following the Way

My friend Nick works in the health department of a local NGO.  Part of my job with PLC is to serve as an administrative liaison with this organization, so I see him pretty much every week, and often a few times a week.  Even though he has an influential job, he is pretty easygoing about most things.  He is always gracious to greet me, no matter how busy his day is (and his days are always busy).  He always makes sure I’m offered tea as soon as I arrive.  He feels comfortable around me enough to tell me slightly off-colored jokes involving lions, foxes and bears.

But it is hard being friends with Nick.

It’s not that he’s not fun to be around (because he is).  But his life isn’t fun.

Each day, he sits at his desk to await a continuous stream of parents pleading for the lives of their kids.  They come begging the help of this leading NGO to provide money and access to essential medical care that is out of their reach.  And Nick does everything he can to help these desperate families, but often everything he can do just isn’t going to be enough.

It was that way on Monday as he spoke with a mother whose child has non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.  She was pleading with them to provide a couple thousand dollars so that she could take her child to Iran for treatments.  But Nick and his doctors had seen the child’s charts.  They knew that this wouldn’t be a therapeutic treatment, but only palliative care.  It was too late for medicine for this child.  And Nick couldn’t give her money when there are other kids who could use the NGO’s limited money and actually have long-term prospects for survival.

Nick tried to offer comfort, but eventually all he could do was watch as this grieving mother walked out of his office crying.

Few of us ever have to deliver news that tough.  Nick does this just about everyday.  Even multiple times a day.  And I often have to watch.

That’s why it’s hard being friends with Nick.

But that’s not the only reason.  Nick has his own troubles.  The reason I had gone to see him on Monday was because I hadn’t seen him in over two weeks.  He had had to take his father-in-law to a nearby city in Iran in order to have quadruple-bypass surgery that wasn’t available in the Kurdistan Region.  (Iran, when it isn’t moonlighting as an all-purpose Near Eastern bogeyman, has actually developed a fairly sophisticated health system, though it does suffer from economic sanctions and a generational brain drain.)  He was relieved that the surgery had gone so well, but he knows that things are still precarious for a while – and if things go south, there won’t be a chance to head back east to have them fixed.

Nick and his wife have a beautiful daughter.  Throughout her life, Hannah has had her own health problems, many of them centering on the function of her kidneys and digestive system.  He’s taken her to specialists in Iran and they’ve tried various different treatments, things get better, but nothing seems to ever resolve the essential disease.  So Nick spends his days doing all he can to help Kurdish families bring their children back to health and he spends his nights worrying about how he can possibly help his own daughter.

And it’s hard to be Nick’s friend because he doesn’t yet know a larger Hope that could bring joy.  He isn’t now included in the divine life in a way that can assure him that his work each day won’t ultimately be in vain.  He currently has no faith that can look to God for healing, for meaning, for peace.

So it’s hard to be Nick’s friend.  But because I do know a Great Hope, because I am in Christ, because I do trust and swear all allegiance to God and pray for the coming of his kingdom, I’m really glad I get to be his friend anyway.

A few weeks ago, my dad got a call from the producers of Rachel Ray’s show.  They were wanting to do a big wedding for several couples who were scheduled to tie the knot during the week that Hurricane Ike struck the Houston area.  Even though a judge would be officially performing the ceremony, they also wanted to invite ministers from various denominations to be present to solemnify the proceedings.  My dad got to be the designated Baptist.  (We still have no idea how they picked him out of all the Baptists who do weddings in the Greater Houston area.)

They decided that they would have the “most senior minister” give a soundbite homily as part of the wedding.  And guess who was “most senior”?  My dad.  (I won’t include any jokes that might offend the elderly here, but you can feel free to leave them yourself in the comments section.)

So set your Tivos and DVRs to record Rachel Ray this Friday, November 21.  I’m sorry that I’ll have to miss it, but I wanted to let you know so that you don’t have to.  And then, please, let’s do what we can to make this a YouTube sensation.

Rumor has it that in addition to his mad skills as a master of the matrimonial arts, word got around about my dad’s ability to grill up an excellent chicken breast or salmon fillet.  Rachel was very impressed and is considering inviting my dad back for a regular segment called “Grillin’ and Chillin’ with the Reverend”.

(OK, I made up everything in that last paragraph except the part about my Dad’s grill skills and the fact that he performs very meaningful weddings.)

But what I am hoping is that there will be lots of couples in the Houston area who are wanting to get married and are looking for a spiritual influence in this critical transition in life and who will see this show and decide that they want to talk with my dad.  That would be a tremendous and eternal benefit to come out of this moment of celebrity.

