They Were Like Birds

Tuesday Syrian President Assad's coalition forces used a chemical agent on civilians living in the Idlib Province. Official counts of the dead now exceed 80. Including 22 members of Abdel Hameed Alyousef's family. A picture of him holding his two dead babies is all over my 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. These are war crimes. These are crimes against humanity. 

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.

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. 

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. 

Picture from Business Insider

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. 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.

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. 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.

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.

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:

"They should stay and fight." "The men are cowards for leaving." "This is opportunistic migration." 

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? 

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.

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.*

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. 

Let us remember carefully the words of our Savior. "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)

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:

Get on our knees. 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? This is our solemn duty and sacred trust. And it's the right thing to do. These are image bearers of their Creator. 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. Love like He did. Even if it costs us our lives.

  


*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. 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. “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. (from an Independent UK article)

A Million Miles From Shore

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. 

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:

You were the Word at the beginning

One With God the Lord Most High

Your hidden glory in creation

Now revealed in You our Christ

What a beautiful Name it is

What a beautiful Name it is

The Name of Jesus Christ my King

You didn't want heaven without us

So Jesus, You brought heaven down

My sin was great, Your love was greater

What could separate us now

What a wonderful Name it is

What a wonderful Name it is

The Name of Jesus Christ my King

How sweet is your name, Lord, how good You are

Love to sing in the name of the Lord, love to sing for you all?

Death could not hold You, the veil tore before You

You silenced the boast, of sin and grave

The heavens are roaring, the praise of Your glory

For You are raised to life again

You have no rival, You have no equal

Now and forever, Our God reigns

Yours is the Kingdom, Yours is the glory

Yours is the Name, above all names

What a powerful Name it is

What a powerful Name it is

The Name of Jesus Christ my King

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

If you need Him as desperately as I do today I'll leave you with this...



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

This In-Between Month, (Later On) Day 25: Heals As It Cuts

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!

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.

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. The Habit of Being is a collection of her letters. That's a good place to start. And Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose 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. 

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.

Anyway, I finally found some quotes by the irrepressible Miss O'Connor that I'd like to share. Quotes about writing. Enjoy!

“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. ” 

― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“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."  

― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

This In-Between Month, Day 25: Our Own Shadows

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. 

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.

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.

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:

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.

Yup. Amen.

This In-Between Month, Day 12: The Fear of God

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. We talk about the church's role (if any) in politics. 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". 

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...

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 have dismissed it as an archaic concept, the personality of an Old Testament God who was replaced by a kinder, gentler, New Testament one, and by others still to reject Christianity altogether. 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 .

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.

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? Again with the clumsiness of human terms, let me try and explain what I think it means. 

To me it is the acceptance of the sovereignty and perfection of a loving omnipotent God. It is the understanding that:

He answers to no man, but yet stoops so low to hear the softest prayer of the weakest saint. 

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. 

He is beyond reproach, beyond any misgiving. 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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

Argh, that felt long-winded and not perfectly clear. I hope that it helps, and there are also some really good thoughts here.

This In-Between Month, Day 10: Lion Tamer

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.

But how I see them, real or imagined, matters not. George MacDonald said:

"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." 

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. 

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.

We are new creatures in Christ. Which means we get a re-do! That chance to start over (and over, and over). "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)!

We are children of God, heirs of heaven, with full divine rights. "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) "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).

We are friends of Jesus. "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.

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. "Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit lives in you." (1 Corinthians 6:19)?

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. "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).

We are accepted. "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. "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! "For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not be subject again to the chains of bondage." (Galatians 5:1). We are chosen, holy, and blameless before God. "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).

This is who we are?? Really?? How? Why?? Because God is love and He loves us!

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) "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). We know, brothers and sisters loved by God, that he has chosen you … (1 Thessalonians 1:4).

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. 

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. "...In whom we have boldness and confident access to God because of Christ's faithfulness." (Ephesians 3:12).

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.

