Visitors

This weekend, for American Thanksgiving, I had Philip, his girlfriend Cailey, and four of her college girlfriends in my home. All of the girls are majoring in something to do with gaming: programming games, designing games, creating art for the games, writing scripts for games. Then there’s Philip playing them in his free moments. The rest of us stick to card games and board games. We played Hand-and-Foot and Scum. Philip introduced us to Dominion. As the group played, I remembered how easily kids laugh at the smallest things, infecting one another until the whole group is laughing at hilarity. I also remembered how much I like having friends comfortable around my table, laughing, eating, talking, and how I don’t need to be in the center of it, just around, enjoying it like a good dessert.

When the topic of Thanksgiving celebrations came up, two of the girls said their families don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. It’s just a holiday for them. They’re American born, but from Asian immigrant families. I think they said something like, “We don’t really get Thanksgiving.” It was an Oz moment. If you don’t grow up being taught about Pilgrims and turkeys and dinners with Indians, the holiday doesn’t feel as important. When I’m in Mexico, I celebrate Thanksgiving, but it’s hard to celebrate with Mexican friends, because the idea of a sit down meal at a specified time in the middle of the day doesn’t make as much sense to some of them—and where’s the salsa? On the other hand, I don’t celebrate Day of the Dead, but this holiday weighs on the hearts of my Mexican friends, especially if they have lost a loved one. They ache to celebrate it, and if their church forbids that, they feel the tension.

Culture clash is like that. We ache for different things, and these aches don’t make sense to people who didn’t grow up with you. And eventually they affect your culture, and things change from how you remember them. So many people in our world know this. It’s hard to give up your Thanksgivings, Days of the Dead, Tet, or whatever traditions you’ve held dear, to see them eroded by the great migrations of our day.

And in Old Testament times, God protected his people from these changes. “Force all the Canaanites from your lands,” he said. “Don’t intermarry,” he said. “Keep the feasts,” he said… “in Jerusalem.” If you’ve read Ralph Winter’s article in Perspectives on the World Christian Movement, you know that in Old Testament times, God meant to draw all the people of the world to his presence at His Temple. In Jerusalem. The Jews were meant to have this incredible culture that would draw people to God, an inexorable, centripetal force. The world would come to Him there.

But today, we are not in Old Testament times. We are not expected to keep the feasts. We are no longer set apart and different. No. Now we are in New Testament times, Centrifugal times, sent into the world, to its very last corners, to live among people just like Jesus lived among us. And this might mean living next to people who have immigrated into our country and are very different from us. Having different customs, even different faiths. They might not get Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or a myriad of other things, including Jesus himself. And so we might we might see our traditions worn away by people different from us, and it might hurt, but it’s our calling as Christians to go, to leave behind what is beautiful to us, and go. To knock on our neighbor’s door (our literal neighbor now) and welcome her without fear, knowing that her presence in our neighborhood will change things, and that’s ok, because God has sent her.

And it’s no coincidence that the tale of the Good Samaritan is set on a road, where people of different races and religions are traveling, maybe migrating, maybe forced by economics or politics to cross paths, and in this story, Jesus makes the Muslim the good guy, stopping to help a Christian left bleeding. Who is our neighbor?

Our church is deliberating whether to sponsor a Syrian refugee family here in Niagara that the Canadian government has approved. Rightfully, there are concerns, but this is my take on it.  

Toolbox

We went to see our new grand-nephew yesterday, two weeks old, all hunched over in a huddle, soft and warm, wiggling and squirming like a tight nest of bunnies. He didn’t know why he wiggled. Some small discomfort. And as hunger pangs grew, he grew more fidgety and started letting out those little newborn squeaks that bypass your brain and hit you straight in the liver or wherever it is feelings are supposed to reside. Then he scrunched his little eyes shut and you could see it coming before it hit you, the tiny forlorn wail. He was a bundle of need.

And I thought about how God gave us all a bundle of feelings to deal with, and how differently we use them, and how we learn to mete out our feelings differently as we grow and change our priorities. For this baby, the wail could be a wet diaper or a burp coming, or a minute past feeding time. Or it could be something more dire. Impossible to tell without being mom and knowing your child. You learn to guess well.

Then as parents, you are so tempted to react when your children cry, “But it’s a small thing. Why waste your bag of emotions on that? There are so much bigger things.” There are, indeed, starving children in Syria. But this makes no sense to the child, because they have drawn from the same bag you have and spent that emotion on that particular care because it seems worthy to them. A child will wail at a crushed toy, a lost blanket, a being-left-behind-for-the-evening. And you can comfort them because to you, this loss isn’t significant. “Significant” changes as you grow.

It doesn’t help to challenge the reasons your kids feel, to interrupt their stories. Once the cat is out of the bag, the emotion spent, you can’t put it back. Reasoning that the thing was not big enough to cry over doesn’t help. They’ve cried already. Our preacher told us a story in church of an athlete who faced cancer himself. Lost part of his jaw to it. And a child. And missed playing in the Superbowl by an inch. I struggled to relate because it made me feel my story was so small; why tell it? And on the other hand, why so much fuss over a Superbowl?  I’m so sorry you couldn’t get in the Superbowl.

As life moves us in and out of pain and loss, we learn to manage our bag of tricks differently, saving our emotions for the things that really matter, a moving target. The little things don’t trouble us anymore because we’ve tasted the big ones. But sometimes we lose, along with our intolerance for pain, our capacity for joy. We forget to rejoice at the little things as we’ve forgotten to cry when lunch takes too long.

