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
Yesterday we left Rome, GA for Chattanooga, TN. First stop, Lookout Caverns and Ruby Falls. The tour was guided which kept River and I from any real mischief. Boring. But River enjoyed the sights very, very much in spite of the guard rails and the ever-watchful eyes.
I was distracted a bit, still am today, by thoughts of Haiti and her people. Especially her women. The number of victims of gender-based violence there makes my heart ache. And where yesterday the sky was bright and blue and yes and possible, today it sulked and brooded and dampened everything (even threw a little tantrum with hail). I adore the rain, but today...???? Back at the hotel I've been looking through the pictures I took in Haiti. I want you to meet some of the beautiful kids from the Lamb Center where I will be working the next 3 months. The children there are so amazing. So full of tenderness and joy. I am so excited to get to spend more time with them. To see them safe in their new home.
Today I have been reading the biography of Sojourner Truth the fiery abolitionist, preacher and woman's rights activist. She was born Isabella Baumfree and into slavery in 1797 and was sold at least three times. She had 5 children from a forced marriage and fled to freedom a year before New York emancipated all slaves when her last master reneged on a promise to free her early.
She once beautifully and powerfully ranted:
"That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne five children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?"
I am thinking that this women who announced that she wasn't ever going to die instead was "going home like a shooting star", would be such a powerful voice in Haiti and anywhere else women find themselves enslaved and oppressed.
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| Sojourner Truth |
Her faith made her fearless. She proclaimed "I feel safe in the midst of my enemies, for the truth is all powerful and will prevail." She trusted God implicitly. His sovereignty, His power. She once rebuked Fredrick Douglas for suggesting that slaves use violence to acquire their freedom. Sojourner chided, "Be careful Fredrick, is God Dead?"
She was no respecter of persons and her tongue was as sharp as her wit and ever able to puncture the most pretentious men of her day. She once castigated a "minister" for his sexism which he tried to justify with scripture.
"Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him."
"If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down, these women together ought to be able to turn it right again."
One day, while preparing for a speech she was told of a threat that the building would be burned down if she spoke there. Sojourner spoke quietly in humble defiance, "Then I will speak upon the ashes."
Wow. My kinda woman.
Almost 10:30 here and River is nestling into a comforter cocoon. Sci-fi on his laptop and the Battle Hymn of the Republic drifts sleepily from his whistling lips. He has not stopped whistling it or singing it for 4 days now. Oh my.
But I am not ready for sleep. My mind is reeling, my heart so very heavy thinking about a report out of Egypt where new laws would give men the right to violate their wives after they are deceased. State sanctioned necrophilia. I am desperately hoping and praying that those men in Egypt's parliament, those who hold this legislation's fate in their hands, will consider the prospect of a man having sex with their daughters after they are dead and send this law back to the pit of hell where it came from.
Please pray for the women of Egypt tonight. For the daughters. Please remember the millions of women enslaved tonight. Pray for freedom, for justice, for hope that they might hold on a little longer. Until God can raise up rescuers.
Til tomorrow then...
In response to the universal health care debate Rand Paul said "With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have to realize what that implies. It's not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery."Dear Rand. I humbly disagree, the politics of health care aside, it is an abstraction, the lack of freedom to do what you want is NOT the same as coercion, torture, rape and violence. And subsequently, in the land of the free and the brave you can quit your job as doctor, and you can become anything, even a politician. There are 27 million people in very real slavery today, 27 million men women and children who fear for their very lives. Please find another word to make your point!
