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.