invisible lines.

I stepped foot in Cambodia today. In terms of what I actually did there, it wasn't very notable; I ate a hamburger made of some kind of meat that wasn't beef or chicken, and I got a pretty green sticker in my passport that will allow me to stay in Thailand a little longer. But I did something else there: I prayed. Fervently, unceasingly. It was my second time straddling a siamese border (the other time being in Mae Sai, where the tip of Thailand spills over into Burma.) The prayers weren't the happy kind, but rather, they were the kind where I have to look at all the tragedy in the world and go to God and ask him what needs to be done to fix this. Many of the other foreigners there for a routine visa-stamp routine don't see what I see, they see a legal technicality. An oppurtunity, perhaps, for some cheap booze or some other "merchandise". There is a darkness in the air in these places that they don't sense. I do, though. I know what really happens in these places, these imaginary lines in the world that men have carved up.

Explore or loiter long enough, and you'll get the picture. A man will walk up and ask what you might be shopping for. Marlborough cigarettes? Viagra, or Ambien? or is it companionship you're looking for? For the flash of a few baht, no door is left locked for the white man with cash. And it's here, right here, in these lines that we've drawn in the sand, where so many of the evils in the world trickle through like water making their way to Bangkok and Phnom Penh. The human suffering in the air is palatable, knowing what I know about what happens in this place.

And with all these scattered thoughts I'm left to wonder what's supposed to happen? How do we fix this? What am I supposed to do about it? There are so many things that have to happen, but for me it starts with a prayer, mostly for the defenseless made victims in this place, but it's also a prayer for us - we, the lucky, who eat our questionable hamburgers and need not worry about much of anything - that we might care.

the christmas sermon.

I'm preaching tomorrow. It's my first sermon. Where better to deliver one's first sermon, I suppose, than a one-room house church in western Thailand, on Christmas morning. In preparing for it, I wrote the sermon I had on my heart; word-for-word, rather than with notes that allowed me to improvise. I did this because I'm not using the prepared text; I'm now going to go through it and linguistically decimate it of english idioms so that I don't unnecessarily send my translator into utter frustration. But I really like it so far. So for you, my dear readers, and perhaps for my own posterity, I present the prepared notes that I will now veer away from:

We made it. All the preparations and planning and parties are done and now it’s time to celebrate. To be honest, though, all of this christmas business seems very odd. A baby was born, two thousand years ago. And now, every year, billions of people set aside not only a day, but countless preparations and parties and money in order to celebrate. For a long time this didn’t make sense to me. Even now I find some of the ways we celebrate christmas frustrating and illogical. But there has to be something there; there must surely be something different about this baby. I could spend several minutes telling you all some of the things I know about my own birth, and some of you might find it interesting, but I don’t think you’d tell your children and grandchildren about it, and I don’t think the world would be celebrating it in a few centuries. So what is it about this baby? When I was born, notable people did not show up at my crib and bow to me, angels didn’t announce it from the skies above. Certainly the story is a good one. But is that it? It’s a good story, and perhaps we want an excuse to throw a party? I’ve been searching for something deeper than that. This all started when I had a really difficult christmas a few years ago. Christmas was always a little hard for me to grasp because I come from a country where we take christmas very seriously. It actually becomes a source of stress for a lot of people. there are parties to plan, decorations to put up, places to go, and so many things to do, in order to have the “perfect christmas”. and I was sick of it. It was my first christmas away at college, and instead of coming home I made my own plans. I was going to go all the way across the world, to a country in Africa called Sudan, where I would be as far away from the american christmas as I could get. I wanted to get away from christmas because I just didn’t get it. God’s plans were different than my plans, though. I didn’t get my visa to Sudan and I didn’t get to go. instead I had to go home. While I was home I looked long and hard at this strange holiday that didn’t make sense to me. Christmas is about Jesus being born, I thought, so I didn’t understand why we make it so stressful and so much about presents and decorations and material things. But more than that, I didn’t understand why Christmas matters. And it was through that experience I had, of throwing out all of the ideas that I grew up thinking about christmas and going back to God’s heart in it, that I’ve come around to loving christmas again. I think that christmas is beautiful, and I think we have a reason today to rejoice and to celebrate. so here are a few thoughts I’ve had about a christmas worth celebrating.

