White Pages

Will they Make it?

2011-04-15T14:10:00.000-07:00

A little boy with a Lakers jersey stands with his sister at his home at the edge of the Pulang Lupa garbage dump. He's looking at the church that has been planted there. It has started some modest income generation projects to provide an alternative to scavenging. Will he have options not available to his father? To some extent this question will be answered by the degree to which the church chooses a wholistic gospel over a privatized spirituality that cares more about heaven than it does about the seeking the shalom of God for his earth. With this little church on the dump site, so far, so good. A sign of hope for these little ones.

Not God's normal

2011-04-12T02:44:00.000-07:00

The morning here in Manila was spent hearing from a leader on social entrepreneurship for slum communities, and then from Corrie deBoer on Appreciative Inquiry. After that we went to the Pataya Dump site to tour the government facility that displaced scavengers and then to the site of the Pataya Christian Church that is led by a bi-vocational pastor who runs a few businesses to employ scavengers. We saw scavengers standing waste deep in foul water "washing" plastic bags to be sold to recyclers. We saw an urban pig farm attached to the church with pigs that feed on the garbage of the site. We saw one of the pre-schools that Corrie planted. Signs of hope in dramatic circumstances. Those circumstances can be overwhelming, and I know they brought insight and conviction. We meditated on the fact that thousands of children know no other reality. They and their families understand this as normal. But this is not God's normal; his shalom plan for their lives and community is beyond their dreams.

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From Fearful Streets to Holy Sweets

2011-04-11T15:42:00.000-07:00

These girls are living the conversion that the biblical character Onesimus did, as he learned that he was indeed not useless, as his world was telling him. These young women, victims of unspeakable things in their families and eventually the streets, are now safe, happy and growing confident in Christ in the Onesimo ministry home on Manila. Their healing is well under way. Our students were so moved by the whole model, which includes education, vocational training, counseling, and discipleship.

Signs of God in the Botocan Slum

2011-04-10T00:29:00.000-07:00

BGU Student Eva Chow and her colleagues in our Manila course study an incarnational ministry of another BGU student Aaron Smith and his wife Emma in the Botocan slum. The church they lead above their home has doubled in size in the last year, amazingly with mostly men coming to Christ. They are sponsoring educational options for the community as well. This community is seeing the shalom of God established little by little. Our students are seeing their shalom vision grow.

BGU Students Reach Out in Red Light District

2011-04-07T07:44:00.000-07:00

It seems almost fashionable these days to talk about the evils of sexual trafficking. It's another to spend the evening seeking out it's victims, standing in front of massage parlors praying, interceding for teenagers who pass us trying to catch our eye. We accompanied Samaritana, a ministry to women caught in prostitution in Manila founded by Jonathan Nambu, a BGU grad. It is an evening that few will forget, and it is our prayer that it catalyzes similar work in the cutie of our students.

Can God Grow Larger?

2011-04-04T19:20:00.000-07:00

Update from Manila: How does one's God grow larger than we have perceived him? By interacting with how he is experienced in a context radically different from our own. When the Filipino experience meets the Korean/America experience, and the Ethiopian leader listens in, and the Indian leader synthesizes what is being said, and the leader from Hong Kong say "here's how that works in my setting." All I can say is WOW!

Fair in Fresno to Soaked in Seattle to Manila Meltdown

2011-03-29T16:42:00.001-07:00

My temperature capacities are being sorely tested this week. May God be in the extremes.

Ready to work

2011-03-23T16:36:00.000-07:00

My friend Orlando Tapia has graduated from Hope Now for Youth and is ready to work. He is 20, has his driver's license, and a great attitude. He gives attention to detail and is a careful worker. He's a great volunteer too. Got a job lead for him?

Now that's a Kiss

2011-03-23T15:12:00.001-07:00

Pucker up baby!

From Ethiopia to Fresno to Serve & Learn

2011-03-13T09:25:00.000-07:00

The world thinks the world of Fresno. Yared, a pastor at a large church in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia will join others from around the U.S this week in a class that seeks to activate community development in cities in the name of Christ. Why would an Ethiopian come all the way here? Wake up Fresno. The world is paying attention to what happens here.

Vigil for Sunny

2011-03-05T10:26:00.000-08:00

Sunny was beaten to death last week in our neighborhood. He was 15 years old. Today we stood on the spot and said that it belongs to the Lord and no one else. And we prayed that we would be agents of God's shalom. We repented of our neglect of youth in the community. And we reaffirmed our vision of a neighborhood of peace. Oh God, let Sunny's death not be in vain.

Thar she blows!

2011-02-20T11:28:00.001-08:00

Dinner view from Moonstone Beach

2011-02-20T11:19:00.001-08:00

Lovely meal at the Sea Chest in San Simeon last night . Now walking together on the Bluff Trail.

Who is this woman I married?

2011-02-12T16:22:00.000-08:00

The artist emerges. Who knew that this creative spark was just waiting to flare?

Perfect weather to start our 31 2/3 anniversary/Valentines Day stay at the Claremont

2011-02-05T17:23:00.000-08:00

32 years later we return to the Claremont Hotel where we spent the first night of our honeymoon

2011-02-05T14:54:00.000-08:00

Dr. Joyce Aryee, CEO Ghana Chamber of Mines addresses BGU students

2011-01-27T02:03:00.001-08:00

Students from 21 nations listen to this amazing woman on God's redemptive purpose for business, and equipping God's people to fulfill their unique purpose on earth.

21 leaders, 12 nations, one grateful Randy

2011-01-26T23:41:00.000-08:00

Sodom Songs, Gomorrah Glory

2011-01-23T07:21:00.000-08:00

That there is currently a place on earth called Sodom and Gomorrah, and that the residents named it that themselves is amazing enough. But the fact that there is now a fledgling church planted in its midst where the love of God is pronounced and a better life is detailed is beyond beautiful. Residents emerge from shacks and makeshift storefronts, walk down narrow alleys filled with the rubble of cast-off materials now made useful, and pick their way around the labyrinth of a community compressed and over rivulets of human waste to a little room where "What a Mighty God We Serve" is being sung. The Community Restoration Fellowship is in worship of a God big enough to lift this community to a new place. Started by two graduate students a year ago, this fellowship of 55 adults and 44 children from this mega slum of 50,000 has been threatened, moved several times, and struggles to create a sustainable ministry in a complex ministry environment.

As I sat with my students soaking this miracle in, I looked out the door and saw a community that has migrated here to survive, but that is living in the grips of the vice so epitomized by its name. Prostitution and crime are rampant, illiteracy and chaos oppress families, and the grinding rhythms and routines required to stay alive dominate each waking moment. They look in pensively, hearing the music, wondering if the song that is sung about the might and love of God is for them.

But this place is not condemned to the same fate as the first Sodom and Gomorrah. There is a redeemer, and through his people this place of sweat and labor and permanent transition can become new. What will the new name be? "They shall be called, 'The Holy People, The Redeemed of the Lord' and you shall be called 'Sought Out, A City Not Forsaken.'" (Isa 61:12)

Street child to culinary artist

2011-01-20T06:07:00.000-08:00

Presbyterian Vocational Training Institute in Accra, Ghana. Could the church do this in Fresno?

It can if ...

2011-01-16T10:22:00.001-08:00

Can two weeks in Ghana change the world? It can if students return to their cities in Asia, North America and multiple nations in Africa with a biblical foundation and agenda for transformation in the name of Christ, and a set of models they can contextualize. Pray for us, please!

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Can two weeks in Ghana change the world?

2011-01-16T09:39:00.000-08:00

Vision for Fresno

2011-01-14T15:21:00.001-08:00

Vision for Fresno

2011-01-14T11:04:00.001-08:00

Mayor Ashley Swearengin addressed the No Name Fellowship yesterday, calling this Christ centered civic leadership movement to invest in the upgrade in education of Fresno's 40,000 unemployed. Her message was biblically insightful, passionate, and fill of hope. I am proud to have her as my mayor.

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The Colors of God

2010-12-31T08:20:00.000-08:00

Our final morning in Vancouver began with a spectacular sunrise. It is a fitting end to a week with many colors.

... They included the happy colors of first birthday candles ...

... They included the warm tones of a dedication to the Lord ...

They included the pure whites of Whistler Mountain, blanketed with a billion diamond points of brilliance ...

... and the liquid version while bobbing in a tiny boat on the Burrard Inlet near English Bay ...

And so we thank God for another year of his technicolor presence with us, and the chance to celebrate it in such a beautiful place filled with the colors of love. De Colores!

Still

2010-12-07T00:01:00.000-08:00

Ice chewer on one side

Deal-maker, titan, master-of-his-fate on the other

Public announcements mixed with the jumbled

Chaos of a dozen conversations

Overlaid by the sound of my own questions that will not

Shut up

And you want me to be still and know that you are God

That I am my beloved's

That in quietness and confidence shall be my strength

There is no quiet here, Lord.

Not here.

But there is a corner of my shallow mind

Where the only sound is the far away heart

The only lyric is longing

Where I choose to pay attention to one thing,

The thing,

Where your silence is deafening,

Your presence all that is required.

I go there so seldom

I may not remember the way.

The Dirty Little Secrets of Paradise

2010-11-24T10:39:00.001-08:00

Yah, Mon; Jamaica was a kick – a kick in the brain, a kick in the heart. What you won't hear in the travel guides: Jamaica has a dirty little secret. I brought to the iconic city of Kingston, leaders who wanted to learn how a city still recovering from a legacy of colonization and slavery and the resulting poverty could take hold of its destiny to be a “blessing to all nations,” as its national pledge promises. The beach was nice. But Jamaica hides dirty little secrets just ten minutes away from the surf. It was there that we saw God at work.

One Love: We prayer-walked the streets of its most feared enclave, Trench Town, through passageways and alleys that just two years ago would have spelled a violent end to us. Those who led us had established a transformational presence through business development, job placement, a vibrant and visible church, regular prayer walks, and collaborative ministry among church and Christian non-profits. One of our students, Sandra Morgan, is at the heart of this effort – The Agency for Inner-City Renewal – and we explored the aspects of that work that could be replicated in cities across the world. Indeed we did learn the power of “One Love” in the neighborhood that produced Bob Marley.

Tears for “The Disappeared.” In another area of the city we stood in front a monument to the tears of children – the hundreds of them who had died violently in Kingston. Some 150 children go missing every month in this city – the equivalent of three school bus loads every 30 days. Some are known to be trafficked for sex or for servitude, though many are caught up in street-life and just disappear. We exposed our leaders to a variety of solutions and a call for the church to be a voice for these voiceless victims in their own cities.

What’s in a Name? Another of our students, Albert West, is leading an effort in Mountain View, an innocuous sounding section of East Kingston whose violence belies its pretty name. In a one-month period just a few years ago 50 people lost their lives to gang/political ruthlessness. Pastor West works with 25 other pastors on a fragile peace there, and an even more fragile coalition. We studied the complexities of this task in honest dialogue and absorbed the anguished passion of our student for transformation. Again, we walked the streets and felt Albert’s grateful amazement that peace had emerged and was holding. We heard of his efforts working with pregnant Moms, unemployed men, health counseling, and providing educational opportunities, all in the name of Christ, with a full contingent of intercessors for the community. We also absorbed his fatigue and his humility.

Half the leaders we were training were Jamaican, but the other half came from the Philippines, Bahamas and the U.S. These are very gifted people, intent on sharpening their vision and skill sets for the transformation of their cities. I wish you could have been with me as we wrestled over models of ministry and fashioned plans for building or re-shaping their current work back home. Seventeen leaders created 51 actionable items for their own cities as a result.

Distressing Disguise: But even as we focused on the systems of the city, on things that bring transformation to whole areas, for me, the images that I cannot get out of my mind are of our visit to Brothers of the Poor. This Mother Teresa-like group is pledged to take in the most physically and mentally deformed of Kingston’s children and adults and treat them with dignity and love. It is a skilled compassion for the most twisted bodies I have ever seen, from infant to adult. Our leaders learned how to see the image, indeed the fingerprints of God, through exterior deformities that threatened to obliterate it it. “Jesus in the distressing disguise of the poor,” as Mother Teresa said. None of our group will ever see the most physically vulnerable of their own communities the same, nor let them be forgotten. We witnessed the joy of Christ made real in the care-givers and volunteers. And that is so much the point of our work.

Personal: After South Africa, then Jamaica I came home to trees that had turned to the maroons, yellows, and deep orange of fall – the colors that remake Fresno streets into tranquil rivers, with fire on the banks. It’s good to be home. We get to see our Canadian Grand Daughter, Elizabeth, (and Joe and Heidi too) as we travel to Vancouver for Christmas this year. Jameson and Sarah are ankle deep in teaching and ministry responsibilities, and Jameson has nearly completed his first seminary class. Aside from a short trip to Seattle next month and our visit to Vancouver, there is no more required travel until Ghana in January.

Tolerance? Decency vs Expression

2010-10-30T08:00:00.000-07:00

Help me out here. Something happened last night that has me thinking about our culture, about the ever changing line of what constitutes decency.

I grew up in the era where a neighbor had the right to spank you or at least wash your mouth out with soap if you uttered a course word. That actually happened in my neighborhood. As kids, it influenced our behavior. I know its hard for some 20 and 30 somethings to believe this -- today you'd be sued -- but it was an era where we actually lived out the belief that it took the whole village to raise a child. There was general consensus about what behavior was appropriate in the community, and what wasn't.

So here's my question: Does our non-judgmental culture require that we just acquiesce to the coarsening of our society -- to it's rudeness, its increasing brazenness, it's shock strategies at getting attention? Do we speak up when personally offended? Or do we just accept this as the way it is, and tolerate it?

This isn't a hypothetical question.

Last night as I was grocery shopping I noticed a young woman who appeared to be about 17 years of age, holding an employment application in her hand talking to a store employee. Her black T-Shirt proclaimed in bright pink letters "I have the pussy, so I make the rules."

Several questions hit me at once, and their likely answers disturbed me to the bone: How could this young girl proclaim something so crude? (Answer: she thinks it's funny, and no one in her world would challenge that.) How could she request an employment application wearing such an offensive shirt? (Answer: because we have come to a point in our culture where she doesn't think it matters.) Have we come to the point where management would even hand an application to someone wearing such a shirt? (Answer: Unfortunately, yes. Apparently they don't think it matters either.)

And my final question, for which I ask your input: Should I have confronted her about how offensive the shirt is? For the sake of holding some line of decency in our culture should I have done the unthinkable -- that is, calmly express my displeasure at her form of expression, and tell management that if they hire someone who thinks that kind of thing is OK, that I won't shop there anymore? (Answer: you tell me)

The fact that we have come to a place in our culture where one can say and do anything with impunity because others will not dare overstep the expectation of "tolerance," means that we are on a slippery road that will take us to a place our parents and grandparents knew would be akin to hell.

I am haunted by the well-used aphorism, "the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for enough good people to do nothing." Well, I did nothing. What would you have done?

Cape Town, South Africa - Lausanne 2010

2010-10-29T11:38:00.000-07:00

Lausanne 2010. On the one hand I couldn’t help but be impressed: More than 4000 leaders from every region of the world, all converging on Cape Town, South Africa for only the third such “congress” in history. Informed, passionate speakers from those same regions gave their best take on where we are in the task of global evangelism, and where we as a global church need to go. A multitude of seminars and dialogue groups explored in great detail every conceivable aspect of mission in an age of globalization. Some of the conversation generated was profound, and some of us made important connections that may lead to very fruitful collaborations for the kingdom. My role was to help delegates build a sustainable spirituality for ministry in the city. That, and invite leaders to consider doing a doctorate in ministry with my school.

