Ladies, help me understand something, please.
You know those magazines in the check-out line at Kroger? They almost always have a famous woman on the cover, and then some sensational headline out beside it? These magazines tell us important life-changing stuff about celebrities, like how bad they look in a swimsuit, how unhappy their marriage is, what their addictions are, how much their purse costs, who their husband is sleeping with, etc. I mean, the kind of information you just can’t live without.
And then there are the blogs dedicated to this same kind of tripe too: Tearing down successful female celebrities, and even successful female bloggers. There’s now an entire genre of printed and on-line materials, an entire industry, built around bringing down high-profile females.
And here’s the kicker. Who’s the audience for this stuff? Who’s shelling out billions annually to read bad things about women? Is it their Male Oppressors? Nope. It’s women. Women - some very much against the objectification of and discrimination against their kind - lap this stuff up. Lap. It. Up.
Help me - a man - understand this stupidity.
Those without Perez Hilton in their feed reader and People Magazine beside the toilet may cast the first stone.
Bush has seen poverty. So has Brant. Sophie, Shannon, Anne, Melanie, Mary, David, and Brian too. And they can’t stop talking about it. Because the sights and sounds and smells of it are stuck to our insides like the parasites we brought back with us. But there’s no Cipro to flush the experience of poverty out of us.
Seeing poverty up close is very uncomfortable because it does two things to me every time: It makes me feel things I and my culture try hard to avoid feeling: sadness, guilt, anger, despair, small. And it also makes me need to change. It leaves me wondering about my finances, my priorities, my church, kids, career, theology, politics, neighborhood, diet, time. I always get the nagging feeling, legitimate or not, that perhaps my life needs a little tweaking.
The way I see it we have only four choices when we eturn home to our middle-class (or better) lives with the third world still stuck in our gut.
IGNORE IT:
We can tell ourselves life hasn’t changed. We can tell ourselves we made it home unaffected. We can tell ourselves - and for some broken people this is actually true - that we feel nothing and no response is necessary. There are entire theologies that evolve from this belief that the life of others does not need to bleed over into our own - it’s individualism gone wild. But I believe Martin Luther King, Jr was right when he said injustice anywhere undermines justice everywhere. What I experienced of it “there” is forever part of me “here,” whether I can acknowledge it, feel it, think about it, and deal with it or not. Oddly, folks who choose to ignore what they’ve experienced in the third world, in my experience, think they’re being tough. Ironically, it’s their weakness, their inability to deal with what just happened to them that’s in play.
FLOAT:
You know people like this I’m sure. In a Christian subculture that demands a sermon start with a good joke, that peddles “Your Best Life Now” and shuns topics that aren’t upbeat and positive more often than not, we’re not a people practiced at going deep for very long. Make us walk through poverty for five days and we’re grabbing every joke, movie, sale, buffet we can find to get us back to the surface as quickly as possible. And we’re apologizing profusely for having ever inconvenienced others by talking about those poor kids like we did. My last day in the Dominican Republic, for example, I was tired of being submerged and serious so I posted a stupid cartoon. It wasn’t even funny but I had to try to get some air. I had to.
DWELL:
A few years ago, after traveling to El Salvador, I came home angry and sad and I stayed that way for months. I didn’t want to feel better. I wanted to punish myself for living such a sheltered life before my trip. I wanted to pay off some debt I felt I had to all those children going to bed hungry, all those people I never cared about or knew about before. I felt guilty for even the smallest amounts of pleasure. Laughing at a joke left me feeling insensitive. Making one was even worse. I felt like I was having fun at a funeral, like I had no business enjoying my life while others were losing theirs. I became repellant and when I spoke about the problems in the third world and asked other people to care too, to do something about it, I was not compelling. If caring meant becoming like me, why would anyone want to do that?
INTEGRATE:
Ignoring keeps us and those in the third world from being made better by our experience. Floating keeps our hardest experiences from growing roots and producing fruit in us for a long time to come. Dwelling makes for some great angsty music and cerebral blog posts but leaves us immobilized. Somehow we need to integrate our experiences in the developing world into our world at home.
I’m slowly getting the hang of this. Five trips to the developing world, and I no longer get angry at my children when they don’t like the gift I brought home or say they’re “starving.” And I actually bought some new shoes the day after I returned this time - with no only a little guilt. Baby steps, right?
I want to be a person who can fearlessly experience poverty and pain, who can be affected by it and still be effective in changing it, see death and live a better and wiser life because of it, see needs and still be grateful for having mine met. I don’t want deny the power of what I experience. I don’t want to stay on the surface away from the dark depths of this world. I don’t want to go all emo, get myself a black wardrobe and never smile again. I want to integrate what I’ve seen into my life forever and be better for it.
You can help me do this by simply praying for me and all the bloggers Compassion has taken to Uganda and the Dominican Republic.
Brian is a gifted man. He’s an organizer, a lover of spread sheets, a great speaker, model father, worshipful listener and he can strip you of your self-esteem with one punchline. Or a hundred. Depending upon his mood.
