Sukarto smiles widely with his remaining good teeth and motions for us to enter his home. It’s a small and simple structure, hunkered down in the ash-enriched soil of Mt. Bromo.
His wife Sukarni also gives our team a warm welcome and quickly disappears to make refreshments for her guests. Even as we start chatting we can hear the grumblings of Mt. Bromo, eruptions that sound like ocean waves and rumbling thunder at the same time. The active crater is about a mile from their house and you can see it clearly from their front yard.
Sukarto, like many Tenggerese people in this area, farms onions, cabbages and potatoes. To help supplement his meager income he also works as a tour guide, bringing his horse down to the “sea of sand” every day, hoisting up tourists onto his small horse and guiding them from the parking area right up to the steps of the smoking crater.
Normally Mt. Bromo, a popular tourist destination in East Java, shoots out a manageable amount of sulfuric steam continually. But since late November, it has been erupting in a more dangerous way, belching out grey ash that has blanketed the community and blown all the way to Surabaya, a few hours’ drive away.
There are no more tourists for Sukarto to make his living. And even worse, his garden is covered in two feet of ash. Life is already hard for these people, and this slow-folding disaster has made it much worse.
The house is built short, Sukarto tells us, because of the strong winds that whip through the fields. If it were taller, it would be easier for the wind to knock it down. When I stand upright in the home there is about four inches of clearance between my head and the ceiling.
Sukarni comes out with a tray of sweet tea and fried bananas. We gratefully partake and once again I marvel at the hospitality of Indonesians even in difficult circumstances. Our team of seven, made up from different organizations in Malang, gather some facts about their situation and try to offer comfort.
The main thing that Sukarto asks for is food staples. The government has brought water but he and his fellow villagers are getting short on food supplies . Normally in a natural disaster there would be NGO’s crawling all over the place and offering such aid, but this has been a different type of disaster, slowly building and out of the spotlight of the media. Nothing dramatic but ash raining down and no one has died.
We ask permission to pray for him and his wife. They seem grateful for the prayers and disappointed when we tell them we need start driving back down this mountain range to our homes in Malang, about 3.5 hours away. Why are we such in hurry…it’s not even raining yet? We apologize we must be going and take our leave.
They walk us to their front yard, all covered by this eerie grey snow storm, and heartily wave us goodbye.
————————————
Dear Faith Activating Friends,
What an experience our survey team had this last Tuesday in the Bromo region of East Java. The reason we came is to see what resources our “Disaster Response Team” of Malang could bring to bear on this unfolding disaster. Our feel afterwards was that the main need is food and maybe some man power to help clean out houses. If you would like to help with giving toward this village, and one other that we visited, see the info at the bottom of this report.
To see pictures of this trip, please click here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=273248&id=707338821&l=ec10a463e3
The first village we came to, called Weringin Anom, is much further down the mountain than Sukarto’s. It lies along a river and was inundated by a flood caused by the eruptions. Bromo’s thick ash, combined with mud slides, has chocked the rivers with hundreds of thousands of rocks and newly formed dams from all the debris. Those dams break when the pressure builds and the rivers overflow their banks.
Where the river normally bends it just kept going and filled half of the 77 houses of there with about three feet of muddy water. Through they were warned by friends upstream through cell phone calls, they didn’t have enough time to salvage their belongings. Our host told us that about half the people have decided to stay and rebuild and the other half are looking for other places. For the ones who stay there is fear it could happen again as Bromo continues to erupt every day.
For our host we gave some money to help repair some damage to pipes in his village. He was grateful and is awaiting our next response.
If you would like to be part of that response, email me at mikeo@gomail.asia and I can send you the information on how to give, either online or by check.
Thanks for your prayers and support for the people affected by the Mt. Bromo eruptions.
Eight-year-old Dika twists around in his wheel chair, trying to hold his head up enough to get a good look at us. He smiles.
By the look of the bumpy roads our team traveled to get to his house, I don’t think his wheelchair ever leaves the front porch. He pretty much stays put in this simple village home and is cared for by his mother and relatives.
