Marvel vs. DC vs. Zondervan

I feel the need to follow up on my last post, partially because I feel like I left a lot of loose ends with what I said, and partially because I happen to think about the concept of identity pretty frequently as of late. Thus, I apologize in advance if I, as usual, seemingly meander a bit on and off topic.

Superman is bull-crap. Not just the comic books or the film series, but the entire concept itself. Bull-crap. The guy can chunk a runaway train toting radioactive isotopes into outer space, fly against the orbit of the earth so fast that he transcends the space/time barrier and reverses human history, and melt a titanium wall with his flatulence, but slap on a pair of plastic eyeglasses on him and you’ve got this incredibly muscular doofus with no social skills. Superman is like that kid that everybody knew of growing up who spoiled whatever make-believe game he was involved in by refusing to adhere to the phantom rules.

Me: “Bang! I shot you with my stick!”

Super-kid: “No you didn’t, I’m wearing a bullet-proof vest!”

Me: “Um, ok, but my stick, uhh…it’s a laser-stick. With guns on it. That are also lasers.”

Super-kid: “Well my vest also has a force-field built into it. And, it can cook macaroni and cheese. Waaaay better than that stupid macaroni that your mom makes with the ham in it.”

Me: “The ham is awesome, and my mom says it’s a good source of protein. Besides, I poisoned the macaroni and cheese, so now you’re dead. For real.”

Super-kid: “I know you poisoned the macaroni and cheese, but now I’m a ghost, so you can’t kill me and I have ghost powers. I just turned you into a butt. A girl butt. This game sucks anyway. I’m gonna go home and play Toejam and Earl.”

Me: “Yeah, well, my name’s in the bible! Both my first and my middle. Loser!”

The deal at stake is that, as a person, Superman adds up to this gigantic question mark. I can’t remember any point in the Superman continuum that you ever get the opportunity to actually see him reveal anything about who he really is on the inside. Alter-egos (and you can make the argument that Clark Kent is his false identity and Superman is the real guy if you want, I don’t care) and monologue thought bubbles aside, the only side we ever see of Supes is this blue and red beast of a man with a serious savior complex. Sure, he fights off armies of jellyfish robots and came back from the dead, but what does he do or think when he’s not pummeling something? Is he closed-off emotionally due to being insecure about his abilities, or because of familial issues? What does he, being nearly indestructible, think about life and death? What does he freaking eat?

I’m not going to lie: I read comic books compulsively up until I graduated high school, long beyond the point that such a habit is no longer considered socially acceptable. In fact, I wonder if one of the reasons comic book readers like superheroes so much is because they are forced to hide a portion of their identity (read that as, the fact that they are huge nerds) from the world in order to be accepted by society. This sort of behavior is actually a common denominator in the life of nearly everybody I know in some shape or form, but I’m getting ahead of myself…

When I was a kid, my allowance came in weekly increments of change that never really belonged to me; my pockets were more or less a form of pre-debt consolidation for the local baseball card and comic book stores. Every Saturday after baseball practice (or, as my Dad fondly referred to it, “Watch Jordan play tic-tac-toe in the dirt behind second base along with the shortstop”) or soccer practice (also lovingly referred to as “Watch Jordan run back and forth awkwardly because he doesn’t understand what the ‘wing’ actually does”), I’d visit the local comic shop down the street from my grandmother’s apartment complex to find the best means of spending what would have been my seed money for college. I’d spend hours digging through bins with my little brother, looking for back issues of X-Force and Shadow of the Bat, waiting for my father to get exasperated and go sit in the car so I could sift through something really bloody and masochistic like Spawn or Barbie. Keep in mind, Spawn was still cool at this point because they hadn’t ruined the character by making a movie with John Leguizamo in it yet.

Now, I’m aware that amongst other nerd obsessions that have recently become socially acceptable cultural phenomena – cardigan sweaters, Star Wars, and Dance Dance Revolution come to mind – comics have received heavy vindication (I hope) due to Hollywood marketability and sheer storytelling abilities. Batman, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four receive credit where credit is due, but apart from the camp humor of watching guys with stretchy arms or adamantium claws, there are many truly fascinating graphic stories out there. Road to Perdition was this viscerally emotional tale about a mobster and his son that was adapted into one of the best movies Tom Hanks has ever done, and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman provoked more thought than any other piece of fiction I’ve ever read. Watchmen, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Maus, The Killing Joke. There’s a lot of good nerd reads out there. Pick a weekend, buy a couple at Barnes and Noble, and make sure to hide them from your roommate/spouse, for the sake of keeping up appearances.

Anyway, I’m just going to go ahead and admit that I’m a sell-out: my favorite superhero, by far, is Spiderman. And this, kids, is where I actually start to tie everything together. See, just like Tobey Maguire, and Stan Lee, and MTV, and your eight-year-old cousin will tell you, no matter how he’s packaged, Spiderman is a head case. He’s one of us. Peter Parker isn’t a case of ‘roid rage with a conscience, he doesn’t have a cool gun, and to be honest, his powers aren’t necessarily even all that cool. Peter is already suffering under the weight of insecurities regarding the nature of his existence, his masculinity, the death of his parents and subsequent “adoption” by his aunt and uncle, and his inability to find acceptance within the social realm he finds himself a part of when we first meet him. Forget the radioactive spider and the “with great power comes great responsibility” speech: the story is interesting because it’s ours. Let me explain.

I love Spiderman because I can forget that Peter Parker is Spiderman. Mask on or off, Peter is dealing with the complexities of becoming an adult, a husband, a father, a person in a world that is analyzing his every move. He faces social games, marriage, depression, guilt, infidelity, addiction, and mortality with the same fear and subsequent shame that many of us do; the only difference is that he fights supervillians and climbs the Brooklyn Bridge in what could feasibly be called his spare time. This is a guy who is at much at war with himself as he is with Dr. Octopus or Electro. Peter Parker has some serious personal demons, and his battles in costume make for an interesting parallel to the war that takes place within the confines of his soul. He wants so badly to reveal to the entire world just exactly who he is (and I’m aware that in the current storylines, he recently did – yes, I’m still a nerd), but the fear of the repercussions of judgment and further attack keeps him in stasis. And so he fights and fails as a man, fights and fails as a husband, fights and fails as a hero, and dies a little bit more inside with each issue.

Spiderman is fascinating because as much, if not more, of the story takes place in the relational realm, as opposed to the usual trend of “fight, fight some more, reveal even worse bad guy behind the plot, to be continued…” The whole mythology behind Spiderman begs the question: Can a man bear the strain of trying to maintain two identities at once? The conclusion is a compelling no, as is evidenced by the number of times that the character has been forced to temporarily walk away from one persona or another. The tension of trying to lead to lives at once destroys his marriage and his friendships (I’ve never had a friend get so mad at me that he dressed up as a goblin and chased me around on a hang glider), and he repeatedly reaches the threshold of tolerance, entertaining thoughts of abandonment or suicide.

