More Mountaintops

Growing up in Nepal, the majesty of the Himalaya are deeply ingrained in my memory, so I was mesmerized by this video I found on Justin Taylor's blog.

Beautiful Feet Project from AsiaLink HistoryMaker on Vimeo.

Mountaintops

Been absent from these pages for a few weeks.  Working on some other projects and traveling a bit.

We plan to return to Papua in about a month.  As that return date approaches, I've been reflecting a bit on this time that the Lord has given us away from the front lines.

In particular, I've been thinking a bit about how often Jesus retreated to the solitude of the mountains during his tumultuous ministry years here on earth.  Despite the fact that some of the tumult in my own ministry is of my own making, my family and I have been incredibly fortunate to have had an opportunity to do some of the mountain thing recently.  As I've noted before, by God's mercy, we've been ensconced in a cabin on a lake in Vermont for the past few months.  

It's the kind of place you never want to leave.  And yet, we know that this place is not our home, it's a way station on our journey, a mountaintop to which we've retreated.  It would be a hard thing to leave this mountaintop, except that we came up here to be with our Master--and we have met Him and enjoyed Him fully--and now it is He that is heading back down the mountain and we'd be crazy not to follow.  Jesus always comes off the mountain.  Jesus called us to simply follow...what a tragedy it would be if we stayed on the mountain after our Master had made His way back down.  Without Him up here, this mountaintop would become a cold, windy and desolate place.  

At times, I have felt far removed from the battlefield that life and ministry can feel like at times in Papua.  I've struggled to not feel guilty as my colleagues continue to fight the good fight while I have retreated from the front lines for a while.  That said, I find that if I stay in the battle too long, I lose focus...I'm still fighting, but I'm swinging blindly, ineffectively.  Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Jesus showed us the "work hard - retreat deeply" model that He lived by.  It is amazing to me that God, from the very beginning--as in the second chapter of the Bible--modeled this work-rest cycle for us.  These weren't simply instructions from the Creator to the creation...the Creator followed the pattern in His own work and creativity.

It is also fascinating to me that in a perfect, pre-sin world, we were designed to work hard, then rest deeply.  Like everything else, sin screws up this perfect balance and we either end up working too much or resting too much.  

And so we'll drink deeply of the solitude, be refreshed by the beauty all around us, not as an end in itself, but as a time to be still with God, gain His perspective on the valley below, and follow Him back down the mountain, filled with joy...not just for the time on the mountain, but also for the anticipation of what the path ahead holds...because He's on it.    

An Atheist With Integrity

Mathew Parris is a former MP in the British Parliament and currently a columnist with The Times of London.  He's a professing atheist. If part of integrity is recognizing good in the opposite camp, even when it weakens your own position, then Mr. Parris demonstrates such integrity in the fascinating article below.

I first read this piece a couple of years ago, but was reminded of it today by an article in Christianity Today by the Bishop of the Methodist Church in Malaysia, Hwa Yung.  (That piece is very much worth the read: here)

Originally published in The Times in 2009, here's Parris' take on the impact of missions:

Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.

It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Giving The Pagans A Run For Their Money

Jesus once said,

the pagans run after all these things

And so do we.

Doing volunteer work, I'm poorer than your average millionaire.  But, in the context of Papua, I'm much better off than most of the people that I live among.  And that is exactly not the point.  Anytime we focus on our relative economic standing, we're looking down the wrong path...and it's a shortcut to unhappiness.

I'm fortunate to rub shoulders with people from all levels of the economic strata and find that in every sector, from dirt poor to filthy rich, you'll find people who have serious cases of contentment.   And, you'll also find, across that same spectrum, others who say they are following Jesus but appear to be running full tilt after 'all these things.'

The former group of people have a passion for life.  The latter, a passion for stuff.  The contented crowd tends to be very free with whatever stuff they end up entrusted with, be it a big pile or a widow's mite.  The running crowd tend to be so focused on getting that they miss out on both the delights of what they already have...and the fun of giving some of it away.

One of the interesting things to me is that when Jesus spoke those words (Matthew 6:32), the 'things' that He observed the pagans running after weren't BMW's or McMansions...no, these pagans were stressing about the necessities of life.  You can sense Jesus' sadness and pity as He watches these folks sprinting after Casseroles, Cokes and Levis like panicked refugees trying to get on the last flight out of Saigon.  The wild thing is that Jesus says that God knows that we need our Casseroles, Cokes and Levis.  I can imagine Him saying to us, 

Relax.  Pursue me.  Pursue life in my invisible realm...

and I'll make sure you're fed, watered and clothed. 

Be content.

One of the greatest gifts we can ever receive is the gift of contentment, and like most good things, I'm finding it flows freely into our lives out of a connectedness to Jesus.

Paul Westlund, In His Own Words

Paul's been gone for over a month now.  Not a day goes by when I don't think about Paul, the difference he made...and the price he paid.

