Quiet

Seems like a relevant name for this post, since I haven't written on this blog for a couple of months...

Also, I recently read the book called "Quiet" by Susan Cain, given to me by an introvert friend. An affirming must-read for introverts everywhere... I must be right on the borderline of introvert/extrovert. I usually come out in the tests as an extrovert, but after living in several African countries where community rules, and especially living on the university campus in Uganda where the community lives in and out of your house, I came to feel more and more like an introvert. Being married to a man who is adamant that he is an introvert and yet who wants to have people around All The Time adds to my need in latter years to fight for quiet time. I am told that we don't change, we are what we are on these things, but I think stage of life, and circumstances that impinge on our lives, do make a difference. This weekend I am being a total introvert, after two fun weeks of non-stop company.

Anyway, the chapter of this book which I most related to was the one on public speaking. Here is a quote:

It's 2:00 am, I can't sleep, and I want to die.

I'm not normally the suicidal type, but this is the night before a big speech, and my mind races with horrifying what-if propositions. What if my mouth dries up and I can't get any words out? What if I bore the audience? What if I throw up on stage?

...Ken watches me toss and turn. He's bewildered by my distress. A former UN peacekeeper, hence was ambushed in Somalia, yet I don't think he felt as scared then as I do now. 

"Try to think of happy things," he says, caressing my forehead.

I stare at the ceiling, tears welling. What happy things? Who could be happy in a world of podiums and microphones?

"There are a billion people in China who don't give a rat's ass about your speech," Ken offers sympathetically.

This helps, for about five seconds. I fur over and watch the alarm clock. Finally it's six thirty. AT least the worst part, the night-before part, is over; this time tomorrow, I'll be free. But first I have to get through today. I dress grimly and put on a coat...

I take the elevator downstairs and settle into the car that waits to take me to my destination, a big corporate headquarters in suburban New Jersey. The drive gives me plenty of time to wonder how I allowed myself to get into this situation... I find myself praying for a calamity, - a flood, or a small earthquake maybe - anything so I don't have to go through with this. Then I feel guilty for involving the rest of the city in my drama...

Her last comments are: "I vow , right then and there, that I will never make another speech."

This passage tickled me because it describes so well how I feel when I am about to do some public speaking. It's like she is me! And Dan is definitely Ken. Not when I am teaching - I get a bit nervous, but not like this. But doing a speech or a sermon...

I do normally vow at some point that I will never agree to do this again. But then when I finish, I realise it was OK...

The author puts this fear of public speaking down to introversion, and her advice is, to choose to speak about topics you are utterly passionate about, to remember what you want the audience to receive, and to get plenty of experience. She herself speaks often and says she is not as nervous now as she used to be.

My experience too is that when I speak more often, the nervousness is less. For me, the only thing that helps is talking to God. I tell him, "You got me into this, you have to get me out of it. I can't do this without your help. I just can't." And then I do get a sense of his presence and that I can trust him. But sometimes after a short while the nerves well up again. So I talk to God again. I guess it is good for my communication with God!

I enjoyed the book, Quiet, but I always find with this kind of book that when it comes to the part about what you can do to help, there is a huge assumption that you have all the power over your own life. e.g. "Choose a school where your child will have this kind of teacher, this size class, etc etc" "Choose a job where you will have your own office, or a lunch hour off," and so on. In my life, I feel as though I never have those choices. You get the job you can get! You normally don't get to choose between four different ones on offer. (Although obviously you wouldn't apply for one that was going to be toxic for you.)

Also, as a Christian, my life isn't my own, to make as good for me as it can be. I believe God wanted me to live on a campus and in a communal society for years. I guess the value for me of a book like this is that it shows me why I react the ways I do, and that there are various things that could be done - but then I have to weigh that up before God, and ask for wisdom in how I make choices and live my life.

My take on Jephthah - and Dan on hell...

https://www.standrewschurchdown.org.uk/media/talks

This is the link to a talk I gave on Jephthah last week, as part of our church's series on the book of Judges.

It is about twenty minutes long, and the reading comes first.

If you look up the site, and go to the previous page, you will find Dan's sermon on Hell. We are beginning to wise up to Jonathan's scheme... well, he freely admitted he gives Dan the hard topics!

If you are looking for sermons to listen to, our regular preachers at St Andrews are always brilliant, Jonathan and Clodagh.

Twenty Years On (well, nearly)

On Saturday we made a two and a half hour trek back to All Nations Christian College - where Dan and I met in January 1996. Some of our fellow-students had organised a reunion for students who were there between 1994 and 1996.