Life is a lesson in adjustments. We are constantly pulling together the drawstrings of reason and emotion, trying to knit the outfit together, because since the dawn of time, these two have become estranged, and we end up spilling our bag of emotions on the ground, wasting anger, sorrow, joy, contentment on things that are undeserving. Or we judge the emotions of others by our own priorities and miss their pain because it’s unreasonable to us. I know a man who walked into the home of a widow two weeks after her husband’s death and told her to move on. He could not read her pain. Maybe knitting reasons and emotions together is one of the greatest changes God makes in us in the end, healing this chasm and letting us read one another well. When we are with Him, and our priorities are renovated, what thing could cause us pain? What loss could we mourn? Meanwhile we are in trade school, with this toolbox, learning.

Rust

Final radiation treatment today.Yay!  Get to see Dr. Blue & Brown again, too, after three months. I want to ask him why certain parts of my body don’t work right any more. The radiologist says it can’t be his fault since radiation targets one small, (you think so, doc?) concentrated area (and if you kill off one part of the body, of course no other part of the body feels that).

I’ve got my theory all worked out to try out on him: I noticed that the chemo dissolved my fingernails, leaving them milky white and with six distinct ridges, one for each treatment. They will take months to grow back normally. So what if the rust in my joints is something like that, too? What if the chemo kind of turned them to mush a bit, and that mush just needs to work itself out of my system? I’m willing to go with that. I can wait, as long as there’s a promise that life will finally get back to normal some day, and I can bend my thumbs again, and hold a pencil, and chop food, and walk up stairs effortlessly. I’m bargaining. It’s one of those stages of grief.  I have the whole plan worked out.

NEVER DO THAT. Because when the doctor blows holes in your theory, you have nowhere to go. “Your joints are inflamed,” he says. “It happens. No, there’s nothing you can do, nothing you can take, no diet you can go on. Arthritis doesn’t usually go away. It’s not reversible.”

Did he just say arthritis? Am I in the right clinic? What is he talking about? I came to this appointment so he can help me take care of some side effects from the chemo, and he’s adding arthritis to the list of things I have to fight for the rest of my life. He’s so empathetic, and my husband, sitting in the chair in the other corner is no better. Now that the bargaining has fallen through, I’m mad.

Lot of good that does. So I move on to grief. Today was supposed to be a celebration day, my last radiation, and Robert has promised to take me out to dinner, but I’m just sad. After Dr. Blue and Brown, I move to the chemo lounge. A nurse brings my prescription for an estrogen blocker that I am to take for five years. “It may make your symptoms worse,” she says. I’m called to the chemo chair. It’s a nurse I’ve not met before. After that, I walk downstairs to my final radiation treatment. “Good luck! Come back and tell us how things are going,” Dianne says. (She’s good! I’d never think of suggesting such a thing. Would you go back to a clinic to tell the therapists how you’re doing? Arthritis and all?)

One moment of light in the darkness: I am waiting in the chemo lounge for my chair, and a young studious looking woman in dark glasses and long, straight dirty blond hair sits next to me with a clip board.  I’m used to people coming up to me in chemo lounges now, though I’m surprised she’s not wearing the bumble-bee vest of the volunteers. Come to find out, she’s a grad student at Laurier doing her thesis on how the arts help you when you’re a patient at the hospital, and she wants me to be in her experiment. She’s going to put me in a group of other cancer patients and teach us all to play Christmas carols on a ukulele. A ukulele!  I’m going to play a ukulele, dead thumbs and all! I’m excited already. We get to perform at the end of it when she does her final presentation. How cool is that! You’re all invited.

And afterwards Robert and I go to our friends’ house, (we had texted them and asked if we could just come in the evening, and they said yes and saved the day), and while the snow falls in huge flakes outside the window, Michelle and I sit in the kitchen and eat apple pie, and I feel safe to be sad, and she empathizes, and even reminds me, “Doctors can be wrong, you know.” Doctors can be wrong.  Doctor Blue &Brown, please be wrong. And we move to other things (like honeymoons), and the evening ends well. Tomorrow is another day.

Play houses

Now that the leaves have disappeared from the trees, leaving so many crooked spikes to hold up the grey skies, the dreys stand out. I thought these bunches of leaves crammed in the forks of branches were bird’s nests, big bird’s nests. In Oaxaca, I watch parrots weave their nests in crooks of trees, so I assumed some other bird did the same thing here. But they aren’t bird nests. They are squirrels’ nests. The thought of those little furry bodies bunched in those leafy nests high up and out on a limb, exposed to earth and sky, makes me smile.

Robert researched the phenomenon for me, surprised that after all these years I didn’t know what dreys were. Canada always holds new surprises for me (that the government sends you reminders to do screening tests for cancer; that the corn tortillas have wheat in them). Dreys hold together because the squirrels start with green twigs, leaves attached, and weave everything into these to make a tight shell, leaving the top open in the summer for ventilation. Juvenile squirrels play at house-making, building little floppy nests that fall apart, their play-houses, tree-houses. Squirrels leave their nests when they get over-run with bugs—lice or flees. Their nests look so precarious, out there on a limb, to discourage predators, but I saw a raccoon hanging by its hands from a telephone wire once, so I know they would try. Maybe the limb shaking warns the little guys in time, a vibration alarm.

As a teacher I’m fascinated with how God engineers learning right into our instincts. We learn. We grow. We develop. This has to be one aspect in which we reflect God. I think of kittens pouncing on strings, and puppies sniffing out toys, and birds pushing their babies out of nests, and squirrels building play-houses. We practice until we are perfect. That is what this life is about. We are God’s juvenile squirrels building things that fall apart in this life. Sometimes they fall right out of the tree, leaving us exposed to the elements and the creeping raccoons. We feel the vibrations under feet as the limb shakes. But He who began a good work in you will continue until it is finished. “It is finished.”

