She Must and Shall Go Free

Judging from the response to my last posting, I’m going to assume that the majority of you either enjoyed it or are still in the midst of the lengthy process that entails reading it. Regardless, I enjoyed writing it, despite my seemingly tongue-in-cheek candor, and yes, Gennie, all those details are etched in the framework of my mind.

Stream-of-consciousness is one of my favorite forms of writing because it reveals the true nature of the experience of a moment. Every instance, every second of your life has smells, tastes, sounds, an entire menagerie of feelings and intrusions into your soul that create a culture, of sorts, of the instantaneous. Some of these things are pleasant, some are obviously not, and deep in the recesses of our minds, they all merge together like a sort of cocktail of the inner-self. And no, I’m not a New-Ager, so shut up. We associate odors with places, emotional responses with sounds, cellular ringtones with friends and family (Kent Hodskins and “Rubber-Band Man” is a personal favorite). One second from now, nothing will be the same as it just was, forever lost to the world save to the interior of your brain, but somewhere deep inside of you, it resonates within your soul, springing back up when you least expect it. This is why, perhaps, you’ll encounter phantom urges, like the desire to call your grandmother after smelling shortbread cookies. Or it could just be something entirely scientific that negates that entire theory. What do I know? I sleep under a “Learn the ABC’s from Clifford the Big Red Dog” blanket at night.

The thing that astounds me is that God actually cares about each and every moment of my existence, and yours, be they awake or obscured by sleep. Existing outside the realm of space and time, He is intimately concerned with the thoughts, actions, and individual lives of every single human being that has ever walked the face of the earth, and He has all of eternity to consider each of us: how He crafted us uniquely and individually from the dust of the earth, if our capillaries are taking enough blood to our muscles, if our strength of character is strong enough to withstand the next trial that we will endure, if we should order a spicy chicken sandwich or just have a garden salad… You and I, we are of vast importance to God, be we Christian or no, because in spite of our natural tendency toward evil, he yearns for us to know Him just as he knows us. I don’t think my brain can handle that yet, having taken into consideration that while God created science, theology, energy, and the reticulated python, I spent my time in chemistry class scribbling battles between stick figures and the head of my professor, Ms. Kotulla (Oblongata), mounted on the body of a Shetland pony. Creativity, I have down; it’s the channeling said creativity into the formation of a fully-functioning universe filled with individualized souls that I haven’t figured out yet.

It freaks me out, because God could be doing something divinely important like stopping tsunamis or moving via the Holy Spirit to cause Westerners to stop caring so much about who wins American Idol, but instead, He’s interested in me, brushing my teeth, clad in a pair of sweatpants and a YMCA t-shirt in a dimly lit orphanage bathroom. And its not that God doesn’t have any business being involved in the situation – He did create the matter that forms every bit of substance in the aforementioned situation, myself included – but it just seems so… I don’t know… infinitesimal? My parents love me, but my mother doesn’t lie awake at night pondering over the thought of her son cleaning out his toaster or wiping up dog piss. I hope.

And yet God is there, every moment of every day of our lives, watching not as a passive eternal observer, but in anticipation that we will seek His wisdom and power to guide our thoughts, lips, and hands on a moment by moment basis. It’s that power and wisdom that produces real spiritual fruit, that makes those moments survivable en masse when they all go to crap. When I stop to think about it, really think about it, it’s this reality that makes it impossible for me to be anything other than a Christian; without a God that is this eternally interested in me, this compassionate, this powerful yet personable, I will not be able to make it through life, period. I was a wretch in every sense of the word before I met Jesus Christ, taking pleasure in my sin and agony in it’s aftereffects, to the extent that I wished for death, and tried to bring it upon myself multiple times. Peace, patience, kindness, etc? They sustain me and do not exist apart from God our Father. Thus, I am neither too humble nor proud to say that I cannot survive this life without a God who longs to guide me through every second of it.

I say all this because I find myself often examining my life through that lens, taking careful mental notes of the particulars of every given situation. One could say that it comes in part from the four years of collegiate journalism classes, but in truth, it’s out of a love for people. If God can love me in such intimate fashion, then it behooves me to love and show similar interest in those whom He has commanded me to love as myself. I’m not watching each moment of my life pass by with my notepad out, jotting notes as I go; I’m watching, laughing, living in community with the blessed handful that will pray over me, dance around me, worship with me, and pass by me. The hands that taught me to ride a bike have meaning, just as do those who hand me my Taco Bell order. The love apportioned to each is different, but if I show compassion to the one and indifference to the other, I am practicing contempt in its mildest form.

