What Does That Mean?

It’s mildly amusing and more annoying than anything else to watch people get so worked up about the “birther” conspiracy that is going around the United States. Of course those who believe such things can’t be reasoned with in any sort of logic at all, so it is probably best not to bother.

The conversations on Facebook of course are reaching epic proportions and yet, there is this funny little detail that everyone seems not to remember; that congress had to have a special ruling to allow John McCain to run.

John McCain was born in Panama to US Military parents. The complicating factor in this is what the phrase “natural-born citizen” means. The original phrasing said this:

“No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”

Natural born or a citizen – because after all, George Washington and the others that followed after him were originally British citizens, so they had to state it that way.

Barack Obama follows in a long list of candidates whose opponents have argued their eligibility according to the “natural-born” clause.

“Chester A. Arthur (1829–1886), 21st president of the United States, was rumored to have been born in Canada to Irish parents. This was never demonstrated by his Democratic opponents, although Arthur Hinman, an attorney who had investigated Arthur’s family history, raised the objection during his vice-presidential campaign and after the end of his presidency.”

Why does this matter? Interpretations abound. What it demonstrates is several things: 1) the founders put the clause in the constitution for a reason 2) people interpret it according to their own prejudices of what they think it should mean. It is not completely clear.

The people who wrote it are dead now as well, so we can’t ask them. What I am guessing they didn’t intend however was for that phrase to be a weapon against someone simply because people dislike their policies. The Democrats used it against John McCain and the Republicans against Barack Obama. Each interpreting it according to what they felt it should mean.

This is what we do with the Bible. On many issues, both sides are absolutely convinced their interpretation is the right one. We use the Bible as weapons against the people whose behavior we don’t like. But interpretations are never that easy. Sure there are things that are cut and dried, “Do not murder” is pretty clear. But there is debate over whether this then applies to warfare as well. Does it? Both sides are pretty sure they are right in their interpretation. I can only say “I don’t know.”

I have heard good arguments on both sides over many issues, and have reached a conclusion: far too often we fail to hear each other. We fail to be civil. We fail to go about convincing each other in the right way.

I used to read the Bible thinking it would give me all the answers. Instead, truthfully the I got more questions than answers.

But I learned that there is a way of interpreting and asking that follows in step with the command “act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with your God.” One that involves listening and compassion and not jumping to conclusions and being “easily angered.”

As with the term “natural-born citizen,” sometimes there is more than one valid answer, even though we would like there not to be. In the end, having that right answer may just make us a “sounding gong or a tinkling cymbal,” because without listening with love, is for nothing.

Political/Religious Musings

“It is not an exaggeration to say that the dominant public witness of Christian churches in America since the early 1980′s has been a political witness. Over the past thirty years, the church has devoted the best of its public witness to political involvement. In my conversations with young people this is one of the top three complaints they have about Christians. Christians no longer divide along denominational lines; they divide over politics.” Jim Henderson, Pastor

It’s sad to read some of this. When did Christianity decide to define itself by how we vote? The heart of the gospel has been lost in a quest for power and has because of that lost its true power. We should be helping the sick, the poor and the downtrodden and instead most churches have been spending far more time propping up a failing political structure than practicing the gospel.

Real Robots

If it came down to the choice of leadership – would I prefer a real robot as a leader or a human trying to shut off their emotions and be logical I would choose the robot.

Sadly, leadership and authority tend to turn people into fake robots. It happens in the church – and church discipline cases without love are one of the greatest causes for people to leave. It happens in business, cutthroat leadership chops off the perceived threats underneath. In the military it happens a lot, leadership feels the need to prove they are robotic and tries to make strategic decisions that preclude emotion. To hold people at a distance seems to be the only way most in leadership can control the results.

But people make bad robots. No matter how hard they try, they overlook what a real robot would see – that even if they, the leader manage to separate their hearts from their people, the people usually can’t.

A real robot would take this into their calculations.

Fake robots acting as leaders do not. They become “clanging gongs” irritating, sometimes devastating if a leader acts without love in the end they will hurt the very dream they are trying to protect with their so-called logic.

This is the whole point first Corinthians is trying to drill into us – our actions, our deeds don’t matter at all if we don’t love. If we truly live according to love, we make decisions that are based on this. Rooted in trying to find the best for all. Many leaders shield their hearts from this, because the pain of it is deep. If you love, you will be hurt. You will be broken. In fact, you will be completely shredded, gutted and destroyed by it.

That is just the point though – if you don’t have love deep enough to endure the death that will come with it, there is no possibility of resurrection. True love restores.

