Cut the Lights! Guerilla Blogging!

I alluded to a power outage in my last post, and it dawned on me that not having electricity is a blessing in disguise of sorts. One of the painful lessons that I’m being taught even in the early weeks of my time here in Nepal is that many of the things that we as Americans consider to be necessities are luxuries to the least of God’s people. And I could go off on a tangent about American spending saving habits measured against our lack of heart and aid for the Third World, but that would go against the meaning behind this post. So I won’t. Lucky us.

Anyway, I find it funny that most of things I can’t even function without in America are mere afterthoughts here in Nepal. No electricity? No water? No television? No Internet? No worries. We eat by candlelight. We gather water from mountain streams and boil it in on our solar cooker, a gigantic dish with solar panels that will be subject of a future post. We go without bathing (some of us longer than necessary). We read books and climb hills and chase chickens through a neighbor’s rice field. We go to bed when the sun goes down and we wake before it rises the next morning. Or at least the orphans do.

All this to say, I’m taking a renewed pleasure in the simple portions of the living experience that is humanity. Sitting on the roof of the Centre, I’ve taken an interest in watching life unfold in the farmlands and communities below me (kind’ve feels like being Batman sometimes, except ; I contemplate who these families are as they plant their fields, fly the kites, swing from bamboo playgrounds, and play futball in the dirt roads. How does God see these people? Where are they from? What do they think, feel, believe? How are their marriages, their friendships? Are they joyful? Do they cry? How does this lifestyle reflect a picture of the Creator that I’ve never seen before?

They work so hard for so little. The family of five (Gramps included) spent a week harvesting and replanting their entire cabbage patch from sunrise to sunset each day, and they did it together. Laughing, eating tomatoes from the vine, chasing a rogue rooster through the carrots; it was beautiful. Nowhere are the stresses and slaveries of the American lifestyle that so many of the urban Nepalis yearn for. No cell phones or cable bills, iPods or ESPN.

Jason was listening to a John Piper sermon the other day in which Piper alluded to the fact that the things we pursue in our personal times are the portions of our lives that bring us freedom or enslavement. How very true… The world we strive for seduces us, sedates us, and in the end, it kills our hearts minute by minute, day by day. My hobbies are not inherently sinful, but my idolatrous lusts for entertainment and knowledge have taken up a cancerous partition of my heart. And now I see a community untouched by these things and I find…peace.

I’ve made it a point to begin pursuing the spiritual disciplines of prayer and meditation each day. Scripture memory, which was once a chore, is now a joy to pursue. Waking up on the other hand; still working on that. I read a lot in America, but rarely did I truly savor the experience. Here, without the distractions and the constant fear of being watched and found out, the whole process takes on new life. I read through Judges and felt the reluctance in Gideon’s heart and the encrusted dirt and dim torchlight of the earthen vessels he and his army bore into the camp of the Philistines. And I started reading the Lord of the Rings again.

It’s official. If you want to travel the mines of Moria and the golden heavens of Lothlorien, one needs do it by candlelight. No car alarms, laptops, or Take Two Video commercials seeping under door from the next room. Make some tea, light on the cream, heavy on the sugar and some ginger. Quiet rooms, quiet hands, quiet hearts. And a single, thick candle. That’s the way we do it in Nepal.

So with the power out (and with every head bow and every eye closed), I read all the way through the book in the course of two days. And I loved it, again, and again, and again. So I leave you with a fitting poem that one of the Shire’s best wrote on my heart during my travels through Middle-Earth.

Recited upon the beginning of a journey far more perilous than that faced by Jason and I, but no less life-altering, I thought the words of a hobbit matched our wonderment more than sufficiently. Big ups to Bilbo, Shire 4 Lyfe…

Upon the hearth the fire is red,
Beneath the roof there is a bed;
But not yet weary are our feet,
Still round the corner we may meet
A sudden tree or standing stone
That none have seen but we alone.
Tree and flower and leaf and grass,
Let them pass! Let them pass!
Hill and water under sky,
Pass them by! Pass them by!

Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate,
And though we pass them by today,
Tomorrow we may come this way
And take the hidden paths that run
Towards the Moon or to the Sun.
Apple, thorn, and nut and sloe,
Let them go! Let them go!
Sand and stone and pool and dell,
Fare you well! Fare you well!

Home is behind, the world ahead,
And there are many paths to tread
Through shadows to the edge of night,
Until the stars are all alight.
Then world behind and home ahead,
We’ll wander back to home and bed.
Mist and twilight, cloud and shade,
Away shall fade! Away shall fade!
Fire and lamp, and meat and bread,
And then to bed! And then to bed!

Bilbo Baggins