Dallas Willard...absent from the body

Just saw that Dallas Willard is now face to face with his Master.

Great post here from Scot McNight and John Ortburg.

Fly Over Country

Dallas Willard's The Divine Conspiracy was one of the very few books we brought overseas with us way back when we first launched this journey.  Great book.  And now I've finally gotten around to reading Willard's The Spirit of the Disciplines.  

I have imagined myself as one attempting to imitate Christ, but Willard shows me for what I really am.  I tend to read the Gospels with an almost exclusive focus on the red letters (well, they used to be red anyway).  Much of the narrative black print between the red lettered sections had become fly over country for me.  Interesting terrain to look down at from thirty-thousand feet, but I'm more or less biding my time until I arrive at my destination: the rich teachings of the Master.

The call to "follow me" had been reduced to "follow my teaching."  I have spent far more energy trying to follow what Jesus taught than I have attempting to mimic how he actually lived his life in those long stretches of black print.

And Willard calls our attention to this.  If we hope to become Christlike, we follow the Master's way of life, not just his amazing teachings.

Willard points out that Jesus was, well, Christlike--sermon-on-the-mount-like--in the crisis moments of his life not simply because he was Christ, but because he had been training for these moments all of his life.  Reading the narratives we see how he wove into his life a pattern of spiritual disciplines that kept him connected to his Father and developed deep patterns of Godliness that enabled him to react in a Godlike way when the evil moments were thrust upon him.

Willard contends that it is ludicrous for followers of the Master to expect that we will be able to turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, love our enemies, hide the good that we do--to be like Jesus in these more extreme moments--if we have not trained as he did in the everyday flyover country of our lives.

We cannot behave "on the spot" as he did and taught if in the rest of our time we live as everybody else does.  The "on the spot" episodes are not the place where we can, even by the grace of God, redirect unchristlike but ingrained tendencies of action toward sudden Christlikeness.  Our efforts to take control at that moment will fail so uniformly and so ingloriously that the whole project of following Christ will appear ridiculous to the watching world.  We've all seen this happen.

The secret?  Jesus' secret?  Spiritual disciplines.  I did a quick scan of the Gospels, and the numerous disciplines Jesus practiced jumped off the pages.  Some were not so obvious: though we don't see it described, his discipline of scripture memory must have been astounding--word-perfect recall after not eating for forty days?  In my quick sweep of the black-lettered narratives, I frequently caught Jesus in the practice of solitude and of prayer.

Alone.  On a mountain.  Praying.

And he says, follow me.

If there was an easier way, 

you better believe Jesus would have been the first to tell you.

--Dallas Willard

Garbage Church

The small group of believers we worship with is a motley crew of messed up people if there ever was one.  Any given Sunday sees the rough block building with the uneven cement floor and the cheap plastic seats filled with prostitutes, drunks, swindlers...and a bunch of the rest of us more normal sinners.  We are all in the process of being transformed by our encounters with Jesus.  The pastor himself is an ex-drunk whom Jesus turned into one of the most passionate preachers I have ever heard.

Every Sunday we have an open mike testimony time, and it can be surreal.  One of the women in the the church shared that she had finally submitted to conviction and gone to ask forgiveness from the woman she had stabbed for cheating with her husband.  A young man shared recently that the reason he's there is because he'd seen the guy playing the bass guitar take a dramatic turn from a life of destructive sin to one filled with joy, purpose, job and family. He wanted his own life, currently caught in the self-destructive vortex of drugs/sex/drink, to experience the same change.  Last week a woman asked for us to pray for her as she tries to reach out to the woman who is currently sleeping with her husband.

One of the leaders told us that some in town refer to the place as The Garbage Church.  Human detritus filters in here.  So much so, that when the pastor saw our neatly dressed missionary family slip in the back for the first time his shocked mind assumed we'd gotten lost and wandered into the wrong place. Three weeks in a row I've watched the same toddler pee smack in the middle of the center aisle while her barefoot mom looks on adoringly.  The barefoot mom and her brood are fresh out of the jungle.  Simple, uneducated, dirty clothes...and welcome here.  Eventually they'll figure out there's an outhouse behind the church, but until then no one scorns them.  After all, how much effort does it cost us to step across a puddle on our way to the front at offering time?

