In the name of Jesus November 6, 2010

I just finished reading “In the Name of Jesus” by Henri Nouwen. I love Nouwen. I feel he is a kind of soul mate. He has a way of writing that is so clear and simple, so normal, and yet so profound and challenging that it reaches my deepest part. In the conclusion of his book he recounts the experience of sharing the stage with his handicapped friend Bill at a conference for priests he was invited to speak at.  He writes, “Often I had wondered how much of what I had said would be remembered. Now it dawned on me that most likely much of what I said would not be long remembered, but that Bill and I doing it together would not easily be forgotten.”

 

In these, my last few months living in Peru, I have found myself asking how much of what I do and what I have done means anything in the grand scheme of things. What will be remembered? Have people taken in the things I have taught? Have our strategies been effective or are we just fooling ourselves? Will anybody actually put into practice anything that I have encouraged them to do?

 

Last night I was giving a workshop on self-esteem and dysfunctional relationships for a church that had invited me to come speak.  When I walked into the church building the man who had organized the event introduced me to another man who I did not recognize, but who said he had met me years ago.  “Oh really?” I asked, “where?”

“At Bethel church,” he responded, “You washed our feet.” He chuckled a little and commented on how terrible my Spanish was back then.

 

I have only washed people’s feet once in Lima, back in 2007 on the Global Urban Trek. At the end of the Trek we decided we wanted to honor our hosts and the people from the churches we had worked with by washing their feet.  At the time we didn’t think much about how our actions would be received in the Peruvian cultural context.  We were used to foot washing as a way of saying we wanted to honor and serve the people whose feet we washed.  While our hosts may have felt honored, they also felt uncomfortable; we washed their feet with cold water in winter (we didn’t have access to hot water)!  Peruvians are notorious for believing that every little exposure to cold things (including drinking a cold soda when its not hot out) can make you sick.  Imagine how they felt when we stuck their feet in cold water on that chilly day!  We were culturally clueless.

 

As I think about this funny foot scene and Henri Nouwen’s comments, I realize that most of the time the best-remembered things are those that touch people in a way that is different and fresh (maybe too fresh, haha), things that don’t fit into the normal mold people are used to.  Last night during the workshop we talked about human dignity, the value of human life.  I asked the participants to list the prices of different things we purchase each day, and then I asked them the price of a hug.  “It doesn’t have a price” they responded.  Suddenly I heard myself saying something I hadn’t planned, “But I need to know the value of a hug,” I said, “will someone please come up here and give me a hug so I can know the value of it.”  They smiled, then one of the ladies in the group shyly got out of her seat and came up and hugged me. Her name was Norma.

 

I don’t know what things people will remember from what I have shared during my time here in Peru.  Maybe Norma will remember our hug.  Maybe the youth I have worked with will remember the silly games we played or the countless times I asked them to express their ideas and arguments in art or drama.  I hope they remember these things.  I hope so because I know I will, and it is these moments of spontaneity, creativity, experiential learning and breaking the formalities of traditional teaching styles that have been most life-giving for me here in Peru. These were the times that I felt the Holy Spirit working through me and creating new life.

 

Peru has helped my grow in my ability to relate to others from that place of freedom and sincerity, not just trying to accomplish a goal but really believing that the people I am interacting with have something to teach me, and my role as a facilitator is to help bring that out.  Nouwen speaks of this process as the movement from “Relevance to prayer, from popularity to ministry, and from leadership to being led.” This practice of servant-leadership is a hallmark of what God has invited me to grow in during my time in Peru. Practicing servant-leadership helps me be less concerned about my accomplishments and enables me to be more interested in just doing what I am realistically able to, and letting that be enough, knowing that my small efforts are part of a much greater story that God is working in the world. It helps me to be less anxious about what people think of me and more concerned about being true to myself and ministering from that place of authenticity.  It allows me to be less concerned about increasing my sphere of influence and enables me to stay engaged with the people who are most marginalized by modern society, letting the illiterate and the poor be my teachers.  My prayer is that I would continue to walk this path in the Spirit of Christ.

