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Between Points A and B

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Well, we’re still in America– not where we expected to be by this date. Many people have told us encouragingly that there must be something else we’re supposed to do here before we go back to India… otherwise we’d already be there, right? There are definitely meaningful and important things that have happened during our stay, but these days we’re mostly feeling bored and looking for useful ways to fill time.

I don’t think there is anything left that I’m supposed to do. What’s becoming clear to me is that the challenging invitation in front of me while I wait isn’t actually to do anything, but rather to learn how to stop doing. Perhaps the reason I’m still here (besides the incompetence of the people handling our visa applications) is that I’m being given an opportunity to learn how to truly wait for something.

I don’t wait well. I’ve rarely ever waited for anything in my life. Because waiting means embracing emptiness inside of oneself; living in the actual tension of not knowing what will happen next, and perhaps even reaching a point of spiritual indifference from which one can joyfully embrace whatever answer or circumstance arises.

I don’t usually embrace emptiness. I run from it– which is why most of the time my “waiting” is actually an active process of filling my mind with all sorts of plans and counter-plans and contingencies, thinking ahead in both directions to prepare myself for every possible outcome before it happens.

I spend time forecasting how long I think it will take for whatever I am awaiting to arrive.

I count down days.

I imagine how I’ll feel when it happens.

I imagine my response if something unexpected happens, and then explore what each and every one of those things might be, so that I will expect them if they happen.

Creating my own plans and answers is no substitute for patiently waiting and receiving the plans and answers that God has for me. But there’s a paradox here, because as human beings we are co-creators and co-conspiritors with God, which means that we work cooperatively with Him to create the future. We have an important role to play in shaping what kind of person we will become and what kind of world we will live in! Where we delude ourselves is in thinking that we can actually create ourselves or our future independently of God.

Rather than action plans and will-power, our growth ultimately depends on our decisions to receive grace or not. Will we accept God’s invitations in our life? Will we recognize God’s activity; push into that realm of weakness and vulnerability that brings us closer to God? Even a thwarted plan or an unexpected delay can be a grace to us if we allow it to be.

So we can resist and kick and scream and slow down the process of our own growth, but we cannot engineer that process to ensure our preferred timing and style. Waiting is not merely a formula of putting in a set amount of time and effort to get a predictable or desired result. It is always an opening of ourselves to the unknown; a giving of consent for our own expectations and plans to be subverted and changed, and for new possibilities to come into existence. Waiting is a patient, sustained yes to God which humbly lays aside our own desires—not disregarding them, but accepting the possibility of giving them up in exchange for something we would not have chosen for ourselves.

I am in that in-between space now, trying to wait with open hands. Amidst my boredom, confusion, frustration, and uncertainty about the future, I am trying to learn how to take hold of the grace that is offered and to allow it to change me. It isn’t easy and I don’t always take it, but as many times as I get wound up in anxiety or bids for control, I find that I am allowed to wander back and try again. I find that grace is offered to me again and again.

The Bad News is Over

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          As a mentor of ours in New Zealand likes to say, “The Good News is that the bad news is over.” He says that to discover what Jesus’ message is for a given person or society, you first have to find out what the circumstances of that particular person or group are: their motivations, their hopes and fears, their problems, and their life experiences. What is it that is keeping them from God? Where are they in need of hope, or healing? The amazing thing about Jesus is that even while he proclaims universal truths about what it means to be human, he also approaches individual human beings with a personal message of truth for them. God is one, yet he meets each of us on different journeys and in different ways.

To the rich young ruler, the good news is that Jesus is inviting him to cast off all of the wealth, possessions, and comfort that have blocked him from experiencing real life with all of its joys and sorrows, and he lays before him the opportunity to commune with God through loving service and relationship with other people. To the impoverished paralytic by the side of the pool of Siloam who has never known comfort or riches, who has spent years waiting for someone more powerful than himself to rescue him, Jesus speaks words of healing and empowerment: “Get up and walk.”

