Golden Sticks and Rubies

For the next week and a half or so, there are about half a dozen missionary couples on campus for furlough seminar (meetings /training that takes place during their "break" in the States), so I have been able to hang out with the kids and help entertain them while their parents sit in meetings.

In Bethany speak, "get to" means that I, and the rest of my class, were volunteered to help with furlough seminar months before we even knew that there was going to be a furlough seminar -- at which point, it becomes less of a "get to" thing and more of a requirement. But, hey, so long as we are talking about kids, I'm okay with that.

Yesterday, on the way to and from the gym, we played follow the leader, sneaking through the building like ninjas (Ninjas are quiet, after all!) and then searching for "treasure" as we walked across campus to the gym. True to form, when I announced that we were searching for treasure, I didn't really have any idea what I meant by that (not that I would ever make things up as I go...), but the kids figured it out, and, by the time Chris "inspected" all of the treasure outside of the gym door and then "hid" it in the corner (away from anyone who might try to take it!), they had picked up enough "treasure" to fill his hands with dandelion gold, rose petal rubies, leaf emeralds, sparkly rock diamonds, and even a sick made of pure gold.

To the kids, they were just about as cool as the real thing, at least in that moment, and I have to think that God would agree.

The funniest thing about working with a bunch of missionary kids (MKs), though, is the things that come out of their mouths in those random kid moments. For instance, in the middle of story today, I asked the kids a question, got an answer or two, and then called on one of the third graders, only to be informed, very matter of factly, "In China, they laugh at you when you fall down, even if it really hurts."

Umm...yes. Yes, they do. (It's a way of saving face and preventing shame, kind of like how an American might pop up and try to make a joke out of their own clumsiness.) Now...about Jesus and the feeding of the five thousand...

It's the equivalent of the, "My Aunt Susan's neighbor's daughter's best friend has a bunny," that you get from kids anywhere, but, generally, a little easier to follow than trying to figure out who, exactly, owns the bunny!

Participant Application

If you are at all interested in the Focus Month, I would encourage you to start filling out the application and see where the Lord leads you from there. Feel free to either copy paste this text into an email and send it to me at celticross89@yahoo.com or to shoot me an email asking for a printable PDF version of the file.



Looking forward to hearing from you.

Focus Month Participant Application

Name:

Grade:

Age:

School:

What about social justice intrigues you or brings forth your passions?

What about the Focus Month makes you want to join us?

What is one example of a an injustice, large or small, that you have personally seen played out?

Briefly, share your testimony:

What part of living communally for a month do you think will be the most difficult for you?

What is one American comfort that you think it would be the hardest for you to live without?

Is there anything that you feel might hinder you from participating fully in the Focus Month?

How can I pray for you?

List three references (one parent, one teacher/youth leader/other adult, and one friend):

Name: Email:

Name: Email:

Name: Email:

Focus Month Reference Form

Name:

Name of student:

Relation to student: parent friend other adult

How long have you known the student?

In your experience, does this student have a passion for justice, or a strong sense of fairness and rightness?

Explain:

What strengths might this student be able to offer in a community setting?

Do you have any reservations about this student's ability to participate in the Focus Month?

Social Justice Focus Month

Hey,

I blogged about the Focus Month over on my other site, and I would love if you would pop over to check it out and let me know what you think.

God bless!

Social Justice Focus Month

For those who many not have received my newsletter, I want to give you the same information that has been passed on to others regarding things that are happening in the fall, namely, the social justice focus month. Beware; it is lengthy…
Disclaimer: None of this is what I would have planned as the way to spend my first few months back home, but I feel strongly that to not go through with this would be an act of direct disobedience to the voice of the Lord, so I prayerfully submit the following.
From September 28th to October 29th of 2010, a “ministry trip” opportunity will be open to students from sixth grade and up (all the way through college students!), as a chance to work and learn together about social justice issues and the ways that they impact our lives, or perhaps, ways that they ought to impact our lives.
The trip will take place almost exclusively within the greater Tri-Cities area, but we will be constantly on the move, staying in the buildings of different congregations who are willing to let us sleep on their floors for a night or longer, and it will be different from summer ministry trips in a number of other ways (the main one being that it will take place during the school year).
The main purpose is to grow in our understanding of God’s heart for social justice issues, as well as our knowledge of situations where there is a need for Christ followers to be a voice calling out for justice and hands acing to right wrongs.
Secondarily, the purpose is to awaken the Church in the Tri-Cities to the need to act and pray.
The “service project” portion of the trip will be entirely student led, ie Jessica is not sitting in her dorm room coming up with a list of things for us to do. Rather, we will approach God each day with the assumptions that He has a plan for us, is willing to tell us that plan if we are wiling to listen, and that He could just as easily tell that plan to a twelve year old as He could to a twenty-one year old.
There will also be a learning component, where I do my best to introduce a balanced view of any number of different issues and then provide a chance for individuals to come to their own conclusions and discover their own passions. God’s glory is made manifest in places where His justice is lived out, but, until we know what it means to seek justice, it is almost impossible to really live it out.
In order to escape some of the dangers of a short lived, mountain top experience, participants will be required to completely commit to the focus month (no outside jobs, extra curricular activities, etc). This is purely to sustain our intentional community for long enough that new habits are built and life change has a chance to take root.
I am currently neck deep in putting together a hands on curriculum that will tie day to day life within the community into school assignments (math, language arts, science, social studies, etc) that we will send back to parents to grade as they desire. Basically, we will become a month long homeschool co-op, and, therefore, avoid breaking any truancy laws, so long as all of the Intent to Homeschool forms are filled out and in their proper locations.
(Ha! Staying out of jail would be a good thing…)
We will do our best to live simply, justly, and sustainably in an intentional community, while still participating in the American context, in order to explore what it really means to live as Christ followers wherever He sends us.
I know that it all sounds crazy, so, for now, I am asking you to ask questions and pray about it. Pray that God would light a fire for justice in the hearts of those who He wants to participate, and…check with Him to see if He wants you to be somehow involved.
:)

