You Sneaky, Manipulative God...

God is so sneaky sometimes. I'm reading Isaiah 6, which is one of those inspire-me kind of passages. God is so sneaky with Isaiah, like border-line manipulative. Listen: "Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, 'Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?' And I said, 'Here am I. Send me!" Wait. Who is God asking? Isaiah is the only one in the room. God makes it seem all rhetorical and stuff, but it's not. This is a question only for Isaiah. God has a mission and purpose only for Isaiah, but he asks anyway and lets Isaiah really claim and own this.

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When I was in Costa Rica, I got to help out with a ministry in La Cuenca (which I'll describe through the words of another short-term missionary I met down there). "La Cuenca is dangerous, violent and so broken. For a while before I arrived, nobody was allowed in the area due to all the issues with drugs, gangs, and violence. The three missionaries I worked with in La Cuenca, Hugo, Magaly and Fernando, have been returning to this area for the past five years via a two hour bus ride and no salary. Even though the three are all part of growing families, they receive under $100 per month in support" (Caroline's blog).

One time while I was at La Cuenca, I went with Hugo to visit a family. I stepped into a house no bigger than a dumpster and no cleaner. All around me, a car door and scraps of metal and wood made for walls and ceiling, which blocked no rain during the rainy season. Making small canyons in the uneven dirt floor, toilet and bath water from homes higher up the hill ran between our feet as we talked. The five children had long dropped out of school, and the oldest daughter fumbled with a pot of rice cooking over a log fire just outside the door. Prostitution is stealing these girls and gangs have already taken the boys. When you're an uneducated and unemployed and unmarried mother of five children, what are your options?

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This is the world we live in. I hear God saying, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?" and I know God's looking at me, because I'm the only one in the room. "Here am I, God! Send...oh, wait. We'll finish this conversation later. I'm about to be late to class."

Maybe I Should Hide My Qur'an...

I just finished another conversation trying to explain why in the world I would want to read the Qur'an. Someone even said, "Isn't that that terrorist book?" I realize that was surely, surely, a joke, that this is the Bible belt, that I can stand on half the street corners in these small southern towns and see anywhere up to 3 Christian churches at one time, but are we all really this tunnel-visioned? Yes, the Bible has loads of truth in it. As does the Qur'an, and the Tao Teh Ching, and The Bhagavad Gita. I would never call myself a Universalist by any means; I don't believe we're all on different paths up the same mountain to the same God sitting at the top. However, I do believe in some great Absolute (we can call it God). I also believe that truth is available to everyone, at all places, at all times, and that this Absolute will use anyone and anything to reach us, no matter how deficient. As one thinker put it, "all the world's thoughts, all the world's most beautiful languages and literatures, are but vehicles for that ineffable message which comes to the heart in rare moments of ecstasy... For me the embodiment of that voice has been in the noble words of the Arabic Qur'an" ('Abdullah Yusuf 'Ali).

For me the embodiment of that voice has been in the words of Jesus Christ; but when I look for it, I find truth everywhere. As it says in Jeremiah 29, "You will search for me and find me when you search for me with your whole heart. I will be found by you." When I read the Bible, I find stories of love and a God that sacrifices everything just to have us. When I read the Tao Teh Ching, I find order, balance, and something universal uniting us all. When I read Nietzsche, I see what sexist, racist, ageist, nationalist man turned bitter looks like (this is a joke...). The point is that every text I read gives me a slightly bigger picture of all this--of life and God. Why wouldn't I read the Qur'an?

I'm tired of saying we're Christians when we've never read a single Sutra or Surah or Veda, much less our own Bible, and the same goes for professed atheists. We say we're Christians or atheists or whatever, but we're really just ignorant. And as far as Agnostics go, you can't choose doubt as a philosophy of life any more than you can choose immobility as a form of transportation (Life of Pi). Agnosticism may be a stage in life (I'll attest), but it's no place to stay.

Whew. Glad I got that out of my system. Here's what God used to speak to me this morning:

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The Holy Qur'an  C.23 & 24


But he [Muhammad] grew steadfastly in virtue and purity;
Untaught by men, he learnt rom the, and learned
To teach them; even as a boy of nine,
When he went in a trade caravan with Abu Talib
To Syria, his tender soul marked inwardly
How Allah did speak in the wide expanse
Of deserts, in the stern grandeur of rocks,
In the refreshing flow of streams, in the smiling
Bloom of gardens, in the art and skill with which
Men and birds and all life sought for light
From the Life of Lives, even as every plant
Seeks through devious ways the light of the Sun.


Nor less was he grieved at Man's ingratitude
When he rebelled and held as naught the Signs
Of Allah, and turned His gifts to baser uses,
Driving rarer souls to hermit life,
Clouding the heavenly mirror of pure affections
With selfish passions, mad unseemly wrangles,
And hard unhallowed loathsome tortures of themselves.

God, forgive us for using our systems of religion to hide from you.

What would happen if a generation embraced something greater, giving all of themselves away?

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We're losing today's generation, not because we're making Christianity too hard, but because we're making it too easy. Now when Christianity started, it was a radical movement. A movement that changed the world of the early church. People can get behind something like that. We've got to stop selling easy faith--do this and you'll get this. It's never been about houses and cars and soccer practices, our biggest worries being what bill to pay off next. Here in America, we have this idea that we're supposed to be happy first, but no, Jesus doesn't send us that message. He never promises a life with less pain and less worry, a life with secure jobs and more money, a life with a gym membership and a dog.

