Red Jogging Suit

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I’m standing at stiff attention in my too-tight fitting red jogging suit.  The instructor paces through the hotel conference room full of 25 Indonesians and foreigners, all wearing the same red uniforms, to inspect our stances.  He suddenly calls for an about-face.

 

My timing is a little off, as I actually spin the wrong way, and it’s obvious to all.  The instructor parks his demanding persona in front of me, and in a surprisingly polite way, asks me to drop and give him five.  The American who is on my left side, who has already been giggling throughout this whole exercise, erupts into volcanic laughter.

 

I try to be a good sport and drop down to do my five push-ups of penance.  The whole room applauds.

 

He barks at us for more left turns, right turns and about-faces.

 

 “Sit down!” he suddenly yells.

 

“Thank you sir!” as we all quickly obey.

 

“Stand up!”

 

“Yes sir!”

 

“How is your strength?”

 

“Five-Five,” we yell in unison with two pumped fists, meaning  5 out of 5 on mental and physical stamina.

 

“Codass Indonesia!” (the name of the company that is doing this “outbound training”)

 

“Best friend!” we all respond as we shoot our arms forward and give the thumbs-up sign.

 

And again.  “Codass Indonesia!”

 

“Best friend!”  Two thumbs up.

 

“Are you ready for a new challenge?”

 

“Ready,” everyone shouts with spirit.

 

 

Not me.  I’m not ready.  I’m making my exit strategy.  Maybe as we are all marching off to the parking lot for another challenge game I will just slip out and scoot away on my motorcycle.  It’s already 10 PM and I’m dog tired.  I thought this was going to be a boring governmental meeting, lasting maybe two hours tops, and I’ve already been at this hotel since 5PM with my fellow foreigners-turned-soldiers.  Too many of my American Constitutional Rights have already been trampled on during these first five hours and I can’t imagine lasting two more full days of this.

 

The bizarre meeting is the opening session of a three-day training put on by the city’s department of labor and outsourced to a very zealous group of trainers, my new best friends.  The labor department is one of three governmental agencies those of us needing work visas deal with here.  We all pay $100 a month as a foreigners’ tax and word on the street is this agency is getting heat from their higher-ups to show what they are doing with all that money.  There’s a lot of money going in but not a lot of receipts showing money going out.

 

 

So what better way to splurge on us foreigners by demanding that we attend a three-day retreat with the theme of military discipline and team building?  Included are two nights at a hotel with all meals paid, a transportation allowance of $15, plus a groovy red leisure suit that I wish was American XL and not Indonesian XL.

 

Out of the 40 organizations that were invited, those in our city hosting foreign employees, only 20 are represented.  I heard from a “pengurus”—a warrior advocate whose full-time job is to overcome governmental bureaucracy—that if you ignore meetings and events like this it can make the next visa processing round even more difficult.  Most of the people here are of that profession, along with a few token foreigners from their organizations.  Like me, all of them are trying to figure out how to wiggle out of this.

 

The next two days are not as intense, but often punctuated with shouts of “Codass Indonesia” and the obligatory reply, “Best Friend” (effective and hypnotic marketing strategy).  We do a lot of team building exercises like making up cheers and challenges like rope courses and tower building.

 

It’s actually not all that bad, but I still duck in and out of the schedule, due to other important things I explain to my trainers I must attend to, but really due to the fact that I am a spoiled and entitled American and don’t like submitting to things that don’t make sense.   The days start at 5:30AM and end at 11PM.  I have to apologize for missing certain things on the schedule, like the late night dance-around-the-campfire and the early morning yoga by the pool.  All the Indonesians attend every session and press in to all the activities with good spirits.

 

I am the entitled, spoiled, pampered American grumbling the whole way through.  These Indonesians are fully pressing in and embracing all of the schedule’s inconveniences and physical challenges.  They joke and laugh a lot the whole way through.

 

While they were trying to learn something new to take home with them, I could only think of the exit doors that led back toward home.  I didn’t really get much out of the exercise, but I was very inspired by the can-do, non-entitled attitude of my Indonesian teammates.

 

They are my heroes. 

 

“Do everything without complaining or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe.” (Philippians 2:14-15).

 

 

 

 

 

Zeal in the Manger

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“Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end.” – Isaiah 9:1

 

This prophecy of the coming Messiah, written 700 years before Jesus was born, foretold of a special child that would grow so strong the entire government would “rest on his shoulders.”  This Anointed One would be called “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace” (vs 6).  That sweet little baby in the manger would grow up to preside over a powerful kingdom that is continually growing and getting stronger.