All Nations is "the other" missionary training college in England (Redcliffe being the other "other".) I went there after two years in Zambia, to do an MA in Missiology. Dan came over for one term as a sort of semester abroad, whilst he was studying at CIU in South Carolina. 

At first on Saturday as I walked into the buzzing hall I felt detached, then overwhelmed as individuals loomed out of the crowd and back into my consciousness - names had to be checked on name-badges - adjustments made for aging, and huge great teenage kids beside now-mums-and-dads - but once those barriers had been crossed, it was amazing. 

The men had changed more than the women. Men actually change shape as they age - their necks and jaws widen, and their hairline changes (some more than others). Women simply fill out a little bit, maybe go grey, but usually cover that up, and generally get more beautiful. We all had changed since 1996 - we all had wrinkles and weight which we did not have back then, and we all had a burden of experiences, both great ones and hard ones. One lovely thing was that several of the tutors were there, all having left the college in the intervening years -so it was really touching and fun that they came as well. Our principal of that time, Chris Wright, and his wife Lizzie were there, seeming exactly the same, and Chris gave us a great and relevant talk from Deuteronomy (a book he taught a much-loved course on whilst we were there as students.) 

We had about two hours of sharing our stories and showing a few slides. It was uplifting and, honestly, exciting to hear of all the work that has been done, in countries across the globe, by the All Nations class of 1994. Most of us had been overseas for almost all the years since then, and a few are still working abroad, and happened to be home on leave so were able to come. Just a few have mainly been in Christian work in this country rather than overseas. Sadly four of our number had died, three to illness, but one, Dave Roberts had been murdered as he was intervening in a robbery. We remembered them and prayed for their families.

It felt so normal to be together again once the initial strangeness had thawed. It felt wonderful to see the teenage kids playing together - like a family reunion. It was gratifying and I felt proud (in a good way I think) of all the years of kingdom work that have been done since we were students together in 1996. And grateful to God for all these dedicated, kind, fun people. 

I also felt greatly encouraged in our work at Redcliffe, which is so similar - that our students will likewise be going on to dedicate their lives to God's work in various forms, and that in twenty years time they might get together and reminisce, and be glad. 

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

 I have just finished reading this latest book from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and have really loved it. Adichie is firmly one of my favourite authors. This is a huge book but I lapped it up, sneaking half hours to read it when I should have been doing other things...

It tells the story of two Nigerians, girl- and boyfriend at school, callled Ifemelu and Obinze, who both travel to the west as adults to find the "better life" they have dreamed and talked about as students.  Ifemelu gets a scholarship to the US, and Obinze finds work as an illegal immigrant in the UK. The book is partly their love story, but more about their experiences as immigrants, their relationships, how it is to be black (which wasn't an issue back home) and eventually how they return to Nigeria and pick up new lives there.

Ifemelu takes to blogging about her experiences as a "Non-American Black" and the sections on her blogging are brilliant, including some of her posts and readers' reactions.

For me the parts I read most avidly were the transitions, both how Ifemelu arrived in the US, and then how she felt about returning home after fifteen years abroad. I was surprised how completely I related to the descriptions of her initial reactions to the west. Her shock that it was not all as clean, wealthy, and beautiful as she had come to believe. Her feelings of confusion about everything. Her disappointment with the fruit and vegetables.

This is such a rich book, revealing about what it is to be an ex-pat, and a returnee, a woman, a friend, a desperate job-seeker, a lover, a writer. I highly recommend it.

Beauty out of rubble

The story of Coventry is well-known, but our recent visit there was another step forward for me in my recent quest to understand the cross more fully, and in my thinking about how God deals with human evil. 

Coventry was bombed on the night of 14th November 1940. Two-thirds of the city was burned down in the one night - by incendiary bombs dropped by German planes. The medieval cathedral was ruined. But when the cathedral's provost viewed the destruction the following morning, his words were: "Father, forgive" : not "forgive them" - he said "forgive" - in the knowledge that in this war, untold damage had been done on all sides: German cities had been wiped out too. All humanity needs forgiving.  His decision was to preserve the ruin as a memorial, and to build a whole new cathedral to be a symbol and a place of reconciliation.

In the rubble, medieval nails were found lying, fallen from the burned roof timbers. Someone fashioned three nails into a cross, and the "cross of nails" became a symbol of peace and reconciliation. One was sent to Berlin to a church which was also bombed to pieces at that time.

The cathedral stonemason noticed that two of the charred roof timbers had fallen down in the shape of a cross. He took them and nailed them together in that formation, and set them up in the ruins, as a symbol of hope and forgiveness. Once the rubble was cleared, the charred cross was set up on an altar in the old cathedral ruins, with the words "Father, forgive" enscribed on it.

