Of Desert Cliffs, Temptation and Money

Today I was challenged to think about temptation. Recalling the time that Jesus spent in the wilderness, wrestling with his own demons, Lent is a time for Christians to sort through their lives and look clearly at the places where temptations lie. 

My goal was to draw a picture that shows what tempts me most. I had a couple thoughts in mind about my inner temptations, but I decided to focus first on setting the scene. I used most of my page to draw a golden cliff (with purple shadows along its flank) rising up out of a flat red desert.That dark blue speck on the edge of the cliff is me. As I was working along, I drew the bubble that would eventually show my greatest temptation, but I purposely left it blank till the very end. 

When the rest of the drawing was complete, I grabbed a pencil and quickly drew in the first thing that came to mind in the temptation category.

Money.

Interesting.

I think of myself as a person who normally does not worry too much about money. It has a way of coming and going all on its own, and I have learned to trust it to work itself out.

And I think of myself as a person who can live quite happily without any major extravagances. We all need a little money, but I don't think that I need a lot.

So I was surprised that when I thought about temptation, money leaped into my mind.

Maybe it's because I am at a turning point in my life where money is at a minimum and opportunity is at a maximum.  Part of me is tempted to worry about money and to limit my dreams accordingly, but another voice urges me to push on and never let money (or the lack thereof) hold me back.

Right now, I'm not sure which is the wiser voice. But I think I better pay close attention to how money, and the temptation of money, is working in my life.

Of Monkeys, Grace and the Hunger Games

On Thursday, I woke up thinking about grace.

To be honest, I had a dream about it. And I would like to tell you about the dream. But isn't that one of the most frustrating and annoying experiences in life - to listen to someone going on about something they dreamed??

"Well, it was LIKE my old grade school but inside it was more like a shopping mall. And my kindergarten crush was there, but he had a beard and a pet monkey. He asked me, 'Why are you wearing pajamas to school?' I looked down and realized he was right!! I was wearing one-piece footie Barney pajamas at school...so embarrassing! I tried to run away from him but it was like my feet were buried in wet cement. I couldn't move so I just stood there and cried. Then his monkey offered me a Kleenex." 

You can find pictures of ANYTHING on the internet. It fascinates me beyond words. 
Photo by Indiadee in Happy in Hampi

So I promise to leave out all the wonky bits and just cut to the point.

First, the back story:

The past few days, I've been dealing with some frustrating situations. These are not life and death problems; honestly, there have been no serious offenses and no big harm done. No need for apologies or heavy duty forgiveness.

The best way I can describe these situations is that they make me feel like someone is taking a giant piece of sandpaper and slowly, even somewhat gently, rubbing it over me. I'm irritated. I feel scratchy and annoyed and really fed up.

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Now here's where the dream comes in.


In my dream, I was talking to one of my sandpaper-y people. And sure enough, I was getting that scratchy, uncomfortable feeling that I have been suffering in real life. But in the dream, as I listened to this person, it slowly dawned on me that all the annoying and irritating words coming out of her mouth have also bounced around in my brain. Word for word. She was quoting my own thoughts, and in doing so, reminding me that I am no different from the people who annoy me.


Which means...I am annoying too.


Wow. Good solid slap across the face.


And when I woke up, I realized what I need to feel better. 

Grace. 

To me, grace is that tender quality of seeing the best in others and choosing to believe it, no matter what. It's that gentle, kind feeling that we all crave, that tells us that everything is going to be alright. 

But here is the slippery thing about grace: we all want it. But we can't get it. We can only give it.

In his fine book, Wishful Thinking, Frederick Buechner says it like this: 

Grace is something you can never get but can only be given. there's no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about you own birth.

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And this quote nails it too:

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. -Philo

I hunger for grace for my own life. 


And on this day before the movie premiere of The Hunger Games, I found myself thinking a lot about hunger. In this red hot book-turned-movie, hunger refers to the literal lack of food suffered by most citizens of the post-apocalyptic nation of Panem. Chosen teens, known as 'tributes' are selected from every food-deprived distitrict of the country, and forced to fight to the death in the Hunger Games. While this annual last-man-standing competition provides an extra measure of food for the victor's home district, it mostly serves to amuses the citizens of the capital and reminds everyone of who's in charge.  Our hero, young Katniss, boldly takes on the challenge and eventually satisfies her hunger for food as well as justice.

It's a really solid story. 

And while the word 'hunger' in the title may be a reference to our need for food, on this day, it reminded me over and over that in this life, we hunger for much more than food. 

We hunger for love.

We hunger for acceptance. 

We hunger, maybe most of all, for grace. 

But we can't reach out and take it. We can only offer it to others and trust that they will offer it back to us.