A good portion of my work for the Preemptive Love Coalition involves writing. Whether it is for an awareness piece or some new marketing effort, we talk consistently about funding life-saving heart surgeries for over 3,000 Iraqi kids who are dying on a waiting list.  We talk about the need for an urgent intervention of love just so that these kids can survive into adulthood.

Sometimes I wonder if language like that overdoes things a bit.  I can’t help some days but feel like it is too hyperbolic, too dramatic.

Today, I don’t feel like that at all.

Last night we got an email from our partnering organization.  When 10-month-old Mohammed got off the plane in Amman for a pre-op screening, his skin was a deep shade of blue from insufficient oxygenation of his blood.  He was gasping for breath.  They rushed him to the hospital.

But it was too late.

Ten-month-old Mohammed died yesterday.

We’ll probably know more in the next few days about the complications that might have brought this about, about why we lost him on the threshhold of hope, about why his heart couldn’t make it just a few weeks more until he could have had surgery that would have probably saved his life.  But we already know the three most important facts in the matter:

1. Mohammed was born with a broken heart.
2. Mohammed died from a broken heart.
3. There are still over 3,000 Iraqi kids who are just like Mohammed.

So maybe all this talk of “life-saving heart surgeries” and “dying on a waiting list” is just a language game — but it is one that is played for keeps.  Dramatic words speak to dramatic realities.

There are plenty of you who are thinking these days about what you might give to family and friends to celebrate and honor the birth of a baby who came to the world he created to heal it of its broken heart.  Many of you get frustrated with the triviality of the tokens we exchange in celebration of his coming and in anticipation of his return.  You wish that what you could give in adoration of him might be more consistent with the nature and value of what you have received from him.

If that’s you, I would recommend clicking on the graphic to the left and giving a “Gift of the Heart” this Christmas.  You can give a gift (of any amount you choose) in honor of someone you love that will help to save the life of an Iraqi child, whom Jesus loves.  (The good news is, he also loves you and the people you love, too!)

And once you give, there is a very nice certificate that you can download to present to your loved one to share with them about the gift of hope, life and a new heart that you are celebrating with them this Christmas.

And if that is not enough to sufficiently express your gratitude for God’s Indescribable Gift, then you could also give a monthly sponsorship (again, of any amount you choose) that would allow you to regularly contribute throughout the coming year towards funding life-saving heart surgeries for Iraqi kids whose days are running out without urgent, sacrificial generosity from people like you.

So while you’re thinking about gifts you might give this season or even a regular, monthly sacrifice you might make throughout these next twelve months, be praying for the family of little Mohammed.  At some point in the next few days, his mom will get back on a plane and travel back to Iraq — alone.  Her only companions will be her deep grief and abiding sense of loss and a few cherished memories of a little boy born about the same time that Abby and I moved to Kurdistan.

Pray for hope and healing for this family.  Pray that God’s kingdom will manifest itself more rapidly in this country.  And pray for fresh and fervent faith in good news of Resurrection and Reconciliation.

Autumn has arrived in our city.  The temperatures had dropped from the scorching levels of summer for a while now, but this week things have actually gotten noticeably cooler.  It’s time for sweaters and layers!  Chocolate is being sold in stores again (since now it won’t just melt sitting on the shelves!).  They’re even starting to fire up the radiator system in our apartment building.

We spent a lot of the week meeting with some friends who were visiting us from Turkey.  The husband works for an NGO there and the wife is a midwife.  Together, they had some great advice on how to begin moving towards PLC’s first partnerships with hospitals in Turkey.  They’ve even agreed to try to make some contacts on our behalf with hospitals they are already connected to.  It was an encouraging thing to have someone give such clear affirmation to the possibility of expanding our organization’s work into Turkey.

They also gave a great training session on biblical principles of peacemaking.  It has been good for our hearts to think through the truths that they shared and to invite the Spirit to illuminate areas where we’ve not done all that we could to live at peace with others (Rom 12:18) or to be peacemakers between other parties that are at odds (Mt 5:9).  Reconciled relationships are one of the most potent signs of the power of the gospel of the kingdom, and I’ve been encouraged this week to open myself more fully to work for such reconciliation.

We had a chance to spend several hours with some of our former neighbors on Thursday night.  They were living in our apartment building while they were building a new house.  After a couple of months of staying with her parents while some other things were getting finished up, they finally moved in this past week.  It was great to get to see them again.  Her parents were also spending time with them that night and so it was a good evening to get to know them better as well.  We looked at old family pictures and heard lots of good stories.

Last night, we babysat Emma and Micah and they were a ton of fun.  They were both in really good moods and enjoyed playing sweetly with us and with one another.  It was a great night with them.

