stonecriesout

Reflections & prayers on my mother's 65th birthday

It's October 13th, what would have been my mom's 65th birthday.  No more or less significant than any other year I guess, and October 13th doesn't seem to strike as much of a chord as February 19th (in about four months, it will mark the 15th year past her death), but hey, here I am.

Lately I have seen that denying myself time for reflection and prayer has disconnected me from my present surroundings, and the neglect for reflecting & praying on my past has disconnected me from it, also.  I suppose it's my instinct now, to protect myself from what the past might want to do with me now, but we all know pushing it aside will not make it go away.

I don't think of my mom often, or at least I don't think I do.  She's not much more than a distant memory to me now, a figure in my mind that is probably more so based on speculation and imagination than experience.  I didn't really know her then, and I don't really know her now.
I'm beyond wanting to judge her now, not concerned with what kind of person she was or if she was a good mother.  I'm bored with learning about her and analyzing the evidence.  She died, I didn't really know her, and I'm still alive.  So what else do I really need to investigate?

The part that does interest me is how people respond to learning that I grew up without her.  Some seem to pity me, which I guess I appreciate, but I also kind of despise it.  Some seem to want to joke about it, which actually makes me pity them.  Some are just sad for me, which is not totally necessary, but it's probably the most loving thing.
I think some people throw their "sons who grow up without mothers exhibit particular tendencies, and I recognize A, B, and C of those in you" on me, which just makes me want to throw up on their face.  Get over yourself already.

Occasionally I'll notice things in my life and say, "I wonder if mom were still alive if I would do that/be like that."  But I'll never get past wondering.  I'm not going to define myself based on imaginary situations.  What good does it do to wonder about such things?  Can I, by wondering, change my past or my present?  Bah, what a waste of time.

The way that I think I'm most influenced by my mom's life & death is in dating/romantic relationships (surprised?).  If a son's relationship with his mother "trains" him how to have relationships with women, then the correlation in my life is clear as day.
When anybody asks me what my "type" is, I tend to jokingly respond, "I like girls who don't want to have a boyfriend."  That's the simple, funny deflection, that is somewhat honest, but mostly serves to end the conversation I don't totally feel like having.
The longer explanation is that I see a pattern in past relationships, or at least in past interests of mine, of girls who may or may not be confident that she wants to date (not just me, but anyone), who receives love freely, but doesn't know how to reciprocate.  Girls who I feel I constantly need to be pursuing, because I don't get much indication back that the love is mutual.  Truth is, they probably do/have show(n) it, but for whatever reason I haven't recognized it.  Because I didn't deeply connect with my mom, I naturally fall in to relationships where the connection isn't so deep, and I don't know how to get it there.
I've also only dated girls who haven't had a boyfriend before (not as a rule, obviously), but I'm not especially sure how that ties in.  I guess my jealousy and insecurity would overcome my desire if I saw (in my perception) an even smaller window to the whole of my interest's heart.
As I'm living in the consequences of not feeling adequately loved by my mother, perhaps "low-risk, low-reward" is the name of the adventure for me.

The funny flip-side to this weirdness is my friendships.  Ever since seventh grade, almost all of my best friends and people I have spent my time with have been girls.  Up until sixth grade (the year my mom died), it was guys.  What's up with that?  Do I just miss being around women?
What I do know is that I could always find a circle of girls I felt safe and comfortable with, not as insecure as around guys or other circles of girls.  Sure, I've made close and lasting guy friends, but the vast majority are female.  In some ways you could say they've served as "mother" for me: protecting me, comforting me, expressing disappointment in my failures, showing support for my successes--in short, loving me.
I don't really think much about that whole part, just noticing.

I guess my prayer to go forward is for healthy instincts in relationships.  I pray that God would heal what lingers that is destructive.  For sure the lingering distrust of the institution of family, born out of response to the shoddy one my parents had going.  I pray that God would just teach me through current, old, and new relationships of all kinds how to better love and trust people.  I pray for peace with my life.  For freedom from insecurity and superficiality.  That God would show mercy on me by bringing people in to my life to show me how to love like I ought to.  That I'd see this and God would change my heart and I could respond by loving him and the people around me completely.  That as he changes me, I could see the way he is teaching me, growing me, and preparing me for what is next, and that I could bear good news of what I've seen done in my life.  I've already seen so much of this, and thankful doesn't even touch the surface of how I feel.  I'll just keep praying for a little more mercy and a little more love every day.