The new cathedral was finished in 1962. It is an amazingly modern, light-filled building. The cathedral has an on-going and active ministry of reconciliation. Sitting right next to the remains of the old cathedral, it is a powerful sign of hope and new life. The whole place has an amazingly peaceful, calm atmosphere, pouring balm on your soul as you wander about.

To me, the message was that although God does not prevent terrible events such as the Blitz, although mankind does wanton harm to one another, although beautiful things are destroyed and lives pointlessly taken, although we cannot explain how human beings can be so stupid, so destructive and so evil - in spite of all of that, God is there in the midst, and he shines a light of hope right into the destruction - his cross falls into the rubble as a sure sign that he has ultimately overcome all of this - there will be new life, there is always hope, there will be redemption. If we can take part in the reconciliation and offer the comfort to others, and freely forgive, we can be part of the good, not part of the evil.

So I found another piece to put into the puzzle, of the meaning of the cross.





This is a tiny replica of the cross of nails, which you can buy in the gift shop.
This cross I like.

Technology and mission

This Thursday a guest lecturer, Mike Frith, came in to speak to the Thrive class about "The impact of technology on mission."

Technology has changed mission so much, from my own experience, in the twenty two years since I first went out as a short-termer. For one thing, then when I went as a 25yr old to a very rural corner of Zambia, there was no email, and we had only landline phones - except that the copper lines were regularly dug up and stolen, so in fact, we rarely had the use of the phone. Communication with family back in England was via letters, which took three weeks to arrive. The post office was a tiny concrete block hut with peeling blue paint. I used to drive there about once a week on my trailbike and collect two huge bagfuls of mail for the whole mission station, hoping that a few things would be for me. I remember the day when an American missio arrived with a laptop, and opened it up beside the swimming pool, and asked me if I wanted to send an "E-mail." 

The other side of the coin was that when I left Zambia after two years there, I didn't expect to ever see or hear from most people there again. (I was so lucky to be able to make a visit back there though, when we later lived in Zimbabwe - which was amazing.) I exchanged hand-written letters with a few people, which eventually dropped off. But now, after working in Zimbabwe for five years and then Uganda for eight, I have facebook friends from all three African countries, I message with some former students frequently on facebook, I hear from them by email - my connection has continued to grow with more and more people. It's really a joy. But, it could get out of hand!

Mike raised with the students how the growth of communication in particular has both huge benefits for mission, but also contains pitfalls. Security can be an issue, privacy of course, as well as cross-cultural issues - for example, if I never wore shorts during my eighteen years in Africa, out of respect for cultural norms there, now could I have a photo of me in shorts on my facebook page? What if a friend tags me in a photo so it appears even though I would not have put it up there myself? The good thing is, I never wear shorts! (thunderthighs...) But, what about with a good old G and T in my hand? Which I do partake of sometimes...

Mike raised a lot of other issues, including our growing use of screen to screen communication in place of face to face interaction. From my experience in African countries, people so much prefer face to face connection that they travel huge distances for meetings, and phone or email does not replace that adequately. In fact, you wouldn't necessarily take much notice of what anyone says on the phone - face to face is the thing. But that value might change, with everyone everywhere using email more and more. But wouldn't we all agree that "real" interaction is better than virtual? Jesus came down to live amongst us - doesn't that hold a great deal of meaning for us?

Mike ended with two great questions: 

1. What is behind the human need for more information and knowledge? Is it ultimately to know the divine or to replace Him (become omniscient ourselves)? How do you think those who don’t believe in God view this?

2. What is behind the need for humans to be more connected? Is it ultimately to connect with the divine or to connect to the whole world without needing Him (become omnipresent ourselves)? How do you think those who don’t believe in God view this?

 I think there is so much in those questions. Any thoughts...?! 

More about Jesus' death... still thinking...

After posting a few days ago on the Beautiful Gospel, under the heading "Why did Jesus die?" I thought I should say something more...

Because I feel as though the explanation of Jesus dying on the cross I gave, is true but it is once again not all of the truth.

Christianity is a mystery, it is not easily explained. And we have tended as humans to want simple, clear, step by step explanations - largely especially in western Christianity because we like things clear and logical.

