tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-80952925044260764472024-03-15T18:10:06.835-07:00Musings and Miscellanies, Oh My!Mark Langhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03661141836736474743noreply@blogger.comBlogger102125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8095292504426076447.post-69648672288489807932020-03-24T12:41:00.000-07:002020-03-24T13:08:15.684-07:00Love In The Time Of Coronavirus<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Love is sacrifice. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">There is no greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">. All across the world, healthcare workers are sacrificing for their friends and for strangers alike. They are sacrificing for those who contracted COVID-19 from willful ignorance, from reckless disregard, and others innocently from some unsuspecting source. And yet medical workers treat them all the same, fight tirelessly for their healing. For this and so much more we all owe a great debt of gratitude and honor. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">But that is only a small part of what I want to say, and it is to those medical workers I write, I want you to be prepared. Your life is about to change forever, your sense of fairness, justice, and right and wrong may soon suffer so great an upheaval that it leaves you reeling in shock and existentially wounded. Please hear my words. I write them in love.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">There is a term, many of you may know, a condition of the soul called moral injury. It is also a condition that many medical professionals already have from years of working in the healthcare industry. For anyone unfamiliar, “Moral injury refers to an injury to an individual's moral conscience resulting from an act of perceived moral transgression which produces profound emotional guilt and shame, and in some cases also a sense of betrayal, anger and profound 'moral disorientation’.” <span style="font-size: xx-small;"><b>1</b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">“The concept of moral injury emphasizes the psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual aspects of trauma. Distinct from pathology, moral injury is a normal human response to an abnormal traumatic event.” <b><span style="font-size: xx-small;">2</span></b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Moral injury refers to the “the lasting psychological, biological, spiritual, behavioral, and social impact of perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations” <span style="font-size: xx-small;"><b>3</b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Said another way, moral injury is “A deep soul wound that pierces a person’s identity, sense of morality, and relationship to society”. <span style="font-size: xx-small;"><b>4</b></span> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">There are critical distinctions that need to be made between moral injury, burnout, compassion fatigue, and post traumatic stress. Moral injury is primarily an existential crisis, and while it is often exacerbated and usually accompanied by the p</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">hysical exhaustion of burnout, the ever narrowing e</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">motional bandwidth of compassion fatigue, and the u</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">nconscious and very normal response of stress after trauma, it is more fiendish and perhaps more debilitating than all of the others combined.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Moral injury can be divided into two categories: individual responsibility, that is the perpetration of, or the failing to prevent, harm, and other responsibility where we witness the dereliction of sacred duty and/or betrayal by trusted others.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">In this current crisis you are going to be asked to do more than you've ever done, with less than you've ever had, for more people than you could have possibly imagined. Resources will run out soon. At the time of this blog, New York has 5-6 days of critical medical supplies left. Already doctors and nurses are being asked to recycle disposable protective gear, or wear it long after it is safe to use. The decisions being made in boardrooms and political dens are affecting you and your patients in real time. And the stark reality of limited ventilators and other life saving devices is about to have a very real cost in human lives. This is battle field medicine, and no amount of training could psychologically prepare you for this.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Tomorrow, or maybe the next day you will have to choose which patient gets life saving resources. Tomorrow or the next day, another of your peers will fall ill, a victim of recycled masks, of compromised immune systems due to physical exhaustion from endless shifts. The blame may be easy to spot, the mistakes glaring and some even seemingly avoidable, but you will have no time to obsess on that, you will be in the fight of your life, perhaps the fight for your life.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The cumulative effect of all of this, the damage from this perfect storm of ignorance and unpreparedness, will leave your soul wounded. The unfairness, the tragedy, the inequality will fracture your heart, your mind, your spirit. Moral injury fills the vacuum where the illusion of human virtue once was. People will fail you, the system will fail you, your leaders will fail you, and you will be altered in ways unimaginable.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">When this over, and it will end, you will be forced to deal with the moral injuries. Some will come from events where you failed, or perceive you did, the decision to give the ventilator to one patient over another. This will lead to toxic, negative, internally directed emotions and cognition like guilt, shame, and lack of self-forgiveness. Other events, those outside your control, administrative or political decisions or inaction that cost lives, will surface as toxic, negative, externally-directed emotions and cognition like anger, inability to trust, and lack of other-forgiveness.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Both types of events are associated with spiritual/existential issues, the loss of "faith", of questioning morality, and until resolved, these internal conflicts can in turn exacerbate social problems like isolation and aggression along with inducing mental health symptoms such as anxiety and depression leading to substance abuse and greatly heightened suicide risk. Doctors are already at one of the greatest risks for suicide, even in non-coronavirus times.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Limited life saving resources, the desire for p</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">ersonal safety over patient care, outright mistakes, a</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">dministrative decisions with dire consequences, even c</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">o-workers playing God will all wound your soul, but the greatest existential crisis that you may face, will be why must the innocent suffer. This virus preys on the vulnerable, the weak, the defenseless. The ones who need us most. Where is the fairness, the justice in the universe? Where is God? If God exists, why doesn't He intervene?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">There are no easy answers. There may be none you find satisfactory. But for your own well being, for the care of your soul wounds, let me offer what I believe is the only true inoculation against, and the only cure for moral injury: hope.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">If you are reading this as a Christian, than you will perhaps appreciate what I am about to say, but in the event you do not believe in God, or the Christian God, please consider the thoughts to follow objectively. Every code seems nonsense without the key, a jumble of words and phrases with no meaning. If your universe seems dissonant, confusing, and indecipherable, (or when it does after this is all over) let me humbly offer the Key.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">First you must realize you are not alone in this, hundreds of thousands of medical professionals are going through or will go through the same things. Secondly, I believe in a God who suffered in every way, bore every burden any human would ever suffer, and understands intimately your moral crisis, your soul wound. Feeling alone in this is an inescapable prison, but knowing you are not alone, that others, most importantly that God understands, is the beginning of comfort, the first glimmer of that hope.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The Christian bible says “Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,” Romans 5:3,4</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Scripture makes many promises, and perhaps none as seemingly unfathomable as this: “suffering produces hope”. The promise that for the believer, good will come from our afflictions. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">As I've <a href="https://musingsandmiscellaniesohmy.blogspot.com/2017/03/behind-those-blast-walls.html" target="_blank">written about before</a>, I spent 16 weeks at a field hospital near Mosul, Iraq. There I saw the worst humanity can do to the most innocent among us. Children targeted by drone strikes, hunted by snipers. One night I carried five children to the morgue. It leaves you breathless, concussed. It shakes your faith. No easy answers come in those moments, no words of comfort for others come easy either. And yet something in us holds fast. Words form on our tongue that are not our own…</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">"…rejoice in your sufferings, know that suffering will produce endurance, and endurance character, and character will produce hope."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">This passage is saying that when Christians suffer, they have a strength that is not their own, in their weakness they find God's grace, His great power, holds. When they would run in fear or in despair, when they would curse sacrifice and live for themselves instead, His nature in them holds. When in the midst of their worst physical, mental, even existential crisis, He never leaves them, hope is produced and that hope holds. For the Christian hope is not an abstraction, it is a person, His name is Jesus Christ.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Christianity is much more than a path to follow, a philosophy to obey, it is the transformation of our very nature by God Himself living in us. The power and the intimacy this affords us becomes such great confidence in the darkest hour. For the Light of the world is in us and even death could not extinguish Him. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">My prayer for you is this: Fall to your knees as you fight this wretched demon COVID-19, or perhaps it has already knocked you to your knees, and cry out for God of the universe to give you the hope of Jesus. He promises to work all things together for the good of those who love Him. He is infinitely able, and His love for you both unfathomable and unstoppable. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Love is sacrifice. There is no greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. Jesus calls you friend, He laid down His life for you. So that you could live this life with the same power that raised Him from the dead and destroyed the sting of death, the power of the grave forever.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Let His perfect love casts out all fear. Let Him start to heal those soul wounds. Let Him be your peace in this storm, your shelter from more moral injury, from fear itself. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Keep your chin up and wash your hands. Love you all. Xoxo</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">1. Litz, Brett T.; Stein, Nathan; Delaney, Eileen; Lebowitz, Leslie; Nash, William P.; Silva, Caroline; Maguen, Shira (December 2009). "Moral injury and moral repair in war veterans: A preliminary model and intervention strategy". Clinical Psychology Review. 29 (8): 695–706.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">2. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Molendjk, Tine (2018). "Toward an Interdisciplinary Conceptualization of Moral Injury: From Unequivocal Guilt and Anger to Moral Conflict and Disorientation". New Ideas in Psychology. 51: 1–8</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">3. </span></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Litz, et al. 2009, p. 697</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">4. </span></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Silver, D. (2011). Beyond PTSD: Soldiers have injured souls. Truthout.org (9/3/11). Retrieved from http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/beyond-ptsd-soldiers-have-injured-souls</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>Mark Langhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03661141836736474743noreply@blogger.com0Gulfport, MS, USA30.3674198 -89.092815530.1483393 -89.415539 30.5865003 -88.770092tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8095292504426076447.post-53153741420963088532018-10-19T11:06:00.000-07:002018-10-19T14:02:24.300-07:00A Letter to Men, Chiefly on Women <br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Dear Brothers of the X and Y chromosomes,</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">It is with great heaviness of heart that I write to you. Because in an age where your sisters are finally being heard, finally finding their voices, many of you seem to have taken a dismissive posture, a condescending tone, you're talking over them, and some of you are even mocking their historic #metoo movement. I love you brothers, but I'm angry.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Let us avoid a protracted history here of the marginalization of women. Although it would do us all well to know that history, to take ownership of our complicity, to mourn it and repent. Let's just look at a few grotesque and urgently relevant facts about the genders.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publications_nsvrc_factsheet_media-packet_statistics-about-sexual-violence_0.pdf" target="_blank">1 in 3 women will be sexually assaulted in their lives</a>. 1 in 10 will be raped. 91% of all rapes are committed by men. Let that sink in.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Overwhelmingly, in 80% of rape cases, the victim trusted her attacker. She trusted you, man, brother of mine. She, trusted, you.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The threat of violence, even death as retribution for speaking out, keeps rape as the number one underreported crime. Almost 2/3rds of sexual assaults go unreported! That amounts to tens if not hundreds of thousands of women who cannot point to their attackers, either from fear of violent repercussions or the very real issue of post-traumatic symptoms that can incapacitate victims.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">We don't have time here to chronicle how the justice system has further marginalized women, slapped the wrists of violent rapists like Brock Turner, consistently blaming women, telling them to keep their legs together, to dress appropriately, to not be so careless. These malignant, misogynistic pronouncements from presiding judges are well documented and only further demonstrate the patriarchal system currently in place.</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The statistical evidence that points to men being the vast majority of sexual predators and violators of women is mountainous and undeniable and yet it seems that some of us brothers want to make ourselves out to be the victims of some great conspiracy against males. With the suggestion recently made that "it's just not safe to be a man anymore". The truth is that there are those females who misrepresent their rapes, but that number is around 2% and certainly not justification for men to dismiss the greater, pandemic issues of male on female violence. Men are not at so great at risk here that we must co-opt the #metoo movement and try and make a moral equivalency. It's a non-starter guys, a false dichotomy, a futile narrative that seems whiney in light of our universal entitlement. And in our hearts we know it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">So let's address a few actual statements men have said, ignorant pronouncements that shouldn't even merit discussion but apparently still do.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">1. "If women were more careful where they went, what they wore, what they drank, and how much they drank, they wouldn't be so prone to assault." Women being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, wearing the "wrong thing" is not an invitation to rape them. Brothers, no matter what, to be a real man means to control one's urges. You are not an animal. But when you make any excuse for your brother's violent behavior you erroneously attribute their perverted will to only animal urges. Should women walk alone, wear what they want, go wherever they want, even at night? The statistics say if they do they have very real chance of being brutalized by a man. So maybe until men quit acting like animals women will have to circle their wagons in self-protection. And so we have the #metoo movement. Brothers, for those of you who want to continue to paint a moral equivalency between women dressing "seductively" and rape shame on you. You merely reveal your own sexual objectification of women, your own deeply ingrained belief that a women's body is a function of your desire. "Modesty" or lack thereof is not the frontline of the battle against rape, the unbridled lust of men and male entitlement is. Brothers, do you know the rape crisis line number by heart? Your sisters do. Brothers can you leave your drink at the bar unattended? Your sisters can't. Brothers do you text your friend when you get home to let them know you are safe? Your sisters do. Brothers does it ever cross your mind that what you're wearing might so inflame the lusts of the opposite gender that you're in danger? It stays on your sisters mind. All. The. Time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">2. "What else did they expect would happen?" The #metoo movement started in Hollywood, a place known for its promiscuity and sexual permissibility, for objectifying the female body, and yet rape is still just as wrong and damaging to Hollywood females. Some of the men talking about this movement seem to be implying that because Hollywood portrays, even elevates a certain sexual lifestyle where anything goes, that this is the inevitable conclusion, the judgement if you will, the natural result of a permissive culture. But when we listen to the testimonies of Hollywood women, the abuse of power in a male dominated industry is what created the fertile environment in which hundreds if not thousands of women were sexually assaulted. Men, using the positions afforded them by a patriarchal system, abused their subordinates, leveraged their power to coerce women to acquiesce for their career's sake. Victim blaming is always wrong because it always implies that men cannot control themselves and shouldn't be accountable for their own actions. Brothers you are not animals. Your sisters are not your prey. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">3. "This is a politically motivated agenda." Saying the #metoo movement is a political agenda cold-heartedly and ignorantly implies that women are using their sexual assaults as fuel for a political fire. Almost as if they waited for an opportune time to make these revelations known, for the greatest political impact and the most debilitating damage to their political opponents. Shame on you for even suggesting such a thing. Women who have been abused live every day in the dark shadow of their trauma. We don't get to decide when and where they speak. And if they are being emboldened to speak now, even years after the event, they must be honored, must be heard, must be respected. Furthermore, even if a women's testimony is "politically motivated" that doesn't excuse the indefensible behavior of any man. Recent hearings in the Judge Kavanaugh have magnified our inability as men to listen and to respectfully respond to women who have experienced sexual trauma. Whether Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was raped by the Judge or wasn't does not excuse the way she was talked about, the way she was grossly maligned. When we speak so viciously to a victim, we are speaking to all victims, past present and future. We are speaking to our mothers and wives, and maybe most heinously we are speaking to our daughters. Will they feel safe to speak up about their own attacks? Or will they be silenced as so many women in the past have been silenced, by fathers and brothers, presidents and judges, speaking so dismissively, so corrosively about women. By most accounts, Dr. Ford's reliability as a witness was never in question. Could she be mistaken of some of the facts, even who attacked her? Yes. Was she attacked by someone? I also believe yes. Was she treated with the decorum and compassion victims of sexual assault deserve? Not even close. But, let's assume for a second Dr. Ford was lying, was a political plant? Can a man act judiciously, empathetically, even when being falsely accused? I'd hope so. Especially when we are demanding women act a certain way to not find themselves victims of sexual assault. And yes, I always want the truth to come out. I always want an end to politically motivated attacks of any kind. And yet, once again I say, this is not the time. To conflate the greater #metoo movement with this one instance is to confine and redefine an epidemic by one symptom, real or imagined. No matter what the truth is in from the Kavanaugh hearings, millions of women have been brutalized by men. Let's not paint the Judge as a victim of character assassination at the expense of an entire movement of women who have had infinitely more than their character assassinated. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">4. "Men are abused also, often by women." Yes, this is true, in 1 out of ten cases. And yet it is not our time to distract from the super majority of cases that are male on female assault. As with the #blacklivesmatter movement when some tried to co-opt the phrase by espousing #alllivesmatter, we must remember that these movements are about upsetting the status quo, confronting an imbalance of power, about certain voices finally being heard and not the silencing of other voices. No one, not once, said white lives don't matter. The movement was and is to say black lives are equal and haven't been treated that way. Such is this #metoo movement, not to disqualify male victims of sexual assault, but to say women's voices have long carried less weight and now there is finally a choir of female survivors saying if we put our voices together we will be heard. Sing my sisters.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">5. </span>"<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">This is all just the consequences of sin, the reality of a fallen world." To my Christian brothers especially, to paint any issue so indiscriminately undermines both the validity of your message and the sincerity of your motives. To state something so unequivocally lacks all the intellectual nuance that communicating Truth about complex issues in a modern world requires. Yes, sin, the consequences of sin, the entropy of the universe that sin began, are all apropos to the larger discussion about any type of evil and injustice. And also this is not the time for that, we know that broken people break others, that is not in debate. What is at the forefront of the #metoo movement is the reality that men abuse their power, power afforded to them by institutions that have been built to both preserve male dominance and female subjugation. We as Christians must denounce the inequality of those systems. Christ came to bring equity to His church. We must repent where we have knowingly or unknowingly been party to the marginalization of women and the muting of their voices. We must remain defiant against the enemy who would deface the image of God by repressing women. We must also stand defiant against the very "consequences of sin" in our own hearts and minds. We must root out sexual entitlement from our thoughts, our actions, and even some of our doctrines. We must remember the charge to submit one to another in love. Christlikeness looks like gentleness, kindness, and longsuffering. Not brashness, defensiveness, and self-justification. This isn't about us men. Mainly because it always has been.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Brothers this is what you can do: Stop objectifying women. Stop using their bodies, whether by pornographic images or in your imagination, for sexual gratification. Stop telling jokes that are sexually perverse, or disparaging of women. Stop justifying the crude and cruel, debasement of women by our President, by musicians, by celebrities, by your friends as "just joking". Quit telling women to lighten up. Brothers remember women are the image bearers of God. When you debase that image you fight against God, you spit in His Holy face. Brothers listen to your sisters, tell your other brothers to shut up and listen too. Brothers you are the image bearers of God too, mimic Christ in His love for his bride by laying down your life for the women in your life. Brothers love all women like your daughters, respect all women like your mothers. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I waited to say these things until the political circus of the Kavanaugh hearings were over, until Harvey Weinstein wasn't the token face of the male violator allowing other men to hide in his very large shadow. And though there is a culture of rape, a culture of misogynism that must be urgently addressed by all of us, right now this is about a #metoo movement of sexual assault survivors, their stories, their demands. It's about shutting up and listening. It's not about men being heard, we've always been heard. Right now it is about our sisters speaking and men not speaking over them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I wrote this to address my brothers, not to defend those men who support the #metoo movement. Brothers who love women, it is not our time to be acknowledged for being decent humans. Because brothers, once again, this isn't about us. If you want to help, hold a megaphone for your sisters to shout in. And only then if you are asked, and there is no available women to do the same.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">And to my sisters. I am sorry, words cannot, will not suffice. But I hear you. And I am listening intently. And I want to be part of a culture shift where men no longer abuse their power to feed their sexual appetites. Where men no longer hold the power, where it is equitably distributed to the most capable, regardless of gender. I'm listening so let me know what I can do, or let me know if you want me to do anything at all. This is about you.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I love you my sisters. You hold up more than half of the sky. Xoxo</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>Mark Langhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03661141836736474743noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8095292504426076447.post-14262398389774219782018-10-16T20:46:00.000-07:002018-10-17T09:58:50.459-07:00Jonah. A Prophet's Pride and the Relentless Grace of God.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">After almost two years of reading, studying, wrestling, and writing, my <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JFTVQDL" target="_blank">book on Jonah</a> is finally finished! What a labor of love it has been. With so many of my friends along the way letting me flesh out these thoughts in conversation, in bible studies, and in less than literate first drafts. I wanted to take a moment here to thank them all again, and also to give a little insight into why I wrote this book, why I felt it is a story that urgently needs to be read.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Nearly 22 months ago I stepped off of a plane into Northern Iraq in the middle of the night. After a long day of security training and a longer night of restless sleep I traveled with new and returning team members to a field hospital 8 miles from Mosul. Coalition forces were in the final phases of liberating East Mosul from ISIS and here I was on the plains of Nineveh about to enter a heavily guarded and fortified compound and face death like I'd never before. Bombs shook anything that wasn't made of concrete and our on-site orientation included a tour of the compound's many bunkers. I was a long way from Mississippi, surrounded by real enemies, about to be changed forever.</span> <span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">And while the story of my time in Iraq is referenced in this book, the majority of that experience will have to wait to be told. The pain is still too fresh, the memories yet to be completely processed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">During the lead up to my deployment I read as much as I could on the region. Its geopolitical history and current state. And of course the rapid rise and spread of the scourge that was ISIS. The terror ISIS was inflicting on the innocents of Northern Iraq cannot be described more accurately than to say it was demonic. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I also read the biblical narrative of Jonah. In fact I was drawn to it over and over. As I write in the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JFTVQDL" target="_blank">book</a>:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>Perhaps it was the intensity, the urgency, the utter insanity of a war zone and grasping to make sense of my surroundings, but I was drawn over and over again to Jonah and the story of Nineveh. And as they had many other times in my life, the words of the book seemed simple and unrelated to my spiritual journey. Jonah remained a mythology of my youth, a fantasy of Sunday school. That story that so quickly captures the imagination of a child and insults the intelligence of an adult. The story of a big fish and a wayward prophet sulking in its stomach. And yet, continuously I was drawn back to it, until the Spirit began to unravel Jonah to me, piece by piece, line by line.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I read the book of Jonah maybe 25 times before it started to make sense. As I began to dig into the geopolitical narrative of Jonah's day I began to see modern America. And as I began to get insight into Jonah's heart and motives, I began to see myself, and my brothers and sisters in Christ. Jonah's day was rife with nationalism and his heart was too. He hated Nineveh, they were ethically inferior in his mind. He wanted their destruction, in fact he tried to sabotage God's mercy to achieve just that. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Today I see an American church clamoring toward isolation, conflating patriotism with nationalism, and resisting the call of mercy toward its neighbors. I see a deep riff forming between "us" and "them". And it breaks my heart. At its root I believe the issue is pride. It is the false belief God is on our side and against those we despise. And we couldn't be more wrong. And the results of our pride and lack of mercy are disastrous.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">As I write in the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JFTVQDL" target="_blank">book</a>:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>God is not the god of America, He is the God of the universe. Like Jonah, if we forget that God is sovereign over all nations, we make God small, we remake Him into our image. He starts to speak like us, starts to look like us, and starts to hate all the same people we hate. </i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Throughout the story of Jonah, from his call, to his rebellion, and all the way to his ultimate decision to sit outside of Nineveh and hope for her destruction, we also have God relentlessly pursuing Jonah with grace. My book is about that grace. It's about the true nature of God and how we should and can image that. I hope you will read what I wrote, ingest it line by line, and be fed on the richness of God's word. There is so much truth in the 48 verses of Jonah. And yet most urgently is the cautionary tale of a nation and its prophet choosing nationalism over God's desire for inclusion. Jonah was and is a prophet with an important message. One the modern American church cannot afford to miss.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I'll leave you with this short passage from the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JFTVQDL" target="_blank">book</a>:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>The Church of Jesus is so much bigger than the Church in America. And the gospel is not best told in English, nor best represented by our idioms and American personality. The gospel is fuller, richer, more vibrant when spoken in diverse languages and expressed through many cultures. This great flavorful feast, this common meal, with so many savory spices. The worldwide Church has so many beautiful reflections of God’s glory. Like an infinitely sided diamond each of us reflects the light of God’s image in a beautifully unique way. You and I will understand God more fully when we meet Him again through the testimonies of believers from all over the world. That’s a promise. There is absolutely nothing nationalistic about grace. The Gospel gloriously transcends all governments, all nations. It speaks clearly and precisely about the day when we will pass from this world to the next. In heaven any deference or exclusion due to national identity will be locked in the prison of the past. </i><br /><br />“After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’” (Revelation 7:9,10) <br /> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">You can read a sample of my book and purchase the electronic version <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JFTVQDL" target="_blank">here</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">xoxo</span></div>
Mark Langhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03661141836736474743noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8095292504426076447.post-46770848161641770632018-10-13T10:10:00.000-07:002018-10-13T10:10:57.606-07:00Behind Those Blast Walls<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">My first day at the emergency field hospital just east of Mosul, Iraq was very much like my last day. Mortar strikes on civilians, children bloody and broken, black bags to hold the dead. The slow, solemn walk, cradling a ten year old in my arms, counting the steps to the morgue. Laying someone's son down on cold gravel, reading his name one last time on the death certificate taped to the body bag. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Time of death 18:17. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Patient #855. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I'll never forget the sounds of his dying. The rattling and the gurgling. I'll never forget the songs we sung over him, the prayers strangled by grief and sorrow. The tear stained cheeks and our righteous anger. I'll never forget the faraway look on his precious face. I'll never forget his face. What was left of it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Many of us were strangers a week before, two days before. Strangers taking care of other strangers. One set from the west, a land of peace and prosperity, one set from northern Iraq, a region ravaged by terrorism and war. And now here we all were, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, translators, construction workers, administrators, and HR reps. One and all hearts turned inside out and taking care of the dying while other new friends fight for the living in mobile operating theaters a few hundred feet away. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">That last night may have been the worst. The toddler with ribs exposed from mortar wounds. 9 children in one day. But there were other days, other nights when I thought my heart might die. The toddlers with their feet shot off. The whole families targeted by drone strikes. The burnt and blackened restaurant patrons, victims of a suicide bomber. One night in particular I carried five children to the morgue. It leaves you breathless, concussed. The mortar of sorrow, a direct shot to the soul. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I'm processing, I'm free bleeding my heart and thoughts here so I don't explode and because I don't have the luxury of denial. I cannot separate my belief in a good and sovereign God and the suffering of innocence. If there is no reconciling the two than I am lost. We all are. Especially Christians, fools to be pitied of all men. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">But what we found there, behind those blast walls, with the ceaseless drums of artillery fire, the strangled song of the whine and wail of one ambulance after another, was that hope is not a thing you wish for, it is the only thing afloat in a raging sea of chaos. It is what you hold on to, what holds on to you so you do not go under the relentless waves of grief. And we found that you hold on to each other. And you pray like gasping for your last breath. And you plead with heaven, even when heaven is silent. And you raise your broken hearts together in a pitiful little petition, more whimpers than words, and you beg, unified in grief, "Jesus please....."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The Bible says that suffering produces hope. A comical, sadist thought when the belly is full and the sun of our futures never sets, always shines on our glorious destinies. But when the night never ends, when the morgue is full, when evil seems to be laughing in every shadow, on those nights you somehow see it. Suffering produces hope in this way: when terrorism and hate and the cancer of evil spreads over all that is good with a blight of darkness, the light still does not go out. There is a flame in the hearts of those who have known the love of God. There is a song of praise that is not stalled on their lips, is not silenced. There is a light in the inner places of those who have heard the Word of Life and believed. This is the flower of hope that grows in the garden of souls by heaven's Holy seed. This is the hope that springs eternal, because it has always existed, always will exist apart from the human stain, in the Holy heart of God. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Suffering produces hope in the same way bomb blasts produce the broken bodies of children. It is the inevitability, the cause and the effect of universal laws. But only one will remain. Hope will swallow grief one day because Love will conquer all. But Hope is inevitable in us only when we trust, against our own instincts, in the goodness of God and allow ourselves to be taken deep into our own human frailty, far past vulnerability to the point of despair. And in that wasteland of our utter uselessness, in that wilderness of our unraveling, God is there, He is faithful, He alone, as He has always been, is holding the universe together and simultaneously holds us in the palm of His hand. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">That is the only hope: that God holds His own in the palm of His hands while they yet suffer. And that the insatiable hunger of the mouth of Hell cannot devour the ragtag, broken band of believers called the church. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">In the picture above I hold in my hand a 50 caliber bullet taken from the body of a pre-teen boy. An ISIS sniper shot him because their's is an ideology of fear. They target the weak, not just because the weak are a low-hanging fruit, but because most of us are weak. Most of us are trying to live our simple lives in peace. ISIS needs capitulation. They need submission. A sniper bullet in the side of a child reminds us the world is not at peace and things are not simple. It reminds us that suffering isn't a concept, that no abstraction paralyzed this young man. It reminds us that we are fragile and vulnerable. It reminds us that to walk the way of love our hearts will be obliterated by suffering. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">And so against all hope we hope, that Love will one day conquer all. But not human love. Only God's selfless love, for with it carries His perfect all-powerful justice and the promise and ability to make all things new. Godspeed that day. Especially for the precious children of Mosul.</span> <br />
