While I’m off being thankful, here’s another post from the past. This one was originally written during a trip to Ethiopia with Wess, the president of Compassion International. He introduced me to a man who spoke two sentences that have stuck with me for more than a year - and I hope I never forget. His God was bigger than mine back then. In case your needs enlarging today…
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I met a man today named Shiferaw, a Ghandi look alike in business casual. He was once the Minister of Justice in Ethiopia, when the communists ran the country. He is a Christian they kept around because they could trust him and he was good at his job. When the curtain fell on Ethiopia and the Church went underground, Shiferaw worked from inside the government to protect as many Christians as he could - alerting them to raids before they happened, foiling government plans to arrest Church leaders. Wess (the president of Compassion International) first met him in those dark days.
When the curtain rose, Shiferaw was elected the first President of the Ethiopian Evangelical Alliance - a coalition of churches working together, sharing resources and wisdom across denominational and geographic boundaries. Then Compassion International arrived in Ethiopia and Shiferaw went to work for them as president over East Africa - Ephriam’s job today.
He no longer gets paid by Compassion International but he works for them. He works for their cause from the outside. He took us to a building project he’s just begun - a research and training center for holistic child development. That’s the fancy title given to what Compassion does. They develop the mind, body, social skills, economic condition and spirit of children, believing that all parts are affected by poverty and must be attended to to end it. We walked the dirt grounds of what will someday educate people from all over the world on how to apply Compassion’s holistic development model in their own churches and communities. Compassion taught Shiferaw and now he’s planning to teach others so that children all over the world will be rescued from poverty.
Over breakfast Wess remarked to Shiferaw that his is a big dream. And then Shiferaw said the most amazingly profound thing - I wrote it down.
Abraham was asking God for just one child - just one - and God asked Abraham to count the stars.
(There’s a song in that. Don’t steal it from me.)
While I’m away on vacation, here’s another post from the past to amuse you. Not only will this little tale from May of 2006 amuse you, but it will also likely make you - no matter who you are - feel like a very competent parent. A dose of at-least-I’m-a-better-parent-than-that-guy is my gift to you this day after Thanksgiving. You’re welcome.
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“What’s doobie?”
She’s five - I thought. I also thought things like: She must have seen cable at Uncle Brian’s house. Now we’ll have to move. I never liked Uncle Brian much anyway. Maybe Becky’s having an affair with a pot head when I’m out of town. Or a drug lord from Nicaragua. Maybe Becky’s dealing. Maybe Uncle Brian’s her supplier. Maybe he’s a drug lord from Nicaragua.
Things like that. Normal rational things like that. Then I took a deep breath and feigned calm.
“A doobie is like a cigarette. People smoke it. Ok?” I pulled out my chair and she pulled out hers.
“If you smoke cigarettes you die,” she stated with the confidence of a Surgeon General.
“Yea, pretty much. I guess that’s true. If you smoke long enough you get sick and some people even die.”
“Mommy says you die.”
“Yea...So do you understand what a doobie is now?” I spilled a box of crayons onto the kitchen table and handed her a stack of construction paper hoping the interrogation was over and we could draw together instead or at least have some normal little people conversation about, I don’t know, colors of finger nail polish she’s into this week or how to make a fart sound with your armpit. Anything.
“Can you take me to see them make doobie?”
“Well, it’s not like shovels or pencils. I mean, they don’t make them in a big factory somewhere like that. I don’t think.”
I imagined a steel box miles wide and long. Inside, union members pull levers and pack joints in printed cartons and head back to their homes in the suburbs when the whistle blows at five o’clock. “They grow plants. Then they cut the plants down and dry them out in the sun. And then they crunch up the plants when they’re dry and roll them up in a little piece of paper. And that’s how you make a doobie - how THEY make a doobie. But we can’t go see them do that.”
“Then they make it on fire like a cigarette and they breath it and die,” she continued matter-of-factly while adding a red smile to the yellow sun beaming down from the upper right corner of her paper.
“Pretty much.” My page was still blank. Suddenly realizing how dry my mouth was, I stood to get a glass of water. “Do want anything to drink?”
“No. Why can’t we see them make it?”
“Doobie? I mean doobies? Well, it’s against the rules to make doobies, Sweety. Doobies are drugs. Some drugs are good for your body like cold medicine and stomach ache medicine, you know, and some drugs are bad for you. If you use drugs that are bad for you or hang out with people who take drugs that are bad the police can write you a ticket.”
