Periodicals

We were up on the top floor of the library, reading our periodicals for poli sci when I interrupted Fiona.  "This is a bad statistic," I said, and then realized that had been a poor way to word it.  I wasn't questioning its validity, just stating that it is a problem.  It's bad.

"The average price of a human being today," says researcher Kevin Bales, "is about $90."  That's the price averaged across the global market.  In North America, slaves go for between $3,000 to $8,000.  In India or Nepal, you can buy a human being for $5 to $10."

So says the February edition of Sojourners magazine.

And so we talked about -- because we wonder about -- what on earth are we doing sitting on the third floor of the library, reading the news from all over the world and then writing reports on it when other people are being sold?  What's the purpose?

And we didn't come to any firm answers, although we talked for a while longer and I will probably be blogging through some of the conversations/questions that Fiona and I keep running into.  We know there is a purpose for which God has put us where He has -- that we have been given the chance to be in college now, that we are who we are.

But still...

I think it is good to be reminded sometimes of what else life could so easily look like.  To be thankful to God for all that He has spared us, and to wrestle with what faithfulness looks like, and to stay brokenhearted for the broken.

Making Peace With Proximate Justice: A Speech and Questions with Steve Garber

I'm sitting upstairs in Skye Lounge, listening to Steve Garber speak.

Did you hear that? Steve Garber. My parents gave me his book The Fabric of Faithfulness and I thought I was too young for it, not even going to college yet, and it was dense, pulling together pieces of pop culture and the Bible and classics and questions. But I waded through it -- probably more because I am stubborn than anything else -- and it was like Till We Have Faces, pieces of it nagging at the back of my mind. I don't think I could have been more than fifteen or sixteen. That gave me time to reread it, to let things percolate through the filter of my life.

And it has been good.

So it is a huge blessing to get to hear him speak.

He began talking about Jon Stewart and Rush Limbaugh. Here's his summary.

Jon Stewart: If you knew what I knew, you'd be cynical too.

Rush Limbaugh: If you knew what I knew, you'd be angry too.

And Garber asks, Can you know the world and still love the world? Or do you simply become more detached and disinterested the more you come to know.

About how John le Carre's novels, and how people read them and say That's just the way it is, Garber asks -- really? If that is just the way it is, what are we doing here? What is the point?

About his time in Washington DC, he says, I've lived there to push back the cynicism of the city.

Is justice just crap? If it isn't, what is it? How do we live that out in the context of American pluralism?

He talks about how people come to Washington full of visions, sure that they can change everything because they deeply care about what is right and God does too. And about how making politics is no clean business and you have to find a way to stick with it. To make peace with proximate justice and accept what is something, even if it is not everything, and to continue on rather than dropping out. That you cannot say it must be everything that I am envisioning or it will be nothing because it hurts too much. That you have to have enough confidence in God to accept something.

About Israel and a friend of his who has come to deeply care for it, how if you are serious about it, you have to take seriously the hopes of the people who live there. On both sides. The solution may not be perfect, but it will be something.

About Blood:Water Mission, and the difficulty of continuing a charitable project when people rip you off and take advantage of you. How do you make peace with proximate justice?

About Mars and M&Ms and the search for a vision that cares for economics and people and earth. How all these things should weave together in a fulfillment of the shalom promised in jubilee.

So we make peace with proximate justice, accept that the world is not yet as it one day will be, live in the tension of redemption before the consummation.

He talks about how the culture is upstream from politics. What we want shapes the policies that we have, and it is not easy or cheap to change politics. But what needs to be changed will not be addressed until we care about it, until it matters to us.

And he wraps up with a question and a challenge to this roomful of college students: Does Christianity provide the answer to the complexity of these questions? You need to be able to answer this.

And I am glad to have heard him.

The Story Woven

The ground was white with snow.

We were spending the weekend in a "cabin" -- sort of a hunting retreat -- in the middle of nowhere, four hours' drive, slow behind the plow/salt truck. It was a long weekend for most of us, with no classes on Monday for MLK day, and we were taking some time to sleep and read, do homework and cook and catch up with each other's lives. With no internet access. With no phone service, except the landline, kept for emergencies.

