You and God

The two year old can’t talk, doesn’t have the words, but reaches up her hands to strong young daddy. He reaches down and lifts her up, cradling her in his left arm as she clings to his neck. He pushes open the screen door, strides into the back yard picking up a small plastic toy shovel on the way. Hands it to toddler. He walks into the garden, sets her down in a safe spot and shows her a digging motion with the toy shovel “Dig sweety. Dig like this!” She has no clue what a garden is- what planting, weeding, watering, harvest are. No clue about the fathers plan, about the future, how things work, what to do. She is blissful, ignorant- basking in daddy’s presence. He sets to work with a will and a purpose, turning over the fallow earth. She whacks the ground with the toy shovel feebly, spastically, wobbly gaze immediately towards daddy to see what’s next.

Weeks pass. The season progresses. There they are again, she with her toy watering can, watering stones and babbling to herself. Daddy is watering in earnest, systematically, with a view to the harvest.

Now toddler lounges in the luxuriant shade of a leafy green-bean teepee. Daddy is out in the sun picking luscious juicy plump tomatoes. He picks up toddler on the way to the house to enjoy yummy tomato sandwiches. “You worked hard, sweet-pea” he says lovingly as she rides in his arms with her head on his chest. “Look at what we grew!”

Singapore Airport Freakout

So yeah our ticket back to Indonesia had us fly first from Vancouver BC south to Portland Oregon where we would then transit onto a much bigger trans-pacific flight.

So  we're in portland airport and it is like 10 minutes to boarding time and I approach the check-in desk to see if we can maybe get a better seat with more leg room for the 11 hour flight to Tokyo. The clerk says "These boarding passes you have aren't good enough. I will issue you new ones." Ok I think fine. Who cares?

So then the clerk asks me if I have a return ticket to come back from Indonesia. No, I reply honestly.  "Oh but you have to have a return ticket otherwise we can't let you board" Just great! He confers with a colleague and she comes over and looks intently at the computer monitor hidden from my view. She says to the first guy "No, this rule is for visa on arrival passengers whereas this passenger (me) already has a visa" But they call in some security supervisor ("Red Code") to tell them what to do.

Meanwhile they start boarding!

So this woman comes and reads the rules on the monitor and says "You will have to purchase a return ticket before we let you board".  I am like praying my head off.  "Lord please influence their hearts and minds to interpret and use their discretion to let us on this flight! Please give me the grace to receive whatever the outcome of this is! Please grant me the discernment and creativity to navigate successfully through this!"

So there are like five passengers left in the line-up boarding and the rest of the boarding lounge is empty and the security supervisor says "No: looks like you are gonna have to buy a return ticket. Let me see your luggage claim tags" Oh no! I think to myself, She is going to pull our luggage off the flight! Then she says "Let me just read the rules again" The 3rd last passenger disappears down the gangway to board.  I feel inspired to stand up with our carry-ons and walk over to the gangway entrance like we are just about to board. I am standing in front of the boarding desk and the security supervisor is standing there staring at the hidden monitor.  She says to the first woman "They are going to have to buy a return ticket" The first woman says nothing.  So I feel inspired to stretch out my hand over the counter and point at the monitor screen that I can't see and say "But this rule only applies to people getting a visa on arrival in Jakarta whereas I already have a visa" At this point the first woman pipes up and says "That's right" The security supervisor then relents and says "oh ok I see. All right then. Off you go" And we are the last ones to board! Crud! Not the kind of excitement I need!

OK. So anyway they also said they couldn't print off boarding passes for the last leg of our journey from Singapore to Jakarta. We didn't know why, but they said we could just get new ones when we went to board in Singapore. Fine.

So we go to the boarding gate in Singapore airport (and it is like at least a kilometre walk way out to the end of this ridiculously long terminal wing) and ask if we can board with the e-tickets we have and they say no we need to get new boarding passes.  So anyway long story short here I am walking and running back and forth the one kilometre plus (so now my leg is killing me) from the boarding gate to this service counter trying to get this stupid boarding pass printed that Delta should have just given me. As it turns out, the Delta staff in Portland (yes, the same ones who didn't want to let us board without a return ticket) had completely changed our registered ticket number when they re-printed our boarding passes so that in Singapore they could find no record of our booking, and again this is 30 minutes before take off!! Argghhh!!!  But a very helpful young woman of a different airline very adroitly helped us by reconstructing our proof of booking from looking at our old boarding pass stubs (which Kathy had saved, precious woman that she is) from our previous journey legs and also from looking at our luggage tags which showed also that we were booked all the way to Jakarta.

Moral: DO NOT FLY WITH DELTA!!!
DO NOT ROUTE THROUGH THE STATES IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO!!!
GOD ANSWERS PRAYER IN TIGHT SITUATIONS!!

What Can I Do?

