If Christianity were to be compared to a river, many Christians would be standing ankle deep in it. They enjoy the exhilaration of being in the river, and perhaps the water at times feels good (other times it almost certainly feels too cold or hot) – but they just aren’t going to get in past a certain point. I think that the banks of the river are fairly gradual for most of us, sloping gently down towards a middle that is deep and where the current is much much stronger than any of us is comfortable with. God beckons us to the middle of the river, where He is in control and where we are not. He beckons to a life of surrender, we wade in the eddies* enjoying the feeling of water around our ankles.
By the Grace of God (most certainly not through our own effort) Marinajo and I find ourselves further out into the center of the river than ever before. As we prepare to leave our friends, family, and all that is familiar for Honduras, there is a very real sense that the current has taken us over. This has never been more real to me than it was Saturday evening. We were in the process of moving all day Saturday. Assisted by dear friends, we moved a piano, and then about 24 boxes of items that we had packed away for long term storage while we are to be gone. This is the stuff that we don’t want to get rid of, the keepsakes, the memories. In the process of moving we stopped by our home in Windsor (now rented) several times. I don’t know if it was the act of putting the memories into storage, saying goodbye to a dear friend (my best friend, really), or saying goodbye to the house that did it – but somewhere in all of that I began to feel this overwhelming sense of loss. After all of the moving, I met my family, late, at Christ Community Church for Saturday evening worship. I had barely sat down when the tears welled up side of me. All evening, as the worship service progressed, my emotions just took over and I could barely keep from weeping there in the pew. As the sermon ended and the Praise and Worship band came up to play, I just kept feeling this deep sense of loss at all that we were leaving behind. The friendships, the familiarity, the sense of home here, it was as If each of these things were being peeled away from my heart and it hurt. I started looking for Pastor Steve (missions pastor). I knew that of all of the people in the church service, I could walk up to him and spill my heart out to him and he would understand. I wouldn’t have to explain to someone that I didn’t know that we were about to leave the country to go into missions work, Steve knew all about this. I also knew that Steve’s heart would be open to just listening. I can’t tell you what a blessing he has been to us as we’ve walked this journey of faith in getting ready to go to Honduras. So, I told Marinajo what I was up to and then went and found Steve and asked him if we could talk. I could barely hold back the torrent of tears that was certainly coming. Steve, sensing the seriousness of the moment, took us back into a private prayer room where I simply fell apart. I am just not given to large displays of emotion. I cry a lot – but just little bits at a time where you might have to wipe away one tear, but never the river. Tonight there was a river of tears. I still don’t fully understand why. I just know that God had tapped my emotions and was releasing sorrow and anguish that had been building up about leaving. I should say that these last few weeks have been particularly stressful and that it is very possible that the stress had been building up to a moment like this. Steve just kept his hand on my back while I sobbed out the words to try and describe what I was feeling. He just listed, like I knew he would, and kept his hand on my back to let me know he was there. Four hundred Kleenexes later, I was finally able to compose myself long enough to talk normally with Steve. I explained to him that tremendous sense of loss that I had been feeling.
(Back to the river analogy) I think that by God’s grace, we’ve stumbled in towards the middle of the river such that we are in over our heads. Make no mistake; I think that this is God’s design for each of us. I guess the rocks are what surprised me the most. I think our American mindset makes us think that if we are “in the middle” of God’s will, then we will be floating around like the angels, playing harps and laying on clouds. Nothing could ever be wrong with one who is “so spiritual” to be in that place. In fact, I find myself tumbling along in the river, bouncing off of big rocks as we go by. I don’t know why I am surprised. Jesus defined it so well by His life and His words. “In this world, you will have trouble” or “the world hates me, they will hate you also” or “blessed are you when men hate you”. Where did we get the idea that the Christian life is supposed to be easy and prosperous? As we prepare to leave, we bounce around among the big rocks like money and family and Saturday night I swam headlong into a boulder of loss and sadness. I don’t feel like I’m steering at all. I can remember the instructions from the white water rafting instructor years ago, “if you fall out, no matter what – keep your feet in front of you, whatever you do don’t go down the rapids head first”. And that is what this feels like: rapids.