And so -- Saturday -- we went for a walk in the woods. (A suibien kind of walk, my Chinese friends would say. It took me a while to explain that to my roommate once. I said I was going for a walk. "Where?" she asked. "Around campus," I said. "Where?" she asked. "I don't know," I said. "Nowhere." She stared at me. "Why?" "No reason, I just want to." She smiled. "Oh, a a suibien walk," she said, with understanding. It took me longer to get a general feel for what suibien meant. Random. Whatever you want.)

We slipped around on the ice and put our feet through where it was thin, endangering our shoes with the hidden pockets of freezing, muddy water. We posed on the hillside and took pictures.

And on our way back to the cabin, I took a deep breath. Thinking again about Proverbs 3:27, about a conversation that I had known I wanted to have from the time I decided to go to the cabin for that weekend.

Proverbs 3:17 says: Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to do it. I tend to think of that especially in terms of encouraging people, when you have a sense of perspective on their life that they are likely to not be able to see on their own.

If you've read older posts, maybe you've seen this one, the one called It's a Wonderful Life. If you haven't, the story makes more sense if you read it.

So I walked a little faster and caught up to him. We talked about jobs and school and such. And then I took another breath and said Thank you. I don't really remember exactly how I explained it. But I know that he is continuing to be in positions of authority; he has a wife, he has men under him. And he has much to offer in terms of growing them.

It unlocked parts of the weekend that wouldn't have been there, otherwise. Some laughter, because we got to know each other better than we would have. Some discussion, washing dishes -- So what has God been teaching you? What have you been learning? -- that came far more naturally when we knew that there was a context for it to fall into, that we'd already been part of the same conversation, if not really introduced to each other before.

It is beautiful how God weaves life together.

The Goodness of God

This point keeps coming up recently:

We sin because we don't really believe that God is good.

Last weekend I was at a staff training seminar for CCO where Tim Geiger, who works for Harvest USA, was speaking. His focus was sexual sin (and holiness), and he was talking about how sin -- any sin -- is based in a desire for something that's good. The problem is that we move this from being a good desire into being an ultimate end, something we're determined to get at any cost.

Tim Keller made this same point very well in Counterfeit Gods.

And I was discussing this last night with ZhongguoTim [okay, I realize that I have now talked about three Tims in a row. Not sure why that's how it happened, but there it is]. I know that this is where sin comes from -- that

each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death. (James 1:14-15) --

but I need to keep hearing it. It's easy to justify my behaviors and find acceptable behaviors that are still motivated by sin. We talked about grades, about building relationships with people. Are these motivated by desires to glorify God? Or to feel in control?

James gives us the antidote for this poisonous inclination in the next few verses.

Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. (James 1:16-17)

If we believe that everything good comes from God, then we will trust Him.

We talked about this again today in my Environmental Ethics class, when we were discussing how God had decreed that Israel give the land a rest every seven years. How hard would that have been to obey? I would have thought, Are You crazy? I'll starve! My teacher summed it up well. "We think that if we obey God, bad things will happen."

Yep. There's the heart of the lie we believe.

So instead... we have to let go of trusting in ourselves and cling to the risky belief that God is trustworthy, that He is good. That He is omniscient and does know all of our circumstances. That He's omnipotent and has the power to work all things for good. That He's omnipresent and is with us in everything, is working in everything.

And mostly that He is all good, and that He desires good for His children.

Habits

[As a slight disclaimer... I've been meaning to post this for about a month, and just haven't gotten around to it. Not that it makes much difference, but here it is.]

I was reading The Divine Conspiracy (still; it didn't make my packing list for China so it kind of got put on hold) and hit a section on how much sin comes from habits.

I've thought more about habits in the past three months than I probably ever had before, because as soon as we got to China we started realizing that we had all kind of habits that were so deeply engrained we didn't even realize that they were habits, we just thought they were how life was. And we longed to rebuild a similar set of routine habits, so that we could do things like eat and buy groceries and shower on autopilot. It takes a lot of energy to consciously think about everything that we do in the course of a day.