To the Pharisees, who have spent their lives pursuing the spiritual disciplines of fasting, pious works, and thorough obedience to religious law, Jesus breaks through the delusion that they have achieved true relationship with God by denouncing heir false piety and pointing them toward the path that would rescue them from their particular bondage: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” His repeated, harsh rebukes of these arrogant men are actually a loving and persistent call for them to embrace the only change that could save them. But with those who are buried in shame and guilt rather than pride and apparent righteousness, Jesus takes a different tack. There is no rebuke from him for the woman caught in adultery. Jesus never snuffs out a smoldering wick or breaks a bruised reed, and he recognizes the poor in spirit when he sees them. In this case, it is the self-righteous accusers who are shamed out of following through with the punishment they had planned, and Jesus offers that fallen woman the surprise of mercy and a fresh start instead of the anger she expected from God and society alike.

Everyone’s journey is different. Some people come chasing after Jesus with a determined hope that refuses to be turned away—think of the blind man crying out to Jesus over the demands of the crowd for him to shut up, or the guys lowering their disabled friend down to Jesus through a hole they had dug in a stranger’s roof, because they were determined to get to Jesus in spite of the long line of people waiting outside. Other people are just minding their own business, or even hiding from Jesus, when he begins pursuing them: that’s the Samaritan woman at the well, who’s taken off guard by the man who strikes up conversation with her in spite of the taboos which divide their genders, their religions, and their races. That’s also Zacchaeus, who thinks he is inconspicuously observing Jesus from the safe distance of his tree branch when Jesus puts him on the spot and invites himself over for lunch.

And so it is with our journeys: different people, different seasons, different truths which Jesus speaks into our lives to guide us down the particular path which will lead each of us to God. I’m trying to get better about accepting that, so I can stop judging other people according to the truth that has been give to me. Like Peter on the beach with Jesus, hearing that the road ahead of him will include suffering and a sacrifice of his personal freedom, I turn to others and want to know, “What about these guys? Are they going to have to give up as much as I do to follow you?” And Jesus, still the same 2,000 years later, replies simply, “What is that to you? You, follow me.”

It is probably my growing awareness of the unique and personal nature of journeying with Jesus that has me so frustrated with the spiritual formulas, the moral rules, and the angry God of judgment that I so often hear proclaimed in churches as supposedly “good news”. This message of fear and judgment does nothing to cure the disease of the righteous religious people who already know the formulas and keep the rules, and it crushes the people who are already “bruised reeds”–the sexually broken, the abused, those who already hate themselves and expect rejection from God with equal intensity.

I think the Good News is love—in all of its universal truth and individual expression. Love was what Jesus offered to pharisees, paralytics, and prostituted women alike, but because he knew each of them down to the very core of their being, the path toward God he offered to each of them was unique. The good news for each of them, and for each of us, is that the bad news is over.

Advent

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          Two years ago, we were waiting to move to India for the first time. This advent season, we are waiting for visas to be processed so that we can return to India. There are certainly times that seem more clearly marked than others by uncertainty or waiting, but the truth is that Advent speaks to our perpetual life experience of living in the present and waiting for the future to unfold. No matter what season of life we are in, we harbor hopes, fears, and expectations in our hearts; we turn excitement, possibilities, or dread over and over in our minds. And advent speaks to that tension of suspended possibilities; of hoping and preparing but not knowing how it all will turn out.

I used to think it was a bit artificial to go through the motions of supposedly waiting in suspense for something that we all knew was coming in a predictable form on a predictable schedule. After all, Advent culminates in Christmas every year. No surprises there. But Advent is not just the season of counting down to Christmas day—it’s also the long vigil for God’s arrival. We are waiting for God to be born in our world, to grow in our lives, to proclaim peace in every painful situation of conflict and confusion that we find ourselves tangled up in. And the truth is that while we may have our own ideas of what that will mean, we don’t know exactly what it will look like when it happens.

