Hello, friends.
I haven’t been blogging much lately. I spent those weeks on the road, and ever since I’ve been back in Bangkok I’ve been living at BJD, a lovely campus ministry in my neighborhood in Bangna. It’s community living, which means that the internet shuts off automatically at 10:30. This has unintended consequences for my blogging, because I work best when it’s really late and I’m sleep deprived and I turn off my filter and wing it and just do the writing equivalent of vomiting awesomeness. (I don’t think that’s the first time I’ve used this phrasing.) It’s an awful tendency I have when I’m fully awake, to play literary softball and just hope I end up with something that makes people think highly of me.
but I’m tired now, and so I don’t really care what you think of me. The internet has indeed shut off, so I’m mashing it into a pages document and if it’s any good I’ll throw it on in the morning. I guess I’ll just say how things are going and inevitably it will spiral into my own hokey philosophy-theology. Also, my grammar might get worse and worse as this thing goes on.
ok, fine, you win. a few stories from my wanderings.
I prayer walked in the ancient hindu temples in Siem Reap, Cambodia. It’s a weird thing prayer-walking in such places, I don’t mean that in a bad way though. I don’t feel weird about it in a spiritual sense, because, let’s face it. Temples aren’t really about worship. They’re about one-upsmanship. We need to have bigger temples than the neighbors. even the people who give offerings at such places aren’t offering true worship. they believe in a god, so they go and give it stuff that they think will make it happy. Not because they love it, but to “make merit”. In order words, there’s something in it for them. I’ll give you incense and orange fanta, and you will bless my business and help me conceive a child. it’s a business transaction. As christians, we can look at this as phoned-in idolatry, but wait: often this is what we do with our worship. We give god portions of our time, perhaps enough to feel inconvenienced, and then we look for the tangible benefits. I’ve learned in the past few years to get away from this with the God I believe in. If we really trust God, it means that we trust him to provide us with what we need. In my prayers, I often say, “Hey God, I think this is what should happen”, but I’ve gotten away from all the demand-making like when I was a child. and I don’t mean I found a proper balance, I mean all of it. Who am I to dictate orders to God. It’s me who follows him, although often I need to be reminded of that. I’ve found that the more I rely on him, the more joy I have, even though I have less than I would otherwise. Occasionally I’ve thought about what my life would look like if I did the pragmatic thing and got a job and started climbing ladders. I could own my own car at this point. I might have a promotion or two under my belt, and a budding resume that could attract some better salary options. But the conclusion I’ve come to is that my life is filled with so much more joy without all of that stuff that I would choose this again without much thought. Joy, perhaps, in spite of the tangible benefits. Since the end of DTS, I’ve spent nights in some of the seediest places in the world. I’ve eaten on about two or three dollars a day for the most part and lost about somewhere between 5 and 10 pounds pounds in a few weeks. I’ve been alone for the vast majority of my time, sometimes hundreds of miles from the nearest person who would recognize my face. I’ve gone weeks on end without legitimate fellowship with anyone other than God. I’ve felt alone, at times as though more than ever before. By all worldly standards, I’ve given much and gained nothing. And yet, I have this joy. This stubborn light that refuses to go out. And in a way, it affirms everything. All the hardships chip away at all my imperfections, and I manage to learn from everything.
Umm, what else happened? These many weeks feel like a blur. Time passes faster when you’re alone. Oh, I saw my lovely friends in Phnom Penh. Thearith and Angela are kind people, and introduced me to even more kind people. I’m not allowed to return to Phnom Penh as a single man without being prepared to marry one of Thearith’s cousins. I ate a handful of duck eggs, the kind where the egg is fertilized and the fetus is allowed to grow a bit before they boil them. Not bad, better than a regular boiled egg.
