Under Heaven

There is evil in the world – cruel, brazen, mocking evil in the world. You can stop your ears. You can avert your eyes. You can fortify your life like a medieval castle, complete with moats and turrets, against the day that evil finds you where you live. You can box it up in neat philosophies and tie it with a bow of flawless exegesis. You can sleepily forget that it exists, even for years at a time . . .

But for all that, evil will not suddenly become less real, less aggressive – not to the child sold into a brothel before she can spell her name, not to the homeless man beaten for the amusement of teenagers in an American city, not to the Sudanese woman who bears the child of a systematic rape campaign.

If I have shocked your sensibilities, you who come here for your dose of lyrical prose, I am not sorry. It is midnight, I have turned the lights on, and around the world there are some two million children whose dignity goes for the price of a steak dinner. Tonight I have five of them stuck in my head (the five are somehow less bearable than the two million), so let me for at least five minutes refuse to look away from them.

Evil demands response. It will either run us over or rouse us to combat.

What shall be done?

It is one of the great advantages of Christianity that it takes the reality of evil as its starting place. Pure wickedness, and nothing else, necessitated the work of the cross. Christianity is thus well-reconciled to the accumulated life experience of most people under heaven. This faith becomes more difficult to understand, though, because it does not stop with recognition. It charges ahead with its lovely, terrifying images of the kingdom of God: days of judgment, the drying of all tears, heaven and earth remade without the blot of an accursed rebellion.

Indeed, it goes too far. It strains credulity. Two millennia later, where is the promise? Do the prophets of that kingdom live where the poor live? Do they walk in the Managua trash dumps, the Freetown slums, the Burmese refugee camps? Do they read the same newspaper? Surely they are fools are dreamers all to proclaim that the unjust execution of an itinerant Jewish teacher and miracle worker – a minor act in the history of the world’s gross excesses – will make everything good as Eden again. Evil doesn’t just linger with us; it laughs, it romps. By all appearances, it reigns.

What shall be done?

I have wept at evil. I have wept because it mocks the goodness and glory of my Maker. It treads His name in the gutter.
I have raged blindly at evil. I have raged because it praises the perverse and lays snares for the sacred.
I have sat frozen in the paralysis of despair. I have sat frozen because the weak cried out and the righteous faltered.

What shall be done?

The ancient Scriptures are not silent concerning the reality of evil. Nor are they silent about the end of evil, and how that evil shall be ended. The answer has two parts: “Take heart! I have overcome the world,” says Jesus, the Word whose words are life to us. In His coming, His atonement, His resurrection, He has overcome the resident evil. He has knocked over the first domino. He has sung the first verse of a new and brilliant music. But there is a second part.

“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” This is our mandate, our portion. We are to take up arms against evil, and our arms shall be the same as Christ’s, who wielded both authority and humility, truth and compassion, power and the obedient sacrifice of His will entire will and being.

What shall be done?

I dare you (as I, trembling, dare myself) to let yourself be re-arranged by two realities – the reality of evil and the reality of our responsibility to address it. If you call yourself Christ’s, this is not an additional feature - it is the very substance of the life of redeemed creatures. The answers we find are unlikely to seem rational, reasonable, or sufficiently moderated. But they will have the smell about them of things that are right. And sometimes in this world of unvarying gray, we still have to choose.

Am I ranting more than usual? Undoubtedly.
Am I over-simplifying? Almost certainly.
Am I wrong? I must own the possibility.

But this, God willing and God aiding, is what I shall do.

You know you want to . . .

. . . come to an IJM Benefit Dinner this fall. All events will have Gary Haugen, IJM President and Founder, as the speaker and Lamont Hiebert of Ten Shekel Shirt as the performing IJM Artist Partner.

October 14 - San Francisco - Fairmont

October 30 - Houston - Westin Oaks

December 11 - DC - Omni Shoreham

www.ijm.org/benefits

Come!

Three Feet of Green Space

Yesterday, I prayer-walked the campus of Georgetown University. The freshmen are arriving, posing for pictures in Dahlgren Square, and the football team (such as it is) is practicing without pads on the carefully painted yardage below the Southwest Quadrangle. Which means, of course, that another summer has fled. There are other, subtler signs of its lingering departure: The fireflies have all gone, the thunderstorms are fewer, and the light has a leaner, yellow quality.

The election season is ramping up, too. The McCain staffers have multiplied like hamsters, and by all appearances, they never go home. Taking a break on the esplanade today, I found one of them stretched hobo-style on a bench, barefoot, his tie undone and his bicep pressed against his eyes, blocking out the world.

I am in his camp today. I am hiding from my spreadsheets and my Outlook calendar amid three feet of green space, amid breezes that rustle a thousand five-pointed leaves, and bugs that tick and chew and buzz. It is the deep breath before the long, sustained effort at perfection that comes with the banquets.

