C.S. Lewis song!!  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PycBrNP8dXg

suffering

Hi, it’s been a while. I hope the world’s been good.

In the past few years, there have been a lot of deaths around me. Of friends, friends’ friends, friends’ babies, friends’ parents. I think the kind of hurt that comes with someone’s death is a one of a kind. So, I’ve been thinking about hurt. When I think about how much hurt in this world, sometimes I sulk in feelings of hopelessness, sometimes I repeat one word over and over: “why.”, and sometimes I just want to curl up in a ball and pretend the world is just a purely happy place.

Before, I had never really questioned why there was suffering. Suffering as an inevitability was cognitively understandable. But it’s different with God in the picture. A good God. Then comes the age-old question of: why doesn’t a good God prevent suffering?

I don’t see suffering as a way for us to understand joy. I don’t see evidence that one who does not know suffering does not know joy, and I think many concepts of dichotomy are human constructs, just one way the world could be working. Though I have learned much through hurt, I don’t see our learning as the reason for suffering. After coming to know God, I’ve learned more and been transformed painlessly more than I had through being hurt. And oftentimes, it seems like suffering just leaves people in worse places without giving them anything.

And I don’t think there’ll ever be a fully satisfactory answer to the question of suffering and a good God, especially for those going through suffering and crying out for help. I think an interesting question is: Why is the idea of a good God someone who takes away all physical and emotional suffering in this world? Perhaps a good God is someone who takes away spiritual suffering/disconnected so that we are free to transcend physical and emotional suffering? I don’t believe that God’s intervening every day to keep me from hurting people, something that I think would be going against my free will. I think it’s similarly hard to prevent accidents, deaths, etc. without going against people’s free will or completely overturning the physical laws of our world.

We can observe that the world at this time isn’t perfect (and if we were created to be fully fulfilled only by God, could a world so disconnected from God be perfect?) and we are not perfect; It’s hard not for imperfection to lead to suffering. A friend brought up once: Why didn’t Jesus heal everyone on Earth when He came? I believe He didn’t come at that point to change physical laws such as the death of the flesh in this imperfect world, but to create a bridge for us to access an all-fulfilling relationship with the God who is Love. And with that relationship, there is fulfillment and joy and peace that can be accessed no matter the physical state (a story of that here and a few songs from Korean-Australian twin singers jayesslee: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78B7yDhpGcg). And I saw that in Uganda: the joy and peace in God in the midst of physical deprivation and emotional hurt.  

tasks

Hi, it's been a while!
In the midst of trying to get things done (but also trying to get sleep, which strongly influences how well I treat people), I am being reminded that to spend time doing things without doing it with God is a waste of time spent. So the time that I'm trying to be efficient with to save time is being wasted. Without keeping Him in the forefront of my mind as I do things, it's no wonder that I feel lost as I lose myself in my work and tasks.

A note about how I decided to seek Christ:
Realizing what was keeping me from seeking to find out more about Him and venturing into believing Him was: if I stepped into it, I was afraid that I'd slide down the slippery slope and believe it and be believing in something that wasn't scientifically provable (nor refutable). In other words, I had no faith in my belief that there was no God and in my ability to figure out what was true after exploring both sides. Now that I've been on both sides, I understand the nature of belief better

unity part 2

belated continuation of the Unity post:
The other part of unity that really stuck out to me on this trip was our common sinful nature. It seems strange to call sin a uniting factor. Perhaps commonality is a better phrase, but I do feel that understanding of the sin that is in myself allows me to better understand others as well, especially in situations that I can hold judgement about, a few of which I will touch on later.

Sin was a hard concept for me to understand and even harder to accept. Having grown up in a strictly athiest home and a pretty peaceful neighborhood, my idea of people until perhaps about 2 years ago was that everyone was born pretty much good/kind (quote in Mandarin that every kid is taught: ren2 zhi1 chu1 xing4 ben3 shan4 = every person is born to be kind). I knew I, and everyone else, wasn't perfect, but that didn't mean we weren't still good.