But I have many “on the other hands”. There were many gaps in the program – places where the western strings and power levers were revealed, showing that we have a long way before the whole church is valued and trusted enough to take their rightful place in what purports to be such a global event. Leadership of the event did not give full voice to indigenous Christians. The whole church was not invited to be full participants in the event., with Orthodox, Catholic and Chinese Registered Churches not invited. Not one Native American representative was invited; the few that came got there through a back door institution. There was little public dissent. The script was carefully dictated.

I do praise God for the hundreds of volunteers that made this happen, some investing months and even years to the effort. And I am quite sure that the Holy Spirit inhabited all the good intensions, all the prayers and praises, all the discussions both formal and informal. I trust that there will be both eternal and temporal fruit. But I can’t help but hear the frustration in the voices of my Latin American and Native American friends when they reflected on the opportunity missed, and the feeling of not being honored or trusted with full membership in the process.

The picture presented of a world beset by complex evils of child labor, sexual trafficking, ethnic cleansing, civil war, corporate exploitation, the poisening of the environment, and millions dying without knowledge of the one who died to set them free, is a world far too complex to reach without the whole church. The motto of Lausanne, since the first Lausanne Congress that resulted in the benchmark Lausanne Covenant in 1974, has been “Whole Church, Whole Gospel, Whole World.” John Stott, Rene Padilla and Samuel Escobar helped draft it as a result of true and honest conversation. It will not be fulfilled until Whole Church is truly present, as they envisioned.

As I sit in the Cape Town airport, I dread the more than 24 hours it will take to get home. And 12 days later I leave again to teach in Kingston. But I know it was a privilege to be here, and the Lord will carry me on.

They were there for "such a time as this..."

2010-10-20T13:47:00.000-07:00

I felt my eyes fill with tears tonight for two men that you have probably never heard of, but who are heros to me. Rene Padilla and Samuel Escobar, both with the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students in Latin America for many years, and beyond that, giants in the Lausanne Movement shared their journey. Lausanne has been used by God for more than three decades to call the church to faithfulness to the whole gospel, for the whole church, in the whole world. Through their low-kuy, faithful, honest, constructive critique and prophetic words and deeds, their contribution to the transformation of the global church is incalculable.

But I doubt you have heard of them. Both are authors and theologians, activists and student ministers -- both have lived sacrificially and simply. Both have brilliant minds, but even here in Cape Town serve humbly with no flash or celebrity.

Knowing full well that you cannot understand how full my heart is toward them, or what it meant to me to see them together on stage tonight singing with a group of fellow Latin Americans -- to see Rene's daughter Ruth Padilla deBorst up there singing her heart out -- it was exactly what I needed. I realized that they lived and are living their lives for an audience of one -- their faithful savior. And they lived and are living their lives in a way that made a contribution to the shalom of others. There is no higher calling.

They were there for such a time as this ... over and over again -- the right men for the right times. I want to live my life like that.

Rene Padila and Samuel Escobar, my brothers and my heroes -- thank you.

Jade

2010-10-17T13:27:00.001-07:00

"Please sir ... I won't ask you for money ... but if you could buy me some corn flakes I can eat for five days." She was visibly pregnant and on the street. Thrown out by her family. No prospects. It was a typical story, one that I have encountered in many cities around the world, my own included. Here in Cape Town I am getting accosted daily, by men and women and children. I learned from two significant Johns in my life -- John Stott and John Perkins years ago that giving money is seldom the loving thing to do, and my general policy is to rule it out in most cases. But I could not not respond, so I went to the market with her, bought her groceries and then violated my policy -- I let her keep the change. I told her that I would pray that if she sold the food I just bought her or used the change on drugs or alcohol that she would get really sick. I felt bad about that later. But there you have it. In the end he told me she would get a room with the money. Having heard every story in the book I am pretty sensitive to BS, and I didn't sense any from her. I prayed for her. She asked questions about her salvation, unsure that God would accept her as she was. I tried to tell her that when God looked at her he glowed with love and devotion to his daughter, that he thought the world of her. Her brown eyes got a bit wider but she said nothing. The conversation was as fertile as her three-month profile.

Her name was Jade. I wondered as I walked to my hotel whether she could ever come to believe that, like her namesake, she is precious. Can she ever feel treasured, like a precious stone? Could the Lord carve his image deeply into her frame -- smooth away the rough edges created by the street -- so so that everyone could recognize her infinite value?

Will we ever get to the point where she has somewhere to turn, besides a random white man who happened by in this part of town? I didn't care anymore whether she was lying to me. Tonight I pray a tired and pensive prayer for Jade.

The Table: Loving the Strange and Stranger

2010-10-15T13:00:00.001-07:00

Ate a plate of Warthog, Antelope and Crocodile tonight at a restaurant here in Cape Town. Loved every strange bit of it. Worthog, worthog, worthog -- it just rolls off my tongue. Like I've been eating it forever. "I think I'll have the worthog tonight," as if I had ordered it a thousand times. I swear it wasn't just the novelty of it, although that's initially what appealed to me. But I'll remember it because the taste spoke to my senses in a way that made my normal diet feel as if I had been eating sand.

As I prepare to serve at the third ever Lausanne World Congress here in South Africa I am asking the Lord to give me new appetites and tastes. I join more than 4,000 delegates from around the world who gather at "the table" (a metaphor referencing the giant plateau known as Table Mountain in Cape Town) of the Lord as His sends the food of his word to his people for the transformation of the world.

But the new menu at this table is definitely strange. And I am convinced that it is not the strangeness that is attractive. There is an aspect of the interaction with a new food that involves risk, and its a little uncomfortable. But the taste is its own reward.

Last night on the street I was approached by a young woman asking for money. I asked her name, and she said "Donna." But after 30 seconds of conversation it began to dawn on me that Donna was a young man. After having spent a late night last year on the streets of San Jose Costa Rica ministering to transvestites, I began to realize Donna's identity and took a moment to pray for her. It was an unusual conversation -- stood out for it's strangeness. But there on the street corner praying with my hand on her/his shoulder, this felt like a new meal. Risk taken. The reward of the risk, a deep satisfaction.

I am not addicted to strangeness. In some sense I do choose it out of a sense that this is often where I find Jesus. I find myself writing about it often because its taste jolts my dulled senses so much. But more often than not, it seems like it is strangeness that chooses me. Perhaps it is a confrontation that I need.

Because the location of a meeting we attended after my dinner of warthog tonight it was not safe to walk alone, so another male delegate and I accompanied two young female delegates to their hotels for safety. It turns out that one of them was the daughter of a Christian leader in Mexico City that I have partnered with over the years. I have been in her home celebrating their amazing ministry among the urban poor of their city. The strange, miraculous circumstances I often find myself in seem to me to be orchestrated by a heavenly chef. And tonight was like desert.

Signs of Hope in The Lemonade

2010-07-23T15:12:00.000-07:00

In Guatemala City we took our students to the largest slum of Central America, called La Limonada (literally, The Lemonade), sitting at the feet of two of the most amazing urban leaders in the city, Tita Evertsz and Pastor Erwin Shorty Luna.

Tita has 15 years experience serving La Limonada through specialized children's programs before and after school. She literally had to escort us into the slum due to its level of danger. The respect the community has for her was our protection. We descended down into a ravine via a path leading around slum shacks cobbled together by rusting corrugated tin, rotten wood and concrete, to one of two schools she has built. The ravine flowed with a river of garbage and sewage, but it could not overwhelm the river of hope that flows in this notorious slum.

Just the week prior Tita had received a death threat from gang members who wanted protection money. Yet even the threat served the kingdom because some young gang members she had been loving and serving, upon seeing how shaken Tita was, dropped to their knees in prayer for her, indignant that someone should threaten her. God allowed them to see the impact of such threats on someone they loved -- significant because some of them had demanded protection money of others. I know this is an overused phrase, but she is truly the Mother Teresa of Guatemala.

Shorty is one of Joel’s gang chaplains, who grew up a street kid on the streets of Guatemala City and then was a major gang member in L.A. A powerfully built man with a quick smile, he is now working hand in hand with Tita doing some church planting work in the heart of La Limonada. He is a mature Christian who flows with a deep knowledge of Scripture and a spirit of joy.

The whole community loves Shorty and Tita as they have built relationships through Tita’s schools, and Shorty’s fearless mentoring of violent youth.

Then we visited a shack where a severely retarded 16 year old girl lived like a hermit on a rotting mattress in a corner of a dark room. The shack was perched over the ravine. Her mother was overwhelmed, as well as trapped by an abusive husband, who was sexually abusing the three daughters. I felt like throwing him out the window into the ravine, but thankfully Tita is pursuing a wiser approach. During that visit we were able to get the ball rolling to get the girl to a care facility run by an associate. A God-ordained coincidence — a Dios-idence according to Tita — meant the colleague was just a five minute walk from the shack when we called him. He was able to join us right away and get the story. Tita began to ramp up her relationship with the Mom and look for a way out for her and the girls, which are few, given the abject poverty.

Shorty and Tita are signs of hope that the world needs to know about.

We also spent an afternoon and evening in the city of Peronia where a controversial pastor has garnered a peace accord between the two rival gangs in his community. He spent the entire day with us. We met former rival gang members that are now friends. Crime in the whole district has dropped a reported 74%. More hope.

The Scriptures say, "There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God." (Ps 46:5). La Limonada (literally, The Lemonade -- leaves a sour taste) is becoming a city of God. Others see shacks wrapped in misery. Tita and Shorty said they feel that unless you can learn to see joy and beauty in the midst of pain sand suffering you will never last in this call of God. I needed to hear that and see it demonstrated. I see hope and fragrance of sweet lemonade.

Boxes of Bones

2010-07-20T06:34:00.000-07:00

You may not want to read this. I promise happier thoughts in the future. But my privilege requires it.

Entering into another country’s open wound – mass murder and genocide – is like standing next to the surgeon as they probe a cancer. It feels personal, and a privilege, though I never met any of the victims. Yet I have heard from their children and grandchildren, have seen their tears, and strangest of all, have touched their very bones. They are stacked in clear bags and cardboard boxes at the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala, as they are matched through meticulous DNA testing with the some 50,000 people who were “disappeared” during the Armed Conflict. This is a crucial project for the healing of the nation, not to mention the individual peace of thousands of families. And it is a chance to ask about the role of the church in this healing, about the church’s silence at key points, about the ways the sins of the past reach into the present daily life of Guatemalans. The blood still cries out from the ground.

I’m not sure what to write about this, so can I process my junk for a minute? What relevance could this strange privilege of mine – to glimpse a national agony not my own -- have to my friends? I don’t know the answer to that question; perhaps you can tell me. At least bear with me. At the next table tonight, an American youth group from Michigan is here on a mission project. They are serving Guatemalan kids. Their youth pastor announced to me that Jesus really didn’t call people to end poverty. They are just here to save the street kids of Guatemala City. But I wondered what he would say to the relatives of the victims, or to the custodians of the bones. Did not Zaccheus’ repentance mean justice for those whom he had oppressed in his city? The Youth Pastor’s gospel drives him to acts of compassion, but cannot lead him to imagine, let alone pay the price needed for there to be transformation of evil systems. His message of love, delivered to the grandchildren of the murdered, will be appreciated by them, but does he realize the children on the street are there precisely because generation of Grandfathers was violently removed from their role as provider and model? Did their pain and the agonized cry of the children left to fend for themselves not echo in God’s ears, break God’s heart? As Ray Bakke reminds, did not a political decision by Herod mean that hundreds of kids died for Jesus before he had a chance to die for them? Does the heart of Jesus not long to transform the systems that keep pumping out modern day Herods in every generation? And because our CIA funded the Herods of that generation, do I not bear some responsibility to speak for these bones? Sorry, impolite questions.

I saw it lying on the table at the forensic lab, though I could almost feel as if it saw me. It was the latest skull to be unearthed, found among the murdered. It was slightly larger than my fist. Children have always suffered worst for the sins of adults.

As I passed through rooms stacked to the ceiling with sealed and tagged boxes – the remains of identified victims – my fatigue began to grow. As I listened to our guide, I absent-mindedly leaned against a stack of them, as if a wall. A pillar of bones, some with the unique signatures left by machetes on limbs or gunshots to heads. Thousands of tibia, fibula, clavicles, hip bones, no longer privileged to support their original owners, they now supported me – helped stand me up straight for a little longer. The least I can do is stand up for them. The least I can do is to train leaders to ask the impolite question, imagine a future without need for a place like this, and organize their lives around that quest.

Something Larger than Myself

2010-07-11T09:34:00.000-07:00

Standing by the General Grant Tree in Kings Canyon National Park it is easy to feel small -- something that rarely happens to me. I tend to be the tallest thing around, unless my sons are also in the room. The fact that this Giant Sequoia has stood silently since the time of Christ, towering above its companion Lodgepole Pines and Western Red Cedars impresses smallness on everything in its shadow. I love that feeling. I sat, immersed in it, sketching the lower portion and its fire-scar because I was taken by its swirling red and amber texture. But there is no way to sketch the hugeness, the feeling of weight, the dominance, and the soaring height. There is no sketchbook tall enough, no journal with enough pages to explore the contrasts between us.

If there are few living things that can make me feel puny, there are plenty of circumstances that seem to have that power. My work is populated with things larger than myself, and every day the scouts send back reports of giants in the land. It's on days like that when I need go stand in the shadow of real giants. I need the reminder that some things which loom large are large only in my imagination. Being at the foot of something real blows these ghosts away. But there's something else that happens as well, as I crane my neck to take in the top and then let my eye extend past it. I worship the One who made the Sequoia, the One for whom that tallest, heaviest of living things is no more than a matchstick.

That's when smallness becomes a gift.

In praise of all that reaches high

Of all that towers tall

Which in their redness pierces sky

And dwarfs the false gods all

I praise the mind that dreamed of giants

And planted them for me

And pray that I remain compliant

Then join their company

Ya Man

2010-05-14T09:14:00.000-07:00

Well, at least I flew over the famed beaches of Jamaica. Waves rolled to shore in layers, just like the photo-shopped pictures in travel magazines. But then the plane also rolled, and all I saw was cloud. I thought to myself, this is getting ridiculous. It’s so typical for me. I can’t count the times I served in New York City at urban projects and have still not seen the Statue of Liberty. Just the basement of some inner-city church. Same with the famous souk in Amman, and the White House or Smithsonian in DC, and many historic churches and sites in the 30 cities in the US I served in. Too busy to see them. Never any time. Too much fatigue by the time I’m done. And now, I can add the beach in the world’s quintessential vacation spot to the list of things missed.

But, I did see something that many won’t because of it’s location. Ya Man, it was random but I saw Bob Marley’s house. I don’t know much about Marley. Reggae. Weed. Dreads. A legacy of music known around the world. Marley came from the rough streets of a slum called Trench Town, which he sang about. Our students will study Trench Town next April, so I was doing an advance trip to scout it out. It is a poor and violent community that happened to bear one of the most internationally known music superstars. Did I go in the house? No. I passed it on the way to a literacy program for children that was on the same street . But I rolled down the window and heard the familiar beat and guitar tumble in. And I thought to myself, this is ridiculous.

My hosts couldn’t believe I spent only two days in country, and all of that in meetings. Typical American; always onto something else. In my case it was a conference in Memphis the following day. Not to say I didn’t see some cool stuff: an NGO specializing in transformational ministry. A micro-lending ministry and , an early childhood program, a reading program, a church plant, a radio ministry providing national commentary on the social conditions of the country, a spectacular view of Kingston Harbor. I ate some traditional Jamaican food, including Ackee and Salt Fish for breakfast. I met the Chick-fil-A guy of Jamaica. And the president of Caribbean Graduate School of Theology and I essentially raced down a restricted corridor in the Jamaican airport to get to a flight we didn’t have tickets for to grab the last two seats as they were closing the door. The bottom line? I didn’t make the beach, but I made some fabulous memories, as well as plans for next year. But when I take my students there, our toes are going in the sand on one day. And Memphis? Probably won’t do Graceland. Typical. Ridiculous.