To understand christmas is to understand the heart of God for us. And the bible itself is our story, the story of humanity. The bible is made of two parts, the old testament and the new testament. And each of these two parts has a beginning. so in order to understand this new book, we’re going to have to go back to the old one. And it started with God creating the world, and everything in it. His most special creation was a species that we call humanity. Humans are different from all of the other species he created because he created us special to be a reflection of who he is. He wanted a creature like him on earth, and to us he gave a special purpose: it was our job to take care of the earth. But then something happened. There was a problem. When God made us, he gave us a special power: We get to choose to follow him. He wanted it this way, because he wants us to love him. He wants to follow him out of joy and out of respect for him. That’s why he gave us minds. He didn’t want us to blindly follow him because he forced us to, he wanted our devotion. But when you give someone a choice, it means they can choose the other thing, the wrong thing. to ask someone to be obedient means that they get to be able to say no. And one day, in the paradise he created, his most special creations said no. You told me not to do something, but I’m going to do it anyway, God. I’m smart enough to make my own decisions, I’m smarter than you. Up until this point these two creations were innocent, like children. But then, through that disobedience, something got ruined. They had committed sin. It wasn’t that they ate a certain kind of fruit, what caused them to sin was that they disobeyed God. It cursed them, and even today that curse is still there among us. We are a species that chooses to be disobedient. We choose to trust ourselves instead of trusting God, which is to be disobedient to God. And this made God really angry, but it also made him very sad. Because he is a god that cares about justice, he knew there would be consequences about sin; that because of our disobedience to the one that gave us life, we would have to die. And the idea of creatures that he loved having to die made God sad. So God hatched a plan: He knew that because of the way he made men, there had to be death, and there would have to be despair and suffering. he would have to spend thousands of years working on it in order for it to work, but he knew what he needed to do: He had to come to earth himself, and enter the world just like we do. He had to live a life, like us, and show to the world that it can be done: humans can live right, loving god and loving their fellow men and not sinning. And then, in the climax of this whole epic story that God was forming, He himself was going to die as a sacrifice for their disobedience, so that these broken people could be fixed again.

God went to work. He found a good man, a man named abraham. He blessed abraham, and he spent the next few thousand years turning abraham’s descendants into a special people, and he gave them truth from heaven about how to live and how to be obedient to him even though they were broken. These people were stubborn, though, and they repeated a cycle of being obedient to god and then falling back into disobedience. Every time, when God could have given up and destroyed them, he pulled them back from the brink of destruction and he chose to give them a second chance. And then, through them, he decided to give all of humanity a second chance.

And this brings us to christmas. Lying in the heart of the story of christmas is something much deeper than a neat little story about a baby born in a barn in a far-off country. it’s our story. It’s the story of the time that God himself decided to do it the hard way. He, in his power, could have started the world over, erasing us and replacing us with people more robotic who would unthoughtfully do his every whim. He could have given us all pills that turn our brains off and make us follow him without being able to choose. He could have just killed us off and decided he was better off alone. But he didn’t do any of these things, because God loves us very much. He loves us so much that he sent us part of himself, made human. Even though we aren’t perfect, God is willing to trust us. He has done his part, and now he He knows that the best thing for us is to be obedient to him and to love each other, but he trusts us so much that he’s willing to say “You get to decide what you think is best for you.”

In my life, I’ve found this a hard thing to do. Left to my own devices, I’ve lived a very messy life, I’ve made a lot of mistakes, and often I’ve thought to myself “I know what’s best for me, so I’m going to do what I will do and if God doesn’t like it he can stop me.” But as I’ve grown older I’ve realized that God doesn’t work like that. God trusts you enough that he’s willing to let you make your own decisions, but as I’ve lived I cannot help but find that on my own, without his help, I’m not very good at running my own life. I don’t think this is an accident. As I’ve grown and learned, I’ve found that things are this way because God built me, and when he made me he made it so that I was designed to trust him, and to be obedient to him. When I told God that I would be a follower of him, he began to be able to tell me how I should live my life: a way that is both pleasing to him and in which I live with harmony and peace with those around me. And all of this he has accomplished through this baby, who grew up and lived his life as a demonstration of how we can live our lives in a way that gives us purpose and satisfaction. Through this child, God has given us a teaching about how we should live. But it is a teaching, and a teaching is something that we can choose to either follow or disobey. If we disobey, we will die. It’s not that God will kill us, it’s our actions that will result in our own death. Death is where we were headed, but one night, a long time ago, God sent us a savior. He said that if we trust this man with our lives, we would get salvation from death.