I don’t think I really have to spell out the application point here. And please don’t take this as some indicator that I have some heavy sin issue in my life that I’m trying to allude to without confessing aloud; I wouldn’t abuse such a public forum to do so. I believe that we all, Christian and non-Christian alike, face this impossible and unnecessary battle of trying to pretend we don’t differentiate between the face that we wear on the inside and the perceived face that we wear for the outside world. The truth is that most of us are hurting, very deeply and very visibly, but we will fake whatever we have to in order to keep that from escaping. We wear one face at work, at church, at community group, at the dinner table, this carefully constructed facade that invokes, hopefully, a more than suitable abstract of someone who “has it all together.” We see the truth when we look in the mirror, when we pray, when we cry.

The character of Christ is assumed by any and all who are called to salvation by His glorious name, and yet…the deeply rooted fears in our hearts eat away at us, personal demons trying to convince you of anything other than an identity change at the foot of the cross. The bread and wine slowly, inattentively, are relegated to the back of our minds, muffled by the indictments of a past that is refuses to be forgotten:

“You’re too emotionally needy. Seriously, the only reason that you don’t feel like you can handle all these “trials and tribulations” is because you’re weak and pathetic. Jesus is already tired of you coming to Him with all of your shame and your baggage. No wonder your father left.”

“You gave up your virginity to him and you didn’t even love him; now he’s gone. Do you honestly think that God forgets that kind of thing? There are so many out there like you, and you seriously thought you were special. Not even close. Idiot. You couldn’t trust him; what makes you honestly believe that God will be any different?”

“Do you really think that you’re going to make a career out of this? You’re too stupid to make this decision, and you know that based on past failures. Let’s face it: you aren’t cut out to do the things you think you love to do. Maybe you don’t even love to do them, you’d just like to think you do. Are you confused yet? Good…”

The suit of fig leaves may have originated in the Garden of Eden, but Adam’s handicraft has yet to fall out of style. The beauty of that illustration is the sheer frailty of the veneer that Adam and Eve, that consequently we, apply to themselves, ourselves. Adam and Eve become aware of their nakedness, of their vulnerability before God and one another, and their first inclination is to cover it all up But leaves tear easily, and they still take the rough shape of whatever it is that they’re intended to cover. The shock and subsequent fear of being seen for what they really are – frail and weak – pushes them into full-on retreat mode, and the ramifications of this are still being played out in our churches and homes today. We prod and we poke at each other, and because we all want to appear perfect, that’s what we weigh ourselves against. The result is generation upon generation that come up short, scared, and defensive.

What I really intended to communicate in my previous post was this: I am constantly learning the same lessons from God over and over again, not because I’m stupid and not because I don’t understand the application of them, but because I don’t like what is being revealed in myself. I don’t like it when Scripture and circumstances collide in this thing we call life, and I’m suddenly revealed for who I really am in light of the message of the gospel. So I add more leaves to the exterior, do a little sewing, and return to my contented statement of concealment, from God, from family, from friends, from pastors, and resolutely, myself. I don’t want to face the truth about myself, I don’t think any of us do. I’m offended by the notion that I can’t save myself, and in a direct contradiction of my dependency upon the salvation of grace by faith alone, I’ll do anything and everything to prove that I can. And fight and fail, fight and fail, and end up where I was last week all over again. Somebody made a joke last weekend about the Christian life often feeling like that Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day; I’m not laughing.

I wish I had a repentant heart more often, a truly repentant heart. I wish I wasn’t so hard and arrogant that I didn’t have to be repeatedly humbled by my mistakes and big fat mouth. I wish I wasn’t so opinionated on things that I don’t really have an opinion on. I wish that I could speak with passion about the things that I care about, and mean hose things when I say them. I wish I loved myself as much as Jesus Christ does. I wish I didn’t worry so much, more than I think I do, or that I had more confidence in God to “provide me this day with this day’s bread.” I wish that I trusted myself more often.

The beauty of my situation is that wishes simply reveal the fears of an insecure heart. If a dead heart can be revived, a fearful one can certainly be comforted, and I’ve assuredly felt that in the last fortnight. Yup, I just used fortnight in a sentence, and its 2007. I have security in Christ, but I may very well have put Him inside a box, oh anonymous commenter. I’m currently experiencing the joy of “isolated authenticity of faith,” i.e. seeing the promises of God revealed outside of the context of a bible study or banging on a drum in the woods with a bunch of dudes in our underwear. Whoa, weird. Anyway, I thank you for your prayers for me, as I have felt the immense joy that I have come to associate with intercession for the pains of my heart. It’s not that, as the popular aphorism goes, “a ship’s course has been righted”; it’s that a portion of its weight has been cast off, freeing it to pursue the intended course from which it never truly deviated.

This morning was spent searching for a working ATM and enduring the stress of the immigration office, and the evening in a Nepali emergency room with one of the boys from the hostel, Prakesh, who broke his arm during an impromptu football match. The doctor asked me to help set Prakesh’s arm since I had proven my worth by crafting a makeshift sling out of a sweater back at the hostel, while a nurse requested that I simultaneously restrain a drunk man in the next bed from removing his IV because he’d suffered severe internal injuries after falling out of a tree. I’m not even going to begin to indulge you with a description of what that experience was like, not because you can’t handle it or because I’m running long, but because it didn’t define my day. What did was this passage by Adam Clarke I ran across in the waiting room after washing plaster and blood off my hands, and thus, I leave you with it. God is:

“…the eternal, independent, and self-existent Being; the Being whose purposes and actions spring from himself, without foreign motive of influence; he who is absolute in dominion; the most pure, the most simple, the most spiritual of all essences; infinitely perfect; and eternally self-sufficient, needing nothing that he has made; illimitable in his immensity, inconceivable in his mode of existence, and indescribable in his essence; known fully only by himself, because an infinite mind can only be fully comprehended by itself. In a word, a Being who, from his infinite wisdom, cannot err or be deceived, and from his infinite goodness, can do nothing but what is eternally just, and right, and kind.” (Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, 1894)

That there…that there’s my identity. My finite little brain is going to sleep a little more infinitely at peace tonight.

Tapai Ko Hunuhuncha?

Who are you?

I don't mean that in the "Oh, I wouldn't consider myself postmodern, but I loved Garden State because it raises questions with no discernable answers" sense of the question, but I mean truly: who, in your heart, are you? Really? Do you know?