Today their house is full. Seven other families have made it their headquarters after the mountain they call their home exploded in fury last week. Eruption after eruption from Mt. Merapi has left them all stressed out and wondering about their futures. Their livelihoods as farmers, already hand-to-mouth in normal times, have become exceedingly difficult as no one knows when the farming can resume with gray ash in the air and ground.
Even in their hardship they welcome our team of eleven just as they have welcomed the seven other families. They roll out the thin thatch mats on the concrete floor for us that the evacuated families use as mattresses.
We are happy to find this family and a place to give out some of our food supplies and equipment we have brought with our city, just eight hours away.
Our local host who brought us here has known this family for a while and has already been reaching out to them with Christ’s love. He has already prayed for Dika’s healing and after our long conversation asks me to lead out in another prayer for this precious little boy, whose body is half paralyzed and shrunken.
I ask permission to these Muslim people to pray for Dika in the name of Isa Al Masih, the Arabic name for Jesus. They gladly consent and hold their hands out palms up in the Islamic prayer fashion. As a team we pray a heartfelt prayer for little Dika’s healing, and are disappointed when we don’t see any immediate answer.
We chat more with family members and our host makes plans of when he can bring the extra food and supplies by. They are grateful. As our team puts on our shoes back on to leave, I notice a Javanese woman standing in the hallway crying. I ask her what’s wrong and she looks embarrassed and says nothing. I ask if she has any problems we can pray for her about.
“I don’t have any problems at all,” she says and tries hard to smile to cover up her tears. After some more questions I find out she is Dika’s aunt, and can’t control her emotions that some strangers have just prayed for her handicapped nephew.
Then I notice a woman behind me who is crying even more. Same answer that she has not a problem in the world. It’s Dika’s mom.
The three of us still in the house pray for her as well, that God would comfort her and give her strength. I tell her I know firsthand how difficult it is to raise a special needs child, and get teary eyed myself when I share about God’s faithfulness to my own family. I tell her I have witnessed an ongoing miracle over the years.
By now the rest of the team has made their way down the dusty road back to our mini-bus. They’re probably wondering what is taking so long but have gotten used to moving at a slower village pace during these three days.
I remember that I have an Indonesian New Testament in my backpack. “This is a book about how Isa can do miracles,” I tell Dika’s mom, who is still crying. I randomly open to a page that recounts a story of healing, and one page over there is another story of Jesus healing a paralyzed man.
“Keep praying for Dika in the name of Isa, and read this book to build your faith, okay Ibu?” I suggest. She nods her head up and down, still unable to speak.
By now the three of us left behind really need to get going and catch up to the rest of our teammates. Dika is still stuck at home, the volcano continues to smolder and their family is still is need. Yet I believe God is bigger and better than all that to work both relief and redemption into their lives.
Pray for Dika. Pray for the families like his whose lives have been upended by this cataclysmic disaster. Pray comfort for the families of the 156 people who have died so far and strength for the close to 350,000 people living in soccer stadiums or muddy refugee camps, bored and stressed and waiting and wondering about their futures. Pray that that believers all over these islands would rise up to serve them. Pray that this would be the finest hour of the church in Java.
Our limited help, which can feel so small against such overwhelming need, makes a big difference in the lives of the people we encounter. On our last trip there we met one family camped out of a church. They had been living on nothing but coffee for a few days as their village wasn’t on the government’s danger zone list and they had lost their jobs so there was no daily income. They were still evacuating themselves to lower elevations every night out of fear of another eruption, and were feeling weak with hunger. The food that we brought to them was an urgent answer to their prayers.
We are making plans now for a follow-up trip at the end of this month to this dynamically changing region with its shifting centers of need. We want to bring more medicine, food, supplies and practical help to these displaced people, whether in the rebuilding stage of their villages or the wait-it-out stage in the refugee camps. That depends on Merapi and whether her fury has subsided yet.
How much help we bring them depends on you. If you would like help us purchase relief supplies for this next disaster relief trip, please make out a check to “Mustard Seed International” and write “Mt. Merapi Response Fund” on the memo line. Then send to:
Mustard Seed International
P.O. Box 20188
Charleston SC 29413
Thanks for praying for both relief and redemption for people living around Mt. Merapi . And thanks for walking with those of us serving here in the Ring of Fire.
