the power of words

This morning I woke up after only a few hours of sleep and asked myself, "Did last night really happen?" There are some experiences that should never be put into words. My only comment is that I have never been in a position where I have prayed for God to take a child's life unless He immediately intervened. Sitting beside my bed last night, I fought so hard not to sleep. I was so tired but I did not want to close my eyes and see the image that will forever be burned into my memory. I did not want to dream and I did not want to wake up in the morning with the overwhelming feeling of being dirty.
Yesterday morning we discussed how our words either bring life or death. Because of the nature of entropy in which our world exists, every person and everything is constantly headed towards destruction. The human heart is headed towards hardness, and the main way to prevent the hard from becoming hard is by speaking words of truth.
I never thought that I would come to such a dark place where words of love were the absolute only thing I had to give someone who was suffering.
Finding myself on the curb of a street hysterically crying "God where are?" Is a humbling place to be. Oh God, Where are you?
Today I visited a new church. During the middle of worship, a young woman came up to me along with the minister and started speaking words over me. "God wants me to tell you that He is with you. Although you feel like God has left you, He is still with you." She told me that God had given her an image for me of a mountain with a curving road and a bike explaining that it signified my life's path. She said that I do not know the next step and that I am worried about the direction of my life. "But dont worry because God only sees a straight path so just trust him." How bizarre. Its in moments like this that I realize that even in life's darkest moments, God still speaks powerfully.

Blessed are those who mourn....

This last week has been one of my hardest weeks here. A few days ago a came down with a nasty cold/flu and discovered the same night that I had gotten lice from our trip to Cambodia. I have been boiling water to wash my sheets and pour into my hair since we dont have hot water or a wash machine. I am also having trouble knowing when I have fever because we dont have air con (the weather right now is similar to July in texas)I am constantly hot and sweating. It is very easy to slip into a state of self- pity, but then I realize that so many of the women and children we work with experience the same discomforts on a daily basis.
Monday night the Word Made Flesh field in Kolkata,India suffered a great loss Tuesday after discovering that one of their Sari Bari ladies had been murdered. (Sari Bari, a business initiative for women, began in February 2006 in a red-light area of Kolkata. They began in a small room with three women who wanted to start the road to freedom from the sex trade; they now provide jobs for 28 women and expect to reach 50 women by the end of 2009. Sari Bari trains the new women to sew blankets and bags from recycled saris (the sari is the traditional dress for Indian women). In addition to tailoring lessons, the training program includes literacy, math, budgeting, nutrition and informal group therapy. The community desires to see a transformation of the women’s minds and to encourage the women’s value and self-esteem through on-going training and support. Visit the Sari Bari website to learn more and to buy a handmade blanket or bag.)
From one of the WMF staff:
One of our ladies who has spent three months with us in training was murdered by a customer last night. There will be no justice for her… everyone in the brothels knows who did it but will not speak up. This is a devastating loss for our community. The Sari Bari ladies in particular see themselves in this loss and the realities and violence that some of them still face as they continue to live in the brothels. Please pray for our dear ladies and for Pornima’s family-who would not even come to see her because of the shame of where she was working.

Pornima had a great day at Sari Bari Monday. There was new hope and belief in herself, that she could have freedom and was a mere day away from completing her first blanket. She will be cremated with her blanket sometime today or tomorrow and will surrounded by the family God gave her three months ago in all of us at Sari Bari.

We are brokenhearted that Pornima will not be able to see the dream for her life fulfilled. We can only hope for freedom in the next.

Jesus have mercy on us and on the whole world.