“And go to jail.” Tiny pink billowy flowers bloomed from the end of her crayon along the bottom of her paper.
“Yea, sometimes.” I swallowed mouthfuls of cold water and prayed there were no more questions. When did my little girl become an expert on our criminal justice system?
“Why do people smoke doobies? They’re gonna go to jail.”
“You know how when you get scared at night you like Mommy to come sit with you? And when I get sad I like to make music or color with you?”
She nodded.
“Some people are really sad or really scared and they think if they use bad drugs they’ll be happy, I guess.”
“But they get dead.” And with that she slid down from her chair and posted her work on the refrigerator with a magnet and a look of satisfaction.
“Yea, they, um, get dead,” I stammered. “So if anyone ever talks to you about trying drugs you need to come tell Mommy or Daddy or Uncle Brian or Aunt Amy, ok? So we can tell you if it’s a good drug that will make your body well or a bad drug. Will you do that? Ok?”
“Yea.” She removed another page from the stack in front of her and gripped a black crayon in her fingers. “I’m making a farm.”
“Ok, well is that all you wanted to know about doobies then?”
She nodded.
I drank another glass of water. She drew a cow and a farmer and a barn. I drew a factory with odd smelling smoke coming from its chimneys.
I couldn’t stand it any more.
“Where’d you hear about doobies, Gabriella?”
“On the radio they sing, ‘doobie doobie doo doo.’”
“Oh.” And I pinned my drawing to the refrigerator alongside her smiling sunshine and pink flowers.
I’ve set some old posts from the archives to go up while I’m away on vacation. Today’s post was originally written while I was teaching the book of Genesis to a bunch of college students back in 2005.
I never received so much positive e-mail before or since. For all the women out there (and we men who need to be reminded from time to time of their incredible value), here’s Woman.
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Genesis 2:19 So GOD formed from the dirt of the ground all the animals of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the Man to see what he would name them. Whatever the Man called each living creature, that was its name.
Hippopotamus. Platypus. Rhinoceros.
Orangutan. Elephant. Lemur.
Dog. Cat. Goat.
Fly.
Genesis 2:20 The Man named the cattle, named the birds of the air, named the wild animals; but he didn’t find a suitable companion.
Cow. Salamander. Zebra. Not one he called Friend.
Genesis 2:21 GOD put the Man into a deep sleep. As he slept he removed one of his ribs and replaced it with flesh. 22GOD then used the rib that he had taken from the Man to make Woman and presented her to the Man.
This one God named. Woman, he called her.
She was His final creation. The finishing touch on a masterpiece. What was missing. The world was not complete and neither was Man until she arrived.
Genesis 2:23 “Finally! Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh!”
And man said, “Wow! This is good! Really really good! She’s more beautiful than Peacock, more graceful than Eagle, better conversation than Monkey. She’s perfect. I don’t ever want her to leave. I can’t believe I ever lived without her. I must have been living half as much.”
Genesis 2:24Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and embraces his wife. They become one flesh. 25The two of them, the Man and his Wife, were naked, but they felt no shame.
One. Not by paper or principality.
Naked. She stands bare before him, untainted by corrosive self-doubt injected by magazines and peers. She has no peer. She has no ideal. She is pleased because her Maker is, confident and prized because she is His.
Then flesh rests against flesh. Relaxed. Valued. Belonging. What was separate, housed in two bodies, joins. The depths of two souls woven together in an instant. No shame. No lonely. No distance.
Day and night, waters and skies, birds and cattle. All of this was incomplete without man and man was incomplete without her. And she is so treasured and essential that God couldn’t pull His pen through even one book of His epic without her flowing from His heart and onto the page. There she is on the pedestal of Adam’s adoration and God’s provision.
Before model’s measured her and husbands forsook her. Before companies passed over her and children fatigued her. Before magazines dieted her and age bent her. Before religion veiled her and preachers silenced her. Before governments controlled her and fathers ignored her. Before the world fell and rose only to stumble for eons as a crippled amnesiac unable to recall her worth - she was Woman. Friend. Lover. Beautiful. Valuable. Essential. Completion. The final brushstroke on God’s canvas.
I’m away from the internet for a few days, spending time with family and a big ol’ spread of deserts I’m sure...and being thankful for both and more. While I’m gone, I’ve scheduled some old posts from the archives to show up here every day for your reading pleasure.