With Christ,
Mike O’Quin
FLAGSTAFF, AZ. Someday when my hands are trembling so that I can’t even manage to wipe the drool off my chin, and I am left alone with nothing but my memories, I will know that my life moved no further than the summation of my dreams.
My life’s work has given me a chance to look into the eyes of thousands of people, to consider their expressions, to notice their choices, and to listen to their worldviews. I am a voyager on a quest to figure out how and why certain people break through the emptiness and confusion of their circumstances into a thriving life replete with creative freedom. I pray to understand the prime activators of creative freedom, the internal thinking processes that are owned by those who catalyze their dreams from their imaginations into existence.
Last night our family had dinner with Ginny, who spent the summer of 2009 with us in Indonesia. I wrote about Ginny in my book A Certain Risk. This 20 year old represents to me the hope of her generation. She’s had a rough year, but she is faithful. She reminds me that all great dreams are challenged by an impossible obstruction, and this is where many dreams wither up and die. The rarest of dreamers finds the courage to turn inward, where from the depths of the soul, she cries out to God for help.
This is precisely where my little sister Ginny is today.
Ginny will discover that without fail, God knows and hears the cry of her soul. God is transforming her into a storm chaser. Through the thunderous squall, she is learning to thrive in a crystalline awareness of the quiet presence of the Spirit. Faith is becoming her steadfast new reality even as clouds burst over the rampaging, turbulence of her life. In every direction she turns, grace will abound. Her experience of prayer will never be the same. She will find herself exulting in an intrepid journey that leads from one miracle to another.
We are now finally seeing signs that the movement of Jesus is crouching and poised to unleash the most powerful generation of visionary dreamers into human history. There is a longing in their eyes for something deeper. All over this nation, I hear them talking about audacious dreams. This gets me jazzed up for the future. We are being purified. I wonder if Christianity has ever been so poised to rise up and soar.
It is hard for me to fathom why we hear so many pessimistic comments about young people these days. Granted, we have chided them for the panic in their eyes during any moment they are stranded between hotspots. But to their astonishing credit, many of them have shaken off the slumber and are rising from the fog. Their greatest challenge will be to master the art of activating their dreams. They will need to shift their beautiful imaginations into gear and find the will to infuse their dreams into the world beyond cyberspace; the real world where cynical hearts and unbelieving minds wait anxiously to wage war against them. They will need to forge the mind patterns and heart attitudes that will help them dream for the impossible, then chase down those dreams and exist within them. They must live with increasing clarity. Life is a day shorter every night. They must desire to seize the divinely appointed moments God places before them, and to redeem whatever time they have left. The stakes are much too high for us to waste opportunities perpetuating the cycles of irrelevance. We must focus our efforts on what counts, learning to “discern what is best.” (Philippians 1:10)
Ginny, you inspire me. You will know what it is like to experience the creative power of the Spirit of Christ rising from within you, awakening dreams within you, advancing through your life and changing the world you live in. Your dreams will persist, even on the winds of resistance, advancing boldly and effectively into defiant zones of oppression. Rise up today, filled with hope and certainty that God is unleashing his kingdom through you.
BEYOND DESPERATE, SHE WAS FOUND BY HOPE
Earlier today, I walked with my ten year old son Stephen through the National Gallery of Art here in Washington DC. I was amazed at Stephen's ability to feel the art, and to easily identify which pieces touched him and why. Both of us were mesmerized by a certain painting by Andrew Wyth. It is called "Wind From the Sea." (Your computer screen does not do this masterpiece justice.) This work of art swept us away to another place, and made us feel as if the salty breeze were actually fluttering the curtain. The painting portrays a fresh wind, and this imagery reminded me of my friend Maizah, whose husband Eldat is pastoring a church in the Meratus Mountains of Borneo. She tells one of the most amazing stories I've ever ever heard.
WHEN MAIZAH WAS twenty-one years old, she couldn’t tolerate her boyfriend’s jealous tantrums any longer. She worked up the courage to sever the relationship. Heartbroken, he melted into tears on her doorstep, incessantly begging for her to change her mind. Eventually he dried his eyes and shrank away from her front door. Within days, his internal darkness rose up and replaced his pain with furious rage. After threatening her life in a hot rage, he eventually calmed down and settled for cold revenge. He went to the village shaman and paid him to invoke a demonic spell against her.