A New Thing

(This post describes events from July 2010)

See, I am doing a new thing
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the desert
And streams in the wasteland

The wild animals honor me,
The jackals and the owls,
Because I provide water in the desert
And streams in the wasteland

To give drink to my people, my chosen
The people I formed for myself
That they may proclaim my praise

We wanted to do something different at the mid-project retreat this year, something that wasn’t in the Global Urban Trek Director’s handbook. The above passage from Isaiah 43 had been echoing in my spirit throughout the Trek. When I was in college I started thinking about the idea of the “new thing” that God was doing, the new creation, the new life that we live in and the new kingdom that we usher in as the body of Christ. I coined a catch phrase, “the old man is dying.” My artist friend Sarah said she would do a painting of it someday.

The fact that we even ended up at the retreat center was the first new thing that God did among us. We were supposed to go to a different retreat center, which I discovered (through intuition and a wise phone) call had double booked the dates of our retreat. So at 5pm the day before our retreat I snapped into task-mode and within 30 minutes we had reservations at “Villa la Paz” (the Peace Villa). The funny thing is that I had a feeling this change was going to happen, I perceived it in my spirit.

During our second night at the retreat center we did a Bible study on Isaiah 43. I led it, and it was a somewhat mediocre effort to academically pull apart the text and understand what it was talking about. I struggled leading a study in this kind of academic style that I hadn’t done for a long time. During one of the moments of awkward silence where no one seemed to have an opinion about anything, my co-director Helyn asked our student Josh what he was thinking. “Actually I am really distracted right now and having a hard time connecting with this passage,” he responded. “I was thinking about how to make keyboards accessible to people in rural African villages where there is no electricity.”

“Actually,” I responded, “I think that what you are thinking is exactly what this passage is about. You know, streams in the desert, isn’t that what it is to bring music and innovation to a place that doesn’t have access to that kind of technology?” The comment diffused the uncomfortable silence of boredom, disarming the formality of the study and revitalizing us, and we finished off the study by commenting about the “new thing” that God is doing and inviting us to perceive, then we each illustrated what we envisioned in the passage.

The next morning we continued our journey into Isaiah 43, first with a traditional lectio divina (divine reading) wherein a person read the passage several times out loud, and we listened for words and phrases from the passage and shared the impressions and invitations that God was giving us all through this communal hearing of the word. The purpose was to listen to one another, to what we were each experiencing with the text, and let our sharing produce a nourishing feedback that would allow us to enrich our own insights and interpretations. After this process of listening and sharing we returned to our drawings from the night before and added to them based upon our communal experience in the lectio divina.

After pouring the word out into our artwork we stood outside in a circle together and shared our pictures with one another, one by one. As each person shared we listened to them and genuinely held them with our attention, then we proceeded to reflect on the commonalities of our artwork. Many themes emerged that ran through the various pieces—butterflies and streams of water, deserts, crosses and gathered people, new growth and trees and dynamic flourishing, and the city with its mess and its hope. Our invitation from that point was to create what Nancy called a “tapestry” with our various drawings. In a moment of divinely inspired perception Katerina pointed out that we were standing in a circle around a tiled design in the pathway that formed an image that resembled some of the images in our drawings. In the center was a cross, and around it were shapes that resembled butterfly wings. At that moment one of the students dropped their drawing and it floated to the ground and landed on top of the tiles. Helyn reached to pick it up. “No, don’t touch it,” Nathan called out in a firm voice. And suddenly we all saw it, we perceived that we ourselves were a living version of the artwork we had created, and we began to piece together a living, moving tapestry where our drawings came to life through us. Some fluttered around with their drawings as butterflies, perching on people’s shoulders. Others sunk down to the ground and began to weave and flow like the streams of water they had drawn. I circled around the group like the spiraling process of constant exchange and evaluation and flow that I had drawn as the central dynamic of my picture.

After all was said and done we sat down together in silence. Finally, after a long but surprisingly not awkward period of silence Katerina chirped, “well that was definitely the most hippie thing I have ever done with a Christian group.” We all burst into laughter. God had done a new thing among us.