Knowledge is Power

In the face of countless global affronts to justice, it can easily become overwhelming to begin to imagine understanding enough to bring even a single solution. More than overwhelming, it can become paralyzing.

Years of schooling have taught us not only to find the "right answer," but also to find the "right way" of getting to that answer. Even our workplaces expect us to "act right," to fit into the mold of that particular company or department, and it can be disorienting to find ourselves swimming in a sea of international, or even domestic, issues that seem to have no easy answers.

There are ways, though, to put edges and outlines on the map, even a color key and topographical features, if we give it enough time and thought.

The easiest way to clear off the hidden parts of the map is to find out what other people think, to find out if they can see lines that are invisible to you. Knowledge is power, and, in this case, that power can, sometimes, be enough to jolt us out of our paralysis, enough to help us find a next step to somewhere, anywhere.

There are documentaries that can be watched online for free (and completely legally) and alternative news agencies that cover stories from a different bent than that of major networks, and of course, YouTube, Google, and Wikipedia are your friend. Maybe I'm just a nerd, but search engines are happy things.

Kenya Update

My internship supervisors just updated their blog (Go figure. Just because I leave the country doesn't mean that everything in Kenya came to a standstill.) If you're not already, you should make sure to bookmark and follow their blog. Check out the links on the side bar as well, as they have links to blogs from all three of the Kenya internship teams.


It might be hard to tell in this picture, but these are the Upwards soccer jerseys that my parents brought with them last August. They made it all the way from the desert of Eastern Washington to the desert of North Eastern Kenya, and, after a few months of waiting for the right time and place, Jason and Bekah passed them out to a group of boys that some of our friends have been working with.

The great thing about soccer jerseys is that what fits an elementary schooler in Tri-town can also fit a teenager in G-town.

Many thanks, once again, to everyone who helped to gather things for my parents to bring with them. The things that you sent are still being used to bless people through holistic ministry and outreach.


Righty and Vaeh (and Charis!) are going to have plenty of construction experience by the time that they are big enough to effectively use a hammer. In between a dozen other responsibilities, Jason has been working on the construction of a girl's school, in partnership with both Kenyan and Western Christians, a huge need in an area where universal primary education is still a relatively new concept (well within living memory) and girls were not, traditionally, considered as important to formally educate.

Every country and region has its own challenges when it comes to formal education. In this part of Kenya, even things as integral to the culture as following herds throughout the season can pose challenges to schooling. And, it's not just Christians who are trying to make a difference.

Check out this video to get an idea of some "less traditional" school models that are being used in the area -- or more traditional, depending on how you look at it.


And...because YouTube is my friend (especially on American speed internet), I finally got my hands on a good picture of the bridge that we crossed over every time that we went to the primary school for Bible club or computer classes.

This is part of the very few kilometers of paved road within the province, and there are occasionally crocodiles and hippos in the water underneath the bridge -- a little different than Minnesota, where the only thing under bridges are monstrously huge mosquitoes!

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Picture Story

My senior class was sitting around the other day, in between our last class period and lunch, when one of the guys decided to entertain us all with a tub of playdough and an old-school overhead projector.

Maybe we've just spent too long without the constant stream of entertainment that comes in the States, but we were quite entertained. (Yep. Most of the…volume in the room was the Kenya team. Somehow, even though we are “technically” the most introverted of the teams, we came out the other end of internship the loudest…)

There was no narration – other than constant comments from the audience – so, I’ll let you decide what is going on in the story.

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Becoming the Answers to Our Prayers

Sitting in chapel today, as we talked about and prayed through issues that place children worldwide at risk, I started noticing an interesting trend.

My classmates who were leading the chapel had focused in on four “risk factors” that they felt are the biggest issues facing children today; poverty, oppressive rituals and traditions, slavery, and war or other forms of violence. They gave equal attention to each of the issues and personalized each one with stories about particular children.

Any World Vision advocate would have been proud.

But, when we started praying corporately, it was as if all but the middle two issues faded completely off of the map. It almost seemed as if we were hesitant to pray for a solution to poverty or war.