Amen.

On Apples, God and the Question of How Much Slices Change Things

"Hmm,but 0f what I kn0w between christian n islam is n0,we're n0t the same g0d, christian believe in 3 g0d n muslim is 0nly 1 allah/g0d.. S0, that's n0t the same kak diane:-)"

Well, now I was in a pickle, wasn't I. In the midst of a pleasant conversation with my Muslim friend, Spidey, about our shared love of the one true God/Allah, he had raised up the mysterious Christian concept of the Holy Trinity. 

This idea is central to Christian beliefs, but it's also notoriously difficult to grasp. It's challenging enough for adults to wrap their minds around the idea that God is three distinct persons in one, but I've also had the honor and bewildering problem of trying to explain this notion to children. After multiple goes and a lot of trial and error, I've hit upon the following metaphor which works about as well as anything. 

Imagine you have two red apples in front of you. They both look quite the same. 

Now imagine taking a knife and cutting one of those apples in half, from top to bottom. What you see now is still an apple, but it looks a bit different. Looking at this cut side of the apple, you can see the tiny edge of the red outer layer, and you can also see all the white crispy part. At the very center, you can see the seeds too.

Is this apple now three different things? No. It is one thing with three distinct parts.

Is it fundamentally different from an uncut apple? Nope - even though it's been cut in two, it's still an apple, just as it was before.

So. In simplest terms, Christians see God as a cut apple. Muslims see him as Allah, the uncut apple.

How much does one single slice change our God?

In my heart and in my mind, this is what I believe: an apple is an apple. Let's live in peace.

Of Father Abraham's Many Sons

Father Abraham had many sons

And many sons had Father Abraham
And I am one of them
And so are you
So let's all praise the Lord.


This cute little song has been rattling through my head lately. Coupled with a set of increasingly kooky body movements, it has captured the imagination of Christian Sunday School children for generations. Besides being a lot of crazy physical fun, it conveys a spiritual sense of "we're all in this together" that builds Christian brotherhood and sisterhood among baby believers. 


Which is good and proper.


But in truth, that song isn't just about Christians. 


Father Abraham's sons include the brotherhood and sisterhood of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. We are all Father Abraham's children. 

Sacrifice of Isaac by his Father Abraham. Yikes.

That innocent little song reminds us that God's plan is for us to live in peace.


Yes, I know there are differences between these three faiths. Some are small, some are huge and seemingly insurmountable differences.  And generally speaking, our respective cultures reinforce those mutually exclusive differences and admonish its followers to remember that everyone cannot be right.


I acknowledge and respect those differences. And only God knows the truth about His plan for His creation.  But I'm much more interested in what brings us together. 


As Jew, Muslim or Christian, we all love the one and only true God, who goes by many names but cares for each of us with a deep abiding love, and has a plan for our salvation.


In response to that love, we all express our faith and share our lives with other believers by: 

• gathering together
• praising God
• reading sacred texts
• encouraging each other 
• praying together
• offering gifts
• fasting for deepened spirituality
• caring for the poor
• building community together.

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All three faiths love the same God.  The God of Abraham.

All three faiths believe in one true God. 
All three faiths trust in this loving, wise, constant God to guide us and help us live our lives according to His wisdom.


These common bonds matter to me.  Although I practice my Christian faith with a full heart, and understand God's love for us through the image of the cross, I appreciate the fact that had I been born to a different family, in another part of the world, I might be keeping kosher or wearing hijab at this very moment.  Accepting other people's way of expressing faith in our shared God does not mean I compromise my own principles;  it means that I am trying to love as God does.


So I choose to love all of Abraham's children. 
And I am one of them. And so are you. So let's all praise the Lord.  



{It's with a certain sense of irony that I offer this video of the Father Abraham song being sung by United States Marines. I'm not making a statement about Christian domination, military control over religion, or American colonialism. I just think it's a really fun version of the song.}

Of Identity Theft, Patterns of Grammatical Mistakes, and Prayer

Twenty four hours ago, I wrote this post and told you about how I recently met a man from Uganda on Facebook. In light of the recent public discourse about Joseph Kony and his crimes against the Ugandan people, I found this an amazing bit of synchronicity, and asked my new friend's permission to write about him and use his photo. He told me without hesitation to go ahead and use whatever I needed.