So when I read through my last post, it seemed that I had done away with a belief in the idea that Jesus sacrificed himself for my sins (known as the penal substitution doctrine.) But, there is a lot in the Bible about the idea of Jesus being the sacrificial lamb, whose death paid the price for our sins. I do not believe we can actually write that out of the explanation. But that aspect is the one that western conservative Christianity has focussed on: the metaphor of God as judge but sending his Son Jesus to take the punishment for us. And I think that Brad Jersak, and many many others, have wanted to show that this is not the only way of seeing the cross, this is not the only truth - although it is true. But by emphasising this metaphor, we may have ended up showing God as an angry judge/headmaster, requiring appeasement, sending his own son to pay the penalty on our behalf - and not giving enough weight to the other sides of the story, such as God's love.

There are various different facets of Jesus' death and resurrection in the Bible, and I think they all partly explain what happened there on the first Good Friday. I don't have time nor probably the ability to do justice to this. But I wanted to point out that there are lots of ways of viewing the cross.

For example, John in his gospel compares Jesus being lifted up on the cross, to the bronze serpent which was set up on a pole in the wilderness for the sake of the Israelites, who were being bitten by poisonous snakes and dying. God told Moses to make a bronze serpent on a pole, so the Israelites could go and look at it when they got bitten, and be cured of the snakebite and not die. John says that Jesus was to be lifted up like the bronze serpent. In other words, we look to him on the cross for healing, and for life - not in this case for absolution.

Also, Jesus is likened to the Passover Lamb - well in that case, the Israelites did not kill the lamb to pay a substitutionary penalty for sins (that was a different sacrifice altogether) - but at the first Passover, it was so that they could paint the blood on their doorposts as a sign - so that the angel of death would not enter their houses but pass over them. So if Jesus is the Passover Lamb, it means he dies so that we, as believers, can be protected/saved from death - again, as a way to life.

When Jesus died, the veil in the Temple was torn in two. This symbolises that the barrier between God and human beings was ripped apart through Jesus' death - so that we can now have direct access to God in prayer, and know his presence, and as it says in Hebrews, approach his throne unafraid. So here Jesus' body being broken, is shown to mean that he opened the way for us to God.

Dan is good at putting things into diagrams to help him figure them out. After reading my last blog post, he showed me this diagram he had come up with:



Father...................Son                                                                                

           JUSTICE                                                                            

Words like sacrifice, substitution,                                                                         
propitiation, expiation        

Christ......................Satan

                                                                                                                                     VICTORY

Words  like defeat over demons, spiritual powers,

                                                                                                   crushing the serpent's head, defeat of evil etc.



                                                         

    

                                                           Jesus.............................Me
                                                                             LOVE

   Words about restoring me to God, reconciliation, 

giving me eternal life

So there are many ways of looking at the cross. Whilst I would wish that we didn't have a crucifixion at the heart of our faith... I am at the same time grateful for it - how could I not be. Thankfully, it was a death followed by a resurrection! Jesus didn't end up dead, but alive. So we don't have to stay grieving, we can look on to the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances, and to how Jesus speaks to us today in our hearts. Thank goodness for that!

Why did Jesus die?

When Jesus died by crucifixion at the first Easter, was it a human sacrifice? God hated the pagan practice of human or child sacrifice among some of the Canaanite people of Old Testament times (those who worshipped Molech, Leviticus 18:21.) Why would he have made his own son Jesus die, to appease himself, in the very manner he called despicable and abominable in the Old Testament? It doesn't make sense.

In the Old Testament, God did require animal sacrifices, as a way of dealing with the people's wrongdoings, to restore a right relationship with him. And it is true that in the New Testament, the book of Hebrews calls Jesus the one perfect sacrifice, paying for all our wrongdoings, doing away with the need for the sacrificial system.  Evangelical western Christianity has tended to home in on the language of sacrifice to explain the death of Jesus on the cross.

But I have read and heard a few things recently that have made me see it a bit differently. I have followed some debates as to whether Jesus was really appeasing his own father's anger on the cross. Could that be right? And when we say that Jesus "paid the price" for our sins, whom exactly was he paying? Was he paying God? Or satan? CS Lewis' first Narnia book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, speaks to that a bit when the boy Edmund is captured by the White Witch - Aslan meets the Witch at night and offers himself instead of Edmund and so he Aslan is killed on the Stone Table. But the person demanding and extracting the payment is the Witch, not Aslan. She seems to be in the role of Satan. And after submitting to obey the ancient law (equivalent with the OT Law?) Aslan overcomes the law and death itself, is resurrected, and quickly joins his people who are already fighting the Witch, defeats and destroys her, restores all the poor creatures who have been subjugated to her, and frees Narnia to be the harmonious, beautiful, joyful land it was originally intended to be.