It is the beginning of my third year at IJM. My work is steady and repetitive, but it no longer overwhelms me on the regular basis that it once did. I can barely account for the passage of time, and before I know it this tree will be bare-limbed, groaning with fresh-fallen snow. I strive to remember important and calming truths: What needs to happen will happen. And what doesn’t will fall by the wayside. And the fireflies will know when to come back.

A Lunch Break Poem

On my own
Naught can I do
Of the good
You will me to.
Can You tame
A heart untrue,
Bend it from
Unholy views,
Stir it from
So long disuse,
Make it yield
To Thee Thy due,
Health and life
In it imbrue?
Many words
Meet with Thy few:
“Abide in me,
And I in you.”

Over My Head

I have a habit of getting in over my head, of over-commitment and under-resourcing, of squeezing too much from too little. In that spirit, I’ve been trying lately to wrap my finite intellect, which wheezes and huffs with the effort, around the efficacy of prayer. I have not been searching for a yea or nay – that particular question has been for some time resolved for me in the affirmative – but I have been searching for a glimpse, if it may be had, of the mechanics of that efficacy.

Suppose that I and many other people pray for improbable outcome X, and it comes to pass. Would it still have been granted if I alone of all that crowd had kept silent? Is any prayer ever the pebble that tips the scale? Or are the prayers of God’s people inseparable before Him, like drops of water in a river? And wherein lies the undeniable but inexplicable charm of a fallen race to move the hand of an immutable Divine?

I have no answers to these questions. I have read Spurgeon and Willard, Lewis and Tozer, Carmichael and Chesterton on the subject. From them I have gotten signposts, and not the desired schematics, truths that only deepen the mystery.

Scripture does not seem overly concerned that I understand the process. I am told not how prayer works, but “This, then, is how you should pray.”

If all the roads in this province of thought lead to befuddlement (and so far, for me, they do), then I seem to have three options: 1) I can, distrusting what I do not understand, cease to pray. But my very spirit recoils at the thought . . . 2) I can continue to pray out of habit, or grim-faced compliance, but with secret mistrust that my prayers make any difference. But no sane or honest person would waste time in this fashion . . . 3) I can, in obedience, go on praying, because I know on instinct that the Maker is far more important than the mechanism. And the Maker that I know would not tell me to ask, would not tell me to seek, would not tell me to knock, only to let it be a lie told for the comfort of infants.

Walk with Me

The fragmented stories below, all of which I have heard with quiet wonder in the last week, are true. I have had them all first-hand, or second-hand at worst. I have changed some of the particulars - name and locations - so that no one minds if I put them down, but the substance had not been altered. May they be of some good to you.

Act I : Maryland

About two weeks ago, Brian took Bethany salsa dancing at the Lucky Bar on Connecticut Avenue. Afterward, he took her to Volta Park and asked her to be he wife.

So the last few times I've seen Bethany have been a little giddy. She is trying to plan a wedding on very short notice (they are shooting for autumn), in a city where she no longer lives, while being almost constantly on the road for seminary classes or fundraising. On Thursday, she had an appointment at a wedding dress consignment store - somewhere in Maryland, I think. I couldn't go, but Ann, staying with us for the summer, was her willing consort. She didn't expect to find anything, but she was armed, at least, with the admonitions of her sisters, "Don't wear pure white. It will wash you out with your complexion," and "Pick something that accents your waist. You've got a cute waist."

When they arrived, they were met by a bleached blonde saleslady. She had ten visible body piercings, five in each ear. She was, to hazard a guess, sixty years old. We'll call her Cathy.

Bethany was not allowed to be alone with the dresses, not even for a minute. Cathy followed her straight into the dressing rooms, and while Bethany wrangled the yardage of ecru taffeta and candlelight satin - or whatever is the going term for off-white these days - Cathy talked.

Cathy asked Bethany what she did, and was impressed to find that she worked with students in a campus ministry setting. It was so good, she thought, for the young people to have someone who would talk with them, help them work through their feelings, listen to them. Cathy was raised Catholic. She tried to go to church on Sundays, but it was hard, and she rarely made it anymore. She got so tired.

When Bethany had gotten herself into a dress, she would come out to model them in front of Ann.

"What about you?" Cathy said to Ann, "Are you doing this anytime soon?"

Ann, about to start her second year of law school, demurred.

"Yeah, don't get me started on the marriage thing. I was married for twenty-five years. I'll never do THAT again."

Bethany, head-to-toe white in a dress Cathy was theoretically trying to sell to her, was not sure what to say.

When all the dresses had been tried on, Cathy walked Ann and Bethany back to Ann's car.