Details are my life, because they make us individuals and give substance to our memories. The depth and breadth of a life can’t be summed up as physical characteristics, nor can it be defined in narrow demographic terminology. For example, when I think about my friend Ben, I don’t just visualize his face and his personality, but I think about all things associated with him: the smell of fried eggs and bacon, chewing tobacco awkwardly and haphazardly hidden in the middle console of an Isuzu Trooper that itself feels reminiscent of the log cabin from White Fang, climber’s chalk, inappropriate dirty jokes, plaid shorts that fray at the edges of the pockets, red beard and red beer, laughter and longing. He’s more than a burly guy sporting a red beard, a student, an engineer-to-be. We are not to be defined by our occupations or our ages, because as people, we are more than our paychecks and birth certificates.

So as I sit in a coffee shop, in a bar, at work, on a bus, I’m learning the world around me rather than absorbing or being absorbed by it. The individual persons around me have their own stories, their own lives which are part of this great big meta-narrative that God is writing out in eternity. You are of vast importance to me because you have eternal significance in the eyes of Jesus Christ. The barista at Arsegas who spent three months of her life in Africa as an aide worker, feeling that she never truly aided anybody because she was sick with dysentery the entire time. Calvin, the security guard at the Olive Branch Mission in Chicago, who served as a personal body guard to the likes of Ozzy Osbourne and Kurt Cobain, and knows how to make near-perfect apple-flavored taffy. Bipin, a Nepali friend who accompanied Jason and I to Chitwan, and is related to roughly half the city of Bharatpur; he likes to wear his mother’s socks. Professor Brian Wilkie, who didn’t believe in “society” and died of a heart attack the semester after he purchased my Beaux and Arrows t-shirt (some Pi Phi function I never attended, bought the shirt at a flea market) in the middle of a class because it reminded him of his wife.

Taxi drivers armed with false smiles and dirty jokes. Professors with degrees and divorce papers in equal proportions. Agnostics who secretly fear God and missionaries who secretly don’t know Him. The elderly waitress at Wafflehouse who works the midnight shift because she’s afraid of being alone. The gang member saving up his wages from dealing heroin to go to law school. Female Maoists who admit they only joined the revolution for the free education and child care. Tibetan. Jewish. South African. Australian. We’re all beautiful and damaged, lugging our burdens through a world that cares for nothing other than a quick fix and a polished exterior. God loves His broken people, and so do I.

So what’s the point of all this? Why invite you through this parade of characters for any reason other than a testament to my ability to remember the minute?

God loves Nepal and is in the process of redeeming it, that’s why. If my description of Kathmandu made you cringe, imagine what it’s like to live here, not temporary like myself, but to have been born, raised, and reared for death in a society that is hostile toward humanity and hostile toward the cross. The Nepali, having been born into one of the ten poorest countries in the world, face an uphill battle for survival that literally begins with birth: Nepal boasts some of the globe’s highest morality rates for both infants and their mothers. An average family of four lives off of less that $400 U.S. per year, eats meat only one day out of that year, and works day and night farming land that they will never own in the world’s only remaining feudal system. Social persecution hides behind the veil of Hinduism, with ignorance and fear permeating every level of the caste system which serves as the country’s backbone. Death is an escape from the pain of life here, a reentry into the pool of souls that awaits the reawakening of Vishnu and the destruction and reproduction of the universe.

The world views Nepal as this mystical, forbidden realm, a carefree playground for Buddhist monks and Hindu seers; thus, the myriad of tourists who traipse through the mountains and crowd the over-priced guest houses are caught off guard by the sheer desperation of the poverty they encounter. Child laborers and crumbling, vacant temples aren’t featured in the brochures, nor are leper colonies and vagabond immigrants. This is a land in which struggle and poverty have become part of the culture, to the credit of the strength and the hearts of its people. What is surprising is that despite the lack of money, health care, available work, and food, there is no overwhelming feeling of anxiety or desperation in the Nepali. They are, as a whole, joyful, light-hearted, and celebratory in the face of what drives the West to the brink of personal hell. To be Nepali then, is to bear the weight of an inextinguishable pain and endure it with joy.

Each time I take a micro-van back to my home in Godawari from the city, I find myself fighting the urge to cry as I watch daily life unfolding outside the window of my diesel-powered torpedo. Young mothers nursing their babies, knee-deep in the village bathing pool as they chat with friends; elderly women, backs permanently bent from decades of porting loads of rice on their shoulders, who kiss the hands of their nephews and neighbors, welcoming them inside for a cup of milk tea and biscuits; a crowd of unemployed men in their early 40’s, laughing as they play carom-board (a popular game that works like billiards, except with tiny discs) and share a package of cigarettes that has been graciously provided by the shopkeeper who is currently in third place. The buildings are drenched in a façade of mold and brick sweat, the streets buried in a fog of diesel exhaust and dust, everything in sight either unfinished or on the verge of condemned.