Advent, a wise priest told me last week, is the spiritual art of waiting for the unexpected: preparing ourselves for what we know while remaining open to the unknown. If we aren’t on the lookout for Jesus, we’ll be caught off guard by his arrival in our lives. But if all of our careful planning fools us into believing that we can predict and control the future, then that rigorous preparation may actually prevent us from embracing him when he comes! Our assumptions may prevent us from accepting the surprising ways that Christ chooses to incarnate in our lives and in our world. It’s a delicate balance of planning and not planning; preparation and spontaneity.

Only One Thing is Necessary

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Now as they went on their way, Jesus entered a village. And a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house. And she had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving. And she went up to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.” But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.
Luke 10:38-42

          I’ve usually identified with Martha in that famous story—despite her unflattering portrayal as a complaining, somewhat self-righteous woman whose concern for superficial domestic details distracts her from Jesus.  More recently, I even started to question the moral of the story. Fine and well for Mary to soak up Jesus’ wisdom while her responsible, hardworking sister takes care of the rest, but really—what would the three of them have eaten for lunch if both sisters had been passively basking in their guest’s company? To broaden the sweep of my question, exactly who is supposed to take care of starving children and trafficking victims and do something about all of the injustice in the world if we’re all just contemplative hermits or church people who spend more time singing praise choruses and studying the Bible than we do engaging with the world outside our religious enclave? Maybe now a few others can identify with my defense of Martha.

But in response to these questions has come the gentle whisper that perhaps this story is not the simple dichotomy of practical action vs. pious devotion that is often taught, on Sunday school felt boards as well as in sermons intended for adults. I’m beginning to recognize the Mary in myself, too—the part of me that does want to just sit with Jesus and be still and be loved. And it occurs to me that the Mary in the story might have felt the same ambivalence and tinge of guilt while she sat there as I do. Maybe when Martha appealed to Jesus for some help with her “lazy” sister, her accusation tapped into that inner guilt and caused Mary to expect a rebuke from Jesus rather than the reassurance he gave her that she was justified in her stillness.  Perhaps Jesus’ response was a surprise to both sisters, rather than being a rebuke to either of them.

The more I reflect on it, the more I become convinced that the condition of distraction or of presence with Jesus is much more a matter of the heart’s posture than it does with external activity. It’s clear from Jesus’ life and teachings that there is a lot of important action that needs to be engaged in—he spent himself on behalf of the poor, healing the sick and shepherding the harassed crowds of the oppressed. But the equanimity with which he was able to meet both acceptance and rejection; the infinite patience and compassion he demonstrated for the mobs of needy people that followed him wherever he went—all of this leads me to believe that even between his times of obvious solitude, Jesus never really left his Father’s caring embrace. He was somehow fully immersed in the suffering of the world while managing to sit at the feet of God the whole time. He offered love, acceptance, and peace to the people around him out of the vast supply of what God was breathing into him on continual basis.

I feel attracted to this possibility growing in my own life. I hear Jesus’ invitation to sit contentedly with him in the hours of waiting in crowded hospitals and the scenes of violence in my neighborhood as well as in the quiet moments of prayer in the morning with my door closed. Paradoxical as it sounds, I believe Jesus when he says that he has called me to live in this crazy place and to do nothing but sit at his feet. It may take more time of focused sitting before we’re able to multitask with all the buzz of the realm of action and external events, but that inner stillness is the only thing that will sustain our action over time and give it significance. No point in running ourselves into the ground if we’re forgetting the one thing that is necessary.