Here’s the point. We stand in the river, ankle deep, thinking that there is safety there. And in a sense, there is – for we are in control. We get to decide just how much of God we take in at any one moment. We can climb out of the water and go back to our daily lives and then wade back in next Sunday to see how it feels. But this is no God at all. Rather it is a god that we control. God (Jehovah) never accepts this kind of faith. It is familiarity, not faith that we have when we are up to our ankles. God demands more. When we do finally slip into the middle a bit and get bounced around by the rocks some, we get back out shaking and cold and our friends on the shore say “see, I told you so” and others who are standing ankle deep say “you’re doing it wrong” and we just assume that the middle must only be for pastors and such. What we don’t understand is that the rocks and the rapids bring weakness. God is interested in only one thing for us, that the life of His son Jesus be made more and more real in us. His goal is that we might become His righteousness and that we might be made to abide. “Apart from me, you can do nothing”. But “abide in me, and you shall bear much fruit”. Lastly this: Jesus said that it is only in losing one’s life for His sake that we can truly find life. If we try and keep our lives, we will lose them and if we are willing to forfeit them for Him, then we will find life. I think that the only place that the character of Christ can be truly formed in us is in the moments of our discomfort, the moments where we lose our footing and are swept away, if you will. This process simply can not happen as long as we are ankle deep.
So why go in for it at all? Why endure the rocks and the lack of control if all we are to learn is how hard life can be? We go in to the middle of the river because only in its complete abandon can God be truly known. Oh the joy of feeling the presence of God in the midst of your complete brokenness! If you want something that will satisfy you right down to your very fibers, then find yourself with no hope, but Him, and then let Him deliver. Throughout this whole sobbing mess Saturday night, my overriding feeling was one of God’s presence and peace in the midst of pain and loss. He is SO FAITHFUL. He says that He will never leave us or forsake us and that is so true in the rocks and the rapids. We find that God did not design us for a life of comfort, rather He designed us for a life of adventure at His control. And we find that like an engine that is finally rid of the bad gasoline, or the bad spark plug, we are finally free to be what we were designed to be. Life is never so hard as it is in the middle of the river, but it is never so good as it is there either.
*Eddie - Water flowing upstream behind a rock or other obstacle. Eddies often provide a safe place to get out of the current
Monday, September 15, 2008
Saturday, August 30, 2008
In a dry and weary land.
O God, you are my God,
earnestly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you,
my body longs for you,
in a dry and weary land
where there is no water.
So begins Psalms 63. “In a dry and weary land where there is no water”.
Angry dust clouds billow from a truck speeding down a dirt road like steam pouring out of a steam engine as it labors up a hill. Those on bicycle, horseback, or those walking are consumed in the cloud as someone carelessly speeds by – completely oblivious to the discomfort that they have inflicted on a fellow human being.
Construction across the street causes the Bilbo (dust) to rise up to our house like storm clouds gathering in a massive thunderstorm. Rumor has it that this same construction site has run out of water – their well has run dry.
The small village of Lucinda is out of water. Out of water.
These are the images that I bring back from Honduras. It is said that Honduras has two seasons: wet and dry. This is definitely the dry season. Yes, the place that we are going to is in the jungle, but the jungle is a place of extremes and right now, the extreme is dry. The whole area strains under the dryness and awaits the next extreme, the rainy season. In a month or so, torrents of rain will change the landscape and the plancha (dry river bed) will roar with water once again. People will make their wary river crossings in too much water. But right now, it is dry. It is so dry that several areas are out of water.
When was the last time anyone in the United States contemplated being out of water? When we need water, even in a place like Las Vegas Nevada, right in the middle of the desert, we turn on the faucet and there is water. A water shortage means that we cannot water the grass, or plant new sod. It doesn’t mean that we have no water to drink. Local environmental laws cause all construction sites to be constantly attended by a water spray truck so that dust is not a problem, even as they move dirt and work the land. What I am trying to get across here is this: the Bible is rife with imagery about water, and for the most part, we don’t get it. We have no idea what it means to be thirsty, really thirsty.
When God said, through the prophet Isaiah For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground, or when He said come, all you who are thirsty; come to the waters. The people understood this imagery for what it was. It spoke to perhaps the deepest physical need that they had - the need for water. When God spoke through the prophet Jeremiah They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water, the people understood the imagery of their sin – broken cisterns that cannot hold water. Sin can never satisfy you, you will always be thirsty. And then when Our Lord Jesus said If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him and when he said to the Samaritan woman at the well Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life, the reaction was from someone who knew what it meant to be thirsty. She knew what it meant to drag herself to the well every day, in the heat and the dust, simply to do what we take so easily for granted. Sir, she said, give me this water so that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water. Her reaction was completely understandable, and it was completely physical. But Jesus had something else in mind; he revealed himself to her as the Messiah. Thirst can make us look for answers. The dryness can give us a perspective that we cannot have any other way. The reality of spiritual condition before Christ is worse than those images that I wrote about. We are completely without life, we are in the deepest of deserts. But, the reality of our spiritual condition in Christ is so much more than we understand. We are so drenched with God, in Christ, that we literally stand justified before a righteous and holy God. We have a never ending source of water (The Holy Spirit) welling up from within us. We have more than we will ever need. More than we need to get through cancer, coma, or chaos. More than we need to face tomorrow. More than we need to rise up in blessing and holiness in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and reflect His glory. For that is our purpose. May we be refreshed in a dry and weary land, where there is no water.