And so the message from God for us through christmas is this: We’re worth saving. To him, we’re worth the sacrifice. But there is another message for us through this child, even those of us who have already accepted the message of salvation. and it a lesson about how to live while we are still alive. The salvation that we received from Christ dying on the cross is what allows us to go to heaven when we die, but something else happened when God came to this earth and walked as a man: He lived a perfect life. He didn’t just do this to prove that it could be done, he did it as a lesson for us, about how to live well, and to have meaningful lives. He taught us to reject all the old ways of living life, and to instead live like he did: Humbly, unselfishly, and to love God and to love our neighbors. So friends, I have an encouragement for you all as we celebrate the birth of Jesus: Let us continue to strive to be like him. Let us look at the life that he lived while he walked among us, and let us do likewise. And what does it mean to live like him? It means many things, and our gospels are filled with suggestions. But the one thing more than anything else that Jesus did that made him different than the fallen men around him was that he went to the Lord in prayer. He had a relationship with the Lord. and he was obedient to the Lord, even to the point that he would die as an act of obedience. And this is what God wants for us, to have a relationship with him. He wants us to obey him again, to set things right again. God has given us a second chance, and that is a message for all the world. It is truly a reason to celebrate.

Vagabond Discipleship, Pt. IV: Lessons in Obedience

"You know the way to the place where I am going."
"Lord, we do not know where you are going, how can we know the way?"
"I am the way."

The common metaphor for life, both in the bible and elsewhere, is that it's all a bit like wandering. Sometimes we do so with direction, and sometimes we don't. Sometimes we find ourselves sure of our next step, and sometimes we don't. Sometimes we go the wrong way, losing ourselves down all the back alleys of life looking for the way back to what feels normal. To be a follower of christ is to find ourselves along this path, and to be told, "follow it." And along this path there are many obstacles, and many distractions and detours that seem to be calling out to us. Often we know the right way, and yet the flashing lights on the side of the road beckon us with enticement. But to be mature in our faith, (that is, to have a faith that is real) is to not only know what is right, but to do it. This is all very straightforward at some points; it's as though we find ourselves on mountaintops, and we see the road ahead stretched out before us in all clarity. Then we begin to follow it, and it takes us deep into the valleys below. We get down there, and the sun shines less and the fog comes in with the morning and what before seemed so clear and so obvious becomes muddled to the point of utter inner turmoil. And it's in these moments that our faith becomes our guide. We have seen from the very mountaintops in the days that have passed that the path is true, and though we don't know the destination apart from a simple promise, faith is taking the next step, even though you don't know what comes after it. For the more ambitious of us, this is a hard teaching. We want to see the greatness that is in store as a result of our obdeince. We want to be sure, and it's this very desire that leaves us often questioning everything.

God makes it clear, however, that obdeince is the means for everything good. Obedience isn't the goal, the goal is love. More than anything, God wants us to love him and to love each other. We show love for each other through our actions, but as for our love for God, he says over and over, "if you love me, you'll be obedient to me. you'll follow my commands. you'll be pliable, flexible, and humble. Sometimes you'll be doing one thing and then I'll tell you to do something else, and to be obedient means to drop everything in life that might seem important and do what I want you to do. You know those feelings in your heart that tell you to good and to love others and to live abundantly? I put those there. They aren't magical or imaginary."

It's hard to measure success with a thing like outreach. It's even harder when you don't speak enough of the language to where half of the time things are going on that you're completely unaware of. In the last week I seemed to get in this state of mind where I felt like I was a blind man being led, we were always in a constant state of motion and action, and I felt completely ineffective except to smile much, show grace, and to pray without ceasing. And I know by just being there I can open doors and be beneficial, but that's all hard for me. I have to keep going back in prayer, as if to say, Ok, God. I'm here. You told me to do it and now I did it. Now what? WHY am I here? What do I possibly have to offer? And what I keep having to come back to is that God seems to insist more on working in  me than through me. and it's a humbling thing, to have to accept that it's me that I'm here for. It's ok. But I find myself at some point questioning everything, like the man in the fog in the valley. Thinking, "Can't I serve in a way that's more edifying to ME, God?" Questioning every single step, every single choice, every single action. When it comes down to it, in my heart I'm a doer, not in the sense that I merely want my hands to get dirty and the feeling that I'm doing good, but there's this need to know that what I do actually matters, that in the bigger scheme of things it makes things more better than worse. And with this, that's just tough cookies: That's not what this is. It's a process for me to make peace with that. I can buy a poor man a meal, but where will the next meal come from? I can plant a seed, but if I'm not there to pull the weeds as the plant grows, someone else must come along and tend to it. Trusting god with these matters is like exercise for the heart.