I've been chewing on that question for years, to some extent because I want to know the purpose for which I was created, but mostly because each time I come to a painstaking conclusion, it seems like I endure a drastic shift in character and tumble further down the rabbit hole. I think I've got myself figured out, and then circumstances and the revelation of sin cast new light on all these areas of my heart and character that I've completely failed to notice in the past. The apostle Paul, in a rather blatantly obvious statement when taken at surface value, really understood the tender need of the human heart for the exposition of sin when he wrote in Ephesians 5:13-14, "But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible, for anything that becomes visible is light." (ESV) If God truly is "the Father of lights, with whom there is no shifting shadow," as referenced by James, then there really is no way to see into the depths of your own soul without the catalyst of the refinement that comes via the Holy Spirit. We cannot see these things on our own, for we are the willingly blinded when it comes to conviction.

If we are made in the image of our Creator, then we cannot really understand who we were intended to be before the creation of the world without knowing Him personally and intimately. Sanctification is the process by which we are purified, but as we are called to and drawn toward the Father, we gain a deeper understanding of who we are in reference to the working of His glory, and how deeply the nature of our flesh separates us from that working and that power. So it seems that each time I'm engulfed in the flames of trials, I come out a little stronger, a little purer, and a little more sure of just who and what I'm becoming.

Case in point: Jason and I have embarked on a teaching series based on the parables of Jesus with the orphans for our evening devotions twice a week, and I was reluctantly drawn to the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9-14). I say reluctantly because the first time I perused the passage, I knew that my teaching it would be as much for myself as for the children. As Christ presents the sory, it contrasts the Pharisee, whose holy exterior conceals a heart yearning for personal glory at the expense of God's, with a tax collector, who is so deeply moved by his enslavement to sin in his heart that he cannot bear to present himself in the temple to cry out in prayer. One raises his head toward heaven and touts himself as a saint; the other acknowledges his depravity with a broken spirit and self-flagellation.

As I worked through the meanings of exaltation and humility (no simple task when you're speaking to a mixed crowd of 6 year-olds and 19 year-olds), all I was really aware of was the bright red tint of my face and the shame I felt in the midst of the conviction of the very words I was speaking. A particular verse that has haunted me over the last six months is John 5:44, which poses the pointed question of, "How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?" The interior of my heart has been the site of an intense conflict between the righteous cleansing nature of the Holy Spirit and the depravity of my pride and self-exaltation during this most recent and current season of my life, one that will continue to rage as long as I glorify the work of my hands over the work of my Savior. That sucks. A lot. And as weak of a realization as that is, the words just will not come to express how bitter I feel over the way I've treasured my deeds and my reputation over the relationship that defines the core of who I am, who I am being transformed into. Somewhere in the midst of the humility that's being ground into this pitiful frame my soul inhabits, my heart is being changed; but that doesn't mean I feel it every day.

I've touched on it in a previous post, but I'll lay it out here again: when I hopped my intercontinental flight to the country of Nepal, my heart was very much in "Carve out glory for Jordan" mode. Very little changed in that regard for the first few months I was here, but God, in His infinite sovereignty, decided to teach me a lesson in humility through the physical pain of a month-long struggle with stomach bacteria and skin boils. Lying in my sleeping bag, half-delirious from ibuprofen overdoses and unable to even sit up due to the literal pain in my butt, I received some stern tutelage in the purpose of pain and the consequences that will always, always accompany sin. And my sins are legion, or at least they feel that way at times...

I don't feel like the same person anymore, and its encouraging to receive emails and letters from old friends (thanks Marquel, you really lifted my spirits last night) who unconsciously confirm the evidence of my struggles and subsequent victories. Writing may be catharsis for the soul, but the careful words of an interceding brother or sister speak more truth to me about what God hath wrought in me (I don't have any idea what the present tense of "wrought" is, else I would've said that instead). So keep those words of encouragement coming; I need them dearly right now.

This has been a tremendously hard week for me emotionally, and for no specific reason. I've felt very alone, which is surprising considering how immersed I've been in the makeshift videshi community of believers that Jason and I have gotten involved with through our church. Melancholy attacks at the most inopportune moments, and while I'm not a ball of energy by nature, scripture requires that I be engaged with community by necessity. The body was created to be interdependent for a specific purpose, just as the Church's body is likewise interdependent -- we need each other! So pray for my heart right now, as it is exhausted by the weight of emotional isolation from other believers and self-imposed exile from the presence of the Spirit. I don't have to live like this, and I don't want to. I need you beloved....

Bear out.

Ursa Minor

Against my better judgment, considering the change of heart I've had regarding the whole Relevancy Movement, I've decided to release a Nepali iMix. Music is quickest insight into my heart that I can possibly give you, aside from blogs that stretch on for nine pages in Microsoft Word, so I beseech you to hear me out on this one. Want to know what it is that's burning in my ears (besides shallow compliments) as I'm wandering through the back alleys of Lagunkhel? Want to understand what it is that I'm thinking? Want to criticize the tar out of me? Here's your chance.

I'd post the sucker on iTunes, but three of the tracks aren't available and I'm too much of a perfectionist to settle, so you'll have to hunt 'em down yourself. Either way, here's what I'm listening to these days:

1. Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar - Bob Dylan
2. Last Goodbye - Jeff Buckley
3. Warning Sign - Coldplay
4. Your Heart Is an Empty Room - Death Cab For Cutie
5. How Life Can Turn - The Appleseed Cast
6. Old Soul Song (For the New World Order) - Bright Eyes
7. The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts - Sufjan Stevens
8. A Consistent Ethic of Human Life - Derek Webb
9. The High Countries - Caedmon's Call
10. I'm Nowhere and You're Everything - Chris Thile
11. When You Thought You'd Never Stand Out - Copeland
12. Breathe Me - Sia
13. My Enemies Are Men Like Me - Derek Webb
4. The Lark Ascending or (Perhaps More Accurately, I'm Trying to Make You Sing) - David Crowder Band

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.

My fingers are tired

Yessss! Marathon blogging is back!

And P.S. - Jason and I are safe again: Calm Returns to Plains of Nepal

A Day In the Life

Big, big, BIG news, but I’m going to make you read all the way to the end of this column to get it. Unless of course you just scroll down to the bottom. Mouse turd.

The question I’m most frequently asked about Nepal, aside from the inevitable “So if they don’t use toilet paper, how do they…y’know…?” is the vague and unanswerable “What is it like?” Anyone who has spent time in an East Asian country, or anywhere outside the continental United States for that matter, knows the true and epic impossibility of trying to answer that vague inquiry without giving an answer that is equally vague in return. The oft-used, and predictably lazy response is, “It’s good, but different,” but I have a sheer dislike of describing things as such. The word good has evolved into the preferred fallback reply when no actual thought has been applied to the question at hand. For example:

“Hey dude, how’s married life?” “Oh you know, it’s good…but it’s really different.”

“Have you Diet Caffeine-Free Cherry-Vanilla Dr. Pepper yet?” “Yup, and it’s not half-bad…just different.”