...Saigon. a city that aches, and my heart aches for it. I stayed in a small dormitory on the walking street, the kind of place where a child can be starving and sleeping in the ledge in front of the closed entryway to a building, and across the street tourists can be drinking 4 dollar mixed drinks and soliciting prostitutes. And yet there is hope. I can’t tell you why here, I started to write the next story, realized I couldn’t. I’m not being elusive, just protecting some friends of mine. I bought the child a meal, by the way. I’m not trying to bring light to my good deeds, I say that to make a point. If you see someone starving, give them something to eat. That’s what separates us from the lower primates, and, well, Mitt Romney.
I then went to Nha Trang, which is where young men who have dignity and self-respect go alone to - no wait, I lied. I am the only young man with dignity and self respect who travels alone to ever go to Nha Trang. It’s a place one can go to turn down offers for prostitution to build one’s own self-esteem regarding such matters. Travel note: if you find yourself in southeast asia alone and you’re a young man, wear long dress pants and wear collared button-up shirts, and show an even remote respect for the culture. eat at the restaurants where only locals eat and order what they’re ordering. The locals will like you, and try to set you up with their daughters.
I took the bus to Hue. Oh, did I mention that I had to completely reorganize my entire itinerary because there’s no way to get from Saigon to Hanoi directly during Tet without booking weeks or months in advance? the mental notes are stacking. anyways, picture this for me. You’re laying down. There are two iron bars on either side of your knees. if your sleeper-bus chair is laid flat there’s about two feet of clearance between the ground and the peice of plywood above you, which has more people on it. There are two people lying directly on your right side. There are two people lying directly on your left side. As though you’re sharing a king sized bed with four other people. There is no air circulation whatsoever, and after about 15 minutes you and the other four people are all sweaty and emit all sorts of awful smells and heat. Now imagine the bus ride is 12 hours long. Yes, I’ve done that. Special thanks to the lovely australian couple on the right side of me for being sociable and good sports. The weird thing was that it didn’t phase me at all, I never thought to complain. It was another in an endless succession of ridiculous things to go through. Shake it off, move on, get stronger.
Hue is a nice place, as far places go. there are ancient walls made of the most wonderful crumbling bricks that have slums and gardens on top of them now. The locals will let you walk through and even smile at you as long as you aren’t a jerk about the way you use your camera and you wai at everyone who’s an elder. Also, wear collared shirts and dress like an adult with respect and dignity. you’d be surprised at how many western people miss this memo, and stand there shell-shocked, entering into non-touristy neighborhoods wearing flip-flops, swimming trunks, and a beerlao t-shirt. On behalf of all self-respecting people with white skin who get treated with suspicion because of your self-disrespecting behavior, “This isn’t Bonnaroo. Please leave Asia.”
halfway through the 12 hour bus ride from Hue to Savannakhet, the poor lao man behind me began projectile vomiting all over my seat and got a good splatter all over my back. Remember how I said nothing shocks me anymore? I’m dead serious, nothing shocks me anymore. All I could think about was how bad I felt for him, as he lost some serious face. The kind woman across from me donated several of her wet wipes to clean me up. Lao people are so kind.
I spent 6 nights on the Mekong: 2 in Savannakhet, 1 in Thaklek, 1 in Pak Kading, and 2 in Vientiane (pronounced Wiang Chan). Met many lovely people. Pak Kading was my favorite, as I was perhaps the only barang in the town the night I was there. In a sandbar along the Nam Kading I got to play football with some kids, and the next morning I had breakfast with the town primary school’s english teacher. Lao people are among the kindest, most welcoming, and most considerate people I have ever met. That is perhaps the best summation of my time in Laos, so I will leave it at that. There are other stories you can ask me for, though.
..And now I’m back in my lovely neighborhood, Ramsong. Being here makes me miss my friends, but I am glad to be here.
I’m sitting in on a week of the Applied Principles of Communication school this week. It’s very good. We’ve been talking about basically the way we as humans process information and come to assumptions about the world and derive conclusions and meaning from that, and in that context asking what it means to learn and to improve, and to break out of our patterns of false thinking and to break away from false masters.