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<br />Mark Langhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03661141836736474743noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8095292504426076447.post-78460768627310722182017-07-05T09:32:00.000-07:002017-07-25T19:20:23.603-07:00Same River Twice<br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">For the last ten weeks I have been back in Iraq at the same emergency field hospital I worked at <a href="http://musingsandmiscellaniesohmy.blogspot.com/2017/03/behind-those-blast-walls.html" target="_blank">earlier this year</a>. The bombs were not so close this time, the acuity rate not so high, but the scars of evil were just as ugly and ever present. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I am changed forever. We all are. We have seen <a href="http://musingsandmiscellaniesohmy.blogspot.com/2017/03/lost-in-garden.html" target="_blank">things that cannot be unseen</a>. Our heart's have been crushed, ground to dust, blown to bits, over and over again. And the thing is, what each of us will confess, is that it was a sacred honor, one we wouldn't trade for all the glittering things. And that for most of us this was the first time in our lives where all of our passions were engaged; personal, professional, and spiritual, in a community of our peers doing the right thing, at the right time, for the right reasons. And that's what we all long for isn't it? Isn't that what it means to be fully alive? And maybe that's strange, to feel so alive under the shadow of death. To travel to a war-zone to find family. But maybe what is more strange is we weep when we have to leave, and many of us dread the coming home. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">And so I write this for my field hospital family, I write this for those that love them. They are not who they once were, they are stronger and yet more fragile. The have gone to a place of bombs and terror and seen what those evil forces do to the bodies of children. They have sat countless hours with the dying, held out hope with trembling hands to the living. They have stifled the urge to scream too many times to count. They have fought back tears daily so the floodgates wouldn't open forever. They are not who they were when they left you, they are better than before, but they are more broken. Over them hangs an invisible shroud of grief, they must mourn for what's been lost, for what they've left behind on the war ravaged plains of Nineveh.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">So please be careful with them, let them tell you their story in their own time, even if it's a long time. It's a story that costs them in heart-break. The words conjure images that will haunt them forever. Let them have their silence and space, to process, to heal. Be patient with them, small talk may be unbearable after a season so intense, so pregnant with purpose. A trip to the mall or Walmart might be unhinging for them when they've seen those fleeing war in tattered rags and matted filth, gaunt with emaciation. They see with new eyes now, hear with new ears. There has been a deep shift in their sense of justice, a widening of their worldview. You will alienate them quickly if you politicize refugees, or paint Muslims or Middle Easterners with a broad blunt brush. These are no longer abstract terms to them, no longer strangers from news footage. They have done life with these precious people, they've listened to stories of horror so unimaginable that it left them reeling and speechless. The throats of babies slit in mother's arms, whole families mowed down by ISIS snipers as they ran to freedom. Daughters hiding in the piles of the dead, sons surviving on cardboard and blades of grass. <a href="http://musingsandmiscellaniesohmy.blogspot.com/2017/04/a-million-miles-from-shore.html" target="_blank">Your churches may seem more shallow to them</a>, words like suffering and persecution now have faces and stories, have a new infinitely higher ceiling of meaning. They have seen the cost of faith. But they love you, they still need you, maybe more now than ever. Brokenness isn't a switch that can be flipped on and off, a setting to be dialed down. So be gentle. Please.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">And now to my EFH peeps. I love you and miss you. More than words can say. I want to honor you, you crazy ragamuffin crew. You are my family. You are my heroes. I have tasted heaven behind those blast walls in our little community, I have seen the image of God in each of you.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">In the OR doctors and nurses who had to amputate the limbs of babies through the tears in their own eyes I have seen the image of God. You put back together bodies without enough pieces to put together.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">In my ICU nurses I saw God's heart everyday. I love you so much it hurts. I cannot say your name or conjure your faces without tears. You lovers, you fighters, you wonder workers, you solvers of the riddles of the body. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">To my charge nurses, you bosses, you beasts, you rock solid sisters. You led like lions with the hearts of lambs. I saw the Lion of Judah in you, the Lamb that was slain. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">To my ward nurses, nothing is beneath you. You feet washers and bum washers and all the parts washers. You emptiers of endless bedpans. You radiate the humility of the Light of the world. The One who was equal with God but came to wash our feet. To die for us.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">For the keeper of sacred stats, the lighter of candles. For the master of all the moving parts. I love you two, you Sriracha sisters, you dumpster fire choir. I saw the humanity of Christ in you, the toll it took on your hearts.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">In the anesthesiologists and CRNAs, you givers of sleep and wakers from slumber, I saw the Breath of Life in you.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">In those that came with blow up dinosaurs and bags of toys because laughter heals and a child's playthings shouldn't be bullet casings, you are a flood of joy, I have seen Him in you.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">For the Marine making balloon animals and keeping us safe (sometimes from ourselves). For the </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">makers of big decisions who fight the war of head verses heart every single day. I see the Father in you. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">For the set up crew and construction teams. You turned an empty muddy field into a full blown trauma hospital all the while war raged around you. You imaged the Risen One.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">For the maintenance men who battle nature and entropy and never sleep too deep. Who fight fires figurative and literal. Who make medical devices from spare parts and hold the whole thing together with zip-ties and duct tape and bailing wire. You look like your Creator to me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">For the Triage nurses who conducted the whole chaos like a symphony. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">For the trauma nurses who work magic on the hairbreadth edge of a razor. You look like your Abba. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">For staff care who tried to lighten our loads, who sat with the dying, who kept us in chocolate, and led us in communion. I have seen the High Priest in you.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">For the ER docs steady, ready, wise and gentle.The pharmacists, phlebotomists, sterilizers, med supply, bio-med and lab techs your skill and ceaseless hard work was never sexy but was the science in saving lives. I saw my Savior in you all.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">You are all the broken-hearted healers. You cups for Living Water in the desert. You are the pierced hands and feet. I have such a clearer picture of God because of you, I have such a deeper understanding. There is an old proverb that says, "n</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">o man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man". You will never be the same, but the fire and the hand of Grace have made you like glowing gold, even when you feel like you'll never shine again. The grief will lessen, the sorrow too, but i</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">t will never leave you. That's the price of loving, it always has been, from long before time began when the Lamb was slain.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">And finally for my Iraqi, and Kurdish, and Yazidi brothers and sisters. You are so brave. You have lived in the shadow of war and terrorism all your days. Tragedy has been your food and sorrow your drink. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">And yet you hold onto life in spite of what has been stolen from you. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">You have opened your hearts as wide as the horizon and embraced a ragamuffin band of westerners with so many misconceptions. You have taught us about love and humanity, honor and sacrifice. You have shared your food and your tears, your stories and laughter. We miss you, we love you. You are in our hearts forever, precious habibis.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>Mark Langhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03661141836736474743noreply@blogger.com33tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8095292504426076447.post-27090000117132907212017-04-20T14:30:00.000-07:002017-04-20T14:30:08.334-07:00Happiness Is (Not) A Warm Gun<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">A look inside the Emergency Field hospital where patients wounded from the battle to retake Mosul and from ISIS terrorist attacks are treated by brave medical professionals from around the world.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">In 6 days I head back to Iraq. Back to the emergency field hospital near Mosul where I was earlier this year. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">As I've processed <a href="http://musingsandmiscellaniesohmy.blogspot.com/2017/03/lost-in-garden.html" target="_blank">working in a trauma hospital</a> so close to an active war zone, having seen so much death, especially the death of children, I realize it will take a long time to unpack all I've experienced. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Trauma, like grief, is a sucker punch. It blindsides you, it staggers you, it leaves the mind, the heart, the psyche reeling. It's much l</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">ike this: the burning fragments of film frames temporarily illuminated by the same fire that is destroying them. Trauma, like grief, changes everything, forever. It clings to our days with a grayness, with nagging sadness, with wondering whether you'll ever be truly whole again.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">It is said trauma is "not the thing that happened but the effect left on us by our experiences". Rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, and increasingly irresponsible sexual behavior spike among survivors and witnesses to trauma. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The suicide rate among trauma survivors is 15X higher than the rest of the population.</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> Isolation, anxiety, depression, loss of appetite for food and fun are all symptoms of a post traumatic experience.<b>*</b> It can feel like a low grade fever of unhappiness, constant and incurable. To be sure, trauma is a toxin, it tires the body, it wearies the blood.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Much of trauma counseling seeks to normalize the effects of trauma, reinforcing the idea that what survivors and witnesses of trauma feel (and do) as a result of trauma are very normal reactions to an abnormal situation. This is a permission to forgive ourselves as much as it is a building block for recovery. It's saying "</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">You are not defective, you've just been broken by your experiences and need help putting the pieces back together".</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> It helps us understand that fatalism born in self-defeat because of a negative response to trauma is a downward spiral. And that coping mechanisms can become a new self-perpetuating prison and actually keep the survivor from starting to heal. Self-loathing and self blame are very real responses to trauma and can be extremely high among first responders. Those that go to help in traumatic situations often feel like we couldn't do enough and wear the guilt and shame of those feelings of failure for years. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Studies on trauma reveal relationships are the key to coping during and after a crisis. In fact the number one predictor for resiliency after a trauma is existing healthy relationships. Psychologists are also finding that </span><a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/love-and-sex-in-the-digital-age/201509/the-opposite-addiction-is-connection" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;" target="_blank">the opposite of addiction is connection</a><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">. The greatest factor in not becoming an addict and in ultimately beating addiction is healthy relationships. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Recently the results of one of the longest, most comprehensive studies on human happiness were released. For 75 years researchers at Harvard tracked the emotional and physical well-being of the studies participants. What they found is no shock, it's been said for years, by many similar studies of smaller scope, the key to a happier and healthier life: good relationships. According to a Harvard researcher, "It's not just the number of friends you have, it's the quality of your close relationships that matters." More specifically it's the amount of vulnerability and depth within those relationships, and how safe we feel sharing with one another. In other words, the extent to which we can breathe deep and be seen for who we truly are, and truly see others the same way. We long for connection, for acceptance, for love. It's the universal human condition. We were made for community, we are programmed to not be alone. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">One of the biggest reasons I am OK is because of a wife and friends that have shared similar experiences with me. They push back against the inertia of isolation that would be my natural tendency. It doesn't mean we effortlessly talk about our darkest days but we do understand each other's silence. We know what the far away look in the eyes means. And we also share a common faith. We know that the most important part of our relationships is the community, the family that we are as believers in Jesus. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Happiness does come from relationships, and everlasting, perfect happiness, what the bible calls joy, comes from relationship with the One that will never leave us or forsake us. In Jesus alone can we have limitless vulnerability and bottomless depth. In Him alone can we be known completely, He did in fact create us. So it follows then, perfect healing, the truest resiliency, the best inoculation against the prison of our desires can only come from knowing we are accepted with all of our faults, and that we are loved unreservedly and endlessly by the One who proved it by dying for us. And the path forward for any of us is to accept Him, on His terms, and remain in relationship with Him for all our days. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">There are gifts of clarity that can come with trauma, albeit with a heavy cost, like a magnifying glass brings such focus, such illumination, right before it burns a hole in the leaf. I fear death less, I cherish life more. We're so fragile, all of us humans. I also hate evil more, and realize that fear is its most powerful weapon. And I know that being good is more than just behavior, more than just abstaining from wrong. Good's gotta be brave, and it's gotta fight back. And that sometimes the most powerful weapon in that fight is forgiveness. And I learned, by watching people transformed by love, that loving your enemy is not just a suggestion, its a command. And it's evil's greatest fear.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Looking back, sometimes it's as if I am looking at these memories through that magnifying glass again, other times it's a microscope. One can make everything too bright, too volatile, the other too close and clinical. I have found the only way I can look back and consistently see clearly is through the lens of scripture. And though scripture doesn't always give us the answers to the questions we ask, it does however give us the answer in the person of Jesus. Knowing my Savior has experienced the full horror of hell means he understands all I am going through, means He has felt it too. And the Spirit that was in Him through the entire ordeal lives in me. The Spirit of all hope, all peace, all comfort, and all joy. The same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead and will one day raise me to be with Him forever, to</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> the eternal hope that all these things will pass, and that the destiny for the beloved is beautiful, and painless, and never ending bliss. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">One more thing, when I write about my time in Iraq, a wave of guilt tends to wash over me as I remember the mothers and fathers of the children who were torn apart by ISIS, as I recall the many stories of my Iraqi co-workers who have lived under the dark shadow of terrorism and war most of their lives. I would never, will never place my experiences on the same plane as theirs. These words are for the others like me, who have had similar experiences. Who have suffered trauma or seen it. For those medical professionals and relief workers who go to help. These words are to honor them. They are my heroes, mostly because they don't see themselves that way. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">For my EFH people. I love you. If you ever need to talk you know how to find me. We're all in this together. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">We</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> have been broken by our experiences, He is putting us back together. xoxo</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i><b>*</b></i></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>Other symptoms of post traumatic experiences can include aggressive, erratic or self-destructive behavior, disassociation or memory blanks, numbness and the lack of ability to concentrate. Many people experience sleeplessness and irrational fears.</i></span><i style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif;">You can read more about the symptoms <a href="http://www.trauma-pages.com/s/t-facts.php" target="_blank">here</a>. If these symptoms persist for more than 30 days they can be PTSD. Please see a counselor.</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>Mark Langhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03661141836736474743noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8095292504426076447.post-54393927007350077312017-04-06T17:58:00.000-07:002017-04-07T10:09:45.907-07:00They Were Like Birds<br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Tuesday Syrian President Assad's coalition forces used a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/world/middleeast/syria-gas-attack.html?_r=0" target="_blank">chemical agent on civilians</a> living in the Idlib Province. Official counts of the dead now exceed 80. Including 22 members of </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/world/middle-east/article/2085404/i-couldnt-save-anyone-theyre-all-dead-now-22-members-one" target="_blank">Abdel Hameed Alyousef's family</a></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">. A picture of him holding his two dead babies is all over m</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">y social media and news feeds. The world is weeping at such grotesque tragedy, weeping for Abdel, weeping for the 28 other children and 20 women who were killed in the attack. Most died foaming at the mouth, choking, suffocating from the sarin gas. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">These are war crimes. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">These are crimes against humanity. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">A year ago I was in Greece. Working in the north near the border with FYROM at the refugee camp called Idomeni. There I met hundreds of Syrians running from Assad's 4 year assault on his own people, running from ISIS, running from a war with too many factions and not enough heroes. The drawing above was given to me by Razan, an 11 year old from Damascus.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">One very cold morning I got to the camp early to find protesters all along the rail tracks that used to provide unfettered train access to FYROM for trade and passengers alike. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The presence of protesters wasn't anything new, a daily occurrence for a beleaguered population of 13,000 whose lives were stuck in limbo while politicians pulled their strings from warm boardrooms thousands of miles away. But this morning the signs were different, this morning the mood was especially somber. Protesters seemed hopeless, far away in their stares. They were looking homeward, but through a thick fog of grief. Aleppo had fallen after almost four years of fighting. By the end of 2016 the battle for Aleppo would have become one of the longest sieges in modern warfare, 31,000+ people dead and 36,000+ buildings completely destroyed. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Sitting in the tents of Syrian refugees, listening to their stories, the string of tragedies that had become their story, I found myself sharing chai and tears with total strangers. I will never forget their words. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The Syrian boy below was shot in the leg by a sniper. His mother suffered from PTSD, her husband had been murdered by ISIS. Wet-eyed and weary she recounted both incidents, showed me the pictures on her phone. Showed me the decapitated child that was her daughter's best friend. Her little body left in the street as a warning to submit or be killed. This trembling mother had left before her children shared their father's fate, or before they became another lifeless example, lying in the road.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Above, the photos of Rostem, a young man shot in the head as he walked home from work in Damascus. His mother Amina wept as she told me about him, how she didn't know if it was Assad or IS that had killed him. She'd fled Syria with her daughter, to get her to safety anywhere. And then she teared up again, apologizing that she had no food to offer me, and then with great pride said if you were in my country, at my home, I would feed you the biggest meal. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Her husband Omar smiled for the first time, but only for a moment as he told me of Amina's brain tumor. His words were slow and anxious. He he couldn't lose her too.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Now another year has passed. There are thousands of other stories to add to these. Refugees still pour out of Syria and other war torn countries. Still make treacherous journeys with their young, the infirmed and elderly, for the hope of safety. Thousands have died, drowned in cold seas off the coast of Turkey, Greece, and Libya. Thousands more will drown. Stories like that of the chemical attack Tuesday reveal what these people are running from, what's at stake.