“Haven’t seen you in while Mark. How’re you feeling since the operation?”
“Oh, you know… Getting my tubes tied wasn’t the end of the world; it’s just a little different, but nothing terrible. Just a little snip here, a tuck there… Hey, how ‘bout that Super Bowl, huh? Man, that Prince is just something else!”

I hope you get my point: we, the American public are in a gradual state of dumbing ourselves down in every conceivable manner. We’ve reduced our vocabulary to one word phrases and an astonishing number of acronyms; the typical college freshman can barely speak in a complete sentence that utilizes every part of speech, much less do his laundry without mixing the colors and whites. Our movies get louder and explodier (copyright Jordan Greenwald, 2007), our magazines compensate for lack of depth with full-color photos of Lindsay Lohan in rehab or fluff pieces about rapid weight-loss pioneers who are more marketing devices than people, and it should come as no surprise that the number one song of 2004 involved Usher screaming “Yeah!” every four seconds. Somewhere, Lil’ Jon’s high school English teacher is weeping underneath her desk, clutching a copy of Ulysses. Mashed potatoes was too complicated of a dish for us to make on our own, so we created a “Just Add Water!” version, and when that proved to still be difficult, we gave up and delegated the culinary arts to the microwave. Overall, most Americans no longer bother to indulge our brains because Walmart executives and Oprah do all of our thinking for us.

Now I could tell what Nepal is really like, but that isn’t a short story, and typically people just want a solitary adjective or an uplifting sound byte, as opposed to a lengthy narrative that is as provocative as it is disturbing. Nepal is a living, breathing, struggling amalgamation of humanity. It is beautiful, it is desperate, it is joyful, and it is ever-changing. The Nepali people preserved their identity as a friendlier Shangri-La, a country comprised of mystical Hindu farmers. After opening up the borders in 1951, Nepal revealed what it really is: whatever Western tourists expect and desire it to be. Nepali people, like other East Asians, are inherently and immensely hospitable; the difference is that the Nepali have been more than willing to sacrifice their personality for the sake of modernization to suit the needs of each and every tourist that sets foot in the country.

As the West has sought out the Nepal for its escapist curiosities and mysticism, so Nepal has sought the West for its prosperity and culture. Tourists come looking for truth and missionaries come promising it, but both leave behind their impression: Nokia phones and Harry Potter, coffee shops and cable Internet, Yankee caps and Britney Spears t-shirts. As we encourage changes that will best suit our travels, we destroy the cultures and societies we are making our various pilgrimages to. The irony is that the Nepali are people have become as much of a tourist attraction as the mountains and rivers (one brochure states “Come for the adventure, stay for the mystic wisdom of the Nepali shamans!”), when all they really desire is to either become like the tourists they cater to, or escape to the United States. Today, Nepal is a shell of what it was only 20 years ago, and in another 20 years, it will be a shell of something else. The lives and the people that make up those shells are what interest me.

So I offer you this, if your eyes aren’t already tired from reading my present thoughts that are in sore need of an editor: a look inside a day in the life of Nepal. You want to know what it’s like? Very well. Be forewarned: be it humorous or be it broken, this is not a land for the calloused heart. Nepal is equal parts anecdote and leper victim. Herein lies merely my perspective, but read on if you care to take a look inside a typical Kathmandu Monday.

Monday, 8:46 am, and I wake up to the sound of a Pekinese fighting a “Tibetan mountain dog” in the alleyway below the bedroom I’ve just regained consciousness in. The alarm clock is predictably not working, not because of shoddy workmanship, but due to the morning government-directed blackout; we’ve having two per day, for a total of six hours, for the last month due to a strain on the city grids. I rub the sleep out of my eyes with fingers too numb from the cold to feel, gradually coming to terms with the fact that I’m not in my own bed (though this room is really, really nice compared to my CWC lodgings). A perusal of the engravings in the stack of bibles on the nightstand confirm a decision that the freezing temperatures convince my brain took place in a different lifetime: Jason and I have spent the night, for a second consecutive evening, at a friend’s house in a southern Kathmandu neighborhood.

I slip my jeans and fleece back on, feet sacrificed to the cold because I’ve foolishly chosen to wear sandals on a weekend that began promisingly warm. Wandering into the den, I find Jason awake and perusing a Jonathan Edwards book, pretending to translate Olde English into Real English while he waits for the power to return so that he can Skype his sister on my laptop. We mutter the garbled greetings that have now replaced “Good morning!” after four months, and I sit down on the couch to listen to a Grove sermon on my iPod and read an old copy of Time magazine filched from our incognito host’s bedroom. Said benefactor, who will remain nameless for safety purposes, is on a month-long “debrief” (read that in missionary-speak as “vacation”) in Thailand, but his roommate, a 46-year-old Philippine missionary, is busy cooking oatmeal and ruining a familiar, but ambiguous Josh Groban song in the kitchen. Philippines are natural entertainers: they’re always entertained by themselves, even if nobody else is.

Somehow, the three of us manage to kill an hour taking turns seeing who can sing the most dramatic version of a serious song in a pathetic take on American Idol; our Philippine elder wins, in unsurprising fashion, by cooing yet another Josh Groban classic while mimicking the backseat love-making skills of Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic. Jason and I are nearly too shocked to notice that the electricity has been switched back on, but the 6,000 decibel warning of Instant Messenger signing itself back on brings us back to reality. While I’m washing the Philippine filth off of my face and brushing it out of my teeth, Jason delivers the bad news from the local Kantipur affiliate’s morning show: the labor union bandh, or strike, which shut down all the city buses and forced us to crash in Groban’s Nepali recording studio last night will be continuing today, and possibly tomorrow.

Bandhs, while frustrating to most visitors to Nepal, have become part of my everyday life in the last few months. Some bandhs are logical, some last for weeks, and some turn ridiculously violent without warning (please see my October post on the subject for a good personal example). This specific bandh is in response to Nepali citizens being allowed to ride on tourist buses to destinations outside the Kathmandu Valley, which is costing the crappy public buses (which constitute 95% of the country’s fleet) a lot of fares; naturally the appropriate response to lost income would then be to shut down all the country’s public transportation. All strikes are intended to send a message, and the message of this one is quite clear: “Bus drivers love burning tires.”