Update on "Tampa"

2010-05-09T15:59:00.000-07:00

This the way "Tampa" spent his last weekend of freedom, before learning the police wanted him in connection with a home invasion robbery. He said "the ocean is much larger than I ever imagined." We couldn't pull him away. I read him that line from the old hymn that said "... for the wideness of God's mercy is like the wideness of the sea ..." and he was moved. He maintains his innocence, and aspects of the victim's testimony seems to suggest its possible. He is attending daily Bible readings in jail, and his Hope Now for Youth staff tell him he can resume his final two days of program when he gets out, and graduate. We have tried to help him see this setback as "an opportunity. Be like Paul and Silas and get used to telling of God's goodness to your cell mates. And let's see how God expands the walls of that place. What matters most is what is ahead, not what is in your past. You have been set on a new path; God loved you too much to let you continue in the direction you had chosen. What do you want your life to be like when you are out?"

His next court appearance is May 12. Pray for God's plan in "Tampa's" life to be revealed, much larger and more beautiful than he ever imagined, and for justice tempered with the wideness of God's mercy.

I am in Miami, en-route to Kingston, Jamaica where I will lay the groundwork for a course in Transformational Leadership there next year. Yes, there are nice beaches. Perhaps I'll see one as I drive. But there is also some of the worst corruption in the world, which operates in the shadow of the highest number of churches per capita anywhere in the world. And dramatic poverty. Figure that one out. Obviously, something's wrong. Appreciate your prayers.

Of Refuge and Tears

2010-04-27T20:08:00.000-07:00

Please pray for our young friend "Tampa." I helped him turn himself into the police today. God provided in Numbers 35 that there be "Cities of Refuge," places where someone who committed a crime could run to avoid revenge. We provided safe haven -- refuge -- for Tampa after he initially provided information to the police about a crime, and because of it, was in danger from the gang he implicated. Though some cautioned us against it, it wasn't hard to take him in. We have known Tampa for more than a decade. He and his siblings grew up in our tutoring program. He used to sit on my lap to read. And there was no warrant for his arrest. He was scared, teachable, dependable, meek.

During this month Tampa went everywhere with us. We took him to church. He accepted Christ on my porch. We got him connected to Hope Now for Youth. He had perfect attendance. He volunteered every day at the Leadership Training Center helping with renovations. We took him to see the ocean, a first in his life. He helped me renovate a bathroom. We introduced him to many former gang members who are now in ministry, leading fruitful and beautiful lives. He told me he wanted to be like them. He went to community meetings with me where he saw Christians trying to improve their neighborhoods. Tampa's eyes were wide open this month, opened to a world that he was unfamiliar with. A gracious world, full of love and good will.

So when we woke this morning to the news that the police were seeking him in connection to the crime, we agonized. And we had to tell him that he should turn himself in. The day began with an appointment with an attorney. This is going to cost a lot of money. It continued with negotiations with police about a place to meet them. They could not say if it would be for an interview or an arrest. There was still no warrant. While we waited to hear from them, Tampa wanted to complete another day at Hope Now. He was to graduate on Thursday. So he went, and I paced. Paced, cried, prayed. I wondered if Tampa would have the courage to go through with it. I wondered if he would bolt.

The police set up a neutral ground for the meeting, something they don't normally do. Tampa and I went together. And they were gracious. But they arrested him. He has called me three times from various stages of the process. Just wants to check in, hear my voice as Tina says. He's doing the right thing. He says he feels OK. His mother and sister are in tears. Friends of mine who have surrounded him over these last few weeks have begun to call. Their caring helps. But tonight I end in tears as well. All the hours invested, all the prayers, all the hopes, all the fears we have experienced in these weeks came to a head. Whatever the verdict, I believe Tampa has become a child of God and has a fruitful future. And I think with the right guidance, Tampa will become the Man God intends. But for now, tears, and a sense that I need my own refuge.

We'll Be Right Back After this Message from God

2010-03-22T15:27:00.000-07:00

God's country, right?

I don't know where we were. It was pretty. With friends at the wheel, I didn't pay attention. I was distracted by baby-white wildflowers which covered the landscape like a dusting of snow. We got out of the car and started walking a trail that reminded me of Africa -- red earth and green hills. But the horizon was pure Scotland, minus mortarless rock walls or yellow gorse.

Our Friends Chris and Patty provided the guidance and companionship. We hiked to the mesa and looked down at Millerton Lake and the San Joaquin River snaking into it. OK, now with my bearings secured I could imagine myself a Miwok seeing this scene for the first time. This isn't Scotland or Africa -- this is 30 minutes from my house and I have never been here. OK, 30 minutes plus two hours hike up hill.

Tina did really well. Her new hiking shoes worked out, and her sky blue hiking blouse danced up the trails wicking sweat away just as advertised. The afternoon sun illuminated her beauty and she glowed. It started to cool off on our hike back to the car, but the challenge of the trail soon made us stop to rest.

When people say they experience God in the countryside, it often makes us want to scream. God is in the face of an inner-city kid who is learning to read. God is in the alley that has just been cleaned. God is in the house that is being renovated by a hopeful couple. God is in the teacher who prays for her student who has to navigate gang territory to get to school. God is in the tired Dad who still goes to a community meeting because things are being discussed that affect his neighborhood. God is in the Mayor's boardroom, the prostitute's bedroom, the casino's back room. We don't have to go to the countryside, OK? He's in relationships, in suffering, in decision making, in the built environment, not just the created one. OK?

And OK, God is on the Mesa looking down at his handiwork. I needed the reminder. I need to do this more often.

800 Year-Old Words on Grief

2010-03-11T16:15:00.000-08:00

Theologian Raymond Brown is famous for saying "All truth is God's Truth." By that he meant that if something is true, it doesn't matter who said it, whether Jesus or someone else. The spirit of Jesus lives in and expresses itself through people who have yet to discover the source of their wisdom. So, while I will always look first to the scriptures for help in dealing with the grief I feel over the untimely and tragic death of my pastor, I also pay attention to those who speak the language of the heart with insight and integrity. Such is the person of Rumi, the 13th century Afghani mystic. He wrote in Persian, often referred to God as his Beloved or Friend, and seemed especially in touch with the human experience. I could share many, many lines from his poetry that have helped me, but for now let me just leave this one short offering, there for any who would say the lines thoughtfully and prayerfully.

My heart, make friends with grief

And if you do, what luck!

Embrace it for your grief

Is the call your Beloved answers.

The Hebrew King David said something similar ...

the Lord is near to the broken-hearted.

So I am grateful for these simple, ancient affirmations, both from eastern cultures. One Inspired and the other Divine. Both consistent with Emmanuel -- God with us, in our time of mourning.

New shoes lead to new destinations

2010-03-08T13:44:00.000-08:00

I have never been a backpacker. I did one major trip when I was in high school that nearly killed me, and ended a friendship with one of my buddies when we discovered just how we got on each other's nerves. Of course we were too ambitious -- tried to go too far on the HARDEST trail in Kings Canyon , carrying 65 pound packs.

When we started our family, Tina and I took the boys camping a few times, again in Kings Canyon (got to get back on the horse -- face your fears) but it never took hold as a lifestyle. I did get some good pictures of us frying the tiny fish we caught, and I pull them out occasionally just to remind our sons that I am not just some latte-sipping, art gazing, poetry freak of a dork. I am that, but I can stand by an open fire with the best of them, as long as I have fire-starter.

So when REI had an amazing sale, and after my sons fooled me into going by saying that REI was an art store called Really Expressive Impressionists, I went. OK, OK, it wasn't that bad. But I could not pass up a pair of hiking boots that were originally $200 on sale for $49.83. Which led me to buy another pair for an equally low price, because it was such a good deal. All for a guy who hasn't hiked in a very long time.

So we went hiking -- OK, walking really, but in the foothills by a stream, which makes it hiking in my book.

Which just goes to show that new shoes can lead to new destinations.

Which made me wonder, as I was rewarding myself with a latte, what new shoes does the church in Fresno need, that might lead to some new destinations for the gospel?

Boys Become the Teachers of the Man

2010-03-04T18:44:00.000-08:00

As we all have tried to come to terms with the death of Pastor Jamie Evans, I have so often been at a loss for words. This is embarrassing for someone like me -- who lives by words. Embarrassing for a Dad, who would, eons ago, lay his hand on the shoulders of his sons when they were young, praying silently for just the right thing to say.

Because of this void during these sad, sad days, I find myself latching onto other people's words to stand in for me. A fellow leader says in times like this "we need to care for each other" and I repeat that to people who look to me for guidance. Another friend shares that depression is like a cancer of the mind and can turn a person into someone else at the end. This seems true, and as good an explanation of the tragic decision Pastor Evans made this week as any, and so I put it forth in candid conversations among people trying to make sense of such awfulness. These and many other words have rolled off my tongue like I knew what I was talking about. But in truth, my own mind is numb with the loss. There are no words. And so, I am grateful for those who are able to summon words of power in the midst of crisis. My son Joseph reflected on John Donne's taunting of death in Death be not Proud - -

for, those whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow, die not

... and I was encouraged. The poet sometimes has an edge over the preacher in that the goal is not explanation, but consolation. That led me to the poet Dylan Thomas who said

though lovers be lost, love shall not; and death shall have no dominion

... and knowing he was referring to the resurrection passage of Romans 6:9 I was consoled. Death is not the end and will not rule. Then through some means which I don't now remember, my son Jameson reminded me somehow of the terrible hope in the midst of tragedy that sets the gospel apart -- that good can one day grow from this seedbed of pain. The right word at the right time.

So I have no words in this time. I guess I am OK with that. While it is true, as Kieth Webb sings,

I am like a mockingbird

I have no new song to sing

I just tell you what I've heard

I'm like a Mockingbird

... at the same time I realize its not always up to me to provide the right word. The words of others will do. But I'm not at a loss for them. Like colorful and soft gifts, they are dropping like blossoms on my shoulders. They have helped me work through my own grief.

The best of them have come from my sons. The boys have become teachers of the man.

Randy's Newest Book at the Presses

2010-02-24T13:59:00.000-08:00

I am excited to announce the publication of my new book

Poetic Intercessions: Artful Prayers for a Friend.

This book took shape over a year’s time when I was praying for a friend who had had a stroke. Each week, I wrote prayers in poetic form and sent them to my friend. He was greatly encouraged by my having labored over these, by their creativity, and their potential usefulness for followers of Jesus as they pray for their friends who are sick. He has since fully recovered.

Artist Tiffany Cable did ten, monochromatic watercolors for the book, corresponding to several of the prayers. They are beautiful.

Then, amazingly, celebrated author and poet Luci Shaw caught a vision for this project and wrote a powerful foreword. I was really humbled by her affirmation.

It will be available at Harmon Press as well as Amazon, or through your local bookstore by order. But for those of you in Fresno, I will have a limited supply of both paperback and hardback at a more than 30% discount.

It’s at the press now and should be available soon. You can see a brief description at the following link: http://harmonpress.com/bookstore/poetic-intercessions-artful-prayers-for-a-friend/

Thanks for your friendship and interest,

Randy White

Poppy & EJ

2010-02-06T20:16:00.001-08:00

I'm Poppy, I'm your Daddy's Dad

And you are my Grand Daughter

You make me very, very glad

I feel I could walk on water!

Lizzy Joy, you're so fun

Lizzy Joy, a gift of God the Son

Your Poppy loves you, you should know

He prays for you each day

He loves you when you're high or low

And so he'd like to say ...

Lizzy Joy, you're so fun!

Lizzy Joy, a gift of God the Son!

What I Can Do

2010-02-01T15:18:00.000-08:00

I lay awake at midnight on my box-spring-of-a-bed in a Ghana hotel room, wondering whether the experience I had orchestrated was accomplishing its purpose. Because no one can be an expert on all cultures, all cities, all urban strategies for mobilizing God's people for transformational influence, I was overwhelmed with the complexity of the task. The task: leading three non-english-speaking students from China, a student from post civil-war Sierra Leone, a French speaking African from Niger, an Americanized Nigerian, a Tanzanian, a tri-lingual Canadian and five students from the U.S. in a dialogue where they would learn from site visits, from me and each other how to focus their ministries on transforming their cities. They were all so different, all coming from various degrees of ministry experience and theological training. With our Ghanaian hosts I had crafted a daily diet of teaching, dialogue and site visits to NGOs and churches making a difference in the city of Accra. I knew that I had done my best, but the goal seemed elusive at midnight, and sleep deprivation proved detrimental to faith at that moment. There in the quiet of my hotel room I kind of lost it. I wish I had remembered then what I recall now -- that is, the time I tried to have a serious manuscript Bible study on Habakkuk involving a gang member, a college freshman girl, a man convicted of murder but recently released from prison on a technicality, and a gray-haired member of a presbyterian church mission committee. "What the heck am I doing?" I asked myself at the front end. "There's no way this is going to work." But it did. Everyone learned something. In the end, it was also true for the group in Ghana, though it had its own challenges. Students have begun to make plans in their own cities. It's fun to see these emerge, even in their initial stages. It's fun to consider that these emerge from a dialogue I set up, rather than primarily from expertise I pass along. I know that my experience in Urban Ministry and Christian Community Development plays a role. But there's something else that is going on -- something that happens in the dynamic of a dramatic urban environment, the interaction of committed practitioners, and the prayers of saints from around the world that are laying the spiritual foundation for this kind of learning. I just need that perspective when I am staring at the ceiling at midnight. So I do what I can do, and pray that God accepts that offering and makes it more than it is.

He Could Have Been Dead

2010-01-29T05:46:00.000-08:00

He could have been dead

But at 40 miles per hour

I couldn’t tell as our class sped past

His shirt the color of dust

Lay draped over his thin frame

In the gully beside the road

The cloud of debris kicked up by our bus

Settled over him

A burial in stages

One thin layer

One disinterested car at a time

But I did notice

His hand formed a pillow

A mat kept him from

Dissolving into the brown African soil

Resting, not dead.

Homeless Lord

You who had nowhere to lay your head

Should he rise tomorrow and

Shake off his earthen blanket

May he roll up his mat with hope

And find a new bed among the loved.

I give myself to a world where he can.

Help! I Cry Help from Ghana.

2010-01-25T00:39:00.000-08:00

Help! I cry HELP from Ghana. If you can read this, HELP me celebrate an amazing day. I don’t want to let it be lost or just reflect on it alone. We took our 16 doctoral students from China, Europe, Africa and the U.S. to visit a micro lending institution in Accra that is taking lending to the poor to a new level. They provide loans to the very poor by taking the banking process to them, often in their shanty towns and mega slums. Mobile bankers establish daily visits to individuals to help them save in a very liquid, informal economy. Though savings amounts are small, they accumulate and provide a base for getting micro loans – enough for a sewing machine or a storage unit or a small stall in a market. Portable deposit machines record their savings and issues receipts. These loans, like most micro loans in the world, are made mostly to women, and the mobile bankers are mostly women. The repayment rate is 95%. Lives are being improved physically, and meanwhile, the staff of the bank has daily prayers with each other and their customers. Next week we will meet with a similar organization, this one more of a ministry, and spend time with one of the recipients of a loan. Our students are getting all sorts of ideas for their contexts.