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I'm angry, I'm heartbroken. I hear the politicking, the rhetoric. I hear the hard-hearted diatribes against refugees, read the ramblings of those that have never tasted terror. I understand the complex nature of this issue. I understand the scrutiny and vetting of refugees, of governments being safe and responsible. But what I cannot understand, what I cannot stomach are the accusations levied at these families fleeing from terror. Accusations, some of which are made by people calling themselves Christians. Accusations of people they've never met, whose stories they've never heard, whose lives they've never had to live. Accusations like:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">"They should stay and fight." "The men are cowards for leaving." "This is opportunistic migration." </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Stay and fight? While their families are being picked off by snipers, mowed down by air attacks, gassed with chemicals? Stay and fight and send their families along the treacherous journey to safety? Where many women are raped, many children exploited, many never make it at all. Stay and fight for who? With who? In a war with no rules, no boundaries. Where is the hope for defeating so many enemies on so many fronts? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Cowards? These people have lived in these conditions for years, bravely, defiantly. Where is the cowardice, the opportunism in wanting to get your family out of harm's way? Get them to a life without war. What kind of coward, what sort of opportunist braves human traffickers, frigid waters, and years mired in refugee camps for freedom? I'd say that people like that have incredible internal fortitude, anything but cowardice.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">To be sure, this is not the face of cowardice. This is shock. This is a father who has lost his 9 month old twins, Aya and Ahmed, and 20 other members of his family to a chemical attack from his own government. This is what staying gets you. A mass grave with 22 members of your family.<b>*</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Are there opportunists? Yes. Are there terrorists lurking in the ranks of this great throng of the dispossessed? Sure, probably. Will we stand before God and give account for the selfishness and self-protection that kept us from helping the hurting huddled masses? You know in your heart we will. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Let us remember carefully the words of our Savior. "</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me." (Matthew 25:25-36)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">We don't have to be anti-American to be pro refugee. We don't have to work against the security of the state to obey the mandate of Scripture. We don't even have to demand our government do anything but we have to. As a Christian our personal safety is not paramount, as a disciple it's not really even an option. What is paramount is our expressing the love and mercy of God is. Our obedience to His Holy word is. Our citizenship is in heaven. Our allegiance is to Christ. Our job is to build His kingdom not our own earthly one. And this is how we begin:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Get on our knees. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Let us repent of failing to weep for the children of Syria, of Iraq. Let us repent of choosing self-preservation over fighting for the sanctity of these lives. Let us ask God to show each of us what to do. How we can be a light in this darkness? How we can welcome the refugee into our homes, or go and meet their needs where they are? </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">T</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">his is our solemn duty and sacred trust. And it's the right thing to do. These are image bearers of their Creator.</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> Let's not live in fear of hostile takeover, or religious subversion. We have not been given a Spirit of fear but of love and power and of a sound mind. We have been given the same power that defeated hell, death and the grave. We should be the bravest, most selfless and loving people on the planet. We have the perfect example. We, of all humanity, have the precious gift of Jesus. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Love like He did. Even if it costs us our lives.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><b>*</b></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-style: italic;">Another member of the family, Aya Fadl, recalled running from her house with her 20-month-old son in her arms, thinking she could find safety from the toxic gas in the street. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-style: italic;">Instead, the 25-year-old English teacher was confronted face-to-face with the horror of it: a pick-up truck piled with the bodies of the dead, including many of her own relatives and students. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-style: italic;">“Ammar, Aya, Mohammed, Ahmad, I love you my birds. Really they were like birds. Aunt Sana, Uncle Yasser, Abdul-Kareem, please hear me,” Ms Fadl said, choking back tears as she recalled how she said farewell to her relatives in the pile. <b>(from an Independent UK <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/syria-chemical-attack-idlib-gas-father-abdel-hameed-alyousef-twin-babies-aya-ahmed-killed-khan-a7669491.html" target="_blank">article</a>)</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>Mark Langhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03661141836736474743noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8095292504426076447.post-41989148376407118242017-04-03T15:54:00.000-07:002018-10-13T11:56:42.237-07:00A Million Miles From Shore<br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Sunday we went to church. It was the first time to be with a group of believers worshiping since we got back from Iraq. I could be generous, I could put the best construction on the story, but I won't, it was bland and felt well-rehearsed. In fact, had it not been for a friend wanting a ride we'd never have gone. And even then I chose that particular church because I knew I could wear a t-shirt and flip-flops and nurse my coffee buzz from the shadows in the back of the auditorium. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The worship band was white and tight and theologically light. The production was perfect and the performance bright and bubbly, their toothy grins sparkled even from where we were near the back. The first couple songs could be described as ice-breakers, overly positive, rally the troops sorta filler. Sincere I'm sure but shallow feeling nonetheless. I started to zone out, the lights, the production blurred, my mind wandered. Then they slowed it down, put on their solemn faces, dimmed the lights to match the mood and deftly segue into communion. And they sang this song:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>You were the Word at the beginning</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>One With God the Lord Most High</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>Your hidden glory in creation</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>Now revealed in You our Christ</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>What a beautiful Name it is</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>What a beautiful Name it is</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>The Name of Jesus Christ my King</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>You didn't want heaven without us</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>So Jesus, You brought heaven down</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>My sin was great, Your love was greater</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>What could separate us now</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>What a wonderful Name it is</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>What a wonderful Name it is</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>The Name of Jesus Christ my King</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>How sweet is your name, Lord, how good You are</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>Love to sing in the name of the Lord, love to sing for you all?</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>Death could not hold You, the veil tore before You</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>You silenced the boast, of sin and grave</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>The heavens are roaring, the praise of Your glory</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>For You are raised to life again</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>You have no rival, You have no equal</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>Now and forever, Our God reigns</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>Yours is the Kingdom, Yours is the glory</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>Yours is the Name, above all names</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>What a powerful Name it is</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>What a powerful Name it is</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>The Name of Jesus Christ my King</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I'd never heard the song before a couple months ago. We were still in Iraq and one hard morning this song was sung so emotionally raw. I was undone. And here again, this past Sunday, so far from the Middle East, tears stung my cheeks and it was all I could to not weep deeply, sorrow and joy and hope and heartbreak, and disintegrate into a sloppy puddle of snot and tears.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">One of the hardest things for aid workers is to come home again, back to normal, back to the status quo. It's nobody's fault it's just that everything has changed. And one place where these differences, these changes are most conspicuous, is church. In Iraq our morning devotions were punctuated with grieving over the lost limbs of toddlers, the explosions of war in the distance, and mostly the desperate need for the scriptures to be true and for God to be near. Living and worshiping behind blast walls not 25 miles from an active war-zone keeps everything in sharp focus. Prayer is pleading, scripture study is like reading the engine manual while the boat is stranded, listing strangely, and taking on water a million miles from shore. And worship, worship is free bleeding. Its the painful sort of vulnerability that comes from being exposed as weak and impotent and incapable of saving your self. And there you are, among seventy-five others, all slowly coming apart at the seams. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">And that's not to say you have to fly a few thousand miles into the heart of darkness to find desperation. Suffering is everywhere. Cancer kills kids and addiction takes fathers and car accidents devour whole families in one great gulp. It's just that sometimes we do our best here in the west to insulate, even theologically inoculate ourselves from suffering and that's a luxury of a society that isn't completely broken by poverty or being obliterated by war. I'm just as guilty, I often just want to be able to breathe deep, spend the day at the beach in mindless, painless pleasure. And sometimes I do.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">But there are other days, when I am broken. When I feel like I am falling, I mean free falling into some great pit of despair and I need Him. I need Jesus, this defeater of death, this buyer back of men with the currency of His blood. I need him more than my next breath, more than gravity. On those days I'm reluctantly thankful for those 6 weeks in a war-zone, they exposed me for who I am, worthless and weak. But oh how beautifully they revealed Him for who He is. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">If you need Him as desperately as I do today I'll leave you with this...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">And for those couple hundred believers this past Sunday, I'm sorry. It's not you, it's me. Please forgive my pride. I love you. Thank you for knocking me off my high horse once again. xoxo</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>Mark Langhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03661141836736474743noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8095292504426076447.post-47493301132432712672017-03-27T12:55:00.000-07:002017-03-27T13:37:17.912-07:00Lost In The Garden<div>
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</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">There were two suicide bombings, almost simultaneously. One at a security checkpoint and another at a restaurant called Sayidati al-Jamila, or "My Fair Lady" in English. Within 30 minutes, our field hospital just East of Mosul, maybe 20km from the explosions, began receiving</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> casualties from both ISIS attacks. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The first wave was from the restaurant, all young men, mid twenties, some burnt black and hair singed gasping for air, others riddled with shrapnel. Within minutes the second wave, security forces bloody and bodies full of pieces from the vehicle born bomb. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Within an hour we were overrun. Trauma and ER beds full, an OR that would be inundated through the night and into the next day. An ICU that would be stretched to it's limits doing extensive burn care. I've never heard the total injured from the twin blasts but the death toll is officially at 14. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Whenever casualties came to us they were immediately tagged one of four colors. Green, yellow, red, black. This system, of a small ribbon tied around the wrist, let all hospital staff know the critical or non-critical nature of the patient's wounds. Green meant stable, superficial and non life threatening wounds. Yellow, wounds that needed medical attention soon but not immediately. Red, immediate need for medical care without which patient would succumb to their injuries. And black: beyond the scope of medical intervention, injuries too severe, death inevitable. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The ribbon above is from the son of a General in the Iraqi army. He was a casualty of the </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Sayidati al-Jamila restaurant blast. After he died, after we brought him to the morgue, I cleaned the cot where he lay. I could, <i>I can</i>, still smell the explosive and the burnt hair. For some reason, and I didn't even remember until yesterday, I stuck his black ribbon in my pocket. I don't remember his name, only his father, in full uniform, crying, asking over and over and over "why...why...why...?" And that his brother, and his brother-in law, who both fought for their lives a few feet away in the ICU, later would join their brother in the morgue. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Every morning at the field hospital we would assemble for a short time of singing and prayer and sharing of the hope followers of Christ have in Him. Most mornings I would read a Psalm before we began. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">That next morning, looking out at our team, I saw a weary and heart-heavy group. I saw wet eyes and sorrow-filled souls bleeding the question of the night before, "why...why...why...?" I was looking in a mirror. I </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">read </span><a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2091" style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif;" target="_blank">Psalm 91</a><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">, a passage that had been read on several other mornings, a passage we were holding on to for life, so near a war zone. The Psalm begins so beautifully, God's beloved safe in his shadow, gathered under the refuge of His wings and it ends this way:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i><b>"Because he loves me,” says the Lord, “I will rescue him; I will protect him, for he acknowledges my name. He will call on me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble, I will deliver him and honor him. With long life I will satisfy him and show him my salvation."</b></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">One of the rubs of any religion, or any philosophy for that matter, secular or sacred, is that things don't always play out as </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">promised. The facts seem to undermine the faith. Every apologist, every theologian and philosopher, every single honest believer has run their ship aground here, often blindly, because their own experiences are in disagreement with the beliefs they espouse. Even this Psalm, filled with promises for protection, is daily contradicted by the deaths of those that love God, those He says He loves. For us, a rag-tag bunch of aid workers and medical staff at a field trauma hospital who had seen the innocent victims of terrorism, who'd seen too many children die, if we were honest with ourselves, we knew that God's protection sometimes seemed to be a lottery of birth, or arbitrary at best.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I suppose I could sell all the books, speak at every sold out stadium to an adoring throng if I could reconcile these things here. If I could justify God's goodness in light of suffering, make every thorny why into a prick-less and perfect bouquet of because. I cannot. Not for you, or me, or the hundreds of Christian martyrs that die every year trusting God for deliverance. Not even for the tens of thousands of children killed every year, whose only crime is being born into a geographic locale prone to terrorism, or natural disaster, or plague, or famine.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The truth is it seems we are all born with an invisible ribbon on our wrists. Our chances of survival, our likelihood for success, the sum of all of our breaths tied to the color invisible there. It would seem there is a lottery of birth, the more western or white or well to do you are the more chances you're a green. If you're a woman in Afghanistan you're yellow, a Yazidi in Iraq you're red. If you're poor anywhere you're never a green. History shows us, at the very least, that catastrophe and war have their favored playgrounds. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Christianity would proffer that all suffering began with sin. That the rebellion of the original earth-dwellers, their choice of the knowledge of good and evil over innocence brought with it the downward spiral of entropy, the advent of decay. That those first bites of forbidden fruit rotted the whole earth to the core. But that doesn't give us much comfort, doesn't reconcile God's promises of safe haven written 3000 years after the garden with the fact we don't often get that protection. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">While in Iraq I read extensively in the book of Job. Looking for comfort and understanding in the oldest book of the bible. It deals with the question of suffering more than any other biblical text. In fact Job's questions, are the same questions we are asking. Why do the innocent suffer? Why doesn't God intervene? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The following are some of my takeaways. Some seeing through a dark glass all the while processing. They are not a tidy wrap up of all the horrors I saw. There is no mopping up the blood spilled, no amount of understanding un-explodes bombs.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">If you've read the story you might remember several things. One, there is a reason for Job's suffering, a reason he is never privy to, a reason, in Job's case, that was not his sin. Two, Job's closest friends presume to know the reason for his suffering and argue at great lengths that Job is a sinner, that his hidden sins have found him out, and that God in His righteous justice is punishing Job with a penalty befitting his transgression. And finally, Job maintains his innocence the whole time, begging God for answers. You may also remember Job does get his audience with God and the Creator of all things never answers Job's questions, nor for that matter, ours. So wh</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">at then can we learn from Job? About the reality of suffering and the nature of God. Maybe at least these things:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">1. God doesn't owe us answers, though He allows, even encourages his tiny creation to ask. He is perfect, never mistaken, and doesn't have to explain himself or His reasons. This is hard but brings me comfort if nothing else in this: God is not arbitrary, He does not change. I may not always understand Him but He is not chaos wrapped in randomness. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">2. There will always be other voices, sane, even deeply empathetic voices, that will try to get us to trade faith for fatalism, honesty for self-delusion. That will try and make us make excuses for God, or at the very least put words in His mouth. I do not need to placate God by confessing to sins I didn't commit, by groveling, by leveraging Him with promises of future obedience. He already knows. On the contrary I need not make excuses for His behavior either.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">3. God is always seeking to restore what was lost in the garden. He is always offering innocence back in exchange for our ceasing to respond to Him with the knowledge of good and evil. He is always offering Himself to us, in all His holiness, as lover, Lord and friend. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">When God finally does speak to Job in <a href="http://biblehub.com/niv/job/38.htm" target="_blank">chapter 38</a> it is not with tender words of consolation, it is with thundering boasts. He hurls His own questions at Job, utterly unanswerable assaults on Job's finite humanity. This continues unabated for another full chapter until at the start of chapter 40 God re-phrases all of His previous questions into one eviscerating rhetorical, more taunt than query: “Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct him? Let him who accuses God answer him!”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Job, as you might imagine is undone. He whimpers that he has no response and puts his hand over his mouth. Again there is no tender placation from God, only a second barrage of thunderous questions, this time with a new caveat, Job will have to answer His Creator.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Finally after two more chapters of God roaring out rhetoric as a raging storm, Job must answer Him. Job begins clumsily, humiliated and overwhelmed.</span><br />