 

If that’s true then why does the church seem to be in decline?  Church growth in the U.S. isn’t even keeping up with the birth rate.  According to the magazine Christianity Today, 70% of America’s youth will leave the church by the time they are 22. 

 

In a New York Times editorial this week, Ross Douthat reflects on the role and influence of the church in America in the context of the holidays.  Read it here.  He reviews two books, one of which sounds really interesting, “To Change the World” by David Hunter.  Douthat writes:

 

Having popularized the term “culture war” two decades ago, Hunter now argues that the “war” footing has led American Christians into a cul-de-sac. It has encouraged both conservative and liberal believers to frame their mission primarily in terms of conflict, and to express themselves almost exclusively in the “language of loss, disappointment, anger, antipathy, resentment and desire for conquest.”

 

Thanks in part to this bunker mentality, American Christianity has become what Hunter calls a “weak culture” — one that mobilizes but doesn’t convert, alienates rather than seduces, and looks backward toward a lost past instead of forward to a vibrant future. In spite of their numerical strength and reserves of social capital, he argues, the Christian churches are mainly influential only in the “peripheral areas” of our common life. In the commanding heights of culture, Christianity punches way below its weight. [i]

 

The quote that jumps out at me, and why I will be putting this book on my Amazon.com wish list, is how the church now “looks backward toward a lost past instead of forward to a vibrant future.”

 

As believers, we believe.  We hope for the best in the truest sense of the word hope.  Bill Johnson defines this potent word as “joyful expectation of the good.”  The best days are still ahead of us.  Hope for them.

 

From my perch in Southeast Asia, it’s not hard for me to hope.  The reason is I get to see some very amazing things that God is doing, right smack dab in the world’s largest Isl*mic nation.  Just this week I heard a story form my city that blew my socks off (wanna hear it? email me).  If God can move like that here, He can move anywhere.

 

There are other signs of hope even in my beloved home country.  I’ve got a friend named Jeremy Story who is leading the charge to stir prayer on college campuses in the U.S.  See his website.  I love his stories.  When I see the zeal of leaders like this, outmanned and outgunned yet still moving forward into the battle, my heart is encouraged.

 

But the most encouraging fact that anchors my hope is the zeal of God to accomplish His own purposes.  Back in that ancient prophecy of Isaiah, after his jaw dropping prediction of how the Messiah would reign and all He would do, it tells us how in the world all this is going to happen:

 

“The zeal of the Lord of hosts will accomplish this” (vs 7).

 

Our future is indeed vibrant.  God’s zeal is the most powerful substance in the universe.  He is moving and will move even greater in the days to come.  Don’t underestimate that tender baby in the manger.

 

 

The Fury of Faith

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I have a heart friend named David Arcos. Every time we’re together, this one-of-a-kind worshipper of God makes my heart sing. He helps me to celebrate the creative spirit, and he inspires me with his passion to serve orphans in Zambia. David is attempting to do the impossible. He lives with a God-sized dream of rebuilding a village for orphans whose lives have been decimated. As David talks about these children, his soul is alive with hope. As you read, allow your heart to be drawn into what he sees …
 
Running to Stand On Mountains

By David Arcos

The shouting. I think I’m gonna miss that the most.  The desperate, heart-felt, thankful shouting to God coming from the throats of orphans. They remember what life was like. Rachel said it best when she compared her life in the partly built children’s village with her living hell just a year ago, “We were the parents and now we are the babies.”  Children were handed children to care for while their parents died.

Peddling sex was the only way for many of these girls to make an existence.  Now they sing about being rescued … home-spun poetic tunes call to memory their stories of redemption.  They are still children, and yet have endured more than a lifetimes worth of pain.  Challenge and struggle has aged them. Crying is a luxury they are learning to experience again.  

A young boy named Joseph described to me how his grandfather, a family shaman, would “drown him in his dreams” before Bishop and Busa Ted stopped the shaman with the power of prayer.

Joseph shouts to heaven with the passion for life. He runs with no shoes on the rugged earth. These orphans, together, trained to run a race that we hoped would gain them the completion of their village with a school, clinic, church, and a future.  

And why not?

Why couldn’t 30 orphans who had already been immersed in hell stand up, turn around and prove to the nations that with the power of God pulsing in their veins, nothing can hinder them from running, sprinting, lasting, pursuing, seeking, struggling, rising, and soaring into an impossible future. Their shouts are heard. They drift across the Atlantic. Their strength makes us believe. In the middle of all that darkness, Africa is being stirred by a shout of the fury of faith. This shout fills the sky. It is a declaration of victory, an assertion that they know where they’ve come from and who they are.  May our soft prayers turn to shouting too!  Why not?