But that’s not all. The morning began with Stephan de Beer of the Tshwane Leadership Foundation (TLF) in Pretoria, South Africa, who walked us through the essential disciplines of becoming Reflective Practitioners of Transformational Leadership. I can’t possibly do it justice! Stephan helped us become “imagineers” – those who can envision characteristics of a new reality for each of our cities around the world, and outline initial steps to fostering some of those components. Stephan called us to cry more for and shout less at our cities, and then called us to laugh with those among the poor who laugh – laugh, in the words of Cox, as the “last weapon of hope.” He helped us deconstruct the narratives that are told about our cities – Fresno is an armpit, Fresno will always be uneducated, Fresno is a nothing town, Fresno is dangerous – and construct an alternative godly vision that can give us practical guidance as to how we apply ourselves. Then he demonstrated what he had said by sharing what is happening in Pretoria through TLF.

There is so much more, but for now, just celebrate with me, won’t you? God has done something very fine today. And cities around the world will be different in the future because of it.

Randy's Twilight Zone

2010-01-09T21:04:00.000-08:00

This is just too strange. Something in the Universe has shifted. Tina is reading and I am cleaning. OK I lied about the cleaning, but I needed that image to show you how the universe has shifted. Because Tina is sitting there where I normally sit, doing what I normally do. Except that she's added a nice twist by having popcorn at her side and is now making all sorts of annoying crunching sounds as she soils the pages of Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea with salty, buttery fingers. Makes me want to have four shots of whiskey.

Meanwhile all I can do is think of my little E.J. White, all 7+ lbs of her. I think that with initials like that she will eventually be writing children's books like Five, Fully Loaded Diapers or, what's sure to be a hit in Canada, No, Don't Take Me Ice Climbing.

Today I trimmed trees and vines (Tina tells me this is what normal people do on weekends), attended a funeral, bought some shoes for me and a frame for a picture of Elizabeth imitating Joseph's "yes, I swallowed the canary" look, re-polyurethaned my fireplace and mantle, took my first wife to dinner, ate cake at a neighbor's, watched another man trim a much larger tree, called my Dad on his 92 birthday, heard my 89 year old Mother tell me she loves me, bought a hat for my trip to Ghana next Friday, and listened to my first wife crunch. I don't get that many weekends home, so I packed a lot in. This was a good one, even if the universe has shifted. I could use a few more of these.

To Elizabeth Joy White - 7 pounds, 3 ounces, Dec 26, 2009

2009-12-26T22:02:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Joy, a beautiful name

E.J. White, an author? a poet on her way to fame?

Consecrated by God, a comfort in pain

Bringer of sunshine to a world of rain.

Born early this morning to Heidi and Joe. Mother, Daughter and Dad doing fine. Grandparents ecstatic.

Flight North

2009-12-10T13:55:00.000-08:00

Its warmer above the blanket,

That cottony cover that shrouds the

Still sleepy coastline, over which I fly.

Below it, dawn’s breaking remains unknown,

It’s signal flare not seen.

But we have sliced a tear,

Shown it to be nothing as we rise toward the

Automatic cheer of the day’s beginning.

And now, as we leapfrog the blue-haired chain of

Seven Sisters, who stretch and reach for the

Reality above, I watch their timeless peaks pierce the shade,

Their craters catching the first amber rays,

Surrounding cinder cones appear as

Innocent dimples on the smiling face of a

Rested Earth.

Leaving hurts, but

This helps.

RWW 2009

When I am Gone

2009-12-01T18:40:00.000-08:00

When I am gone

It is as if drought has struck

The creamy Buttercups that once blanketed the

Rolling contours of a

Softened soul

Give way to endless prairie

With only sage to pluck

A sad bouquet

Un-given

Each journey exacts a

Nameless toll

There’s life in the thirsty plain

Its true

But coming home to you

Is the hope of rain

Chesterton's Reminders

2009-11-25T21:00:00.000-08:00

I found thee two quotes from G.K. Chesterton, my favorite English thinker from the last century (along with Lewis and Tolkien and Sayers and -- Oh well, I guess there are a few ...) on the subject of GRATITUDE — a good thing to think about during Thanksgiving:

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs? ~G.K. Chesterton

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder. ~G.K. Chesterton

The first one is just clever, and reminds us to get our priorities right during these holiday seasons. On that last one, I just love the idea that gratitude is “happiness doubled by wonder.” It works well for followers of Jesus, since we look to God in wonder over his indescribable gift, and are thankful for all his bounty.

But Chesterton also makes me grateful for those who use their minds in creative ways. He was amazing -- a journalist, playwrite, theologian, novelist, debater and overeater (he weighed 300 pounds).

Thank you, God, for your image embedded in humankind -- the swirl of your fingerprints are all over us.

The Tondo Trinity: Bat People, Drainage Dwellers, and the soon to be displaced

2009-10-15T15:38:00.000-07:00

Visited the Tondo slum where millions of people are trying to cling to a life so precarious that any piece of infrastructure, no matter how crumbling, provides a piece of their survival strategy. There for we have what are being called "Bat People", those who piece together shacks that hang suspended from freeway overpasses. They cannot stand up in them, yet some have been there so long they've raised their kids. Having no land rights or access to land, they claim the air above it, baking from the heat of the cement and being rattled by constant traffic overhead. Some 150,000 per year come from the country to the city in Manila and and about 50,000 end up here. Or they end up here:

This is a drainage pipe under a road. We crawled inside and met a family of four who are living there, along with three other families have made that wet, dark space their home for the last two years. Crouching over as we listened to their story I could not stand up straight as the sweat dripped off my nose. The father had seasonal work, the mother had her hands full, the oldest daughter had just dropped out of high school because she didn't have the extra money needed for school projects -- amounting to about $1.50. Her future is turning on such a small hinge.

As I travel to observe these dramatic situations and help my students formulate strategies, it seems like there is a fine line between voyeurism and gathering the information, personal experience and perspectives necessary to be an advocate. I pray that my glimpses into humanity may lead to God's bringing of peace for this family and others in the cities of the world.

Have I become so strange?

2009-10-11T19:51:00.000-07:00

In the Botocan community (slum) in Manila I visited Aaron and Emma Smith (he an American and she a Filipina that grew up in the Balik Balik slum that nancy Donat ministered in -- she as a little girl knew Nancy). They are Servant Partners staff who are living there incarnationally. I walked with them down a labyrinth of alleyways, over an open sewer ditch, past dogs and roosters, by dozens of children playing between rusting tin siding, sprouting in the slums like daisys in the cracks of the concrete. I sat in their two-room space where they live with their 2 year old son Zach who sleeps with them on the floor. They have running water and electricity which makes them slightly better off than their neighbors but it means a greater chance of them being able to sustain their efforts at planting a church over the long haul. The kids on their alley love them and kept peeing in out of curiosity.

Had my first ride in a Jeepnee yesterday, and also my first ride in twhat they call a Tricycle here, a motorcycle with a side car. I sat sidesaddle on the back and held on for dear life as my friend got the side car. It reminded me of the question Ray Bakke always asks: "what is better, a bicycle or a jet airplane? Answer: depends on where you want to go and who is with you. The same is true of ministry models and churches. No one size fits all needs and goals."

We also visited a house church in the Welfareville Slum, Block 37.1. This area was flooded in the recent typhoon. What a mess. What chaos. What amazing beauty in the lives of those we met. It was the worst labrynthine slum I have ever been in. Worse than Calcutta, worse than San Jose - CR, worse than Mexico City, worse than China. Trash burning, the black acrid smoke clogging the lungs. Shacks cobbled together -- housing made of trash. Thousands of illegal electrical connections.

We sat under a tarp covered area next to a shanty -- a space for the church gathered. At one point a woman shared her testimony in Tagalog. She and her son had been separated in the flood from the typhoon, and was missing for three weeks. He had just been returned to her. She herself was nearly drowned as she tried to cross a street to get to work. The raging waters carried her away. Because she missed work, she lost her seamstress job, and the $4/day wages. She was in tears with gratitude for her life and the life of her son, but in need of a solution.

That night I ate dinner alone, exhausted from the exposure, the issues, the discussions. I signed my bill for the dinner and realized what had just spent could have fed her for five days. As I travel to the slums of the world, I am more troubled, not less.

As we ended the service with songs and prayers I told the women gathered that our students had come from around the world to visit them because we heard that Jesus (Hesus) was in their midst, in Block 37.1, and if they loved one another they would see him. I aid they are not alone, that people all over the world are praying for them. Their warm smiles and attention told me that they felt encouraged, but I continued to be troubled. Had I over-spoken? Did I promise too much? Weren't these words easy for me to say? Nevertheless, I felt it was right.

From there we went to a mega church that meets in a mall. They are reaching young, affluent youth. Thirteen services, the latest media, lots of energy. It might be said that they are reaching a constituency that no one else is through their methods. But I left with the question, "what does reaching mean?" I hope their vision of the church includes the poor I had left earlier that morning.

I felt empty. I wondered, "have I become so strange that I cannot enjoy worship among the comfortable? " God help me if I am becoming judgmental. God renew your church to include justice for the poor.

My Search for Sex Workers in Manila

2009-10-09T08:05:00.000-07:00

So we walked along Quezon street in Manila tonight, horns blaring, sewer vents stinking, nervously picking our way across crumbled concrete hoping to run into young women selling themselves. Our Samaritana guides rehearsed what we would do. They would make the contact, we would step back and pray. Before long we came upon a group of people gathered on a storefront porch out of the rain, some sleeping on cardboard mats, others preparing for the evening ahead where they would trade sex for money, where little pieces of them will die one customer at a time. Only, our guides introduced the girls to us directly and asked us to pray for them directly. The group of leaders from Myanmar that I was helping to lead were deeply moved, and began to tell me that they had never seen this kind of ministry before, one like Samaritana that reached out in friendship with these young women, invited them into relationship, provided job counseling and assistance, medical care. They prayed with fervor, and began talking about what it would take to start such an outreach in their cities. In the end we prayed for seven women, Jenny, Janette, Nancy, Vanessa (who started taking drugs recently), Sherry, Carasita, and Camille. We prayed for a 15 year old girl. And we prayed for the committed women who led us. Oh God, have mercy on your children.

Typhoon's impact increased by human sin

2009-10-08T05:40:00.000-07:00

The vision from my hotel room includes this building that has collapsed from the recent Typhoon Ketsana in Manila. This is but a tiny example of the devastation that residents are still dealing with in the aftermath. Now, even two weeks later, the waters are still creating a glut of piled up trash, and sludge. Typhoon Parma followed Ketsana and is still parked over the north of Luzon dumping meters of rain on a fatigued population. But here's my question: Is this an act of God, as they say? Well, of course. It's a natural disaster, right? Rain is God's territory.

OK. I'll give you that. But there's more to the story of the 250 people who lost their lives in the flooding. Rain is an act of God, but not the choices that city planners made about how to handle the rains in historic flood basins. That corruption, greed, and lack of moral leadership that led to those deaths is man's specialty. Government abandoned the role of stewarding the commonwealth of the people, caved into commercial interests, cut costs of projects that could have led to better draining even thought the engineering was there. And worse yet, God's people who are in key positions in government have been taught that their faith is best expressed in praying over their meals and sponsoring office prayer meetings, rather than shaping more just policies in local government. In fact, many of them have been taught to separate religious belief from political involvement.

But we are called to seek the well-being of our cities (Jer 29:7), to invest ourselves in them. That's what I have been doing here in Manila. My students are learning about the relationship between Christian ministry and city planning -- learning about how to help the church contribute to more just policies, the alleviation of suffering, and the stewardship of God's creation that we were meant to tend. Pictured below are students from Myanmar, Brazil, the Philippines and Nigeria working together on a plan for shalom in their cities.

May God use our time in Manila to create cities of God across the globe.

Profile in Courage

2009-07-17T20:26:00.000-07:00

Ray Bakke has said that some things in history have been just too difficult or too dangerous to do, so God has called a woman to do it. Such is the case of one of my DMin students, Po Ming of Hong Kong. She lives in the Kowloon City district, a space with thousands of poor that many in Hong Kong stigmatize and avoid. Here in Costa Rica where she is studying in the program I am teaching, you see her reaching out instinctively to children in the Los Tables slum of San Jose. It is an extremely dangerous area we visited and served in, and you see her loving children on the spot where there had just been a murder last month. Po Ming came from a difficult family situation growing up, but broke free and came to Christ, who has now called her back to the very kind of environment she had left. She planted a church for the urban poor of Hong Kong, and now is part of an NGO that reaches out there. I don't know whether I am teaching the class, or she is. I know that I am humbled by her courage, and so sad that most what she does is invisible to most of the world. But there is One other who sees, and I know that there are tears of joy in his eyes tonight too.

Red Light Prayers - Part 2

2009-07-15T23:33:00.000-07:00

After having spent this night with my students on deserted Costa Rican street corners in conversation with young transvestite men who were selling themselves, the haunting words of Octavio Paz pulled at me.

I am a man: Little do I last

And the night is enormous.

But I look up:

the stars write.

Unknowing I understand:

I too am written,

at at this very moment

someone spells me out.

They were men but their names were

Nicole and Jasamina,

Alejandra,

Stephania and Erica.

I will not forget them.

The bondage they are in, like the city corner they inhabit, is a

Dark and cavernous abyss,

An empty anonymity.

But I knew that God knew who they really were, knew their stories, felt their pain and alienation, was loving them even as they were.

I knew he was tracing the letters of their real names in stardust,

In the tail of some comet,

Was longing that they come to know their true identity in Christ, longing to free them to be loved with a pure love, as he intended.

It's 1am but I wonder if I will sleep tonight

Knowing that they are still under the night sky,

Praying that they will look up.

Red light prayers

2009-07-15T14:48:00.000-07:00

Your prayers are appreciated tonight as I take a group of Bakke students to support a ministry that reaches out to women who are practicing prostitution as well as transvestites, all of whom hang out in the parks in downtown San Jose, Costa Rica from 7pm to midnight. Obviously, because of language barriers and lack of expertise, our participation is via prayer and whatever interaction we can foster through translation. We want to communicate hope and grace. Our prayers will rise through the glare of neon red tonight, heard by a God who is not scandalized by the poor choices of his children, nor passive toward a system that often forces such choices. Senor Jesus, nececitamos su ayuda.

Transformation Tracker

2009-06-30T13:26:00.001-07:00

Many times we don’t get the privilege of seeing the immediate fruit of our work. But when we do, it is so encouraging. Perhaps you remember that I spoke into the lives of some African leaders in Ghana in January. They came from six different nations, including Sierra Leone, which has just emerged from a decade of civil war. One of those students was Warren Fornah (pictured here), a pastor and Christian leader in Freetown, a city of 5 million in Sierra Leone. As a result of our time together he feels called to use his position and influence over about 200 churches to help his nation and city repair the social fabric that unraveled during the war, leaving many physical, psychological and spiritual scars. He feels the church has a special role to play. I just received word from him today that he has introduced some of the material I designed to help leaders in a city understand its identity (from chapter 20 of my book Encounter God in the City: Onramps to Personal and Community Transformation (IVP 2006)) to the main council of churches in the city – the one that helped to negotiate the truce between the government and the rebels. Warren reports that this material has, in his words, “immensely helped the council even as the process is on. The findings are gradually coming up. The exercise is quite exciting and helping to create a new paradigm for the entire council of churches in Sierra Leone.” I ask you to share my amazement and joy as some feeble effort I have made is producing a human harvest out of proportion to and beyond any skill I have – glory to God. I pray that thousands recovering from that civil war will benefit by a church newly equipped to understand and address the needs of the city of Freetown. And I pray for Warren as he presses ahead on the long road to recovery in Sierra Leone, for his perseverance and struggle.