Toxicity

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          Andy and I just returned from a two-week trip to Los Angeles to visit friends from Pepperdine, our “family” in Watts, and some biological family. We graduated from Pepperdine two years ago, so the people we knew as freshmen and sophomores when we left are now juniors and seniors about to graduate! It felt good to be able to return to a place that had been so meaningful to us in a formative time of life, and to still run across so many familiar faces. We were even able to meet up with some of our mentors, people who taught us about marriage and Following and have therefore shaped our lives forever. And it was good for our spirits to get to spend time with so many of the close friends that we graduated with, who are still living and working in the L.A. area. Thanks to them, we traveled all over L.A. county without once having to rent a car or even use public transit, and we always had a place to stay. Thank you Christine, Dave, Thomas, Becca, Lauren, D’Esta, Stuart, Grant, Paul, Jen, Bryan, Steph, Michael, Gary, Adam, Daniel, Genieve, Brittany, Shelby, Dusty, Cecily, Jon, Rose, and everyone else whose hospitality fed, sheltered, and transported us during our stay! There are even more people whose conversation fed our souls with good questions and insights and stories. Now add perfect Southern California weather to all of that and you can see just how good we had it.
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an aerial view of Pepperdine’s campus
           At the same time, however, there was one aspect of the trip that was discouraging. For several years now, an injustice that has weighed heavily on my heart is the way that our culture objectifies people, particularly women. I would venture to say that this plague is nowhere more evident than in Los Angeles, where a lot of trends begin and a lot of destructive mass media is produced. Pepperdine’s campus is a microcosm of it, and you can tell by the way that a lot of female students dress (or don’t get dressed) that they have completely bought into our society’s lie: that women are primarily sexual objects who exist to meet others’ needs and whose value and worth depends on their sex appeal. Now some may think I’m being dramatic, until they see a lecture hall emptying out and find themselves wondering whether students forgot to change out of their clubbing outfits from the night before, or whether some of them might have lost their pants while walking to class.          But I can’t rag on them too much, because I know the positive reinforcement they get from the guys around them, and I know the unhealthy lengths that I and other women I know and love have gone to in order to meet those same unreasonable standards of beauty. It’s easier in the short-term to deprecate the women who annoy the rest of us by putting themselves on display, but when I recognize my own weaknesses and fears in them, I can empathize with them and feel the compassion that their situation ought to evoke in us. It makes sense to try emulating air-brushed, soft-porn advertising perfection, if you believe that your identity and the security of your relationships depend on it.

But the truth is that we women don’t have to get on that exhausting hamster wheel of comparison, jealousy, and insecurity, and that we don’t have to devalue as we age. The truth is that our dignity has nothing to do with our sex appeal and everything to do with the Image that we bear and the Love that created us. And the truth is that men don’t have to chase the phantom promises of lust and dehumanize themselves by cultivating selfish and distorted appetites.

In a culture as toxic as the one we live in, that kind of radical message needs some reinforcement– because the opposing lie will be reinforced with every billboard, commercial, and magazine we see. Its important for brothers and sisters  to look out for each other’s spiritual and emotional well-being, and to protect each other from the lust and the insecurity that have become so normal and accepted in our society. I really believe that viewing other people (and ourselves) as objects to be consumed is the root of so many other, more obvious evils: eating disorders, pornography and other sexual addictions, prostitution, human trafficking. All of these big things begin with a small, personal belief that is based on a lie, so the best way to start addressing any of them is to pull out that lie by the root. So men and women, knowing that our struggles fuel one another’s struggles, how can we stand out from the world by treating ourselves and one another differently? How are we reinforcing or challenging the sin in each other’s lives, and how can we draw each other toward wholeness?

Patience or just long suffering?

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Digging out a pit and building a septic tank.
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Building a stairway to replace the bamboo ladder that once led to the roof.
          These pictures document the slow and sometimes painful process of waiting for the pieces to come together. Most immediately, we are waiting for construction to finish on our new roof-top room so that we can leave our current home– the humid, ground floor room whose prominent location perpetuates a constant stream of visitors at all hours, and reminds me of a dark cave with its lack of natural light. But in a deeper sense, we’re waiting for the pieces of life here to come together. We’re looking for what the next step is—what kind of roles and work we should take on, and how to begin to put our skills and ideas into action to respond to the needs we see around us. And yet we know that the “next step” flows out of exactly what we’re doing now—getting to know people, studying verb conjugations and vocabulary lists, and all of the unspectacular daily moments, tasks, and conversations that comprise our being present and available exactly where we are, right now.

