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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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