The situation sucks for the city in general, and I happen to be in a particular danger: my passport has been sitting in the Nepali immigration office for two weeks (government offices are open for precisely 6 hours a day, zero days a week), and there are hints from fellow American travelers that the employees usually don’t bother to hang on to such pithy items as passports for more than a couple days. I’ve made three trips to the office in the past week to retrieve my ticket back to the land of beef and Mount Rushmore, only to find that Nepal likes to inexplicably declare national holidays when the government workers don’t bother to show up for work. I nervously weigh my options while watching the tail end of the Colts-Patriots playoff game on satellite feed, Jason talking over Vern Lundquist as he at last completes that international phone call to his sister. I don’t have much of a choice; if my passport still exists, it needs to be liberated immediately, and since I don’t have any means of transportation other than my size nines, it looks like I’m going to be getting a good workout today. Please note: there is no such thing as an unexpected hike in Nepal, because if civil unrest rears its head in any form, it will spill out into the streets and screw everything up for everybody. Except on Saturdays; Saturdays are “holy” days.

Strapping my sandals on and stepping out the front door with Brian Hirschy’s hideous army green backpack in tow, I am assailed by two things: a Pomeranian that believes itself to be a Doberman, and a 30 degree increase in temperature. I am sweating in my jacket already, but I still can’t feel my toes. Locking the gate behind me, patting my pocket to make certain I have the receipt for my visa with me, finding my “new” iPod serving as a paperweight next to it; I pop in my headphones and turn on a John Piper sermon on Romans, partially to facilitate spiritual growth over the course of the next hour, and partially to insulate myself against what I’m about to hike through. Here’s my journey.

Leaving the neighborhood of Nakkhu, instantly forced to wade through two separate wedding processions that are winding their way through the narrow muddy streets. Each party is trailing a full Nepali brass band playing a form of folk music I last heard in the Borat movie (honestly), and with the two bands wearing identical red uniforms, I puzzle over whether or not one will end up at its final destination with two extra French horn players in tow. Nakkhu is one of the first areas of Kathmandu to be infiltrated by house churches, and since it is no longer illegal to be a Christian in Nepal, there is a large, outwardly expressive community of believers in the surrounding areas. Four churches, different denominations but decidedly charismatic, crowd the street corner. In a sense, its as if I never left Arkansas.

Six boys playing cricket in the street wave enthusiastically and shout “Hello!” at the overdressed videshi (foreigner) shuffling toward them. I smile and say hello back, enthusiastic not because the boys are so friendly, but because my feet have finally decided to accepting blood from their respective capillaries, and ask how the boys are doing this fine morning; they do not respond, not having yet learned a proper response in their English classes. I’m bid farewell with more cries of “Hello!”

I cross a bride spanning the river that marks the lower border of the city of Patan and hold my nose. The city of Kathmandu has been voted by an international environmental group as the #2 most polluted city in the world in the last week (#1 is Dehli, India, for those of you who are interested), and the river below is a perfect example of why. The banks of the river at the bridge are nearly 20 feet tall, the grass matted with settled dust as truck drivers have taken to dumping their loads into the river rather than waste petrol by driving to the designated dumping zone outside of the city. The water itself is infinitely black, sludge-like, with the smell of urine and toxic waste wafting from its banks; I count amongst the swirling rubble three diapers, a pair of bicycle tires, four living ducks and one dead one, condom wrappers, snack noodle wrappers, an Anaheim Mighty Ducks t-shirt, and two women washing their hair. The urge to vomit is stifled, eyes remaining close until I am safely a block away.

The street winds through several blocks of identical houses and identical shops. Three little girls play hacky-sack with a handful of interwoven rubber bands. Because of the bandh, there is no school today – teachers cannot reach their respective classrooms, and children’s buses are denied use of the roads. Sure enough, as I reach the intersection of Ring Road, the main street that tightly borders the whole of Kathmandu, an endless stretch of empty school buses extends beyond my sight lines. It serves as a chilling reminder of the last bandh I happened to get caught in, which left hundreds of children stranded on buses on this same road overnight, many of them below the age of seven. The number of children that go missing each year in this country thus becomes yet another Nepali conundrum, both utterly believable and utterly unimaginable; a recent newspaper bulletin established that in the month of January, 350 children disappeared in the Kathmandu Valley. These are the disappearances that were reported.

Trudging through the Tibetan community just south of Jawalkhel now, pausing to watch a group of street dogs viciously attack a puppy. A pile of refuse at least a foot tall has collected outside the gates of the Tibetan Labor Workers Union complex, left uncollected possibly as a slur by the Newari government against the not-so-welcome immigrants. A young boy, ankle-deep in the trash, is sifting anxiously through fruit rinds and rubble before, face beaming, pulling out a broken purple sandal and slipping it onto one of his now noticeably bare feet. I assume his shoes have dislodged themselves at the bottom of the trash heap, then recoil in horror when he pulls a out yellow sandal of a completely different style and slips it onto the other foot; the child, homeless, has just lucked into a “new” pair of shoes.

Three elderly women and an ancient man stumble, zombie-like in a circle around a Buddhist stupa, lifelessly and desperately whispering unanswered requests to the prayer wheels they obediently spin each morning and evening. Two girls laugh hysterically across the street, urging a puppy to leap back and forth across their jump rope. A shopkeeper stands outside his Ghurka knife emporium, smiling through his plaid scarf as he sips his morning cup of tea. A man parks a motorcycle on the curb in front of his shop, and the two embrace, sharing in the morning’s pleasantries; as I pass by, the motorcycle driver helps the shopkeeper light a stick of amber-scented incense, waving it prophetically over the knives that will likely go unsold this afternoon.

An open-air market awaits me just south of the traffic chokepoint in Jawalkhel, locals selling grapes, potatoes, and radishes that have brought in from the countryside, as well as stomach-ache remedies and condoms. An old woman throws a spoiled orange at a street urchin who has just failed at pinching some of her goods, missing his head with a pitch that would have been well out of the strike zone. Schoolboys whose parents sent them out the door despite news of the strike on the morning news have scaled the fences of the private soccer field on my left and are debating on the legitimacy of a goal. An ambivalent police officer, dressed in military blues, finds that his cries of disapproval have gone unnoticed by the infidel Ronaldos, and rather than climb the fence to scold them in person, he practices twirling his bamboo cane. The locals appear unimpressed, and hungry.

Traffic picks up here on the main streets of Patan, arteries coursing into the heart of Kathmandu. I follow the flow of traffic, opting not to walk on the non-existent sidewalk, feeling the phantom pangs of sensitivity in a right elbow that has been tagged by a half-dozen motorcycles or rearview mirrors, as each vehicle passes me by. This is out of character for me, as I often walk head-on into the surge of Suzukis and Kias: I like to be able to see the face of each person who comes within centimeters of potentially plastering me. The chances of surviving a pedestrian collision are not good. Nepali traffic laws dictate that, because there is no such thing as vehicle insurance in the country, if a pedestrian is injured in a vehicular accident, the driver at fault must pay for the injured party’s medical treatment in full; if the pedestrian is killed, the driver pays $1000 to the grieving family, and the matter is considered settled. Therefore, pre-meditated murder comes off necessarily cheap, and Westerners who stray too far into traffic are considered fatalities who “just didn’t understand our laws.” I hug the curb; I’m worth more than $1000.