“Sing to Him a new song; play skillfully, and shout for joy!” Psalm 33:3

To help support orphans in Zambia, please contact David Arcos.

David@Mosaic.org

I Shall Live to Live Again

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Today I sifted through some nostalgic papers and photos my mom kept when she was still alive on this earth. I came across this ode to the Creator, written by my uncle Dave, who also wrote the hit song “Wildflower.” This is one of those rare poems that deserves to be relished; ever so slowly, like a hot drink on a windy night as rain batters the window.

 

The Beneficiary

By Dave Richardson

 

Will I ever be entitled to the knowledge that you hold?

For I thirst and I am starving in my mind,

And though I am secure within the future of my soul,

There are histories my heart has yet to find.

 

How did it all begin, from the void you live within?

Through eternities where none but you exist,

From an endless parallel You joined the lines of Cause and Will,

Creating life from out of the abyss.

 

You alone have been where time itself cannot survive,

And I long to see beyond the edge of space,

I’d like to look at Heaven through the vision in your eyes,

Or look upon the wisdom on your face.

 

When did you decide that it was time to cut the key,

That unlocked all the darkness to the light?

Did you breathe upon some spark floating through infinity,

To set the skies on fire in the night?

 

There are birds with eyes of fire lighting diamonds in the sky,

As the blaze above continues to expand,

With ever changing hues in reds and greens and blues,

In perfection from the Artist’s gentle hand.

 

I am mortal. Life will end, but I shall live to live again,

If I am favored whatsoever in your sight,

Give me time enough to live to enjoy the gifts you give,

And finally, let me shine within your light.

 

Let my shadow fly through your vast and endless sky,

That I might see the future and the past,

And when this captive life is through, I will come to realize

That my spirit and my soul are free at last.

Eternal Ripples of Hope

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By David Arcos

GUEST CONTRIBUTER to FaithActivators
 
We are eternal ripples of hope.  We are road signs for the wanderer. We are those that weapon ourselves with brush and baton with bow and camera.  We are the poets that splash images of beauty and breath. Like rescue workers we carve through fallen mines, dispelling glory so that darkness will not consume our friends.  

Gleams of light, flickers of promise.  

We are image makers, window washers, we are storytellers whose riddle and moral triumphs death itself.  We are prophets speaking color and shade, language of divinity.  We tickle, prod and pull through eyes of needles.  We woo a planet of pain with mirrors and play.  We dance on tears and tongues until they cry mercy!  Crowd, audience, mob we trap them all by spirit and prop. In defiance the human heart like a stallion stands untouched and untamed.  Emotion is his name and we, masters of the ride, approach undaunted, resolved to meet our calling.  We are the few that ride him, for we were created to.  And with harnessed strength we steer him into the invisible land of hope.
 
We create and tape heaven to earth.  We frame our reels for the blind watchers and waiters. We make sense, awaken souls with peep holes, and mysteries.  We are seers.  Who Xerox originals from the very dreams of God.  We live for the seeker, the looker, the peeker.  

We bleed and our paint can is full.  

We cry and our songs illuminate old screams and memorized yearnings.  We are life amplified and questioned.  We are faith on canvas.  We bind up wounds with pictures and pull drowners with black notes.  We are fierce with imagination. Hunting souls like hidden treasure chests.  We travel worlds to find just the right key.  We are the reminder to this earth that God plays.  We are ARTISTs and we are eternal ripples of hope.  

So…what is a Faith Activator?

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Apostle Paul stood in the Areopagus and said that God arranges our lives so that we will seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.  For in him we live and move and have our being. I have good news for you. The One who created you is within reach.  Perhaps God has even been gently tapping on the front door of your soul. Today his voice is heard. He says, “My child, I have imagined your beautiful face and loved you since before creation. I have created you to live and move and have your being in ME.”

 

Come along with us into the Kingdom of Light.  Wander through the halls of Hebrews eleven. We will reach out to the God of Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and Daniel.  Their God was unconfined.  He was in their faces. He was their Creator God, and he was intimately infused into every aspect of their consciousness. He was their strength, their vision, their hope, and their reason for getting out of bed every morning. Because they lived with an activated faith rather than a passive acknowledgment of a distant God, their lives were characterized by movement, courage, compassion, a willingness to suffer, and a radical obedience to the lover of their souls.

