Talking and listening

Why are you cast down, O my soul,
      and why are you in turmoil within me
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him
     my salvation and my God. (Psalm 42:11)

I wonder sometimes if many of our problems come from spending too much listening to ourselves and not enough time spent talking to ourselves. Facing troubles and difficulties in life, it is hard not to get discouraged and downcast. It is easy to start listening to those thoughts that tell you that things will never get better or that God cannot use your circumstances to mold you even more into the image of His Son. Forgetting that we serve a God who suffers with His people in their affliction, who uses suffering to accomplish His purposes and who redeemed us by the suffering and death of His Son, we convince ourselves that suffering is an intrusion in our life, an enemy, an outsider, something to be rejected and expelled as quickly as possible. We forget that it was through suffering that the Founder of our salvation was perfected (Hebrews 2:10) and so we hear our flesh telling us that glory is our birthright, not sorrow. Though Scripture always links suffering and glory, we seek to tear them asunder. We groan but it is not born of hope but of despair and sorrow. And when we do listen, we hear people who ask, “Where is your God? Why would God allow this to happen to you?"

The psalmist recognizes this pit towards he is being pulled. And twice in Psalm 42 (verses 5 and 11), he takes ahold of himself and speaks truth to himself. He reminds himself that there is hope, not in changed circumstances but in God. He reminds himself that there will be a day when praise will issue from his lips rather than groans. That his God is a God of salvation and deliverance, though that salvation may take him through the valley rather than around it. And he reminds himself that God is God and not himself; he is not the centre of the universe. Perhaps God has higher priorities than his own personal peace and comfort.

Don’t waste your suffering. You are where God wants you to be; right now.  So am I. Nothing has come into our life that does not pass first through His hands. Rest in that. And make sure that you talk to yourself more than you listen to yourself.

Yank!

Want to know what's fun?  Stepping on your oxygen line while you are sitting down and then trying to stand up. The feeling of your ears being pulled down to your shoulders is really quite amusing!

Sunday morning sunshine

Stayed completely off of the computer yesterday so my apologies to those of you who posted such warm and encouraging comments.   Thank you so much.  I am really blessed to have so many praying and caring.  By the way, yes, I do moderate them, just as I do all with all blogs that I am responsible for.  Not only does it cut back on  the crazies and the spammers but it protects me and VOMC from possible legal action since there is some movement to make blogs responsible for the content of the comments that they allow.  You have no idea just how hateful some people can be.  Thankfully, I don't usually get those on this blog.

But enough of that.  It's Sunday morning and the sunshine is shining nicely into my little office.  I'm not at church as it's just not that possible for me anymore with my immune system being what it is and needing to preserve my energy as much as I can.  Crowd and visitors do tend to wear me out, I am afraid.

I am feeling not too badly this morning, although morning was tough.  I rarely wake up feeling really rested.  Yesterday was not a great day but it was not a bad day.  I suspect that with my new regiment of prednisone (50 mg one day, 7.5 the next), that I won't have the highs and lows that I have been having in recent weeks.  We'll see.  I do suspect that I will need another transfusion this coming week though. I do have one scheduled for Tuesday and I would not be surprised if I need it.  I really have come to appreciate those who donate blood.  If you haven't and you can, why aren't you doing it?  You have no idea whose life you may be saving!

A good day

Yesterday was a great day.  I was able to attend the entire Religious Liberty Partnership meeting, then go back to office for about 3 hours to meet with friends, colleagues, and a former colleague whom I had not seen in 11 years.  All in all, it was nice having a day that one could really call normal.  And then I had a good sleep on top of everything else!

I am working from home today, just to slow down a bit and to keep me from getting too run down.  Have a couple of articles to write today and dozens of emails to sort through from the past couple of days.  Decided though that I am going to have to cancel or have someone else cover my speaking engagements from this point on.  Just can't count on my health to hold even from to day to day and it's not fair to let folks down the way that I have had to lately. 

Thank you to each of you who have been upholding me in prayer.   May I ask that you please pray for Denita.  She is really tired and I am very concerned about her.  She carries a big load as my wife and as the mother of our kids who are just venturing out into the world (with all of the stuff that comes with that)

A day of semi-normality

Today was a good day.  Received two units of blood and had my prednisone intake increased to 50 mg (every other day), so I had the energy to attend 3 hours of the Religious Liberty Partnership meetings this afternoon.  What a joy to see some of my colleagues from around the world.  I am hoping to sit in for most of the day tomorrow.  If you can, please pray that I can do this. I am even hoping to be able to give a short "devotional" on the biblical view of the Christian and government.

As I told the group this afternoon, I know that the Olympics don't like steroids and blood doping... but I sure do.  At least they allow me to function at some sort of level of normalcy. 

Sick today

Tried to go to work this morning and to spend some time with Christof Sauer, a colleague whom I respect much who is visiting from South Africa.  I had hoped to spend some time going through some of the reference material that I have compiled in my continuing research on the theology of persecution.  Unfortunately, I felt terrible and could only stay for about 90 minutes before being taken back home. I was sick to the stomach and terribly weak and tired.   Fortunately, Christof felt content to go through my library in my absence and I hope some benefit with come of it for future research.