At first glance, this looks like a dying land, mired in crumbling structures and crumbling people. Step off that micro-van, however, and there is nothing to be heard but the giggling of local gossip, the laughter and singing of children. Between the broken homes and shops grow fields of poppies, the Technicolor yellow of the Land of Oz. Naked infants weave in and out of traffic, cackling at the top of their lungs as they chase after a neighbor’s puppy. Little girls accepting free chocolates from a shopkeeper who can’t afford to give them away, while their younger brothers goad bike tires down the street with a stick. I honestly find myself wondering at times if I’ve been transported into some sort of dream world that begins where Charles Dickens left off. Nepal is a country inhabited by the generous, exuberant poor, the sort of people who only exist in Oliver Twist or Newsies.

True, one could write all this off as some sort of escapism of the masses, a country full of people who have embraced absurdity as a means of intentionally denying the seriousness of their struggle. But the beauty is the openness of the people to the message of the Gospel! This is a country whose people have starved spiritually for ages, oppressed by the silent idols whom they daily pay offering to, and now, suddenly, the unknown God has made Himself readily available. The Nepali hunger for Jesus Christ like no people I have ever seen, in spite of familial oppression and social persecution.

One year removed from the collapse of the Hindu monarchy, the Church has completely transformed. What was once considered a taboo underground network of heretics is now a mobilized force of truth and compassion. Nepali Christians man government offices, care for the diseased and the incapacitated, operate children’s homes and health clinics, and share their faith with friends and family. I’m routinely surprised by the number of men I see who are intentionally involved in the local body because they often outnumber the women, a true inverse of the American church (unless of course, you count singles ministries).

The real triumph is that that the Nepali church is the Nepali church, unaffected in its cultural expression of the image of God by Western missionaries and Western standards. The charismatic movement has really taken off here because the Nepali are, by nature, attuned to the arts of emotive song and dance, but when you watch them worship, there aren’t traces of the seeds of foreign missionaries in their songs or teaching. This is the gospel at work, in a new language and a new culture. Nepalis had to invent new words to interpret the bible because language did not previously exist to describe things like grace, mercy, or agape love. There is light in the darkness here in the jaws of the beast, and it grows stronger each and every day.

In light of the pain and the sickness and the squattie potties, there is consistent encouragement here through the sheer amount of growth taking place in the hearts that comprise this land. A missionary serving on the Tibetan border recently returned with stories about attempts at evangelism that were met with enthusiasm by the hill peoples because Christianity is now regarded as “that Nepali religion.” Just this week, one of the boys in our hostel returned from a holiday with extended family in a remote eastern village to report that, after several years of prayer, over half the village has accepted Christ in the last month! The Nepali may need pastoral training and personal discipleship, but they are already mobilized enough to commission their own missionaries to surrounding nations or the purpose of church-planting. Praise God! There may not even be a niche for foreign missionaries in this country by the end of the next two decades!

So don’t stop praying for us, and by no means cease your prayers for the spiritual redemption of Nepal. Pray for Christian leaders to be borne out of the Newari and Chettri peoples, out of the Kham Magars in the west, out of the Maoists, out of the Brahmin caste. Pray for the bible colleges, that they would prepare a new generation of Nepali men and women to courageously pursue righteousness and teach the truth of the gospel of salvation to their communities. Pray for Christian marriages, that they would be built on a foundation of sacrificial love and honest communication.

Pray for Jason and me as our needs are many. As we begin work on designing a library for CWC, pray that we would find affordable furniture and appropriate educational material, and that the environment we produce would be conducive to the children’s studies. Pray that as we teach through the parables of Christ in our evening devotionals with the children, that the truth of God’s living Word would penetrate their hearts and minds and produce spiritual fruit. Pray for the bible study we are leading with the older boys, that their enthusiasm for Christ would be unwavering, and their commitment to spiritual leadership would result in a powerful ministry that continues long after Jason and I have departed. We will be trekking to Mount Everest base camp the last two weeks of March with a Sherpa guide who is a believer, so pray that our health holds up as we physically condition our bodies, and pray for our ministry as we hike: we are hoping to pass out bibles and materials in several villages along the established trail.

I’ll leave you without another recent photo-editing experiment, this one of some village boys pole vaulting into the Rapti River. Grace and peace to you all in the name of God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Bear out.