In the end, it ends up being the logical thing as well – because a truly strategic leader would realize that what is best for their people is also best for them. A robot person won’t make this decision. A true leader has to open their hearts to their people.

Why Global Warming Misses the Point

It’s difficult to get Christians in America to pay attention to the environment. There are a number of reasons for this. When it comes to global warming especially, Christians pull out all sorts of charts and graphs to argue that it really isn’t a problem. I once did the same thing.

But what changed my mind wasn’t a fancy graph or chart. What changed my mind and caused me to rethink my purchases and lifestyles was travel. I came face to face with the catastrophic things that are happening to people in the name of consumerism. The lung cancers diagnosed in China because of the coal factories. The plastic waste in the toxic river out in front of my apartment and watching children – and even students of mine get in it. The poisoning of the rivers near clothing factories in Vietnam and Indonesia.

To the environmentalist out there – forget the global warming argument. Tell your Christian friends about poverty and injustice. Hold us accountable to do a better job caring for the widows and the orphans. Forget about arguing theoretical data – true as it may be, no one will change because of it.

We Christians will get on board when we understand its a justice issue. Argue from that perspective.

Sakura

This week ended Sakura here in Japan. Sakura is the cherry blossom festival. It is a beautiful time to be in Japan.

Now the blossoms are falling and the green leaves are coming out and filling the trees.

The beautiful vibrant blossoms last only ten days or so. The green leaves will be here for many months. Without the green leaves, the tree would die. In the winter, the leaves will fall and the tree will be bare. But it is still alive. The seasons are what allows it to grow, to be vibrant, to be beautiful.

Sometimes in faith and love we forget that. We want to hold on to the excitement of the cherry blossoms – the emotional highs of the beginning of love or faith.

Those highs are only supposed to be a season. A tree would die if it were only blossoms all year long. It has to have leaves to take root to process light into energy and to grow higher and deeper. We err in trying to extend the seasons beyond their intended time frame.

The emotional highs when you first fall in love or find faith are wonderful. But they are only a season. Yet its easy to long for those highs and miss the beauty of the deep green slowly growing leaves in the peace of the summer. Without those leaves, the tree would die. Its easy to miss the brilliance of the trees in the fall as the cool air begins to settle. Its easy to be frustrated with the frigid air of winter when times are hard and growth isn’t obvious. The tree is at rest, but it is far from dead.

Yet without those seasons, the trees wouldn’t have that momentary brilliance in spring every year. Life, love and faith are seriously cheated when we glorify one season over another. All are needed for the full beauty of hope.

Enjoy the season you are in. If you are in a winter, know it is temporary – spring will come again, so don’t overlook the opportunities for rest that are offered. If it is Spring enjoy the vibrancy of beauty – take heart in the heat and comfort of summer and marvel at the colors of fall. Don’t force spring to be longer than it should or look back in askance because you are no longer there. Enjoy the beauty of where you are.

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens: ² a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
³ a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
⁴ a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
⁵ a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
⁶ a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
⁷ a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
⁸ a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace⁹ What do workers gain from their toil? ¹⁰ I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. ¹¹ He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet^[a] no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. ¹² I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. ¹³ That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God. ¹⁴I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will fear him.

¹⁵ Whatever is has already been,
and what will be has been before;
and God will call the past to account.

 

Busyness

I have guilt-wracked moments every now and then about not being involved in church.

I’m not involved in anything really. It’s kind of weird. I am a pastor’s daughter, so this has made for all sorts of guilt induced dynamics. I have tried to figure out how to be more involved several times, but haven’t been able to shake the gnawing conviction that I need to not add anything else to my schedule. Every time I have tried to add something in the last couple years, it hasn’t worked out and I have felt an overwhelming sense of relief when it hasn’t.

Yet, I keep doubting myself. Shouldn’t I be doing something?

But I think that is the clencher – the answer is no. I’m learning how to not do but instead to just be.

We don’t do Christianity……we are Christians. What does that mean?

This is hard  – because we are judged by what we do – and I have not done anything in a really long time. But that process of unencumbering myself from doing stuff has allowed time to just be there with other people. To encourage them and cheer them on and to listen.

I think I finally understand. To often we try to prove our worth with what we do, but God wants us to just be. We are Marthas running around with all our studies and programs and he wants us to just sit at his feet and listen and share life.

It’s funny when I look back at the people and moments that have most changed my life – I can’t think of a single church program or smoothly folded bulletin that I remember. None.

I remember people. I remember kindness. I remember those moments when someone stopped and focused on me, and listened. When someone laughed or cried with me. Stop doing so much. Just be there.

Stuff?

What’s holding you back?