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<i><b><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">“I know that you can do all things; </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">no purpose of yours can be thwarted. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’ </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">things too wonderful for me to know."</span></b></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">But then Job reveals the true gift he'd been given, maybe not the reason for His suffering but at the very least the revelation his tragedy unfolded:</span><br />
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<b><i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">"My ears had heard of you </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">but now my eyes have seen you.</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">”</span></i></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Finally, after God rebukes Job's friends and exonerates Job by having him pray for them, God restores all of Job's riches and family. And God gives him higher honor than he ever had before</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">. Not exactly a Hallmark ending, Job still certainly grieved the children he lost, certainly still had unanswered questions. But now he knew his God was bigger, more powerful than he'd ever imagined. That the gap between Job's righteousness and God's holiness was as wide as Job's ability to speak creation into existence from nothing and God's. This somehow comforted Job greatly, his God was so much greater than he'd believed and yet still came close to Job, not with wrath but glory. Glory that left Job in breathless if not trembling awe.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The story of Job might easily be estranged from Christianity if not for the first prophesy of Jesus in the book of Job. In his exasperation Job wishes for "a mediator between us; he would lay his hand on both of us, remove his rod from me, so his fury wouldn’t frighten me. Then I would speak unafraid." I take great comfort knowing that Jesus suffered all things, that He is at the right hand of the Father speaking on my behalf, silencing the voice of the accuser.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">We will not this side of heaven understand everything, maybe not even the things most important to us. But He loves you and I. We will see him in the midst of our suffering, we will know him deeper if we take from Him the new eyes, the new heart He offers when we're born again in Christ.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I am still heartbroken. There are still memories I don't call to mind. But I am more sure of the power and the nature of God than before my time in Iraq. More sure the suffering of innocence will be avenged or absolved one day- through God's justice or His forgiveness. And I trust that He alone, through Jesus, is the arbiter of both.</span></div>
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Mark Langhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03661141836736474743noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8095292504426076447.post-30315150644638786382017-03-27T11:47:00.000-07:002017-03-27T13:12:09.589-07:00Jesus. In His Own Words.<br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The internet is teeming with memes such as this:</span><br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NPjArit2HYE/WNVZu-ndmkI/AAAAAAAADEE/QSPPUJpV0p0BfZQwqRjsM75pQBsI4tsOACLcB/s1600/jesus-socialism.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NPjArit2HYE/WNVZu-ndmkI/AAAAAAAADEE/QSPPUJpV0p0BfZQwqRjsM75pQBsI4tsOACLcB/s1600/jesus-socialism.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">And this:</span><br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-e4Q0p607TfM/WNVZ23syleI/AAAAAAAADEI/rj8TqsFspiQZk1QR3irtduHJ9bs_BMqQACLcB/s1600/jesus-radical-meme.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-e4Q0p607TfM/WNVZ23syleI/AAAAAAAADEI/rj8TqsFspiQZk1QR3irtduHJ9bs_BMqQACLcB/s400/jesus-radical-meme.jpg" width="255" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">And those images are shared ad nauseum across all social media platforms, especially during political seasons.</span><br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/--HyDBiY1b94/WNVacOBWqyI/AAAAAAAADEQ/l9GEJw8kmAs6LPJ8a3jlAtt_KxVRrMSsACLcB/s1600/bernie%2BJesus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="295" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/--HyDBiY1b94/WNVacOBWqyI/AAAAAAAADEQ/l9GEJw8kmAs6LPJ8a3jlAtt_KxVRrMSsACLcB/s400/bernie%2BJesus.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-SDl8zBEvru0/WNVacOgPwRI/AAAAAAAADEU/GmptOqngMZ8j1kio_KxFq8-9ksJbYkzQwCLcB/s1600/patriot%2Bjesus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-SDl8zBEvru0/WNVacOgPwRI/AAAAAAAADEU/GmptOqngMZ8j1kio_KxFq8-9ksJbYkzQwCLcB/s400/patriot%2Bjesus.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I'm guilty. I found this particular image Instagram worthy because it fit in nicely with my take on the words of Jesus.</span><br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xCS1hzVA1K4/WNVaA6vQglI/AAAAAAAADEM/2fjoKqgjLDAg-awD586jnMj9yYpeo46AwCLcB/s1600/beatitudes_matter.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="260" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xCS1hzVA1K4/WNVaA6vQglI/AAAAAAAADEM/2fjoKqgjLDAg-awD586jnMj9yYpeo46AwCLcB/s320/beatitudes_matter.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">When we quote someone, be that MLK, the President, or Jesus, the responsible thing to do is make sure the context of that quote is represented accurately. We must also make sure it isn't half of the meaning intended. We all know this, as evidenced by how angry we get when someone twists our words or puts words in our mouths. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Now, if I am going to quote Jesus because of His authority on an issue, then I am recognizing His authority. Likewise, if I am quoting Jesus to expose the hypocrisy of someone across the political or religious aisle from me, I must remember, while they may yet be hypocrites, the judgement I give will be equal to that which I receive</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">. Jesus did say that, in so many words...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">So this man we quote, this moral teacher, this poet and prophet. This hippy, this iconoclast. This itinerant Jewish rabbi. This social justice warrior who didn't suffer the rich or the self-righteous gladly. This egalitarian, this raging temple cleanser. This radical revolutionary. This non-violent, non-white, homeless, healer of the sick, raiser of the dead. This refugee, this middle-eastern man. This Jesus, who is all of those things and more. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">He claimed to be the forgiver of sins. Luke 7:48-49 "Then Jesus said to her, 'Your sins are forgiven'." And Luke 5:20-21, Mark 2:10. And by forgiving sins he reiterated to the masses the need for forgiveness, reiterated that sin separated them from God.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">He claimed to pre-exist with God. John 17:5 "And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began." </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">He claimed He would return again. Matthew 24:27-30 "So as the lightening comes from the east and flashes to the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man... At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory." And Matthew 25:31-32, Mark 14:61-62.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">He claimed to be the only way to eternal life. He didn't just tell people how they could find everlasting life, or deepen their own life experience. He actually claimed to give eternal life himself. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">John 11:25 "Jesus said to her, 'I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die...'" And also: John 6:40, John 6:</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">47, </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">John 10:28-30</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">He claimed to be Savior, </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">John 3:14-16. And</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> the Messiah, John 4:26.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">He claimed to be t</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">he Son of God, Matt 26:63-63. One with the Father, John 10:30. He even claimed to be God himself, John 8:58.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">In his book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis wrote, "A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg--or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">We will never all agree on every nuances of all the teachings of Jesus. But if we are to quote Him, if we are to claim the authority of His words, we must re-examine all He said, and who he claimed to be and then decide what the weight of those words reveal, what action we might be required to take. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Jesus loves us but He is not a puppet whose lips we flap subject to our whims and will. He is not a child to be silenced and sent to the corner, a dog to be muzzled and chained. He came to be servant of all but He is still King (</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Luke 23:1-3, John 18:36-37) and Lord (Luke 2:11). He is not a mouthpiece for our religious or political platform. Jesus stands alone as the Truth, the only truth. He, himself, claimed that, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." He goes on to say in that same audacious, and if true, universe-shaking statement, "No one comes to the Father except through me." John 14:16. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Jesus is the social justice revolutionary we all want, <i><b>and</b></i> He is the door to heaven, the way home, the redeemer and saver of our souls we so desperately need. If we would only believe.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Jesus. In His own words. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>Mark Langhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03661141836736474743noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8095292504426076447.post-89326936922122378942014-03-16T12:17:00.000-07:002014-03-16T13:55:54.809-07:00This In-Between Month, Day 28: Character Sketches<div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Later today I will take a train to New Orleans and fly early tomorrow to Miami and then on to Haiti, but for now I am sitting in this coffee shoppe watching people. Listening to their conversations. Learning, painting</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> little character sketches, </span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">trying to understand what it is that makes people in a story believable. The way they interact with strangers, the cadence of their speech, their tics and superfluous movements. The way the boy in plaid stops moving his lips but doesn't lower his voice when he wants to tell his girlfriend a secret. As if lip-readers alone will use this private knowledge against him. Why would he do this? And why does the college guy sitting behind him hunch over his meal like he has done hard time in jail? Protecting his plate with one arm and keeping his face real low, real close to the plate so he can shovel the food in with his spoon. And the man with the rectangular glasses. He has nodded his head in agreement with every conversation at his table and yet not spoken up once. Is he this much of a people pleaser or is he plotting silently the whole time to financially defraud them all? His shirt would suggest as much. That shade of purple. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">But then there are the ones, enigmatic or odd, that capture my attention most.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">For instance that man there. He barks when he laughs, like a dog with a cough, like a dog with a deep, rattling smoker's cough. And everything seems to make him laugh. The barista dropping a spoon. His tablemate mispronouncing a former soviet bloc country's name. Always barking his lung hacking laughter. I imagine he does it at the most inappropriate times. The priest with a lisp at his father's funeral, the sloshed champagne of solemn wedding toast. And always, always into a vacuum of silence, he alone finding hilarity in the most mundane of things.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Then, across the room, is this study in mismatched aztec prints who sits perched on her chair like a nervous little cat. The dog-cough laughter keeps making her jump. I imagine she is startled by shadows and sneezes on the subway. That she is always fumbling her keys in locks. "Sticky-tricky locks" she would say, half growl half whisper, never amused that so many doorknobs in so many diverse locations would for so long continue to conspire against her. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Now they are in line, coffee refills we'll say. And she is fumbling again, through her wallet. She is apologetic, she is out of cash (a conspiracy!) and there is a five dollar minimum on credit transactions. He offers to pay but she declines. He insists and out of deference for the long line forming behind them she mumbles yes. He pays and she smiles gratefully. He smiles sheepishly. She blushes, but this full body sunburn blush and he smiles again, more confident, very warmly and it seems, to me anyway, their eyes hold a second too long. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">So I imagine their life together. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">They are married on a Friday, because Friday is a payday and Monday a holiday. </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Their house will be affordable. No other consideration will be made before its purchase. They'll move the left-over, left behind furniture from his first marriage and the emotionally neutral furniture from her last bad break-up into the two bedroom one bath fixer-upper. His western trade paperbacks will be placed next to her Faulkner and Hemingway and she will try her best to forgive him but it will keep her up nights. He will always, as if for sport, ask her grand hypotheticals, none that she can answer truthfully without betraying his fragile sense of loyalty. He will ask, "If you had one day left to live, who would you want to spend it with?" To which she will feel she must say, "You, honey." </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">But being a bad liar she might try and put him off with some non-answer, or some gentle bite back. </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">She will of course spend it reading. He can be there too if he prefers. Instead she will say, "I love you". And they will both know she doesn't mean it, but for the first time, in a really, really long time, she'll wish she did. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Yep. This is what I am doing when I am awkwardly staring at you in a coffee shoppe. I am living out your other possible lives for you. I just write it down, see what the characters might do, what they might say. And when there is someone or something deeply authentic or universally true in some new way, well I'll hold on to those things for some story sometime. Or it's all rubbish and I'll erase it but I will hopefully have learned a little more about human nature. And every once in a while I'll fall madly in love with someone's imaginary self, and then I'll send them away to some far off locale, and when they get back, if there are still sparks, well then I'll write whatever they say. </span><br />
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Mark Langhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03661141836736474743noreply@blogger.com0Hattiesburg, MS, USA31.3271189 -89.290339231.1100264 -89.6130627 31.5442114 -88.96761570000001tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8095292504426076447.post-50006090658183288812014-03-13T17:02:00.001-07:002014-03-13T17:02:18.068-07:00This In-Between Month, (Later On) Day 25: Heals As It Cuts<br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">I got up earlier than I wanted to go to the DMV as my driver's license will expire while I am in Haiti. The line was wrapped around the back of the building when I arrived and I braced myself for a long morning of waiting. Waiting without coffee. But the entire process is now automated. It took me 3 minutes. I got back to my rental car before my coffee cooled. Winning!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">But yet, for whatever reason, I was one of two people to use the automated machine. The waiting room was to overflowing capacity with disgruntled drivers, faces contorted in disgust. One man ranted how all this technology was some conspiracy of paper conservation at taxpayer expense. He said this, holding ticket number one million forty-five out of about a billion and was still mumbling under his breath as I danced joyfully out the door. Well, I felt like dancing.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Now at a coffee shoppe I am lost in the words of Flannery O'Connor. If I have never mentioned her to you before I am sorry. I would quote her here but everything she said or wrote should be quoted. Get thee to a bookstore, a computer, or the library and read her. </span><i style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">The Habit of Being</i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> is a collection of her letters. That's a good place to start. And </span><i style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose</i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> is great too. Her fiction is the best of American Southern gothic. Full of freaks and Jesus and deep mystery and eternal truth. She has the kind of razor wit and effortless grace that heals as it cuts. I seriously want to just quote her for an hour. I cannot find one phrase that rises above the rest when they all fly so high. For every writer out there, please, please read what she has to say about writing. She is a master and her wisdom is invaluable to your craft. To the Christian and the truth seeker she speaks with a clarity and a poetry that seers into the soul. To the reader and lover of fiction she captures in both narrative and dialogue that which is elementally human having been twisted by misery, wrung through the ringer of life and having resisted all their days Grace. She shows us the grotesque we will become without Christ. Wow. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">My driver's license will be mailed to my parents in 14 days. I will have been in Haiti for a week and a half by then. Some of the people in line with me this morning may still be sitting in the purgatory of the DMV waiting room. God help them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Anyway, I finally found some quotes by the irrepressible Miss O'Connor that I'd like to share. Quotes about writing. Enjoy!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">“The serious writer has always taken the flaw in human nature for his starting point, usually the flaw in an otherwise admirable character. Drama usually bases itself on the bedrock of original sin, whether the writer thinks in theological terms or not. Then, too, any character in a serious novel is supposed to carry a burden of meaning larger than himself. The novelist doesn't write about people in a vacuum; he writes about people in a world where something is obviously lacking, where there is the general mystery of incompleteness and the particular tragedy of our own times to be demonstrated, and the novelist tries to give you, within the form of the book, the total experience of human nature at any time. For this reason, the greatest dramas naturally involve the salvation or loss of the soul. Where there is no belief in the soul, there is very little drama. ” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored." </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose</span><br />