Here's a short clip where Paul shares the passion that drives us.

If you'd like to read more about Paul's life and passion, see the earlier post, Muddy Dancing Shoes.

thanks to jerrett roy for the video

Otter

I get such a kick out of the amazing breadth of creatures that God has designed.  Yesterday morning Cameron hollered for me to come to the window.  We just caught a glimpse of an otter as he disappeared into the rocks and brush at the pond's edge.  We knew that otters were around...but this was the first one we'd seen.

This morning Cameron again yelled for me to come to the window, "The otter's back!"  This time I was able to get out on the deck of the cabin and snap a little footage of the little guy.  The video is grainy and unstable, but I still enjoy watching the grace and agility of this little animal.

Dead Ends

Most days Sheri and I take an evening walk down the gravel road that winds through the woods along the lake.  Towards the far end we come to this terrific sign:  

I can't count the times in my life I'd have given somebody else's right leg for a sign like this.  My unerring judgment will lead me down a primrose path to a pretty and proper dead end.  I'll have to put my life in reverse and back out, generally getting stuck in the ditches a few times in the process.  

So how do you know when a path will lead to a dead end or not?  Don't ask me.  Not sure we'll ever figure that out.  But I'm at least making an attempt to avoid the dead end the Amish call too quick old, too late smart...so I'm trying to learn from the dead ends I've gotten myself into.  When faced with the two divergent paths through the woods (which generally don't come with helpful hand-painted signs), I'm trying to ask,

which one is my Master taking?

Typically, it's the narrow one.

Clarity

Am I comfortable with paradoxes?  Mystery?  Having things in life that are unknowable?  Not being able to understand all the reasons for why things happen?

The Apostle Paul had such a lock on the truth of the Gospel...but he also recognized that we've only been given so much.  Mystery, wonder, paradox and unanswered questions still float through our lives...a bit like a beautiful mist moving over the calm of an early morning lake.  

Of what we are able to see, Paul said,

for now we see through a glass, darkly

The other day my folks mentioned a passage they had heard quoted from Brennan Manning's book Ruthless Trust: The Ragamuffin's Path To God.  I looked it up.

When the brilliant ethicist John Kavanaugh went to work for three months at the "house of the dying" in Calcutta, he was seeking a clear answer as to how to spend the rest of his life.  On the first morning there he met mother Teresa.  She asked, "And what can I do for you?" Kavanaugh asked her to pray for him. 

"What do you want me to pray for?" she asked.  He voiced the request that he had borne thousands of miles from the United States: "Pray that I have clarity." 

She said firmly, "No, I will not do that."  When he asked her why, she said, "Clarity is the last thing you are holding on to and must let go of."  When Kavanaugh commented that she always seemed to have the clarity he longed for, she laughed and said, "I have never had clarity; what I have always had is trust.  So I will pray that you trust God."

Trust the God of the mists.

The Demise Of A Category

The Scriptures are rich.  There is so much there for us.

Take one little paragraph in Luke chapter 23.  Jesus has just died.  Luke introduces us to a man named Joseph who was

a member of the council, a good and upright man, 

who had not consented to their decision and action.

Rats.  This screws up everything.  Members of the council were not supposed to be good and upright.  I had just figured out that the Pharisees were the bad guys.  Pharisees are the self-righteous idiots in the stories that Luke tells.  And I liked it that way--keep people in neat and tidy categories so I know who to love, who to hate, who to respect and who to despise.  The Democrats are the bad guys, the Republicans the good guys...or is it the other way around?  Doesn't really matter, I just need to know who's who so I can decide without thinking whether I like you or not.

But the stories told throughout Scripture continually mess with my categories, and no more so than those told in the Gospels.  And here's one of the secrets about the narrow path that Jesus calls us to:  it's full of surprising people who we'd never think would be on it...and conspicuously absent are some of the people we thought for sure would be.  Categories mean nothing...a person's heart is everything.

Live Free Or Die

We feel extremely fortunate to have been given the opportunity to spend a few months in northern New England.  We're currently in Vermont and my folks live a few miles away across the Connecticut River in New Hampshire.  Cameron attends school in Jefferson, New Hampshire, in the shadow of mountains named Washington, Adams, and Madison.

The Presidentials from Jefferson Meadows, New Hampshire.

The area has an abiding sense of honor for the early leaders of this country.  New Hampshire's motto isn't some catchy new hook to pull tourists.  When you see a NH license plate, you're looking at words that were penned over 200 years ago...by a guy named John Stark, one of the area's Revolutionary War heroes.

Live free or die.  That'll pull the tourists in.

General John Stark

But actually, from a license-plate-motto perspective, it gets worse because we're not getting the half of it.  Stark's full statement, sent in a message to encourage his fellow patriots, was:

Live free or die; death is not the worst of evils.