After last year´s expeeriences we called Delta ´dirty Delta´but this year they delivered us and all our luggage almost on time which was a relief.
We are settling into a much warmer Lima than last year, even a spot of sunshine. We´ve had some great orientation stuff and its exciting to be immersed in an IFES movement that lives and breathes mision integral, at whose heartbeat is the belief that justice is not just something good, but is at the heart of the gospel. I´m once again reminded of the amazing capacity of Peruvians to love and welcome. Tomorrow we´re off to some universities to do some dramas… should be interesting…
I head off in a couple of days to Peru, back for the second year with a team of students from across Ireland, to work with our Peruvian counterparts - AGEUP . We’ll be working with christian student groups in Lima, helping run an English camp, helping out in some of AGEUP’s long term community development work in Caraballyo - the shanty town we had the privilege of spending time in last year. It’s part of a familar story of cities across the two thirds world, where those from the countryside come to try and find jobs in the city, in Lima’s case a city of 11 million people. San Martin is the little community in the area of Caraballyo where we worked last year, it doesn’t ahve electricity or running water, its beside a rubbish dump, which the children play in, yet there is a sense of life and community which we don’t have here.
We’ll also be spending a week in Huancavelica - a town in the mountains badly hit by last year’s massive earthquake where the soapbox and his cohorts will be putting our minimal construction skills to use helping AGEUP with some of the reconstruction they are doing as they work to bring hope and life not just to students but to communities across Peru. It’s around 3700m so the atlitude will affect us a little no doubt, but i was most disturbed to find out that the night-time temperature at the minute is -5!
Once again we are flying with (dirty) Delta, and with a 2 hour turnaround in Atlanta i’m anticipating we won’t be seeing our bags for a couple of days. Change of clothes in the hand luggage all the way!
I’m hoping to post a few updates of what we get up to, what we are learning and some stories of the people we will meet. Hopefully there won’t be any dog incidents this year.
For those of you who are the praying sort, we’d appreciate those prayers as we trave, try and speak spanish, love each other well as a team, and those we meet, and as we serve alongside AGEUP in the amazing stuff they are doing, and especially for Emily and I as we lead the team.
The team are myself, Emily, Lisa, Nathan, Claire, Louise, Philip, Denise, Gillian, Charlotte and Warren.
I sat slightly embarrassed on the bus a couple of days, misty eyed as I read the last few chapters of Steve Turners fantastic look at the life of Johnny Cash. Unlike many biographies he didn’t gloss over anything, its a brutally honest appraisal yet that is exactly how Cash himself was. Its made me dip back into the back collection of ‘the man in black’ and discover the haunting power of many of his songs.
Beginning to understand more of who Cash was, the transparency of his faith and failings has breathed new life into many of his songs. The man who dressed in black, and had seen so much of death was at the same time someone obsessed with life. His faith and Turner’s last chapter on that inspired me no end. Cash for me is an example of a treasure in a clay pot - all is there to see and amid the failings God is clearly at work. Perhaps Cash lived out that battle in public that most live out in private, pretending n the outside that everything is fine when actually the pain, the struggles are overwhelming.
Perhaps Cash’s greatest attribute was the recognition that he knew what it was like to be in the places were many are, so when it came to faith there was never a self-righteous, sanctimonious or ‘preachy’ way with him. Larry Gatlin described Cash and June’s life as an open book, people who weren’t perfect but had found hope that they shared. The God that shined through Cash related and spoke to people as he wasn’t dressed in cliches, and genuinely cared for people. Bono summed it up well
“People were selling God like a commodity, and I couldn’t relate to them. Then I met Johnny Cash and i felt like him. You read the scriptures and you realise that he’s actually like these guys in the scriptures. He’s not like these weirdos.”
Maybe a good dose of Cash-esque honesty may be of more use to the church than slick programmes and great pretenders…
The good folks at summer madness have in a fit of craziness allowed the soapbox to escape from his usual tasks of walking around the Kings Hall site with a hi-viz vest, radio and clipboard looking busy and purposeful, and actually given me something to do. They have in effect given me a soapbox from which to rant. Potentially foolish. However I have been given some guidelines. I’m taking a seminar entitled
5 ways to lose your faith before you’re 25….
I clearly am a model example of how not to be a christian, either that or it is intended to be a somewhat ironic title. Now i’m no expert so I would like your help. I did grow up in this subversive jewish sect as some would say, although when growing up it didn’t seem too subversive but more about the rules, from which i eventually had enough and wandered off for a bit to check out some other options. I couldn’t escape though and figured that it was perhaps a bit of an imitation of the real thing i’d been shown, and this subversive, loving your enemies, upside down Jesus was worth following. I’m still here.
So if you’ve been a wanderer and wandered back to the way of Jesus - what are the things that keep you in this way? If you are a Jesus follower what are the things that help you keep the faith? Or if you’re not so up for all this God-bothering - why not? what turns you off Christianity?
I have an hour to fill so need some substance here…
we’re one but we’re not the same, we’ve got to carry each other
Is how Bono puts it.
Unity.
Something the church is suposed to be famous for. Something that is supposed to characterise those who follow Jesus, and indeed demonstrate to others that we are followers of Jesus because we love each other. Unity is also as Vinoth Ramachandra puts it:
a blind spot of evangelicalism due to our individualistic understandings of the gospel
It is sadly true, often Christians, not just evangelicals or protestants seem to spend more time witnessing against each other than to those who don’t know Jesus, and to whom we want to enjoy the life to the full that Jesus offers. I hold my hands up as one who is guilty, and only too aware that often my reaction to being labelled is to do the same, to define myself over and against another.