I’m also working on my resume, and I’m in the process of applying for both the SBS in the fall and internships for my time in america. I need something to do, might as well do something constructive. If anyone has any ideas shoot them my way.
OH MAN YOU GUYS. so I was writing all of this late last night, as I said, and whenever I write like that I reach this point where the brilliance just takes a dive and I just go off in a completely tangent direction. It’s a way of knowing that it’s time for bed. The stuff I wrote from this point on is pretty good, but it needs a good editor and I need to add to it and clearly define a thesis and turn it into something else. So I’ll fix it up and post it later.
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Saturday, January 28, 2012
growth.
surely these thoughts will be rendered outdated as the years go by, just as thoughts I've had before that seemed so eloquent and enlightened at the time no seem cheap and shallow and thoughtless. No matter:
I have some time on my hands. It's a sensation I'm not used to anymore: I haven't had more than a few days to do fully as I please since about August of 2007, and the freedom of it all is a bit fun and also a bit uncomfortable, but I'm making the best of it all.
The first thing I did was to take a trip. I spent 17 days wandering across Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos. For my own false-humility's sake, you'll have to ask for these stories on your own. I have tons of stories from my time in asia, but I've chosen to omit a lot of them here because I want you to ask me about them instead of stalking me from over the cyber-fence. That isn't to say I'm not glad you're here, just that I often save many of my favorite parts for those who ask for it. I might get around to it, but if you really want to know, ask me for it. Life together is more special than reading things on the internet. But I digress..
Now I'm back to lovely old Bangkok, along with a few remaining friendly faces. and the next thing I'm doing is going through everything. The chaos of the last many months has left my organization in a shambles. You know how when you're on vacation you take seven of the same picture and you think, "oh, I'll go through and whittle them down later." this is later. and it's a mess. and one feeling I especially can't help but feel as I go through all the pictures and documents and music on my computer (only the first stop on the organization express) is just how much has changed in the last four years. for one thing, I'm a much better photographer than I was 4 years ago. Although I lament the current sad state of my camera, it's taught me well. and by that I mean, my topic selection and the way I would frame a shot used to be really bad. minimalism, dear children. And looking at old papers that I wrote (which deserved lower grades than I received, which were lower than what I thought I deserved at the time. Thanks, Dr. Quinn.) and old albums that I thought were great and would share with friends that now seem unlistenable, and poetry that I wrote that I thought was pretty good at the time, that wasn't. Beyond all of this are the emotional things that come up. Mistakes I made, things I would have done different. People who didn't get to see the best sides of me.
And the first instinctual reaction to all of this is to cringe, in a sort of embarrassment for the past self. but I've quickly gotten over it. It's not that you can shrug it off, it's the comfort you can take from the fact that that's who you used to be. and if that's who you used to be, and you are where you are now, and all of the steps both false and true along the way brought you to become someone better than you were all the way back then, imagine what tomorrow might bring, and what further refinement might come. When even the sorrows become ingredients for joy, our joy is infinite. Therefore, I will not stop wondering, and I will not stop learning. Mistakes are sure to be had, and we will learn from them. And in that all despair flails under the weight of our great hope.
I have some time on my hands. It's a sensation I'm not used to anymore: I haven't had more than a few days to do fully as I please since about August of 2007, and the freedom of it all is a bit fun and also a bit uncomfortable, but I'm making the best of it all.
The first thing I did was to take a trip. I spent 17 days wandering across Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos. For my own false-humility's sake, you'll have to ask for these stories on your own. I have tons of stories from my time in asia, but I've chosen to omit a lot of them here because I want you to ask me about them instead of stalking me from over the cyber-fence. That isn't to say I'm not glad you're here, just that I often save many of my favorite parts for those who ask for it. I might get around to it, but if you really want to know, ask me for it. Life together is more special than reading things on the internet. But I digress..