Much of what we've been doing here is evangelism. Evangelism is hard for me, not that I don't think it's important, but: with enough persistence you can make a kid mutter the sinner's prayer, and then announce from rooftops and on streetcorners and on the internet that you "accomplished something" (even though if something was indeed accomplished, it in reality you were a very small part of it). In modern Christendom we choose the wording "Last night such and such a person gave their life to the Lord." I keep wondering, "Can a thing like that even happen like that? In a few minutes, with a prayer that has the right words in it?" Our own phrasing suggests not. "Gave his life to the Lord." A decision like that can't be made in a moment, it is a continual decision. If we are to actually give our lives to the Lord, our money will be where our mouths are, and time is our currency. In the end I don't think god cares all that much about how much we give, he cares about our hearts. "This is love for God, to obey his commands." WIn my life, I can do my best to show everyone I come across how much I love God, but in order to show him, (or rather, for it all to be real and not just some farce for attention), I have to be obedient. It's easy for me to trust God with the big things, I've found, but for me the challenges are in the moments when I find myself wake up in the morning in some village in some place so far from everything that's normal for me, and it's 6:30 and the loudspeaker from the buddhist temple is announcing to the whole village who made acts of merit that day, that's when I make the choice to be obedient. a part of me wants to just lie in bed and feel sorry for myself about the cold shower and the mayonnaise sandwiches that await me for breakfast and the sickness and sore throat that I've been fighting for the past week, and to just trudge through it, like a chore. It's easy to give in to these thoughts; my life right now is a very inconvenient one. I miss my friends and my family. In an average day I've found myself eating things I wouldn't normally eat, doing things that aren't fun, living in a house where the ways have seemingly been built in order to not absorb any sound whatsoever (and someone seems to be ALWAYS plugging away at the same four chords of a guitar). And I find myself wanting, despite my love for everyone, to have a chance to just get away. and then there's this other voice in me that says "Take heart! I have overcome the world." And it's in this mindset that my life is a bit like a dream. I spend my days harvesting rice for old men, seeing the whole world from the back of a truck, talking to drunk men about God and about football, playing with children. My life is ridiculous, God. and I'm thankful to you for it. and it's then that I realize the whole trick to obedience: trust. If our God is as good as he says he is, we must not worry so much and we dare not think our plans are better, for our own sake. I can do it. I can take anything. entire dishes of raw meat, squatty potties with wet floors that leave my socks damp and gross, hours of hard work with no tangible reward. the continual uncertainty of everything, not knowing what's next or where any of this is heading, all the homesickness and loneliness. I can handle all of this and still wake up in the morning and be joyful, and expectant. That's the first part of the lesson. The second part is where I ask, OK, Lord, I can do ALL of this. But why? what good will ever come of it?


and the answer to this question is, "Wait and see. Press on in obedience."

It's weird letting people into your heart, knowing that in a few days you'll be gone, never to see or hear from them again in a lifetime. it makes one feel small. Our only power against such a feeling is to love fully in the time that we do have, and to live without regret.

I'm now in Ratchaburi, in the very east of the center of Thailand. It made yesterday a long, exhausting day, and by the end of it I was physically sick, with the sort of feeling one has where it feels as though they've swallowed a dirty rag. There are more things that I could write, but I feel most would be self-serving. when I tempt myself about writing about such things, I think of the story in the gospels where Jesus heals a blind man. After he heals him, he says something quite remarkable: Tell no one what just happened. It's remarkable. Yes, Jesus had some very practical logistical reasoning for wanting the man to stay silent, but what I keep coming back to is the fact that he healed him. and he didn't want anyone to know that he did it. as though to say, "this healing you've experienced, I did it for you. I did it because I want you to be well. I didn't do it to draw attention to myself, which is what everyone else does whenever they do good, my desire for you to be healed came from my love for you. nothing more. no ulterior motive." Later, when Jesus talks about the pharisees and teachers of the law, he says "Everything they do is done for men to see." but we are to be something different. "The greatest among you will be your servant. for he who exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted." In order for this verse to mean anything, we have to do something hard: we have to scrap everything that we've been taught is important, and in the place of all of our old ideas of success, we have to be able to say, to be obedient to God is the new success. The fools who subscribe to the american "prosperity gospel" will say, "Be obedient to God, and then you can feel good about all the stuff and honor and power you have." but Jesus seems to suggest the opposite: "Scrap everything. How nice your stuff is doesn't matter, it'll all turn to dust. Your reputation doesn't matter, as you'll be dead soon. Your power doesn't matter, soon it will be entrusted to someone else. All that you have that will last is your love. So love well."

As for the "but austin, we want to know what you're up to", I'll be spending the next two weeks in schools and in prison, making feeble attempts to love well. after that, I'll be in Bangkok for a week, making feeble attempts to love well, and then I'll be anywhere between here and Chennai doing I have no idea what until the end of february, hopefully making feeble attempts to love well. When I get back I'm going to spend a week in the woods with a bunch of college kids, making feeble attempts to love well, and then doing I have no idea what, making feeble attempts to love well and hopefully earning ten thousand dollars somehow. In september I'm moving to Sweden, as a feeble attempt to love well. These are my plans, Lord. I think they're yours too; if they aren't, cause them to fall apart. I'll write more about the sweden thing later. I started to mash out a paragraph about it and then I stopped, as I'd like to do it justice when I'm not mentally shot at the end of a long day. Blogging is a lot harder than just thinking about stuff. Also, it's fun to be vague and let you talk to me in person. I miss you very much, dear hypothetical reader, and I wonder how things are with you. Also, sorry about my mixed use of italics and parentheses in this post, I myself admit that it's annoying and I'll fix it and establish a predefined grammatical standard as soon as mashing out my thoughts to you becomes profitable.