What violence has beset us this day

What violence has beset us this day
Of all days, this day was most unexpected
Most vile, violent and cruel
Because it is the day after hope still lingered in one woman’s heart
Yet it lingers no longer with her end
Today is everyday and the today no one wanted
Today is for weeping over violence
Weeping for freedom lost
Where no freedom can be found
Powerless, fearful silent
Offenders protected
Shame for such injustice is heavy on us all.
Three months of freedom tossed like her body
Aside.
What violence has beset us this day.
We all are her. She was us.
Part of us left with her.
The violence committed, indignity
Against her, against us all.
She flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone
This sister gone.
Her fight for freedom was violently wrenched from her grasp,
We will fight on remembering.
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These last two months I have realized that so many Americans live in an illusion. The people we see one the streets are the reality of the world. This is a dangerous realization. To realize this truth without being crushed by its implications is only possible with the knowledge that Christ will one day bring justice to this suffering.
The point of my trip is not to fix their problems, but to be compassionate to them (Luke 6:36). For so many of us compassion has simply meant to shower them with financial aid, and although there is a place for helping their physical needs, most of the time all I can do is to recognize them as people who have been made in the image of God. The word compassion is derived from the Latin words 'pati'and 'cum', which together means "to suffer with."
Sometimes the most powerful way to love someone is by simply suffering with them.
This is an excerpt from Henri Nouwen's Compassion: A reflection on the Christian life
"To the outsider, much Christian behavior seems to be naive, impractical, and often little less than an exercise in self-flagellation. The outsider understandably believes that anyone who feels attracted to suffering and pain and who desires to humble himself or herself to a position of servanthood cannot be taken very seriously. Striving to be a slave seems such a perverted way of living that it offends human sensibilities. Nobody finds anything wrong or strange with attempting to help people who are visibly lacking the basic necessities of life, and it appears quite reasonable to try to alleviate suffering when this is possible. But to leave a successful position and enter freely, consciously, and intentionally into a position of disrepute and to become dependent and vulnerable seems to be a form of masochism that defies the best of our aspirations... Radical servanthood does not make sense unless we introduce a new level of understanding and see it as the way to encounter God himself. To be humble and persecuted cannot be desired unless we can find God in humility and persecution. When we begin to see God himself, the source of all our comfort and consolation, in the center of servanthood, compassion becomes much more than doing good for unfortunate people. Radical servanthood, as the encounter with the compassionate God, takes us beyond the distinctions between wealth and poverty, success and failure, fortune and bad luck. Radical servanthood is not an enterprise in which we try to surround ourselves with as much misery as possible, but a joyful way of life in which our eyes are opened to the vision of the true God who chose the way of servanthood to make himself known. The poor are called blessed not because poverty is good, but because theirs is the kingdom in heaven; the mourners are called blessed not because mourning is good, but because they shall be comforted.
Here we are touching the profound spiritual truth that service is an expression of the search for God and not just of the desire to being about individual or social change. This is open to all sorts of misunderstanding, but its truth is confirmed in the lives of those for whom service is a constant and uninterrupted concern. As long as the help we offer to others is motivated primarily by the changes we may accomplish, our service cannot last. When results do not appear, when success is absent, when we are no longer liked or praised for what we do, we lose the strength and motivation to continue. When we see nothing but sad, poor, sick, or miserable people who, even after our many attempts to offer help, remain sad, poor, sick, and miserable, then the only reasonable response is to move away in order to prevent ourselves from becoming cynical or depressed. Radical servanthood challenges us, while attempting persistently to overcome poverty, hunger, illness, and any other form of human misery, to reveal the gentle presence of our compassionate God in the midst of our broken world."