And it seems to me that Jesus actually goes out of his way to encounter the prostitutes, drunks, swindlers, and kids who pee on the church floor.  He seeks out the broken.  He doesn't seem much interested in those who think they're something special.

Been poking around the first book of Peter, and have been hit by the words from Proverbs that Peter quotes towards the end of his writing:

God opposes the proud,

but gives grace to the humble.

Kind of lays out God's stance pretty clearly.  If I am proud, the God who created the universe is in opposition to me.  If I am broken, he's on my side.

What a gift to be surrounded by people who remind me to stay broken.

Close To Danger, Far From Harm

Tim Harold

We crossed the abrupt drop-off at the beginning of the airstrip a few feet above the ground doing something like 65 mph.  For some reason, on this day, the thought flashed through my mind that if, in that critical second, we bumped the power back ever so slightly, we'd land short of the airstrip and strew expensive aluminum all over the place.

Most of the time I don't think about stuff like that.

But occasionally I have one of those hyper-aware moments when the reality of what you're doing snaps into uncomfortable focus...like the fact that you're taking a 5000 pound projectile freight-training along at 100 feet per second and attempting to slide it into a 100 foot box at the business end of a patch of ground carved out of no-nonsense jungle.  Successfully pull that off and you find that your real fun is only beginning...you now have to figure out how to corral the hurtling beast to a stop on a surface with the same consistency as the stuff coming out of a two-year-old's nose...and this needs to be done with some dispatch lest you exhaust the snotty--but mercifully treeless--surface, slide off the far end of the airstrip into the no-nonsense jungle...and strew expensive aluminum all over the place.

Draconian rules require that you keep your eyes open through the entire process.

Life's a bit like that too...except, you are allowed to close your eyes.  And most of us do, creating the warm illusion of a safe and secure world where danger resides far, far away...somewhere on a CNN homepage.

The reality is, that once sin broke this incredible, used-to-be-perfect place we live in, death and danger became our constant companions.  They are just a bump of the throttle away.

But what if... 

What if that which is most real, most valuable and most desirable to me is also totally secure and absolutely untouchable?  What if no one, no event, no circumstance, no illness...nothing can take away what is most important to me?

Ah, now danger still surrounds me, but harm?  

I'm far from harm.

No matter what happens.

Even if the throttle gets bumped.

For I am convinced

that neither death nor life,

neither angels nor demons,

neither height nor depth

nor anything else in all creation,

will be able to separate us 

from the love of God

that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Isn't This Worshiping God?

Klaus & Jerry busted up our pilot meeting the other day.  Two old guys with a long history in Papua.  They just walked in and gave us all a magical moment.  Jerry was a pilot, Klaus a missionary among the Fayu, one of the most remote and primitive people groups out here. Jerry pokes his video camera in each of our faces and asks us about ourselves.  He gets to the end and says,

You guys are the next generation.  

Keep fighting the fight. 

Klaus points at me and says, "I knew this guy when he was just a kid in Nepal."

He gets teary.  "His Dad checked the first translation I ever did, the Gospel of Luke."

I get teary.

With Klaus

Klaus and Jerry have just come from Nepal, where the small body of believers that Klaus knew when he left in 1976 has done what followers of Jesus always do when they are persecuted: they blossomed.    Jerry tells us there are 100 congregations in the people group now.

A few days after they crashed our meeting, Brad flew Klaus and Jerry out to Fayu territory.  The reception was enormous, deafening...total Fayu raucousness.

A week later, it's Saturday evening, and my phone is ringing.  Jerry is desperately ill, can we pull him out on Sunday?  Fayu land is so far from Sentani that we can't round trip it without refueling...but I don't want to have to stop for fuel if Jerry is as bad as I'm being told.