We're creating something different, something not following Jesus. We say the first step is accepting Jesus into your life. Your life. That's a fine theology, but it's not based on Jesus (if that's who we're claiming to follow). Gandhi said once that he loved Jesus, he just wished Christians would take him more seriously, because everybody knows what Jesus was teaching except for Christians.

Jesus doesn't ask to be invited into our hearts, to enter into our lives. Jesus calls us to come and die. Our old selves? Dead. Our nice houses and new cars? Sold. We're to come and kill everything--our wants, our goals, our securities, our comforts, our possessions, everything. If we say we want to follow Jesus, then we're entering into lives of sacrifice and poverty and homelessness and suffering. If anything, a life that follows Jesus is one of more pain. However, if we say we want to follow Jesus, then we're also entering into lives of purpose and peace and love and freedom. And ultimately, if we say we want to follow Jesus, then we're entering into a new plane where change is finally possible.

Jesus lived an extreme and radical life, a life of sacrifice and poverty and homelessness and suffering. Does he call us all to be that radical? Yes he does, because radical people can change the world. But radical people are the only ones who can change the world.

A Favorite Hymn of Mine

1/10 to Jesus I surrender
1/10 to him I freely give
I will weekly love and praise him
In his presence Sunday live

I surrender 1/10
I surrender 1/10
1/10 to thee, my Precious Savior
I surrender 1/10

Come on God! Almost all of us are surrendering to you what you asked of us. When are you going to change this world?

The Defeated Prostitute I Didn't Talk To

Across the street, two prostitutes were talking to eachother. To my left were three guys chilling on the curb, clearly drunk and still drinking. To my right was another prostitute. Looking back, I guess it was pretty dangerous for a gringo like myself to be all alone with my nice clothes and bookbag on this poorly lit street at 11:00 at night, waiting for the last bus because I didn't realize I had just mised it. I suppose I should have listened to my mama tica.

I was travelling back to San Jose after visiting my family from last year. My mama tica said I should take a taxi when I get off the 2nd bus in San Jose. The late buses are unpredictable. Also, it's really dangerous, especially in the part of downtown San Jose where my bus stop is. Yeah well, I didn't feel like paying the extra money for a taxi, so I walked the half a mile to the bus stop (like I said before, unaware that the last bus had already come). I can honestly say I've never seen so many prostitutes in my life--and the occassional transvestite. I've definitely never had that many prostitues yell at me, stroke my shoulders as they walked by, talk all sorts of vulgar to me, telling me what they could do for such and such a price. My mama tica flipped out when she found out that I had been in that part of town at night and had waited at the bus stop for 30 minutes alone before finally acquiescing to the taxi.

In retrospect, she was right and I should have been afraid. It was clearly dangerous, especially for a rich white boy. However, at the time, the whole scene depressed me too much for me to be afraid. I remember this one girl. She was on the street corner right near where I was waiting. With her heavy makeup and long hair, she was wearing black boots, a black thong, and a black bra--I'm not making this up. But unlike the other girls (and dudes...) I saw that night, she didn't say anything as I walked by; she didn't yell anything as I stood mere steps away from her; she didn't show off her body like the other girls, despite her lack of clothing. Rather, her shoulders bent in, as if she was trying to hide, and she never once looked up from her feet, so I never got to see her face. I'd give her maybe 15 years of age. I remember thinking how defeated she looked.

What would Jesus have done if he had been walking down those streets and seen those same prostitutes? I have no clue. All I know, is that I felt so hopeless. Who was doing something about this?! Where do we even begin to change all this?

Here in Costa Rica, there's a ministry called Renacer, and it's doing something about this. In a way, this ministry catches girls before they get to points like prostitution. Funcioning as a children's home, girls from ages 11-18 come and live here. Every girl is coming out of an addiction of some sort, so heavy therapy occurs. Many girls go through violent withdrawals, and most need therapy for some sort of crime commited against them in life--mostly sexual and physical abuse. Most of these girls haven't been in school in years. When they come to Renacer, they find a home, a family, and God.

Hugging one of the girls before I left, I couldn't help but notice the scars on top of scars of past ripped flesh on her forearms. I found out that Renacer found this girl in jail, at 15 years old, for having almost beaten someone to death. With an intense history of sexual abuse, this girl first came to Renacer after living on the streets and having heavy drug addictions. But the other day as I watched her sing in the choir for worship, I didn't see any of that. Yes, you can see layers of scars all over her arms, but you can't see the same defeat and brokenness she used to carry. Instead, you see a girl with such a big smile, you wonder how she can manage to sing. Instead, you see a girl that reads Bible verses to other illiterate girls during the bi-weekly chapel services. Instead, you see a girl full of joy, constantly serving; because someone has put her first in life, has believed in her, has loved her like she deserves to be loved. She's almost 18 now, and still has a few more years before she'll finish high school, but she'll finish, and then she'll go on to college. "Who knows, maybe I'll work with girls like me one day," she says.

And so I remind myself: one person at a time.