I usually don’t think of patience as a virtue. I equate it with tolerance for wasting time. It is a void of passivity, a willingness to be unproductive or to carry on with a bad or fruitless situation longer than is necessary. But seeing as the Holy Spirit herself (the Hebrew word for spirit, ruach, is indeed feminine) works with extreme patience in human hearts through millennia of obstinate and destructive human behavior, patience is probably a virtue worth revisiting—because I don’t have any patience at all.

It’s probably true that at times the justifying label of “patience” has been slapped onto exactly the kind of laziness or passivity I described a moment ago. But perhaps a more accurate way to think of patience is to connect it with perseverance: a courageous, stubborn, single-minded determination that is bent on accomplishing some purpose or at least bent on holding one’s ground and keeping the faith, no matter how much time it takes to accomplish, or to come into being. Patience is often a willingness to actively wait for something that we really have no power to bring into being ourselves; something that God must accomplish, or something that God has already finished, but the outward evidence of which is not yet apparent.

We need the kind of tenacious patience that can bear the present difficult circumstances without skipping ahead to the future to either catastrophize about how badly everything might turn out, or to dream up alternative plans and means of escape from the present difficulties. We need fierce patience that refuses to give up because of lack of results or weight of disappointments in the short-term. We need tender patience to continue to journey alongside the people in our lives even when they take destructive actions and make destructive decisions, when they manipulate or get angry with us, when they act in self-interest instead of in friendship, when they fail to change or to meaningfully respond to what we’re hoping to model and teach and draw them into.

Isn’t that what She does with us, Ruach Ha Kodesh, the Spirit of God?  Isn’t that the way that She picks up the pieces again and again and re-imagines the path to wholeness as she labors over us individually, and as the Church, and as humankind? I want to be patient as She is patient; longsuffering and uncomplaining like She is in her relentless love of each one of us. I’ve got a long way to go.

Acrylic India

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With just 9 days to go, our return to India is drawing near, and our minds are turning toward the places and people we have left there. I want to share a few paintings that have been inspired by that fascinating country and her people over the past year and a half.
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A “roofscape” of our neighborhood in Delhi. As a going away present, I gave this to the kids who lived across the alley from us in the room with the water tank on top, because they had been so fascinated by my paints and brushes when they came over to visit. They spent the rest of the day comically displaying it to passerby from their rooftop, and it took quite a beating in their custody! Our landlord was confused why I had chosen our slum as a subject, because he had never thought of it as a beautiful place before.

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Sisters sharing a secret.

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An Indian bride.

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A portrait of the old uncle who sold papayas in front of our neighborhood in Delhi.

Source: New feed

5 Day Forecast: Passing Showers and Hellfire

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          We’re writing about this because it seems that beyond the peripheral vision of many Americans, a quiet and ghastly drama is unfolding. For those who are there, of course, the chaos and horror are anything but quiet.  But it’s not being talked about much in the news, in churches, or anywhere else, for that matter– but it’s something that has been on our hearts for a long time.

We firmly believe that this is an issue that everyone should be able to agree on, regardless of our political or religious persuasions. Both political parties have supported (and expanded) the drone program, but the implications of it are so anti-human that this continuing phenomenon demands the attention– and the resistance– of people of compassion. With that goal of stirring compassionate people (and especially followers of Jesus) to action, A. and T. have co-authored this post to look into the human cost of drones, as well as to examine the question of whether this “anti-terrorism” strategy might actually be increasing the risk of terrorism in the United States and around the world.