Woman Married for 30 Years Smiles at Photographer

2009-06-22T19:07:00.000-07:00

After 30 years

It appears

All my fears

All her tears

Were worth it.

We spent our 30th Anniversary in Yosemite watching for signs of hope, signs of the spirit, things that represented a world larger than the life we have created with each other. What an irony - with all the grandeur of Yosemite around us, we found them in the small things, the delicate black and white Monarch and the eager Robin.

Maybe we needed the reminder that even in the world of marriage, its the small things -- the kind word, the laundry folded, the mess picked up -- that contain the largest messages.

We still enjoy being together. We're friends. It doesn't have to be Yosemite. Sometimes we rendezvous in the frozen food section of Save Mart.

Still, it's hard to beat lunch at The Ahwahnee Hotel, and a quick hike around the valley floor. Celebrate with us!

No mental energy so you get pictures

2009-03-26T21:38:00.000-07:00

I have no energy for blogging right now, in case you haven't noticed. Its been a long time. So, for now, maybe a picture will do. It says, "we're still here, we're generally happy, and that's a very nice tree."

Prayers Go Up

2009-02-16T09:24:00.000-08:00

In Ghana I type an email, then

Raise my laptop above my head

As if I am making an offering to the internet god.

The signal is better at that altitude.

Over and over I repeat this motion.

I type and lift

Type and lift

My message sent up prayer-like to the connected universe,

Like virtual incense.

I feel like some sort of

Cyber pagan.

Travel Fast

2009-02-15T06:42:00.000-08:00

Go without food? No problem. I need to lose weight anyway.

Skip media for a time? It’s actually a relief.

Don’t scratch an itch? It’s a discipline for self-denial.

Deny myself some pleasure and replace with prayer? Common.

But take me to Ghana, through the tedium of terminals

Through heavy, humid days

And exhausted, lonely hotel nights –

The drama of children who with grace weave through wafts of black exhaust

Balancing massive, must-sell loads on their heads, approaching

The open windows of

Overstuffed worker-vans and rap-thumping Hummers –

Take me into the irresolvable dissonance of extremes –

The concentration required for me to connect across difference –

To running the show when knowing my deficit

Take me away from the one who is for me comfort and solid ground –

And this is the fast of my life.

G'Day from Sodom and Gomorrah

2009-02-08T08:44:00.000-08:00

Forgive me, I am teetering here in Accra. The woman I am looking at across the road is balancing a great basket of clothes on her head, picking her way along the crumbling roadside, stepping over the sewage ditch with such grace and refinement. I imagine her a Ghanaian Eliza Doolittle, reciting “The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain.” It is a grace that belies the circumstances, and I am discomfited . I have passed hundreds, thousands even, of other women and children with similar burdens in the space of a few days. Today I entered a slum in Accra that the residents themselves have labeled Sodom and Gomorrah. The women from this slum and thousands of others like it have developed ways of living – coping -- with the harsh indignities of life, ways that preserve order amidst the chaos. The contrast confronts me. Clothes are folded and placed atop, her baby strapped to her back, her hands left free to navigate the neighborhood. Even the young women standing in medians to sell fish or brushes or packets of water move so adeptly. Never out of balance or in danger of losing their load, they are twisting and turning to navigate the traffic, handing product to drivers and making change – all with what looks like half the contents of a hardware store or corner market on their heads. Even as they sweat profusely in the unforgiving heat and equatorial humidity, their grace and quickness to smile are a reminder of the gentle imprint of dignity that Jesus has given to every live soul. Perhaps all young debutantes in the US should spend a stretch of time on a Ghanaian street.

Forgive me, it’s the context that makes me totter. I am out of balance as I try to navigate this place, the daily, relentless, unchanging realities that shorten and harden life for its residents. The pollution that hangs in the heavy air from charcoal smudge pots where the poor fry plantain to sell at roadside, or the piles of refuse that endlessly smolder, since the city only picks up two thirds of the garbage that it generates every day. The desperate pressure to find work. The churches and mosques that present a spiritual message that either pacifies the populace or confirms the status quo. Today we exposed students to six churches with varying levels of engagement of the city, some operating for more than 150 years. Entire slums have grown up around them. Some have tried to respond with compassion. Few have gone beyond that with more systemic ministries that address the root problems. The ones that have are as inspiring as they are unusual.

And so I am not doing such a good job of balancing the world on my head. I am tripping and careening down the corridors of my calling to seek the peace of the city. Oh that some of the grace of these women would rub off on me. Oh that I would learn to smile through my burden. Oh that my hands would be free to help others in the process and be raised to God in praise.

And so I say G'Day from Sodom and Gomorrah

What the world needs now

2008-11-26T02:08:00.000-08:00

"The ruthless will vanish, the mockers will disappear, and all who have an eye for evil will be cut down." Isaiah 29:20

He pulls out a gun but up comes the sun

As he heads for the door he is out of C4

They lay in wait but get stuck at the gate

On their way to the bang love takes over the gang

He plans to hit her but is no longer bitter

She plans to steal but considers how she'll feel

We plot deceit but end in defeat

Mockers and mobs dissolve into blobs

Rage pours out red, but by noon he is dead

Hearts once ice cold, like flowers unfold

Of Icons and Saints

2008-11-02T06:47:00.000-08:00

Standing in the Hagia Sophia (The Church of Divine Wisdom) in Istanbul (ancient Byzantium, renamed Constantinople) is an experience of both amazement and deep frustration. Built in the sixth century by Emperor Justinian it was a wonder of the world, a thousand years ahead of its time in design and construction. It flourished as a center of Orthodox worship until the overthrow of the city by the Ottoman Empire, which turned it into a mosque. The majority of its amazing mosaics were plastered over by the Islamic prohibition on images. Now a museum they have uncovered a few (like my favorite above) to inspire visitors.

To stand in front of these is to open a window to the theology of early Christians. Jesus is clad in blue (for his humanity) and gold (for his deity). He often holds his right hand in a pose that crosses the first two fingers to convey his two natures, and combines the final two fingers with his thumb to convey the idea of the trinity. The devotion of the early faithful to these images is seen in the loving detail, right down to the gentle color of the cheek and the mournful emotion of the eyes. While Orthodox Christians do not worship these icons, they have for fifteen hundred years used them in worship to be transported from the temporal to the eternal.

I have been standing before these images in Turkish caves and Romanian churches now for weeks and I am realizing how dissatisfied I am with the casualness of my faith. The strength of evangelical tradition -- of what a friend we have in Jesus -- is also its weakness. It is a comfortable faith that is long on chattiness with the divine, and short on awe. Even if I cannot imagine adopting Orthodox practice or liturgy, I also cannot imagine a deepening of my faith if I continue to neglect the place of the imagination in worship or be so centered on the message and its social or ethical implications that I forget the real presence of God. I have found that great art can help in this process, as if providing a window through which we can glimpse the eternal.

In this (poor quality picture) of a Hagia Sophia mosaic, Emperor Constantine stands to the right of the Madonna and Child and offers to them what is most precious to him -- the city which he has created. On the left, Emperor Justinian stands and offers what is most precious to him -- the amazing church he constructed. The fact that both men were not the most admirable followers of Christ should not diminish an important lesson here. We should live our lives in such awe of God that we should direct the focus of our lives toward accomplishing something beautiful for the Kingdom, something worthy of the Eternal, and dedicate it to the author of beauty himself.

And some lived in Caves

2008-11-01T10:30:00.000-07:00

"They went about in sheepskins ... destitute and persecuted and mistreated -- the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains and in caves and holes in the ground. These were all commended for their faith ..." (Heb 11:37-39)

In Cappedocia (yes, the one mentioned in the Bible) early monks in the Orthodox tradition formed monastic communities, both men and women, to deepen their faith. These became educational as well as ascetic, and shaped the early life of the church. They literally carved homes and chapels and refectories from the very sandstone, frescoing the interiors in the symbols and stories of the gospel, turning the desert into a faithful city.

Into this environment Ray Bakke, Robert Calvert and I took our class to examine the influence of the Cappedocian Fathers, St Basil and others who so shaped the faith and practice of the church as Christianity began to deal with the rise of Islam in the fourth through sixth centuries, a very contemporary issue again today.

Ephesus: They met on our behalf

2008-10-30T10:51:00.000-07:00

What does it mean that more than four hundred bishops entered through this arch in the fifth century at what is known as the third ecumenical council? What does it mean that it is now the ruin, as is the rest of Ephesus where the remains of this church sit? Paul ministered in this city -- almost got killed here. He left Timothy in charge of a fledgling church that had to figure out what faithfulness to Christ meant in the context of pluralism. Later, those Bishops gathered from the known Christian world to hammer out some of the most basic doctrines of the church that we take as gospel. What does it mean that they marched through this arch? Though the buildings lie in ruins, the ideas continue to influence the very practice of our faith -- in ways most of us have no sense of. In other words, we stand on some ancient, Byzantine shoulders. Ideas have consequences. The extent to which I know anything at all about God is a gift from those that stood in this once vibrant church and deliberated on my behalf. They are the family I never knew, and now give thanks for.

The Library at Ephesus, once a wonder of the world. Now a fascade. Timothy had to frame his ministry in the shadow of the intellectual tradition it represented.

Did Paul and Timothy step on these very mosaic pieces? Their testimony endures and cries out, just as this pattern perseveres in the streets of the ancient city.

Commuting in Istanbul

2008-10-20T00:31:00.000-07:00

The metro in Istanbul is close to Mexico City's, except it's above ground. You stand at the entrance of the train and PUSH to get in. Everybody exhales at once to make more room. This morning I bailed out. Just too crowded. That meant I payed 1.4 lira (about a dollar) to walk a mile or more to my destination -- the Kapa Carsi (Grand Bazar). Students arrive for the Istanbul portion of the course today and I knew I wouldn't have much of a chance to see the place. It is a vast, tangled, indoor bazar full of vendors and merchants, all of whom have a question for you. I paid far too much for the scarf and Ottoman design tapestry I bought, because I invariably start the bargain process with an offer too high. At least I gave them a good start to their day. I had limited time, but I stopped for a glass of orange juice squeezed in front of me. Shop keepers were setting up, and old men with white, Abraham Lincoln beards dressed in islamic hats and western suit coats pulled carts past my table, laden with goods. Their commute was more labored than mine.

The ride back was easier. There was time and space to observe students on their way to Istanbul University, decked out in stylish, shiny head-coverings, sitting next to elderly women with more traditional, black chadoras, sitting next to business people in western dress. They all seemed comfortable with the differences -- secular muslim, conservative muslim, christian, young, old.

The traffic out my window starts before 7am, and it is the honking, rumbling, yelling kind. The commute is an unhappy and impatient one. There is no AC where I am staying, so an open window is required, and I hear every engine, every brake in need of replacement, every police loudspeaker, every siren, and every horn.

Everyone is going somewhere. As they go, I want them to know that they are not anonymous. Jesus observes them more closely than I have, knows their name, and loves them. Here in the cradle of Orthodoxy, the birthplace of Christian worship, at one time the city (Byzantium) regarded as heaven on earth, I want them to meet their savior who commuted our way.

Peace in the Middle East, Please God.

In Amman: Someone Else's History?

2008-10-15T10:18:00.000-07:00

I wish I knew my Biblical History better. I have read it any times -- references to the Ammonites, references to David's conquests in this ancient city, references to the Trans Jordan. But I just can't seem to remember it. Its because it is someone else's history, of course. Separated by time and culture I didn't live it. But now I am here in Amman, listening to a dear brother who is also the archbishop of the Armenian church in Iraq who has seen friends die and countless others leave, listening to a Palestinian Christian activist from the West Bank suffering the daily injustices of occupation and corruption, listening to a student worker from Beirut overcoming obstacle after obstacle for his love of students. And I find myself weeping at their lives, their courage, sometimes my country's complicity, and my disconnection from it all.

And because the hand has no right to say to the foot, "I have no need of you" I am listening with new ears. Their histories, their stories, have begun to merge with mine. Current history is being made on this Biblical earth and I cannot forget it.

Peace on the Middle East. Please, God.

Peace in the Middle East

2008-10-10T16:52:00.000-07:00

Its a phrase my kids used to say when leaving the house. It was meant to be ironic, or cool, or random or something. Later they shortened it to "peace out." I never resonated with either.

And now I am going there. I've been advised not to divulge publicly the countries in the Middle East to which I am headed. Better to not draw attention to the event there, endangering the Christian leaders I'll be with. I will attend an event designed to help western Christians listen to Arab Christians who are struggling to maintain both their witness and frankly their literal presence in the shadow of Islam. Then from there I will fly to Turkey to help lead a Bakke class from Istanbul to Bucharest, looking at ancient Christian traditions that have survived through centuries of conquest, oppression and fragmentation to a place of quiet influence in the Arab world.

Listening to Eastern Christians? Studying ancient traditions? What does this have to do with Urban Ministry? Byzantium (Istanbul) was regarded as the New Jerusalem on earth and has shaped more of our historic and modern faith than most can imagine. The great Schism dividing the eastern and western churches began there. Monasticism began in its shadow, inspiring other forms that spread around the world. Literacy was saved by these movements during the dark ages, and our best spiritual writers come from these roots. The earliest urban ministers, Catholics like Dorothy Day and Protestants like Luther and Calvin, took their cue from the early Eastern saints that labored in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria, impacting not only individuals in need but also city systems.

Africans have a word that gets at why this trip is important. "Sankofa" -- it means looking backward in order to look ahead. What was learned in the womb of the ME through the first centuries of the church's history will certainly inform how kingdom people move ahead in the context of political Islam. It is naive to live without regard for the rest of the world, as if we were not interconnected in a thousand ways. We need to understand that crucial region. What is happening in the ME affects us here. If we are to avoid the cynicism of those who do not believe in a God powerful enough to bring peace, we need to go and taste, reflect on site, build relationships and make connections. And we need to convey hope to those who are there. They are not alone.

Please pray for the trip.

Peace in the Middle East

Randy

Just Another Father's Pride

2008-08-30T19:55:00.000-07:00

There's no way of saying this without sounding cheesy. Some things by their nature beg being tuned out or forgotten because of their commonness. If I say, I'm often amazed by my sons, that I cannot explain how they became the good men they are, that their choices and decisions reflect a degree of thoughtfulness and faith that is beyond me, well I'm just another father talking.

But strangely, I who am used to addressing more esoteric subjects, feel the need to float this most basic of human emotions out in the universe somewhere. I was up at 3:30 this morning thinking of how proud I am of my sons. I see what they are giving their lives to -- that young people in Vancouver and Fresno would know the life-changing message of Jesus the Christ. They have both married women who are in every way beyond our highest dreams. They surround themselves with friends of quality who laugh and serve and provide this amazing extended family. And I am left with a sense of gratitude and the humility to know that, in spite of my fallenness, God has gifted them up to be who they are.

So I guess its not just a run-of-the-mill Father's pride that kept me up. Its amazement that I get to witness the fulfillment of all those prayers in the night a couple of decades ago when they were feeding or teething. Its amazement that someone with my particular set of sins and limitations gets to see the improvement of the species through grace alone. And its amazement and gratitude that they still care to hang out with me from time to time.

OK, maybe its just run-of-the-mill Father's pride.