Now I'm back to lovely old Bangkok, along with a few remaining friendly faces. and the next thing I'm doing is going through everything. The chaos of the last many months has left my organization in a shambles. You know how when you're on vacation you take seven of the same picture and you think, "oh, I'll go through and whittle them down later." this is later. and it's a mess. and one feeling I especially can't help but feel as I go through all the pictures and documents and music on my computer (only the first stop on the organization express) is just how much has changed in the last four years. for one thing, I'm a much better photographer than I was 4 years ago. Although I lament the current sad state of my camera, it's taught me well. and by that I mean, my topic selection and the way I would frame a shot used to be really bad. minimalism, dear children. And looking at old papers that I wrote (which deserved lower grades than I received, which were lower than what I thought I deserved at the time. Thanks, Dr. Quinn.) and old albums that I thought were great and would share with friends that now seem unlistenable, and poetry that I wrote that I thought was pretty good at the time, that wasn't. Beyond all of this are the emotional things that come up. Mistakes I made, things I would have done different. People who didn't get to see the best sides of me.
And the first instinctual reaction to all of this is to cringe, in a sort of embarrassment for the past self. but I've quickly gotten over it. It's not that you can shrug it off, it's the comfort you can take from the fact that that's who you used to be. and if that's who you used to be, and you are where you are now, and all of the steps both false and true along the way brought you to become someone better than you were all the way back then, imagine what tomorrow might bring, and what further refinement might come. When even the sorrows become ingredients for joy, our joy is infinite. Therefore, I will not stop wondering, and I will not stop learning. Mistakes are sure to be had, and we will learn from them. And in that all despair flails under the weight of our great hope.
Monday, January 9, 2012
a place I used to call home.
It's all very odd, this living business. It's especially strange if you do it right. It seems very basic that a natural part of life is to allow people in, to see at least parts of you and come to whatever conclusions about you that they may. That is really beautiful, but it's also scary. In allowing yourself to feel anything at all, you run this risk of not measuring up in the eyes of others. The fear that they might not see in you all that you hope is there can be a crippling one. But with diligence and patience, all the little things about you and them that aren't perfect begin to fade, and all of the differences that seemed so staggering and impossible to overcome seem small and petty.
Five months ago I landed on a very large, strange, and foreign continent, feeling very alone in the world. And then something happened. Over the few days that followed, I met 23 people. These 23 people were born in 8 different countries. Together, collectively, we speak somewhere between 9 and 11 languages. At first, it didn't seem how it would all work. These were people I just met. Acquaintances. On the surface they all seemed very neat and different, in some ways like a new toy still in its' packaging, but also with the sheer mystery. It was easy to make first impressions, I found, but as time passed I found also that many of my first impressions were wrong. It's a strange process that happens when you live with someone, when you spend every waking moment with them and share in all of life for a long time. It's something deeper than the sort of "getting to know them" that only takes a conversation or two, where you can say you know someone, add them as a friend on facebook, and have a little common ground for when you see them in passing. Living with someone exposes them, shows them to be who they truly are. You can dress yourself up for a time, but eventually all the cracks start to show themselves: the flaws, the dirt, the insecurities, the pain. The good things too, are all the more evident. it's in this intimacy of living together that great attributes like joy and generosity and kindness can reveal themselves in a sincere way, because it's here that you get to see them when nobody's looking. If you live with someone long enough, you truly know them. Deeper than the surface, there lies everything about them which is now revealed to you: hopes, dreams, pain, flaws, and the alchemy of joy and sorrow that all of us share. Down at the heart of it we're all flawed, beautiful creatures. When you live with someone you get to understand a little more about what that means, and it's wonderful.
but there's something even more wonderful than this. These countless interactions, big and small, that make us get to know someone and allow us to love them does something more than inform us about the truth of something outside of ourselves. It changes who we are, too. It's something my dad once said to my grandfather as the time was growing short: "Everything I learned I learned from you. The things about you that were great, I did my best to take as my own. The things about you that are flawed, I did what I could do differently." And perhaps that's the true joy of sharing life with other people, is that you find the good in them rubbing off on you, and if you're wise about it even the bad in them can be a teaching to you.