A good outcome of the recession in the US was that it burst the bubble that has kept the trend of bigger and better houses going for so long. It’s interesting to me, this whole concept of “stuff” that we have in the US – bigger and better toys. We buy and replace at an alarming rate. Yet the fact is that we don’t need all this stuff. Beyond that, the more we get, the less we appreciate what we have.

Here is the thing – a lot of people complain that they don’t have the time, money or energy to travel.

Of course they don’t – look at all their junk. When we focus your efforts on things – bigger and better and more and more, we have no time to take off to travel and see the amazing Creation that is out there to see. Mark 16:15 says, “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation.” We like to pull out the “preach the good news” part and forget about the “go into all the world” part.

It’s interesting how we interpret the American Dream as the end all be all – go to college, get married, buy a house, have some kids, buy stuff and stay in our own little neighborhood church for our whole lives.

What if this is wrong?

What if this is not what we are supposed to be doing?

What about that part “go into all the world?”

Plastic Waste Experiment

Hainan Island, China

Questions about a Christian perspective on the environment started in China. Somehow the argument that I kept hearing – that Christians needed to fight the environmentalists because they were “Earth worshippers” just didn’t make a whole lot of sense. I say this for two reasons – one Christians believe that God created the world and that it is a gift. So if we have been given a valuable gift I think the implication is that we will care for the gift? The second reason is as Christians we are supposed to love our neighbor. We are supposed to love other people. In loving other people I think that means being aware of what our waste can do to them.

In Changsha, I used to look out my window over  a filthy river, the Xiangjiang. Despite the factories pouring waste into it, despite the surreal piles of trash that got dumped into it everyday, what always struck me about the river were the people. The people I would see swimming in the river. The people who still got their drinking water from the river. The students I talked to who despite knowing the risks in the river would go down to the banks and bathe in the river because it was cheaper than paying to go to the public bath. You see, for a large number of people in Changsha, the river, the dirty, trashy, polluted river is still their water source. I had just about stopped buying bottled water while I lived there – I boiled my water and had clean water delivered to the apartment. I filled up reusable bottles that I carried to class. I honestly didn’t want to add to the growing trash that ended up in the river. Plastic doesn’t dissolve. It stayed there, on the banks of the Xiangjiang until someone came along, collected it and burned it.

I stopped running my last year in China. My first three years I liked nothing better than to run along the river or the coastline. I often walked/ran for miles. I quit in the fall of 2006, my last year there because I kept developing these nagging coughs, and Beth, my friend who is a nurse, gently suggested to me and a couple of the others who were running regularly that we were doing ourselves more harm than good running in coal-polluted air. I remember thinking there was something wrong – very wrong about the world when something healthy that I enjoyed was harmful due to the pollution.

I moved back to the States then to Japan and to be honest it was out of sight out of mind for a while. Even though I made regular trips back to China I didn’t think about it the environmental impact that much anymore or the logical implications of those choices. The common ideology of the Christian church in America is that God gave us the earth and it’s resources to use. And he did; that part is true. But he gave it to us to use and care for; not to destroy just because we can.

It’s like money I realized. My attitude to stuff was the same as my attitude to money. I wasn’t really thinking about it. If you have it and are comfortable, its easy not to think to much about where a bottle of water comes from or ends up. But God didn’t give us good jobs so that we could use all the money just to waste it on stuff that we don’t need. God didn’t give us resources in the world for us to waste them on cheap crap that we don’t really need or use. All of those plastic bags and bottles that I saw piling up on the riverbanks in China motivated me to carry my own there. Just because I can’t see it the trash all the time doesn’t mean it doesn’t end up somewhere. A little research showed me that quite a large percentage of our waste ends up headed for developing countries. Some of it is recycled, some of it is burned, some of it ends up floating in the ocean to wrap around your legs when you go swimming in Bali. Trust me – that isn’t very pleasant.

Stewardship of the earth means we can use the resources to create things. I think God gave us that ability and expects us to use it. Much of that is good. But I question the attitude of consumption for the sake of convenience. That consumption that serves no purpose and harms people. Much of this is the disposables…….the bags I used to see floating down the river. Consumerism and business, I believe is good in and of itself. The God-given creativity of things and the ability to share our creativity through selling them – that part is good. The bad comes when we can’t stop.  Greed is when we want stuff and don’t care about the consequences that our success has on other people. With choices that make our lives a little more convenient – like plastic bags and bottled water, we not only are spending more money on our own convenience – bottled water is over a dollar while getting it from the tap is free – we are not self-limiting. If I go in with my own grocery bag, something I have made a point to do over the last few months I have realized two things. One: I don’t buy as much, because I don’t have room for impulse purchases. Two: I am more conscious of what I do buy, because I come in with an estimate of how much I plan to spend. By doing this, I am saving money three times over; because there is a five-cent discount for doing it as well.