The Merry-Go-Round

Well people, it's been a while.  I've been home from tour for just over a month, and I feel like there is an overwhelming burden of story to tell, and I've only a feeble capacity to tell it.  I think what I'll do is just start rambling on and on and see where it takes me.

Understandably, most people are insatiably curious about my reflections on the tour.  The cynical part of me thinks that people just want me to give a 100% positive, packaged, "here's what I learned, and I'm so happy" response, even if it's insincere, but as we all know, we have to give people more credit than that.  I've been pretty dodgy with my answers, and the reason for that is that I don't really know what the heck just happened.  I'm pretty culture-shocked and feel as though I just jumped off a merry-go-round and am having to re-learn how to walk.

But hey, I'll give it a shot.

The tour itself ended in a way I can't describe.  Satisfying?  I guess.  Climactic?  Not really.  Emotional?  Only slightly.  I feel like I should miss the kids more than I do.  Sometimes I do, but only briefly, and only a couple of them.  The way we ended knowing each other was strange.  There was no way around it--we detached from each other, and we didn't even have to try to.  The kids were checked out for weeks before they actually departed, and I was hanging by threads.  I surely bonded with them, and made an effort to have a special relationship with each of them as individuals.  And of course it was natural with some and damn near impossible with others, but I do feel that each of them knew I loved them and as ill-prepared as I was to be their uncle, I gave it my best shot.
Of course, there was far more to the tour and the job and the year than just knowing the kids and being their uncle.  There was so much that they would never know about, so much that my staff will never know about, so much that only I will ever know about.  I realized yesterday that there is absolutely nobody in this world who can understand on a meaningful level what the last year was like for me.  Not former tour leaders--they had different staff, different children, and performed at 150 different places and are living different lives.  Not Sherae or other staff members, as they had different responsibilities, and this last year means something different to them than it does to me.  Not anyone in my office, because they have not endured the rigors of the tour, so their understanding is formed out of stories told to them and speculation.  Try as anyone might with only the best and most pure intentions, nobody can understand what last year was like for me.  And I have accepted that, as self-pitying as it may seem, and as lonely a place as it is.  So forgive me if I don't try to explain to you what's going on with me.  Forgive me if I just ramble.  It's all I've got.

I don't miss the job.  Make no mistake: it's hard.  I gave it my best, and I blew it sometimes.  All that failure compounded on me as the months went on and was really difficult to swallow.  I had to accept that I wasn't going to be able to do everything I wanted to do and was expected to do, and I had to choose which things to fail at.  I hate(d) that.  So I had to make choices that negatively affected the fewest people, or at least only negatively affected the people that were on tour with me.  Sometimes I had to make choices that pissed off my Ugandan staff in order to please the American hosts we had.  Sometimes I had to throw the 14 of us under the bus (figuratively) to ensure that our organization didn't let strangers down.  Sometimes I had to fight my bosses in the office, if only to delay having to cause more discomfort for the people I was responsible for on tour.  Sometimes I just had to eat shit, and sometimes I didn't do it with any kind of grace at all.  Sometimes I blatantly failed to do my job.  And failure is not something I am comfortable with or easily accept.  But it happened, it was a part of the job, and it's something I'm still dealing with.

The best part of the job and the worst part of the job are the same: the people we met.  Just like any other group of people brought from any context or community, there are probably about 10% you naturally hit it off with, 10% you can't stand, and the rest are just around.  The 10% groups are what I remember the most about the tour.  10% inspired me to live life better, 10% made me question everything.  10% gave me life & spirit to carry on with the mission, 10% drained the life out of me.  Is this a surprise?  It's the same with any job, I just happened to meet thousands of people in my job.

Now that I'm back, I think about the tour as a whole, and I reminisce positively about some of the wonderful things that happened.  I think about how I was shown that God is indeed still here, still good, still worth fighting for.  His is still a good providence, a good moral will, and also still an eternally-confusing idea.  I saw that we don't give people enough credit.  That most everyone has a deep hunger to be generous, to better the world, and to love.  Most everyone is not as vapid and vain as we think they are.  That people are more complex than any of us will ever understand, and that all my ideas about how people are or who people seem to be are almost all surely loaded with crap and nonsense.  I really need to give that up, as we all do, but of course...thinking that way is how we're wired, and I doubt any of us even on our best days can really do that.  But we'll keep trying.