Anyway, I think there is a lot to be said for what was being said in Divine Conspiracy: our habits are so unthought about that it's hard to remember that they exist, and it's hard to put effort into making whole something so ingrained that we've forgotten it's broken.

There are plenty of examples of this. I mean, why does George Bailey never fix the knob on the railing in It's a Wonderful Life? Does he even remember that it shouldn't pop off all the time by the end of the movie? Or last year, I went to a party at a friend's house and fell through one of his porch steps on the way up. Someone mentioned it and his response was along the lines of, “Oh yeah, that's been broken, you just have to skip it.” Or... fix it?

Maybe that was part of what was so radical and vital about the Reformation, the requickening of the idea that God says “Mine” about all of creation. That it's not just about Sundays and holidays and the clergy, but equally about Monday morning and Friday nigh, about the butcher and the baker and the candlestick maker.

That God is just as interested in the money that we don't give in tithes and offerings as He is in the money that we throw into the offering plate.

So the motto of CCO that I grew up around – All of life redeemed – is a precious and beautiful one to have woven into your being.

And I think about Ann Voskamp (www.aholyexperience.com) and yes, how seeking to give thanks for all things at all times – this will protect us from much sin. It forces intentionality about many of the hidden desires of our hearts. It begins making whole what we forgot was there, let alone broken.

Story-writing and Providence

As I keep working on a long story with friends this summer, I have discovered that one of the chief things I try to do to characters is to break them. I am continually throwing them into very difficult situations, and forcing them to meet and get to know other characters who they can't stand, and generally making their lives miserable.

Why do I do this?

It's not just because I'm sadistic and enjoy driving my co-writers insane (although I do sometimes enjoy that too...) but it's because that is really the only way in which the story works. Characters, even ones that I designed, do not typically want to do what they should. If I leave them where they're comfortable, they never go anywhere. A lot of them would never interact, and there would be very little depth or richness to the story. They grow through the things I force them into.

Breaking reveals what they are made of.

Over and over, I keep pushing them until I find their flaws, burning that out of them, and making them into the characters I want, pulling their threads together into the story that I want.

The analogy could be stretched too far, I'm sure, but it is giving me a greater appreciation for how God molds us.

I don't just give my characters tough stuff to the limits of their endurance. I push them past. God throws us into places where we need Him.

My characters (and whoever is trying to work with them to write the story) tend to hate it. But it works. It makes everything make sense, and it does make the characters more real. It makes the story work properly.

I am very glad, though, that God knows what He's doing. I stumble my way through words and scenes, wanting to bash my head against the wall and wanting to throttle most of the characters. After a while, pieces fall into place and I'm happy then, but it doesn't mean that I know how the next conversation fits into the overall picture.

God does.

So I am content.

End of Summer

I've been busy with countdowns recently.

One more day of work.

In two days, I'll be at a wedding reception for two of my dear friends. We've known each other since we were in highschool. It's crazy -- and pretty exciting.

In two days I'll be flying to Massachusetts.

In a week I'll be 21.

In less than two weeks, my next-oldest-sister will be coming to college to start her freshman year.

In less than a month, I'll be in China.

There are other countdowns, like the people I wanted to say goodbye to, wanted to spend time with, before I head home and then across the world. Or, more accurately, the people I don't want to say goodbye to.

And there are the counting-up lists. It's been a good summer.

Days spend in sunshine and dinners with the Wrights and Joanna, full of laughter, weekends with the Kennedys, who kept bringing me home... all summer... the guys in the grounds garage and the tennis balls flying back and forth; lots of Madeleine L'Engle; trees to climb; a trip to DC; going to the park with Sukey and her blue eyes; an alarm clock faithfully waking me up every morning; music and audio books; a beautiful campus to work on; great girls to work with... I made a much longer list in my journal, but you get the idea.

God is good.