The Face of God on a Child

The first time humanity ever looked upon the face of God, the face of their creator, it was the face of a child. God could have chosen any other way. He could have come first as a warrior, sword hilt deep in some monstrous enemy. He could have come as a politician with His golden pen and legislated equality and prosperity to the masses. He could have come as a revolutionary and killed the fatted rich, cut the powerful off at the knees. But He didn't. Nope, the first time humanity ever looked upon the face of God it was the face of a child. And I think we still see God's face more in the innocent play, the rapturous laughter, the unabashed dance of children than any other way. Or at least I think we should.

These are some pictures from the last few weeks. The kids whose snot and tears end up gloriously on my t-shirts. The kids whose imaginations restore my sense of wonder. Whose joy reignites my love for life. They teach me so much about Jesus, about how heaven's country must be. Where light is the color of laughter and anything is possible...just like in the mind of a child.

God is a Father who always calls His children home. But we have to be like little children to accept the invitation, to find our way. We have to believe in the mystical, the invisible, the impossible and the fantastic. We must believe in the wildest fairy tale of all, the miracle of Christmas, that God is with us, has come to save us, because of His great love for us. Kids don't act shy, or self-conscious, or defer out of some sense of false humility. Nope, they run to the Christmas tree, look for their name and start tearing the paper off. That's what kids do. And this morning, along with every other morning, the gift of Jesus is yours, wrapped in Love eternal and marked with your name. Run to Him this morning like a child would. Bet it'll be the best day of your life.

Sometimes I'm Just Lost

Sometimes I switch it up a bit. Take the wrong way to the right place, the long way round to a close one. And sometimes, sometimes I'm just lost and have to find my way back. Saw this church sign the other day on one such very long way wrong way round.

Geez. Of all the obnoxious, smarmy, stupid and banal ways to paint the need for Christ in our life to obtain wholeness of mind. Sometimes when I read these I want to go inside and scream why the particular message is catastrophically misrepresenting the Gospel and God's tenderness that draws the lost to His heart. But alas, business hours were 9-5 daily. I sat there, numb and dumb and full of a greater sense that we are failing in our dialogue with the world. 

My thoughts were all one way or the other after that. You know how you get, the pendulum of emotion. Your heart and will rally behind a noble thought, some great cause, and the next minute your mind waves the white flag of cynicism and surrender. 

Cotton clouds over cotton fields distracted me for a moment.

As far as I could see in every direction, cotton, fields white and ready for harvest. I pulled over to take this picture then closed my eyes, other pictures, creased and faded and colorless, workers harvesting the cash crop 150 years ago. Slaves, fingers raw from the prickly plant, picking next to their precious children. Lives stolen for what? Greed, ease of life for those that won a light skin lottery? 

I am reading Avengers Of The New World. It is the story of the Haitian Revolution, but the author Laurent Dubois does so much more than recount the details of the first successful slave revolt, he chronicles all the historical nuance, all of the minutia of the moment, the pulse of the people who were the prime movers in the French provincial slave trade. He recounts how laws were passed to keep anyone with so much a percentage of African blood from holding office or having other full citizen rights. He details how many of the descendants of Africa were much lighter skinned than some persons of European descent. And that the whole process was as convoluted and circumspect as one can infer by its idiocy. Businessmen and women, professors, even politicians having to prove their pedigree to the ridiculous godless blood-hounds bent on finding out light skinned impostors. Peoples of African descent whose dark poisonous blood would apparently be societies death, an acid bath of blood that would somehow corrode away and crumble the very foundations of white entitlement.

Geez....

So much of history is mired in the subjective. The viewpoint of one country or culture vs. another. So that the truth is hard to really know. But not this, never this. Slavery is evil, will always be evil. And anyone who didn't, doesn't fight against it, they are and always will be complicit. The garment industry has more slavery than any other industry. From forced labor in cotton fields to forced labor in factories. There are millions of children enslaved for the making of the garments that we all wear. Please buy fair trade, direct trade, slave free certified clothing (you can see which companies are doing there part here). And please read this book, it is so very very important as a historical narrative and more, a commentary on the perpetual state of fallen mankind.

I drove away thinking of the church sign, the cotton fields, the guilt of so many so called Christians in the enslavement and abuse, the murder and rape, of countless Africans. I thought, if someone can look at a darker skinned person and not see the image of God, well then they have never seen God. If someone can be so full of hate, well scripture is clear isn't it? They do not know God, who is love.