Passing up Saleways, the Nepali version of WalMart, where Jason and I buy all of our Nutella and spaghetti. There is a Sega Genesis, circa 1990, on sale in the electronics department for $200. Time magazine is $3; Maxim is $13. Maxim is sold out routinely.

Sights of Patan’s shopping district: Nepal’s only Hallmark store. Maoist teenagers handing out pamphlets to motorists and asking for “donations,” despite the fact that Maoist leaders have promised an end to such practices months ago. A pair of police officers standing outside a German bakery munching on donuts, making the stereotype a seemingly international truth. Two competing hospitals strategically placed across the street from one another. A dozen Internet cafes, each promising “High-speed Axcess”; neither of the two that I glance inside on this afternoon have a single working computer. An Italian restaurant. Three pizza places. A Thai restaurant. Several Tibetan restaurants. A Mongolian restaurant. Not a single genuine Nepali eatery in sight – the owners are desperate to please Western visitors, and Nepali food is reportedly “too hard to make.”

A shop advertised as an “Optometrist/Dentist” that actually sells office chairs and bootleg DVDs. A three-story restaurant that offers “Free mixed drinks and kid’s meals during happy hour!” A clump of homeless adolescents and one child of six or seven huddled together in front of a bank, huffing aerosol fumes out of plastic bags; one boy appears to be breathing in spray paint fumes, as is evidenced by a swirling cloud of purple inside the transparent plastic bag he cradles to his face. Buddhist temples. Hindu altars. A cow grazing on a raised grassy knoll at the edge of a major intersection (Nepali traffic law #729: “A motorist who strikes and kills a cow must serve 19 years imprisonment”); the billboards above it shill Oranjeboom and Johnnie Walker Red.

My hip is aching as I reach the bridge into Kathmandu, following the flow of people past the entrance to the king’s palace and United Nations headquarters. A man with no shirt on smokes a cigarette on the roof of the Nepal Ministry of Agriculture building, glaring at the peons below him. Street vendors sell biscuits, cigarettes, chocolates, and more condoms. A man in a well-pressed three-piece suit hops out of an expensive SUV on one side of the street, then runs to the other side of the street and hops onto a waiting bicycle, pedaling like mad back in the direction he just came from.

Billboards proffer such products as Opti-bake Microwaves (“Yumm-teen possibilities!” shouts a girl in a chef’s hat), Choco-Fun candy bars (“Giggle! Giggle! Pinch! Pinch!”) and 2PM Noodles, whose television commercials have made claims that feeding your children said noodles will enable them to fly and withstand bullets. Two familiar faces grace the majority of the posters that graffiti and adorn the walls of local businesses and homes: Prachandra, national hero/villain and concealed leader of the Maoist movie, and the ambiguous construction worker whose face adorns the advertisements for Sukhar Cigarettes, the unofficially government-endorsed brand of choice. The construction worker is hard at work repairing a telephone cable that appears to be strung across the peak of Mount Everest, yet he wears no jacket. I am not the first Westerner to read Into Thin Air and be puzzled by such a depiction.

I pass Ratna Park, the open-air government celebration facility, pausing to watch adult men fly kites and children read newspapers, before hanging the turn that leads me into the immigration office. I am in luck – not only does the official in the visa office recognize me (he greets me with grin and, “Mr. Greenwald! We thought the rebels may have gotten you! Ha Haahhhhh!”), but he does not request a bribe in return for my passport. He hands it over without any fuss, reminding me that he’ll see me again in three weeks when my visa expires again. I am too ecstatic over this proof of my existence having not been thrown in the furnace to respond sarcastically, for once.

I stop over in the Kathmandu Mall, which is advertised as “Nepal’s Only Indoor Shopping Mall” despite the fact that three other malls now exist, wading through four identical floors of American brand clothing being sold as Nepali brand clothing (red and brown Yankee cap anyone?) before reaching the international food court on the roof. My interaction with the waiter follows as such:

“Can I have the Thai Barbecue Chicken with Bamboo?” “No Thai food today, sorry sir.”

“Can I have the Pork Egg Roll and Fried Rice?” “No Chinese food today, sorry sir.”

“Dhal Bhat Takhari?” “No Nepali food.”

“Pizza?” “Oven is broken sir. You like chicken burger? We make with fries…”

After lunch, I head next door to the main branch of the Kathmandu parcel service to pick a birthday package sent by Jason’s little sister, Krystal. If you want to understand the intricate workings of a foreign post office, a highly suggest renting the movie Labyrinth; the building is an ever-shifting maze of walls and piss-poor lighting, staffed by disgruntled desk clerks and an army of warehouse gnomes who are on indefinite break. I’ve been coached on the process of retrieving my box by Jason, who has become a parcel office regular, but it’s still confusing: wander into one dimly lit room, hand over a photo-copy of an ID (two photo-copies if you’re that confused), fill out one form, head into another dimly lit room and pay money for another form, fill in two blanks, return to the first room, wit for your box to be rescued from the warehouse and sifted through for bombs and beef, go back to the other room, fill out the rest of the second form, pay money to one customs official, pay money to another, return to the original dimly lit room which has now grown smaller and dimmer, finish filling out the original form, pay more money, and run shrieking for the light. Have a nosebleed yet? Fear not, that’s the easy version of picking up a package; it gets more difficult if the office manager calls for a pause in activity for the employees to snack on yellow sponge cake and tea, government-provided of course. It is no coincidence that the only fat people I have seen in Nepal work in the post office.

My box contains mini-bottles of cranberry juice, birthday streamers, activity books for children, and some candy. Naturally, as I examine everything in the daylight in front of the building, I attract a crowd of a dozen nosy Nepalis, all eager to see what the videshi has had shipped in from a mysterious foreign country. There is a young boy, a leper, with stumps for both legs and both arms drawing pictures for willing pedestrians by holding a colored pencil in his teeth, and he plaintively asks me for money by repeating the chant of “Paisa, paisa, paisa...” I offer him a cranberry juice and he frowns. Realizing my insensitivity (“The kid has no freaking hands, how the eff is he supposed to drink it? Nice one Jordan…”), I unscrew the lid and hand the bottle to his mother, who is sitting next to him; the boy takes a sip and grimaces again, beginning to repeat “Paisa, paisa…” I walk away, bewildered, humiliated, and deflated. My box weighs 5,000 lbs.

I make it a solid kilometer before the weight of the box begins to strain my back to the extent that it is no longer comfortable to pretend that I am comfortable. Frantic searching for a taxi produces nothing – the solitary cab that I see is forced over to the side of the road by (you guessed it) brick-wielding strikers, who drag the driver out of the vehicle and beat him on the side of the street. No crowd gathers, as a sweaty American carrying a cardboard box is obviously more fascinating than a street fight.