I've struggled with the term "grown-up." not on some emotional level, as though I'm either in a rush to grow up or want to stay a child forever, but I don't get it on a definitional level. I don't think it means anything. I don't think there will ever be some point in life where you cross over from being a child to being an adult, despite what professional graduation and wedding planners might tell you. It's a process of change, and it's up to us to make the choice to think about what it means to live well and change towards that. To take what's good about life and expand on it, and to realize what isn't constructive towards goodness and expel those things from our life. This is a truth I wouldn't have understood if I hadn't lived with others.
The other part of living with people that requires all the courage we can muster is this: you live with someone long enough and you just get used to them and you find comfort in them. Life's more fun together, and it's nice to just exist together for a while with people who know you. You get to the point a few months in where a lot of the hard work is done and the rewards of just being able to love each other and live together begin to pay off. It's nice, and nothing to complain about. But sometimes, life together has to end. When you live with someone, they get this piece of you that nobody else can take and that time can't erase, and it makes saying goodbye and looking into the uncertainty of the future painful.
It's especially hard in this case, because it's 23 goodbyes all at once, and my family scatters off to 5 different continents, leaving me in peace to wander southeast asia alone. In all of my previous goodbyes I had the well-founded hope that there would inevitably be times in this life where our paths would cross again. And I can still have those hopes, of course, but this time I know in my heart that many of these goodbyes are the real thing, and that no matter how much I love this person from the bottom of my heart, most likely I'll never see them again in this life. and that's painful, but I find joy in it because although the future is so uncertain, the future can't change the past. In the times we shared together I was left changed, and the love and life that we've shared will carry on with me in all the time to come.
This post is dedicated to Abraham, Aom, Art, Austin M, Ball, Benz, Brittany, Caleb, David, Esther, Eve, Gift, Isabel, Josch, Rebecca, Ribka, Samm, Stephanie, Taay, Tadam, Taylor, Thearith, and X.
Five months ago I landed on a very large, strange, and foreign continent, feeling very alone in the world. And then something happened. Over the few days that followed, I met 23 people. These 23 people were born in 8 different countries. Together, collectively, we speak somewhere between 9 and 11 languages. At first, it didn't seem how it would all work. These were people I just met. Acquaintances. On the surface they all seemed very neat and different, in some ways like a new toy still in its' packaging, but also with the sheer mystery. It was easy to make first impressions, I found, but as time passed I found also that many of my first impressions were wrong. It's a strange process that happens when you live with someone, when you spend every waking moment with them and share in all of life for a long time. It's something deeper than the sort of "getting to know them" that only takes a conversation or two, where you can say you know someone, add them as a friend on facebook, and have a little common ground for when you see them in passing. Living with someone exposes them, shows them to be who they truly are. You can dress yourself up for a time, but eventually all the cracks start to show themselves: the flaws, the dirt, the insecurities, the pain. The good things too, are all the more evident. it's in this intimacy of living together that great attributes like joy and generosity and kindness can reveal themselves in a sincere way, because it's here that you get to see them when nobody's looking. If you live with someone long enough, you truly know them. Deeper than the surface, there lies everything about them which is now revealed to you: hopes, dreams, pain, flaws, and the alchemy of joy and sorrow that all of us share. Down at the heart of it we're all flawed, beautiful creatures. When you live with someone you get to understand a little more about what that means, and it's wonderful.
but there's something even more wonderful than this. These countless interactions, big and small, that make us get to know someone and allow us to love them does something more than inform us about the truth of something outside of ourselves. It changes who we are, too. It's something my dad once said to my grandfather as the time was growing short: "Everything I learned I learned from you. The things about you that were great, I did my best to take as my own. The things about you that are flawed, I did what I could do differently." And perhaps that's the true joy of sharing life with other people, is that you find the good in them rubbing off on you, and if you're wise about it even the bad in them can be a teaching to you.