I drove and drove and then a grey rain came and stayed for hours but also a rainbow...

My thoughts are grey again today, grasping at God in the aftermath of the typhoon in the Philippines. There are 10 thousand feared dead. 10 million displaced, 4 million of them children now greatly susceptible to kidnapping and exploitation. The needs are so great as those island communities search frantic for water and food. Please if you can, donate to our friends My Refuge House in Cebu, Philippines. They will use the money in country to buy food and supplies and get it to families much quicker that way.

I leave for Haiti Monday. Soon I will be near again her sea. I will be back close to the country I love dearly, one that has suffered so long, so needlessly, that others might profit. It is a country still repressed by the lasting affects of political embargoes and aid policies that deconstructed a resilient indigenous Haitian economy while simultaneously creating dependence. It is heartbreaking and was to my way of thinking completely avoidable. I pray the next decade will be one of renewal for the indefatigable people of Haiti and for her unfathomably wonderful children. I'd like you to meet a few...

And meet my godson, Marc Finley!! Who shares my name and has stolen my heart. Oh and the loving lovely Madame Emmanuel, who spoils me so, with home cooked meals and warmth of home and heart.

And the proudest dad you've ever met! Fedeme, my dear friend who works harder everyday with such decency and determination. Can't wait to see him and his beautiful family.

Sometimes I do take the wrong way, the long way round. Sometimes, on days like today, I just feel lost. Sometimes I lose my grip. But Christ leads me round right again, He is The Way, in Him I am found. His is the grip that never slips. And sometimes when I spend my days on a diet of destruction and sexual exploitation and all the other bad news, when I start to wonder if it's a little too late in the history of things to do any good, well I try and remember mine is not to hold the whole world right side up, to keep it spinning on its axis. No mine is to realize the sorry state I am in and let the One who is in control do what only He can do. I guess I just needed to write today, to bleed off a little. Clear some cobwebs, some shelf space, make room for another days ramblings and rants, poetry and pretense. Thanks. Hope you enjoyed the pictures of the kids. Hope you're keeping it between the ditches. Hope beyond all hope you're holding on to Jesus, and if you're too weak for that, that you know He's holding onto you. xoxox

Killing God

I woke with a word on my lips. I spoke it into the cold grey morning as I wiped the night from my eyes. 

"Cross."

Partially because my mind was tired, and perhaps partially because it is a word so threadbare, so shop-worn with use, I sorta ignored it. But all morning it followed me. Into, out of the shower. It was in the first scent of coffee, in the bottom of that first cup. And then the second and third. It rode with me down the highway to pick my sister up for work, and then sat patiently waiting until I finally listened to what it had to say.

And so listen I did and wonder and listen and query and listen some more and I've thought about it for the rest of the day. And here are some things it said.

In an age of spiritual self-determination, where spirituality's highest law seems to be "do what you want as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else", the cross, the notion of atonement, the belief in a need for atonement have been so dismissively, so condescendingly deemed irrelevant, archaic, and unenlightened. And yes sin, and shame, and suffering were nailed to the cross. Death and it's power destroyed there. But for a world that doesn't much believe in sin, that doesn't see themselves as sinners, doesn't see the need for such horrible a sacrifice, maybe, beyond all these acts of reckless mercy, is something bigger still. Something people of every age deeply desire, and desperately need: that God be killed.

Scripture says it pleased God to crush Christ. God the Father killing God the Son and finding pleasure there. Why? Of all the grotesque and macabre ways...?? I think it's two-fold. God needed to be killed. That is, what everyone that has ever existed thought of God needed to be crushed, ground to bits and blown into oblivion. Every false premonition we collectively share. That God is far off, that He is cold and unfeeling in the face of our suffering. That He is a moral cop, judge jury and executioner. That He is a cosmic killjoy. That He is ethereal and unknowable. That He is a self-absorbed ultra narcissist. All of those false God's killed on the Cross, and secondly only the real God remaining, resurrected and ever living.

Dead the far-off unfeeling God, risen the God who is as close as our own skin. Who felt on that cross what we feel, all of our hurt and fear and shame and suffering. God who is as close as our own spirit where He comes to live when we believe. 