Throwing some random pictures on here for fun. I could perhaps explain them, but I have like four minutes of internet time left at the cafe, so I'll hopefully get around to it at some point.

Vagabond Discipleship, Pt. 3: I am trying to break your heart.

Outreach is a beautiful, lifegiving thing. Not in spite of that fact but contributing to it, there are some moments that bind me. They leave me almost numb with an inner empathetic pain. There are two moments in particular that just got to me, stuck through the night, lingered there, like a sort of tangible object too large and foreign to place or know what to do with. It's easy to read books, memorize statistics, and be able to recite in conversation the cold facts about this beautiful world that seems to have a preference for cruelty and despair. and then the moments happen, where it all becomes real and I find myself shell-shocked, gasping for air, wondering, "Why, God? Why does this have to be this way, and why am I so lucky to have avoided it?"

and then I remember the words that I've muttered to God with a sort of proud nobility: "Lord, teach me everything I need to know, so that I can be a part of the cure." And God shrugged, and said, "Ok. Fair enough. There's no going back, though." and with a naive grin, I pressed on.

The first moment happened one night in the market in Chiang Rai. We finished our shopping; I bought a few trinkets for people back home, but for the most part I just observe at these places - there's a lot you can learn about people in the concrete wilderness where money is king . There's a sort of spiritual queasiness about it all, though, because of what I know about what happens down the alleys in the backs of shops. The lust and suffering that floats into the air is practically sentinent. And then the moment, which was this: I look into a massage parlor and for a small moment my eyes meet with a girl, seemingly about my age. she's dressed in clothes that aren't too revealing, but imply she's there for business. and in that moment I see through her eyes into her soul. And it isn't evil, and it almost seems to not be suffering or joyful or any other sort of human emotion. Just deadness. The human spirit can only take so much slavery, so much pain, before it just gives up, takes it, becomes numb. Like the second it takes to swallow a pill, the moment passed, but like medicine it seemed to shake me in new ways as the night went on.

The next moment happened a few days ago. We went for a walk through one of the villages here in Issan, handing out literature, praying for the sick, playing with children. Those who can speak the dialect would talk to people, but I couldn't aside from greetings. We stopped at a house that drew my attention because of a large sideyard filled with green vegetables. In the courtyard there was a mat, and a young mother was keeping her three daughters occupied while her mom did laundry and her grandmother tilled the garden. It all seemed fairly uneventful, I held the littlest one, who was about a year old, while our sisters talked to the young mother. At one point the mother said something as I passed the baby off to stephanie. As stephanie took the baby, the little one started wailing, and I didn't know if it was the handoff or what the mother said. It was only when we had left and one of our sisters told me what she had said that I was blindsighted: They had been talking about how in the past year her husband had died in an auto accident, and when a couple of pharong came so unexpectedly and seemed so taken by her, she wondered aloud at the idea that I should take her youngest child, in hopes that I could give it a better life than she could. There's really nothing in life that could prepare you for that moment, I don't think, because it's just so humbling, so painful, so real. These aren't statistics in a book, they're people. Lovely, precious people. People that God created.

And this is why we fight, why we give up our own ideas of how to spend our lives and we give up our comfortable western homes and all the money we could be using to have fun, and tell God that we'll give everything; because what we're fighting for is precious.

And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy 
and to walk humbly with your God.

Hey, look at me.

It's the end of a very long day, and tomorrow promises to be another long one as well. We're waking up early and heading out to the rice fields to finish off what's left of the autumn rice harvest at p'Eve's family farm. It's awful timing to be blogging, but I wanted to throw out this idea while it's still fresh in my brain:

I know I've made a few biting and sarcastic remarks about the nature of blogging. and I stand by them, not that I shouldn't be blogging, but what I'm trying to say is that I choose very carefully what I blog about and what I post on the internet. Not because the internet is a bad thing, but with it comes an inherent risk. It's not that this risk is specific to the internet, but I think the basic nature of the internet makes us more vulnerable to them, as we're prone to them anyway. Because the internet is basically like a stage, to stand on and to proclaim things in the hopes that people will hear. The facts of this are made bare especially by social networking and blogs and other social media that exist so people can express themselves. Sometimes someone has something really meaningful to say, but we as a culture and as humanity seem to have fallen into the trap of thinking that it's so important to be heard that it doesn't matter so much what we say. So we loudly and boldly proclaim to any passing IP address that might take gander, "Hey! Look at me!".