I've struggled with the term "grown-up." not on some emotional level, as though I'm either in a rush to grow up or want to stay a child forever, but I don't get it on a definitional level. I don't think it means anything. I don't think there will ever be some point in life where you cross over from being a child to being an adult, despite what professional graduation and wedding planners might tell you. It's a process of change, and it's up to us to make the choice to think about what it means to live well and change towards that. To take what's good about life and expand on it, and to realize what isn't constructive towards goodness and expel those things from our life. This is a truth I wouldn't have understood if I hadn't lived with others.
The other part of living with people that requires all the courage we can muster is this: you live with someone long enough and you just get used to them and you find comfort in them. Life's more fun together, and it's nice to just exist together for a while with people who know you. You get to the point a few months in where a lot of the hard work is done and the rewards of just being able to love each other and live together begin to pay off. It's nice, and nothing to complain about. But sometimes, life together has to end. When you live with someone, they get this piece of you that nobody else can take and that time can't erase, and it makes saying goodbye and looking into the uncertainty of the future painful.
It's especially hard in this case, because it's 23 goodbyes all at once, and my family scatters off to 5 different continents, leaving me in peace to wander southeast asia alone. In all of my previous goodbyes I had the well-founded hope that there would inevitably be times in this life where our paths would cross again. And I can still have those hopes, of course, but this time I know in my heart that many of these goodbyes are the real thing, and that no matter how much I love this person from the bottom of my heart, most likely I'll never see them again in this life. and that's painful, but I find joy in it because although the future is so uncertain, the future can't change the past. In the times we shared together I was left changed, and the love and life that we've shared will carry on with me in all the time to come.
This post is dedicated to Abraham, Aom, Art, Austin M, Ball, Benz, Brittany, Caleb, David, Esther, Eve, Gift, Isabel, Josch, Rebecca, Ribka, Samm, Stephanie, Taay, Tadam, Taylor, Thearith, and X.
Monday, January 2, 2012
Life as an experiment.
(Vagabond Discipleship, Part 5)
Times come and times go. Life keeps changing. Life always changes. And even though it's hard, it's a sign of something good. I think of what my life would look like if it didn't change, if I resigned myself as an 18 year old to cowardice, hid myself in my parents' basement, and played video games. It would have been a very easy life, assuming mom and dad would have ever gone along with it. None of the pain that comes along with growth would have ever affected me. The photographs that make me long for people and places in my memory would either not have been taken or simply not meant anything.
Outreach is over. Six weeks of endlessly wandering all over this lovely country have taken their toll,
and it's a relief to be back in Bangkok. The final two weeks, which I didn't get much of a chance to blog about, were life-filled ones. I don't mean that as a neat feel-goody sentiment, I mean it in the real sense. Exhaustion, heartache, and staggering beauty, all in the context of burmese migrant slums, public hospitals, minimum security prisons, buddhist and christian schools, improperly equipped internet cafes, the homes of friendly strangers, and the streets and highways of this beautiful land.
I'm sitting on the lovely, rock hard matress on the second bottom bunk of the men's quarters. I used to complain about this matress, how hard it is and how when I was getting used to it I would toss in bed endlessly before I could sleep. I don't complain about it anymore. I love it. It's not that it's any more comfortable than before, it's just that I've grown. I see something more in this mattress now: I see the memories in it. I think of the countless times over the past many months when I would come in, expecting to take my rightful claim to the 15 square feet of space on this continent that I have any jurisdiction over, only for it to be filled with four kids from three continents watching youtube videos.
These were two seasons. Lecture phase, and outreach. Before that was a season of mental wandering in the midwest, and before that were the many seasons of my time at Truman State. I have mental images of the next three seasons, of my time serving in thailand, of the six months in America, and then moving to Sweden and studying the bible for nine months. And the thing about all of these seasons is that while I could make meaningless bullet points about the differences and similarities of each, as I continue to move through them I've begun to notice something. Growth. Time seems to stack itself onto the past like bricks in a building or rings in a tree. Sometimes we don't notice the details, but the growth is there; if you pay close enough attention, you'll see it.