I give up and haggle with a rickshaw driver, convincing him to cart me two miles for 200 rupees. When the driver has to hop off of his bicycle and push the contraption uphill for ten minutes, it weighs on my conscience. I offer to help him, but he snaps at me and slaps at my thigh; I don’t argue with him. Two boys on a bicycle ride along next to us, shouting “Hello!” at me over and over again, and when I finally respond, they call me mula sakh, a popular Nepali insult that roughly translated means “radish neck,” and ride away laughing. I find comfort in the story of Elijah and the bear that ate all those kids. When the rickshaw finally drops me off at the choke, I cave in and give the driver an extra hundred rupees and a cranberry juice; I am a horrible bargainer.

The walk back through Jawalkhel is too tiring to be comprehended or paid attention to. I play games in my head, trying to make up sudoku puzzles with no solution or remember the lyrics to Whiskeytown songs. The same old women and ancient man are repeating the same prayers as they aimlessly follow the cycle of spinning prayer wheels around the stupa in the Tibetan neighborhood. The little girls with the jump rope have disappeared, replaced by a massacred dog missing an ear and bleeding from open wounds in its cheek and side. Impromptu games of cricket and soccer rule the streets, cars seemingly having been permanently exiled from the city. Adult men holding hands dance to a Hindi dance version of that Celine Dion song from Titanic song in front of a butcher shop. The sun is setting, the games continue.

I pass Jason on the road home just before the bridge over that godforsaken water, and spend the rest of my journey home trying to figure out if he told me he was heading to a store to buy spaghetti or a spaghetti strap top. A crowd of children follows me all the way through Nakkhu, singing and kicking a soccerball, asking me if I know Avril Lavigne. Two boys sit in the dirt in front of the gate to my home away from home away from home, strumming a guitar and singing “How Great Is Our God” in Nepali. They smile and take my box from me, carrying it up the stairs to our apartment and giving me an awkward hug before running back down the stairwell, laughing all the way.

My Phillipine friend greets me with the admission that he thought I was dead, and I’m unsure whether he’s telling a joke or making heartfelt expression of joy upon this, my triumphal return. I doze in the den for a half hour before Jason arrives back with spaghetti (I knew he said spaghetti!), and we pop in a bootleg DVD of Stand By Me before, surprise! The power goes out! Bed time once again comes early in Shangri La, and I dream of a warm shower and driving a garbage truck for a living in a foreign country.

Still awake?

Okay, so I did promise big news, and since I try to stay true to my word, here you are:

Rina is a mommy!!!! It’s a boy!!!! Rina’s been pregnant since Jason and I arrived in Nepal, and she nonchalantly announced Tuesday morning that her water had broken and she was going to go to the hospital to “maybe” have her son. Santosh, her husband, called later on that night to announce that she gave birth to her son, who has the tentative name of Cillian (tentative until Rina comes to her senses and names the kiddo Jordan), just after 7:00. You would’ve thought that every child in the orphanage had given birth by the celebration – girls jumping up and down and hugging one another, boys pumping their fists and singing Nepali folk songs. Just goes to show you: Nepal is equal parts destitution and hope. Christ is alive here, and the pain is a credit to his glory. So take joy, the kids are alright.

Bear out.

The Nepal Photography Ethics Omnibus

I have a confession to make: buying a camera, for me, may have been a mistake. Looking at my recent contributions, or more appropriately, lack thereof, to this journal of sorts, I see a growing trend. Rather than exercising my writer’s brain and painting a picture of linguistics and emotion, I’ve been quite lax in my willingness to simply compile a pictoral history of my time here in Nepal. This may not be a problem for those of you who are happy to be visual learners, but it’s provided a hidden angst for me: I have a lot on my mind and heart, and photographs simply don’t effectively capture a good portion of the things I’d like to express. Plus, Jason’s revealed proof to me that I am incapable of taking a serious picture – Mom, you were right.

Regardless, during our return trip from Chitwan (you can read a good synopsis of it on Jason’s blog located here: www.jasoninnepal.blogspot.com) , I devoted myself to reading Alex Garland’s trekking opus The Beach. Yup, it got made into a crappy Leonardo DiCaprio movie, but it’s a compelling book nonetheless, and the deeper I got into it, I kept laughing internally at the narrator’s keen insights into international travel, specifically here in South Asia (the tale takes place in Thailand). Anyway, the main character makes this comment about how when he travels, he never takes a camera with him because whenever he records a journey in photographic form, he inevitably comes to a point where the only memories he can drudge up of the entire experience are those captured in the pictures.

This might seem obtuse, but if you’re anything like me, taking pictures on vacations or outings is often times an afterthought. I’m wandering through a botanical garden or throwing a Frisbee at the lake, on the verge of leaving, when suddenly I’m struck with this frantic urge of “Oh-Jenga! SomebodysgottatakeaphotoforthesakeofposterityorI’llneverbeabletoprovetomyselfthatthesefriendsandthisplacewerereal.” Or something anxious and furious in that same vein. I fight that kind of internal loneliness that only seems to surface when I’m in a crowded room full of laughing, joyful people; suddenly, I’m struck with this attack on my ego and my heart that threatens that none of this, none of me is real, and it staggers me every time. So when I look at photos of holiday celebrations with family, high school bus trips to the Harvard campus, or collages of my summer spent in the ghettos of south Chicago, I’m wracked with the guilt of trying to recall, “Did I take this picture because it was meaningful to me, or simply because I felt the urge to take a picture?” I simply can’t remember, and it drains me trying to reminisce over whether or not my memories of people and places are anchored in the truth of the moment in which they took place, or if I’m attempting to rewrite my life experiences to provide insulation from pain.

The sheer barrage of photos I’ve taken and received from co-volunteers in Nepal is overwhelming. Seriously, I have something like 3000 on my computer, and the decision process of posting them online is excrutiating. Do I post:

a) photos of myself, marking the gradual transition from beer-drinking office employee to weathered, pseudo-bearded international missionary

b) photos of only the orphaned kiddos, eventually succumbing to favoritism and only
revealing those children with whom I spend the majority of my time, thus robbing you of the fullness of how amazing the children at CWC truly are

c) photos of what I think and hope captures the essence of Nepal, i.e. architecture,
mountains, lepers, homeless children, Hindu shrines, street dogs, etc., thus capturing the experience, but at the same time trivializing the people by converting them into a brochure designed to evoke an emotional response from you and myself

These are the things I wrestle with, all because of this stupid Canon IXUS 65. Silly, perhaps, but I’ve always had that tendency to over-analyze to the point of non-action. So here’s the deal: I’ll continue to post photos here, but I need to write, and by that I don’t mean venting, and I don’t mean putting together a travelogue. I hate the feeling of needing to have some sort of result or activity to report to America as proof that I’m worthy of attention, when in fact I spend most of my time reading books on the roof or pouring myself into thought over games of Solitaire on my laptop (I tried to delete it, but it’s impossible…seriously). After all, my ministry target is in school for seven hours a day, and unlike home, I can’t just drive to Best Buy or Chez Newell every time things get boring.