Yajasi makes a difference out here only because we're a team.  Tonight, the team comes through.  Sony and Jason give up a chunk of their Saturday evening to install the extra fuel tanks under the Porter's wings.  In the dark.

It's still dark the next morning when my beat up Landcruiser and I head to the hangar.  I'm the last one there.  The team is already in high gear.  Iput is finishing fueling the under wing tanks. Bekah is on the radio, checking the weather at our destination and will stay and flight follow us all morning.  Yafet and Eko are tying down the load and getting the stretcher for me.  The team is gung-ho, moving fast and really kicking it getting the airplane ready.  I thank the guys profusely for working on a Sunday morning.  Quizzical, Yafet looks up from putting away extra cargo straps and asks, earnestly,

Isn't this worshiping God?

These brothers of mine get it much more than I do at times.

An hour and forty-five minutes of seemingly endless rain forest puts me over the village of Dirouw.  Moments after landing Klaus is standing at my open cockpit door.  His face is wan and strained.  I can tell he's been through a tough 24.

"Nate, I am so glad to see you.  I am so glad to see you.  Yesterday, I thought I lost him.  He was totally unresponsive."

We get Jerry on the stretcher.  The Fayu chief prays for him.

Four days later I saw Jerry again.  This time he was 100% vertical.

Apparently God listens to Fayu chiefs.

Lost Man

Through gray tendrils of rain, fellow pilot Zach Osterloo and I had enough visibility to see the distinctive outline of the sharp cliff that stands as the sentinel landmark at the mouth of the Bime valley...but it was obvious that the weather was telling us to stay away.  We turned towards the east and set down in the community of Borme to wait for Bime's weather to improve.

As per usual, there was soon a small throng of people around the airplane, some of them friends I've known for a very long time.  We were chatting about how bad weather for a pilot is a bit like the warnings God has communicated to us in His Word: for your own good and safety, don't cross that line...it leads to disaster.  

After a while a church leader approached me and said, "There's a guy here who is actually from Bime, but he's lost.  He's been wandering in the jungle like an animal for months and nearly drowned in the river the other day.  He doesn't have a mind.  He's not really like a human anymore.  He has no family here, they are all in Bime...can you take him back there?"

I asked if he'd ever been violent and they told me that he was docile.  "He's just not there anymore," they said.  I asked to see him and they brought him over.  His blank, expressionless features were simply heart-rending.

None of our Bime-bound passengers were willing to give up their seat for the lost man, so I was trying to figure out how we were going to make this work when Zach said,

Leave me here.  He can have my seat.

And so, when the rain stopped in Bime we were able to return the lost man to his family.

I can easily imagine Zach as the one in Mathew 25 asking his Master, 

When were you sick and I helped you?

And I can hear the Master's reply, 

I had a brother in Borme.  

He was at the bottom of the refuse pile.

People said he wasn't human anymore.

You gave up your seat for him.

Makes one wonder why it was raining in Bime that morning.  Maybe for the sweet potato crop. Maybe because it's a rain forest and, well, there's a reason it's called that.  Maybe for a lost man named Arin.

Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, 

you did for me.

Arin.
Lost man.
Jesus calls him brother.

photo: Zach Osterloo

God Knows Her Name

Long day of flying today with my colleague Jeffron.  We worked with Helimission to get the Wilds back into the Wano people.  (A while back Justin Taylor on his blog over at The Gospel Coalition  posted some really cool videos on the Wilds ministry among the Wano tribe--worth checking out.)

We also were able to fly the Crocketts back to Daboto for them to continue their work among the Moi (the last time I wrote something about the Moi was here.)

On the radio, we had heard there was a patient and some passengers in a place called Iratoi.  So, after dropping off the Crocketts in Daboto we headed over there.

All we knew: a patient.  Hear the pleas on the radio to pick up patients almost every day we fly.  Here was today's patient:

This beautiful little girl rolled into the fire while sleeping.  Happens all too often.  Her burns weren't as extensive as others I've seen and someone with some basic medical training in the village sprinkled penicillin on her wounds...so I'm hoping she's got a pretty good chance of healing.