cambodia

Last night I returned back to Bangkok from Cambodia. I did not think I would experience so much culture shock coming home to my middle class thai home. ALthough they are neighboring countries, Cambodia is worlds away from Thailand. Because World Made Flesh Thailand is a new field, my team had the opportunity to network with some major NGO's in cambodia. We met with Cambodia Hope Organization (a Christian organization that helps cambodians in the pio pet area farm, provides housing for at risk children, started schools, provides healthcare, and church plants), International Justice Mission ( A group of lawyers that fight sex trafficking), Friends International (an organization that educates and trains cambodian children), and the Somaly Mam foundation (an organization that rescues young women and children from the cambodian brothels). We were also able to visit Mother Teresa's missions of charity for a week. At the end of our second week we visited the killing fields where the Khmer Rouge soldiers murdered approximately 20,000 Cambodians. At the entrance of the killing fields is a wat with 17 tiers of 8,000 skulls that have been recovered. Walking through the beautiful country side, which had now become a massive graveside, we literally walked over crushed bones and pieces of clothing that had not been recovered out of the ground. In the middle of the fields stood a large tree with a marker signifying that hundreds of women and children's corpses were buried beside it. Our guide explained to us that the Khmer Rouge soldiers used this tree to smash the skulls of these women and children. The soldiers, who lacked adequate weapons, sought out primative means in which to torture their victims. The trees, leaves, and many farming tools, had been used to brutally crush thousands of lives. How horrific it was to see God's creation used in such a perverted manner. Walking over the bones that were still scattered underneath my feet reminded me of Romans 8:22 were nature is described as groaning for its creature. At the end of the tour there was a large marker that described the soldiers as having "human form but with the hearts of demons.."

NOt only did the victims of the hundreds of killing fields suffer from the evils of the Khmer Rouge, but the whole country is still feeling the devasting effects of this dark time in its country's history.

AS we travelled through the small villages, I realized that many Cambodians are still experiencing shock and are just fighting to survive. I cant fathom the pain these people have experienced. Its as if many of them are already dead. Many of these people live defeated lives and have given into the misery that surrounds their lives.

Our first night in Cambodia we stayed in a little border town called Poipet. Poipet reminded me of a ghost town. A desolate, dusty, hot town that has been forgotten by the rest of the world. Our second night in Poipet we walked down a muddy little street covered in trash which served as the town's red light district. The women squatted in the corners of the small alleys beside each other in silence. We noticed the eyes peering out the bars on the doors of the brothels where many of the women spend all day and all night. No one is helping these women.

These women are too much work and are too dangerous.

A young pastor explained to us "There is so much need."

A few days later we left for Phnon Phen. The second day in the city my leader and I came across two young children who looked like they were about five years old strapped with newborn babies to them. The babies were dirty and dehydrated. The young children had no idea how to care for the infants who were barely covered in stained rags. The babies' heads flung side to side as the young children roamed the streets begging. We tried to show the children how to hold the babies, but the children were not even able to take of themselves- much less small infants. The reality is that the more sick and desperate the babies look, the more money the children will receive begging. The reality is that the babies are most likely not even related to the children holding them. Many of the babies with the beggars have been "rented" from the mothers. THe reality is that it is very profitable for the parents/ pimps of these children to hold sick babies. The reality is that if these babies do not get medical care soon they will probably die.

I went home that night enraged. To see babies, the most vulnerable of all human beings, treated as a commodity truely reveals the depravity of man.

I dont think we were made to fathom these extreme degrees of evil. And to realize that it is just not Cambodia, that the whole world is crying out for a savior, that the whole world is crying out for justice. But God has not abandoned these people. HE is close to those crushed in spirit and suffers with them. I think it is our natural tendency to question the sovereignty of God amist such evil. We want to shake our fists at God and ask Him why He allows so much suffering to happen. But I wonder if God ever looks at us and asks why we allow so much suffering to happen? Why are these people by themselves? Where is the body of Christ to share in their suffering?

Throughout my trip in Cambodia I read Dietrich Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship and would like to close this email with a few excerpts:

Cheap Grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks' ware. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices. Grace is represented as the Church's inexhaustible treasury, from which she showers blessings with generous hands, without asking questions or fixing limits. Grace without price; grace without cost! The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing. Since the cost was infinite, the possibilities of using and spending it are infinite. What would grace be if it were not cheap?

Cheap Grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian "conception" of God. AN intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself sufficient to secure remission of sins...in such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin. Cheap grace therefore amounts to a denial of the living Word of GOd, in fact, a denial of the Incarnation of the Word of God. Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner.

Costly Grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble; it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciples leaves his nets and follows him. Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus CHrist. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.