Lately it feels like my life is a story, with all the elements needed to be a great one. I'm being purposely vague here, but even just the events of this past weekend were so wonderful and so deep and so personally meaningful to me that I want to sit on a couch for a while and get it all down. I need to write everything at some point, even for my own sake. But I'm not going to do it here. Why not? because we're missing the whole point. The story of this past weekend is a dangerous one to tell in such a venue, and even though I'm cringing to type it, I'm going to so hopefully it'll make sense: The stories make me look awesome. All these things about discipleship that I'm reading about in my bible, I'm doing them. Feeding the unloved, praying over nations, hearing from God, being obedient to him, "loving someone and that being enough to show the gospel". That stuff is happening. but I cringe at the thought of telling it here because our world is filled with the kind of people who say things just in the hopes of having everyone look at them and marvel to themselves about how great that person is. and I'm done with that. That is how I used to be, and I grew tired of it.

There are so many elements of this journey that are so very much out of my control. My finances, my living arrangements, the temperature of the shower, what I'll do tomorrow. And soon the little experiment of "discipleship" that is DTS will be over and I'll feel an almost overpowering social pressure to go home and be normal again, occasionally dropping a line to my nephew that hints at the adventures I had when I was younger but otherwise living like people are supposed to. but here's the thing: I won't.

I won't, because something has changed. Around YWAM there's a phrase that gets thrown around, "Broken for the ordinary." It refers to the fact that when you find yourself being obedient to God, you no longer want to stop, to sell out, to go back to the ordinary christian life of going to church on sunday, earning a salary the other six days of the week, and finding your contentment in your ever-growing pile of stuff. To be an actual disciple of Jesus means to say "screw it, I'm all in." and I mean, "all in", not as a gambling metaphor, but as a gambling term. As a disciple, I'm betting it all on God, and I'm no longer going to protect myself with quotation marks and backup plans. There's an important dichotomy that arises: You're either being obedient, on you're not. And this gets back to my thesis: If I find myself doing good christian things as acts of obedience to God, great. But I could be doing these same things, and if my heart in doing them is "I want other people to hear about it and think highly of me", this is all a lie. If this is our heart, we Christians are just like everyone else, except that our collective taste in music isn't as good. I could be doing all these wonderful things and if I'm doing them as something to tell stories about, I lose. I share some of the stories, but I only really do so because I love to. I'm a story person. But if that's my heart in it, then then things themselves were fake and I've had no adventure; I was merely a tourist doing token good deeds in order to validate himself to people. But that isn't what we're here for.

It's all just words, anyway. You'll read them, and then you'll forget. I'm writing this as a reminder to myself: Your life is for loving God and for loving people, not for impressing someone. It's far more beautiful this way.


At some point when I see your face you'll need to ask me about the story from this weekend. Just tell me that you want to know the symbolism of the golden cross. It's a fine tale, about obedience and kindness and hearing God speak and how normally cross necklaces are stupid and self-promoting, but not always. and I'm not telling it here. That would completely miss the point.

Vagabond Discipleship, Pt. 2 (Too much light to deny.)

Our excursion into the mountains began early Tuesday morning. we loaded up, all ten of us and enough clean clothes and iPod juice to last us a few days, piled into a regular-sized truck. There were five of us in the bed of the truck, sprawled out over the luggage, and as the truck opened up on the highways the siamese air beat at our faces. And there's something about that feeling of the wind flowing past you as the plains turn into hills and the hills turn into mountains that makes one feel poor and free and alive. the mountains soon became towering, and we bought lunch in one of the larger towns in the valley because there were no restaurants where we were going and we wouldn't want to burden our hosts with an unexpected meal. Soon the hills got even higher and even more beautiful, with the view from each ridge growing more fantastic than the one that preceded it as we seemed to take flight in our overloaded truck. Soon the truck slowed, though, as the climb began to push it to its' limits. Then it stopped, next to the second of a long string of thatch-roof cinder-block huts. On the doorframe of this building was written in both English and Thai the phrase "Long live the God." It was the church of a small christian village of the Akha tribe named "sip-song-lang", which is Thai for "twelve houses" (the size of the village when it was named) although the Thai language is not the native tongue of the villagers, who speak the language of the Akha tribe.