The other barrier was to the word "sin". Whenever I used to hear that word in a conversation, my "ears closed off". It was a purely religious phrase with no real meaning to me and had all the negative associations I had with Christian evangelism and of damnation (another phrase I hadn't cared to find out about). But then I came to Brown, and the Christians I met here my freshmen year were nothing like the Christians I had known. And so I listened, and over the past 3 years I've gone through more worldview shifts than I had ever before, at least within my conscious memory. One of those was the nature of sin, which I came to see as anything I think, feel, do that is not aligned with God's will and distances me from Him. And a lot of sin had seemed like no big deal to me (eg. "lust? that's inevitable, if you don't force someone into it then it's not a big deal"), until I began to see and experience the consequences of sin both in myself and others. It took a lot to happen to shake up my original worldview. I may go into how that happened in more detail in later posts. The result was I began to realize 1. so many more of my (and others') issues and 2.how much hurt and harm they could bring. Someone on the Uganda trip compared coming to know God as a process of lifting veils that had covered our eyes from the truth. That could be taken in many different ways, but I definitely think I'd lived with blinders on about my own sin.

My time in Uganda was part of that process too. There was so much of sin manifested in tangible ways, which I think is less common where I grew up. I need to run to class (woot), but there's one story about a girl that really stuck out to me. In the time we spent in Gulu we lived with child mothers (children who were also mothers), of which many were former child soldiers. We were told the story of one of the girls who had been abducted when she was 9 or 10. Right away, she began to be regularly raped by the commanders (grown men) and her brother was killed in front of her soon after their abduction. There is one memory that kept coming back to her:
The commanders had tied 40 people down with their heads lined up on the side of the road. The girl was given a thick stick, and told to bash the heads of these people until they were dead, one after another. She remembers vividly the way their blood splurted and splashed on her as they continued writhing after they had died, and as she proceeded down the line, one head after another, the heads kept cursing at her and talking to her: "why are you killing me? why are you doing this?"
That is sin.
That is the sin also in me.

Unity

Looking back, unity was a constant theme throughout my time in Uganda and a continuing focus point of lessons from God. Even before the trip, the idea of a universal connectedness had always intrigued me and passages about the unity of men as one body and of the unity of God living in us had always stood out to me. 

The first hint of this theme in Uganda was apparent as soon as we arrived and met the Ugandan side of our team (of mostly university students). They treated us like their brothers and sisters from the get-go: holding our hands, literally, and teaching us how to live in the new environment. We learned during orientation that as a culture, Ugandans were much more relational and community-oriented. Individual achievements weren’t as valued as in the states. Having grown up in a very achievement-based community and culture, and having become jaded by the way I had lived my life striving to accomplish and even linking my worth/identity to my abilities, I fell in love with this culture of Uganda. We were told that Ugandan people happily put aside assignments and other to-do’s to hang out with unannounced visitors. I, on the other hand, have lost patience with others and myself when I felt I was being kept from getting stuff done. I don’t think it’s bad to want to get things done, but I’d rather not value it to a point where it hinders my relationship with people and with God. The Ugandan students grew up being around people 24/7 and seem to be as comfortable around people as I am when I’m alone; I, on the other hand, start feeling burnt out and even depressed if I don’t get enough alone-time for a few weeks. Seeing the way the Ugandans worshipped together, danced together, cooked together, washed plates together (in an assembly line style!) was very heart-warming. The first time we joined their dancing sessions at night, the American team ended up circling up and urging people to dance solo at the center, while the Ugandans gravitated towards circling up so everyone could see everyone else and dance the same movements together. I think that differences between culture are fascinating and these cultural differences can highlight different amazing aspects of humanity. One culture is not better or worse than the next, but each culture could learn things from another culture. After seeing the Ugandan culture, it seemed much more true to me that there was a lot of cut-throat competitiveness, judgment, and pride in our society that stemmed from an individualistic, achievement-based perspective.