Since the seasons of life seem to break off, to have that line of clear difference that distinguishes between the two times, it's easy to think of them as almost unrelated, but the past informs the present like the foundations of a building keep the roof stable. Even the seasons that didn't go the way you planned are important as long as you take the lessons and learn from them. This is what our lives on this earth are: messy experiments. In living, we learn how to live. If we're good about it, we learn what it means to live well, to find meaning in it. To find meaning in it all, everything that we experience - some great and hidden truth that's eluded us that finds us in the midst of the chaos. Life can be messy and gross and painful and often in the short term it doesn't go the way you might hope, and sometimes you learn that the things you had put hope in weren't ever the things that could give you peace and fulfillment. Recognition, security, material possession, affirmation among peers - To center one's identity around these things has always meant to buy into a lie. One day, our bodies will perish and succumb to decay and none of these things will really matter, which is to mean that they never mattered, not even when it felt like they did. My conclusion about that while I'm still young is that I get one life, and I'm not going to waste it pursuing those false gods.
So what should we pursue with our lives? The campy sunday-school-answer way of putting it is to follow God. This seems too simple, though, so perhaps I'll phrase it this way: If to follow those meaningless things that we've been taught are important is like bowing before a false god, then what we need to do is find the true God and spend our lives pursuing whoever or whatever that true God might be. In this sense I'm not referring to God so much as a sentient being (although I believe he is), I'm referring to "God" as a metaphorical representation of "the meaning of life." Every person seems to have their own ideas of what that means, and while we can gleam insight from their understanding (or misunderstandings), ultimately the only way we can develop our own understanding is to do it ourselves: to experiment. Sometimes this is painful. Sometimes it means to follow gods, realize that they're fake, and to have to come to a moment of painful humility and say, perhaps to ourselves, "The thing I thought was so important was a lie. I'm going to stop spending so much of my short life pursuing that thing." My days of experimenting aren't all behind me, but here are some of the conclusions I've come to so far:
Every once in a while I have to remind myself that I'm young and that it's all right that I don't have everything figured out yet. That's what life is for.
Times come and times go. Life keeps changing. Life always changes. And even though it's hard, it's a sign of something good. I think of what my life would look like if it didn't change, if I resigned myself as an 18 year old to cowardice, hid myself in my parents' basement, and played video games. It would have been a very easy life, assuming mom and dad would have ever gone along with it. None of the pain that comes along with growth would have ever affected me. The photographs that make me long for people and places in my memory would either not have been taken or simply not meant anything.
Outreach is over. Six weeks of endlessly wandering all over this lovely country have taken their toll,
and it's a relief to be back in Bangkok. The final two weeks, which I didn't get much of a chance to blog about, were life-filled ones. I don't mean that as a neat feel-goody sentiment, I mean it in the real sense. Exhaustion, heartache, and staggering beauty, all in the context of burmese migrant slums, public hospitals, minimum security prisons, buddhist and christian schools, improperly equipped internet cafes, the homes of friendly strangers, and the streets and highways of this beautiful land.
I'm sitting on the lovely, rock hard matress on the second bottom bunk of the men's quarters. I used to complain about this matress, how hard it is and how when I was getting used to it I would toss in bed endlessly before I could sleep. I don't complain about it anymore. I love it. It's not that it's any more comfortable than before, it's just that I've grown. I see something more in this mattress now: I see the memories in it. I think of the countless times over the past many months when I would come in, expecting to take my rightful claim to the 15 square feet of space on this continent that I have any jurisdiction over, only for it to be filled with four kids from three continents watching youtube videos.