After getting settled and introduced to Pastor Asa over a short round of green tea, we once again piled into the van and headed down to the creek. We basked in the pure sunlight and unspoiled nature that had eluded us for so many months in soggy Bangkok as the pastor took us to a low spot of the river and we waded our way up as he showed us how a native would go about catching fish, using a weighted net and thrown into calm spots of the river. We waded in, following him. I thought about it for a second, but quickly gave up the notion of keeping my keens dry and stomped my way in, feeling the cool water hit my feet as the shoes capsized. What are adventure shoes for, anyways? I felt a nudging to take my camera along with me as I waded up the rapids and waist-deep clearings, as though God either had the perfect shot in store for me or he intended to clear the way for a new camera, perhaps one with some decent ISO settings. I made it dry from the waist up, though, and my feeble camera did what it could to capture the magnificent embankments of wildflowers that painted the hillsides as they sloped down into the river. Eventually we made it back to where we had left the truck and headed back to the village, all of us soaked and filled with joy. When we got back we had some time to explore a bit, and as one of my DTS friends gave me a haircut on the back porch overlooking the valley below, the scent of fresh-roasted peanuts and the dinner being prepared for us began to fill the air. On the menu for the evening was rice, my favorite, to be adorned from the communal dishes of pork, greens, garlic greens, and dog. Oh, you wonder about the dog, I know, and I assure you that when cooked by as skilled a cook as our brother Asa it's more palatable than you could desire, a clear favorite over the pork dish.

Soon it was time for us to put on our program and many of the townspeople filled the chapel room. There's a frustration in all of my actual "doings" on outreach, one I will surely talk longer about at some point, that I wish I could be doing more, I wish I could be changing things, and I am powerless. I am humbled by my own words; something I said to my friend Monique a few months ago when describing my first missions experiences, that what it seems God is doing isn't so much using us to change them but that he's using them to change us. That's altogether humbling, for we've been raised to believe that we are the center of the galaxy, the west come to fix the world for everyone else, and we're the ones who seem to be getting fixed of all of our brokenness, and that while we are powerless, God is up to something bigger than we can imagine, and the only way we can be a part of it is if we get taught patience and humility, over and over and over again, to the point that we're small enough to make a difference. Still, there are things we can do, but it begins with that: small. God can't work in us through sweeping incremental changes right now, if ever. Instead he works through us in the smallest acts of love, like little flashes of warm light in a dark world. Too much light to deny.

The boys were whisked away to another modest cinder block building, of one of the congregation's members, and offered mattresses. There's this part of you that breaks when you ponder something like that, because it's never told to you but you know in the room over someone's sleeping without a mattress so your spoiled back can sleep comfortably through the night. It fills me with a love for people in general that snaps all hatred, that someone could even be capable of that, of thinking that my back is more important to them than their own. I don't even know what to say or do to show gratitude except to acknowledge to God that there are things in humanity worth hoping in, and to perhaps to mutter the only Akha phrase I know, "Udu-To-Ma!" (Hello!)

We woke up at 5:30 and once again piled into the truck. I was among the lucky ones to be able to huddle together in the bed of the truck, peering into creation as we climbed higher and higher into the sky as the yellow wildflowers around us began to open to receive the light that slowly began to give a dim to the darkness along the eastern hills. And then the car stopped and as the earth seemed to fill ever full and more brimming with life in order to receive the approaching sun, we climbed up the steep pathways up the mountain and onto a small landing of pasture, and looked down upon creation. Hundreds of mountains greeted us through the clouds below as the sun in all its' splendor made its triumphant rise above the eastern clouds. The millions of yellow wildflowers coating the mountain seemed to imitate the sun as a sort of applause to the coming day and all of Thailand and all of Burma came to life before our eyes. And then, like all of life's triumphant moments, this one passed as well. So it goes. As we made our decent I noted that in life as is in nature, the moments of triumph seem to happen on the mountaintops but the rice is grown in the valleys.

After breakfast everyone went about packing their things, and Pastor Asa brought out a seemingly neverending supply of hot green tea for us to consume. I found myself deep in conversation with the Pastor for the hours that followed. It was a bit of a convoluted process: I would ask a question in English, Isabel would translate it to Thai to pastor Sanguan, and pastor Sanguan would translate to pastor Asa from Thai to Akha. We talked about life in the village, and what life might look like for a child growing up in such a place. I felt equipped for such a conversation, and soon found myself asking questions I could tell he wasn't used to hearing. "Where do the villagers get their water? Is there a method they use to clean it?" "Do the schools here properly equip the children to have a chance to succeed in a university?" "What does an average villager's diet look like?" I'm going to write up my thoughts about this seperately, but what was interesting for the purpose of this narrative was the bond that it seemed to build between me and the pastor. I did care, and through my questions he knew it. And that was life-affirming. When my last question (because we needed to be going) was "how can I be praying for your family) he knew it wasn't me just softballing him some christian pleasantries. I hopped in the bed of the truck and we wished each other well and I knew I would see him again in one way or the other.