Dead the moral cop, risen the fair judge whose wrath is stayed, who Himself took the punishment for all wrongdoings on that cross. Who condemns no one that calls on Christ. 

Dead the cosmic killjoy, risen the one Sacred Heart where we can finally find true happiness. That place of total acceptance where we are finally free to find our deepest greatest joy.

Dead the unknowable God, Risen the God who gives His Spirit to allow us to know Him as we are known by Him, to lead us into all Truth.

Dead the infinite megalomaniac, risen the One who puts all others above Himself.

Dead every false God of our invention and risen our Hope, our Peace, our One True Love. 

So then the Cross, as foolish as it seems, does not stand in antagonism of modern man. No in fact it answers the heart cries in us all. And the cross itself is not it, it is just a symbol. Nothing magical or mystical about its shape, if Christ had come in these times a firing squad, gas-chamber or an electric chair would have been the altar God used to sacrifice His Son. The thing itself is not it, the whole point is that we were created with an eternal curiosity, it's what makes us distinctly human, and God, on the Cross, answers all our deepest questions, calms all our darkest fears. If only we will believe.

Makin' Mischief

Makin' mischief with my son is prolly one of the highlights of being a dad. One recent Saturday morning was spent googly eyeing various objects. But then we were quickly sidetracked. River put googly eyes on his chin and a mustache wrong way round on his mouth. We shot an hours worth of videos of crazy googly-eyed chin man monologuing Shakespeare's Richard III and Chesterton's "Man Who Was Thursday". Then Tom Stoppard and Monty Python had their turns and finally a Macbethian soliloquy on mortality. We laughed til we ached and tears streamed down my face. There is something healing about that kind of laughter. Couldn't get the video loaded but here are a few stills. 

Monday there was more mischief. We bought some over-sized post-it notes and made messages for strangers and slipped them slyly into the appropriate books at our local Books-a-million. 

I'll be heading back to bel Ayiti soon. I am excited and miss her so very much. But it is always bittersweet, leaving my son again. I am not a great dad, somedays maybe not even a good dad. Never claimed to be. But I love my son desperately and times away from him can be brutal. 

A few weeks ago I read a book called "A Million Miles In A Thousand Years" by Donald Miller. It is sort of a companion book to "Love Does" by Bob Goff. In fact the two authors are friends and the books reference the friendship and each others books. I read "Love Does" first and recommend it the other way around I suppose, but either way they are both well worth a read. The basic premise in both, is that our lives are a story. A story that should be whimsical and wonderful and yes, even full of mischief.

I have a friend Kerry. He used to hitchhike when he was a teenager. Kerry wasn't a restless soul looking for a ride out west, no, Kerry was a prankster. He would get into the vehicle with whatever poor soul had unwittingly picked him up and then once they got going good he would start to talk about the strangest, most ridiculous things, acting all sorts of goofy just trying to get kicked out. He also would hitchhike in his tightey whiteys, just for kicks and giggles. Anyway, he never died doing it, but one time a guy picked him up and no matter how strange Kerry acted the guy wouldn't pull over, wouldn't let Kerry out. Finally Kerry threatened to jump out of the speeding car and was released onto the highway shoulder once more. Listening to Kerry recount the mischief of his youth re-ignited memories of my teenage years. When I was full of mischief, when I was willing to do just about anything for a laugh.

I don't know exactly what I am trying to say, only that life gets in the way of living. That as we grow big our wonder tends to grow small, withers in the shadows of our grown up world. It is with more than a tinge of embarrassment that I admit there are times when my son must remind me to lighten up. Anyway, this is not a treatise on levity in an age of brokenness, nor a call to a cavalier lifestyle when there are so many deeply disturbing injustices that need to be urgently addressed in our hurting world. It is perhaps just my way of verbalizing, to myself mostly, the need for joy, God's joy, unspeakable and full of glory in these so often grief gray days. And that a life of loving God and others should sometimes, at least once in a while, be filled with belly laughter. And that there is a really profound reason why Jesus wants us to come to Him like a child, full of awe and maybe just a little mischief.