events and people and places in our lives seem significant and important, and to care about those things in someone else means to care about the person that holds them.


I must admit that lately I've had to do a lot of thinking about why I'm here, and what the point is of me proclaiming myself a disciple when there's a part of me that feels completely incapable of doing so in a way that's actually effective. I do a lot of thinking about the net result of things, that what I'm currently doing isn't leading to grand large-scale sustainable solutions to vast and complex world issues. And in one sweeping gesture I've just been completely humbled of all of that. And it's teaching me to accept the present, to accept the natural frustrations that come about when there are so many barriers of culture and language and finances and uncertainty. Obedience is a hard lesson that I think I still have much work to do about, because part of obedience means I find myself doing things not knowing what it means or where this is going to. And there's growth in that, but the frustration remains. It sounds so cliche to say "God has a plan" because unless I can see it written out before me it's hard to really trust my intuition about God's will. It's what I've been fighting for a few days now, but it seems to be better now because of this one simple act, and what it implies:
While I want to know already the sense in everything that's happening in my life right now, written out in some scroll that only hindsight can bring, I am encouraged to move forward because of the fact that I'm learning so much. Not in sweeping humanity-spanning truths, but in the small wonders of a life made abundant by love. And that's enough for now, because it's the little things that keep happening, like God's way of saying "isn't there just something incredible here, hidden in the souls of humanity? I want you here, and I want you to keep digging at the mystery. What you'll learn is very important, and the love you'll find will change you."

"They found it was more fun doing laundry together, spending time together while they waited (which poor folks have known for a long time)." - Shane Claiborne.

It's my day off, so hopefully I'll scrounge up a few baht and post some excerpts from my journal. We shall see. Anyone who wants to contribute to the internet-cafe-blogging-fund can contact me via my facebook page.

A letter to myself, from the future.

Ok, does anyone here remember Xanga? For those of you who were born before 1987 and after 1992, it was this blog website that people used to use where junior high kids (and other people, who didn't take Xanga up on the offer) would be given blogs for free and not given any real sense of direction about what to write except to say "white what's on your heart!" 

This is fine, in concept, but it becomes problematic when you consider that the heart of the average junior high kid is a torrent of raw emotional gasoline. I myself have one of those up somewhere, and it's maybe the only writing of mine that I'm truly ashamed of. There are papers I've written that I'm not proud of, but that I can at least say "well, I can see how this paper made me grow as a writer." but Xanga was different. Xanga was where you went to when the fellow junior-high-kids in your life hurt you, either real or in your imagination, and you wanted a lonely mountaintop to cry at using words. It was also used for self-promotion, but we use everything for that.

And the thing is, just because we're not in middle school anymore doesn't mean that life suddenly or miraculously less easy; in fact my current problems in life are much bigger than the ones in middle school that seemed so earth-shattering and large. To give a little contextual background to explain where I'm going with this, living life like we're supposed to can be hard. really hard. Whenever it's really necessary, God really encourages me in it, but that doesn't mean that it will ever come naturally or ever be painless. And none of this isn't to say it isn't great; in fact the last week of my life has been filled with elements that are sweet and precious. encouragement from friends, celebrations, endings, beginnings, mountains, bus rides, sunrises, rice-harvests, good friends, flannel weather, and above all the assurance that I'm doing what God called me to do and that whatever pains that come up will soon get caught up in the refiner's fire and leave only the sweeter memories that make it all worth it. But none of that is really helpful at all when you're dealing with the spiritual equivalent of getting kicked in the gut, which will happen from time to time when you're a very imperfect person striving after a perfect God. And when it happens, don't be surprised when you get to the end of it and all of your logic has fallen apart and you see the shards of pride all around you and you were never as humble as you thought you were all along. It's kind of a lovely humility mechanism built into humanity, I think, that we're designed to every once in a while get shattered by our own fallen selves. But that does not change the fact that the junior-high method of dealing with our problems is not healthy and can really hurt the people around us. so I'm proposing a new method, which is to right now write this letter to myself which I can refer back to. It's a work in progress, so bear with it. It's to work sort of like a doctor's prescription, to be prescribed whenever I feel emotionally horrible.

Dear Austin,

first of all, your problems are very small. you don't have a right to expect others to feel as hurt or as bad as you about whatever small problems that you think are big right now. You've gotten this far, so the important thing to concern yourself with isn't how you got to where you are now, but how you're going to get to where you need to be. You have this tendancy to croc-pot your emotions and only come around to dealing with them when you're no longer emotionally stable to be able to, so if you feel horrible, and then a half an hour later you haven't dealt with anything and you still feel horrible, you've gone too far without dealing with your problems. If your problem is with a person, talk to them. If your problem is with God talk to him. At any rate talk to someone, because the way you act when you are alone and angry is the saddest most pathetic thing ever. I know you have your limits, so a good rule of thumb is that if you've listened to 4 angry songs by the mountain goats or watched a season of a television show, or spent 3 hours bottling up your feelings, you've gone too far and you need to stop it and deal with your problems. if it's a person, humble yourself and fix it. if it's where you are in life, change where you are in life or else allow yourself to be content with the season you're in. you're a lot more fun when you're happy, so stop being sad or angry or depressed or lonely or despondent or bored or overcome and deal with your problems so we can move on to the important stuff that you won't just want to forget. Oh, and most important, stay off the internet until this is all over.