Maizah was defenseless against the invasion. The horde slithered into her soul, infecting every aspect of her consciousness. The demons carried her down through the shadow layers of cynicism into unimaginable despair. Her soul felt asthmatic, as if it were wheezing for oxygen. Days and nights were filled with thoughts of suicide. Maizah languished under this cloud of depression for three years. She repeatedly went to her religious leader for help. His only answer was that she should wash herself with the ceremonial water in the basement of the mosque, then turn in the direction of a distant city and pray five times every day. Maizah discovered that the rituals of religion were useless to her.
One day, a man walked into the salon where Maizah was working as a stylist. As her scissors snipped his hair, he talked excitedly about something going on at his church later that night. Then he turned around to face her and invited her to come. Maizah had never been inside a church. When she spent time with joyful, smiling friends she almost always found her heart seething with hatred—and she detested those who called themselves Christians. She had walked past churches and found herself loathing the singing that she heard. Their freedom of spirit was nauseous. Around Christians, Maizah felt like the walking dead.
Now she was desperate. That evening, Maizah went straight from work to the address the man had written down. Trying not to be noticed, she gingerly walked in and found an empty chair in the back row. As she watched the people in front of her, her heart swung back and forth. One moment she was sure it was all fake and this was just another empty religion that was powerless to help her. The next minute she felt mysteriously drawn in.
Suddenly she saw a man walking down the center aisle of the church directly toward her. She looked around nervously and tried not to panic. She felt the urge to get up and run out of the door. Before she could decide what to do he was standing next to her. He said, “For over three years now you have been under the spell of a shaman. Christ will set you free tonight.” Suddenly she felt as if she were the only person in the room.
“I don’t believe you.”
He spoke gently, “Let me pray for you. Christ will set you free.”
She answered again, “I don’t believe you.”
“He invites you to believe in him. He wants to wash your soul clean and set you free. He wants you to follow him and him only.” By then the man’s wife was standing next to Maizah and she reached out her right hand and touched Maizah’s head. She folded her left hand around Maizah’s shoulder and gave her a gentle hug. The woman then began to pray that the Spirit of God would enter Maizah’s soul and set her free.
Maizah’s thoughts swam. Everything around her was spinning. After a few minutes, she groaned, “God, please help me!” Then she suddenly gasped. The gates of her heart were swinging wide open, letting in a refreshing breeze. The breath of life swept through her soul. She blacked out and began falling, then moments later she opened her eyes. The man and his wife were helping her up. Maizah began to weep loudly.
All the way home, she wept. Even as she collapsed into her bed, she continued weeping until she cried herself to sleep. The next morning when Maizah woke up, she could see beauty for the first time. The world around her was filled with joyful, radiant colors. She could hardly open her eyes without weeping. Every few minutes, Maizah broke down into tears, and this continued for three more days. At her salon, the four other stylists Maizah worked with were taken by surprise. Amazed by the sudden changes in her life, each of them surrendered her soul to Christ within the week.
The sparkling tears in Maizah’s eyes as she shared her story with me was a refreshing reminder that the Creator lives! To this day, Maizah’s life is undeniably and miraculously transformed. The same Spirit who once hovered over the primordial abyss spoke words of life into the void in her soul, filling her with light and transforming her into a new creation. Maizah avows that she is a completely new person today, thanks to our Creator who is passionate about making all things new. His compassions are new every morning. (Lamentations 3:23) He puts a new song in our mouths. (Psalm 40:3) He has made a new covenant and written a New Testament. He offers us a new birth and he calls us into a new hope. (I Peter 1:3) He is the maker of a new and living way. (Hebrews 10:20) “The old has gone; the new has come!” (II Cor. 5:17) In the new Heavens and the new Earth, Jesus will sit on his throne and still proclaim, “I am making everything new!” (Rev. 21:5)
Calling All Creatives! Calling All Creatives! We Need You!