Why do we struggle with unity? Partly perhaps because we are human, tainted by the fall and we have a tendency to make a balls of things. Could it also be because we focus our unity on the wrong thing, or use the wrong means perhaps more accurately to seek to achieve unity?
Frequently protestants tend to use doctrinal consensus via theological debate as the means. I know myself I have uttered the words ‘uniting around the core truths of the gospel’ many times. ‘What is core?’ however then opens the debate, and either we see lots of groups emerging, or a watered down consensus that is virtually meaningless. Perhaps we need to listen to the Newbigin’s, Bosch’s and Ramachandra’s of the world who suggest that our unity must come from our mission, or more correctly our shared participation in God’s mission. This becomes messy and more awkward - it is more difficult to draw neat lines. It is noticeable that when churches work together, when they unite in mission, God shows up and people come to know him. When we choose mission as the means of our unity there is less control, and maybe more room for God than when we tightly define our unity. When we focus on loving others together paradoxically we learn to love each other, and it is this that Jesus calls us to - not to judge each other on our doctrinal purity (I think it was Rene Padilla who said that). Obviously its not just as simplistic as I’m making out but i wonder if our problems of unity would look different if we had a greater focus on mission? Once again Vinoth says it better than I ever will:
It is only when we have learned to die to our own plans and projects, including our plans for world evangelisation, that we can truly love another and move forward into every dimension of life under the leading of the triune god of mission.
Who is there who can top a 2 and 3/4 hour set from Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band? They may have taken a while to get going, but when they did it was amazing. Sometimes after a gig you can feel you’ve played out an artist but I’ve been delving back into the back collection ever since. Here’s a wee snippet from the gig. I’m not even going to try to put it into words. Check him out yourself…
Some of the clips on youtube of Bruce playing with u2 and REM are well worth checking out.
After all the excitement of Thursday night, the soapbox ventured out to the *insert energy drink brand* soapbox races at Stormont. On a sunny afternoon Stormont is a great venue, a lush green oasis in Belfast’s suburban sprawl. Unfortunately this soapbox wasn’t racing but some of the racing was pretty funny. Some of the competitors appeared to have forgotten to road test their machines, some had clearly spent far too much time in their garages! Interesting afternoon out but they maybe did string it out too long as the crowd drifted off with not even Colin Murray’s not quite suited to a family day out humour struggled to keep people there.
What better way to end a day like that with frisbee at seapark…
Last night i was at a gig by Martyn Joseph - a Welsh singer songwiter, who has been plying his trade for a couple of decades. He’s no chart topper, but then he’s still around unlike a lot of today’s manufactured pop. How old do I sound? Over the course of 3 hours (with a break in the middle), he played songs and answered questions about his music and life. At times he was a stand up comedian, a master storyteller gripping us with his stories, at times he was the angry prophet railing against closure of welsh mines, of senseless loss of life, celebrity and politicians, at times he had us singing along to Elvis, and at other times the beauty and tenderness of his songs brought tears to our eyes. His songs are in many ways simple - about life and what he sees, whether in the news or an old lady in the post-office. He has that gift of involving us in the songs, of bringing melody and lyrics to express that which often we find difficult to express. I long for more musicians like him - the storytellers and prophets not afraid to write raw honest songs, who aren’t at the mercy of the record company or swayed by the whims of the buying public..
The ‘global credit crunch’ is dominating our news stories, economy, spending and even making it into church sermons. People are worried about the drop in value of the property market - which well certainly in parts of East Belfast was artificially inflated by greedy property investors. Economic growth is slowing, the exchange rate with the euro is not good (for my cross border forays, good for those coming to the pound-zone). In this worry and obsession with the good times slowing, I am grateful for papers like the Independant who can remind us of the real crisis in the global economy. I’ve been reading snippets of this over the last months, but few news outlets are prepared to make it front page news. Maybe partly because it puts our issues in perspective and gives the Daily Mail less to be alarmist about - although I’m sure they’ll find a way to blame immigrants.
It seems we have got ourselves (globally) in trouble with environmental alternatives. Biofuels the great answer to rising fossil fuel transportation costs are causing a real crisis among the poorest countries in the world. Crops that are used for biofuels are also used by milions for food. So when the increasing demand for fuel drives prices up, that means the cost of basic staple foods rises too, and who does it affect the most? The poorest. Those with no voice. This isn’t a little problem. There have been protests in Haiti, the Philippines, Burkina Faso, Tortilla Riots in Mexico and protests in Italy. Western farmers are enjoying the bumper profits but at what cost? Newspapers have been reporting this and warning that we may be sleepwalking towards a food crisis. Ordinary punters like us can change the minds of the powerful, but with this one its so huge - where do we start - any suggestions?
This made me laugh out loud as I walked through the city centre, thinking about getting lunch. I had to look twice to make sure hunger wasn’t playing strange tricks on my mind and I wasn’t imagining that a large rabbit was playing surreal fairground music, or I hadn’t entered the set of Donnie Darko.
This made me laugh out loud as I walked through the city centre, thinking about getting lunch. I had to look twice to make sure hunger wasn’t playing strange tricks on my mind and I wasn’t imagining that a large rabbit was playing surreal fairground music, or I hadn’t entered the set of Donnie Darko.