 

Faith activators are people whose intimacy with God surges into every aspect of their lives. Because God lives in them, they find the courage to create something beautiful where there was once darkness, fear, and confusion.  Faith activators are those rare and remarkable people who build, shape, innovate, color, design and compose the music of life out of the silence around them.  In the place of darkness, they build a city on a hill.  In the echoes of despair, they rise up with hope.  Where there is illiteracy, the faith activators design solutions and people learn how to read.  When thirsty people call out for water, faith activators find a way for them to drink.  Where there are gangs killing each other in the streets, faith activators are peace creators. Like a heat seeking missile, the faith activator searches out ways to carry the hope of Jesus to their world. 

 

The faith activator is a woman who one day wakes up and realizes that fifteen years ago she made the biggest mistake of her life when she said I do to the laziest, most insensitive and selfish slouch on the face of the earth.  She acknowledges that her marriage is so pathetic and miserable that she would almost die if it weren’t for their beautiful children.  Then, instead of retreating into her own passive dream world, or having an affair, she creates a strategy.  She finds a way to take action.  She discovers that she has an imagination that is capable of designing 99 paths toward hope.  She ventures deep into the world of belief.  She digs down deep to find the courage and faith to become the wife that her Creator had in mind.

 

Faith activators sleep peacefully.  They wake up to their dreams rather than from them. The faith activator is the leader who is entrusted with a dying organization.  Four years later that organization has been recreated into a fountain of hope, an alliance of united people who trample injustice. The faith activator is the executive who returns home from an exhausting day at work and notices that the trash needs to be taken out.  He walks to the trash, picks it up, and carries it outside without even blinking.  The faith activator is the couple who is told by their fertilization specialist that they are incapable of having children.  Twenty one months later they are holding their precious and beautiful Korean daughter in their arms.

 

All of these people share more in common than most of us realize.  They don’t shrink back in the face of resistance.  They each acknowledge their challenges and respond to them with courage, using their magnificent minds that their Creator planted within them to strategize and implement solutions. 

 

Here at FaithActivators.com, Mike and I are two neophytes in a quest to live a real faith, a faith that unites us with a real God who lives and breathes and moves and works his miracles in real time. No question about it, we are a couple of freshmen in this course of faith. But come, Lord, breathe in us. Give us the aroma of Christ. We desire to be your voices of hope, life, and light in our generation. And we simply want to invite anyone to join us in this quest.  Spirit of God, breathe eternal wind into our souls; awaken our minds.  Ignite our lives with your blazing fire.

 

Let’s embark on a journey that brings us face to face with choices.  How will we choose to think?  What will we choose to believe?  How will we respond?  This journey will demand our rebirth, transformation, and awakening, as God gently confronts some widely held mind habits that religious people tend to cling to.  They are mind habits that render us pathetic, spoiled children without nuance, depth or imagination.  We will increasingly grasp the correlation between our Pharisaical strongholds and the scarcity of creativity in the cavernous echo chambers of religion.  These strongholds are safety handles that impede us from rising into God’s creativity to propel hope and life into a lost and desperate world.  

 

Along the way we will taste of a moving love story.  That is, the story of our Creator and His immeasurable love for his masterpieces.  We have always heard that God is Love.  It is time to step forward into this dizzying dimension.  We are going to reach out into the universe of the Creator’s love, sinking down to the roots of our souls.  My prayer is that you and I become rooted and established in love, that we will have the power to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that we may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God! (Eph.3:17-19)

Ah..so you’re a physician.

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When Cyndi and I arrived in Southeast Asia eleven years ago, our family was battered by a relentless wave of medical difficulties, especially with our children.  Ten month old Josiah was the hardest hit.  After the first few months we stopped counting the times his fevers would soar to 105F while we were up through the night trying to cool his body with cold towels. 

 

Two year old Katie Skye’s eye problem started quietly.  It seeped into our lives like the early signs of a flood.  She was having difficulty seeing straight.  Cyndi and I remember her saying “I see two mommies.”  We felt powerless to help her as her sparkling eyes grew increasingly crossed.  Her condition was known as “bilateral strabismus.”  I imagined our little daughter moving through a lifelong journey of enduring pity or of people looking quickly away.

 

Katie’s need became more urgent with each passing week. Cyndi and I tried to find help.  We knocked on every door that might possibly lead to a solution.  We searched throughout our city for an eye doctor.  Then we went for help to the bigger coastal city of Surabaya, then on to the capital city of Jakarta.  For months we struggled to locate a solution.  Every Indonesian doctor prescribed the same meaningless eye exercises that we had long since realized were useless.  She urgently needed surgery. 