I recently drove through some of the areas of the state that the tour was on in the beginning, and I was surprisingly filled with warmth and comfort.  I didn't know what to expect--but I really liked it.  It made me want to drive the tour again, just by myself, and go see everyone we had met (well, maybe not everyone).  Of course I won't, but it was nice to have that feeling.  Like it was no accident I went on tour.

I'll keep posting as I keep re-learning how to walk.  The merry-go-round ride is over, that's all I know for sure.  Thanks for checking in, and stay tuned.

Prayer?

Prayer is weird.  Right?

Every faith (or even professed lack of faith) includes some kind of element of prayer in theory and in practice.  And yet... how many of us really have a conscious understanding of what prayer is, how we practice it, and have a sense of it's significance?  Less than we'd hope, I think.

Why do we pray?  Because we have an unfulfilled desire to commune with God, like we are unwilling to be mere spectators in sovereignty?  I think of sports fans (of which I am one), and how we find new ways to commune with the game, it's players, it's teams, and it's happenings--Fantasy Sports, Brackets, rocking apparel, to name a few.  It isn't enough for us to sit, watch, enjoy the thrill of the game, find joy in the game, and sorrow in unfulfilled expectations.  Is this a similar model for our drive to pray?

Or is it so much more, as many people would claim?  Many inspiring men & women in history are said to have prayed for hours a day.  Like breathing--if they didn't, they'd cease to be alive.  How does that work?  I've seen power in prayer.  I've been both the pray-er and the prayed-for, and been shocked by the power of those experiences.  When confronted with this, we have no choice but to turn back to the God we believe in, right?

Well, I have a short memory.  And even though I've been devastated by the power of prayer, I still spend far more time wondering about why and how to pray than actually praying.  As a Christian, I wonder when I hear fellow Christians pray to God, pray to Jesus, and pray to the Spirit.  What's going on there?  Being a Christian, like prayer, is weird.
 
 Seems to me that most of the Christians I've encountered have some distinct "prayer styles."  Humor my indulgence, if you have a few minutes.

1.) Prayers of Petition aka "Letters to Santa"
 

  
- These are most often the prayers I hear from others.  A brief, scripted Thanks is offered first, and then a lace-and-doily wishlist--prayers for new jobs, financial help, prayers for plans to be fulfilled, prayers for blessings (the most ambiguously-used word in prayer) for loved ones, and prayers for "God's will."  The last petition is ironic, because the entirety of the earlier prayers were asking for God to carry out our wills.
** My thoughts when hearing these prayers are all over the place.  Do we really think that bringing these wishlists to God, who we claim to believe to be sovereign, Creator of All, is the best offering in prayer we can bring?  If we do not think that the things we prayed for (asked for) were delivered, does that mean God was unfaithful?  Were those prayers unanswered?  Is there such thing as an unanswered prayer?  Why are these prayers and the following events the gauge by which to determine whether a prayer was answered?

2.) Prayers of Healing aka "Lucy's Narnia Potion"

 
- These prayers are tied to the Letters to Santa.  They usually come about when someone has been injured, or is undergoing surgery, or has fallen ill, or has been diagnosed with some major disease.
Now, I don't want to discount the power of healing prayer--I believe whole-heartedly that I have seen healing come through this with my own eyes!  I guess what I wonder about here is what we specifically pray for.  Healing?  Speedy recoveries?  Favorable test results?  For the Lord to guide the hands of surgeons?  For actual warfare against cancerous or diseased cells?
** Are we honestly open to God's sovereignty over our health, or are we so wrapped up in the idea that God wants us all to be healthy all the time that we expect a drop of Lucy's potion upon receipt of our prayers of healing?  Is it even wrong or misguided to believe that?
- On the one hand, we claim to believe that we are at peace because "God is in control," but then we pray for our wills to be done.  Health is the primary subject of these wishlist/healing prayers, and I wonder why.  If we are healthy, are we "more blessed" than someone who has cancer?  Have we some sort of favor over them?
** This is fresh on my mind, because a friend of mine has recently discovered she has breast cancer.  She's 26 years old.  Can anyone honestly believe that she has any less favor or has any less faith than the rest of us, who are not living with cancer in our bodies?  Has anyone read John 9 recently?

