Tag: relationship

Things that happened while I was gone

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Over the weekend, Andy and I celebrated our five year wedding anniversary. We were out in the woods on a small island off the coast of BC, building small cabins that will serve as “hermitages” for people on silent retreat who need a place for deep solitude and prayer. It felt good to do some manual labor, to see tangible progress as we worked, and to feel good and tired by the end of the day, in a sore-muscle rather than a screenburned-eyes or overwrought-mind sort of way. Our motley construction crew was made up of people from all over the place, some in their teens and some in their fifties, and it was fun hanging out with people of all ages—that doesn’t happen very often outside of family reunions, and intergenerational friendship is one of the things Andy and I had enjoyed so much about living in India. After spending a long Saturday on the work site, we enjoyed a brisk swim at an isolated beach. There were Canadian geese sitting on the water around us, so it definitely stretched my idea of what summer at the beach looks like!

Apparently while we were hammering away in the woods and sleeping in rustic cabins without electricity and running water, a lot was happening back in civilization, and particularly in the country of my birth.

There was the courageous act of protest by a brave woman named Bree Newsome, who scaled the flag pole in front of the state capitol building in South Carolina to take down the symbol of white supremacy and racial violence that had flown over the seat of the state government there for more than a hundred and fifty years. Civil disobedience is intended to show the moral absurdity of laws through breaking them and willingly suffering the consequences of one’s actions. Bree’s action did exactly that: South Carolina police (including a black officer) were forced to arrest a peaceful black woman, who quoted scripture aloud as they handcuffed her, for the “crime” of removing a banner under which black Americans have been enslaved, raped, murdered, beaten, intimidated, and systematically oppressed for over a century. No scene could have more pointedly demonstrated the righteousness of her cause: the law was against her, but justice was certainly on her side. She now faces up to 3 years in prison and a fine of up to $5000 for her heroic act. All of us who follow Jesus can learn from this woman’s sacrificial example.

Also over the weekend, President Obama delivered a eulogy for Clementa Pinkney, a black pastor who was among the slain in Charleston on June 17. I don’t know what opinion you hold of Obama as a person, or a politician—I can’t think of him without remembering the countless drone attacks he has authorized against innocent civilians in the Middle East—but his eulogy for Pinkney is one of the best sermons I have ever heard, and is probably THE most powerful speech I have ever heard from a head of state. Perhaps the fact that, as President, he has made important public decisions with which nearly every one of us has disagreed at some point or another makes him exactly the kind of flawed, imperfect human being who can speak with authority about grace. Seriously, if you haven’t yet listened to the speech, please, please do. It is a heartfelt lament of the ways that we have deeply wounded one another in America, an inspiring reminder of the resilience and love that have continued to grow even in the midst of violence and oppression, and an eloquent call for us to move forward together as a nation towards forgiveness and justice, extending God’s grace to one another in every facet of our lives.

“Justice grows out of recognition of ourselves in each other,” he remarks at one point. “My liberty depends on you being free, too.” One can hear in these words the echoes of both Jesus’ call to love our enemies, recognizing our neighbor-hood with them, and MLK Jr.’s assertion that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

The other big national news of the weekend was the legalization of same-sex marriage across the United States. The reactions of many American Christians have already become an embarrassing adventure in missing the point, but I still hold out hope that we as a Church will be able to let go of our fearful siege mentality and recognize this opportunity to love and extend grace to people who may not share our sexual orientation or our theology. I’ve always been confused by the political kerfuffle over trying to legislate a Christian lifestyle into the laws of the state, since God has never called the Church to control the government. We have been given the task of modeling the Kingdom in our own lives, creating a community that images God’s hospitality and love, and inviting others into freely-chosen, loving relationship with God.

Using legal means to force non-Christians into choices and behaviors that Christians have specifically chosen as disciples of Christ seems not only pointless, but controlling and counterproductive to our true mission in the world. If we send the message to the people around us that we are more concerned about policing their sex lives than about caring for them as people, then we’ve not just lost the “culture wars”—we’ve lost the respect and trust that would have laid the foundations for any relationship with people outside the church to grow. We’ve lost our credibility as God’s ambassadors of love. We’ve lost our purpose as a community.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be involved in wider culture—we certainly should. But even in the realm of sex and relationships, why not concern ourselves with the destructive forces of pornography, trafficking, sexual abuse, and domestic violence that are destroying vulnerable individuals and families and marriages? Which will give a clearer picture of God: a Christian reacting with fear-mongering and angry statements in protest of same-sex marriage, or that same Christian instead demonstrating a mature ability to be gracious with people who disagree with them, whose lives and choices are different from his own? Some Christians have compared homosexuals with Hitler, referred to them as “Gaystapo,” or likened the court’s ruling to the 9/11 Terrorist attacks. Regardless of what we believe about homosexuality, angry antics like these should offend our consciences as Christians. Would Jesus be stirring up fear and hatred at a time like this? Or would he be inviting a same-sex couple over for dinner to hear their story and get to know them as people, refusing to reduce the complex beauty of their humanity down to a single political issue or life decision? I get the sense that he’s probably prompting us to do that right now.

supreme court ruling on same sex marriage

There is no silver bullet.