All who are thirsty
All who are weak
Come to the fountain
Dip your heart in the stream of life
Let the pain and the sorrow
Be washed away
In the waves of his mercy
As deep cries out to deep (we sing)
Come Lord Jesus come
Holy Spirit come
As deep cries out to deep
~
Blessed Be Your name
When I'm found in the desert place
Though I walk through the wilderness
Blessed Be Your name
earnestly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you,
my body longs for you,
in a dry and weary land
where there is no water.
So begins Psalms 63. “In a dry and weary land where there is no water”.
Angry dust clouds billow from a truck speeding down a dirt road like steam pouring out of a steam engine as it labors up a hill. Those on bicycle, horseback, or those walking are consumed in the cloud as someone carelessly speeds by – completely oblivious to the discomfort that they have inflicted on a fellow human being.
Construction across the street causes the Bilbo (dust) to rise up to our house like storm clouds gathering in a massive thunderstorm. Rumor has it that this same construction site has run out of water – their well has run dry.
The small village of Lucinda is out of water. Out of water.
These are the images that I bring back from Honduras. It is said that Honduras has two seasons: wet and dry. This is definitely the dry season. Yes, the place that we are going to is in the jungle, but the jungle is a place of extremes and right now, the extreme is dry. The whole area strains under the dryness and awaits the next extreme, the rainy season. In a month or so, torrents of rain will change the landscape and the plancha (dry river bed) will roar with water once again. People will make their wary river crossings in too much water. But right now, it is dry. It is so dry that several areas are out of water.
When was the last time anyone in the United States contemplated being out of water? When we need water, even in a place like Las Vegas Nevada, right in the middle of the desert, we turn on the faucet and there is water. A water shortage means that we cannot water the grass, or plant new sod. It doesn’t mean that we have no water to drink. Local environmental laws cause all construction sites to be constantly attended by a water spray truck so that dust is not a problem, even as they move dirt and work the land. What I am trying to get across here is this: the Bible is rife with imagery about water, and for the most part, we don’t get it. We have no idea what it means to be thirsty, really thirsty.
When God said, through the prophet Isaiah For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground, or when He said come, all you who are thirsty; come to the waters. The people understood this imagery for what it was. It spoke to perhaps the deepest physical need that they had - the need for water. When God spoke through the prophet Jeremiah They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water, the people understood the imagery of their sin – broken cisterns that cannot hold water. Sin can never satisfy you, you will always be thirsty. And then when Our Lord Jesus said If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him and when he said to the Samaritan woman at the well Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life, the reaction was from someone who knew what it meant to be thirsty. She knew what it meant to drag herself to the well every day, in the heat and the dust, simply to do what we take so easily for granted. Sir, she said, give me this water so that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water. Her reaction was completely understandable, and it was completely physical. But Jesus had something else in mind; he revealed himself to her as the Messiah. Thirst can make us look for answers. The dryness can give us a perspective that we cannot have any other way. The reality of spiritual condition before Christ is worse than those images that I wrote about. We are completely without life, we are in the deepest of deserts. But, the reality of our spiritual condition in Christ is so much more than we understand. We are so drenched with God, in Christ, that we literally stand justified before a righteous and holy God. We have a never ending source of water (The Holy Spirit) welling up from within us. We have more than we will ever need. More than we need to get through cancer, coma, or chaos. More than we need to face tomorrow. More than we need to rise up in blessing and holiness in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and reflect His glory. For that is our purpose. May we be refreshed in a dry and weary land, where there is no water.
All who are thirsty
All who are weak
Come to the fountain
Dip your heart in the stream of life
Let the pain and the sorrow
Be washed away
In the waves of his mercy
As deep cries out to deep (we sing)
Come Lord Jesus come
Holy Spirit come
As deep cries out to deep
~
Blessed Be Your name
When I'm found in the desert place
Though I walk through the wilderness
Blessed Be Your name
Monday, August 25, 2008
Day 6 – 8/23
During Friday night’s dinner, we received a call on the HAM radio from John and Penny Alden (also missionaries here at Loma De Luz) asking if Dad and I would be available tomorrow for br…… and then the transmission cut out. Such is the life of communications here in the campo. Just to give you a sense of how communications sometimes happen here, later John and Penny were able to contact Dr. Renee on the radio and then she called me on the cell phone (yes, there are cell phones here) to relay the invitation to breakfast for this (Saturday) morning. Needless to say, we accepted. Besides never having met John and Penny and wanting to get to know them, I also wanted to get my hands on their truck. It was for sale and we believed that God was leading us to buy it. So up the hill we went to breakfast with John and Penny. I know I keep saying this and I imaging that you might tired of hearing it, but all the same – John and Penny were just delightful people.