And away we went again, across the mountains and the valleys and the paddies and the plains.

We made it to the next Akha village, Ah-hai and we were welcomed by pastor Pa-pon and his wife Oi. On my one and one with Samm, we were walking up to the higher-elevation part of the village and an elderly man got our attention and motioned to us to follow him. we walked through the whole of the town, braving guard dogs and the inevitable gawks and smiles of the villagers, and he took us to the very top of the village, to the temple of a buddhist sect that overlooks the expanse. It was an odd place to have such a discussion, but with a lovely sense of randomness to it all, with the man following us the entire way to see to it that we never got lost and were protected from the dogs, who didn't take to strangers. Most of the the Akha are christian, so I took pictures of all of the thai-language signs in hopes of getting them translated to learn what it is we even saw. We did our same program as the night before. We played and danced with the children.

Last night, along a mountain ridgeline along the Thai-Burmese border, I awoke from my sleep, shivering. The bungalow protected us from the wind, but December had made its way even to Thailand. I looked for the time, and it was around 3:30 in the morning, Indochina time. Unable to sleep, I pulled the blanket off and stepped out off of the bungalow's raised bamboo floor and onto the dirt and into the night. I reached over and fumbled for my glasses, pushed them onto the ridge where my nose meets my forehead and in an instant everything came into focus. The crescent moon that had illuminated half the sky just hours ago was gone, and left behind the entire swath of the milky way galaxy, making it bare, scattering the entire universe with light, too much light to deny. We were hundreds of miles from the nearest city, with its' ever-illuminated streetlamps glowing to rob the universe of its' subtlety, and all of the fires in all of the Akha huts that dotted the mountains were reduced to embers, leaving the night sky bare, showing me everything there is to see as I shivered and slid my hands inside of the arms of my flannel shirt. And I tarried there a shorter time than I cared to, but in that moment I found myself captivated by wonder. A sort of wonder that looks at life, from the largest and most distant stars to the trillions of molecules that link together to form my skin and keep my insides from spilling out onto the cold ground. And it's those sort of moments that make life seem so very much important, because those are the moments in which one feels infinitely small and yet incredibly alive, more so than ever.

there's a part of me that accepts that I don't really have a "home" right now in my life, at least not a physical one. Oh, I have a family, both a normal one that can be diagrammed into a very large tree-looking structure with a series of symbols to represent each person, and a spiritual one scattered across my planet in a way that can only be visualized using these same night stars as a metaphor. I have a room, on a street in a suburb in the middle of America. But it's not my home, really, it's a room that's filled with stuff. Too much of it, and apparently nothing that I can't go without for seasons at a time. At some point when I'm back in that corner of the world I'll probably need to go through it and give much of it away or let other people borrow or else put in boxes. It's all just stuff, really, and even if I can make use of it I'll just be dead in a matter of decades. I was raised, you see, in a culture that implies through its' very shape that having things and titles and money and status is very very important, the stuff of life.

And I too have a title, one perhaps riddled with as much pedantic pretense as the most well-paid of executives who adorn themselves with titles and salaries and such, although my title means something different. I am a vagabond disciple. I have no home, no earthy responsibilities, no salary, none of the ties that seem to entangle everyone else bind me in a way that I couldn't shake off with a little shrug of humility. It's my job not to lead, but to follow another as he leads me deep into the burrows and backstreets and down the dusty paths and across the mountains and valleys and plains and cobblestone streets and across the oceans and rivers, all of which together form a small planet. Some of the inhabitants of this small planet have decided to name it Earth, and I am of the peoples who call it that. And we're all fairly attached to this planet, mostly out of necessity but there's also an element of beauty to it that we're all quite fond of. It seems the more I admire its' better qualities the more I am convinced that there is a God, and the more I look at what we've done with it the more I'm convinced that we need one. And that's what this season of my life is: a time to wander aimfully. There was a part of me that has had to fight (and still does) about the persistent feelings that what I'm doing is selfish, or useless, or counter-productive. To learn, almost for learning's sake but not quite. To have to let go entirely of all of the nagging whispering doubts in my own ear and to trust God as he nudges my heart like an equestrian holding the reins. And I've learned many things, but the most important is this: Being obedient to God when he calls you is not selfish, nor is it foolish. This seems rather straightforward, but part of being a human is to always have a million other thoughts in your mind, both well-meaning and malignant. It's so easy for me to fall into the trap of thinking there's something altogether better or more pleasurable that I could be doing, either to better myself or the world. And yet, God has brought me here. to listen, to learn, to ask questions. And it's most humbling of all to think that that is the answer to everything, is to be asking better questions.

And finally, this morning, I awoke to this. And scarcely else matters in the world, I suppose. There's too much light to deny.