In the Forest of Promise

2008-08-24T14:42:00.000-07:00

It's raining now, and the forested hill out my window is gracefully shedding the deluge into eager rivulets that lead to the creek at the edge of Ray and Corean Bakke's home in northern Washington. Winding through this land, Ray has crafted a 500 foot "Mission Trail," a soft, pine-needle carpeted pathway under a canopy of Douglas Fir, Red Cedar, and Hemlock. Markers every 100 feet or so celebrate the influence of missional Christians throughout the ages, folks like John of Damascus, St. Francis of Assisi, Benedict of Nursia, Martin Luther, etc. Ray has produced a guidebook for the trail, helping the hiker to reflect on the way the world is different because those people followed the climb God had them on. Occasionally there are signs posted that indicate when certain ones of God's people, Luther or John Knox or others 500 years or more previous, were ministering when the tree you are standing in front of had first started to grow. The trail ends in a circle of benches, a chapel in the woods, complete with a cedar pulpit and stone baptismal font. Here, it's easy to reflect on the amazing legacy of costly leadership that we operate under today, almost like the great canopy of Hemlock and Cedar that dance above that chapel.

I have walked this trail a few times over the years. It has never failed to raise my expectations of what a life committed to Christ could be. I walked it again yesterday, when it wasn't raining. Golden sun filtered through spaces in the canopy and, fell on amber colored humus, sharp shale and granite rock formations, and lacey spiderwebs sparkling across the path. Ray has planted more than 3,000 saplings on his property in the last four years, and they have been welcomed into the fellowship of older trees. As I reflect on these trees, it occurs to me that someone 500 years from now might choose to extend this mission trail and post another sign, which will say, "when this tree began to grow, Ray Bakke taught a generation to love their cities and seek their transformation."

I am often lost in thought on this trail, but never in danger of being lost in the forest, though the continuous tunnel of green beckons you around corner after corner. Occasionally there are living splashes of color that act as landmarks: a Huckleberry bush with its edible red berries, a deep plum Japanese maple, or a holly-leafed, Oregon wild grape. One of these splashes jumped out to a startle me as I rounded a bend, resulting in the following haiku:

Surprise hydrangea

Prankster flow'r of the forest

Blue marks my way home

Part of me wants to be one of those colorful splashes, a landmark. But in my saner moments, I know that I really just want to be a sapling planted in the company of elders. As I transition to working closely with Ray's international ministry over these next few years, I know that my branches will take on their own shape. I know that I will reach to drink in the sun at the edge of his remarkable shadow. And I pray that I will grow to be a tree that takes its place in the forest of promise.

The Whites stumble into technology

2008-07-07T20:39:00.000-07:00

We don't pretend to be good at this ...

Taking Down the Alphabet

2008-06-08T07:03:00.000-07:00

Tina stood on a chair to reach for the alphabet that was strung across and around the top of the tiny tutoring room at the back of our house last night. I couldn't bear to watch the dismantling. But so much of language has been out of reach for the children who filled this place over the last 15 years, it seemed appropriate that taking it down should be hard for us as well. With our transitions to new positions, the Wise Old Owl reading and homework club is shifting to another location and we are clearing out the space. I poked my head in briefly to check her progress. Tina is nothing if not efficient. She had already boxed the books, stacked the attendance posters with names of kids we have grown to love -- Lupita, Bobby, Keeshawn, Victoria, Eternity and hundreds of others. The ancient, donated iMacs were being unplugged. The globe of the world sat leaning in the corner - A Swiftly Tilting Planet.

Not one to instantly recognize my emotions, I turned away -- had to get out of there. If my initial fear was that the faces of the kids who had picked out books in that room over the years would accuse me of abandoning them, I needn't have feared. They are always too gracious and appreciative of any effort on their behalf, and too accepting of what must seem like arbitrary changes to their options for that. What I am feeling is grief.

I ran the program at first, scouring the neighborhood on my moped for any available kid who wanted to come for an hour, read a book, do homework with a college student, play a game, sing a song, pray a prayer and get a snack. I met parents and siblings, got to know some of their stories. Many times I walked walk down a street in the neighborhood and children ran up to me, hugging my legs and yelling "Pastor Raaaaaaaaandy!" It became my primary way of understanding what was happening in Lowell, and a way to ensure that my white, middle class eyes could not avoid the realities of life there, and my whiter, middle class mind did not give in to the tidy explanations of middle class culture as to why the poor are poor.

After a few years we had staff take over the program, and as my work caused me to travel more I would miss weeks. But if I was in town I would make sure to come and play the song at the end, to lead a devotion for the college students who were there as tutors, to share a meal with some of them afterward. Tina would be cooking that meal as the program ended, and the kids would walk through the kitchen, interested in what she was making, and of course drooling over the smell of it. What I loved most was seeing kids matched with tutors, siting on benches together, engaged. Brilliant students from Japan, struggling with their English, helping bright students from the 'hood struggling with their English, and everybody winning in the process. We held cooking demonstrations by professional bakers, folded orogami, had an artist come to display watercolor technique, a physical therapist to talk about kinetic energy. With every special feature, my whole insides smiled.

Our ancient, grafted orange/grapefruit tree forms a canopy over the back yard, and each December as the program entered its last week of the term, the children jumped for the lowest fruit. They held them like prizes, would take a second one home for a Mom or a little brother. We would collect the rest and put it in gift bags to deliver to their families at Christmas. My whole insides smiled.

But lest we succumb to nostalgia, the program was also a major inconvenience, and contained pieces that could act like hidden coral in the shore of our week. The preparation and cleanup, the snack wrappers in the yard, the kids with attitude, the damage to property or the simple wear and tear; any of these things could leave our toes bleeding and sore, and won't be missed.

Yet I still grieve. I feel proud of these 15 years. Glad to have loved these kids with our modest effort. Sorry that we will miss what is next for them, though some of them still come by to check in with us. Perhaps I grieve the loss of that inside smile that hosting this outreach created.

We are making plans for the tutoring room, this old 10x10 sleeping porch wrapped around with seven windows. It has great light, has a bathroom, and is connected to our kitchen and back office. It will make a nice breakfast nook, or guest room, or a place to set up art projects -- stained glass or mosaic, or perhaps Tina's sewing machine. Like any change, it is filled with a combination of loss and possibility, of a death and a rebirth.

The alphabet cards are now in a jumble in a box, along with the books. Out of sequence, I can imagine them reassembling on their own in the half-light of their storage, but in a new order of their own making. My mind's eye says that they now spell out a sentence: "get us to the next room." A part of my heart has been boxed with them, and won't be free until they are.

Of Mirrors and Tears

2008-06-02T10:39:00.000-07:00

We turned to go, to leave the cramped quarters of my parents’ downsizing, their unwanted relocation, for our long drive home. I knew I would steer the car without seeing the road as I reflected on their age, their fragility, the increasing ghostlike quality of their presence. The traumas and restrictions of aging are like a tightening noose to them, and their enjoyments are few. But just then the strains of a violin began on the television, and I said, “Is that something from Brigadoon?”

Without hesitation, my Father, who at 90 is finding it harder to express what he means these days, said with certainty, “No, Phantom of the Opera.” Then he pulled us back into the room and urged, “Let’s just listen to the end of this before you go.”

And so we stood there, we four, two couples in a line, watching a man do what so few of us can these days. With the one musical instrument most like the human voice he communicated fully, clearly with my Dad and Mom, through faulty or forgotten hearing aids, right past the latest medical tests, past the corridors of boredom or helplessness they live in. The message found them, like cups of cool water to their perfectly matched pair of parched and grey souls, an oasis found while crawling through the desert that precedes paradise.

As we listened it slowly dawned on me that we were standing in front of the mirror that had made the trip with them in their move. The added angle put me face to face with them, allowed me to witness the power of that melody as it pulled from their frozen faces something I didn’t recognize at first. It was astonishment and awe.

I felt my own breath leave. Was it the glimpse of them at 87 and 90, standing together in their respective infirmaries, together for more than 65 years? Was it the thought that this could be the last time I see this picture? Was it the absolute pathos of the music? Yes, all these things. But slowly, in that regal reflection, I came to know that it was the immensity of the gift that this image was to me that made we weep. That angle allowed me to see them not as my parents but as a man and wife, propping each other up, stiffly, painfully, for nothing but the reward of beauty. It was a too-late realization of how music, and anything true and beautiful, really, was like food to them, and especially if there was someone to turn to afterward and exclaim, “A perfect end to the day.” It was a too-late realization that it had always been that way for them, I had just not understood it in my childhood. It is that way in me as well, but never until this moment in front of the mirror, have I known why I feel it so deeply in my soul. Time is ruthlessly, lovingly, and as a gift to me, insisting that they reach their end with their truest selves on display.

My tears lasted for the first hour of our drive home, silently rolling from under my dark glasses to soak my collar. After a while, I turned to the radio for rest from the poignancy. But it was not to be. It was now my own turn to be astonished – for my own wet face, stiff with the attempt to conceal my tears – to be caught up in amazement by the program I had randomly selected. The strains of Phantom of the Opera had just begun, the melody instantly flooding the car with the images of my parents’ true selves, and peeling back the layers to reveal something of my own, my own equal need for the true and beautiful, and the similar journey I am now on.

The Giver of this gift, the one who spontaneously gathers an audience around a television concert, the one who arranges the right angle in front of the mirror, the one who beckons a driver to turn on the radio at just the right moment, this Giver wants to give only what matters most -- the gift of knowing who we are, the gift of knowing why we are the way we are, the gift of his beauty and truth, the gift of a journey.

The mirror makes their small place seem larger; I am glad we decided to hang it there. But today it expanded my soul as well as the room, and helped me glimpse a reflection of the Giver – the One who planted the soul’s taste for the truth, the One that grants regular feasts of it, the One who causes one traveler to say to another, “a perfect end to the day.”

red-tailed prophet

2008-05-01T20:09:00.000-07:00

Rooster announces a not-yet reality
Red-tailed, Paul Revere prophet of an
Apparently urgent
Urban dawn.
Atop a rusting chassis in a
Cycloned yard
This concrete kingdom deserves advance notice
Of the merciless light
As much as any benign barnyard.
Patriot on his perch
He delights in the warning but
Cannot defend the night.
Let it come, Rooster.
Push the snooze and hug your hen
And I will do the same.
Perhaps the day is kind afterall.

***********************

There, Scott. I only blog these days when prodded.
Keep prodding.

Remember

2008-03-02T08:13:00.000-08:00

I turn the page of a very good book, anxious to know the end of the thought which had so captivated me, and there, lining the margins, like a graded exam, are comments and underlines in my own hand, from a previous day when the same words had first moved me. I had savored them, chewed them even like a juicy tenderloin. But like almost everything I read they had passed through me -- slowly or quickly, who remembers? -- had not taken up residence in my incontinent mind. Having only been enjoyed but never been planted, these seeds of thought could never bear fruit. Now they slap me in the face. I have even re-read sections of books that I have written, and have forgotten that I had ever said such things.

I could worry that this is a foretaste of what my 87 year-old Mother experiences in the throws of her dementia. Unable to remember a conversation past the three minute mark, she experiences over and over the joy of our visit, every time I re-enter a room. But over and over she experiences the panic of my Father's absence, when he leaves to use the restroom.

The command to remember is pervasive in the scriptures. The Creator, ultimate realist that He is, seems to know that the daily beauty and burden of being alive requires an intentionality and focus that consumes us. The command to remember is a prescription for survival -- the lessons of the past meant to provide a more sure footing for the present, a reminder to give ourselves only to things that matter.

But I need more than a reminder. Like my Mother I find myself rediscovering God's goodness every day. While that is a joy, it is difficult to build on my experience, to add to yesterday's joy, to assemble cumulative total of God's goodness in my life. And like my Mother's panic, I must re-learn the falseness and hollowness of sin every hour.

I round a corner and my Mom lights up: "when did you get here?" I turn a page and there are my marks. The joy of first discovery, the frustration of having hiked in circles, of having tread the same ground.

My journal prods my memory. I can at least re-read the most significant lessons. But what I know I really need is a way of embedding these seeds before they pass through me. Beyond the act of underlining, beyond the act of writing them down. What if my mistake has been to treat knowledge as food -- something to be consumed? What if what I really need is to obey the thing I discover-- to turn the calories of truth into muscle, something that can be used, something that must be used to be kept? Every book I read, every passage of scripture I study, every moonlit meadow I see, every shaft of of afternoon light basking my living room with a rich amber glow. Maybe memory is like muscle -- use it or lose it.

The Arithmetic of Blessing

2008-01-14T10:31:00.001-08:00

By Randy White on the Occasion of his Dad’s 90th Birthday

32,850 – The number of times you have opened your eyes
To see the room growing light,
Though not always the same room,
And closed them again at rest,
Though not always at peace.

32,850 – The number of days, I am quite sure, you found
Reason to smile,
Sometimes broadly,
Sometimes bravely,
Effortlessly one day,
As a discipline the next.

32,850 Cycles of hunger and filling,
The interruption of inspiration and the tedium of dullness,
Of love as an experience and love as a verb,
Of muscles taught and the bow unstrung,
Cycles of praying and waiting,
Of worry and unexpected wonder.

The Ancient Word says,
“Teach us to number our days and so gain a heart of wisdom”
We are to look ahead and know they are limited, and so use them well.
We are to look back to learn, and give thanks to an invisible hand.
Ninety revolutions around the sun clinging to this divine blue dot
Have taught you the truth of this, the
Unavoidable arithmetic of blessing.

God has been with you, Dad.
All 47,304,000 minutes of your 90 years,
Upholding, sustaining, training;
And now you stand, like those two wooden
Chinese scholars on your dresser,
Wise in the ancient knowledge of His goodness and grace,
Surrounded with love by those with fewer days and less experience Who still watch and learn.

Beaver Tail, O Beaver Tail

2008-01-11T13:53:00.000-08:00

O Beaver Tail,
When in the market I look at you
My limbs go frail
My tongue turns blue
As if some beaver stout and hale
Had come and chewed my knees right through

rww c 2008

Christmas Eve Notables

2007-12-24T10:28:00.000-08:00

1. Made sure that I borrowed a car from a friend large enough to handle every neighborhood kid coming with us to Christmas Eve service and then back to our house for soup, presents and fusbol tonight. Leaving one at the curb will simply not do.

2. Called another friend to arrange delivery of his used furniture to a woman in the neighborhood who has nothing for her grandchildren to sleep on. She's available at 3pm today. (What a great gift this will be!)

3. Answered a phone call from out of the blue from a man who was drunk, who somehow got my number. Prayed with him on the phone and got him information on assistance with alcoholism.

4. Watched Tina peel potatoes. It is strangely comforting.

5. Finished varnishing a picture frame I made from an old redwood fencepost pulled from a neighbor's yard to go around a new stained glass piece I made for a loved one.

6. Heard from another friend who wants us to come over later after the neighborhood kids go home.

And it's not even noon! Thank you, God, for your presence in this day. We give you the rest of it, and will watch for you to appear in unexpected ways.

A Beautiful Delusion

2007-12-20T11:44:00.000-08:00

I lived atop a pillar these last nine months
It's fluted scrolls rising above, kissing clouds,
The stately straightness of its vision lifting me to fantasy heights.
Expecting the necessary contractions of birth,
Ready,
Eager,
Instead, the quiet reckoning of a stillborn dream listlessly
Dangles over the edge.
The eagle's nest is abandoned,
The perch a delusion,
But the remnant fog in my lungs is a
Painful gift.

White Got Buzzed

2007-12-03T09:02:00.000-08:00

Thank you to all who offered kind words about the Fresno Bee spread that profiled our work in the Neighborhood on Sunday. The Bee journalist, Guy Keeler, did a thorough job, and we appreciated the sensitivity and focus of his reporting.