God loves babies. Jesus began ministry as a baby. He spent more years being God as a child, learning Scripture and carpentry, than being God as a man, doing miracles and telling stories. He spent more time learning to saw boards and to plane them smooth and straight, just as His father taught him, breathing in the pine smell, listening to the rhythmic scruff of the plane, than He did  training His disciples. We so often think of him as the Teacher that we forget how long he spent as the Student.

I have gone so far as to wonder what this quality of God looks like in heaven. Is teaching finished there? Is learning? I have sent an application ahead to heaven for one learning job and one teaching job. I want to learn to be a dancer. I want to dance for God there because there is no chance for that here. Nope. But I also want to be a teacher in heaven. You know all those babies aborted, those sons and daughters miscarried, who never saw a drey perched in the sky in the arms of a tree? I want to teach those kids about God’s wonders—the earth and sky, and squirrels, and kittens, and books and dancing and history, and me. What God did for me. I want to be a teacher for God. I practice a lot now, getting ready, creating my floppy play-houses in the sky, but the day is coming when I’ll get my dream job. Both of them.

Hockey. Who is going to teach those kids about hockey?

Or tlayudas?

Or laser printers?

There’s room for you. Appy here: ________________________________________

Those women

Elai, in her Sociology class, has been researching an issue that is more and more concerning to her and to all of us: human trafficking. I am helping her find sources for her paper and am learning more than I want to know. Elai first learned about human trafficking and the sex trade when she read Half the Sky in high school (the book describes how women are treated in different parts of the world, reminding us that something like 100 million girls are simply missing in the world because of neglect and discrimination; read it. It’s also a six part documentary on Netflix). Now she is studying how one country put a new kind of law into effect that has had a noticeable effect on the sex trade in that country and has caused other countries to sit up and take notice. Many are considering similar kinds of laws.

The Swedish government has taken the stance that prostitutes are often victims, coerced by economics, trauma, or force to do something no human should have to do. The ones driving prostitution, the ones with the power, are the clients, almost always men. Without men demanding it, the supply would disappear.  And when the sex trade diminishes, then sex traffic goes down along with it. So Sweden has enacted a law that prosecutes only the clients and lets the (usually) women go free. Once the law was in effect, the number of johns prosecuted quadrupled, and the number of women walking the streets plummeted. Swedish men now think twice about hunting for a prostitute, because if they go to trial, their wives find out. Over the years, while prostitution and sex trafficking has grown in countries where prostitution is legal, Sweden’s numbers remain stable.

At the other extreme is Holland, who decided many years ago to take a pragmatic approach. After all, “boys will be boys,” and everyone will be better off if we just accept the inevitable. Holland has ten times the prostitutes of Sweden and an enormous problem with sex trafficking, violence toward women, and child abuse. Most of Europe’s  trade of children goes through Holland. And this one piece of data really got to me: the pedophile lobby in Holland is very strong, pushing to allow children their “sexual freedom,” and they have gained legal victories including this one: sexual abuse of children over 12 is now illegal only if the child or a parent complains.  Talk about a slippery slope.

And at this point I am stalled. I think about how this stuff happens within minutes of my home in Oaxaca, just a short drive to certain downtown streets, or to the brothels in Xoxo, where, I’m told, Central American women are trafficked. And here, a half an hour away from me, Niagara Falls boasts of its “escort” services. And like all horrible causes, this moves me, but these people remain invisible to me.

I am called elsewhere. My family serves a different vulnerable people. Among these people, the fathers say they “sell” their daughters in marriage, charging exorbitant sums for them (for they are beautiful, as all young women are). When some of these fathers met Jesus, they decided it would honor their daughters to stop this custom. God changed the way these men looked at women. I like that.

I hope Sweden’s experiment works well and can be tried in other countries, chipping away at the number of men who hurt women and calling to account those that drive the system with their money.  Of course that’s not all that’s needed.  The thing is complicated, and laws don’t solve the problem, especially if they don’t reflect a consensus. They only punish and deter. They don’t change attitudes toward women, especially those women. I’m not sure how much studying the topic changes anything. It must, but it feels big and foreign and elusive, a horrifying research project. Lord, may there be many, many competent people fighting this battle, too.

LEGO

While Robert was gone, Janey invited me over to help her put together a secretariat desk and wardrobe from IKEA. When we couldn’t figure out how to get the thingy out of the power drill, Dan stepped in, and Janey made supper while Dan and I finished assembling the furniture because we all agreed that IKEA and spouses don’t mix any more than spouses and wall-papering. The bit about the power drill (shouldn’t it be called a power screw driver?) tells you how much I help Robert assemble things in the shop (not). But I must say that if you can handle twisting a screwdriver for six hours or steadying a power tool for three, you can put IKEA furniture together. They give you LEGO instructions for each step (I’m advising Philip that if he doesn’t get a job with LEGO he could work for IKEA, the big people LEGO store), picture books and all. I bet the inventor of IKEA put together lots of LEGO kits when he was four.

IKEA and LEGO are very ironic products, because they are pieces mass-produced on assembly lines (probably by the robots that Dan creates in his shop, adding to the irony), but they are designed so that you can be innovative and feel a sense of accomplishment and ownership when you assemble the mass-produced, identical pieces, yourself, into something impossible and original (to you). You infuse uniqueness into sameness. Craftsmanship into factory work. That is a God thing.

I’m glad for assembly lines. They make IKEA and LEGO and Toyotas possible. They also make it possible for me to survive cancer. Today I went to the hospital twice. Muga Scan. Check. Radiation. Check. Doctor visit. Check. Lab test. Check. When Henry Ford rolled his Model T’s off his assembly line in 1908 for just under $900, he made it possible for hospitals to invent integrated cancer clinics that slide you in and out of CT machines, and Linear Accelerators, and Chemo chairs in minutes, distributing the cost among thousands of customers. I am aware that it is the efficiency of the system that makes it possible for Canada’s health system to take care of one more stranger walking in the door. Bravo. I asked myself inside the Muga Machine whether the technologist knew that I get IV infusions that can wreck my heart muscles, and that is why I am lying on her table again. Does she know the part she plays in keeping me healthy along with the 20 other patients that fill her day?