These were two seasons. Lecture phase, and outreach. Before that was a season of mental wandering in the midwest, and before that were the many seasons of my time at Truman State. I have mental images of the next three seasons, of my time serving in thailand, of the six months in America, and then moving to Sweden and studying the bible for nine months. And the thing about all of these seasons is that while I could make meaningless bullet points about the differences and similarities of each, as I continue to move through them I've begun to notice something. Growth. Time seems to stack itself onto the past like bricks in a building or rings in a tree. Sometimes we don't notice the details, but the growth is there; if you pay close enough attention, you'll see it.
Since the seasons of life seem to break off, to have that line of clear difference that distinguishes between the two times, it's easy to think of them as almost unrelated, but the past informs the present like the foundations of a building keep the roof stable. Even the seasons that didn't go the way you planned are important as long as you take the lessons and learn from them. This is what our lives on this earth are: messy experiments. In living, we learn how to live. If we're good about it, we learn what it means to live well, to find meaning in it. To find meaning in it all, everything that we experience - some great and hidden truth that's eluded us that finds us in the midst of the chaos. Life can be messy and gross and painful and often in the short term it doesn't go the way you might hope, and sometimes you learn that the things you had put hope in weren't ever the things that could give you peace and fulfillment. Recognition, security, material possession, affirmation among peers - To center one's identity around these things has always meant to buy into a lie. One day, our bodies will perish and succumb to decay and none of these things will really matter, which is to mean that they never mattered, not even when it felt like they did. My conclusion about that while I'm still young is that I get one life, and I'm not going to waste it pursuing those false gods.
So what should we pursue with our lives? The campy sunday-school-answer way of putting it is to follow God. This seems too simple, though, so perhaps I'll phrase it this way: If to follow those meaningless things that we've been taught are important is like bowing before a false god, then what we need to do is find the true God and spend our lives pursuing whoever or whatever that true God might be. In this sense I'm not referring to God so much as a sentient being (although I believe he is), I'm referring to "God" as a metaphorical representation of "the meaning of life." Every person seems to have their own ideas of what that means, and while we can gleam insight from their understanding (or misunderstandings), ultimately the only way we can develop our own understanding is to do it ourselves: to experiment. Sometimes this is painful. Sometimes it means to follow gods, realize that they're fake, and to have to come to a moment of painful humility and say, perhaps to ourselves, "The thing I thought was so important was a lie. I'm going to stop spending so much of my short life pursuing that thing." My days of experimenting aren't all behind me, but here are some of the conclusions I've come to so far:
- Life isn't about accomplishing anything, at least not the way I thought. I used to think that it was really important to do big things in life, for the sake of being a notable person who does big things. That's stupid, because it's coming from a perspective of thinking that reputation matters. When you die, the opinion that some people had of you at one point in time simply doesn't matter. It's not a bad thing to have a reputation, though; it's just that it should be a symptom of a life well lived, and not the other way around.
- We should still do those big things. We should do good things, things that are worth doing, as long as they are grounded in proper motives. What are proper motives? Obedience towards the Lord. Love towards other people. That's it. all other motives are evil.
- Life is something to find joy in. Not just pleasure, although that's a part of it. Even in all of the sad and painful things, there's joy, because even the sad things can remind us that we're alive and life is something worth living.
- Life is better when you share it. We humans simply aren't made to be left alone all the time, or to feel forced to hide ourselves in the name of social etiquette and external expectations.
- Television and the internet and what we eat and other sources of pleasure can be good things, but they're nothing to live for or put hope in. We aren't made to merely consume for our own pleasure's sake. We can try, and at some point we'll be miserable for it.
- Our mistakes can either be our downfall or our teacher. If we learn nothing, all is tragedy. if we allow ourselves to grow from our experiences, even our worst mistakes can be what make our lives better.
Every once in a while I have to remind myself that I'm young and that it's all right that I don't have everything figured out yet. That's what life is for.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
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.
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.
Friday, December 23, 2011
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.
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.
Saturday, December 17, 2011
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.
"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.
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