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I was sitting with my friend as she related to me her financial difficulties over the past week. Not that they had started this week, but the entire family falling ill at the same time hadn’t helped things. She said she was going to have to take change out of the little tin box in her store to buy vegetables for dinner. Just then, the Big Ma’am and three Big Sirs from World Vision arrived, to check how things were going with the store. My friend straightened and parted the curtain that separated her front room from the shop in her back doorway to go and meet them. I stood with her teenage daughters behind the curtain, invisible from the outside but able to see through the lightweight fabric. What I saw was that my friend was in presentation mode, stiff and formal. “How are things going with the store?” the Big Sirs asked. “Great,” she said. “Before we had problems with food, but now things are OK.”

“Call the child,” they said. They meant the youngest daughter, the sponsored child. The sponsored child raced across the room from where she had been standing with us behind the curtain and one of her older sisters began frantically trying to comb down her hair, put in a clip, make her presentable. My friend called the child’s name again, sounding irritated. It wasn’t that the visitors were showing any signs of being demanding or impatient; I couldn’t see their faces from where I was standing, but they might have even been smiling. It was just that my friend knew where she stood with them: they were the patrons, and their expectations must be met.

My friend called her daughter again. The older sister gave up trying to put in the hair clip and the little girl came running to the backdoor to stand next to her mother. I wondered if this group of four recognizes the effect their presence has on people. One of the Sirs took out his camera to take a photo of the two of them standing there, in front of the shop that World Vision had donated the initial stock for. “To provide this family with a much-needed livelihood,” I’m sure the letter will say when the photo arrives at the sponsor’s house in Australia.

“Smile!” the man said. Click.

A moment later they were gone. My friend returned and sat down wearily. “We were just talking about this,” I said. “You’re hardly making any profit from this store. You still don’t have enough money for food or medicine. Why didn’t you tell them that?”

“Unse kyaa matlab hai? What do they care?” she said. Just then, a customer arrived. She pulled out the box where chewing tobacco was hidden away and handed a couple of packets to the man at her door. Understandably, World Vision has forbidden her from selling those addictive products in her store. Unfortunately, they’re just about the only thing in stock that she makes any money on. The other colored packages of cookies and candy and salty snacks have negligible profit margins. “The things they gave me don’t sell,” she said. “They should have just given me money and I would have bought things for the store myself.” Fair enough. But I find myself wondering whether even that modification would have made much difference. There are so many of these little doorway shops in our neighborhood that there’s hardly enough demand to warrant the supply. The fact that most people aren’t able to read or write and have no knowledge of accounting doesn’t increase the chances of entrepreneurial success, either.

I think again of the photo. That photo makes me angry, because that photo will be a lie. The family in the picture is still constantly worried about how to stay afloat financially, and they go into debt over basic healthcare and school fees. When I had a sponsored child on my fridge in college, I certainly assumed the smiling face looking back at me was out of the woods, so to speak, now that a big aid organization had intervened (that was a Compassion child, by the way, but a few years back in Thailand I also discovered sponsored children being withdrawn from the program and sent to the local temple to live as monks because their families still weren’t able to feed them). I understand the marketing of the whole thing, and how you raise more money by turning compassion into a canned feel-good experience that can be personalized to appeal to consumers. Just $30 a month, to change somebody’s life, supposedly. Heck, it’s a good deal.

But those kinds of bargains just don’t exist in the real world. And I would love to turn this little anecdote into a plug for building relationship with the poor instead of just throwing money at them—I do believe that money is the least of my neighbors’ problems, when you get right down to it—but this situation does not demonstrate any such neat and tidy moral. The fact is that I’ve known this family for about two years, and despite the fun times we’ve had together and the stories we’ve shared and the deep sense of connection we have with each other, all that relationship hasn’t had a measurable impact on their finances. At all. The stresses in their lives are essentially the same now as they were when we first met them. But for what it’s worth, they do tell me honestly about those problems. My friend has cried and laughed and even gotten angry and argued with me, which she would never do with a patron, a boss, a donor, or anyone she needed to impress or appease in order to keep the relationship in tact.

So perhaps I’m being too hard on the international aid groups, because I don’t have a cunning alternative to offer them. But as long as we’re going around not changing the world (because that is beyond us), we might as well get to know our neighbors and try to love them well. Change is slow and small, usually, and it doesn’t always come… but when it does, it nearly always comes through relationship.