And now, a new week is ahead.  We’ll see what this one holds in store!

So what is an average day like here in Kurdistan?  I’m not sure.  But I can tell you what today was like.

Approx. 25 min. before my alarm:  I start to wake up because the construction crew begins working vigorously on the steel for the bank building going up next door.

Later:  After actually gaining consciousness, I spend some time reading Ps 148 and Lk 17.  (Our community here is studying through Luke a chapter-a-week right now.) I spend some time praying for the day ahead, our family, our team and friends here.

9:15 a.m.:  I arrive at the office and begin working through my inbox and scanning the day’s news online.  (Did you all know that there is going to be a presidential election soon?  How have I not heard about this yet?!)  After wrapping that up, I dive into the morning’s project of building and populating an online database for PLC to track the kids whose heart surgeries we are funding so that we can more strategically followthrough with these families.  This took a little bit longer than expected because of the slow speed of the internet and the need to track down the information that we currently have in disconnected record systems.

12:58 p.m.:  Jeremy and I go to lunch when we lose electricity for an hour at our office.  (This happens each day at roughly the same time.)  We have a good conversation talking about some exciting possibilities to begin scaling-up the Preemptive Love Coaltion to facilitate surgeries for a larger number of kids more quickly than we can at present, while maintaing the same quality of care for them and their families as whole people.

2:15 p.m.:  Our friend the Sheikh shows up with some contacts from Baghdad who run an Iraqi humanitarian aid organization.  They talk with us about their access to discounted rates for some hospitals in neighboring countries.  We’ll meet with them again tomorrow to see if we can work out sending some particular children through these connections.

3:00 p.m.:  I go visit the head of the health division for the local NGO that we partner with.  He had asked me to come by.  He tells me he has some exciting news about some significant money from some political leaders here that may be able to fund up to 20 surgeries if we can get some matching funds soon.  Not only was this great news, but it was also fun to see him so excited–the nature of his job and our interaction often means I get to see him overwhelmed by the enormity of the task of improving children’s health here.

3:50 p.m.:  I catch a bus just as a rainstorm/cold front moves into town.  I get off a stop earlier than I usually do to go home and I go pay the internet bills for our home and our office.  (Everything here is in cash, nothing by check or credit, so you have to pay bills with bills.)  This office is right around the corner from where my friend Zane used to work before he left for Turkey this week.  On an average day, I would have stopped by to talk for a while, but today I just had to be sad that he’s gone.  I also go pay our apartment rent and have a quick chat with the manager as he is paying all of the employees of the supermarket their monthly salaries . . . in cash.

4:45 p.m.:  The heavy rains cancel both my plans to go to the bazaar for language practice and to exchange money for next month’s expenses and also our babysitting for Jeremy and Jessica.  We might do both things tomorrow instead.

Evening:  Since our plans changed, we’re having a relaxing night.  I’m catching up on some reading (which never seems to take up a sufficient part of the average day) and Abby is cooking for a party we’re having later this week.  Before the night is over, we’ll hopefully spend some more time talking and praying together as well.

So that’s what today has been like.  As for tomorrow, well, your guess is probably almost as good as mine!

The weather’s been changing all week, getting gradually cooler and greyer each day.  Last night it all started coming down with hard rain, lots of wind and some lightning and thunder.  The rain has continued on for the past 24 hours or so off and on.

So today we’ve enjoyed a lazy Saturday.  We slept in late, read, studied language, did some housework, watched a movie, took naps, ate hamburgers and nachos.  We might even play a trivia game that we just started playing this week before the day’s over.

Hope you’re enjoying a nice, relaxing autumn Saturday as well!

In early September, Abby and I had the chance to go and visit Ryan and Sarah in Wales.  Prior to their moving to the UK last summer, we had been part of a home group with them.  We would meet each week to pray together, to read the scriptures together, to encourage one another towards deeper obedience to Jesus and to share in the joys and sorrows of life together.  So when the time came for us to take a break, we knew that spending a few days with them would be refreshing to our souls.

While we were with them, we were able to spend a couple of hours at Nant Gwrtheyrn on the Welsh coast on an unusually clear and sunny day.  The deep blue of the sea and the bright blue of the sky competed for which was more breathtaking.  In the end, they tied for second behind the vibrant green of the verdant hills.  (It’s been a long time since we’ve seen that much grass and that many trees!)

The spot where we went down to the shore was the site of an abandoned granite quarry.  Many of the surrounding hills bore unmistakable stair-stepped scars from where generations before had cut a hard living out of even harder terrain.  Walking down along overgrown paths and exploring through the old machine shop and gear house, rough and jagged scraps of granite seemed to be in abundance.  With as much as the workers took, they still left plenty behind.