 

One day everything changed.  Cyndi’s uncle, who was a practicing eye doctor in Afghanistan, found a listing of international ophthalmologists and recommended a Dr. Cheong in Singapore who might be able to help.  Cyndi and Katie flew to Singapore and went to see Dr. Cheong. 

 

After a quick examination she spoke the most beautiful seven words, “I can do the surgery tomorrow morning.”  The next day she snipped two muscles between Katie’s eyes.  Immediately her eyes turned outwards.  Cyndi later said it was a terrifying moment.  Yet within a few hours Katie’s eyes had corrected themselves to perfection.  If you look at her now, you would never suspect that she had severely crossed eyes as a little girl. 

 

I was in awe of Dr. Cheong, and I realized something I had never thought about before regarding physicians. These are unique people who walk among us. How much money would it take to equal the price they must endure to make it through medical school and residency? The answer is obvious. You just can’t put a price on something like that.

 

Every single moment since Katie’s surgery, our family’s life has been quietly changed. We live in a different reality than the reality we would have lived without a physician. Since then, doctors have helped me recover from malaria and dengue fever. A doctor repaired my collar bone that had been broken into five pieces. Our family and countless others owe these men and women a debt that can never be paid back.  While so many people drift through life passively ignoring others in desperate circumstances around us, people like Dr. Cheong are swimming upstream, blazing a trail of hope, and living with the strength and resolve to dedicate themselves on behalf of others.

 

In our thank you note to Dr. Cheong, Cyndi and I expressed our gratitude to her, for her willingness to endure thousands of hours of disciplined study so that she might someday work miracles for other peoples’ children. For my family, anyone who serves in the medical field is a hero, and this is one reason that at our school we have a special track for students who want to become doctors, nurses or scientists who work in medical research. 

 

“Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the Kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness.” (Matthew 9:35)

Morning Prayer

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READING IN TODAY’S NEWS, One of the 29 people trapped in a New Zealand coal mine is a teenage boy who’d only been on the job for an hour when an explosion rocked the mine.

Joseph Dunbar had celebrated his 17th birthday last Thursday, according to news reports from New Zealand.

His mother, Philippa Timms, told the New Zealand Harold that she and her son had recently moved to the area on New Zealand’s southern island to get a fresh start in life.

"We moved here for Joseph, to give him a different life, a better life," the Herald quoted her as saying. Her son’s top goal soon became getting a job at the mine, she said.

Can you imagine? The boy moves to a new place to get a fresh start, and after ONE HOUR on the job, he gets trapped in a mine?

Over the last year, while speaking to various audiences, I have often shared a prayer God has given me to say over my family every morning. Although it is very simple, something about this prayer has resonated in many people’s hearts. It is inevitable that someone will ask me to repeat it after almost every time I mention it.

 

PRAYER FOR MY FAMILY

 

Lord, we don’t know what’s going to happen to us today.

 

Today might be a beautiful, restful day.

 

Or today might hold some challenges.

          Someone might criticize us today. Someone may gossip about us. We may face an accident or an unexpected loss.

 

Yet, regardless of what happens today, we commit ourselves to trusting you in all circumstances.

And we simply ask for your help, that you would:

 

Give us your eyes to see the world around us as you see it.

Strengthen our hands to serve others.

Infuse our hearts with your passionate love.

And open our souls to listen to your voice,

          So that we might speak your words.

 

 

My friend, Pastor Gary Bowman in Chula Vista, sent me this beautiful prayer from Thomas Merton:

 

THE DESIRE TO PLEASE GOD

 

I have no idea where I am going.

I do not see the road ahead of me.

I cannot know for certain where it will end.

 

Nor do I really know myself.

And the fact that I think I am following Your will

does not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please you

does in fact please you.

 

And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.

I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire,

the desire to please you.

 

And I know that if I do this,

you will lead me by the right road,

though I may know nothing about it.

 

Therefore I will trust you all-ways.

Though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death,

I will not fear.

For you are forever with me.

And you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

The Thanks I Get

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“Her shoes are nowhere to be found!”

 

“What?” I said aghast, not really believing that Bree’s nice tennis shoes were really swiped just like that.