An hour ago, I received what I expected to be another typically friendly message from this same person. However, he had a big surprise for me:

excuse me mom,am sorry i dont knw you and i dont know who really invited you but it wasnt me at all but i think its been my cousin brother i work with here,i have to first confirm from him becouse i have been sick for two weeks and he is the one who knows my password for both email and facebook. [am sorry am not intrested in the people i dont know plus your stories at all, i cant even allow you to post my picture or to use it in any way even if your paying me i dont need ,but i shouldnt blame you,i should blame my cousin and if i confirm its him,i will give you his "facebook names" you ask him why he did it to me.

please mom,i cant even dare talk of politics and yet my foto is here and am not intrested in it personally [i dont know you at all ,i thinkits a revenge from my cousin brother of the girlfriend]


mom just help me you delete me out from your programs

• • 
    

So I was the victim of a vengeful cousin's prank? Hmm. Okay, I suppose it is always a possiblity that an online contact pretends to be someone who they are not. It makes one feel a bit gullible and overly trusting (why yes, I will admit to having those tendencies) but it's not that big of a deal. Whoever this person really might be, I deleted his photo and name from yesterday's post and went on with my evening. 

But my mind kept drifting back to the situation. And questions, one after the other, popped into my brain:

• Isn't it a little odd for a grown man to share his Facebook and email password with his cousin? 
• And even if he did, wouldn't it occur to him to change the passwords after he cheated with the cousin's girlfriend?
• Who is so sick that they don't even check their Facebook or email for two whole weeks?
• If this person really wanted to severe all ties to me, wouldn't it be easier to just delete me as a friend, delete the pic I posted from his photo album, and possibly even change his Facebook name? Why would he waste his time talking to me?
• If you were the angry cousin who wanted to get even for the stolen girlfriend, would you sign on to the evildoer's Facebook, add random people, and then strike up very respectful and pleasant conversations with at least one of these new friends? Seems like an odd way to extract revenge.
• Could I really have been so blind as to miss the cues of deception throughout not one or two, but four lengthy and fairly deep conversations with this person? It's not like me to misread a person so drastically.

As I pondered these questions, I remembered something else. In our last chat, after I posted the blog with his photo and name, our conversation had turned to some of the deeper issues of Joseph Kony's crimes and my friend turned markedly reticent. He asked that we move our conversation over to email, for fear that the Ugandan government may be tracking his communications.

In our email chat, he asked me several times to prove my identity, so he could be sure that he was talking to me, and not someone pretending to be me. 

He also asked me how he could be sure I was not a spy for the Ugandan government.

Remembering his guarded demeanor and suspicions about true identities gave me chills. Now I was really beginning to wonder what was going on. 

So, little criminologist that I am, I compared the spelling and grammatical style of the most recent messages to those I supposedly received from the "cousin brother." And here is what I found:

• Both persons type in all lower case letters.
• Both persons frequently use parenthetical inserts, but always use [brackets] instead of the more conventional (parentheses).
• Both persons consistently misspell the word 'because' as 'becouse.'
• Both persons use two incorrect spacing patterns with commas, either skipping spaces both before and after the comma, such as "excuse me mom,am sorry i dont knw you" or inserting a space before the comma and skippping the space that belongs after the comma, such as " i dont need ,but i shouldnt blame you."

Interesting.


Of course, none of this really proves anything. I certainly may have been duped by a friendly but revengeful cousin. 

But the more I think about it, the more I believe that I met a person who is afraid of what an innocent friendship with a talkative American might look like to his corrupt and restrictive government; who fears what they might do to him or his family; who trusts no one to be who they say they are.

That makes me really sad. All I can do at this point is pray for him. 

If you'd like to pray as well, I'd appreciate it.

Of Ugandans, Malaysians and the Importance of Watering Your Flowers

Invisible Children

Does it seem a little odd that within an hour after viewing the KONY 2012 video, which opened my heart and mind to the agony of the Ugandan people, I met a new friend on Facebook who happened to be from....Uganda?

{What is KONY 2012? Long story short, it's a film and campaign by a U.S. NGO called Invisible Children that aims to make Ugandan terrorist Joseph Kony famous, not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice. Watch the 30 minute video here and read my blog post about it here.}

I don't have any other friends from Uganda. This man added me randomly a couple weeks ago. I added him back but we had never talked before. Since my Facebook wall was groaning under the weight of links, images and status updates about the KONY 2012 campaign, he began by asking me about my interest in Joseph Kony. When I explained how the video was going viral, and how my heart and mind had been opened to this tragedy, he seemed quite surprised and genuinely touched that people in America would care about people in Uganda.

Edit: Please refer to this post for an update on my Ugandan friend.

After our conversation ended, I fell deep into thought about the way Facebook has brought people from all over the world into my life, changing me and the way I see myself and the world. I thought, for the billionth time, about my Malaysian friends and how another chance meeting has taken my life down a path that I never dreamed of. And I wondered, as I often do, if there is a deeper purpose to my Malaysian connection,  or if this sort of thing is just a lovely serendipity of postmodern life.