"You know," she said to Bethany, "I'm in Georgetown sometimes. I could call you. We could get lunch."

Bethany gave her her business card. Cathy wrote her cell phone number on the back.

"Just call me, if you want to. And if I don't answer, leave me a message. I can just call you right back. It's so nice to have people to talk to."

She hugged Bethany. She hugged Ann, too, who later confessed surprise.

Act II:

In a country in South America, in a hospital, there is a ten-year-old girl called Catalina. Catalina has no parents, so her uncle, Diego, takes care of her. Six months ago, she was raped by an adult in her community. Such crimes are not uncommon where she lives, and they are met with almost certain impunity. But the rape is not why Catalina is in the hospital.

Catalina is in the hospital because something is wrong with her, and the doctors at the public clinic do not know what it is. All that is clear is that she is dying. The doctors are not doing much, nor do they seem to care. They say that they are not treating her because there is no money to pay for the treatment, but they have also removed her from her bed at times so that they can use it as a place to sit.

The employees of a non-profit have taken an interest in Catalina's case. They have been driving around the city trying to find her new doctors, trying to buy her antibiotics and blood. That is the way the health care system works here. If the doctor is good, he tells you what you need, but it's probably up to you, or someone who cares about you, to find it and pay for it. Catalina is in and out of consciousness, but she is a little in awe of the strangers who seem to care so very much whether she lives or dies. She knows, in her own way, why they are doing it.

She wakes from a sleep of drugs and fever, to find one of the women at the edge of her bed. Quiere aceptar a Jesucristo en su corazon, she makes it known, and a little later she sleeps again.

That night, she took a worse turn. I have no reason to believe she is dead right now, but no very good reason to believe she is alive, either.

Act III: Moravia

It used to be that from a particular family compound in Moravia, Liberia, on the western coast of Africa, you could see the ocean. You cannot see it anymore. Now, all the houses have nine-foot walls topped with barbed wire. The rate of armed robberies following the war has made it necessary.

Eight years ago, a comparatively wealthy Liberian woman we'll call Debbie, who lives on the outskirts of Moravia, had a visit from a neighbor woman. The woman asked her to watch her two-week-old son (whom we'll call Anthony). She said she would return in a few hours. Debbie agree, and the woman left.

The neighbor never returned.

Debbie adopted Anthony. Today, he is a smiling, well-dressed little boy. In front of cameras, he likes to put on his Batman costume with the fake muscles. He is cloistered, most certainly, behind the gates of the family estate, but in Moravia, cloistered is also protected. There will be time enough to know the world outside the walls.

Anthony made a friend, Charles, who invited him to come over to play. Charles lived downtown in a less savory district. Debbie did not want Anthony to go, but in the end, he was allowed.

Anthony and Charles played together well enough for a while, but towards evening they got into an argument. Charles pushed Anthony outside the gate of his family's compound. He threw his belongings out after him. Anthony, who knew virtually nothing about the geography of the city, was miles from either his home or Debbie's office, but Debbie's office was closer. He started walking.

Several hours later, Debbie's sister, who worked at Debbie's office, was leaving at an unusually late hour. She was going to take a cab home. She raised her hand. A cab stopped, but she let it pass. Another cab stopped, but she waved it on again. She has never known why she let them go.

Suddenly she turned, and there was Anthony, carrying his backpack, his well-pressed clothes mussed and dirty,

On sight of her, he small knees buckled and he began to cry.

"Anthony, Anthony," she said, pulling the seven-year-old to her chest, "How did you get here?"

Anthony did not know the city, and between Charles' house and the office lay twisting miles of slums, violent neighborhoods, wracked by kidnappings, where he had walked, dirty but unscathed, in his well-pressed clothes. How, indeed?

Anthony looked at her and said, "Jesus walked with me."

Note added Monday, July 21: Catalina is dancing with angels.

Poems for Jesus #5

I fear this cannot be the path you chose -
That downward curves, in darkness, and apart
From all my friends, and sets me among foes.
I turn and say, “Some respite, You’ll impart?
There’s some escape you’ll show me from this place?”
But now my smarting heart receives no cheer;
Gone silent is Your voice, like flint Your face!
My fainting hope quails at your eyes severe.
And downward winding, twisting, while winds blow,
You lead me on and never turn around.
My sorrow grows that you would lead me low –
Until I see your tears have wet the ground!
“Did you not ask,” you finally say to me,
“That I would in my crucible refine you?
And from your mesh of fears to be set free?
The things you asked, I’m faithful now to do.”
And now I see this path has been well trod
By none you have betrayed, but by Your own
By saints and prophets – all well loved of God -
All on their way to praise You at Your throne.
You lead me low, that you might lead me higher.
For gold that lasts, these tears shall be the fire.