This story seems to fit with the understanding of the Christian Gospel which I heard described a few nights ago by Brad Jersak, under the title "The Beautiful Gospel." In his telling of the Gospel, he descries how, as often as human beings turn their back on God in rejection of him or his ways, God moves to where they are and faces towards them again, always seeking and longing to be face to face with them (us). He talked about something like "the unending pursuit of a relentless God" - but pursuing us with love, not anger. God longing for us to be in relationship with him.

In the beautiful Gospel, God never punishes us for our sin. That is not his desire nor his method. He does though let us take the consequences of sin. Every selfish act has bad consequences one way or another. For example, our friendships and family life get marred when we act selfishly or get angry, when we don't count each other's needs as equal to our own. Sometimes we don't suffer the consequences of our own selfishness, but other people do (like when we wear a cheap T-shirt made by a child-labourer somewhere else n the world) - and other times we do suffer consequences of other people's wrong-doing - like when greedy government policies result in poor planning and, for instance, the flooding of land which could have been avoided. Nobody is being punished - but we are living in a world where everybody's actions have consequences, for good or bad, and we are all bound up in it together.

So when Jesus died on the cross, it was not that God nailed him there to make him pay for us. It was that God entered the world as Jesus, God in man, and lived a perfect life. In telling the truth that he was the Son of God, and in gaining so much popular support because of his wise teaching and loving miracles, he incurred the anger of the ruling parties, who used the system to get him put to death. Jesus gave himself up to dying, he was not forced to do it by an angry God. It was a self-sacrifice, to carry through to the bitter end the battle between God and Satan. Jesus death was like the lightning rod for all of satan's hatred of God, for all the consequences of sin in the world, for all time. And the death was not the end - as in the Aslan story - Jesus overcame death, rose out of the tomb, and entered heaven. It is incredible - it is supernatural -, but, he is God.

Under the skin

Dan gave me this little metal bird for Christmas. My mother commented that she found it strange that we still gave each other African things. Well, it is in fact a robin, THE English bird, and Dan bought it at a Victorian market in Gloucester. But actually, it is a "junk metal" bird just like the ones sold in Zimbabwe and Uganda.

To me, it is not strange though. Even though we have been back two and a half years, and the memories don't pop up anything like as often as they did at first, still feeling for our homes and lives in Zambia, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Uganda are just beneath the surface and our roots there go deep.

I still can't get away from reading books set in African countries. I only read "Heart of Darkness" because it is set in Congo, and now I am, very appropriately, in the middle of "In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz" - which is Michela Wrong's account of the fall of Mobutu and the beleagured history of Congo. Reading stories and descriptions of Africa makes me feel like I am glimpsing a very loved home - even if the events described are sad or terrible.

Sometimes a nostalgia or a pang will come out of the blue and stop me in my tracks.  The potted Christmas poinsettia on our kitchen table still reminds me of whole enormous poinsettia trees in our gardens in Africa. And today  when I walked into the supermarket, there was a display of potted jasmine plants. Seeing the pointy white buds in their distinctive sprays, about to open out into the most fragrant blossoms imaginable, made my heart suddenly clench - we had a hedge of jasmine in our garden in Harare, and its beauty and pungent scent accompanied the happy early years of our marriage and the births of our babies - as well as the difficult months before we left Zimbabwe.

Out of the blue.

Heart of Darkness

So many words have been written about this book over the years. But I have only just read it, so my thoughts are fresh - to me - , if not new. Having recently read the dystopian MaddAddam,one  of my reactions reading this was, it is not as graphic as the same book written today would be. The evil is hinted at, the suffering of the Africans forced to work for the colonialists is only sketched in. But in my view the horror is all the darker for that.

One way of thinking about the book is that it depicts a man's journey into his own soul, by journeying towards, first physically and then in understanding, another man, Mr Kurtz. And the ultimate revelation is that what lies within a person is "the horror, the horror"... The great Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe spoke out against Conrad and this book, criticising it at one point for using Africa and the exploitation and suffering of Africans, as a mere backdrop for the story of the mental collapse of a petty white man. It is true that the Congolese people are kept very much in the background, their behaviour seems parodied, they appear out of the forest on the river banks almost as a wallpaper for the journey. And they are called savages and so on. There is some truth in Achebe's criticism. But on the other hand, I wouldn't say this is the story of the collapse of one white man - it is a description of the collapse into madness, futility, and evil, of all the white people involved - and Conrad does seem to link this to the whole evil of colonialism and the wickedness of using its people, stealing from them, stripping the Congo of its resources using the very sweat and blood of the Congolese people to do it. It is really the story of the fall into evil of the whole human race. But the Congolese people are not being blamed, they are the victims, and so they do appear as the props. And clearly Conrad didn't have much understanding of them.