This is Amy and Pjoe. They are from Malaysia and I met them on Facebook too. 

With my mind jumbled full of such thoughts, I decided to chill a bit by spending some time on Pinterest. Most evenings, I wind down by just randomly scrolling through feeds of interesting images, without any focused plan or goal in mind. But this time, within the first few minutes of my session, I suddenly felt an impulse to start a new board of all things floral. Although I love flowers in the garden, when it comes to design issues, I'm not really a 'floral' person. But for some reason, I was compelled, and in less than an hour's time, I had over 60 new pins of floral fabric, floral art, floral arrangements, floral cupcakes, floral furniture, floral clothing, floral DIY projects...you name it. Thoughts of my Ugandan and Malaysian friends were still floating through my head, but after filling my eyes with dozens of beautiful flower-y images, I felt calmed and grounded . I was ready to finish off the day by reading my favorite online daily devotion from the Upper Room.

Big Pop Floral I by Ricki Mountain

Verdant Acres by Anthropologie

Wallflowers from Mathews Family Happenings

Onesie dress from Barefoot in the Kitchen

Children's art from Multiples and More

So, does it seem weird to you that as I opened the devotion on my phone, the first word I saw was...  "Malaysia?" Backing up, I read the whole sentence:


"In East Malaysia, volunteers are currently working to develop an Iban language audio format of The Upper Room in an effort to make the devotional guide available for those who do not know how to read."


I felt a rush of wordless emotion that resurfaced all my ponderings about the connection I feel to this country, and the unformed idea that maybe, like these volunteers, I have something to contribute to the people there. Or maybe to the Ugandans. And maybe..no, quite possibly, they have important things to teach me in return.

And maybe I'm stretching here, but as I went on to read the main article of the devotion, the topic was...flowers. Yes, flowers. The author wrote about her patio full of flowers that droop and sag when unwatered, but grow full and lush when given a drink each day. She used this truth as a metaphor for our need for daily prayer, suggesting that our spirits needed the same daily 'watering' to thrive and grow.

Daily habits matter.

So let me recap:

• A Ugandan friend pops into my life just as the Kony story breaks wide open. 
• A report about volunteers in Malaysia echoes my thoughts about how I might be involved with that country.
• A sudden preoccupation with flowers is followed by a blog post that uses the image of flowers to underscore the need for daily prayer. 

Three striking coincidences drop into my life over the course of maybe three hours. Were these patterns the work of my overactive imagination, or maybe just the result of cosmic rolls of the dice?

Or was God once again using synchronicity to wake me up and show me something important.

I don't know. But he sure has got my attention.

Of Roots and Shadows

Roots by Elena Nazarro

If Lent is a time of returning to the roots of faith, and reminding ourselves of what we believe and why, then this post from my favorite faith blog gave me a perfect seasonal smack-upside-the-head. I'll link you to the original post here but it's so good that I want to put the words right in front of you:

JESUS RECEIVED, BLESSED, ate with, and even commended many of these sinners [tax collectors, the religiously unobservant, prostitutes, and other "obvious" sinners] against the “upstanding” of the day. He touched, healed, and raised many of the unclean. In sum, he was Light to those who dwelled in the shadows of societal isolation. He regarded those on society’s margins as persons and treated them as God’s own children. 

During Lent we may vow to identify and repent of the ways we have helped deepen the shadows — or just hidden our faces from those who dwell there. We may determine to search the dark corners of our families, workplaces, churches, and towns, in hopes of bringing light, revealing the faces of those easily ignored. We may seek ways to go to the margins to find some more of the ones he loved so much — and if we do, we may find Jesus there with them. 

If we make such courageous gestures we will be strengthened and guided by remembering the time and ways in which we ourselves, in dark and lonely times, were graciously sought and found by Jesus. His continual coming to us is our abiding invitation to be agents of his merciful seeking in the world. 

-Thomas R. Steagald
Shadows, Darkness, and Dawn

Love lives in shadows too. 

Here is what I take from this:

1. God loves the blatant sinners of this world just as much as anyone else. Maybe even more so.

2. He requires me not to reach out to them through pity or a smug sense of superiority that I am 'ministering" to them in their broken condition. He expects me to truly love and respect them as equals.

3. My efforts to be 'good' and 'holy' do not make me a better person in God's eyes. Quite the opposite. He wants me to stop drawing lines between 'good' and 'bad,' and simply love people.

4. I may not be a pimp or child molester, but I'm no angel myself. God comes to all sinners in their brokenness just as he comes to me in mine.

The roots of my faith remind me that I stand in the shadows too. My job, as always, is to love.