Pray for the little girl in Iratoi...I've forgotten her name.  God hasn't.

Bokondini. And Books.

Not sure it gets much better than this.  A simple cottage in the mountains, rain on the roof to rhythm you to sleep at night, bacon breakfasts on the wood stove, stream fed micro-hydro electricity 15 hours a day...and shelves full of books.  The three of us are just finishing up a great break in Bokondini (central highlands of Papua.)

Too much rain clogs the hydro inlet with debris...
and gives us an excuse to have a candlelit dinner.

Speaking of books, here are ten I read in past year that were particularly good.  In no specific order:

Paul Miller: A Praying Life.

Learned desperation is at the heart of a praying life.

The eminently quotable G.K. Chesterton makes my list three times.  All three classics are well worth reading, and the Kindle versions are free.

Orthodoxy

There is one thing that Christ and all the Christian saints 

have said with a sort of savage monotony.  

They have said simply that to be rich 
is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck.

If our faith comments on government at all, its comment must be this:

that the man should rule who does NOT think he can rule.

...the more I considered Christianity, 

the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, 

the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.

Mysticism keeps men sane.  

As long as you have mystery you have health; 

when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.  

The ordinary man has always been sane 

because the ordinary man has always been a mystic.

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens.  

It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head.  

And it is his head that splits.

All Things Considered

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. 
An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

In the end it will not matter to us whether we wrote well or ill; 

whether we fought with flails or reeds.  

It will matter to us greatly on which side we fought.

Heretics

But in order that life should be a story or romance to us, 

it is necessary that a great part of it, at any rate, 

should be settled for us without our permission.

Exactly at the instance when hope ceases to be reasonable 

it begins to be useful.

Maurice Herzog: Annapurna

A mountaineering classic that inspired a generation of mountain climbers.  This is one of the few tales of the modern era that deservedly brushes up against the label epic.  In 1950 Herzog and his team first had to find Annapurna before they could climb it...and in doing so be the first humans to stand on a peak higher than 8000 meters.

In my worst moments of anguish, 

I seemed to discover the deep significance of existence 

of which till then I had been unaware.  

I saw that it was better to be true than to be strong.

Ed Viesturs: No Shortcuts to the Top


Viesturs was the first American to summit all 14 peaks higher than 8000 meters.  I found it fascinating that his success (and survival--the mountains claimed many of his colleague's lives along the way) was due in large part to the number of times he turned back--often within sight of the summit.  This came from his unyielding adherence to his philosophy of mountain climbing:

Reaching the summit is optional. 

Getting down is mandatory.

This struck me as so central to how we achieve safety in the unforgiving environment of flying light aircraft in Papua that we've pilfered Viestur's motto, modified it, and adopted it as a flight department:

Completing the mission is optional.  

A safe landing is mandatory.

Dallas Willard: Hearing God

A great companion to Brother Lawrence's The Practice of the Presence of God  and Frank Laubach's Letters by a Modern Mystic

In the last analysis nothing is more central 

to the practical life of the Christian 

than confidence in God's individual dealings with each person.

Laura Hillenbrand: Unbroken


Quite simply one of the best stories I've ever read.









David Platt: Radical

 ...in the American dream, where self reigns as king, 

we have a dangerous tendency to misunderstand, minimize, 

and even manipulate the gospel 

in order to accommodate our assumptions and our desires.

The cost of nondiscipleship is profoundly greater for us 

than the cost of discipleship.

David Watters: At the Foot of the Snows


I recently posted on this one...fantastic read of God moving into the hearts of a remote Himalayan people group.

Jesus At The Door

We were awoken once again to the bitter reality of this current life's fragility this past Thursday morning. I had my helmet in my hand, ready to walk out to the airplane to fly when we learned that our good friend and colleague Zeth Nabyal had lost his short, terrible battle with tetanus.

Zeth leaves behind his wife Selina and their three beautiful children, Windy, Timothy and Angely. 