Other than the unity that I saw in the Ugandan culture, I also experienced the unity across all barriers of race, language, culture that have been used to divide people. Time and again, we were called brothers and sisters and treated as such. Deep bonds were built despite upbringings that could not have been more polarized: teenage girls who spent their childhood sleeping on the street s in the middle of the town to stay away from rebels, then were abducted and forced to kill uncountable innocent people (including family and friends),  to Ugandan university students who have spent a majority of their lives in the capital city and visit their home villages on holidays, with their daily lives completely unaffected by the civil war in the North, to Americans who had grown up playing in little league, being told to do their homework every night, or competing with friends on the xbox. I could see better the underlying commonality of all people, the common core that makes us human, and see the unity of us all as one (body). I could see more that every human was not just my brother or sister, but were like a part of me. And what I do to another human, I do to myself. Therefore, when one says “do unto others as you would have others do unto you”, it’s as if what you do to others you really do to yourself as you are one with others and when you feel the pain and joy of others as your own. 

To be continued...

Transformational and Healing

My time in Uganda reaffirmed and increased my understanding of God as a transformational and healing God.

I came to a personal relationship with Christ recently: Dec. 3^rd 2010, and He’s done transformational work in me, drastically changing the way I think and feel about people, the state of our world, and also myself.  But He had been working in my life long before I came to recognize Him, and I saw this on the Uganda trip. He’s lifted me from addiction, depressive episodes, mistreatment of myself, blindness to the truth, and constant  guilt and shame;  He’s made me less selfish, insecure, stubborn, judgmental, and prideful and He hasn’t let me stay chained up in the guilt and shame that came from seeing these problems in myself. More excitingly, He’s teaching me much about how to love better and give better and He’s given me an inner peace, joy, and hope: the amazing feeling of His presence that I had never experienced and that makes me feel more alive.  

Seeing His work in myself came with seeing His transformational character at work in amazing ways in Ugandan people I met. While I don’t know the details of many of the people I came to know, I know they’ve been through more than I could ever imagine. Yet they’ve come to see hope in the midst of their suffering, find joy in their everyday, offer forgiveness for the most horrendous violations, and accept God’s love for them when they had a hard time feeling worthy of anyone’s love.  God’s helped people to trust others as they came to trust Him, love others more as they come to experience His love, and to forgive others and themselves as they receive God’s forgiveness. I’ll post up more details of stories of people who have blown me away in showing me how God provided, then healed and transformed them. 

Their stories

http://childvoiceintl.org/about-a-girl-blog/
read about stories of the child mothers at ChildVoice International! They're painful stories, but it's how things are with many people and at the same time there's also always hope in their stories.

"

I remembered how I had been walking a lot. My foot had swollen and cracked and I lost all of my toe nails. My feet started bleeding. The rebels were trying to decide whether to kill me or not because I couldn’t walk. Instead they decided to carry me on sticks like a dead person. As they carried me, I started to bleed from my stomach. I was shot that year. It entered my stomach and exited the right side of my back.

I was remembering all of this, all of my problems—my feet, my hand, and my bleeding stomach. At the same time I started thinking about being HIV positive and how my husband left me. I thought about my friends and family at home. Bringing all of these bad thoughts and problems together made me have a very bad nightmare about the bush that night."

"...I pray all the time now as a group and by myself in the morning and at night. I go to chapel every morning, and there are people here who share their past problems and I share mine too. I have people I can talk to and I am doing better these days because of it.'"

and I think this is talking about our visit: 

Cross Cultural Friendships

We have had different visitors coming to the centre lately, and we have already made a lot of new friends. I really enjoyed having them here. It was a lot of fun. I got to practice my English and we played games. They taught us songs, dances and different games and we worshipped God together. It was just so nice!

We also learned from them in other ways, like how to keep visitors and friends when they stay with us. We learned how to show respect to others of a different culture, like the way we should speak and act. Sometimes they do different things that are funny to the Acholi people, and we never knew before how we should be with them.

The day that the visitors left was really sad. It was hard to watch all of our new friends leave, but we are excited to have them back again and to have other visitors coming again soon. Now that we have stayed with some visitors, we will know better for the next ones who come and we will share a lot together.