When I’m around and he has a new audience I’m an easy target. Such was the case in the Dominican Republic. And, lucky for him, I was way too stressed and overworked to fight back. ‘Cause I can bring it if I need to. But there wasn’t enough caffeine in the Dominican Republic to get that part of my brain working right on so little sleep and such restless sleep.
But I’m rested now.
And I have pictures.
I was holding up just fine when Brian was the only one jabbing away at me. I laughed. We laughed. Fun was had by all. And then the sarcasm began to spread - a sure (and twisted) sign that folks have accepted you into their herd, I’d like to think. First, Melanie started roasting me for presumably being a wuss because I’m both a musician and a Baylor grad. Now that I have my wits about me I would like to point out to Melanie that neither is my doing entirely. By his grace God made me more talented than her and gave me a scholarship to a higher institution of learning at which “whoooooop” is not recognized as an actual English word and where musicians are those who play well and not just loudly while standing in a square. (And it was six to one girls to guys at Baylor in those days. Them’s good odds. And there’s no denying the love many of those women had for musicians now is there?)
Then it was Marlboro Man‘s turn. I was walking with my friend Keely through a rough neighborhood. I wasn’t her only protection. That needs to be made clear. I’m not delusional. A large large man without a neck named Ivan was the real muscle. I knew this. I am aware that my size alone makes no one feel secure. Yet Marlboro Man just had to point this out to the rest of the group in case there were any doubters. I believe the exact quote had him stating that it was a good thing Ivan was with us because the whole “buck o five of Shaun” sure isn’t going to keep anyone safe. To which I have a witty comeback this morning but will not type it for fear of retribution from a man who regularly “mugs” cows, eats fried calf testicles and bites horse ears for a living. This sort of man, I suspect, might not play nice if provoked and might have enough land to make me “disappear.” But, for the record, I am a buck o forty seven point five. So. There. I’m rubber, you’re glue.
So, yesterday morning, with my self-esteem as thin as my biceps, thanks to a week with many “friends,” I went to the gym with my wife. By “gym” I mean that place full of stay-at-home moms soft rockin’ to Jason Mraz and Kelly Clarkson while stair stepping and ab crunching. The woman who taught our class trains women for pageants. And she kicked my butt. And not just a little bit. In the shower this morning there were large portions of my small body I could not wash because of a lack of cooperation from major muscle groups like my entire chest, both arms, my butt and legs. But I’m gonna kick some tail in the evening gown competition now for sure.
But yesterday, as butt-kicking as it was, was just a warm-up. Tonight, I’ll face the Cuban Assassin for the first time in two weeks.
He will tie an elastic band around me and make me drag him around a room. He will have me hoist a heavy bar over my head and run around the parking lot. He will make me kick things and throw things and I will want to give up. But I won’t. Instead I will envision Brian’s, Melanie’s and Marlboro Man’s faces on that medicine ball and chuck it farther than a medicine ball has ever been chucked. They have given me the eye of the tiger. And if the eye of the tiger is not enough to get me through the day’s workout, well, I plan on bribing the Assassin with a Cuban cigar I bought while in the Dominican Republic.
No one’s asking me. I’m just an independent contractor, a part time guy - and a very new one. But I’m not a fan of the word “project” - as in ”Compassion project.”
Words conjure up images for me and those images have everything to do with how I’ve heard words used in the past. In college I spent a week or so in Oakland, serving the people in a neighborhood that contained a government housing project. Bland run-down buildings. Government owned. I spent one afternoon just picking up trash in the project: used condoms, bullet casings, empty dime bags, all kinds of garbage. I spent another day mowing yards. I got hit in the head with a rock that day.
When I hear “project” I think of that place - not a place I’d want to live, not the kind of place I’d walk through alone.
I hung out at Compassion projects all last week in the Dominican Republic, and they’re nothing like Oakland’s. They’re more like my house was on Saturday.
On Saturday, neighborhood kids trickled over to our yard as they do almost every day, pulled toys out of our garage and started playing. They don’t ask anymore. They know we don’t mind. Their parents don’t mind either - they know by now that they’re kids are safe at our place.
Becky brought out a tray of food around noon and they all ate. The chain came off of a kid’s bike and I fixed it while he asked questions about every move I made. Kids drew at an art table in the garage. Boys rode skateboards and scooters down the driveway. Girls played hand games. A couple of them got in a fight and we intervened, made them talk it out. Redneck Neighbor caught me up on his life since I left town. Naturally, God came up in some of the day’s conversations but even when He didn’t, He was there.
If my house was a brick-and-mortar church building, that would be as close to a Compassion project as anything I’ve experience in the U.S. Compassion doesn’t build buildings. So, a project is a local church where local people play with kids, and teach them and make them feel safe and welcomed. The kids are fed and tickled and parents trust that they’re in good hands. And everyone hears about God. But even when they don’t, they know He’s there.
We need a better word for this kind of place at Compassion. Some folks have started calling projects “child development centers.” That works, but it’s so much colder than what I experienced last week. What do you call a place that meets the social, economic, physical and spiritual needs of children? More of us in America should probably call it “home.”
I’m sleeping in mine tonight, but still thinking about theirs.