It is true the Congolese people in the book are dehumanised, except for one or two glimpses of genuine interaction - such as at the helmsman's very moment of death - and that is sad, and leaves the book feeling dated. I felt the same reading Graham Green's The Heart of the Matter, where there are no African people included in the story at all. But Conrad was writing at the end of the colonial period and he was writing to show the evils of the colonial enterprise, not condoning it. He objects manifestly to the ignorance and self-seeking greed of the various agents and station managers his character Marlow encounters. He seems to prefer Kurtz's complete madness to their hypocrisy and stupidity, which is why Marlow sides with Kurtz in the end. I would see the book as a step in the right direction, a first awakening to what was going on in the "Scramble for Africa".

Conrad ends the book with the none-too-subtle message that the heart of darkness is not in far off "uncivilised" places, but just around the next bend of the river,  - for all of us.

This made me wonder about our capacity for evil, again. As Christians we know the source of light, and He is real to us. And I said in my recent post on this, that we have the responsibility of being that light to other people. But still sometimes I am touched by fingers of that darkness, that sense of horror at the heart of it all, even hints of despair. When the evil that goes on seems too much, too prevalent. When the news shows young blood-covered Syrian men lying in hospital, no living relatives left, no solution to the fighting, the beautiful Syrian cities shot and bombed to rubble. When fighting in south Sudan goes on, and on. When the flood waters damaging our farms, homes and churches sit and sit and sit, and it still rains and rains. When I then think of Bangladesh flooding worse than this every year...

Is the human race a messy, selfish disaster, and our world a ruined, warming planet heading inevitably to its man-made end?

That would be one way of looking at it.

Another way is that God made our world, and made us, male and female, in his image. When he made it, it was all good (Genesis 1). When we messed up, he sent his son to show us the right way to go about life (John 3:16). And at the same time, to give us a way to be saved from our own personal particular sins. And he also sent his Spirit to be in us, to give us the strength and ability to live right. And he also promises that he will return to reign on earth, and that then the evil and all the pain will be No More. This painful, sometimes dark time, is the grace period God has allowed us, for as many as possible to get to know him. Also, the world is not hurtling downward to disaster and ruin like a run-away train. It may be heading towards its end, but, only at the pace and timing allowed by God, and under his control.

That gives me a lot of hope to hold onto. And we do need hope.

Twelve Years, MaddAddam, Romans

We went to see Twelve Years a Slave, expecting not to enjoy it but knowing it was an amazingly well-told and moving story. Two things affected me the most: the cruelty of people to their own fellow human beings, and the strength of the will to live, partly through the ability to cling to a tiny shred of hope. Before we even see the way the plantation owners use and dehumanise the slaves, we see how two profiteers blatantly befriend and entrap a happy, normal family man and musician (the main character), and sell him to slavers, in full knowledge of what they are doing to him. What makes people able to misuse each other so baldly?

While I do sometimes feel like punching somebody (not saying who...!) out of anger or frustration, I'm not sure I could actually cause physical harm to another person cold-bloodedly, for my own gain. But we hear about this kind of cruelty and misuse of others all the time - young girls being trafficked, women held captive and raped for years on end in a suburban house, drugs cynically sold to teenagers, etc etc etc.

(But, what about the harm I cause others without seeing it? As when I buy a cheap T-shirt which was made by a child-labourer somewhere? Just because we don't see the effects of our actions doesn't mean they don't have that effect. I worry about that.)

I have just finished reading Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam, the third part of her brilliant MaddAddam trilogy. (The first book was Oryx and Crake, the second The Year of the Flood.) As with the film, this was an uncomfortable read, but giving some enlightenment. It is set in a dystopian future, where the human race has been almost entirely wiped out, through a drug hidden in a pleasure-pill called "Blyssplus". In this future world, people have become obsessed with leisure, self-image, and gain, and society is controlled by corporations who are developing more and more extreme ways of using technology to make money. Consumerism gone completely mad. For example, Paintball has become Painball where people literally fight to the death, watched online by any who want to. Corporations kidnap their rivals' employees and strip their brains of the information, rendering them brain dead. The depths of cruelty and cynicism in this world are phenomenal. But much of what the author imagines, has been done, or is now possible to do, and actually, the cruelty we see in our entire human history is only being projected into a more technologically able future.