We see the effects of Henry Ford’s gift to the world everywhere: in our grocery stores, where we can buy gala apples or hass avocados in any store across the continent, or in our schools, where every student is guaranteed the same curriculum program, or in our churches, where people move in and out of warehouse-looking buildings, receiving the latest, greatest teachings and worshippings. If we didn’t have these things, we’d miss out. We’d die of cancer or ignorance.

As we know, God produces on a mass scale, turning out kitties and rose buds and little human babies that look more or less the same each time, but somehow no two things He makes are ever the same. And he uses organic assembly lines, our bodies, to build new cells and keep our engines running, all the members staying on task toward a common goal of survival or maybe just points in a video game. But God makes something new every time He puts the pieces together. How does he do that! Because when things start feeling monotonous, the same ‘ol, same ‘ol, we need to remember that although faithfulness is required, monotony is not His style.

Jan Vormann cleaning up the city

What’s he making out of us, his IKEA pieces, his LEGO blocks? Cool thing is that we get to decide that for ourselves, picking each other up off the ground and fitting one another together (don’t you just love that squeeky, creeky sound of LEGO blocks fitting just right?) into a wonderful new invention that we will own and love because it’s us, us including Jesus. We are assembling something made from millions of pieces, made by millions of members, a one-off impossible creature. Ahhh. So if it gets tough on the line, think of that.

Gunmen

Here we are again. A stand-off with the Law. But while the police upheld civil law, the others were on the side of Law. Those gunmen laying waste to people in a theatre hall were coldly killing because their victims did not follow the Law of God…as the Gunmen saw it. They left a country bewildered—half a world bewildered—about why a handful of men would try to enforce their understanding of God’s Law with bullets. And then they blew themselves up to reap their reward. That’s a lot of faith. And we know they have not learned what God has always known and what we are barely learning: that you cannot force Law on people, or not for long. You can’t force anything on people—not for long—not even Love.

In the 1530’s a group of radical Protestants called Anabaptists (re-baptizers) tried this. They set up a society in Munster, Germany, where God’s Law was enforced by violence, and their rebellion was betrayed and taken apart by violence and internal corruption, their leaders tortured and hung in cages outside the city walls, which are there to this day. In response, the Anabaptist movement chose a non-violent path in responding to tyranny and violence that they have offered to the world ever since.

A few years ago I set up for one of our school chapels a debate between Robert, an Anabaptist, and Carter, a Presbyterian, who believed in just war (fighting to stop evil). But to mix things up a bit, I had Robert defend the just war position and gave the peace position to Carter. They had to defend the other side from what they believed.  Carter had far more experience with the debate format, but Robert, of course, was just as good an arguer. Most of the kids at school are gung ho about weapons and the military, so they wanted Robert to win the debate, but they had all taken debate class from Carter. He knew his stuff! That was the quietest chapel on record. You could have heard a pen drop.

While this is yet another subject on which Christians have to agree to disagree, we do have to think about our response to violence and authority and especially imposed authority. Paul said, “Slaves, obey your masters.” What if, heaven forbid, we were enslaved by ISIS? (For a picture of this, read John Hersey’s White Lotus where the Chinese come on ships to America and take them away as slaves). Yet (finally) we know slavery and tyranny of all kinds is wrong. We (finally) understand we were all created for freedom. We know that we can use violence to stop things that are wrong. It’s why we have police who enforce the law and stop gunmnen.

So let’s talk about Law. The Gunmen of our world have an understanding of God’s Law and want to impose it on us. We know this is wrong. But do we do this to others? Do we try to legislate Law for other people that they don’t understand or share? Oh, we say, but our Law is the right one. Yes, maybe so, but it’s the imposition on others that’s the problem.  When Jesus came to fulfill the Law, he came not to give us a new set of regulations, but a Law that would be written on our hearts, in our consciences, and in our minds. It would be the Great Law, the only Law really: Love. All the laws derive from this. And this is the Law out of which God created us and gave us freedom from Him to make our own choices and even Fall and drag Him down to Hell with us. He gave us Law as a Tutor to lead us to Jesus, who would set us free from all Law on the one hand, and make us his slaves and his servants to all, on the other. The paradox of Grace. He persuades us so that we give him everything, all power and authority and trust. We give it freely, willingly, joyfully. He forces nothing and requires everything, and we learn the difference.

So when Christian leaders lead, they do not lord it over anyone but serve everyone. They demand nothing, least of all submission. They love. And those who have learned to trust them follow freely because they choose to. When pastors lead, they demand nothing, least of all submission. They love. And those in their care follow freely because they choose to. And when husbands lead, they demand nothing, least of all submission. They love. And wives follow freely because they choose to. In the Kingdom of God, there is no such thing as positional authority, where you gain authority simply by assuming a job and a title. All authority is earned. There is no external Law, only that which is written on our hearts.

Those gunmen have not learned about true law or true authority. They still think they can impose both by force. And for a time, perhaps they can. But ultimately, they will lose. And so will we to the very extent we forget the Law of Love and apply (however mildly) their method. We grieve with France. We grieve with Syria. We grieve over what made those Gunmen do what they did. We may not be able to do much. At least we should apply what we do know right where we are, “that the world may know.”

Remembrance

The wind is strong today, determined to wipe the last stubborn leaves off the trees. When you drive in the hollows, the trees are protected and colorful. But here I’m in the open and glad for the evergreens around the yard that stand up to the wind and ward off the grey stooping ceiling. Sentinels in spiky uniforms.