John and Penny are some of our role models in terms of integration with the Honduran culture. John works at some of the local Honduran clinics and with some of the local doctors. Penny and John both work quite a bit with a local Honduran church and have invested their hearts into the Honduran people here. I know it sounds crazy, but it is quite possible to come here (in my capacity as a technical person) and never really integrate with the culture. You have to want to. This of you who kow us know that we do want to – but it takes some real effort to make it happen. John and Penny are two people we can emulate as to how they have accomplished this.
After breakfast, John was good enough to take us on an extended tour around the area. We drove to all of the local villages within ten miles of the hospital and John explained each of them to us and kind of gave us a sense of how each of them fit into the local landscape. Since John works in these towns, we didn’t just drive down the main street and say that we’d had a tour. We drove down many side streets, stopped at a few people’s houses, and generally got to know the area. Thank you John for taking so much time with us! The information and orientation that it provided were invaluable!
After some rest, we had a very nice dinner with the Merrits and the Greens. To illuastrate how things often happen around here, I’ll explain how we decided to do dinner together. We had a cooked whole chicken, and mentioned to one family that this would be far too much for us to eat and invited them to join. Well, they were planning on getting together with family number two, but let’s just throw it all together in pot-luck and all three families can eat together. Pineapples were harvested from outside and cut up (you can’t believe how good they taste!), mango, melon, plantains (small banana like fruit – the Honduran potato) and all of a sudden you have a great meal for six! What a blessing!
We had a really nice time of prayer after supper and coffee. We prayed for adult missionary kids living at home, and struggling. We prayed for our family as we prepare to go and for Marinajo as she endures a long time at home without me. We prayed for the longstanding needs at the hospital, more staff, enough money, etc. And lastly, my dad prayed for Marinajo and the kids and I. I was really touched by the fact that my dad was down here praying for me as we prepared to come. What a neat blessing. I know that he’s been touched by all that he has seen and done and I can tell you that he and I have been able to spend more quality time together here than I could have ever dreamed for. Thank you so much God for this time that he and I have been able to spend together!
John and Penny are some of our role models in terms of integration with the Honduran culture. John works at some of the local Honduran clinics and with some of the local doctors. Penny and John both work quite a bit with a local Honduran church and have invested their hearts into the Honduran people here. I know it sounds crazy, but it is quite possible to come here (in my capacity as a technical person) and never really integrate with the culture. You have to want to. This of you who kow us know that we do want to – but it takes some real effort to make it happen. John and Penny are two people we can emulate as to how they have accomplished this.
After breakfast, John was good enough to take us on an extended tour around the area. We drove to all of the local villages within ten miles of the hospital and John explained each of them to us and kind of gave us a sense of how each of them fit into the local landscape. Since John works in these towns, we didn’t just drive down the main street and say that we’d had a tour. We drove down many side streets, stopped at a few people’s houses, and generally got to know the area. Thank you John for taking so much time with us! The information and orientation that it provided were invaluable!
After some rest, we had a very nice dinner with the Merrits and the Greens. To illuastrate how things often happen around here, I’ll explain how we decided to do dinner together. We had a cooked whole chicken, and mentioned to one family that this would be far too much for us to eat and invited them to join. Well, they were planning on getting together with family number two, but let’s just throw it all together in pot-luck and all three families can eat together. Pineapples were harvested from outside and cut up (you can’t believe how good they taste!), mango, melon, plantains (small banana like fruit – the Honduran potato) and all of a sudden you have a great meal for six! What a blessing!
We had a really nice time of prayer after supper and coffee. We prayed for adult missionary kids living at home, and struggling. We prayed for our family as we prepare to go and for Marinajo as she endures a long time at home without me. We prayed for the longstanding needs at the hospital, more staff, enough money, etc. And lastly, my dad prayed for Marinajo and the kids and I. I was really touched by the fact that my dad was down here praying for me as we prepared to come. What a neat blessing. I know that he’s been touched by all that he has seen and done and I can tell you that he and I have been able to spend more quality time together here than I could have ever dreamed for. Thank you so much God for this time that he and I have been able to spend together!
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