The Christ Journey

tasks

2011-10-03T13:28:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-08T09:50:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-09T20:58:00.000-07:00

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

2011-07-30T09:21:00.001-07:00

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

2011-07-29T13:08:00.000-07:00

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.

Reflections on Uganda

2011-07-26T12:51:00.001-07:00

The past month in Uganda has been a rollercoaster learning experience, but the lows weren’t bad because I knew God would pull me back up and that He was teaching me no matter where I was. The main things that I saw God do in me was (and is) to show me what broke His heart, teach me how to better build a relationship with Him, and lead me in what to do with what He has shown me.

To hear about the living and medical conditions before going to Uganda was not at all the same as seeing it, even if I only got a glimpse of it. The images keep coming back: faces of children in semi-unconscious states as malaria, sickle cell disease, and so many other physical hurts plagued their bodies, their mothers sitting on the dusty floor in the cramped 2-ft wide space next to their cribs. They tell us they don’t have enough money for their child’s medication or for food for their other children waiting for them at home, or that they’ve sat on the floor next to their child for days praying for healing, or they don’t know what is going to happen to their child’s future because the disease has invaded and incapacitated the brain, and as the doctors and nurses don’t have the time or desire to listen to them, they’re telling their worries and grief to us, foreigners who have never experienced the physical hardships that they are in, who are protected by vaccines from the ailments their kids were struggling against.

To hear about the stories of abducted children and the physical mutilation, emotional trauma, and sexual abuse that the LRA/rebels inflicted was not the same as spending day and night chatting, snacking, singing, dancing with child mothers affected by the war and then to hear about what these new best buddies have been through: bullet wounds, HIV, family tortured and killed in front of them, rape for years by military commanders, forced to take lives of innocent people day after day. What I saw and experienced brought out a lot of feelings: guilt, hopelessness, and that heavy ache in the chest. Nobody knows heart ache better than God. He Loves each of us more than we could ever love anyone, and everyday He sees His children torturing, raping, deceiving, using, isolating, judging each other. I can’t even imagine the pain we cause Him.

But in the midst of the hopelessness and pain, we also saw God at work. In the hospital filled with sick children, there was a mother who talked about Jesus as her only hope and the only reason why she could still keep going. At childvoice, our child mother friends worshiped Jesus with such passion and joy, and we hear how, as they come to Childvoice and grow towards God, their nightmares subsided, they began trusting people and each other, they come to care about their babies much more, and they see hope in their futures. The way these girls, who had been robbed of family and friends, an education, and their childhood years, love each other and their babies and have so much joy in the little things in their everyday is a testimony to God’s healing and love. We saw a lot of brokenness and it was hard to see how deep our human sin runs and the suffering it leads to, but we also saw God provide, and beyond what we can see from our human perspective, we also know He’s intimately involved and working in every situation whether or not we are aware of it.

God also told me I could take part in changing the state of our world, that the little impact I can make is of value, and also that an individual can also make a big impact; He urges me to trust Him to be able to use me. He has also been leading me in what to do with my education and thereafter. On the way back from California the week after coming back from Uganda, I had a 4-hour conversation with the lady sitting next to me even though my plan had been to check out for the 4 hours to make up for the all-nighter I’d pulled. The lady exuded friendliness and love and taught me lots of awesomely interesting things. One thing that really impacted the way I thought about my future path was what she planted in my head about the need in my home culture for counseling/psychotherapy; Working in that field in my home culture was an option that I hadn’t fully considered because of how closed my culture is to the idea of psychotheray. In processing my time in Uganda, I saw how I could be used in my home culture: I have had exposure to Western thought patterns that have helped me through issues that were linked to my culture, and I could bring these elements back. We had seen how the counselor at ChildVoice made a difference in the child mothers’ lives by living with them and coming to build a close relationship with these girls. The Ugandan culture may also not be very open to psychotherapy, but the girls did benefit from it as it was used in a way that fit into their circumstances and culture. I was suddenly very grateful that I’d retained speaking fluency in Mandarin as there are many Mandarin-speaking communities who may benefit from counseling.

God also really worked on our relationship, and the closer I got to Him, the better I was able to love others and myself. God taught me how to trust and lean on Him, how to turn to Him more readily, how to come to Him more vulnerably and break away the shame and guilt barriers that I’d put up between us, how to receive His Love/ how to see Him as my Daddy, how to be open in experiencing, understanding, and expressing my emotions, how to have faith in Him that isn’t boxed in by my logic and the way I want Him to work…

To be continued

Stories - Uganda

2011-07-24T05:24:00.000-07:00

This is a new blog because I was having a hard time myself remembering the address of the old one. Hopefully I won't be changing blogs for a while from now on.

trip to Uganda, a little background: I spent about a month in Uganda this summer with 15 others from the States and 15 Ugandans; we were all college students and campus staff. We spent two weeks in the capital of Kampala going to primary and secondary schools, going to different wards in a governmental hospital, and visiting lots of families in their homes in different towns and slums; Then we drove up North to Gulu, a previously war-wrecked area, and stayed at ChildVoice International with girls who had been affected by the 2 decade long war (spanning some of their lifetime): these girls were all mothers (often not out of their own choosing) and many had been abducted to be child soldiers by the rebels (the LRA) during the war. The LRA have since a few years ago left Uganda to Congo, where they have continued to raid villages and abduct children to be soldiers.

One of the things I learned in Uganda was the importance of story-telling, and I realized how rare it is that I sit down and tell people a story. I like to talk to people about ideas and theories, but I would have a hard time telling people details accounts/stories of anything I’d experienced. This hindered the sharing of my experiences and might have limited people to only my perspective/my review of things I'd seen . So I’ll be trying my best to share stories from Uganda, big and small.

*Names have been changed and details are only from recall

Bradley is only 24, but he’s already a preacher at his church. He lives with his grandma in a house that is basically only one room, about 2 meters by 3 meters big. He welcomed us with a big grin and brought out chairs for us to sit on. He tells us he first moved here to live with his grandmother when he was 10 when his father passed away and he had no one else to live with. It was hard times for him, but he then quickly became part of the worship team in church. From there, he knew he wanted to be a preacher even though it’s a job parents try to keep their kids away from because it pays next to nothing. And when he stays at home with his grandma during the daytime, people will ask why he’s not going to work or school at his age, but Bradley loves his job and is happy to make the sacrifices. He talks about his job like it’s the best thing that has happened to him. As we talk, a woman who looked to be in her 50s came over and repeatedly said hi to us and grabbed for my hand while saying she wanted to talk, that she liked me, and various other things I could not understand (I think she was interested in our conversations because I was a foreigner). Bradley kept shooing her away and she finally left with a few angry comments. On the walk back, the Ugandan students I was with told me she had been drunk, a thought that had not crossed my mind as I was used to seeing people drunk only in the limited context of college parties, and that so many in Uganda drink from morning ‘til night because there’s so much they want to forget.