Today I went in for radiation two hours early, forgetting to adjust my calendar for my day off yesterday—Remembrance of the 11^th hour on the 11^th day of the 11^th month. Everyone was wearing red poppies. For soldiers left behind in Flanders.

We remember soldiers of all kinds. I have just finished my book, and the last chapter is about  women “soldiers.” (I avoid military imagery when talking about Christians service, but sometimes we forget about the people who have been killed in “battle” for their faith. As evangelicals we don’t have a moment of silence for our martyrs, or any remembrance at all that I know of.) My reading highlighted the women in the roll call at the end of Romans: Phoebe, Prisca, Mary, Junia, Tryphaena and Trphosa, Persis, the mother of Rufus, Julia, the sister of Nereus. I’ll tell you what the book says about them.

Phoebe heads the list. She is a deacon (not a deaconess; apparently there is no such thing in the Bible) from the church of Cenchrea, a port near Corinth, from where Paul was most likely writing, and from the way she is commended to the Roman Christians, it’s possible she was the carrier of the letter and read it aloud to them, as would have been the custom, the first interpreter of its Pauline tones. Some translations call her a helper or servant, but when the same word is applied to Paul, it becomes “minister.” The deacons we know about in Acts were certainly gifted ministers of the gospel, leaders of the early church, and probably Phoebe was, too, because she’s also called a benefactor, one who “stands before” others to preside and/or aid, and when Paul uses this word elsewhere, it means elders or leaders.

Prisca (Aquila’s wife) we know about from the book of Acts, a tent-maker, a hospitality giver. Her name goes before that of her husband, and she’s known for gently, discreetly mentoring Apollos. Paul talks about her as a fellow missionary, doing the work of God to proclaim the gospel, and he claims that “all the churches of the Gentiles” give thanks for her ministry with Aquila.

Junia, probably married to Andronicus, is counted as “prominent among the apostles.” A female apostle, and an outstanding one! For a thousand years no one questioned this. But Martin Luther decided that this wasn’t possible, so he changed her name to Junias, a male, when he wrote the German translation of the Bible. Sex-change-by-translation, someone called it. Someone else went back to check the records. The name Junias simply doesn’t exist. There are lots of “Junia’s” in ancient Roman inscriptions, and they are women, every one. So says my book.

Mary, Trypheaena, Tryphosa, Persis. These women, like the others, were known for their “hard work,” which for Paul means the hard work of spreading the gospel and ministering to the churches. The last three may have been slaves, and the two Try’s might have been sisters (often named similarly), even sex workers, because their names meant “dainty” and “luscious.” Whatever they were before meeting Jesus, Paul knew them as fellow workers, soldiering on beside him through thick and thin to bring God to people. 

Then there is one who became like a mother to Paul, and Julia who may be the mother of Nereus’ sister, bringing her up to serve just like Mom. It’s hard to tell, since Paul doesn’t mention the blood lines, marriages or social status of the women. No. They are co-workers, working hard. If you've done research on them and know other things about them, let me know. Burning question: if Paul welcomed women as leaders in the church, as it appears he did, why didn't he make this obvious? Why did God allow the ambiguity that's caused so much conflict and unheld babies?

Whatever their role, I'm glad Paul included these women in his roll call of honor. I'm glad to be reminded of them.

Tyrannical texts

A friend of mine, a Moravian minister, sent me a book that I’m just finishing now. It’s about those texts that get to us, that bother us and make us mad. They are also the ones some people use to put other people in their place. The ones that don’t make sense and require a lot of research and contextualizing. The ones that Christians fight over and and take sides over and stop fellowshipping over. The book calls these the tyrannical texts.  I mentioned the one that made my friend Kathy mad. Under the Old Testament, if a woman gave birth to a boy, she was unclean for seven days, but if she gave birth to a girl, she was unclean for two weeks. She needed 33 days to be purified after her son’s birth and double that to be purified after her daughter’s. What’s with that? The Law is full of such discrimination against women.

slavery memorial: Tanzania

Yes. I know. The Old Testament does not have the weight of the New because Jesus fulfilled the Law. We aren’t under the Law now. We read the Old Testament through the lens of Jesus and disregard those adamant requirements for animal sacrifices and feast days and untrimmed beards. That is good Anabaptist thinking—the rejection of a flat cannon. But even a hundred and fifty years ago, the Old Testament and New were still read with equal weight. And then there are those troubling  New Testament commands like “Slaves, obey your masters.” Today we know that although Paul may have had a point then, to use this as justification for slavery today would be unthinkable. (Why didn’t he say this?) Yet this verse was used by Christian pastors all across the South to justify slavery from the pulpit. Here is how one Southern newspaper summarized the Christian position on slavery in 1820:

“The Bible, comprehending the old and new Testaments, contains the unerring decisions of the word of God…These decisions are of equal authority in both testaments…God is infinitely just and wise in all his decisions…so it is culpably audacious in us to question…Whoever believes the word of God…must believe in the absolute rectitude of slave-holding.”

Preacher who pushed for Georgia to be a slave state

 If you were a white minister in the south, this is what you preached. It’s horrible. But look at the language. Does some of it sound familiar? It’s what the abuse of spiritual power sounds like. I know you’re wondering where I’m going with this. Am I gunning for people to interpret Scripture however they want? Is there no solid ground? (Short answer: No. Yes.)