For those who missed it, you can check it out (minus most of the pictures) at http://www.intervarsity.org/aboutus/pressroom/index.php#IV-in-the-news

or

http://www.fresnobee.com/263/story/238217.html

Perfect Fit

2007-11-20T20:05:00.000-08:00

Worn smooth by salt and sand
This feather wood, in the shape of an open hand
Cradles what is laid across it –
Another sculpting from the sea,
Drifted stick refugee,
Sloughed without pain from a
Distant tree –
It seeks the lifeline of the first,
Nestles in a gently curving space on the
Knotted, weightless woody palm,
Its own little valley where it rests
In divine balance.
And I, plopped seal-like on my low rock
Letting eternity slip through my
Fruitless fingers
Am the final force in the completion of their
Destined union:
I am the Matchmaker of Moonstone Beach.

RWW 2006

The Privilege of Shaping the Shapers

2007-11-17T15:28:00.000-08:00

I had the honor of addressing students at the Gordon College Convocation this week just outside Boston. More than a thousand students showed up as I explored the subject "Every City a City of God." I found Gordon students to be earnest, extremely bright and wanting to see examples of people seeking shalom, and experiencing it. Val Buchanan, Director of Gordon's inner-city outreach program in the nearby city of Lynn, and her fun staff team, had invited me to campus to build vision for community engagement and urban mission worldwide. In addition, I met with many students who had sincere questions about urban ministry. I did a podcast, taught a class, and trained their outreach team.

So what was I doing at a Christian College? It was a little surreal. The idyllic setting, New England colors in late fall, almost the entire student body gathered. Not my normal venue. I felt honored to be asked, for the chance to shape the future shapers of evangelicalism. These students will graduate to ministry and the marketplace; the vision they carry with them will determine the direction, focus and character of key sectors of the church's mission for a generation. I wanted to encourage the Gordon staff who are seeking to help students and staff leverage their privilege for the sake of the last, the least and the lost. It was a privilege, and I am grateful for the warm reception and gracious response.

While in the Boston Area I dropped in on Mako and Ming Nagasawa, former directors of the Boston Urban Project, who live in the Dorchester Community, the second highest crime neighborhood in Boston. We feasted on Jamaican food and toured the neighborhood park that Ming helped to plan and fund. I heard about the church that meets in their home, one that welcomes neighbors, including those struggling all the vices and vulnerabilities surrounding poverty. We talked about future prospects for urban projects. And I introduced them Val Buchanan at Gordon College.

God, thank you for the gifted, faithful people you've allowed me to meet, and the chance to serve, connect and shape as you lead.

Back Bearing Fruit

2007-09-03T14:22:00.000-07:00

You’re back! How did it go? These months of sabbatical have been a timely gift. God knew how deeply we needed it. We minister out of who we are. If who we are is defined by mere productivity, pragmatism, and management by objective, we have settled for something less than fruit. And its all about fruit, about the outcomes God gives when we do His work in His way. This is why God commanded that fields lie fallow – unused – for a season, so that they might be replenished, and become fertile soil once again, in order to bear fruit. Truth was, Tina and I felt like an overworked field for a long time – depleted. This chance to rest, pray, read, visit, listen, look, soak, ponder, write, laugh, question, walk, and a host of other things there never seemed to be enough time for, was perfectly timed to get our field ready. And the world didn’t fall apart in our absence, nor our ministry!

What is the fruit? Tina and I established some new rhythms: certain prayer times, certain prayers, and our spiritual conversation has renewed. We have taken care of ourselves physically, and our energy has returned. We have reflected on our life, talked it all through, and gained new clarity. We refined our sense of mission, found ourselves hopeful about the future. We read close to 40 books between us, some of them out loud to each other, and found “our well” filling up. We met leaders around the world and I established better connections. We encouraged some young leaders in the places God sent us. They encouraged us. We reconnected with family and friends. And I dedicated time to the cultivation of my creative side and emerged with a manuscript for a new book, a handful of poems, a few paintings, mosaics and stained glass, and some overdue household projects.

You said you refined your mission? Yes, you know all the experts on mid-life stuff counsel to do the internal work necessary to boil your calling down to a single sentence. In order to do that, you really have to focus, to decide on what is most characteristic of your gifts and passions, and how you want to spend the rest of your life. What do I want to do? I want to inspire and mobilize international momentum among students and urban leaders for the redemption and transformation of their cities. “Say to the cities of Judah, ‘here is your God!’” (Isaiah 40:9) “[Jesus] answered, ‘Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also, for that is why I came out.’” (Mark 1:38) “And the name of the city from that time on will be, ‘The Lord is There’.” (Ezek 48:35) “Seek the well-being of the city to which I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its well-being you shall find your well-being.” (Jer. 29:7)

What’s next? Top Quality Seed: With our local leadership team operating on all pistons I am free to focus on strengthening gains we have made in 26 other cities and responding to new potential work there. I am excited to see elements of our year-round program in Fresno inspiring similar components in Orlando, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Greensboro and Tampa. In the coming months we are presenting two major training events to inspire and equip new and current Urban project staff to achieve similar outcomes. We are ramping up the resourcing of every Urban Project Director across the country. I am preparing messages for a major outreach in Boston, sending students to community development training in St. Louis, and writing material to help equip students to engage the church in relevant ministry in the midst of a migrant stream. And I am raising money for this expanded vision, my conviction and dream is that InterVarsity would grow to have the infrastructure it needs to offer the finest training of this kind in the U.S.. We will help more students become transformational leaders, that is, leaders with the motivation and skills to make a lasting difference in neighborhoods affected by poverty and violence.

This vision is larger than us, and we need your help. It is not something that our energy and determination will produce, nor can it happen overnight. It will be, by nature, the fruit of plowing, planting, risk, weeding, sweat, hope, heavenly timed rain, farmer-inspired prayers, and the mysterious, divine process described by Jesus himself when talking about how the kingdom of God grows. We live, inspired by a vision. We do our best to work toward it, we trust God for the rest.

We are rested, focused, ready to go. Thank you for helping us be that way. Those who wait on the Lord will renew their strength …” (Isaiah 40:31)

I Will Miss the Books

2007-08-23T14:01:00.000-07:00

The gift of sabatical is primarily the gift of time. I read more than 30 books during this last 6 months, read them cover to cover, and smaller portions of many other books and articles as well. They covered a wide range of genres and subjects from books on spirituality and renewal to books on ministry, to poetry, to all kinds of fiction including mystery, fantasy, and historical novels.

When people ask me which of these books I would most recommend, it's almost impossible to answer, given their range. But I almost always find myself referring to the impact of Ronald Rolheiser’s Forgotten among the Lilies on the way I see myself, my expectations for life, and my place in the world. Rolheiser takes his title from the last line of St. John of the Cross' poem, The Dark Night of the Soul, "I have left all of my cares and anxieties, lost among the lilies." It has helped me lean into love as my sole foundation and goal and into my identity as a beloved.

James Houston, ex-Oxford don and founder of Regent College has challenged me to identify and give up the false self and find my true self hidden in Christ in a series of essays collected in the book Joyful Exiles (IVP 2007). Its not the kind of book one picks up casually to read for a few minutes, but what I am reading there is staying with me.

Limburg's Encountering Ecclesiastes was my first serious study of Qoheleth, and I am forever endebted to the way he has changed my opinion about this author, and forever grateful for his example of realistic faith.

And finally, an unpretentious reflection on the love of God by Floyd Roseberry, given to me by Tom Parsons, became God's whisper to me throughout my sabbatical. Living as God's Beloved is essentially a reflection on a series of quotes from Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton, Evelyn Underhill and many other spiritual writers on our life as a beloved of God. I went back to this photocopied stack of pages again and again.

Each of the more than 3 dozen books that I read have become part of me in different ways. In some cases, their points, like gourmet meals presented on fine china, live vividly in my memory. Others, I digested more like good, everyday fare. They nourished me without standing out or being noteworthy. Granted, some went through me fast. Thankfully, none made me constipated.

With seven days left to this magnificent, 6-month Sabbath, I might have room for a few more. Any suggestions?

Build Something New

2007-08-08T09:52:00.000-07:00

Tina will tell you that I hate anything having to do with maintenance, repair or replacement. After all the work and sweat and expense, you basically have what you had before. But give me a wall to rip out, a change to make, an upgrade to install, a room to renovate and I'm all over it.

This makes the current sound drifting in through my open screen this morning like sweet music to my ears. Just down the alley, on one of the many empty lots in the neighborhood, a new house is going up. The asymmetric pounding of hammers, the whir of skill saws, the rhythmic cadence of nailguns, Mexican workers calling to each other contrasted with the unlikely Tom Jones CD in their boombox (who knew?) all combine to make me feel hopeful, excited, even joyful.

It's the same emotion I experienced when walking into my friend Steve and Sheila's 108-year-old house in Lowell earlier this morning to see the once damaged, wide-plank, Douglas Fir floors being sanded and re-finished. The honey-colored beauty under my feet produces something inexplicable in me. The floors unify the rooms; they speak a language of restoration and generational connectivity, but also of hope, of opportunity, of progress, of the future, and again, of joy.

Have you noticed, the subject of building, of architecture, of design, of physical structures comes up time and again in the Bible and in teaching of Jesus -- a farmer building a grain tower, the architecture and decoration of the temple, the tower of Siloam, the parameters of the New Jerusalem. Certainly, Jesus used the common places of life as a vehicle to convey truth, including where people lived, worked and worshipped. And we are to, like Noah, look forward to taking up residence in a city one day, whose architect and builder is God. The description of Heaven is of a luminous city made of precious materials, with God himself as the source of light -- a place with a definite wow factor.

Here, in the waning weeks of my sabbatical, as I prepare for resuming ministry, I find myself longing for that kind of hope regarding the future, the hope of progress, the sights and sounds of building something new, of making improvements, of seeing change. I do not want to simply maintain what has been built in my work over the last decade. I guess that means that God has done his work in me, the work that I prayed would happen on this extended sabbath. He has sanded the floors of my soul, ripped out a few false walls in my spirit, and improved the infrastructure of my will. Now, God, make me into a builder.

Does anyone have a Tom Jones CD I could borrow?

Dominus Illuminatio Mea

2007-08-01T10:22:00.000-07:00

I think it began with the sunset. As I descended Highway 50 over the El Dorado Hills, there it was, this magenta orange explosion of the horizon being swallowed by a distant peak. It was a gift, which 30 seconds later I would have missed. Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata had begun on the radio, and I smiled at the symmetry of it; sun and moon in the same thought.

Or, it could have begun with the pensive wave and intentional meeting of the eyes with my father from his porch as I drove away, moments earlier. Nowadays, every gesture, every glance from his 89-year-old frame seems pregnant with meaning, or potential, or sometimes a gnawing feeling of something missed. My mother was in tears at seeing me go. She’s in tears a lot these days, the confusion of dementia, the hardness of life at 87. Perhaps something about this parting made me susceptible to being stunned by the magenta-orange spectacle around the bend, which, with the brooding music roused something in me. I instinctively prayed to the God of Spectacle – heartfelt prayers for my parents whom I had just dropped off, for each member of my family, for our future.

But perhaps, actually, it began nine hours and 450 miles earlier that morning, with the hymn I sang with my father and mother and my wife at the ocean. I Cannot Tell Why He, sung to the Irish melody known popularly as O Danny Boy, had stung me with its simultaneous acknowledgment that there are things we don’t understand about the story of God yet there are things we hold in surety, His love for us, his sacrifice for us, our future with Him. I began to weep as I sang, providing a spectacle of my own for the moment. But they accepted my tears at these words. In fact, words have been the only things I have ever seen to make my father cry, most often the words of a poem. I think he understood.

So now on the road with dusk descending and the Sonata ending I continued on my three-hour journey home, when I was blindsided by the “it.” A full, yellow moon rose at three times its normal size, through Halloween clouds that lay in horizontal lines before it. It was interesting, but I have seen this before. Every few minutes I checked it out through my left window as I headed south. On the radio the music had been replaced by a reading of the book of Ephesians, no commentary, just the poetry of the King James translation read by someone with a voice that made you realize how true and beautiful the text was. As the night deepened the moon ascended above the clouds and brightened and then strangely took up residence dead center in my front windshield. At first this was a mere curiosity. How long would the straight road allow this? But after twenty minutes of driving into the moon the bewilderment of Spectacle returned. I hardly looked at the road. The truth of the text and the brilliant sphere illuminating my face – like a Mag Light in the teeth of God – stirred something in me and I found myself pouring out my condition to God as one does a doctor. As if God had said “open” I let Him look inside me with his lunar scope, let Him see what I was I longed for most. Holding nothing back I prayed urgent prayers of confession and the depth of longing for focus of one who has felt pulled in a thousand directions for too long. Through new tears I prayed that for the rest of my life, for the rest of my children’s lives, we would center on Christ, make Him our single-minded focus, sense His illumination, seek Him through our wind shield wherever we go. And I knew, as the brightness of moonlight blurred and refracted through tears, that the doctor was listening.

The moon shifted slightly after that, the curve of the road moving it left or right, still always dominant in my view. I was breathless for the rest of the trip home. It is impossible to express how focused and unique this encounter was, but I felt both examined and heard and healed.

When did "it" begin, this encounter with a God who took a thirty-minute, loving look at me? With the hymn? With the wave from my Dad? With the sunset and Sonata? Or perhaps, when my mother pushed for the last time and the doctor said, “it’s a boy.” Has there ever been a time when His light has not been on me, even if I am unaware?

Dominus Illuminatio Mea. The Lord is my light.

The Restless Gift

2007-07-17T15:37:00.000-07:00

The window seduced me in that place, and I was powerless.
Outside, things moved: the flag curved in slo-mo,
The Cottonwood sloughed its wisps sideways
Newly clothed branches waved gently,
Mockingly? No, it’s just what branches do when nudged;
Unlike that place,
Beyond the glass,
Air motivated, pushed, stirred.
Things should move.

My 12 year old mind did, faster than the pace of the one talking
In that place,
Already moved ahead, beyond,
Answer anticipated,
All rabbit trails entertained at the least provocation, it ran
And ran, and ran.

Things should move. My knee did, constantly running in place,
In that place,
Like Wiley Coyote in the air over a cavern,
Bounced with an tornado of energy, sprung up and down with
A message that legs are for locomotion,
Jiggled a protest that mine did not fit
Under the desk anyway;
Instead I straddled it,
Like a too-old child on a plastic pony who realizes this
Should be the last time around forever.

My hands moved too, drumming what I imagined was an exotic beat
Which I knew everyone would appreciate, an incessant thumping with my special, thumb - middle finger combo that drove
Everyone to wish me gone from that place,
Gone through the window.

And that’s where I have been,
Through the window now for some time, running;
For years I have felt on my face what moves the branches, have run till my legs
Are bounceless. I have clambered over walls
Up ladders, through contests, have waded in the morass of
Daily mud.
I have moved, because that is what I do,
Who I am
In my own place.

How very strange that now in my middle days
The manic metronome is quieted. I gaze up at the window from
Below, see the yellow lights, the stately books resting in rows and feel moved
To climb back in,
Feel sure that I see movement
Yes, ideas waving gently,
In that place,
Mockingly? No, perhaps I didn’t know,
It is what ideas do.

You have given me restlessness, Still One,
My whole life through.
It has kept me from dissolving in place. It has beckoned through windows,
Called me to discomfort, and called me to quiet.
Here in the middle,
With legs that have found they fit under new desks,
Still I admit,
I see a pond at peace out the window, and my heart
Still hopes for a ripple.

The Relentless Cult of Novelty

2007-07-13T13:44:00.000-07:00

Former Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in describing the emptiness of art education in the academy, addresses the foundation of higher education's rejection of traditional subject matter in favor of nihilistic, avant-garde approaches that are focused solely on technique. He calls it the "relentless cult of novelty," whose underlying quality is a "deep-seated hostility toward any spirituality" and enslavement to anything "new."

