The Real World-changers

Fatigue and crankiness tend to override my self-governor, so ordinarily I might not have posted that last entry. What prompted it, though, even more than Obama's victory speech, was sitting in a room full of missionary parents who had come from all over South East Asia to attend their childrens' graduation from Faith Academy. During the program at the Senior and Parents breakfast, each student's parents were introduced and we were told where they were serving and what their ministry was. By the time they reached Megan's name towards the end of the list I was rather hoping they would skip us. After all the church planters, teachers, pastors, nurses, doctors, tent-makers and translators, being introduced as a software engineer felt as relevant as a basket-weaver in a battlefront command post.

I don't want to discount or minimize the importance of selecting the right candidate to lead our country, but the hyperbole that politicians indulge in during their campaign speeches rings hollow and empty to the point of being silly in comparison to the very real changes quietly being made in peoples' lives through the ministry of God's ambassadors on the front lines around the world. God is working through these people in powerful ways to advance His kingdom in the face of strong resistance and and often at the cost of very real casualties. I was quite humbled to be around them.

It's just entertainment, folks...

It hasn't been any great effort for me to resist returning to the issue of politics, but when a candidate starts saying things like "we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal..." I can't help but hear echos of someone else who had a somewhat enlarged opinion of himself (Daniel 4:30) and I start getting more nervous than I usually am.

It is part of the normal political process for candidates to make wildly unbelievable and preposterous claims in order to get elected, but it's also part of the normal political process for everybody to understand that there's no way the candidates can actually deliver on those promises, and normally noone expects them to. Everyone understands, as someone else has said, that "Politics is show business for ugly people." What terrifies me the most in this current election is that a certain candidate and his supporters appear to actually believe that he can fulfill those wild campaign promises.

(Yes, living in the middle of Obamaland, I do know I've just offended 99% of my friends.)

In the Philippines - 1

Yvonne & I are currently in the Philippines for Megan's graduation. Yesterday evening we were given a tour of the new Faith Academy auditorium (still under construction) which will be named in honor of Yvonne's mom & dad, Dick & Helen Cadd. I just had to share this. It is an amazing, state-of-the-art concert and theater auditorium, but the entire complex will also contain all the fine arts disciplines at Faith, plus meeting rooms & a prayer room.

Everyone who knows Yvonne's parents agrees that this is a very fitting memorial for Dick & Helen, for the contributions they made not just to Faith Academy itself, but to the lives of hundreds of students who were inspired and enriched by the Cadds' investment in their lives.

Sorry for the layout mish-mash...

Silver & gold have I none, but such as I have...

I followed closely behind the young Filipina missionary, stepping carefully around and over things I'd rather not remember let alone describe, following a path alongside open sewers, trying not to gag from the indescribable stench. Closing in on either side were rows of squatter shacks built from cardboard, tin, and miscellaneous wood scraps. No electricity here, and the only water was carried in from a truck a quarter mile away in 5 gallon gasoline cans. We were preceded by a crowd of barefoot children, laughing and shouting and seemingly oblivious to their squalid surroundings. Through the holes that passed for doors in the shacks I could see dingy, filthy interiors that were little different from the exteriors. From the shadows inside we were being carefully watched by many pairs of sullen, suspicious eyes. We were in Barrio Magdaragat, a "village" of roughly 20,000 people that lived beneath the shadow of Smoky Mountain, Manila's (then) 10-story-tall garbage dump. Everyone here, including the children, made their living by scavenging through the daily garbage for anything that could be recycled and sold.

My guide stopped and called out a greeting in front of a shack that even from the outside was different; there were curtains on the windows, and flowers in a jar on the bare plywood dining table. We stepped inside and my mouth dropped open: It was spotlessly clean and bright, sunlight pouring through the window. Inside, I was introduced in Tagalog to a beaming young woman, then my guide turned to me and explained that this young mother was part of our mission's ministry in Magdaragat, and part of a small church that had been planted there in the middle of the garbage dump. The difference between this home and all the others I had passed was astonishing. Here was a brilliantly shining testimony of the real and tangible difference God can make in a person's life.

Last Sunday, continuing our "Are we really going to talk about... " series of sermons, pastor Gregg's subject was poverty. Since his trip to India, the poverty he saw there is what defines the worst of the worst for him. For me it is Manila's garbage dump. Yvonne and I spent three years with a mission that had several ministries there (and elsewhere), and since I was the mission photographer, I got to see abject poverty more often than I cared for.

What will always stand out to me, though, was not the feeding programs for children, nor the training programs for mothers, or the vocational training programs, the homes for lost and abandoned children. What stands out to me is the difference between the people who had Christ in their hearts and those who didn't, though each lived in identical circumstances.

By all means, let us do what we can for the poor. But let us never forget that real power for transforming lives is not found in poverty relief programs - as good and necessary as they are;
the truly transforming power is Jesus.

(personal note: when we left the Philippines we were planning to return but our plans changed. I left behind thousands of slides and negatives that I would love to have, but don't. I'm very grateful for photo-sharing sites like Flickr; the photos there picture it exactly as I remember - except for the smell.)

Um... Say, Al?

Snow in Newberg, on March 27.


(And yes, I know all about the ice shelf in Antarctica)

Winter mornings...

The late organ virtuoso, Virgil Fox, used to say that Shakespeare and Bach had "felt everything." The same could be said of the Psalmists: Every emotion experienced by humankind is expressed somewhere in the Psalms. Like countless others, the Psalms have been a tremendous help and comfort in every circumstance life has thrown at me.

But today I'm having a some trouble finding what I need. Can someone point me to a Psalm that talks about getting up on the wrong side of the bed?

"His heart is steadfast..."

When you have a close loved one (your wife, for example) who has what constitutes a major disease (such as cancer), bad news eventually becomes routine. Not that you get used to it, you just get used to the idea that it's going to keep happening. Kind of like getting beat up by the neighborhood bully; you never get used to it, but over time you come to expect it, and resign yourself to it.

So when Yvonne called late this afternoon to tell me she was in the emergency room with severe chest pains, my first response was to steel myself for the blow; it looked like the bully had caught us with our collective guard down again. Fortunately it wasn't any of the very serious things it might have been, but a case of Costochondritis - an inflammation of the cartilage that connects the ribs to the sternum. (Similar to Costcochondritis, the inflammation in my brain when I go to costco.) One Aleve and one hour (and several hundred dollars) later and she was feeling fine.

Maybe getting resigned to bad news is better than what my response used to be - instant panic - but it's not what I want it to be, either. In spite of the fear, pain, weariness, and anxiety that have marked this battle with cancer, God has proved his faithfulness and trustworthiness in ways that we would never have seen otherwise. So, after experiencing God's provision, grace, and comfort first hand over the last few years, you'd think that when bad news jumps out at me now that my first response would be to remember God's faithfulness, remind myself that He is still in control, and trust Him.

Right. Uh-huh.

Not yet, maybe, but this I aspire to:

"He (the righteous man) will have no fear of bad news; his heart is steadfast, trusting in the Lord." Psalm 112:7