 

Here’s the tyrranical text I am researching now: 1 Corinthians 14:34. Look it up if you wish. I’m not going to write about it. But I can assure you that whatever interpretation I choose, someone will disagree. Someone might even question my integrity or my commitment to the authority of Scripture, and that would be unfair. And dangerous. You see, it’s because no one could talk to those southern ministers about their fierce, public defense of slavery that this demonic institution could thrive in the South. No one could question it or disagree, because then you’d be disagreeing with Scripture, and even with God, Himself. And this is not what we want to do. But we do want to question human beings, human leaders, even pastors, who are not God, and who can get things wrong. I think as many of them have gotten things wrong about women as got things wrong about slaves a century ago. On my last trip to Mexico a friend told me that her church forbids her husband from holding their baby: it would be demeaning to him because holding babies was the wife’s job. It made my blood boil.

Durer

Do you know the first thing Jesus ever did in the Temple of God? He asked questions for three days. Do you know why Jacob was given a new name and a blessing? He wrestled with God.

Moses was inspired when he said all those things that today make women look like inferior beings, and Paul was inspired when he wrote, “Women should be silent,” and “Slaves, obey your masters.” For some reason God wanted those words in our Scripture. It’s taken us thousands of years to learn that those words aren’t meant to justify slavery or sideline women in our churches today. What else have we been preaching for thousands of years that isn’t right today? Do we think that we are the first ones in history to get the Bible 100% correct? Are we perfect in knowledge, like God, Himself? Or is there room to pull out those tyrannical texts and argue, and pray, and study, and listen, and wrestle with one another and with God?

Questions

I am married to someone who asks a lot of questions. When Janey’s family and the two of us were walking the Bruce Trail, Robert was testing Dawnelle’s reflexes by tossing something to her, a pocket knife, I think. She squawked, and Dan asked if she’d prefer that he start tossing her questions instead. She said she’d stick to the (closed) knife throwing. Smart girl. Because questions can be just as hard to parry. “Just look at Socrates,” I said. “Who’s that?” She asked. (Teachers live for such questions).

trireme: love the eye

I told her Socrates was a fat, ugly old man, who walked around Athens asking awkward questions and getting himself in trouble because (supposedly) his questions provoked the youth of Athens to question the existence of the gods. He was called the Gadfly of Athens. Nice. He also started questioning the judgment of the authorities of Athens, who he thought were running their war with Sparta the wrong way because they kept eliminating any ship captains who lost sea battles. They were getting to the place where they finally had no competent captains left to put on those sleek triremes. (They lost the war; no surprise). But Socrates’ criticism was considered anti-patriotic, and he was handed a nice hemlock soda. Robert asked me if I thought he looked like Socrates, and that’s why I was telling the story. I thought it best not to answer. I’ve learned some questions are rhetorical.

To balance out the picture we have to remember that the Snake asked Eve a question, too, and brought down the entire human race on her answer. So not all questions are healthy or innocent.  But if you notice, God’s solution wasn’t to shut down the question even when we got the answer terribly wrong.

My friend Kathy gave a testimony this Sunday about how God tolerated her questions. She asked Him why He had included that passage in the Bible that said that women were unclean after childbirth (she has eight kids). She told Him she was angry about what that sounded like, and she shut down the conversation with Him over it for a while. She said that He just waited for her patiently, and eventually He helped her understand Him better, and now they are closer than ever. There were tears in her voice as she told her story. She said God isn’t ever shocked at our questions.  He doesn’t mind what path we take to learn as long as we get there.

I found this passage in one of Paul’s letters (my paraphrase): “When you meet together, one will sing, another will teach, another will preach, one will speak in tongues, and another will interpret…Let two or three people preach, and let the others evaluate what has been said.” It even says that when a person listening to the sermon gets an insight from God, the first speaker should sit down. I can’t even imagine this much participation and accountability in the way we normally do church. And Paul wasn’t even addressing leaders here. He was addressing the whole church. I think he expected a lot of give and take. I don’t think he minded questions.

beware

A teacher friend of mine walked into my classroom for the first time. “I see you use the socratic method for teaching,” she said. And yes, I do. I use a lot of questions to get kids thinking about literature and life. But how in the world did she know that? “Your seating arrangement,” she said. “You’ve seated your kids around circular tables to make it easier for them to see each other and talk to each other and ask questions.” Granted, this is risky; it can bring chaos into the classroom. Paul discovered this. Like me in my classroom, Paul had to establish order, telling people to take turns when they spoke. Socrates ended up paying for his questions with his life. So did God, actually, before he got death (the ultimate chaos) under control. But they all decided that questions were worth the risk. Not that I see a hemlock soda in anyone’s future here. But  sometimes when you’re on the wrong end of the questioning, it gets tempting.

non-poisonous hemlock tree

Sommelier

The color overhead has moved to beneath our feet now, a wave of yellows, oranges and browns tumbled over by the wind as the tide shifts to winter. Fall is quick. It is a verb, a golden movement from up to down in a slow, silent spiral. We take a walk on the Bruce Trail in two spots, one along Rockway Falls, and one next to Janey’s house with her family. Dawnelle’s take on the look is “Dead, dead, dead.” Robert’s is, “Look at all that firewood.”  As for me, I’m just glad to be out walking in this carpet of leaves while it is still warm enough to stay outside this long. Robert keeps wanting to turn back because he knows better than I do how quickly I tire, but I want to keep going. It’s good medicine being out here.

The Bruce Trail runs all along the Escarpment (the cliff down which Niagara Falls) and is named after an earl. It is the longest and oldest marked hiking trail in Canada, and travels through woods,  past waterfalls, over roads, and along people’s lawns and corn fields, a 900 km kaleidoscope. We admire the details: a stark white mushroom on the bottom of a tree trunk, a pine burl, a shimmering pool. What I think about is this: it’s not just humans who use love languages. You know the five—giving gifts, saying affirming words, showing affection, serving, spending quality time. I am fortunate to have a husband skilled in all of them. But God has his five love languages, too.

