On detachment

Some thoughts to reflect on regarding “things” and detachment.  Or to use another word: simplicity.  From Nouwen email newsletter.

To be able to enjoy fully the many good things the world has to offer, we must be detached from them. To be detached does not mean to be indifferent or uninterested. It means to be nonpossessive. Life is a gift to be grateful for and not a property to cling to.

A nonpossessive life is a free life. But such freedom is only possible when we have a deep sense of belonging. To whom then do we belong? We belong to God, and the God to whom we belong has sent us into the world to proclaim in his Name that all of creation is created in and by love and calls us to gratitude and joy. That is what the “detached” life is all about. It is a life in which we are free to offer praise and thanksgiving.

A poem from a (tck) third culture kid

Someone sent us this poem not too long ago and maybe it will help all of us to understand ourselves if we are tcks or if we are trying to understand others who are tcks.  Written by a high school senior.

America; Foreign Home

How could I tell them?
They would never understand…
That my heart and life are split in half,
Yet each bleeds into the other side, undefined.

They know not the side of me that belongs across the sea.
They only know what the eye can see; the American inside of me.
And yet this American is tainted, stained, infused
With the chaos, the wonders, the essence of her other home.

My people have not known what it is like to save a child from the streets.
My people have not known the abject poverty, the smell of disease.
They have not heard nor seen the vain, desperate cries to empty, ugly gods.
It is not enough to show them our pictures or see a video. It is not enough.
They simply don’t get it… Until that same voice pricks their hearts.

All the dinners, all the fellowships, all the talks
With all the average people in all the average churches
It wears one down to explain over and again that
America has now become the foreign land.
The awkward silence ensues, and they serve more food.

Because they don’t understand this foreign land, they don’t understand the foreign me.
I’m too foreign to be American, too American to be foreign.
I have become a puzzle-piece, with ever-changing, ever-morphing sides.
With some I do not fit; the kids in the States would never match my sides.
That is sometimes unbearable; sometimes freeing.
Sometimes both at once.
Maybe I have the worst and best of both worlds.
I will keep searching for my niche; for I know that my misshapen heart
Will always have a home no matter where I go…
Home is in following Him.

Alexandra
Bangalore, India
Sept. 2008

Where we live

Someone asked me where we live recently. Here is a link to our neighborhood. http://www.google.com/mapmaker?hl=en&ctype=0&gw=10&ll=14.681267,121.081765&spn=0.002091,0.003841&t=h&z=18&iwloc=2_0

Gloomers or the Brokest Generation

I am not sure if Mark Steyn originated these words for today’s current generation who will be inheriting the massive debt that the U.S. is currently incurring but I fear that they will fit for those of my grandchildren’s generation and beyond. A glimpse of the gloom Steyn writes about.

We thought you’d say that! God bless the youth of America! We of the Greatest Generation, the Boomers, and Generation X salute you, the plucky members of the Brokest Generation, the Gloomers, and Generation Y, as in “Why the hell did you old coots do this to us?”

Because, as politicians like to say, it’s about “the future of all our children.” And the future of all our children is that they’ll be paying off the past of all their grandparents. At 12 percent of GDP, this year’s deficit is the highest since the Second World War, and prioritizes not economic vitality but massive expansion of government. But hey, it’s not our problem. As Lord Keynes observed, “In the long run we’re all dead.” Well, most of us will be. But not you youngsters, not for a while. So we’ve figured it out: You’re the ultimate credit market, and the rest of us are all pre-approved!

REACH for forgiveness

My wife pointed me to this article on the process of forgiveness. Thanks dear. Simple way to remember the essentials.  Probably the hardest for me is E and it seems to me that if C was practiced more often, we would have a different world.

R ecall the pain

E mpathize with the offender

A ltruistic gift of forgivness

C ommittment to publicly forgive

H olding onto forgiveness

Why we need to give now more than ever

Very challenging article out of World Mag on giving or rather the excuses we make for not doing so.  Sure applies to me here where there is so much poverty.   Err on the side of generosity is what one author said in a book I read on giving and mission.  Anyway, here is the latest paragraphs but I hope you can read the entire article.

It’s a foolish idea, but I’m wondering if we can work up the courage to give recklessly this year. Wouldn’t it be something if our response to hard economic times was not to give less but to give more? What would the world think of us if all of us turned off the financial advice shows, imperiled ourselves just a little, and gave so much that every crook and lowlife and spendthrift in town darkened our churches’ doors?

They’d call us fools, most likely. Which is a sign, I think, that we were getting ourselves on a better path. It’s when the world thinks us prudent, or business-like, or—merciful God forbid—normal, that we’d better worry.

The land is filled with need and a growing fear. What will we do in the face of it?

A new definition of friendship?

In an article which I am sure a lot of people will disagree with, Meghan Daum writes about a new understanding of friendship in our social networking world today. She described how a 2004 survey showed few people felt that they had a close confidant.  Maybe for the younger crowd, Facebook has helped on the friend front but for those of us over thirty, do we feel any less lonely even if we have hundreds of “friends?”  When I am asked to be someone’s “friend” on Facebook and I barely know them,  I begin to get a bit overwhelmed.   Basically, I am in Facebook to stay connected with the people I care about, to enter into “their world” so to speak.  And, for being accepted as their friend,  I really appreciate that.   Well, here is what Daum wrote.  Reactioins.

I think of a friend as an actual person with whom I have an actual history and who I enjoy actually seeing. It seems, however, that this is no longer the definition of “friend.”