So, seeing as how I’ve managed to bore you to death by giving you a thoroughly wordy treatise on photography, blogography, and all things inbetween, let me simplify: I’m going to revert back to making blog posts at least once a week, cutting back on the number of photos a bit, and writing about the things I really want to write about. I’ve got this burning urge to just share about the gospel, about what you can learn about Jesus through pilo, about Nepali transportation, food, culture, and about the problems facing Westerners in international missions and aide work (because there are a lot of them). Here’s a hint on that last one: the American way is NOT the best way, as I’m finding out consistently.

One ridiculous prayer request before I log off: my beloved Chacos are on the verge of falling apart. I bought them my freshman year of college, 7 years ago now, and I never imagined they’d crap out on me. Regardless, a big split opened up in the sole where the toe strap cuts across underneath my foot, and I really, really want them to make it back to America. So as dumb as this sounds, pray for my sandals…I hate wearing socks and shoes.

Expect more from me soon. For now, here’s a picture of me running from a rhinoceros.

More Christmas Pics

Here, you can see the full extension of my Santa hat.
Jason spent the whole night telling me how much I
Looked like Will Ferrell in that movie “Elf.”
Is that good or bad?

Lokendra and Dipesh kick off the dance party that followed dinner.
This is the most animated I have ever seen Dipesh, whom
Jason often describes as “an accountant.”

CWC in all its illuminated splendor.

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, Jason and I decided to tone down
our nightly devotional times and celebrate Advent with the children.
Every night, we read scripture and sang Christmas hymns by candlelight.
This picture is a collage of images taken during those devo times
that I thought captured the mood. At least it looks cool.

Come On! Let's Boogey to the Elf Dance!

For those of you who are results-oriented,
Jason raised money to give the kids Christmas gifts.
That is a LOT of red and green wrapping paper.

Ground zero on Christmas morning.
Normally I hate shots of people opening their gifts, as this is often
the only memory captured in the vast majority of Greenwald holiday photos,
but I had to add this one.
That Spiderman doll is nearly as big as Bijay is!

After the carnage, I took a nap with the doll
our Austrailian friend Renee bought me.
The current time? 5:45 in the morning.
Mom? Dad? I’m sorry for each and every Christmas
I woke you up before sunrise.

The Christmas celebration at Calvary Church.
It’s pretty common in a Nepali church for people just to wander around
behind the stage while the pastor is speaking,
or for little kids just to run loose, as is evidenced by the little guy in the sport coat just aimlessly standing around in front of us.

It's Christmas (in January)! Let's Be Glad!

Yup, I know I said I'd post more frequently some time back, but Jason and I decided to ring in 2007 with a much needed vacation to Chitwan National Park, which kept me away from a computer for over a week. So much to update you on, and so precious little time and clarity of mind to devote to it all.

Seeing as how January is officially half over, at least on my half of the globe, what better time could I choose to rave about Christmas in Nepal? This may actually be a good thing, as some of you may still have your trees and lights up. Don't read that as a joke, as a few years back, I came home from Christmas break around the 20th of January to find that my roommates (Jason and Taylor Wood) still hadn't thrown away our 7 ft tall Alleuvian Fir/raccoon retirement community. I think nearly all the needles had fallen out, but the decorations and lights were all still on the tree. What centerpiece could better express the feeling of "We're all in our mid-20's and too busy to bother with trifles like fire hazards."

But I'm off on a tangent here, AGAIN, aren't I? Christmas...in Nepal...right?

Let me get straight to the point: Christmas in South Asia is both a blessing and a lament, and I loved it for both reasons. To those here who are Christians, it is a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, a day of joy spent in worship and feasting, untainted by the commercialism and Pokemonism that drives the holiday back in the west. Read that as: NO GIFT-GIVING. To everybody else on the continent, Christmas is....Monday. Go to work. Drink tea. Go home to your family. Eat rice. Go to bed. Etc...

So while it was a bit depressing to see so many people out and about, oblivious of what Christmas means to so many millions of others around the world, I had a blast at the celebration held at Calvary Church, the spiritual body which includes our children's home in its body. We sang songs all day, or at least the kids did -- Jason and I just hummed along and pretended we weren't confused. I was the proud winner some sort of pinata game: participants pay 5 rupees and then take a blindfolded swing at a clay pot filled with candies. Having woken up at 5 a.m. to exchange gifts with the kids, I spent a good portion of the afternoon sipping on milk tea and napping out on the church lawn. And during the evening service, Jason and I led the CWC kids in a performance of a couple Western Christmas carols for the congregation.

But the best part my friends? Not Christmas, though it was fun (and highlighted with a spiritual possession that I'll be more than freaked out to tell you about if you email me and ask). I'm honest and conceited enough to admit that the highlight of the holidays for me was the Christmas party we threw in partial celebration of my 25th birthday. I can say with certainty that my Nepali birthday was without a doubt the best that I've ever experienced, due mainly to the fact that having been born on December 23rd makes it near impossible to celebrate -- somewhat difficult to be a glory-hog when you have to share the spotlight with the Saviour of the universe.

So I had my first legit birthday party in about 7 or 8 years, and it was a blast, complete with buffet line, bonfires, wine-in-a-box, cultural dancing, and a boombox blaring the Vengaboys. I'll let the photos speak for themselves

(l-r) Sonu, Dipa, Sushil, Sabita, and Gita
Sushil and Ishor played some Nepali Christmas carols for us,
while the girls spent most of the night trying to hide from my camera.
They don't look too shy here.

Some of the younger children crowd around the birthday cake.
We had to make sure it fed all 100 guests, so I got one that weighed 17 lbs.
What can I say, I like my chocolate.

(l-r) The bear, Rina (my "boss"), Umesh (towering over us all), Rajesh, and Yubrats
That goofy kid I'm clutching in front is Moses, Rina's apdopted lil' bro.
My santa hat is standing straight up because I was clever enough to stuff
a cardboard birthday hat underneath it. Awww, I'm so cute...

Laxmi (in the middle) performs a dance number with many of the older
girls set to the tune of a Nepali Christmas song.

Nabin (middle) is honestly the best dancer I've ever seen in person.
He spent weeks choreographing a routine for the boys to a Nepali folk song,
then threw in a bit with all the canes at the last minute.
Really cool to watch, and really fun. Great job guys.
PS. Note that half the guys aren't wearing shoes.
The temp was close to 34 degrees. Ouch.