Sight. I think of the ways He delights us with contrasts. Among the brown leaves starting to show their skeletons, there is one bright yellow leaf still whole. The white mushroom against the brown bark draws my eye. Robert says his mom would collect these tough woody creatures and paint their back with scenery. The smoothness of the pool contrasts with the tumbled leaves and bare, tangled branches between us.

Sound. The dry leaves rustle as the miniature waterfall murmurs steadily in the background, soothing. It too is a child of the fall, its water making a shimmering curtain down over the rocks, passing on that hurricane water we had last week.

Feel. The cold rocks are covered with brown crunchy leaves and a fur of bright green moss. Choose the texture you like, and you’ll find it somewhere here. The contrast is refreshing. Everything God makes invites you to explore further. Ok, except scorpions. And even those, someone like my student Ember would delight in studying.

Smell. Look. A baby evergreen coming up among all these adult deciduous trees. Bright green against all the brown. I think of Christmas trees just hauled in from fields, bringing their smell inside with them. Did you know that smell is the only sense directly connected to your long term memory? How many Christmas trees did you just remember? It’s the only sense that gets more sensitive with age. The best taste testers are old.

Taste. I am not eating anything out here on the Bruce Trail (I wait to pick an apple fallen off the tree in Janey’s front yard), but other creatures are busy eating. One trunk looks like it has become a feast, and all around me the decay makes it possible for spring to come again. Death into life, a lesson of redemption. I eat an innocent apple fallen from a tree in the garden, and I know, in contrast to the imagery, that it is a gift, one of God’s love languages to me. Remember the song, "He fills up my senses?" God fills my senses with good things; my youth is renewed like the eagles. I am a sommelier of God’s goodness, ever more experienced.

Room

Usually I get in to Linac3 right away (don’t ask; I don’t know either. On my first visit, when I asked where the radiation lab was, the nurse said, “It’s there on your paper.” Uh huh. Wait. I just realized what Linac means: Dianne told me the other day that the machine is called a linear accelerator—lin ac—If that’s any help when you’re looking for a radiation room). Today they were running behind, and I was supposed to wait 40 minutes, but Amanda in Linac1 said she could fit me in. Because I’m quick. In and out in fifteen minutes.

I notice the differences in the room right away. They stand out in this solidly white room with its white bed under a white sheet under a white machine waiting to swallow me. On this ceiling, instead of giant dew drops on tree branches against a blue background, they’ve bolted giant hosta leaves against a purple background. Not that I know they are hosta leaves. When they are 200 times too big, it’s hard to recognize them, but Amanda has been in this room a long time, and she’s figured out what they are. She says that makes this the Purple Room. Next door, the Yellow Room has falling leaves. She says that the bosses switch things up every so often (think about that phrase for a bit. Every…so…often? TESL students must be shaking their heads). They change the technologists around to new rooms and partners to break the monotony.

When Elai was in high school, she wrote a research paper on a possible career path that I  had wisely picked out for her. It was precisely this job, a technologist working with death rays or sound waves that travel ultra-ly through your tissues. It’s a great job. Good pay. You get to work in one white, windowless room for eight hours a day, helping very ill people in and out of a machine. “Right,” she said. “I get to look at what is hurting and killing people all day. In a room with no air. No thanks!” So much for my planning my daughter’s career path. She’s now a drama major at Wheaton, managing lights for a play called Caucasian Chalk Circle with half a car sticking up out of the stage. If I weren’t visiting Linac 1, 2, or 3, I could go see it with her. Sigh. The life of a starving artist, my dear. But so much more FUN!

But I tell you I am thankful for Dianne and Rob and Derek and Amanda who attend me, calling out those numbers, shifting, measuring, adjusting, syncing me to life. As they prep me, they say in their young voices, “Excellent. Perfect. Very good. I agree.” I feel part of a job well done. You can find satisfaction in any room. And compassion. And hosta leaves.

Really. Take Room. I haven’t seen the movie yet. It’s out this year. If you see it before I do, tell me what you think. The book was astonishing. It’s about Jack, born and growing up in one 10’ x 10’ room until he’s five because his mother is a captive there. To Jack, the room is an entire world because his mother makes it one, for love. “Good morning, Room,” he says. “Good morning, Lamp. Good morning, Sink.”

Hamlet, with such a different mother, cries out, “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” Do you know, it’s up to us to make the room livable? To call out, “Excellent?” To make a room a fairy tale with Sink and Brush for characters? To plant the hosta—on the ceiling if we have to?

Paul says, “I have learned to be content.”  God’s second greatest gift. After what makes it possible. Love. Am I ready for such a lesson?

Familiar

I leave in another hour for my radiation treatment and a 30 second consultation with the radiologist, “No skin reaction? Great. See you next week.” or "It's just boring now, isn't it." He barely gets in the door. I wonder how a 30 second visit gets billed. Maybe it’s by the word. Fifty bucks a word would be about right. It’s clockwork now, no drama, no fuss. I don’t even have to register at the reception desk. I scan a bar code I’ve been given on a piece of paper, walk on back, change into a gown and sit down. I notice some of us get to stay in street clothes, and some of us have to wear patient uniforms, I mean gowns.  (I wonder if there were any women on the committee that designed them. They are so fashionable. And you have to remember which parts of you are covered and which aren’t, because it’s not obvious.) You don’t really notice the gowns so much when everyone is in uniform, the staff and the patients. But in mixed company, when half of the people in the waiting room look normal and you look like a pale blue blob wearing jeans and boots, you remember. But I am so used to it all now that when I lay under the machine and wait for the familiar series of beeps and buzzes, I almost fall asleep, and when the technicians come back in, I’m disoriented and forget to wait until they lower the bed, and I clunk my head against the machine. They apologize.