Through tears, Selina told Sheri and I that in the early morning, Zeth had sensed it was time and told those with him,

I feel like this is the end. 

Please pray for me. 

One of the men in his hospital room began to pray. After a bit, Zeth interrupted him a bit gruffly and said,

When are you going to get to 'Amen?'

Jesus is at the door, waiting for me. 

I need to go. 

The man abbreviated his prayer.  Zeth breathed his last...and didn't keep his King waiting any longer.

Henry Moore invested many years in mentoring Zeth in the field of avionics (aircraft electronics) and Zeth served on our team in that capacity for more than 15 years.  But Zeth was so much more than a technician in the service of Bible Translation.  A pillar of his church, the chairman of the committee for translating the Old Testament into his native Una language and a respected leader among the Una community, Zeth's presence here on this earth will be dearly, dearly missed by many.

Zeth is in heaven now.  I think he may find it familiar.  I will never forget the day when I sensed heaven come down and envelope Zeth and the other Una with him on a remote Papuan mountainside.

I wrote the following in September 2007:

I’ve known Zeth for a long time.  Ten years in fact.  An easygoing guy, we’ve frequently shared light moments.  Seen a lot of laughter on Zeth’s face.  Never seen him cry.  That changed a few weeks ago.

The day started at 5:30 in the morning as a lot of my flying days do.  The preflight inspection on the Pilatus Porter went fine but we weren’t able to contact our destination on the HF radio for a weather report.  Four of us huddled for prayer in our dusty cargo warehouse.  Zeth, Dick, Paul and myself asked the Lord to give us good weather in Langda.

Without a weather report, we launched in faith for Langda just after 6:00 am.  An hour later, crossing the spine of Papua’s high ranges at 13,000 feet, we held our breath waiting for the valley beyond to come into view.  What a feeling to see the Langda valley open before us without a cloud in sight.  Thank you Lord.

Soon the Porter’s turbine engine was spooling down on Langda’s aircraft-carrier-like runway--at 6,200 feet above sea level, this 450 meter shelf of land juts out from the otherwise near-vertical terrain around it… almost like God put it there thousands of years ago to serve as an airstrip.  I swung out of my seat and dropped to the ground.  Zeth was already out of his seat, untying the cargo net that secured a pile of non-descript boxes in the cabin behind his seat.

Wow, Zeth, wasn’t that incredible how God opened the weather to make it in here today? 

Zeth tried to respond, but the words stuck in his throat.  Hands trembling with the ropes holding the cargo net, Zeth lost the battle to control his emotions and the tears flowed freely down his cheeks.  Working through his tears, Zeth began to unload the Word of God in the Una language…a twenty-year labor of love.  Dick & Margreet Kroneman and a team of committed Una men and women had given their life’s work for this moment.

Born in a simple hut with a grass roof, Zeth joined the first generation of Una to emerge from the Stone Age.  Around the time of his birth, the light of the Gospel had reached into the Langda valley and brought freedom from oppressive spiritual powers that bound the Una people in an endless cycle of killing and witchcraft.  That freedom led to opportunities never before seen for the Una. Given a chance to get an education on the coast, Zeth made the most of his opportunities and pursued an education in electronics. He ended up becoming part of the Yajasi team in our Avionics Department.  From a grass hut to aircraft avionics…an incredible journey.

At the airplane, the people formed a festive procession to the church, the boxes reverently cradled on bow-and-arrow racks.  I noted that Zeth was by no means alone in being unable to keep his joy from overflowing into tears.  Dancing, whooping and rejoicing were followed by a time of quiet reverence as we were led in prayer by the Una Pastor.  I cannot remember when I’ve been so moved.

A few days later I was again landing in Langda.  This time the airplane was full of guests coming to attend the formal celebration and dedication of the Langda New Testament.

The Una people staged an elaborate drama depicting the cycle of violence and fear that once held them firmly in its grip. They celebrated the freedom that the Gospel of Jesus Christ brought them and now the wonder of having His words speak to them from these pages in their own language.  For many of them, it was as if this were far beyond what they could ask or imagine.