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Mark Langhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03661141836736474743noreply@blogger.com2Hattiesburg, MS, USA31.3271189 -89.290339231.3271189 -89.2903392 31.3271189 -89.2903392tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8095292504426076447.post-39729197719387393802014-03-13T09:27:00.000-07:002014-03-14T07:32:45.154-07:00This In-Between Month, Day 25: Our Own Shadows<br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Sometimes I can be my own worst enemy. I am certainly my hardest, most unrelenting critic. If I took the tone with you that my inner voice takes with me, well you would not be my friend. Blame personality type or order of birth but I hold myself to an impossible standard. And when I fail, as I always do, as I always will in light of unattainable perfection, I have a hard time forgiving myself. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Don't get me wrong, there are many things I fail at that are your garden variety failures. Ones so common and ordinary as to be too pathetically boring to admit here, but even those things, maybe especially those things, raise my inner voice's ire and I take a good tongue lashing.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">And what I have found, wherever I go, is that most of us, in one way or another, are the same way. And what is worse is that we put our critical voice into God's mouth. And many times in my experience, people don't even realize it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">As I lay in bed last night, sleepless, restless, melancholy to the point of morose, a little bird of thought flew headlong into the little window of my soul. "When we face the sunlight we cannot see our own shadows." And in the darkness of that room, with darker thoughts, that little flash of light fluttering, that little thud and shudder and chirp of a truth reminded me this:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">I must stare into the face of Jesus whose beautiful radiance will devour my shadows. And the more I am consumed by His loveliness and His light the less I will think of me, my darkness, my ugliness. And the more I bathe in the glow of His perfection the more I realize I need not even try to be something I am not and cannot ever be. What I can be, is a vessel, or maybe a cup, or probably more likely a shot glass to carry His light and His love and His utter perfection to the world. Anything else will leave me mired in self-loathing and failure. So I give up (again) on being perfect. And though I may be found muttering "shut up" to myself, or even screaming it now and then, well, I refuse to listen to that voice of condemnation any longer, for in Christ there is no more of that nastiness. I choose to believe what scripture says about me, namely that I am unconditionally loved and that His grace is made perfect in my weakness, not in my mock perfection.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Yup. Amen.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>Mark Langhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03661141836736474743noreply@blogger.com0Hattiesburg, MS, USA31.3271189 -89.290339231.1100264 -89.6130627 31.5442114 -88.96761570000001tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8095292504426076447.post-16840711337696258112014-03-09T17:01:00.000-07:002014-03-09T17:01:19.394-07:00This In-Between Month, Day Twenty-Something: Time's a Revelator<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Today River and I rode through the mountains. We turned Gillian Welch way up and drove real slow, winding in and out of endless curves cut from sheer rock faces. She sang "Time's a revelator" and as she did it seemed time slowed, our surroundings coming into such sharp focus. The trees, </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">except for a few evergreens,</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> were bare and covered the old round hills in great gray bristles. There were tall slender symmetrical ones that looked like flightless feathers (for what are trees if not the earth's feathers, and forests her many wings). And there were huge white writhing ones too that looked like the skeletons of great lumbering beasts. And the ground, the trees and it seemed every stone was covered in a thick green fur.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">After a week of rain the sun gilded the surface of streams and glowed rocks until they burned like coals. The endless bare branches, the sun cutting through with no canopy of leaves to obscure its light meant shadows criss crossing at every odd angle and making a maze on the forest floor. No photo could capture the stillness and the magic of those few moments any more than you can be warmed by a sketch of the sun. We just kept saying "wow, wow, wooooow". Our words, our breath, our movements slowed too. We stopped and stood on a giant rock in a river bend and my son, my own wild River broke the spell by quoting Coleridge which only served to put us back under the spell deeper still:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><i>In Xanadu did Kubla Khan</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><i>A stately pleasure-dome decree:</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><i>Where Alph, the sacred river, ran</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><i>Through caverns measureless to man</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><i>Down to a sunless sea.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Now, in our hotel room, River strums his guitar and I am thinking about time, this short interval of eternity scaled for human reference. Time <i>is</i> a revelator and I suppose we agree, "only time will tell" goes our prediction. We comfort ourselves and promise one another that "time is a healer". The ancient greeks in all their wisdom defer to time as the "wisest counselor of all". But we only have so much of it, and like Dave Perkins sings, "we lean against time with heels dug in". How many on their deathbed beg and barter with time? All my possessions for just a few more days. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Not much else to say I guess. I hope these scriptures about the time we have now and the time we have left will encourage you, and especially me to trust God more, drink down each day with great breathless gulps, and to get busy about kingdom business, mainly loving on widows and orphans and the lonely and the crushed in spirit. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">“But I trust in you, O LORD; I say, “You are my God.” My times are in your hand.” – Psalm 31:14-15, ESV</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” – Ecclesiastes 3:1, KJV</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">“So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.”</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> -Psalm 90:12, ESV</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">“Lord, remind me how brief my time on earth will be. Remind me that my days are numbered – how fleeting my life is.” – Psalm 39:4, NLT</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">“But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” – 2 Peter 3:8-9, ESV</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">“The LORD is a stronghold for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble.” – Psalm 9:9, ESV</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">“Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” – James 4:13-15, ESV</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">And the one that seems to stay in my mind these last few weeks...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">“He has made everything beautiful in its time.” – Ecclesiastes 3:11</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span>Mark Langhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03661141836736474743noreply@blogger.com0Great Smoky Mountains, United States35.4505757 -83.377245733.7972087 -85.959032700000009 37.103942700000005 -80.7954587tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8095292504426076447.post-76341717330891613892014-03-04T11:25:00.001-08:002014-03-07T18:55:54.459-08:00This In-Between Month, Days 13-16: The Ones Left Behind<br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">The days run together a bit, I could separate them, but the overlapping, the bleeding of thoughts one day to the next; life is more fluid than "x"s on a calendar. The last four days have been marked all the same, by conversations with a diverse cast of characters, by images with the edges blurred, by honest if not impatient prayers and what seems is heaven's silence. But then heaven will, promises to, make all things beautiful in its time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">At a little coffee shoppe in Ocean Springs I met Jack and Genevieve who are cycling across the South, from Savannah, Ga and then up to Alaska. They are warm and generous with smiles and conversation. They call Montreal home, although they have sold their belongings, quit their job and have no home to go back to. In fact, they are worried that when they do return to Canada a few months from now, everything will be so different and they will feel like strangers. I assure them it will probably be so. That they will see things they'd never seen before, the obnoxiousness of ads built to prey upon our deepest needs and fears. Selling community in a lite beer, acceptance in a new shirt, a sense of greater well being in a fragrance. They laugh when I tell them to be easy on their friends, the ones left behind.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Later, as I walk along the beach, the seagulls huddle on the sandbars, except for one. </span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"> He is riding a cold wind current, tunneling and spinning, diving and rolling and then straight up, like he was shot from a cannon. I always think of Richard Bach's little book<i> Jonathan Livingston Seagull </i>and the brave bird of the same name. Every time there is a solitary gull I am taken back to highschool and 16 years old. I picked the book because it was shortest but it left me buzzing for days, not at the philosophy Bach was intoning but the beauty of the story, the gentle defiance, the bravery and humility. If nothing else I learned that to live a life less ordinary, there are always the things and again, the ones left behind. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">A lighthouse in Biloxi and below a plaque commemorating "wade-ins" during the civil rights movement. Black and white activists would walk into the water together on Mississippi's segregated beaches. It took over 8 years after the first wade-in for a legal ruling to allow God's children of different colors to laugh and play together in the ocean He created for all of them.</span></b></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">I am reading a book called </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">"Neighbors," by Jan Tomasz Gross</span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"> about the Polish town of Jedwabne where all of the Jews were locked in a barn and burned to death on July 10, 1941, not by Nazis, but by their neighbors, fellow Poles. </span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Gross writes that the Nazis moved into the little town, they "easily reached agreement" with local officials on what to do about the Jews. Hundreds, including women and children, were soon brought to the town square. They were taunted, tortured, brutally desecrated and beaten with clubs and stones, herded into a barn, which was locked and set ablaze. Gross recounts other acts of demonic cruelty that surely made the Nazis proud. </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Stories such as of Jedwabne, Dachau, the 27 million enslaved today and even the Biloxi wade-ins remind me that for any great act of evil or injustice there is always a majority of complicit bystanders. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">There was to my knowledge only one brave woman in Jedwabne, Antonina Wyrzykowski, 25 years old then, who In 1942 hid seven Jews on her farm while the Jews of Jedwabne were being massacred by her Polish neighbors. She had a husband and two children, all of whom were threatened with death if caught by the Nazis. Much later she would write: “It's not about your religion, but about whether a man needs your help”. Those rescued Jews hid on her farm until 1945, despite regular searches of the property by Nazis and a very “aggressive attitude from Polish neighbours”. When the Nazis were driven out of Poland by the advancing Red Army, she and her family were beaten by locals for hiding the Jews. Her bravery is recounted in Anna Bikont's 2004 book <i>My z Jedwabnego</i> (We from Jedwabne).</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: start;">Antonina Wyrzykowski died in 2011 at the age of 95.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Today is grey again and how I've always imagined Poland. And that on a day as grey as today Antonia would have bundled up her children to leave Jedwabne for the last time. Maybe she limped a little, maybe her husband's face was still swollen from the beatings. They could no longer stay but what were they leaving behind, and who? Was it a family farm, a house her grandfather had built with his bare hands? Were her neighbors also her cousins? Maybe even her siblings? Sometimes bravery costs you everything but your own life, and sometimes of course, that too.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Our stories, the ones we live, maybe the ones we write, they are for ones left behind. Cautionary tales like Antonia's or hopefully like Bach's parable, to spur others on to great heights. It could be as simple as a bike ride away from corporate Canada, or as society shifting as a short civil rights march across a hundred foot stretch of sand. Every act of gentle defiance, every act of humble bravery is someone's story to be read of others. Stories that don't just deny convention, but destroy it. Like Em told me, there are those who live inside the box, those that live outside the box, and those that ask "What box?". It seems that in society, in church, in politics even, it is very fashionable to be iconoclastic, to live outside the box. But in truth those lives are still defined by that box. I want to live by that "What Box?" view. That reality for me that is inherent in the gospel, where Jesus is constantly destroying all convention, turning the world upside down with radical selfless behavior. Where foolish extravagant love is law and all things are possible, the highest heights, and the end of injustice and cruelty, if we will only let Christ destroy those boxes within boxes that hem in our brains and hearts. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Here's to a gentler, braver future (raises coffee cup). To loving, serving, and defying with foolish extravagance and radical sacrifice. To you! And the story your life will tell!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>Mark Langhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03661141836736474743noreply@blogger.com2Mobile, AL, USA30.6943566 -88.043054130.257462099999998 -88.688501100000011 31.1312511 -87.3976071tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8095292504426076447.post-88938164407498988852014-02-28T19:02:00.000-08:002014-03-05T06:45:47.373-08:00This In-Between Month, Day 12: The Fear of God<br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Today River and I shot a little pool, talked a lot about music and I realized again, looking at this young man who I helped make, that every second with him is such a gift of grace, every minute a miracle of mercy. As I dropped him off to spend the evening with his friends I was already missing him before I drove away. He is so bright, our conversations cover so many topics where I am way out of my depth. His questions make me search the depth of my experiences and hold fast to the promise that God gives us the words to speak when we need them. </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">We talk about the church's role (if any) in politics. </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">We often talk about Christianity in the modern age, at the crossroads of culture, and how the language we choose to use in communicating the gospel is crucial. One phrase that came up was "the fear of God". </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>A web search for "fear of God" images and these were the first two that came up after a plethora of ads for some clothing company out of LA that sells 1000 dollar oversized understated neo-skinhead fashion...</b></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">That phrase, "the fear of God", seems to perplex so many (and it has always made me a little uneasy too). It has been used at times to bludgeon people into belief, others </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">have dismissed it as an archaic concept, the personality of an Old Testament God who was replaced by a kinder, gentler, New Testament one</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">, and by others still </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">to reject Christianity altogether</span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">. We are told to love God for he is a gentle father, and then to fear God because He is a mighty warrior. And from the outside, and even the inside I suppose, this can make Him seem a bit schizophrenic .</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">As a Christian well immersed in “church” (and having at one point learned Christianese fluently) and, subsequently, living in a post-modern age where words have been emasculated, (and being no theologian), my response to the “fear of God” has always been a bit convoluted. I was taught, as a child, that this “fear” meant awe and wonder. And I still believe that to be one, large, dynamic part of it. But I think our system of awe and wonder may not big big enough for God. If a “2” is a litter of puppies being born then a “9” is River being born. The headroom for God is very limited. I say God is love. And then I say I love chocolate. The sliding scale starts in the finite but goes into the infinite. Words fail us and yet words are most of we have to communicate these concepts.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">When I read the scriptures, it seems to me that fear is expected to be a huge part of worship and the relationship we are supposed to have with God. We're told the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. That fear is for our protection, for our blessing, for our understanding, for all things in the universe to remain in order. It is this fear that is supposed to compel us to cherish our neighbor, to feed the poor, to be kind to the stranger. Hmmmm.... At the end of his days, Solomon, whom scripture calls the wisest man, summed it up to this. “Fear God and keep His commandments.” So than what is this fear? </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Again with the clumsiness of human terms, let me try and explain what I think it means. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">To me it is the acceptance of the sovereignty and perfection of a loving omnipotent God. It is the understanding that:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">He answers to no man, but yet stoops so low to hear the softest prayer of the weakest saint. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">He can take or give without permission, be that life or riches or power. He owes no one a single thing and yet His generosity knows no bounds. He gave His son up to the dogs of hell for them to devour Jesus's flesh just for us, so that we might have eternal life. And then He makes us joint heirs with Christ of all of heaven's riches. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">He is beyond reproach, beyond any misgiving. </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">He cannot lie. He cannot err. He cannot cease because He always was. And yet He calls us friends, we who are a ragtag bunch of rebels, liars, mistake makers, whose lives are a breath, a vapor, a flower fading.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">He is all powerful and could at any moment, without our permission, end all life by grinding the big blue-green ball of earth to sub-atomic grit in His hands. But yet in His unfathomable tenderness He holds us gently, safely in His hands and not only does he not crush us, he keeps us from the crushing weight of all else. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">I believe, if His majesty were revealed, in total, to any created being, they would explode, or implode, (or worse) but that what stays His hand from exacting justice on us all is His infinitely merciful heart, is His promise to love those He has called children. Oh how He loves us! Infinitely more than we love Him. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">So then the act of fearing God to me, in the simplest definition, is the total acceptance of His complete control and incomprehensible greatness and of our total depravity and infinite smallness all wonderfully wrapped in the revelation that we were created for Him to love and that His purpose, His eternal plan, is fulfilled when He exchanges His wrath for us as sinners with His love for us as children. Then the invisible realms see the very nature of God and I suspect, they tremble too.</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Argh, that felt long-winded and not perfectly clear. I hope that it helps, and there are also some really good thoughts </span><a href="http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/rejoice-with-trembling" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;" target="_blank">here</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span>Mark Langhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03661141836736474743noreply@blogger.com0Hattiesburg, MS, USA31.3271189 -89.290339231.1100264 -89.6130627 31.5442114 -88.96761570000001tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8095292504426076447.post-19978384590055422622014-02-27T19:58:00.000-08:002014-02-28T10:43:01.258-08:00This In-Between Month, Day 11: Happy Birthday Mr. Steinbeck<br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Today Mr. John Steinbeck would have been 112. I have often pondered following the same route he took across America with his giant poodle Charley. Load up a little camper trailer, give it some literary name, and visit point by point every place Mr. Steinbeck did in his delightful little book <i>Travels With Charley in Search of America</i>. To chronicle how America has changed, what she has become in the 50 years since the book was published. But of course my idea lacks all originality, having been done by countless literary enthusiasts and travel hounds for decades. In fact one such fellow, a Mr. Bill Steigerwald</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> followed the supposed route and found some of the travelogue to be in the kindest words, littered with artistic license</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">. You can read his gentle de-bunking </span><a href="http://truthaboutcharley.com/travels-with-charley-timeline/" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;" target="_blank">here</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">But it's the thing. The doing and the writing about it. Steinbeck describes it this way in the book: "...