A couple of months ago, we read an interesting Kindle Single called Aftershock: The Blast That Shook Psycho Platoon (download it for free here) about some of the struggles US soldiers face as they come back from either Afghanistan or Iraq.  It talks about the effects of two conditions: post-traumatic stress disorder (PSTD) and mild traumatic brain injury.  Aftershock follows the lives of one platoon that experienced a rocket attack while they were in their barracks at a main base in Iraq.  The rocket barely missed their building, and fortunately, only one of the men experienced minor physical injuries from shrapnel.  Unfortunately, all of the men experienced some psychological injuries from the distress of a near-death experience and from the blast waves emanating from the rocket.  Research is showing that the explosions of these bombs, land mines, and rockets can rattle the brain so much that the end result is like a concussion. Concussions are dangerous enough for football players or other people who suffer accidental head trauma, but the Army’s researchers are finding that concussions are even more severe for soldiers since usually the concussions are sustained in the middle of combat when a flood of chemicals like adrenaline are surging through the brain.

Concussions are strange and unpredictable injuries: some people experience no long-term effects from them at all, while others experience headaches, memory loss and other life-altering symptoms. When these brain-altering injuries occur during traumatic events– like losing friends and fighting for your life in battle– they can be compounded by post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Over the past few years, the combination of those two conditions has manifested in many (but certainly not all) returning war veterans as an inability to adjust to civilian life, irrationally violent behavior, and suicide (the VA estimates that 18 U.S. war veterans commit suicide every day).

         While the effects of bombs on soldiers is concerning enough, it’s even scarier to think about the effects of collective PTSD and serious brain injury on the millions of civilians in these war zones. Under Obama’s administration (the same Obama who won a Nobel PEACE prize), the number of drone attacks in Pakistan and Middle Eastern countries like Yemen has sky rocketed: both the CIA and military both are using these un-manned aircraft to kill whomever they wish from a safe distance.
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          The psychological impact of unpredictable, repeated drone attacks on a civilian population is huge– it creates a sense of unending, inescapable terror. In addition to targeting individuals who make it onto a “kill list” based on CIA intelligence, there are certain “signature” behaviors or patterns of movement which can cause a person to be targeted by a drone even if there is no prior evidence of terrorist activity. For example, there have been several instances in Pakistan where some men the government had labeled as insurgents were killed in a drone attack, and drones later returned to attack the people who gathered to attend the men’s funeral. Presumably family, friends, and neighbors who happened to know the men showed up at the funeral and were killed just for knowing someone on the CIA’s kill list…  often, just being a male of military age is enough to justify your execution (after the fact) as a possible insurgent. Not only that, but so-called “double tap” drone strikes have also frequently targeted people who rush to rescue those injured in an initial attack. The drone attacks are like drive by shootings, just more high-tech.  People who happen to know the insurgents (and have no choice in how they are involved), innocent neighbors, and even those who try to rescue the injured after an attack can all become victims of this terrifying anti-terror strategy which asks no questions, hears no witnesses, and executes before there is any chance for legal defense.
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So-called “collateral damage”.
          If being in proximity to a bomb blast– like a drone missile– can have disastrous effects on the brain and can create PTSD, then isn’t it reasonable to think then that an innocent Afghan, Yemeni, or Pakistani teenager who survives one or multiple drone attacks because they happened to live in the same village as a targeted insurgent might suffer the kind of brain damage and PTSD that would lead him to act violently and irrationally without regard for his own life as he tries to cope with the trauma? Might these traumatized and grief-stricken youth who have lost family and friends to American drone strikes be especially vulnerable to the sales pitches of Al-Qaeda-type recruitment that promises justice and revenge for what they have suffered? As a strategy for decreasing the risk of terrorism on U.S. soil, the use of drones is self-defeating.