Your buddy,

Austin

Sorry I'm not actually talking about my life among the mountains and plains of northern Thailand yet. I'll get to it at some point. It's really hard for me to write about that stuff in this setting because I paid a state university thousands of dollars to beat into my skull the idea that anything I write needs to have a thesis statement. and it's hard to do that when the thesis statement is "hey look, neat!" but I'll think of something better soon.

Hi, Mom.

perceptions, and life abundantly.

Ok, so I’m trying to be as methodical as a I can with this one, and I admit that the structure of it is coming out kind of messy. It’s a blog. you’re not paying me to read it, and I feel no pity for you, dear hypothetical readers.

there are two elements to blogging that are hard for me: the first is that it has to be a very intentional act. it’s hard for me to sit down and simply create something worth reading just because I feel like it. and that’s a poor motivation, to spend a long time writing something poetic and brilliant just because I want to say “hey everyone. I’m alive and am in a position in life that involves internet access.” The second is that blogging is just so vulnerable and arbitrary, like a man who stands on a cliff reading essays so that the universe might hear. lately I’ve written a few really long letters, and there’s something beautiful about writing letters because it’s a message with an intended destination. I’ve been reading from the pastoral letters of the bible lately and there’s something about them that’s just so special, not even because of the truth that the writers are trying to get across but because of the sheer love they have for the recipient that seeps out into every little choice of pronoun. And this isn’t that at all. there’s this element to blogging that seems to be writing to the wind. But I’m going to try this anyway, and with any luck and with god’s grace I will accomplish the literary equivalent of vomiting brilliance all over this document.

So the first thing I need to do is establish my audience. If I’m not writing to the wind, who am I writing to? My audience pretty much consists of people I know, who I don’t have to explain the entire story of how I got to where I am now. I want to tell that story, but it’d take a lot of patient writing that I just don’t have 12 hours to sit down and write out right now. I hope to do it at some point soon, but even if I do it I’m not sure I want to put it here. I don’t think it’s out of a lack of candor that I should approach the internet with a bit of restraint in what I say. It’s the internet. and there’s something to be said for subtlety and careful selection of what’s important. I’m learning that there are a lot of things about me and my life and my choices that I like and that are good, but that I don’t want to choose as some big part of my life, something that I stand for, something I represent. I’m noticing that I hate what the internet is becoming, especially as people are being raised having never gone without it. It seems like the entire world has lost sight of the simple beauty of doing things for the sheer life of it. People do things just so they can make facebook statuses that said they did them, and insist on taking pictures of themselves in any situation because what’s really important about doing anything is to be validated in doing it. It’s not even so much about who you are on the internet, it’s about who you appear to be.

And I am tired of all that. So I try to use the internet differently. To actually communicate, and not promote myself. The problem I’m talking about is actually bigger than the internet, it seems like people of our generation are missing the point of life in general. We think that fulfillment in life is recognition when it’s life itself that’s the blessing. The thing is, my life is really abundant right now. It’s not perfect, there are a lot of things about it that are beautiful and great and there are other things about it that are painful and stressful and transient. however, it’s important to me that whatever it is about life that is important and meaningful to me is what’s truly at the forefront of my decisionmaking. what I’m learning is that life is for living abundantly, so who cares what other people think? This line of thought runs contrary to everything I’ve been trained to care about. How much stuff I have and how well off I am and how much positive attention the masses of people give me seem such small matters when I realize that I only get one life, and validation is so much less important than love.

I guess what I’m trying to get at is this idea that I think we as a culture (and, let’s face it, in the online generation we’re all pretty much one culture at this point) need to scrap what’s been popularly decided as what’s important in life. the two cornerstones are the concepts of notoriety and security. And it’s this notoriety one that I’m focusing on here. I think where it comes from is that we think that if other people affirm us as the people we’d like to be thought of, it somehow magically turns us into that person. And so my old model of doing things was that I’d do something that would make me look kind or good or funny or cool, and the most important thing to me was that other people saw that and inferred those words upon me. So it’d always need to be some big spectacle. and even if I got the recognition I thought I needed it still left me hollow. And all of whatever reputation I built within a group of people would lose its meaning because groups of people themselves have no permanence. Who cares who I was thought of being in high school, or in college? It all is scattered to the wind and the reputation I thought made me valuable is nothing. Who people think I am now will soon mean nothing. So it doesn’t matter who people think I am, what matters is who I actually am.

So who do we actually want to be?
I want to be kind, and thoughtful, and loving, and joyful, and patient, and good, and faithful, and gentle.
I want my life to be filled with adventure and acts of beauty and remarkable kindness.
My primary pursuit isn’t to be thought of as any of these things, I want to actually be them and do them. And if other people don’t notice it’s all the more glory to God that I possess them. It’ll be our little unhidden secret, and when people have the time and patience to discover it, it’ll be like finding buried treasure. And how wonderful would life be if everyone were like this, with every passing stranger possessing within them entire universes of possibilities, hopes, and idiosyncrasies, making every moment an opportunity to explore new uncharted pathways into the mystery it is simply to be alive.

and here I am, spending a sunny november saturday on the internet, orating to no one. Screw it, I’m done. I'm going for a walk. I wonder what new pathways I’ll find. If you want to know how I'm doing, call me, for I miss your voices and faces dearly, friends.