</span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any here..." And in me I certainly find that same desire, and mirrored in my soul</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">, perhaps even more intensely, the desire to write about it. And not just America, but every strange sun-soaked Island, every frozen gunpowder grey country. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">How could you not want to sleep out in the wild desert when Steinbeck describes it this way? "At night in this waterless air the stars come down just out of reach of your fingers..." and "...</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">there are mysteries in the desert, stories told and retold of secret places in the desert mountains..." But then to write the stories of touched stars and of the mysteries of those mountains. Wow. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">In the Atlantic 1962 review of <i>Travels With Charley</i> they wrote: "</span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">This is a book to be read slowly for its savor, and one which, like Thoreau, will be quoted and measured by our own experience."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Isn't that just it, the reason writer's write, maybe one of the reasons Jesus spoke in parables, that in communicating stories we measure our own experience against others. And in that we find the big truths, the universal ones. And at the same time take the big things, the universal images and ideals and make them all our own. When someone reads us, when they feel less alone, when some turn of phrase makes their breath stick in their lungs or some titanic weight of sorrow shipwreck and sink deep inside their chest. That's the payoff, it is for me. To communicate truth in such a way that somewhere someone wants to meet my tender Savior, to communicate beauty in such a way that someone somewhere places their hand on their chest to still their beating heart, and falls a little more in love. Ahhh to be that writer. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span>Mark Langhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03661141836736474743noreply@blogger.com0Hattiesburg, MS, USA31.3271189 -89.290339231.1100264 -89.6130627 31.5442114 -88.96761570000001tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8095292504426076447.post-28523264365827339832014-02-26T14:10:00.001-08:002014-02-26T14:28:26.410-08:00This In-Between Month, Day 10: Lion Tamer<br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Outside it is cold and gray and wet and inside it is only slightly less so. Haiti's warmth is a far away and I am missing her sunshine. (And her children, and her rice and beans, and her sea, oh and her starlight.) But there is coffee! And internet and the familiar faces of strangers. In my mind I make up tall tales about them. File them away for some story. The slumped red head there, with the oversized flannel filling out a job application. I imagine she is having a moral crisis, and finally she lies, claims she was a lion tamer, from the summer of 06 through the fall of 07. How she thinks this will sway the managers at Starbucks to give a job nod in her favor, I do not know. But it makes perfect sense to her. That's the best part.Then there is Dave, stranger than fiction. He is a volume of books, all of them start with what he's had or having for his last or next meal. If he takes his pills he is ok. If he takes too many he is far away. And if maybe, one pill is a little too small, well the real Dave bleeds through and he will show you his painted webbed toes and tell you of his current if not somewhat morbid fascination with squirrels.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">But how I see them, real or imagined, matters not. </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">George MacDonald said:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">"I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of; for to have been thought about, born in God's thought, and then made by God, is the dearest, grandest, and most precious thing in all thinking." </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">The most important thoughts I will ever have of me or you will have of you or they will ever have of they are God's thoughts. He does not make up more believable or less boring personalities for us. He is not able to be deluded by His own romanticism. He is not persuaded by jealousy or bitterness. He doesn't allow His opinion of us to be leveraged by our imperfections or our needs. He speaks only truth, at all times, and what He says is binding, for all eternity's days. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Mind you all of the thoughts God has for us existed before time began. They are His heart and mind for us. But with our closed ears and hearts and minds we cannot, could not ever hear Him. The new life we are gifted in Jesus means opened ears and enlightened minds and a new heart too! Then we can begin to not just hear what God says about us, but because we have already begun experiencing His transformative power, we can trust that He will finish the job. And we begin to believe, when on our lowest days He doesn't run away, that He must actually see something wonderful in us.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">We are new creatures in Christ. Which means we get a re-do! That chance to start over (and over, and over). "</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">So then, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; what is old has passed away--look, what is new has come." (2 Corinthians 5:17)!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">We are children of God, heirs of heaven, with full divine rights. "</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">But to all who have received him--those who believe in his name--he has given the right to become God's children." (John 1:12) "</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">And if children, then heirs (namely, heirs of God and also fellow heirs with Christ)--if indeed we suffer with him so we may also be glorified with him." (Romans 8:17).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">We are friends of Jesus. "</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">But I call you friends, because I have revealed to you everything I heard from my Father" (John 15:15). And He proved it! Scripture says no greater love has a man than this than that he lay down his life for his friends. And Jesus did just that. Died in our place. I know that's elementary, sunday school 101...but it should shock us everyday.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit. Wow. Consider that, the intimacy that entails, that God would want to make himself at home in us. Geez. "</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit lives in you." (1 Corinthians 6:19)?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">This one sounds sacrosanct and too high for me, that we are the righteousness of God in Christ. But what I understand it to mean is simply this. Christ took the blame for everything we ever did, are doing, and will do and gave us instead His perpetual and immutable innocence to all those crimes. Talk about diplomatic immunity! The perks of being related (by blood) to a King. "</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">God made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we would become the righteousness of God." (2 Corinthians 5:21).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">We are accepted. </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">"Receive one another, then, just as Christ also received you, to God's glory." (Romans 15:7). We are not alone, nor are we isolated or ostracized by our differences. We are part of Him now, along with all the others. "</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female--for all of you are one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28). We are free! "</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not be subject again to the chains of bondage." (Galatians 5:1). </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">We are chosen, holy, and blameless before God. "</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">For he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world that we may be holy and unblemished in his sight in love." (Ephesians 1:4).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">This is who we are?? Really?? How? Why?? Because God is love and He loves us</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">But God, being rich in mercy, because of his great love with which he loved us, even though we were dead in transgressions, made us alive together with Christ--by grace you are saved. (Ephesians 2:4-5) "</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Therefore, as the elect of God, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with a heart of mercy, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience … (Colossians 3:12). </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">We know, brothers and sisters loved by God, that he has chosen you … (1 Thessalonians 1:4).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Now when you look in the mirror you may want to remind yourselves of these things. Don't use your sassy voice, and I promise not to use mine. This new us in Christ is a gift, we didn't earn it and therefore shouldn't flaunt it. For example. If you get pulled over by a cop you might not want to say something along the lines of, "My dad is God so send the ticket to Him, He can take it out of my heavenly inheritance." And please don't use your place of preeminence with Christ to cause you to step to the front of the Starbucks line in front of the rest of us. I may kill you.</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">And though knowing how God sees us will help navigate the toughest days at work, and the lowest lows of loneliness, the most important reason for us to see ourselves as He sees us, is so that we will have the confidence to go to Him. "...</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">In whom we have boldness and confident access to God because of Christ's faithfulness." (Ephesians 3:12).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">So for all the Daves and all the red-headed lion tamers...you are unconditionally loved, and you are magnificently from the mind of God.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span>Mark Langhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03661141836736474743noreply@blogger.com0Hattiesburg, MS, USA31.3271189 -89.290339231.1100264 -89.6130627 31.5442114 -88.96761570000001tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8095292504426076447.post-24157160271379064752014-02-26T12:48:00.000-08:002014-02-26T12:50:57.955-08:00This In-Between Month, Days 8 and 9: The Locust Effect<br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Just over a week back and all other thoughts these last two days have been unable to escape the terminal gravity of this book. Everything I say or feel is caught in this convergent orbit around it, toward it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">In the following quote Gary Haugen sums up the title and the premise of his new book <i><a href="http://www.thelocusteffect.com/" target="_blank">The Locust Effect</a></i>. “Without the world noticing, the locusts of common, criminal violence are right now ravaging the lives and dreams of billions of our poorest neighbors.” It is rare, that a statement like this, one </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">so enormous, so far reaching in its implications, so shocking in its claim can also be undeniably true. As with the Holocaust or the purgings of Stalin or Mao's great leap forward that saw 45 million killed in 4 years, humanity wonders aloud how this could be happening under our noses, "without the world noticing". They ask where the good people are? The collective ego assumes we have evolved past this sort of mass evil. Mr. Haugen goes on to indict us all.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">“One would hope that if the world woke up to such a reality, it would swiftly acknowledge and respond to the disaster—but tragically, the world has neither woken up to the reality nor responded in a way that offers meaningful hope for the poor. It has mostly said and done nothing. And as we shall see, the failure to respond to such a basic need—to prioritize criminal justice systems that can protect poor people from common violence—has had a devastating impact on two great struggles that made heroic progress in the last century but have stalled out for the poorest in the twenty-first century: namely, the struggle to end severe poverty and the fight to secure the most basic human rights.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">In the absence of enforced law the strong take from the weak whenever they desire. Land, sex, physical labor; all the poor have, coerced or stolen or worse from them all across the developing world. The problem is deeply complex, rooted in and mired by years of bad governance and inattention by the world community. And though it speaks to the wickedness men are capable of it also reveals how this same wickedness can be kept in relative check where there is rule of law. Please read this book. It will change how you understand poverty, how you view the world. </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">(I am posting this in a longer form on the COH blog too with alot of statistics.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>Mark Langhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03661141836736474743noreply@blogger.com0Hattiesburg, MS, USA31.3271189 -89.290339231.1100264 -89.6130627 31.5442114 -88.96761570000001tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8095292504426076447.post-26568691487598246872014-02-20T06:45:00.001-08:002014-02-21T12:23:10.843-08:00This In-Between Month, Day 3: The World-Wide Whisper<br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">River and I walked around the French quarter today. He entertained me, effortlessly shifting between Monty Python and C.S. Lewis, H.P. Lovecraft and Dr. Who. Riffing about pop culture and the nature of evil. All in a cast of voices from the somber to the insane. He is older, looks older, changed in subtle ways. I want to lament what I have missed but instead try to only celebrate the man he is becoming. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Later as the shadows of the afternoon gave contrast to the neon signs River sang "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" then "Norwegian Wood". And somehow "Hotel California became "American Pie" which then was Tennyson.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">"For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">With the standards of the peoples plunging through the</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">My son's deepening voice and passion for song lyrics and all things guitar was a soundtrack to my thoughts. I tried to be right there with him, and most of me was, but the images of Kiev on fire...well it looks like hell's flames have come to earth.</span><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Otelk4S77ts/UwYKUIMcxLI/AAAAAAAAC2g/J0iqq1qsMs0/s1600/Fire-protest-Kiev-008.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Otelk4S77ts/UwYKUIMcxLI/AAAAAAAAC2g/J0iqq1qsMs0/s1600/Fire-protest-Kiev-008.jpg" height="384" width="640" /></a></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ATVJoEJ7ClA/UwYKUWHhfMI/AAAAAAAAC2o/5PoVRGs0V2M/s1600/Protesters-clash-with-pol-016.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ATVJoEJ7ClA/UwYKUWHhfMI/AAAAAAAAC2o/5PoVRGs0V2M/s1600/Protesters-clash-with-pol-016.jpg" height="360" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Pictures from the Guardian UK.</span></b></td></tr>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pLQ5pR2LO70/UwYKUf8xhWI/AAAAAAAAC2k/Ln2VjNro4hI/s1600/kiev+on+fire.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pLQ5pR2LO70/UwYKUf8xhWI/AAAAAAAAC2k/Ln2VjNro4hI/s1600/kiev+on+fire.jpg" height="440" width="640" /></a><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">It seems there is no "</span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">world-wide whisper" but instead a scream. All creation groans for all things to be made new but the daughters of Eve, the sons of Adam wail. </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">The forgotten tragedies Central African Republic where religions devour each other. Boots on the throats of their brothers.</span><br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-i1TP0-lGYc8/UwYNTNxGsuI/AAAAAAAAC28/iRWShQK_x7c/s1600/christian+soldiers+winning.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-i1TP0-lGYc8/UwYNTNxGsuI/AAAAAAAAC28/iRWShQK_x7c/s1600/christian+soldiers+winning.jpg" height="360" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">The caption above read "Christian's winning". Now how is that even possible? How can you reconcile laying down your life for your brother with a boot on his throat. What part of hacking him to death with a machete communicates the love of Jesus. None.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Syria with 9 million refugees. With a </span><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/michael-gerson-the-despair-of-syrias-refugees/2014/02/17/43294b50-97fd-11e3-afce-3e7c922ef31e_story.html" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;" target="_blank">bloody conflict</a><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"> dismissed by the west as "someone else's civil war" as "baddie vs. baddie". But when civilians are targeted, when children are blown to bits because father's speak out...it is all of our problem.</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> Below families flee across deserts and borders into the makeshift camps. Leaving behind death for living misery. </span><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6T8AWFUClws/UwYQ4swpb4I/AAAAAAAAC3Q/j9AMFvS97j0/s1600/080703-130824-syria.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6T8AWFUClws/UwYQ4swpb4I/AAAAAAAAC3Q/j9AMFvS97j0/s1600/080703-130824-syria.jpg" height="360" width="640" /></a></div>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-kfcVkFqAYGo/UwYQ4oya9_I/AAAAAAAAC3U/vbyGJOw5zxw/s1600/Mideast-Iraq-Syrian-R_Horo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-kfcVkFqAYGo/UwYQ4oya9_I/AAAAAAAAC3U/vbyGJOw5zxw/s1600/Mideast-Iraq-Syrian-R_Horo.jpg" height="314" width="640" /></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">I'ts all so much to feel. Too much to understand how one of us can or should respond. I am at a loss, feeling so far from the reality of it all. Today all I can do is pray. Pray for the children's lives destroyed by these tragedies. I just want to do something. But what?? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">I gotta go, River is ready to ramble on. I have a friend Nat in the Central African Republic, he and his wife work with <a href="http://www.tearfund.org/" target="_blank">Tearfund</a> (who are also working in Syria). If you can, help them try and protect the innocent there. Mesi Anpil.</span><br />
