Life in the slum

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 »

Instead of being grateful, obedient and trusting, as a naive reading of the exodus story might have led us to imagine, Israel spends forty years in the wilderness wanting to go back to Egypt, fearful of entering the Promised Land because there are giants there, and generally displaying all the signs of the fallen humanity to whose plight they were supposed to be the answer. - from Evil and the Justice of God, p. 56, by N.T. Wright (emphasis mine)

Sometimes I lament at how difficult discipleship and leadership development is among the urban poor in Bangkok. When the believers in our house church and other neighbors continue to struggle with gambling, alcohol abuse, worry, fear, etc. I wish my neighbors would soak up the Word (not just intellectually, but heart-wise) like my friends back in college used to. I want to scream, “You’re supposed to be the answer to all this! Yes this world is messed up and there is much in your lives and our community’s life to worry over and reason to flee the problems and self-medicate with gambling and alcohol - but God wants to use you to change all this mess! There is so much more to life than what you’re living!” Read the rest of this entry »

No, I’m not writing about abortion or capital punishment.  I’m talking about a weariness and heaviness of heart, maybe even depression, that I observe in many, many Thai people.  I don’t like to minimize this phenomena and I don’t think it would be too far to call it death.  Its a decay, an eating away at the bones.  I started noticing this acutely right away when I returned to Bangkok, even in the taxi ride from the airport.  Just looking at the faces of people running the shops along the streets, it struck me.  What is that heaviness, where does that weariness come from?  Especially in “the land of smiles”?  I think its partly from years of poverty, of struggling to make ends meet.  Life is just a struggle and joy has been sapped, except when special occasions and visits from loved ones revive it.  There are probably also those heart wounds - from abuse as a child, from abandonment by a spouse, from medical emergencies and financial disasters - that remain unhealed without expectation of future healing.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

I just got done reading The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis. My mind is on fire. The picture I can’t get out of my head is of the Great Solid people entreating the Ghosts to stay…but without an ounce of sorrow or pity. At every point, their joy was indestructable.

I started reading this book at the suggestion of my good friend Dan. I had previously lent Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian trilogy to him and his wife Liza. We’ve had many a discussion on issues McLaren brings up, particularly the question of hell addressed in the final book, The Last Word and the Word After That. Dan suggested that McLaren must have gotten many of his paradigms from Mr. Clive Staples. Just this morning, Dan was saying that he never really took The Great Divorce to be an analogy for heaven and hell, but for what essentially happens here on earth. Its interesting how I read it from the opposite view, but I think end up at the same point. What I mean is, if we’re talking about eternity being in every moment and every moment being in eternity, what’s the difference? Heaven begins now, as does hell. Heaven is now, as is hell. We’re experiencing heaven now, and some are also experiencing hell now. Now. And that’s exactly what Clive Staples says.

This is so amazing to me, because it means that we indeed can become like those shining solid giants in the “high country” whose joy is so indestructable. Here. Now. In Permsup, in Boston, in Los Angeles, wherever we may be. In 2006. Or 2549. Read the rest of this entry »

Some of my immediate neighbors in the Permsup community are the drug dealing ring here. A number of these young men and a couple women hang out in front of the community every day and night. In my first year here, I used to hang out with them a fair amount, especially this one kid Gaeng. But in the last few months, it has been a rare occasion that I’ve stopped and chatted with this group. This has been somewhat intentional, in order to focus my energies on the family oriented group that includes Ratchai, Komsorn, YaiGao, etc. in which we already have well-established relationships and significant inroads for ministry. But I think its been partly in avoidance also. This group can be much crasser and the sobriety quotient is much lower. Its just less comfortable to hang out with this crew.

But a couple weeks ago, with my good friend James visiting, they called us over, and we stayed longer than I normally would. And…I felt so comfortable with them. Its funny, like you have to get over that activation energy, and then bam! it flows. Once past that first facade, I felt there was a definite spirit of openness and seeking among these young men. (I think I used to write them off as too drunk to remember anything I would say to them.) There’s about 4 or 5 core men that are always there that I’m familiar with (Bperk, Bpet, Joe, Lek), but then there’s others who are transient in and out. The second time we hung out with them a couple days later, it was actually one of the new guys, Black, who asked me right away, “So, Dave, I’ve been wondering, why is it that you, a foreigner, live in the slum of all places?” A perfect entry to share the gospel! These are the moments I live for. And I feel much more confident now than I did a year ago in terms of sharing the holistic missional wholeness of the gospel and contextualize it as going beyond Buddhism rather than in direct conflict with it. I feel armed now! I can articulate why the gospel is such good news. Read the rest of this entry »