While riding my mountain bike a few weeks ago, I took a tumble and shattered my collarbone into five pieces. A group of villagers carried me to my house, where I was helped into the passenger seat of my car. I asked someone, “Can you tell my wife I have to get to the hospital?” Minutes later, we were on our way. It felt like gravel was churning around in my shoulder where a collar bone used to be. I needed a doctor, and I needed him fast.
When we are seriously injured, we know exactly where to go. We make a bee line for a doctor. When our sewer pipes get clogged up, we call plumbers. When our cars break down, we take them to mechanics. And when our souls feel like they are dying of solitude, thirst, emptiness and brokenness, we entrust them to … psychologists? Politicians? Priests? Professors?
Not a chance.
Instead most of us turn to the gardeners and shepherds of the soul. We plug in to the I-pod, rent a movie, turn on the television or roam the aisles of a book store in search of the cure for our internal sickness. This is no random coincidence. Much like a surgeon can slice open a shoulder and patch up a collarbone, an artist is a surgeon of the soul.
The greatest artists have always known their mission. Pablo Picasso referred to painting as “an instrument of war.” He said, “I want to draw the mind in a direction it’s not used to and wake it up. I want to help the viewer discover something he wouldn’t have discovered without me. That’s why I stress the dissimilarity, for example, between the left eye and the right eye.”
Art is lightning that flashes across the sky in the dead of night, momentarily revealing the broken furniture on the patio. If even for a moment, the lightning exposes the conditions of our souls and sends the rats running for cover. It may tear open a widespread condition of humanity, or focus our awareness on something very specific that most people have chosen to ignore. Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn well after the conclusion of the Civil War. Pen in hand, he opened up the human heart and rearranged our inner consciousness. Readers picked up his book and laughed until our sides ached. Meanwhile we found ourselves drifting along the Mississippi River with a slave. Then we were beckoned into the slave’s life. We were annoyed to discover that he had feelings. He had a family. He had a soul just like us. He even had a name. Eventually Jim became our own imaginary friend, and all of us longed for him to be set free. Then we put the story on the bookshelf and went back outside, into the real world where the devastating effects of slavery continued to hang over the grandchildren of slaves.
A writer had toyed around inside of us until he was satisfied that we had been set free from our numbness, our death of compassion for the desperate plight of humanity. His art took effect. In our new, transformed state of mind, we were far more ready to take action on behalf of freedom. And therein lies the power, the nobility and, dare I say, the responsibility of creativity.
Although the Christian artist is often very quiet and sits toward the back of the church, there is rarely a more powerful or influential person in the building. The church urgently needs to call upon her artists to step to the forefront of the movement of Jesus. Imagine if your pastor were to gather a team of artists in your congregation and say, “This is the passage of Scripture I want to address in four weeks. These are the themes and messages that I want to convey. Would you mind helping me bring my message more deeply into the hearts of my congregation?”
The timeless American writer Flannery O’Connor once said, “I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I’m afraid it will not be controversial.” May we see an explosion of controversial art at the forward edge of the Christian faith. May we all burst up from the tired old paradigms and begin to create with courage. We must leave behind expressions that are frivolous, careless or irrelevant ramblings of meaningless philosophy. We must create with a radical standard shaping our vision. We must create by faith, after getting on our knees every morning and surrendering our souls to God with the hope that he will put a new song in our mouths, that he will unleash a redeeming narrative to humanity through us.
Artist, may the Spirit of God light a fire in your soul. May He set you free to create with authority and courage. The church needs you! May the streams of Spirit fueled creativity flow, causing change in the world around you. May your creativity result in movement, response, healing, truth, and life.
Re-thinking Creativity and Ministry
In the season when kings mounted swift stallions, unsheathed gilded swords and went to war, one king called in sick. Following a massage and a hot bath, he stretched himself across fluffy white, goose down pillows. His mind began to whimsically drift away from the fierce battles raging outside. His thoughts turned instead to nostalgic memories of youthful days. After awhile his mind drifted through the window, beyond the curtains fluttering in the afternoon breeze. His imagination tinkered nowhere in particular, like a butterfly wandering aimlessly in a pastel field of wildflowers. After hovering for a moment over an intriguing snake hole, he was suddenly sucked down into the rogue abyss of his own dark side.