I was thinking about recent progress in relation to my work in holistic rural development and wondering how much credit I should honestly take.  I want to accurately credit God where it is due and not steal His thunder.

I was tempted to say "I can do nothing: it is all God" but for the fact that he holds us accountable and responsible for our actions, to the point that someday for some he will say "Well done, wise and faithful servant of mine! Come on into the eternal blessings" - which tells me that God gives us credit for our actions.

My conclusion is that God gives us one ability and one alone: to choose to surrender/cling to him. We can cling a lot or we can cling a little.  Only as we cling to him does he incarnate himself through us and do that which has lasting value.

Be a Hero Today

Now just because objectivity is not really that attainable is not to say that subjectivity is bad. There is yet another sense in which "subjectivity" is also good. It is how God created us to be: He created us in His image; is it not fitting we should partner with Him in creating new realities by the power of our word? We say to love "Exist!" and it is so. Because in grammar-speak "subject" also means one who acts, one who initiates and does things- an actor or agent.

Because we don`t know very much, except that we are going to die, we are desperately in need of God`s intervention. All we can do is cling to the loving Presence of God made available uniquely through His incarnation, Jesus. And so He helps us manage our animal instincts and channel His loving Presence. And in this mutual loving indwelling, us in Him and He in us, He delegates to us the authority and choice to re-create the universe, beginning with our personal realities.

Today you can recreate new worlds for those in your life, your home and neighbourhood, your work and school. You can change their realities by loving them as neither they nor you ever dreamed possible. Just acknowledge God`s loving Presence with you now and surrender unconditionally to His will for you regardless of loss, cost or consequence. Just keep clinging to Him and follow Him wherever He goes- into solitude on your knees, into prison to visit the lonely, or skid row to hug the unhuggable, or to leave the popular clique and sit with the losers, or to ask forgiveness of the neighbour you hate or to pay back the money you owe or to turn away from some kind of escapist behaviour to instead- cling to His loving Presence. Then with His loving eyes and heart incarnate in you will see and feel how to be a hero today.

What Do I Know or Care?

If nothing else, I read a lot. The Bible, theology, philosophy- and I can't for the life of me say as I know a heck of a lot. I now know I know nothing. And it seems like most thinking people today agree that we don't really know very much. Our theories of ultimate origins, of the structures and ends of the universes, of how many dimensions there are and what they might be like, of how different minds, societies and cultures work- All our theories are highly speculative. With 7000 or so different human cultures on our little planet, all differing in what we value, believe, assume and our reasons for what we do- we have to ask a lot of questions and talk for a long time just to get to know one another and understand each other. That's why thinking people say "all is relative" and "we create our own realities", imprisoned in interconnected labyrinths of imagined worlds. Nietzsche said we are "trapped in a prison house of language".

Well, a lot of religious thinkers and philosophers have being saying similar things for thousands of years. The Bible for example has many stories and statements about how limited human understanding is. But beyond our profound ignorance, the Bible adds that we all helplessly and hopelessly tend to cruelty, injustice, irresponsibility, callousness, escaping "reality", the single-minded pursuit of pleasure at any cost, self-destruction, hatred, bitterness, arrogance, selfishness, thoughtlessness, recklessness, negligence, narrow-mindedness, hypocrisy, defying and ignoring God.

So I don't know anything and can't do anything good, trapped in my subjective (mis)interpretations of my social world, and unable to care. How awesomely kind of God to persist in seeking us, breaking in to the prison houses of our minds and filling us with His loving Presence, motivating and guiding us to surrender unconditionally to fulfill His loving will.

The Right to Bear Arms

This is a note for my American friends.

Hi. I don't necessarily endorse the American doctrine of the citizens' right to bear arms, but I just want to point out the anachronistic nature of it.

The doctrine was developed in the age of muskets and canon, before steam power and electricity.  The SPIRIT of the doctrine is that the populace has the same firepower as the state.  The POINT was for the citizenry to be able to defend itself from the tyranny of the state.

Obviously now the balance of arms between state and populace is extremely out of balance, to say the least.

If the SPIRIT of "The right to bear arms" were fulfilled, that would mean ordinary citizens had equal access and control to every means of control and attack that the state has; nuclear, biological, chemical, submarine, aerial, satellites, nanotech and everything in between.  I'm just sayin is all.

So, the NRA and other defender's of private ownership of automatic and semi-automatic small arms are completely delusional about their ability to stop US governments from oppressing and overpowering ordinary Americans.  The only result of liberal small arms ownership is negative: high rates of domestic murder, accidents and crime.

So unless you private American citizens are going to somehow achieve equity with the state in all areas of modern warfare, which as you must admit looks pretty impossible, you should just hand in all your guns now and bring down the crime rate, the domestic murder rate and the number of accidental injuries and deaths from small arms misuse.