Margaret Atwood does give a glimmer of hope, in that a very small group of humans survive, along with some human hybrids made by one of the corporation geniuses. The survivors are mostly former members of a quirky religious cult called The God's Gardeners. Whilst they are not really Christians, their religion is a hotch-potch of Christianity, Judaism, and conservationism. What I like is that it is the people of faith who still love the natural world and try to conserve it, who do recycling, grow their own food, avoid harming others. And they are the ones who survive, mostly (not taking the Blyssplus) and who know how to make a go of living in community, and without electricity or supermarkets. (By the end of the trilogy they are actually still using commodities raided from the falling-down malls. But there are some hints about them learning to make their own ink and paper for when those things run out.)

It is not as simplistic as I have made out here, the characters are complex and among the God's Gardeners there is all the nominalism, doubt and division that we see in our churches. I think it is the understanding of the deep-seatedness of faith in God, the wisdom of living his way, and as part of that, a hope for creation and a mandate to love it, that I really warm to.

Thinking about the cynicism and greed in our society, the terrible things that people do to each other in war or for financial gain, can make me pretty depressed, and sad in general for the world, and for God who must feel so let down, so disappointed. But reading the biblical book of Romans in our home group, I have been reminded that evil is nothing new, God knows and has always known what his people are capable of. And he is light. The light of goodness and love does shine, although sometimes it feels very small. But, it won't be overwhelmed. The hope we have is that evil practices will end, and that there will be justice, that God does reign. In the meantime, we have to hold on to the hope, not get too sad, and more importantly, keep doing our bits of goodness and kindness, being that light to others.

I Corinthians 13 Guide to Culture - thanks to YWAM KnowledgeBase

This version of 1 Corinthians 13 was written especially for people going to work in another culture, and it goes to show, love wins every time.


If I speak with the tongue of a national, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

If I wear the national dress and understand the culture and all forms of etiquette, and if I copy all mannerisms so that I could pass for a national but have not love, I am nothing.

If I give all I possess to the poor, and if I spend my energy without reserve, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love endures long hours of language study, and is kind to those who mock his accent; love does not envy those who stayed home; love does not exalt his home culture, is not proud of his national superiority,

Does not boast about the way we do it back home, does not seek his own ways, is not easily provoked into telling about the beauty of his home country, does not think evil about this culture;

Love bears all criticism about his home culture, believes all good things about this new culture, confidently anticipates being at home in this place, endures all inconveniences.

Love never fails: but where there is cultural anthropology, it will fail; where there is contextualization it will lead to syncretism; where there is linguistics, it will change.

For we know only part of the culture and we minister to only part.

But when Christ is reproduced in this culture, then our inadequacies will be insignificant.

When I was in Britain (Korea, the US....), I spoke as a Brit, I understood as a Brit, I thought as a Brit; but when I left Britain I put away British things.

Now we adapt to this culture awkwardly; but He will live in it intimately: now I speak with a strange accent, but he will speak to the heart.

And now these three remain: cultural adaptation, language study, and love.

But the greatest of these is love.

• Based on work by Kevin Colyer and others.
 
• Content is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License unless otherwise noted.

A bluetit and a harvest mouse

Today while Alex was a t a birthday party, Abby and I did some painting. It had been a long time... I had another go at a bluetit - they seem to be hard to get right! Abby painted a cute little harvest mouse. 

Connection

This Christmas we simply bit the bullet and bought Alex an XBox 360, which connects to the internet and the TV - so at last he can play two (only... so far) computer games on our television, play against other friends remotely, and, um, have fun. Dan and I also signed up for a Tivo box, which means we can watch programmes up to a week old, and record ones we want to keep - so we feel totally up-to-the-minute, techno-savvy, and pretty darn chuffed...

To boot, we brought down from the roof where we had stored it, a massive beautiful soft blanket which our friends the Lilfords gave us when we visited them in Botswana. This blanket is so heavy, and warm, like being under a huge non-sticky marshmallow. So now it is all too tempting to spend these chilly winter evenings squeezed on the sofa, snuggled under this wonderful blanket, enjoying our new technology. One problem is, the moment I pull the softness to my chin, the warmth and weight makes me start to doze, and in minutes I am off to sleep!

Anyway, we had another problem until today. We have wifi in the house, but the strength wasn't enough for the XBox live. Alex would be in the middle of a game when it would suddenly freeze and the message "Disconnected from XBox live" would appear. He would reconnect only for it to happen again. We found out that the line between the router, in the kitchen, and the xbox in the living room, is too cluttered with various solid objects like a filing cabinet and a radiator, which make the connection too weak.

So we had to bite the next bullet and buy something called a Powerline home network adaptor - you just plug one part into a socket by the router, and the other part into a socket near the Xbox, with ethernet cables into each device, and then the connection is no longer wireless - and it no longer drops at all. We have gone up from one bar to five bars! Wonderful.