But when we finally got down to the shore, we didn’t escape the granite.  Unlike the beaches of the Gulf Coast, you can barely find sand on the Welsh coast.  It’s all rocks, much of it probably granite cut out of those very hills in centuries past.  But the rock that cobblestones the shore is different from the shards of granite that cover the hills.

The stone left on its own remains much like it did when a Welsh quarryman hewed it out of the hills, discarding it for whatever larger price he was actually working for.  The edges were angular and the surfaces irregular.  Its beauty was not much more than one would expect for the geological litter it has become.

But the stones by the sea had been entirely transformed by their continuous contact with waves and wind on the shore.  After decades, or even centuries, of the lapping erosion of the tides, they were smooth and rounded, with a perfection that seemed like it couldn’t have been accidental.  It remained solid granite, but it had also been transformed to have a softness that made it seem to be anything other than a rock.

As Ryan and I walked along a stretch of the beach, we talked about how hard it can be to follow Jesus in our world.  We talked about how hard it is not just because our world is hard and broken in jagged ways (though it is), but also because we’re much like the world that we’ve been cut out of: rough, jagged, abrasive, anything but smooth.

But then I took hope in feeling the weathered granite stones beneath our feet.  For each of them, there had been a day when they were as chiseled and chinked as the rocks still strewn up on the hills.  But in time—over a great amount of time—the protruding imperfections had been worn away.

The hope for us is that God, too, the Creator and Lord of the wind and the waves, is working in our lives to smooth us out for the work he is calling us to do through the work he is calling us to do.

Looking at myself, it seems like there is still much that he needs to do.  But looking out from the Welsh coast, it seems like he has plenty of sea to do it with.

[Note: This post is re-published from a newsletter article that I wrote about a month ago, but is appearing on this blog for the first time today.]

One of the most hopeful thoughts I have is that, every moment, I can be transformed.  Because I am in Christ, meditating on this proposition is a hopeful thing because I expect the transformation to be along a Christward trajectory.

But in reading Psalm 135 recently, I had a very sobering realization that moment-by-moment change is not merely possible but rather inescapable – and not only inescapable, but also not inevitably sanctifying.  I hope in each moment to be transformed to be like Christ, but there is also the possibility of refusing him and experiencing spiritual deformation through the rejection.

The idols of the nations are silver and gold,
the work of human hands.
They have mouths, but do not speak;
they have eyes, but do not see;
they have ears, but do not hear,
nor is there any breath in their mouths.
Those who make them become like them,
so do all who trust in them!
(Psa 135:15-18 ESV)

The temptation to worship a small statue made of precious materials or fine craftsmanship is not an immediate enticement for most Westerners today (though there are undoubtedly places in the world where such “literal” idolatry is very much a live issue).  But all of us are still tempted toward new idols of our own fashioning.  Perhaps they may be a person, a possession, a position or a passion.  But it’s something.

And when it is anything (or anyone) other than God, we become like it – and we don’t become like God.  Because our god is self-made (or at least its “divine” status is), then our god is self-centered.  We serve it because we think it best serves us.  And the last thing I need is to become more self-seeking and self-serving.

When we worship anything other than God, we become blind to other people’s sufferings.  When we prioritize anyone over God, we become deaf to others’ cries of pain and calls for help.  And because we are unaware of others, our voices are mute to speak up for them.  And worst, we don’t move to breathe life into others because we have no breath in ourselves.  We are slowly suffocating as our pseudo-god sucks the life out of us.

If my life isn’t regularly vindicating the honor of others or acting with compassion towards the people around me – in other words, if I am not becoming like God (Ps 135:14) – then I am becoming like whatever pantheon of idols I am foolishly craving after.

So this has me asking today:  How am I living?  What am I becoming?  And what does that say about who I am truly worshipping?

Over the past several weeks, Jeremy has put in hundreds of hours completely overhauling the website of the Preemptive Love Coalition. So you ought to go over there a pay a visit. Spend lots of time looking around learning about the desperate needs of 3,000 kids and families in Iraq and what you can do to help them.

Even if you have been to our website hundreds of times before, if you haven’t been there since the redesign, it’s like you’ve never been at all. In particular, you might enjoy checking out a new program, PLC Pinwheels, and some new ways to give.

Check out this great video about our PLC internship program by one of our 2008 interns, Chris.

The Preemptive Love Coalition from chris taylor on Vimeo.

(Peter, the intern who talking-heads most of the video, just turned 21 earlier this week.  Happy birthday, Peter!)