The Una dramatized their prior lives of violence.

At one point during the festivities, the organizers had thirty or so key members of the translation team line up on the uneven hillside.  As the clouds swirled around us and light misty droplets fell, each member was given their own copy of the Una New Testament.  When the church leader distributing the Bibles got to Zeth they were both beaming great wide smiles.  Then their eyes met. I saw a deep connection between these two Una men, a profound understanding as to what this book really meant.  The smiles melted away and they locked each other in an embrace and wept with abandon.

I was trying to photograph the moment but it will have to live only in my memory because I had to turn and walk away.

I returned moments later, my composure regained, to see Zeth and the others, clutching these books to their chests as though someone had just given them a gift they hadn’t dared to hope was even possible.

Then, in unison, they raised the Evidence that God speaks and understands Una high in the air.  Zeth’s face said it all: triumph, defiance, relief…YES!

I glimpsed heaven in the Langda valley that day and I will remember those moments for as long as I live.  It is unspeakable privilege to be a part of this.

We have given away nothing and gained everything.

Until we meet again Zeth.  Say hi to Paul for me.

Only One Rock Star

Read something recently that referred to an apparently famous pastor as "something of a rock star in evangelical circles."  Been pondering that a bit over the last couple of days.

As I've pondered, I've started into the stories of the book of Acts.  Haven't gotten very far.  Still stuck in verse three of the first chapter.

Jesus, having defeated death, appears to his disciples over a period of forty days and conducts the first seminary ever.  Can you imagine the cred that Jesus has at this point?  They watched death take this guy.  Must've been human after all.  They watched this guy pry death's fingers off his own throat.  Must be, well, God!  And now, he's going to give us some pointers?  I'm thinking this was a pin-drop zone.

So what does he talk about?

He appeared to them over a period of forty days

and spoke about the kingdom of God.

The first time I heard our Papuan pastor preach he was in this verse.  He did a full stop and asked himself and the congregation, "If this is what Jesus focused on during those forty days, why on earth do we spend so much time focusing on chasing the blessings of God instead of pursuing the kingdom of God?"

The guy can flat out preach.

As I came upon those same words in my own study, following the pastor's lead, I decided to spend some time trying to figure out what this kingdom is all about.

I suppose one should always start these kinds of things with the obvious.  It could have been a democracy of God, or a republic of God, but it's a kingdom. And a kingdom, for better or for worse, has a king.  And only one king.  He's a good king, to be sure, but he is the king.

If we want to be rock stars, we're fooling ourselves if we think we can be rock stars in the kingdom of God.

There's only one rock star.

To have a rock star pulling the spotlight to his or her self  in 'evangelical circles' would seem to indicate that those circles must lie outside the kingdom of God circle.  Only room for one in that circle.  If I'm pulling the spotlight off the king towards myself I am a usurper.  You can't be a rock star and loyal to the king.  You can't promote the king and yourself at the same time.

The problem is, we all want to be rock stars.  It's what we got infected with at the Fall.  The biblical account tells us that the first one to want to be a rock star in God's kingdom got himself and his fan base thrown out.  Ever since, he's done a stand up job of convincing the rest of us to chase after that same goal, with equally devastating results.

Unchecked, our hunger to be rock stars within the kingdom of God results in much ugly, non-kingdom-of-God behavior.  Besides, a lot of rock stars die young, lonely, empty and chemically-altered deaths.  In other words, it ain't what its cracked up to be.

May we be content to serve the king, obscured from view to the rest of the world, knowing that the king has got his all-seeing eye on us and that rewards come later.

And what's this?  I take it all back, it seems like we can be rock stars after all...it just looks a bit different:

If anyone want to be first,

he must be the very last,

and the servant of all.

Jesus makes it abundantly clear what rock stars (leaders?) look like in his kingdom.  Leadership is getting up and going to the back of the line.  It's nothing but service.  Service to the king and service to his subjects.  This takes character, not charisma.