Technology keeps on giving us new parables. This today made me think of how my connection with God is sometimes so weak, like a wifi connection that gets blocked or interrupted - I might even be in the middle of a prayer or reading the Bible, and I totally drift off, or someone calls me, or I just lose the moment and decide to go back to my novel. Sometimes the connection is perfect and so strong. When I was thinking about starting the New Year, I was all excited about starting a new year in my faith. But a few days later I haven't really prayed much, and I wonder why it is so easy to let it drop.

Wouldn't it be great to have a Powerline Home Faith Network Adaptor - so that I stayed connected with God all the time. I think that would help a lot - when I was stuck in a traffic jam and so mad and arriving 45 minutes late for Abby's piano lesson, or when I was stressing about the first lecture of the course I'm teaching at Redcliffe this term, or when I was feeling so discouraged  and fed up about doing housework when the carpets look dirty again even a few hours after vacuuming... if only I had those five bars, all the gifts and blessings of being with God All The Time. I wonder if PC World can help me with this one... I wish!

Water water everywhere

This happened when we had only been in Uganda for a few weeks: we were staying in the Jacksons' house, and just down from us, our neighbours had four students staying in their converted garage - complete with lino on the floor, a table and beds, a charcoal burner to cook on. But they told us that the roof leaked when the heavy rain fell.  It was just as well that the practice was stopped not long after. Anyway, the campus is on the side of a hill which stands up above all the surrounding area, so that when the rains come, first the heavy clouds assemble, billowing and swelling over the top of the hill, and when they start to spread out over the top, the rain suddenly pours, - in bucketfuls. On this day, as the clouds began to gather and swell and the thunder began, we saw these four girls run out of their accommodation and take up stances in the road, faces pointing up towards the clouds, fists raised against them: "You shall NOT rain! In the name of Jesus, we command you, you shall not rain!" Unfortunately though the thunder growled and rumbled on, and soon the fat globs of water began to fall and splash around their feet, and then, slightly muted, "OK, you may rain, but you may not spoil our things!"

I have been saying the exact same prayer in my head over the last couple of days, even though feeling that praying against the weather is seemingly pointless. It is going to come. But England has been inundated with water again these last two weeks. There is flooding in the north, south, east and west. Hundreds of people were flooded out of their homes over Christmas. And we know from our experience in 2007, when our house in Gloucester flooded badly, that it can be up to six months before you can move back into the house, depending on builders, insurance and, the weather. So it is no small thing. 

Flooded fields just outside Gloucester today

Our area has just escaped so far although the big river Severn, in whose valley Gloucester lies, has burst its banks at several points. But the fields all around where our little house is, in Longford, are all covered with water now. A few more heavy downpours, and it seems likely that the roads will flood again. No, Lord, please! (We ourselves are living in a rented house in a safer part of town, but it is our tenant - and also our floors and walls - in the little house we let out that I am talking about.)

I have often wondered about God and the weather. I know we all ask those questions when there is a major weather-related disaster, such as the Tsunami, or the earthquake in Haiti - but also, what about just, a country getting a lot of rain? Or, a lot of sunshine, like Uganda? The weather affects everything - the economy, food production, as well as also people's mentalities, plans, and even their happiness levels. Is God involved in the weather? He must be. Yet it seems so random. And can we pray about it? I remember hearing people say, "You mustn't pray for fine weather for your wedding day/bbq/swimming party - think of the poor farmers who badly need the rain!" Annoying, but true I suppose! "Nice weather for ducks" about sums it up - the weather we want may not be what our fellow-creatures want.

What about this:

"He sends his command out to the earth; his word runs swiftly. He gives snow like wool, he scatters hoar frost like ashes. He hurls down his crystals of ice like crumbs; who can stand before his cold? He sends out his word, and melts them; he makes his wind blow and the waters flow."  Ps 147: 15-18.

As God is in charge of this world, the weather is in his remit as well, of course, as this psalm shows. But it seems clear that God normally lets the world run along in its natural course, which includes the weather as well, for good and for bad - this is the only explanation for illness, for birds being eaten by cats in the garden, for people losing their jobs, and all those things that happen that we wish didn't happen. What I hold onto is that God can and does intervene at times, but honestly, it would be ridiculous to think of him providing the exact right weather for all our requirements from one day to the next - how could he run the world like that? He also expects us to use our brains to find ways of living in the world as it is.

But anyway, I shall still pray that Gloucester doesn't get flooded, because I really don't want it to! But I have to accept that if it does, God will help us and everyone else get through it, that this is part of living in a messed-up world, that this life isn't all we have.