In some ways, it makes sense. Growing up in the Church, you hear verses about how the poor will always be there, and warnings that there will be wars and rumors of wars, maybe so much so that we have given up on those issues. Relegated them to the back corner of things that “just happen” and we have no power over.

Some quiet part of our brains whispers that it won’t do any good anyways, and another part agrees. That other part, somewhere deep in our emotional hub, would rather spare the relatively quick burst of emotional energy needed to become temporarily angry over the issue of sex trafficking or FGM than sustain the intellectual muscle required to reexamine our paradigms of poverty and violence.

Making that jump from an emotional response to an intellectual one is hard work, and not something that come naturally, maybe more so because we know, in that deep, gut level sort of way, that, if we really, truly pray for solutions to poverty or violence, we might find ourselves becoming the answers to those prayers.

Which, leads to an interesting question.

When we talk about issues of social justice, are we really willing to be the answers that we are looking for, or are we just talking in order to appease our own sense of guilt?

Is there a purpose to knowledge if it comes without action?

Sun on My Face

For all that it is already June, it is NOT VERY WARM here in Minnesota, or, from what I hear, in the Tri-Cities either. Of course, that gives all the more reason to soak up the sunshine on the days that it does pop it’s head out from behind the rain clouds.

 

And, sometimes, it just means ducking my head down and ignoring the steady drizzle that is different from the sudden downpours we would get in G-town that it almost seems wrong to refer to them both as “rain.”

Saturday was one of those, just pretend it’s not raining, sorts of days, as Esther and I spent hours on a not particularly efficient public transportation system, trying to get downtown to the farmers’ market. Let’s just say…a matatu driver could have gotten us there in a quarter of the time, although much les sedately.

Nonetheless, we did make it, and I am currently attempting to pickle the asparagus that I bought. Knowing my lack of skill in the area of food preparation, this could turn out to be an adventure. But, surely there is not too much that can go wrong with something that sits in a cupboard and ferments for a few weeks. Fermentation is one of those things that nature does on its own. We’ll see how well nature and I get along when I try to harness it. Lol.

 

It may be summer now, but fall is coming faster than I had looked for, and, if we actually intend to eat during the social justice month, I had better start learning how to cook. Next step: something more complicated than pickles.

Any suggestions?

What If?

What if, as Christians, we gave up living according to the world’s standards – and not in a “we wear long dresses and blow up abortion clinics” sort of a way?

The challenge today is to find the things in our culture that bring us closer to the people we are supposed to be a living witness of Christ to, and to find the things that pull us farther away from them.

Sometimes, the best way to get an idea of the big picture is to get just far enough away from it all to see it from a different angle. (Think of it like climbing a tree as “it” in hide and seek. Suddenly, you can see exactly where everyone is hiding.)

Of course, our culture says that that is crazy, that there is too much to be doing to take time out to climb trees, to learn to see a picture bigger than ourselves. What the culture doesn’t understand, is that there is too much going on in the world not to learn to see that way.

The Way Things Change

 

I was talking with a friend a few days ago about future plans, and how hard, but good, it is when God upsets those plans and dreams and replaces them with something else, something that will bring His glory and expand His Kingdom in ways that we never would have imagined. Speaking for no one but myself, I can see over and over again how that has been true in my life.

Growing up, I was going to be a writer, or a painter, or an astronaut, or any of a dozen different things – all at once, of course, because, that way, I wouldn’t have to pick just one. Never for a moment was I going to do the things that I read about in missionary biographies. I was going to write stories like those, not do them.

Things changed, and I was going to get a degree in youth ministry, or sociology, or linguistics at a school that everyone knew the name of, with professors that taught things I couldn’t find the answers to on my own. Never for a moment was I going to attend a tiny school that was only partially accredited or get a degree in Intercultural Studies or write so few research papers that I could count them on one hand.

I was going to take time off and thru hike the Appalachian Trail, or the Pacific Crest Trail, or backpack through Europe. Nowhere on my mental calendar was there a chunk of time blocked out for going to Africa, let alone spending sixteen months in Kenya.

If I wrote a book, it was going to be fiction, something to replace the endless stream of historical romance that tries to pass itself off as adult Christian fiction. A non-fiction book on social justice activism was nowhere on the radar.

When Kenya did come into the picture, I was going to work with street kids, or teenagers, or at least mainly boys.  Nowhere were there plans to spend months in an office working with someone on a preschool curriculum or to spend hour after hour playing with the daughters of different missionary families.

After school, I was going to relax, live quietly for a while, get a job, and raise money for a future in Nicaragua, working with kids, still mainly boys, who live on the street. Never for a moment, was I going to ask people to do the impossible, to set apart a month of their lives – or the lives of their children – purely for the purpose of growing in an understand of God’s heart for justice.

My goal in life, even after Nicaragua came into the picture, was to be a pseudo wall flower, never attracting too much attention or doing anything too strange. Obviously, God had other plans.

What about you? Where has the Lord taken you that you never thought you would be?

(The picture choice was more or less completely random, but I tend to think that living in the desert and being fed by ravens probably wasn’t high on Elijah’s bucket list either.)