Today’s post was originally written during my first trip with Compassion International (8.23.2005). This was the first blogged Compassion trip that I know of - giving me a little idea years later.
Now, if you’ve been reading Shlog for a while, but not from the beginning, you may be surprised to know that I’ve not always been a supporter of Compassion International. Nope. I was a skeptic once. It took Compassion almost five years to get me to go see their ministry in the third world for myself. And once I did, well, I was very convinced they were all they claimed to be. Skepticism killed. And I was very changed.
Here’s the proof. This post was my thinking out loud at the very beginning of a major shift in my theology, politics, and lifestyle. It was written the day I first felt (and feared) my life would have to change drastically in order to follow Jesus. Not many answers back then; just a lot of shock and frustration.
See you in a few.
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DAY ONE
SAN SALVADOR:
McDonalds. Shopping malls. Sherwin Williams. This looks like North America. This looks like a place blossoming with the fruits of capitalism and democracy. And it is.
Prostitutes. Broken glassed storefronts, graffiti. A passed out bearded man on a sidewalk. This looks like North America too. This looks like a place choked by the weeds of selfishness and politics. And it is.
San Salvador, Central America perhaps, is just North America fast forwarded or under a magnifying glass. The disparity between the haves and have nots is here in different proportions, in exaggerated contrast. The living and the dying share the smallest nation in Central America, splitting it in half. Fifty percent of El Salvador’s people are impoverished, living on less than the equivalent of $1 a day. The other fifty percent have more. They are living somewhere between getting by and luxury.
And that is what makes the Americas so much more frustrating to me than some other impoverished nations. In parts of Africa exist tribes in which poverty is the norm. There is no wealth, no getting by, no other kind of life within view to compare oneself too. There is no hope down the street. No one to plead with, no neighbor to help. It is easy in such places to believe that such a neighbor, one that was blessed with more, would share if he only existed. And maybe he does in some far away land. Maybe he’ll arrive on an airplane and save us – they might wonder.
But in the Americas the neighbors with more than enough exist in abundance and every poor person knows it. I was slapped today by this realization that in the Americas help IS down the road and needn’t arrive from a far away place by plane. If only the houses we passed on the way to the Compassion International projects today would look beyond their own front doors. If only the patrons of the malls and fast food chains and home improvement stores would keep just enough and spend the rest on fighting poverty next door. If North Americans would look at their daughter’s dance costume as three Salvadorans that could be saved, at their new stereo as six stomachs that could be filled, at a church sound system as ten thousand bodies clothed, fed and revived by the love of God – If only.
If only the Church, in every nation it lives in, would stop and stoop and dress the wounds of it’s own members and then it’s own countrymen and then those beyond it’s borders.
If only I could do this. Only enough. But what does that look like?
I play and/or speak 100 times a year - that’s 10 times a month with two months off. I’m not very good with time but according to my blog (who needs long term memory when you’ve got a blog?) I’ve been keeping that pace for exactly two years now.
In that time, somewhere around 4,000 kids have been sponsored (91 of those this weekend!), thousands of miles have been driven and flown, many many Chick-fil-A sandwiches and burritos from Moe’s have been digested, and exactly two suitcases and one guitar and case have been destroyed.
First, my suitcase. Actually purchased four years ago, it’s held up as a Samsonite is advertised to. The handle came off, sure, but, hey, that’s nothing a little Gorilla Glue and duct tape (OK, lots of duct tape) couldn’t remedy. My suitcase’s twin didn’t fare so well. It went on tour with Brody and Mercy Me or David Crowder - I can’t remember - and came back with a handle so bent and broken it was beyond repair. A ceremony was held curbside just before the trash man carted him off to the baggage claim in the sky.
And here’s my guitar case - as it was Thursday night.
Doesn’t look too bad, until you realize that it opens where it’s not supposed to open.
Nope. That’s not good.
Not good at all.
But, again, it’s nothing a little duct tape (or, in this case, gaffer’s tape) couldn’t fix.
I’ve got some time off before kicking off a Christmas tour in December (dates coming soon on the tour page). I don’t think my suitcase or my guitar will make it to see the new year. There’s no way.
So, fine folks at Yamaha and Samsonite, Christmas is coming up and I was just thinking, well, maybe you could…
Or I’ll just buy some more duct tape.