How quickly we get used to things. I have trains passing through my backyard every day, and I don’t hear them anymore. I remember when we lived in Ometepec, a group came down from North Carolina to visit us. They slept on the floor of our living room, right next to the street, under openings in the concrete to let in air…as well as the barking of the dogs that protected the street throughout the night. You know how they are. By day the just laze around, but by night the are filled with bravery. Glen couldn’t sleep with all that racket, so he opened the door and threw rocks at the dogs, and off they scurried (don't worry: you don’t have to hit Mexican dogs to get the message across. All you have to do is look like you are picking up a rock and winding up to throw, and that does the trick). But they’d always come back because they were just doing their job, protecting the street at night, and they had nowhere else to go. In the wee hours, Glen gave up and made his peace with the pack of dogs so that both of them could get some rest. We didn’t hear a thing. We were used to the noises of Ometepec.

I’m glad God made us able to get used to things so we can get some rest, but I’m even more glad that in the midst of repetitiveness, he surprises us, thumping us on the head. Today I looked outside, and at first I thought the window was dirty, but then I realized that in the few minutes since I’d last checked, the yard had been covered with mist, and I couldn’t see past the property line. I was encased in white water. This does not happen in Oaxaca City, and I am not used to it. I watch the trees dropping leaves, a steady rain of shimmering gold weaving a variegated rug on the ground. I have not seen this for fifteen years. In the radiation room I meet a new technician: Alexis. And Dianne, whom I’ve seen for three weeks now tells me I’m one of the fortunate ones to get this far in my treatments without redness. Someone else admires my new haircut (!) It’s easy to have a perfect haircut when you start out bald. Everything is so even.

Some things need to be boring and uneventful, like hospital visits and plane rides. I’m glad that in the midst of ordinary days, God sends extraordinary things, like fogs, and nurses who notice haircuts, and friends who sleep on floors. And if the things He makes (nurses, gold-raining trees) have endless ability to surprise and engage us, imagine living with God, Himself, the source of all surprise and personality. No wonder we will not need the sun to vary our days. We will work for an eternity to know God, and He will become Familiar, but we will never get used to Him. 

Relational muscles

As Robert and I drive around the Niagara region we see how the buildings reflect the changes in the culture since we lived here twenty years ago. I mentioned the rural churches I see closed down and put up for sale, but rural schools are being sold, too. The tiny school up the road from us now has just closed. It still has the painting on the outside walls of adults and children holding hands together. All different colors. Robert went to kindergarten there, and my friend Dawnelle used to go there only a few years ago. As the number of school kids enrolling each year continues to drop, the school boards close more local schools and build large, amalgamated ones, so if you’re interested in renovating a quaint old school as a home, now is the time. The median age here in the Niagara region is higher than elsewhere in Canada. There aren’t as many young people running around, so it’s just that much more homogeneous, maybe a bit more staid, more private.

At the same time, new homes keep going up. We see housing developments where there used to be fruit farms. And the size of custom homes is impressive. Every week, when we drove to Robert’s nephew’s farm to pick up our box of fresh vegetables in the summer, we looked across the street to see how the new house was coming along. Maybe it’s 10,000 square feet. I don’t know. It has two separate garages and two separate upper decks overlooking the lake, as well as two separate patios out the back sliding doors. It’s huge. Looks like a hotel. And it’s for two people. I’m not saying what the square footage for a couple should be; I’m just saying that even by this culture’s standards, the place stands out. That’s a lot of privacy.

Diego Rivera

And I think of Mixtec homes where we used to live. There is no word for privacy in their language. Their homes once used to be one room, sometimes two, with wooden walls and roof, for sleeping and for cooking. The smoke rose right through the wooden shakes. Then they built houses out of adobe, a little larger, and now the smoke found its way through tile roofs. Most recently, with money trickling back from relatives working in the US, the houses are concrete, but the same pattern applies, two rooms: one for sleeping and the other for everything else. Now gas stoves begin to replace the wood fires on the ground, and moms send their children to the mill down the street to grind their limestone-soaked corn kernels instead of crushing them at home on their kitchen grindstones, but I don’t yet see them building separate bedrooms and separate living spaces. Privacy is a commodity they cannot yet afford. Of course North American houses once looked more like that, too, many, many years ago.

It’s a paradox. As families in North America prosper, we choose to have less kids and roomier houses. We are busier and spend less time at home. It’s more and more difficult to have people drop by or stay for dinner, and there is no expectation that we should. We value our privacy and see it as a basic need. People’s lives overlap less and less as their society prospers, and convenience is more and more an option. This is a more comfortable way to live. Of course it is, and we all choose this way when we can. It eliminates all kinds of stress, and tension, and conflict. But it does not teach us as much as when we live overlapping lives. It does not demand as much, does not require as much sacrifice, does not show up our faults to be corrected, hopefully in love.

The Mixtec communities we visit are poor. To survive, families stick together and rely on each other a great deal. People traveling have very few options for lodging, so the culture values hospitality. When we show up on their doorstep unannounced, they take us in and give us room to sleep where everyone sleeps. They might give up their only bed, if they have one. Their space is our space. I remember when we were first married and living in a borrowed home, a two-room adobe place, the family sent their daughter to live with us so we wouldn’t be alone. When my Colombian friends were here, Girlesa told me about how she has spent months with a team of six missionary trainees living in her home with her. It’s been tough, but she knew it was the right thing to do. Six months? I couldn’t do this. I am more North American than Mixtec and realize how much I value privacy, control over my own space and time. It’s a gift that prosperity brings. But I also realize that Mixtecs have relational muscles I can’t even understand because their poverty has required a generosity never required of me. I honor that. The Kingdom of God is close to them. Their muscles bulge.