Not only does it create more enemies for the United States by tarnishing the country’s image abroad and boosting Al-Qaeda’s recruitment, it also sets a dangerous precedent for other nations to follow. Will the world become a safer or more dangerous place if nations like Iran, North Korea, China, and others follow the example of the world’s leading superpower by using drones to carry out extrajudicial killings inside the territory of other sovereign nations with whom they are not even at war? By the low standards we have set thus far, Iran theoretically has the right to strike Israel with drones (which they are acquiring) in the name of national security, and China is entitled to use drones  to kill off the pesky Taiwanese or Tibetan leaders who threaten its regime’s power.  I think we can all agree that those are some absurd and terrifying possibilities.

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“Screamin’ Demon” AAI RQ-7A Shadow drone
          At the very least, we as Christians should catch the irony of both President Bush and President Obama using weapons with names like the “Predator” drone, which rains down “Hellfire” missiles, while they simultaneously claim to seek God’s direction in exercising their power as “Christian” leaders. It seems that they’ve either had a miscommunication in prayer or that Jesus has uncharacteristically commanded them to rain down hellfire on their enemies.

But hopefully as the Body of Jesus we can sense more than irony– hopefully the Spirit will open our eyes to see the injustice of murdering innocent people, especially children, in our endless pursuit of greater security for ourselves and our children. Hopefully we sense the danger in ignoring human rights, human lives, domestic and international law in the name of defending our rights. God willing, we will recognize that this violent disregard for the lives of people from a culture and a religion not our own actually cheapens our regard for our own lives and makes a mockery of our supposed devotion to the God who created us all, who imprinted us with His image, who lived and died as one of us, and who declared that He is forever present in the enemy, the outsider, the needy and the rejected ones.

Our prayer is that as the community of Jesus, we can take up our cross and find creative ways of practicing the active nonviolent love that Jesus taught us, and that we can find the courage to stand against our society as an example of self-sacrificing love in an age of paranoid retaliation.

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Source: New feed

Five Years Later

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          Five years ago, A. and I came to Thailand for the first time. We hardly knew each other when we arrived, but by the time we left, we had become close friends. A few months later, we would fall in love with each other.  But by the end of our semester abroad, we had already fallen in love with Asia, and especially with the simplicity of village life we had discovered while living with the Karen hill tribe.
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We couldn’t have guessed back then that we would be married just over two years later 🙂

          We’ve stayed in touch with many of the friends we met in Thailand back then, and this week, we were able to fulfill a long-standing hope: we returned to that village with one of our best friends from university to attend our Karen friend’s wedding!  It was amazing to see the whole village and extended family come together to cook and decorate the church with fresh flowers from the market. Everyone brought rice wrapped in little banana leaf packets to contribute to the ongoing feast (it was hard to distinguish one meal from the next since there was always food around!), and everyone took home leftovers at the end. Without being told what to do, everyone seemed to naturally flow into potato peeling or flower arranging or whatever it was that needed to be done at the moment. We also appreciated how casual and low-key everything was—the priority was spending time together with family and friends rather than putting on a show for the guests, so the schedule for the wedding day wasn’t even decided until the day before, and nearly everyone who was invited had also contributed to the preparations beforehand.  Even during the ceremony, various small groups of people sang songs to the couple while kids played on the floor in the middle of everything. And just a few hours afterward, a bunch of us went with the bride and groom to play in a nearby waterfall.
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standing with the bride and groom

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the entrance to the church

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the wedding ceremony

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congratulating the new husband and wife

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A. & I with our friend Alex, who traveled to Thailand with us in 2008, and his girlfriend Susan

          Five years ago, it was 2008. That year marked the beginning of our life together, and the beginning of a long searching that has continued ever since—the pursuit of simplicity, of community, of justice for small, beautiful communities all over the world whose existence is threatened by prejudice, indifference, power, and greed. 