Went to the hospital later in the day to get some blood work in case I need a transfusion tomorrow and found out that my hemoglobin had dropped to 69 again, which explains my fatigue, I guess.

The short of it is that I will probably be unable to contribute to the Religious Liberty Partnership meetings, as I had hoped.  This is very disheartening to me.

One of the biggest struggles I have is with a sense of incompleteness with my work. I wanted so much to finish revising my book but I feel that I will never get to do it.  If I had the chance, I think that I would like to be able to focus on three things:

• my research
• the mission's monthly newsletter
• my blogging

These three things seem to be what I have the ability to do in these days when I have energy for little else.

A Sudanese sunrise

It's early Saturday morning and I am sitting looking out of the window of my home office which faces towards the southeast.  The colour of the sky this morning reminds me of sunrises in southern Sudan.  A rawness and beauty that is hard to describe.  I have been thinking a lot about Sudan lately.  Reading Marc Nikkel's book of letters from Sudan has me thinking back to my early trips there in the late 1990's, of how I fell in love with the people of that part of the world and how so much of my early work with The Voice of the Martyrs focused on the plight of the Christians there.  The recent arrest warrant issued by the ICC against Present El Bashir has reminded me just how unfinished the work of bring peace and justice to this torn country.  And I am saddened because there is virtually no chance that I will ever go there again.  I am happy that we are continuing to invest in the lives of the Sudanese by supporting a school in Loka; so much better than just sending relief aid.  But I would like to see the work for myself.  And to see another Sudanese sunrise.

Today's sunrise reminds me of the past and of a future that is ever more certain and finite. 

The things I have witnessed, the life that God has given me.  What a gift.  How thankful I am for the memory of a Sudanese sunrise. 

Back at home

Well, I'm back working at home.  I am slowly winding down again and so I thought I had better work out of the house again for a while, especially as I have Religious Liberty Partnership meetings next week here in Mississauga,  I really hope that I will have the energy to attend all of the meetings from Tuesday to Thursday.

Yesterday I had a hospital bed delivered too, so that hopefully I can sleep better.  Because of my breathing issues, I find it hard to sleep flat.  Last night was a bit better than the night before, so I'm hopeful that it will help once I get used to it.  Still, I hate not sleeping with Denita, even if we are still in the same room.  After more than 25 years of marriage, I've kinda gotten used to her. :-)

Working at the office

Praise God that I have been able to work at the office the last couple of weeks.  It is great to be able to rub shoulders with my favourite group of people in the world; my co-workers here at The Voice of the Martyrs.  I know that a big part of it is the increased prednisone and the oxygen, but I'll take it any way that I can get it.

Are "you" the reason for our present recession?

It's easy to try to find people to blame for the present recession that seems to have gripped the economies of the world.  Greedy bankers, CEOs with exorbitant salaries and bonuses, politicians who encouraged out of control debt.  The list could go on, and there is a degree of truth to all of it.  But the issue goes much deeper, as an insightful article in Macleans a few weeks ago, points out. The article suggests that, quite simply, the present debt crisis may have come about because we all came to believe that we deserved the very best whether we could afford it or not. 

As the article's authors point out, "advertising has always promised us a better life through stuff. But listen for it, and you’ll notice the pitch has changed.  The shift is subtle, but powerful."  There was a time when advertising encouraged aspirations to a better you, a better life, a rosier future.  "See this," the ad would suggest. "This could be you."  That changed in recent years and I saw it expressed around the world, even among developing world Christians.  People began to believe that they need not aspire to anything; they were already worthy of it, they deserved it, they were owed it, they should get it now.  The focus shifted from desire and aspiration to entitlement and affirmation. 

In the West, this affirmational approach (you are perfect just the way you are, you deserve this, it's all about you!) led to debt accumulation of a type never seen in history. Now the time has come to pay the piper and many are finding that their possessions are worth less than what they owe for them. In the rest of the world, it also led to debt but also to dependency on foreign generosity fed by Western guilt over the perceived financial inequalities between churches in the developed and developing world.  We contributed to this by convincing our brothers and sisters in the developing world that they should have all of the gadgets and perks that we have. Now. Why use your old computer that, though adequate, lacked certain features?  Your international partners will surely get you a new one.  Surely you can't be a church leader without a Blackberry?  After all, all of the foreigner missionaries have one.  Why worship in a home or a grass hut, which a fancier, cement and steel facility could be built, even if the ability to pay for and maintain such a building is impossible. Surely the foreigner, with his wealth, owes it to you!  Why wait, when you can be get it now?  Why save, when you can ask someone else to fund it?  And we in the West, with our good intentions and values increasingly influenced by values of entitlement and instant gratification created an environment where the passing on of such beliefs to our foreign partners was not only possible but inevitable.  We rewarded those who sought after things like we did! 

I wonder if this recession is really going to teach us anything about our sense of entitlement and inappropriate use of money and debt both here and around the world.  Our present attitudes created this mess but now we seem intend on insisting that our government spend their (our) way into oblivion in an attempt to get back to where we think we deserve to be.