A friend is someone on your Facebook page or in your Twitter circle. A friend is someone you might know personally but who could just as easily be the friend of a friend of some other Facebook friend you don’t actually know. In any case, these friends have been assigned value not necessarily because of anything they’ve actually done with you or for you, but because, well, they just exist in the world and so do you.

Tired

Being on vacation and resting from being tired so this seems to fit

Design

Link to an article about why people are now wanting to ban the use of the word “design” as in intelligent design.

Traveling

A busy month it has been.  Ten days traveling in Mindanao, at several places without internet.  Home for a week, took one day for a silent retreat.  Now, we are in Baguio on a week vacation and only internet is when we go to the internet cafe.  A lot has been happening–some of it has been hard but God remains present with us.  Home on Saturday, then back out on Sunday to Tuesday to Calapan.  Then, April should mean staying in Manila I hope!!  Planning to join a silent retreat for three days during Holy Week with friends.   Read recently some Madeleine L’Engle.  Reading thru Yancey’s book on Prayer and finishing up second edition of Journal of Spiritual Formation and Theology–once again outstanding.  Hope to have a few things to write about when we are in one place with internet–meaning home.

Walking the road of the righteous

Reading this week in Psalm 25, a Psalm in which the author seems to be trying to trust (wait, hope, follow) a God, full of unfailing love and faithfulness despite defeat, deceit, deep distress and potential disgrace.  Verse 11 stands powerfully at the center of the Psalm,  “For the honor of Your name, forgive my many, many sins.” NLT   And then, in verse 18, the Psalmist pleads,

Feel my pain, see my trouble and forgive all my sins

This is a Psalm I needed to read!   Then, I pulled out Craige’s commentary on Psalms 1-50 and this is what he had to say,

The prayer is that of a person who has made the choice and is walking the road of the righteous; but the dispassionate wisdom has been transformed to passionate petition, for the right road is not an easy one on which to walk.   It is lined with enemies who would like nothing better than to put the walker to shame; and the traveler on the road is also plagued with internal doubts, as he recalls in his mind previous wanderings from the road and former sins.  The essence of the road of the righteous is this: it is a road too difficult to walk without the companionship and friendship of God.

The Psalmist, troubled from without and within, has stopped for a moment in the way; he knows he cannot turn back, but scarcely knows how to continue.  And so he prays that God would show him the raod and make him walk in it (4-5).  He knows that he does not deserve such guidance and strength, but as one forgiven of sin, he is confident that God will show him the road again (v2b).

Now, I know why I need to read this Psalm this week.  I am desperate for the companionship and friendship of God on this journey.

No one ever makes it alone

Can’t sleep (having that  coffee at 4 pm might have something to do with it) so why not get up and blog.  I have been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s amazing book Outliers,   in which he tries to analyze exactly what it is that makes some people successful and others not.Tonight, I finished reading the chapter called, “The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 2.”  In it, he followed the story of two geniuses, Robert Oppenheimer and Chris Langan–one most people (that have studied science) are familiar with and the other a relative unknown.  What struck me is what he said about Chris Langan, someone possessing what some would say is the greatest mental ability of anyone alive today.  Why had Langan lived in relative obscurity and been unable to “make it” in academia?   Listen to what Gladwell says,

Every experience he had outside his own mind had ended in frustration.  He knew he needed to do a better job of navigating the world, but he didn’t know how.  .  . These were things that others, with lesser minds, could master easily.  But that’s because those others had had help along the way, and Chris Langan never had.  It wasn’t an excuse.  It was a fact.  He’d had to make his way alone, and no one–not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses–ever makes it alone. (bold italics not in original quote)

Looking at worldview

Does the church need to do some some serious study on the worldview of today’s generation.  An article by John Stonestreet at Breakpoint suggests so. The church today finds itself ministering in a cross-cultural context just as much as any missionary overseas.

Referring to a book by Christian Smith and Melinda Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, Stonestreet suggests that we need to help today’s students figure out what Christianity is all about.  And he is referring to those with a church background! He suggests that the contemporary worldview battles today “are rooted in a basic disagreement of what it means to be and live as human.”

Today’s students enter a world of runaway biotechnology, postmodern social constructions of gender, virtual online identities, family redefinition, distorted understandings of beauty, and multiple sexual orientations, each of which fundamentally challenge our concept of humanness. Further, our culture has largely embraced Darwin, trivialized Scripture, and relativized truth, and has therefore left few stable resources to negotiate this corporate identity crisis.

He issues a challenge for us to work on clarifying definitions which in this post-modern age seems to be a bit tricky to say the least.  Stonestreet writes,  “Assuming that we share definitions, or that traditional definitions will go unquestioned, with the emerging generation is a mistake with significant consequences.”

Avoiding the bad or doing the good?

More Lenten reflections from Catherine Larson out of James 4:17 at Breakpoint. Some of us are better than others at “avoiding the wrong things” but how do we measure up in “doing the right things”?   I didn’t say express those hurtful words last week to my sister but I withheld love and encouragement!!

“Anyone who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins” is what James 4:17 says.  Actually, when you read Jesus, even avoiding the bad is not as easy as I previously thought.  Jesus says, if you look at a woman with lust in your heart, you have already committed adultery with her (Mtt 5:28)

Sin is both omitting goodness as well as committing evil.  Larson writes,

“It reminds me what a huge gap there is between me and the perfect standard God requires. I have committed sins. But I have also omitted goodness. I have neglected the words of praise someone needed; I’ve idled away my talents; I’ve not been generous when God has prompted.

Larson also writes about repentance; that is “a good place to begin before we ever come close to thinking about the wrongs others have done to us.”

Why shouldn’t I get a B?

Article on student thinking about evaluation and grades