Lost in himself, he ordered a servant to fetch the curvaceous wife of a faithful and trusted five star general. After he waited anxiously for several minutes, she appeared at his bedroom door with a terrified expression on her face. Within a few weeks, it was whispered in the palace that a baby was on the way. After making a few clumsy attempts to cover up the scandal, the king ordered her husband to be murdered, and brought her to live amongst his bevy of other conquests.
Sometime later, the king had a visit from the most preeminent artist in his kingdom. The artist unfurled his canvas. Then he began to paint a sequence of images into the king’s mind. “There were two men in a certain town, one rich and the other poor. The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle, but the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb he had bought. He raised it, and it grew up with him and his children. It shared his food, drank from his cup and even slept in his arms. It was like a daughter to him. Now a traveler came to the rich man, but the rich man refrained from taking one of his own sheep or cattle to prepare a meal for the traveler who had come to him. Instead, he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and prepared it for the one who had come to him.” (II Samuel 12:1-4)
As the king watched this tale unfolding in his imagination, his heart was drawn into the story. He became increasingly irritated by the injustice being portrayed. He said to the artist, “As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this deserves to die! He must pay for that lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity.” Then the artist looked straight into the eyes of the king and said, “You are the man!” It was the moment of truth. Scales that had once blinded his eyes were torn away. Light invaded his heart. The king blinked in the fierce glare of truth.
A work of art painted into the king’s imagination had been his catalyst of freedom.
King David’s heart had been locked away with a “do not disturb” sign hung on the door. He was untouchable. His servants were terrified to even speak to him. Having constructed a barrier between himself and truth, he was unaware of his own state of mind. David’s blissful ignorance of his own soul environment is typical of the human condition. The Bible describes the mental consequences of wandering away from God as, “madness, blindness and confusion of mind.” People at high noon are described as groping around like blind men in the dark. (Deut. 28:28-29) What was God’s counter attack in the battle for King David’s soul?
A work of art.
A sequence of powerful images were launched like torpedoes meant to seek and destroy the lies that had rooted themselves in David’s heart. The Prophet Nathan aimed straight for the imagination. Rather than threatening David, the Prophet slipped in through the back door of his mind. David was shaken free of his delusions from the inside out. A renewed imagination became his catalyst of freedom. Transformed and set free, he sat down and penned the 51st Psalm, “Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me … O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.”
What is an artist? An artist is any person who has nurtured the ability to frolic on the playground of the human imagination. I wonder, is there any greater influence on the face of the earth than this? All of us can nurture the gift of creativity. Take a few moments today to consider your ability to communicate effectively in the realm of the human hearts around you. Can you foster and develop your creative talents to confront the fallen and broken conditions in the world around you? If so, you can become a mighty weapon in God’s right hand to advance his kingdom.
RETHINK YOUR CREATIVITY:
Practice telling compelling STORIES.
Re-imagine creativity: Think of creativity not simply as “self expression” but as a RESPONSE.
Focus: What are the fallen soul environments around you that DEFY you to respond with delicate creativity?
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN EMBARRASSED to hear yourself laughing exactly like a good friend laughs? Our voices often imitate someone we love and admire. This is because God has created us, his image bearers, to adopt the mannerisms of the objects of our worship. The Creator designed us to be worshiping beings. We simply can’t
Read MoreMY NAME IS RUTH. I am in the 11th grade and will graduate next year. I want to share with you my story, and describe how our challenges shape our character and fill us with the strength to persevere. I am convinced that in Jesus there is always hope. With God, nothing is impossible.
Read MoreIn 1985, hundreds of parents in the remote Borneo village of Kaladan longed for a junior high school for their children. At the time, there were three Christian families living in this village of approximately 10,000 people. One of these individuals had heard of an organization named Mustard Seed International, which builds Christian schools, youth ministries and orphanages, and trains national teachers to serve in impoverished and unreached communities. Mustard Seed leaders were sent to visit Kaladan. At the time, Kaladan was dominated by two religions; Islam and Keharingan. Keharingan is a mixture of Animism and Hinduism. Many of the people in Kaladan worshipped the bones of their ancestors, and paid homage to monkey spirits who controlled their village.
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