"This relentless cult of novelty, with its assertion that art need not be good or pure, just a long as it is new, newer, and newer still, conceals an unyielding and long sustained attempt to undermine, ridicule and uproot all moral precepts. There is no God, there is no truth, the universe is chaotic, all is relative, 'the world as text,' a text any postmodernist is willing to compose. How clamorous it all is, but also -- how helpless." (quoted in The Fabric of Faithfulness: Weaving Together Belief and Behavior, by Stephen Garber, IVP 1996)

Even as an art lover who has appreciated many forms of abstract art, I have stood in front of certain modern art exhibits (I won't say all, and I am not generally indicting moderns art) and have struggled with the clamor of which he speaks -- the noise of clashing techniques for the sake of technique, the dominance of irony, and expression not rooted in any belief system, floating without connection to anything substantive or capable of making a positive contribution. They are indeed helpless to contribute anything. The one, overarching value of "new, newer, and newer still" is actually a form of enslavement -- and here is an irony for you since irony is so highly valued -- since the academy has rejected tradition, so much of art is cut off from memory, leaving new artists to themselves to explore age-old issues (Solomon was right - there really is nothing new under the sun) all the while thinking they're being new or novel.

No, I'm not thinking of doing a degree in art education. I am just noticing how dependent great art is on story. The grand story. Without that, all we are left with is expression. This is true not only of pictorial art but of literature as well. The great English mystery writer and theologian Dorothy Sayers favored the poetry of statement over the poetry of search. Search is so often a black hole of longing and yearning, sucking everything into it, while statement is, by definition, a deep well which is rooted somewhere, which has a point of view -- as Bakke says, a view from a point -- and which seeks to give something.

There's a homeless man sitting in the shade of a tree across the street from my living room. He's drunk, taking drags on his rolled cigarette and shouting occasionally something about Buddha. If I were to paint him in the style of one of the modern artists in a gallery I visited last week in Cambria, I would focus more on the application of paint than on the subject. I would paint him in isolation divorced from his context, or I would invent one, placing him intentionally next to Christians emerging from Sunday school. But if I painted him in the style of Van Gogh, or sculpted him in the style of Rodin, I would hope to learn his story, focus on his inherent dignity, and explore how it connects with the larger story of creation, fall and redemption. Perhaps I would attempt to depict how God's image was imprinted on the man. The lie is that there is intrinsic value in the novel, the new, the newer still. The truth is the value comes from how what we create connects to the story of God; that connection forms the foundation for making a positive contribution.

Turns out, this is true not only for art but also for everything else we would attempt to make: a household, a ministry, a relationship, a family, an impact on our city. Each of these things draw their value from the way they relate to the story of God. It's our job to make the connection, rather than chasing after the elusive god of novelty -- whether its a "new" ministry model, the "latest" home design, the "newest" fashion, an "updated" love life, or the hot-off-the-press- must-have theology.

2007-07-09T06:17:00.000-07:00

Worn smooth by salt and sand
This feather wood, in the shape of an open hand
Cradles what is laid across it –
Another sculpting from the sea,
Drifted stick refugee,
Sloughed without pain from a
Distant tree –
It seeks the lifeline of the first,
Nestles in a gently curving space on the
Knotted, weightless woody palm,
Its own little valley where it rests
In divine balance.

And I, plopped seal-like on my low rock
Letting eternity slip through my
Fruitless fingers
Am the final force in the completion of their
Destined union:
I am the Matchmaker of Moonstone Beach.

Something More One Day

2007-07-05T13:43:00.000-07:00

A friend gave us a slab of green marble a decade ago. It's been sitting behind a shelf in my spidery carraige house collecting dust. You don't throw away marble. I knew it would become something more one day, even if for the time being it was a haven for black widows.

Then Jameson mentioned that he needed a writing desk to work on. After dragging ourselves without luck to half a dozen furniture stores and even a trip to IKEA in Sacramento, it dawned on me that we could use the marble and build something ourselves. We found some beautiful cherry to surround the marble. With a clear finish on it (no stain), the amber swirls really look beautiful next to the marble. Jameson and I had never built a piece of fine furniture before. We designed it together, measured together, cut the pieces together, re-cut the pieces together, corrected our mistakes together, and sweated together in the workshop. When it was finished we shook our heads and marveled at the outcome. It was the "something more" that was meant to be. What a great project this was for us!

It's true of me too. I am raw material -- albeit more like sandstone than marble. Parts of my life are standing alone in a forgotten corner, gathering dust and who knows what else. But God knows my potential, perhaps even has some other costly material to surround me with. And someday, someone will stand over me too, smiling with pride.

St Patrick's San Simeon Breastplate

2007-06-27T12:10:00.001-07:00

Tina and I memorized St. Patrick's Breastplate early in our sabbatical. It's the one that starts "Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me, Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me ..." It helps center us, and we especially love it when we are walking.

As I sat on the beach at San Simeon last weekend, I wondered what St. Patrick would pray if he were with me. Here's my go at it: St. Patrick's San Simeon Breastplate

Christ in ebb and Christ in flow
Christ as tired tides recede
Christ on sand at sunset’s glow
Christ in driftwood and seaweed.

Christ as cares expand to oceans
Christ as oceans crash ashore
Christ as crashes cause erosions
Christ, remove what’s not secure.

Christ is carved in pelican beaks
Christ is pooled in crags with glee
Christ through snails and starfish speaks
Christ through green anemone.

Christ I come, though feebly so
Christ your wideness beckons me
Christ I come to face the flow
Christ to shape and make me free.

Build something tangible

2007-06-18T17:07:00.001-07:00

"What do you do?" I get asked on planes, trains and in rental car agencies. I get asked in polite company, and in the heart of the 'hood. My answer is always something like: "I mobilize and train students to follow Christ by moving into high crime, high poverty neighborhoods, and make a transformational difference there." Sometimes it ensures a quiet flight, sometimes elicits a blank stare, sometimes entices a genuine conversation. But the conversation inevitably leads to the question of our product. What kinds of outcomes are we seeing? How do we measure success? After all, success is everything in America.

Even my sabbatical has to have outcomes. Here they are as I described them three months ago: 1) Decompression. 2) Discernment. Now at the mid point I have added: 3) Demolition and 4) Design. Its because after three months of contemplating, writing, reading, thinking, watching, walking -- I need to DO something; I need an outcome I can point to. A wall removed between our kitchen and back office, new ceiling fans in both rooms, the range repaired, the plumbing fixed, a writing desk designed and built with my son. We NEVER have time for this stuff, and we are on a roll. Next month it will be the stairs that have fallen down and the back deck that has suffered under the feet of a thousand neighborhood kids.

FUNNY THING about fixing stuff. With my mind relaxed and my body engaged in physical activity my thoughts are freed to chew on all the lessons we were taught during the first three months. And now that we have a table in the kitchen, I have a place to sit while thinking.

productivity vs. fruitfulness

2007-06-11T08:53:00.000-07:00

Tina and I like to get things done. To watch Tina at 6:30 am, when her resevoir of energy is at its fullest, is like watching one of those speeded up movies with the characters buzzing to and fro. It's a blur. And nothing gives me greater pleasure than attacking a project. I am focused, nothing deters me and I don't stop just because I'm tired, dehydrated, experiencing chest pains -- little things like that. When we do things together, we are productive. It's how we're wired. We've always been that way. I really don't expect it to change much. In fact, there's not much incentive to change. American culture rewards that makeup -- it's the standard. I often resent it when I don't feel others approach their lives or ministries in the same way -- when they're not working as hard as us, when they seem to judge everything by how well it fits with their gifts, their energy level, their need for peace or time off or fun. After all, its better to burn out than rust out, right?

Being on sabbatical has challenged me. To be sure, we have time for productivity. We have accomplished household projects with delight. We have checked things off the list. Whether we have been at home or abroad, we have arisen to each new day with the knowledge that it is a gift not to be wasted. We are to be stewards of it. And for the most part, this has meant being sure that I work on the sabbatical assignments I was given, that I maintain productive spiritual disciplines, that I not engage in trivial pursuits. I even researched and wrote a book. So why am I feeling challenged?

It is from the the idea of letting my field lie fallow. Unproductive. It is living in that place where my life circumstance dictates that I believe in the idea of replenishment. That soil, when given a rest, will become more fertile. Sabbath -- ceasing from work -- becomes the seedbed for greater productivity.

Enter Henri Nouwen, who would take issue with the way I am using the word "productivity." He would applaud my desire to be a good steward of my life. But he would give a gentle corrective. "A call to live a fruitful life does not necessarily imply a call to be productive." (Lifesigns: Intimacy, Fecundity, and Ecstasy in Christian Perspective, Image Books, 1986) While acknowledging that productivity is good, he addresses the potentially improper motivation in productivity, and the false promises of productivity to deliver what it does not have the power to, when he says, "in our contemporary society, with its emphasis on accomplishment and success, we often live as if being productive is the same as being fruitful. Productivity gives us certain notoriety and helps take away our fear of being useless." He goes on to say that lives that are anchored in God's love, and not lived in fear (fear of rejection, fear of uselessness, etc.) are free to bear fruit, fruit that is a gift, an automatic outcome of who we are. "Whenever we trust and surrender ourselves to the God of love, fruits will grow." "Some of us might be productive and others not, but we are all called to bear fruit; fruitfulness is a true quality of love."

Undoubtedly Tina and I will maintain our list of projects. We will check things off the list with vigor. Weather on sabbatical or in the heat of ministry we will "work as unto the Lord" (Colossians 3:23). But I know that one outcome of this sabbatical for me will be the greater freedom to let things rest and trust that fruit will grow. At the end of the day, the point is to live a fruitful life, not just a busy one. Jesus said, "I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last" (John 15:16).

Oxfres - a tale of two cities

2007-06-07T10:31:00.000-07:00

Oxford its not, but Fresno is home. It is a mercy of God that we returned to a Fresno June that contained temperatures in the 70's. It's been beautiful. We are glad to be home.

Fresno has no Thames but it has the Kings. It has no Lewis or Tolkein but it has Saroyan and Masumoto. It has no Eagle and Child but it does have Sequoia. It has no Christ Church Cathedral but it does have St. Johns. Students here are in shorts and flip flops, not the scholar's gown and formal attire of the high table, but they are students aspiring for something better nonetheless. There is only one Oxford, and it will forever move nand inspire me like no other city can. But there is also only one Fresno, and holds me like no other city.

I shared with my friend Matt this morning that if Oxford reminds me how I am wired, how God put me together, why I notice and care about the things that I care about, and frees me be that person, Fresno reminds me of my resoponsibility to put who I am into service for the sake of God's Kingdom.

Its a tale of two cities, and the way they speak to my life.

Our friends have welcomed us back, and the house was in pretty good shape too, thanks to Jameson and his friend Tim who held down the fort in our absence. Tina is back at work full time, and I have turned my attention to framing the next three months for maximum focus on what's ahead both institutionally and professionally.

Goodbye Oxford, For Now (snif)

2007-05-30T06:19:00.000-07:00

One should take notice when it occurs to one that he is content, at rest, and full of peace. That sensation is rare enough for me over the last few years so as to stand out, jump up and down, slap me in the face, even. One should notice what one was doing when one got slapped.

I was in the Bodleian, holding a leather-bound 17th century poetic prayer in my hands, thinking about the relationship between the writer's life and my own, while looking out the beveled glass windows at clouds floating over the top of one of the Oxford Colleges, All Souls I think. I had just sent my manuscript in to the publisher and had time to explore for the fun of it -- no agenda, no commitments. Just the freedom to learn for the joy of it, and the time to consider and digest what I've read. Thank you, God.

Which makes saying goodbye to Oxford all the harder. There is no equivalent. Yet the challenge will be for me to invent ways to feed my spirit as I have done in this place, which seems so set up for it. But as C.S. Lewis yelled to Sheldon Van Auken as he ran across the High Street after their final meeting, "Christians never say goodbye!" Lord, I would love to come back some day.

We say goodbye to new experiences as well. Can you tell how excited (read: terrified) I am to try the national sport of England?

No, that''s not Tina bowling. It's Helen Lake, daughter of our hosts, who took mercy on the American and let me hit it a few times. But I can now tell you the difference between a "four" and a "six," what an "over" is, and the difference between one-day cricket and a test match. This has to make me the Fresno expert on the sport.

We say goodbye to new friends, Deborah Lake and her husband Richard and kids, Helen and Matthew and Deb's mother Jennifer. We are so grateful for their openness and generosity, and we will never forget it. We will always remember the village of Eynsham, and their 300 year old home. I have the dents in my forehead and scalp to help me remember (low ceilings and doorways), although now I also have amnesia from the blows, so I won't remember how I got the dents.

And goodbye to old friends Ken and Phyl Bennett, former wardens of the North Oxford Overseas Centre where we once lived, who have continued to pray for us, serve us and love us over 18 years. Here, they took us to Stratford Upon Avon, the birthplace of Shakespeare. Also, goodbye to Venu, Geetha and Sangeetha who hosted us, fed us delicious Indian cuisine and taught us the joys of netlesss badminton.

Tina returns to work full-time next week. I enter phase two of the sabbatical -- planning for the our National Urban Program and personal future casting.

Goodbye Oxford, for now. We'll call you.

"Lord afford a spring to me,
And help me feel like what I see."
- John Newton

Lost? Nevaaaaaaaah! I've a right to wander

2007-05-25T03:51:00.000-07:00

The English take great pride in their "freedom to wander" -- a right to walk through all manner of field and farm, a right guaranteed by law. This is how we found ourselves (OK, yes, utterly lost) in the middle of some knee-high crop of something that looked rather like razors on a stalk than some thing I could cook and eat, utterly confused as to the difference between a hedge and a row, and the fact that the blue line on the map didn't seem to be where the little river we had crossed seemed to suggest it would be. We ended up in the back of some farm with a farmer looking at us like, "oh great, another set of Americans who can't read a map. When I asked if I could take this road back to the village he said, "You could, but I think they already have one there." English humor. OK, I made up that last exchange, but it could have happened that way. We did eventually make it back to our house on the village square.

Wandering is what sabbatical is all about. Yes, we've wandered through villages, under the spires of Oxford, throught the bookstacks at the Bodleian Library, in and out of concerts and lectures and exhibitions. Tina and Deborah have wandered picking Elder Fowers and later mixed their own Elder Flower Cordials. When we wander, we place ourselves in a position that anticipates serendipitous events -- graces from a loving God who likes to jump out from behind a bush or bookstack and say "surprise"! You have to get yourself lost every once in a while -- not in control -- to experience these.

Our friend Geetha took us to Dorchester to visit the village and cathedral. What beautiful days we have had with Geetha and her husband Venu while here.

Their daughter Sangeetha hosted us at the Trinity College High Table; for 500 years students have dined here. They recited the grace in Latin.

ONLY SIX DAYS LEFT IN ENGLAND
Already I am savoring the last moments here. I will miss the honey-sweet fragrance and soft steel blue of the Ceonothis bushes, the white lace of the Blackthorne tree, the Van Gogh-like yellow of the vast Rapeseed fields, the soft breeze throught the stained glass windows of the Bodleian Library Upper Reserve, the lunchtime recitals at Hertford College, and all the bitters of the Kings Arms, the Eagle and Child, and the Turf. I wan't to remember the freedom to hold in my hands precious, crumbling manuscripts from the 17th century, the treasures to be discovered because of the luxery of time and the priviledge of a Bodleian card. I want to remember the open handed graciousness of our hosts, the Lakes, as they have welcomed us as temporary members of their family and let us dine at their table and partake in the rhythms of their lives. I want to remember so many who took initiative in our lives, who drove us around, who cooked for us, who included us. We do look forward to coming home, but I will also be sad.