          In the last five years, a lot has changed in Thailand. The city where we lived has gone a lot more “upscale”, looking less distinctively Thai and more like sterile shopping districts plastered with the same multinational brands that you see all over the world.  There are more touristy bars and gimmicks than we remember. Even in some of the village areas that seemed so remote when we first visited, there are now paved roads and even high-speed internet! At the wedding, too, we saw signs of change: young hipsters who have moved from the villages to the city for work wandered around taking pictures with smart phones while older members of the tribe slaughtered animals and prepared food in ways that this youngest generation may have never learned. Most of them were wearing bits and pieces of their traditional tribal clothing over skinny jeans and t-shirts.

          In the last five years, a lot has changed for us personally, too.  W­­­­­­e dated, got engaged, got married, and moved to Asia. We’ve collected more stamps in our passports; we’ve collected more battle scars, more hopes and dreams, and more questions than answers. So much has changed since 2008.  But in many ways, our slum community in India is just another village that has invited us in as part of the tribe.

Source: New feed

Thoughts on leaving (for now)

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          Two days ago, I was sitting at the train station, watching monkeys fight and frolic in the rafters and lope along the empty railway tracks where our train should have been two hours before. Earlier that day we walked out of our community for the last time until June, and we began the long journey that will take us to Thailand, various parts of the U.S. and back to India again over the next three months. On this last day, something exciting happened. We’ve helped a handful of neighbors open bank accounts over the past few months, which has often been a challenge since most of them are unable to read or write and since the bank staff often have little patience to help them. But this last week several events culminated in the staff of a local non-profit being authorized by that same bank to come into our slum and help people fill out forms and open new bank accounts on the spot! It was wonderful to see people coming en masse to the small bamboo and plastic house of the shopkeeper who had agreed to host the event in our community, and to see neighbors becoming experts, explaining the required documents to each other, and spreading the word to more and more people.  It was also exciting to see the NGO staff treating our neighbors with respect. People were suspicious of these outsiders at first—especially because in the past people have sometimes entered the slum posing as bank representatives, collected people’s money, and run!—but because we were able to give them a personal introduction, people decided to give them a fair chance. And unlike many of the other well-meaning but disconnected social workers who venture into the community, these guys are starting to earn the respect of our neighbors by treating them as equals, telling people to call them by the colloquial bhai, or “brother”, rather than “big sir”. All of this was still in progress by the time we left, but if all goes well, then these bank accounts will enable people to save money in a secure place and make them eligible to apply for much-needed widow’s pensions, government scholarships for their children to attend school, and other financial assistance.
          However, while some neighbors were opening bank accounts in one alley, others were beginning to build new homes on the far side of the sewage canal because the government informed them yesterday that a public works project is going to start on the land where they currently live, meaning that their shanties will be destroyed.  Both of these things reminded me that a lot could change for better and for worse while we’re away. Such is the tenuous life of the poor.

It felt strange to say goodbye to the neighbors and friends that we’ve gotten used to seeing every day (some of them multiple times per day): a mixture of sadness and anticipation and plain old relief. The truth is that I’m tired. I’m tired of seeing so much suffering and pain, tired of struggling so much against unjust systems that have no heart and no mind; of being drawn into the chaos of other people’s lives, often able to offer no real solutions or help other than to be along for the ride with them. I’m looking forward to some silence and some open space and some rest.

Picture

the cow who goes door to door begging for food in the mornings
          But of course I know it won’t be long before I’m feeling restless and subconsciously beginning to wish for the adorable kids next door to walk into my room and do cute things like show me their lost tooth or the dance they learned from a new Bollywood movie. I’ll miss all the noise and activity, and I’ll probably feel bored with all the peace and quiet and loneliness of car windows and insulated walls and big, grassy lawns. I’ll wander down quiet streets and wonder, where are all the pedestrians?—and not just the people, but the vegetable sellers, the herds of goats, and the Brahmin cows?

But that time is not yet. For now I’m enjoying the relief of some time away from all of the noise and activity to be refreshed and to reflect on all that’s happened and all that is ahead. To relax in the knowledge that it is God who brings justice and transformation, and not me. To remind myself that God is still at work in my absence, just as He was before my arrival.