Compassion

When I first was coming to Thailand, someone close to me said, “I really respect your desire to go and share the gospel. But I don’t understand why you want to focus on the poor.” I couldn’t believe he said that and my anger burned at him. How could someone separate the poor from the gospel? This person later questioned whether focusing on the poor was a waste of time, energy, and resources. Oh my anger burned. God’s special concern for the poor is clear throughout scripture. How did he not get it?

Sometimes recently though, and especially today, I can understand those questions and the pessimism behind it. I’ve lived and worked among the poor in Bangkok for nearly four years now and I would have to say that a lot of the reasons that the poor are poor and continue to be poor are the fault of the poor. And it does seem sometimes that working to achieve holistic development among the poor is a slippery slope battle (not a downhill one, but an uphill one). Read the rest of this entry »

For the past 3.5 years, I have been a squatter. I have lived in the Permsup community, a place of uncertain existence. Permsup has been home to about 500 people, the majority of whom have lived there 12-15 years or more. Some have lived there for 40 years. Ever since before I moved in, we were aware that a road project was scheduled to come straight through Permsup, evicting everyone. This pending eviction has hung over our heads like a cloud that destroys hope for the future and the freedom to plan.

It has affected me in very concrete ways. Because I never knew how long we would be here, I always felt hesitant to invest in my house and in long-term thinking programs of development. If I had known Permsup would still mostly be standing 3.5 years later, I would have made a lot of improvements to my house, both for my own living situation as well as to be a community resource center, perhaps with a computer lab for teaching skills to the neighbors and so on. In affect, the cloud of eviction forced me to live like a camper, wanting to live there among the people to identify with them and stand with them in solidarity and build relationships, but afraid to really move in and invest like this was truly my home. I was always afraid any investments made would be bulldozed away in short time.

And so it is for my neighbors as well. They live an uncertain existence, never feeling like this is truly their home, but cherishing the cheap housing it provides currently too much to plan for a better and more costly future. Without land rights, a community cannot develop. There is no foundation. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the area’s I’m hoping to grow in in the coming year is the spirit of grace-ful dialogue. (I.e. speaking the truth with love, constructive conflict, etc.) One of the models I look to in this is Brian McLaren. As can be seen from my other posts, I’ve gained a lot from McLaren’s writings in the last year. But I believe perhaps his greatest contribution to the church will be remembered as the grace-full-ness in which he shared his ideas and engaged critics. One of my mentors who knows McLaren personally said that he is the “classic non-bridge-burner”. He does everything he can to maintain relationships and avoid burning bridges. Especially as I continue to be shaped in my theology by McLaren, Dallas Willard, and N.T. Wright and begin to be more vocal about this new worldview and understanding of what the Good News of Jesus is (which might be pushing the envelope for many in traditional evangelical circles), I hope to learn this spirit of grace-ful dialogue so that I might point to the Kingdom of God at all times. As this same mentor of mine says, its more important to be in right fellowship than to be right.

I just read this article on McLaren’s website. It is a “friendly note” to his critics sharing his desire for grace-ful dialogue between them that would represent the Kingdom of God well rather than the mean-spirited dialogue which often predominates in religious debate. I think it is a great summary of Christian ethics for grace-ful dialogue and useful for meditating on and putting into practice. I hope you are blessed by the article as I have been and will be.

I recently wrote a post on the power of an indestructable joy. That was mostly related in terms of encouraging hope where there is despair - particularly the kind of fatalistic despair common among my neighbors in Permsup. Since then though, I’ve been thinking about the relationship of joy to pain. There is pain in despair, sure, but its a pain where an indestructable joy, drunk with the reality of hope, is a truly compassionate thing. There are many situations, however, where such joy is not compassionate but seems almost insensitive. I’m talking of situations where people have received terrible things, and at no fault of their own. Friends suffering from random, debilitating diseases, kidnapped children in northern Uganda being forced into soldier service raping and pillaging as they have been raped and pillaged, etc. Where pain exists and exists in abundance, does joy even seem relevant? While the reality of hope is still a true thing there, what difference does it make? As Henri Nouwen has been teaching me, I think the thing there is just to suffer with people.

Now this makes sense of course, everybody knows that one of the best things you can do for people in pain is just to be with them. Just show them that you care. Don’t run away from the pain, or try to make it seem less than it is. But dwell in it with them.

My question though, is how do we mesh joy with pain? Doesn’t joy and hope have anything to say unto pain? We are people of eternal hope - and we are also called to suffer with people. It’s generally assumed that joy and pain are mutually exclusive. If we have joy, we can’t be experiencing pain; if we are in pain, we can’t be experiencing joy. But is this true? It would seem to me that the entire Christian enterprise rises and falls on whether this assumption is false or not. Because in Christ, there is most certainly hope and therefore joy. But we cannot be followers of Christ unless we endeavor to suffer with those in pain. If we run away from pain, we are not followers of Christ, for Christ left all the glory of heaven to dwell among us and suffer with us. It must be true, therefore, that joy and pain can simultaneously coexist. Read the rest of this entry »