 

The youth group volunteer and I continued the frantic search around the front entrance of our “empowerment center,” a place set in a poor Indonesian neighborhood, designed to empower people out of poverty.  Tonight we had just held a party there for homeless teenagers who live around our city’s town square.  We played games with them, taught them some English, fed them, and honored their graduation from a free graphic design class we offered to them.   We clapped and cheered when the ones of them who completed the course stood to receive their certificates.  It was a lively night of celebration.

 

After the meal, the 18 honored guests shuffled their way out of our empowerment center to the waiting public transportation mini-van that we had rented for them.  As per Indonesia custom, both ragged street beggar and wealthy ex-pat teenager had slipped off their shoes before entering our building at the start of the party, and now it was time to find their footwear amid a tall mountain of 40 pairs of sandals and shoes. 

 

Apparently some of our new friends thought this would be a great opportunity to upgrade.  We waved the guests goodbye, the van drove them back to the town square and we started cleaning the party’s aftermath.  That’s when the shoe search started.  As we were looking for the first girl’s tennis shoes, another youth group member approached me.  “I can’t find mine either,” he said dejected.

 

“Oh, Willy, I’m so sorry.”

 

I felt a rise of anger in me.  You mean to tell me the very people we threw this party for—these poor street kids—stole two pairs of tennis shoes right off our front porch?  How is the youth group going to feel about this, especially the barefooted ones?  Will their parents be angry at me? This is the thanks I get? 

 

All of these thoughts swirled through my head as I continued the fruitless search, grasping at some unlikely scenario that the two pairs were simply misplaced.  But deep down I knew better.  I imagined those shoes were tucked away inside a tattered backpack and riding back to the town square even as we searched.

 

Before the event, I read to the youth group this statement from Jesus: “When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous” (Luke 14:12-14).

 

“You guys are going to be blessed tonight,” I promised the youth group as we were gathering together all the boxes of fried rice.  “Jesus said so.”

 

And yet, especially for two members of our youth group, they weren’t blessed. They were robbed.

 

The shoe theft was an initiation of sorts for these teenagers into the world on serving the poor.  It’s something that sounds very romantic—“serving the poor”—until you spend a lot of time around poor people.  Some of them can be lazy, manipulative and sinful just like all of us can.  They can even steal your shoes.  After getting burned a few times, it’s easy to keep a radio talk show host distance from poor people and judge them as maybe too lazy to help themselves.  That’s why the poor are easy to avoid—we seldom run in to them unless we are intentional.

 

Also if you are serving the poor because you are waiting to get positive feedback from them, you are going to be disappointed.  I’ve talked to many relief workers frustrated that while they worked hard in the hot sun to build houses for people displaced by some cataclysmic natural disaster, the people they were serving were just sitting under the shade and passively watching.   It infuriated them.   So forget about getting a Mother Theresa warm fuzzy all the time.

 

Another bad motivation—if you’re serving the poor to assuage some materialistic guilt, you’re not going to make it for the long haul either. Look at these wretched poor people!   How can we drive these nice cars and they have to walk everywhere?  How can we eat in nice restaurants when they barely have enough to eat?  That kind of motivation doesn’t last very long, maybe long enough to throw a few coins at a social Santa in front of a mall for an annual shopping spree.  But it’s not sustainable for the long haul.  Human compassion is a very low octane fuel. 

 

That’s why the motivation for serving the poor and broken has got to be God’s heart to serve the poor and broken.  The high octane fuel we need for the job is the heart of God.  He loves the poor.  He wants to lift them.  We can continually plug into that power source, no matter how much our emotions wane.  We may even feel nothing, and we can be honest with that.  “Lord, I don’t feel like getting into the complexities of needs in the lives of the poor. But I know you love them and want to lift them.  Please infuse me with your desires for them.”

 

The poor and needy are well, very needy.  Ever read Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goat ?   The hungry, the thirsty, strangers, the sick and prisoners are all featured prominently in it—those are some needy folks.  Their lives are complicated.  They can drain us.  They can even deceive us.  That’s why it’s so important to keep going back to Jesus for a refill of our hearts until they are overflowing again.

 

What I said to the youth group last week was true: “You are going to be blessed!”  I just shouldn’t have added the “tonight” part.   My timing was off—Jesus never promised immediate returns.  He did promise, “You will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”  In other words, one day this youth group will feel the pleasure of God and the applause of heaven for throwing a banquet for these street beggars.  It will be well worth it on that day.

 

Serving the poor for an audience of One.  Feeling the pleasure of God and His very own joy for lifting the ones He loves.  That’s worth a couple of pair of sneakers.

 

Relief and Redemption

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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 M*slim 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 their traditional 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