That made me stop and think. A few months after making myself use the reusable bags every time I go to the store, I’ve realized that I have been saving quite a bit because of it. If you have an endless supply of bags to fill, you don’t think about adding a few things. If you brought one and something doesn’t fit in the bag, you stop and think about it.

Being a good steward to me, has come to incorporate this. It frees up more resources for me to help others. It also made me realize how easy it is to be caught up into the cycle of consumerism. How much less would I buy each year if I planned out my purchases? Starting this Lent season, I am going to keep a running record and check – all I am doing right now is paying attention to how much I save using reusable bags and bottles. We’ll see what the result is.

Wondering Why

“You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.”
― William Wilberforce

There have been few books that have so powerfully impacted me as Nicolas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book “Half the Sky” which exposes the plight of women around the world. I think part of it is because I have been to many of the places they describe. I’ve walked there, talked with the people, seen the pain in their eyes. The truth is the book, like the movie “Slumdog Millionaire” shook me to the core, I had to put it down a few times. Because I had seen the people the book described. I knew some of them. I didn’t see them as “those people over there” – some I called my friends.

It’s strange having been out of America so long, to read the blogs in the States on what the church concerned about. It’s a strange, strange surreal world. How blessed the US is by far. It’s a nation where if you choose, you never have to look.

But I wish we would.

I’ve realized though, that people need to see it. They need to walk down the streets and see people face to face to understand. They need to talk, and become friends with the people in the news articles. They need to interact. They need to go to the places where angels fear to tread. They need to do this because they need to know that we are talking about people.

Humanity. People. They need to go and understand that that child they sponsor with Compassion, could have ended up trafficked if she wasn’t being educated. Then they need to hear the stories of the girls who have been and see the smiles and the hope from those who have been set free. They need to teach a grade school class full of boys because the girls are all gone. They were never born. They need to talk talk to the mother who has buried five children from disease. To listen to the music played by the victims of landmines. To listen and hear the story of the taxi driver who works 17 hours a day to provide for his family and see the delight and excitement in his eyes when you give him something so trivial – the fruit from your hotel room. They need to be shaken by surprise when you casually offer a leftover snack to a shop keeper and not only does she snatch it from your hand, but six other shopkeepers poke their heads out of their stores around and ask if you have one more apple. To see the frostbitten hands of the student who has no heat and no gloves. To know each person by name.

Many question the legitimacy of short-term trips. This is what they are for – I say they are for  changing the people who go. They tear down walls of prejudice and assumptions and put people face to face with the truth – that those people in that news article whose home washed away or was destroyed in an earthquake? They are human. They are people just like us. So send the kids. Start them out in middle school and change their perspectives. Don’t let them hide in the halls of America behind a white picket fence. Send people. Of all ages, send them.

Send them so they can’t say they didn’t know.

Faith & Travel

It’s two things that I suppose wouldn’t be interconnected most of the time. Yet, I can’t think of another time in my life when I feel more connected to God than when I am on the road.

I think that started as a kid, when I was growing up, we were on the road constantly, making an hour and a half – two hour trip at least, every week or two weeks. You learn to do your thinking on the road. You also learn to value it. My greatest studies and best times with God have been while I have been on a long train ride, crisscrossing China or Thailand or somewhere else, sitting in the dining car with a Bible and journal and enjoying the journey.

They have paralleled each other – my walk in faith and travels around the world. Its hard sometimes to separate the two – my walk with God has been one that has consistently taken place as I zig-zagged through countries and much of it has been on some form of public transportation.

I think this is the heart of why I don’t care for road trips. It is easy to read and write on a train, boat or airplane. Not so easy in a car or bus. I feel like something is missing when I try it. Something besides just the tray table.

There is something to be said in that moment – of going somewhere and yet not yet arrived, something that calls out, a place that is sacred and yet so public – whether it be airport, train station or the vehicle itself. It has mirrored my own spiritual journey in a way that otherwise couldn’t be described – my walk has been one that has taken me to amazing places and glorious destinations. One in which I have soared above the clouds and hit the rocky seas.

My faith has been one that is constantly in motion, changing broadening, deepening and yet constantly in transit.

I see this reflected in scripture. God doesn’t leave us where we are unless we choose it. You watch as he takes people on journey’s from Abraham through Paul – they were constantly moving. The heroes in the Bible were on a journey. Sometimes they ran and sometimes they fell. But it was the process of faith and movement that drew them on.

We weren’t meant to stagnate in one place. We were meant to move, to grow and to change.