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Mark Langhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03661141836736474743noreply@blogger.com0New Orleans, LA, USA29.951065799999991 -90.071532329.511127299999991 -90.7169793 30.391004299999992 -89.4260853tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8095292504426076447.post-30000400768585792362014-02-19T06:44:00.000-08:002014-02-19T07:12:20.454-08:00This In-Between Month, Day 2: Magazine Street, New Orleans<br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">As I walked down Magazine Street today this thought turned over and over in me.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><i>"Humility is not thinking less of your self but thinking of your self less." </i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">C.S. Lewis.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">The last two weeks there has been a lonely lilted melody playing in the back rooms of my mind. Faint as a whisper, and real thin, like an echo of an echo. This week past someone turned the volume up and I found myself humming along, but still no words, no recollection of the tune. Until today, sitting in a little coffee dive on Magazine St., distracted making little mosaics of all the photos I'd taken, a few words twisted by memory and then a sudden jolt of recognition and a whole phrase coming back to me.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><i>"Your fire burns me like a favorite song</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><i>A song I should have know all along</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><i>I feel you move like smoke in my eyes</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><i>And that is why..."</i> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><a href="http://overtherhine.com/albums/ohio/" target="_blank">"Bothered" Over The Rhine</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Which is beautiful, and made me long for someone but wasn't the spiritual epiphany I had hoped for (yet) but it did lead me to revisit this album:</span></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-36ROHMm68gQ/UwQ9NXjf0bI/AAAAAAAAC1k/M6jodG_-caE/s1600/ohio1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-36ROHMm68gQ/UwQ9NXjf0bI/AAAAAAAAC1k/M6jodG_-caE/s1600/ohio1.jpg" height="400" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Which led me somewhat amused to the song "Jesus in New Orleans" where I read these lyrics:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><i>"But when I least expect it</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Which brought me back to selflessness. Jesus, in sweat became blood dripping agony, prayed this prayer to His Father. "Not my will but Yours be done." That is where it starts, thinking of our selves less and Him all the more. This is the first step on the path of selflessness. Surrender of our will to His and then we can really begin to live for others. What this will look like may be different for all of us, but it will have the same results, magnifying God in the eyes of His creation, and elevating those created in His image to intimacy with Him. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">50 cent paper backs at a thrift store. My first purchase in these here United States. </span></b></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">I am reading Anne Lamott's " Bird by Bird, Some Instructions on Writing and Life". (Which I love and want to stop all else and finish, thanks Em.) And one of the things she tells young writers and old writers (and dead writers and those not born), is to write. Write everyday, write short things. Silly little throw away things. Just write, write, write. Get the fuel to the engine of the thing. Prime it, choke it, flood it sometimes, but keep trying to crank that engine. It is the same, in some ways, this business of being selfless. Just do it. Listen longer to a strangers rambling story. Listen with a wide heart and kind or concerned eyes. Tip better. Smile more. Tell people what you like about them, really mean it. Give your spare cash, and maybe a little that's not so spare to those that need it more. Make your days more about others, which doesn't mean you are forgotten. NO! God will take care of you! Seek first the kingdom and whatever you need for life and Godliness will be yours! Seek the "upside down kingdom" as it's been called, the one where the King came to be a servant and traded royal chariots for donkeys. The Kingdom where it's not about me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Please excuse me, for coffee and Miss Lamott await. And in an hour I will see my son! </span></div>
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Mark Langhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03661141836736474743noreply@blogger.com0New Orleans, LA, USA29.951065799999991 -90.071532329.511127299999991 -90.7169793 30.391004299999992 -89.4260853tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8095292504426076447.post-34018768328977462122014-02-18T08:58:00.000-08:002014-03-21T18:32:42.090-07:00This In-Between Month, Day 1<br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">I have always been fascinated by the in-betweens. Dawn and dusk and their strange grays, horizons, borders and shorelines- that no-man's land. There is a tension in the in-betweens, a solitary confinement too. And what is art without those visceral forces, that isolation?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Yesterday morning, after the chaos of an airport run, the smells of burning trash and dirty diesel exhaust, and all the craziness of a normal Haitian Monday, I sat alone in the terminal at Port-au-Prince's Toussaint Louverture International Airport. I scrolled through photos of the day before, an impromptu beach outing. These two precious baby sisters, reclining in a wheel barrow. The Haiti that I was leaving behind for a month. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">It is hard to separate the feelings I get, the leaving a country I love and the going to a country where my son is. These in-betweens, they get more and more intense, more and more convoluted with each border passing. I feel like part of me stays, sojourns in that no-man's land, a little lost, never settling. My mind was on these thoughts and always the stark contrast of the poverty I was leaving, the luxury I would soon be in. I stared at my little cup of espresso, the last taste of Haiti for a month.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Later, as I sat waiting for my flight to New Orleans. A gentlemen, an entomologist by profession, sat across from me tearing pages from a magazine. Finally, bettered by my curiosity, I asked him what he was doing. He said simply, "It's too heavy." He was ripping out all the adds, another magazine's worth, and setting them on the seat beside him, making the very large magazine less unwieldy for his flight to South America. I jokingly asked him if he had paid for the magazine. He said, "yes, dearly." I laughed and remarked how the publishers were double dipping grossly, selling so many ads, and still taking their pound of flesh from their readership. He chuckled. I wondered aloud maybe most people buy it for the ads. Maybe they want to be told what to wear, and what to watch, and what to smell like. With the tone of a man who prefers the studies of bugs and not people he humored me, "Maybe." He continued to make his magazine lighter, the stack beside him grew to the height of another normal magazine, and I sat quietly. Finally I said, "Maybe people should do that with their lives? Rip out all the ads, all the pinned pages, all the critical analysis of the consumer at large. Maybe all those voices telling them who to be should be silenced as such." He looked at me, as if I were a rare species of cockroach, and as he stood he said. "You're way too young to be talking that way." And then he handed me the pile of pages and walked away. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">I found a sunny spot, near the sky train, and spread the pages on the floor. A drunk British tourist, worried about my sanity, said, "Hey Jesus, don't let them tell you how to be, don't let them get to you." Indeed. To which his sober country mate said, "Leave him alone, it's probably just art or something that he's doing." Only when he said "art", it was like a curse word. I made the little mosaic below in honor of those concerned Londoners while bored and waiting to board.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">The flight to New Orleans was easy and uneventful. Sleep tugged at me but the flying mostly west at that hour always means flying into the sunset. The strangest of in-betweens, you literally watch the sun setting in slow motion, and oh the oranges, the yellows, the reds glowing the clouds. And then on descent, between the layers of clouds, like the sun exploded and irradiated everything with color. By the time I got to the hotel in New Orleans I was too tired to write, too tired to make sense of what it all meant if anything. I took a miraculous hot shower, I laid down in a bed too soft, too fresh for words. I thought of Haiti, my little wood shack by the sea. I thought for a few moments I'd never sleep here, not without the rolling waves...but then I was gone. Into the in-between of dreams.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">The word for 2013 was "selfie". The most watched youtube video, with over 600 million views in the 2013 calender year is a song called "Gentleman" which depicts a man being anything but that, instead it is a crude celebration of the heights of selfishness even if it's meant to be somewhat ironic. (Please, spare yourself the agony.) Is this the way we see ourselves, and others? The way we want to be seen? I am no pile of ads and neither are you I suspect. A photo taken of ourselves is mostly harmless, and a crappy song doesn't necessarily become ones life governing philosophy. But who are we to be? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Tomorrow I see my son for the first time in three months. I am always painfully aware that I am to set an example for him. And so the word that's been in my spirit, the one the ads can't sell you, the way they won't tell you to be, the one that flies in the face of all culture, the one that I am really bad at, is "selfless".</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">For me I want that word to mark my new year. To be the legacy for my son. And I find it impossible. And only with Jesus, only with His example and the sacrifice and power of the cross can I start to even begin to be selfless, which by any other name would be "Christ-likeness". Even as I type that word I know what it means and my soul shudders a bit and shrinks back from it. But I must. When I look at the state of my heart, my mind. When I take stock of my desires. When I look at the great needs in this weary world... Well it'</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">s time for change. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">So will you join with me and swear off selfies for a year? Haha. Just kidding. (But that is a thought..) Let us make 2014 a year where we are selfless. Where we change our spending habits, our consumption levels. (</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">And besides, it's "too heavy" to carry all that weight around.)</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> Use less and purchase </span><a href="http://fairtradeusa.org/" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;" target="_blank">slave-free</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">. Give more to </span><a href="http://www.ijm.org/who-we-are" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;" target="_blank">those</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> doing the urgent things. May the way people describe us become the word selfless. Hard as it will be, with Christ all things are possible.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Gonna try and journal this in-between month. Love it if you stop by once and a while. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>Mark Langhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03661141836736474743noreply@blogger.com0New Orleans, LA, USA29.951065799999991 -90.071532329.511127299999991 -90.7169793 30.391004299999992 -89.4260853tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8095292504426076447.post-49704183181165790732014-01-22T19:12:00.000-08:002014-01-26T16:12:22.889-08:00The Murmur of Rain<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">This week these two thoughts ran a parallel path in my mind, it seemed to me anyway. Truth was they were on subtle, but convergent tangents that crossed tonight. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Hull" target="_blank">John Hull</a> who went completely blind at the age of 45 wrote:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">"I opened the front door, and rain was falling. I stood for a few minutes, lost in the beauty of it. Rain has a way of bringing out the contours of everything; it throws a coloured blanket over previously invisible things; instead of an intermittent and thus fragmented world, the steadily falling rain creates continuity of acoustic experience."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">"[E]verywhere are little breaks in the patterns, obstructions, projections, where some slight interruption or difference of texture or of echo gives an additional detail or dimension to the scene. Over the whole thing, like light falling upon a landscape is the gentle background patter gathered up into one continuous murmur of rain."</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">In the video still above from the short film about John Hull called "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/01/16/opinion/16OpDoc-NotesOnBlindness.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0" target="_blank">Notes on Blindness</a>" Hull's character says "If only rain could fall inside a room, it would help me to understand where things are in that room, to give a sense of being in the room, instead of just sitting on a chair." In the film the directors simulate rain inside the kitchen.</span></b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">"Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes – like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night – little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape will be quite hidden in the end. Ten minutes – ten seconds – of the real [Helen Joy] would correct all this. And yet, even if those ten seconds were allowed me, one second later the little flakes would begin to fall again." </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Tonight as the wind cuts around my little hut, bleeds through palm leaves, I can hear it distort, blunted by this, whistling through that. In fact, it is only because the wind comes into contact with resistance that we hear it at all. Like rain revealing contours or snowflakes of memory falling like a shroud over an image, that which can not be seen (at our vantage) is experienced still because of another unseen thing, the wind.</span><br />
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<b style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: 10px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">In Radiohead's video for their song "House of Cards", no cameras or lights were used. Instead, 3D plotting technologies collected information about the shapes and relative distances of objects. The video was created entirely with visualizations of that data. </span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">The bible says that faith is the evidence of things not seen. What if then, when we pray in faith, (and any prayer to an invisible God is faith) it is a little like 3D plotting or even echolocation. That is, prayers going out and revealing the contours of things not visible. But unlike Radiohead or the dolphin or bat or the stealthy submarine, what goes forth in prayer does not collide with Thom Yorke's head or fish or insects or treacherous underwater terrain, no, what if prayer goes out into the invisible world and collides with what is beyond our natural physical perception. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">And furthermore, while were on about this sort of thing, what if, (like we are want to sing), Grace <i><b>does</b></i> fall like rain. And what if, like Mr. Hull's rain, Grace falling </span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">creates a continuity of spiritual experience. Reveals the hidden world behind all worlds that corrupted sight cannot see. And like Mr. Lewis' snowflakes, Grace is God's </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">impressions and selections and thoughts settling down on the true image, the true nature of things.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Hull finishes his poetic passage on rain by saying:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">"This is an experience of great beauty. I feel as if the world, which is veiled until I touch it, has suddenly disclosed itself to me. I feel that the rain is gracious, that it has granted a gift to me, the gift of the world. I am no longer isolated, preoccupied with my thoughts, concentrating upon what I must do next. Instead of having to worry about where my body will be and what it will meet, I am presented with a totality, a world which speaks to me."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">And isn't this just it! That God's grace rends the veil to reveal the world! Though we had eyes and could not see, He gives us the ability to truly percieve, and see beyond ourselves, beyond our isolation and our preoccupation with our thoughts-- and we too are presented with the gift of a new world, a world that speaks to us, a world where finally, our spirits can be at rest.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>Mark Langhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03661141836736474743noreply@blogger.com0L'acul, Haiti18.4497853 -72.66981129999999218.4347228 -72.689981299999985 18.464847799999998 -72.6496413tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8095292504426076447.post-85448434590501069152014-01-18T14:07:00.000-08:002014-01-22T19:14:05.815-08:00Gory Bits Gone Wrong<br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">I was on my lunch break, lying skyward on a bench, reading an excerpt from John Hull's memoir about going blind called "Touching The Rock" when...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">At that moment, her little world was only as big as the belly of that stuffed animal turned wrong way out, wires like blown arteries, sheared from a heart in the shape of a battery-less box. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><i>Something had to be done. Right then.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">I walked to my shop, found a tiny screwdriver, some electrical tape and pliers to strip the sheathing from the wires. Her worry receded a bit, the implements in my lap meant -</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><i>Something was going to be done. Right then.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">She was a steady nurse. Kept the little screws safe in the folds of her pillowcase dress. Scolded the boys for wrapping electrical tape around their appendages. But her eyes never wavered, never left our patient. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><i>Something was about to be done. Right then!</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Her body language willed my fingers on as I twisted wire into wire, first the black and then the red. I turned my palm up and she placed the electrical tape into my hand. Slowly I wrapped the once severed wires, first the black and then the red. </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Her eyes had questions that her mouth never asked. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><i>Not now. </i></span><i style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Something was being done!</i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><i> </i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">I pushed new batteries into place. Switched the little switch to on. And she held her breath, held it in, held back elation, held back joy. Not yet.... </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><i>Is it done? Now??!!</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Her eyes did not need a mouth to ask. I handed her our patient, quickly she pressed it's paws together and from somewhere inside it's belly, little electric currents carried a signal to a tiny speaker hidden behind fake fur flecked with dirt. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">NOW!!</span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lClmFe19K8E/Utnv8eWDUgI/AAAAAAAACzI/HTi8RpSX8N4/s1600/smiling.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lClmFe19K8E/Utnv8eWDUgI/AAAAAAAACzI/HTi8RpSX8N4/s1600/smiling.jpg" height="640" width="450" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">When all my guts, all my gory bits have gone wrong. When my insides feel like they are on my outsides and I don't feel like it will ever be better. I hope I remember today. Remember this child. Patient and trusting and willing and hopeful. I hope I am like her when my Divine Physician must work on me, when He strips back the sheared places, and slowly twists my heart back together.</span></div>
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<br />Mark Langhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03661141836736474743noreply@blogger.com0L'acul, Haiti18.4497853 -72.66981129999999218.4347228 -72.689981299999985 18.464847799999998 -72.6496413tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8095292504426076447.post-57985176153783315642013-12-31T17:56:00.000-08:002013-12-31T19:22:04.553-08:00Market Day!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3N5YIeWvDGQ/UsILZ-1AjhI/AAAAAAAACu4/jpF_VbrQ48A/s1600/banana+1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3N5YIeWvDGQ/UsILZ-1AjhI/AAAAAAAACu4/jpF_VbrQ48A/s640/banana+1.JPG" width="476" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; text-align: left;">I think if you want to take the pulse of a people you walk through their markets. And if the heart of Haitian cities are the markets, then that pulse, that lifeblood is the women. In a sprawling maze of rusted tin and muddy ruts covered in low-hung and haggard tarps H</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; text-align: left;">aiti's woman sell their fruits and vegetables and other humble wares. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; text-align: left;">These photos are all stolen, awkward and clandestine, as most Haitians (unless they are your friends!) are very wary of being photographed. The women of the market work so hard, such long hot days, to provide for their families. They are beautiful beyond words. These few pictures don't do justice to the chaos of smells and sounds and colors that are Leogane Market, you'll just have to visit yourself.</span></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ODAtgXEz0ao/UsILBtuq4eI/AAAAAAAACuw/Pc3q_XaQvhs/s1600/banana+2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="476" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ODAtgXEz0ao/UsILBtuq4eI/AAAAAAAACuw/Pc3q_XaQvhs/s640/banana+2.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-juqwlU97iq4/UsILg50HVDI/AAAAAAAACvI/K35lEhBhTQY/s1600/photo+(38).JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="476" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-juqwlU97iq4/UsILg50HVDI/AAAAAAAACvI/K35lEhBhTQY/s640/photo+(38).JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iRhXWwvllBQ/UsILcjI6oBI/AAAAAAAACvA/gHwWr0XFytc/s1600/photo+(39).JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iRhXWwvllBQ/UsILcjI6oBI/AAAAAAAACvA/gHwWr0XFytc/s640/photo+(39).JPG" width="476" /></a></div>
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<br />Mark Langhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03661141836736474743noreply@blogger.com2L'acul, Haiti18.4497853 -72.66981129999999218.4347228 -72.689981299999985 18.464847799999998 -72.6496413