3.) Prayers of Protection aka "Suit of Armor"

- As we travel, we are often prayed for by the pastors or other hosts.  This is basically a prayer for safe travel, for safe play, for all-around safety.  Sometimes we even hear the borderline-ridiculous "hedge of protection" prayer, which always makes me bury my snickering face in my chest.  What is a hedge of protection?  Why not a moat of lions on trampolines?  <regards: Jonathan Acuff>
** I don't have any beef about these prayers.  Why wouldn't we pray against unforeseen accidents?  But then again... without those prayers, would we be any less safe?

There are many more prayers that we hear that I think are quite powerful and authentic, and bring true worship to God.  I kind of hate that I'm always criticizing the way people worship, but I hope that it will process and morph in to some Socratic questioning, and in to more pure offering and service.

I'm processing now what I've seen in prayer that has really inspired me, and maybe I'll follow this rambling post with one that outlines some of those.

Most importantly, though: What do YOU think????
I want to know what YOU think about prayer, and what I've just written about prayer.  Why do YOU pray?  How do YOU pray?  Is it meaningful?  How do you think GOD receives your offerings in prayer?

Go nuts.  I'm really curious.

Church, Race, and the feeling of Home?

As most of you who know me can testify, faith & race are two things that often dominate my analysis of the world around me and influence the way the I live my life.  I think that religion, race, and gender are the 3 most provocative words in American culture (and perhaps world history), with things like homosexuality, abortion, and politics all falling under the umbrellas cast by RRG.

This tour has put me in a unique situation regarding all three facets of RRG.  I represent a Christian ministry, I am guiding 12 Ugandans and 1 mixed-race American woman, and myself a Korean-born American through many kinds of churches and Christian communities.  I am the only male in leadership on staff, and I am the leader for the 3 women with me.
As you can imagine, most of the communities we have seen have been pre-dominantly white communities.  We have seen a few pre-dominantly black churches, and some churches have had a high hispanic population.  And as one who usually seeks out the connectivity of cultures beyond man-made racial divisions of the mind, I have been surprised to see some almost universal cultural differences.  I still hold strong to my idea that our complexes around race are 49% illusion, 49% delusion, 1% evolutionary, and 1% pigmentation.  Most of it has little to do with the latter 2% I mentioned, though.

The white communities (churches & homes) we enter are typically very controlled environments.  The men control the church environments, and the women control the home environments.  Everything has a place, a time, a structure, and deviating from these things is akin in their minds to sinfulness.  There seems to be a belief or mental stronghold that church is a gift from God, but also should have the place in our lives as a necessary inconvenience.  I used to think that people came together to worship the church instead of God, but I don't see that as much.  What I have tended to see is that generous, well-meaning people come together at church because they believe it is just the right thing to do.  Most speak wearily of the commitments they made to the church or their fellow members.  But accountability and timeliness are the pinnacles of Christian behavior in these controlled environments, and to feel at home at these churches, much is expected of you.  Are you leading a small group?  Are you volunteering with the worship service?  If not, you are merely a regular visitor.  This sense probably drives the strong feeling of obligation & duty in the members of the church.  It often feels like more like a workplace than a place of worship.  There is a similar hierarchy to many businesses in place: Male Leader, 2 Male Sub-leaders, a 3rd-tier of mixed-gender leaders (though the women are probably at their ceiling in this hierarchy), and finally, a bottom-level of women in clerical work and male volunteers.
The home is a different story, even in the homes of the men in top leadership positions at the church.  The women clearly control the environment, and the men do dutifully submit (this is not true in every case, but nearly all).  Rarely does a male do household work: preparing meals, cleaning common areas, managing the family's logistics.  The woman in the home makes the decisions for the schedule of the home, the discipline of the children, and the acommodations for the guest.  Most often, the woman in the home is the first one awake and the last one to sleep.  The male often falls asleep watching TV on the couch while the woman is putting the kids to bed and preparing the home for the following day.
The children though, (to borrow from a term from Shelley's In Defense of Poetry) are the "unacknowledged legislators" of the household (and, as I assume, the family).  I forget who it was who quipped that the most impressive thing they found about America was how well parents obey their children.  This is almost always a clear and accurate description of the family dynamic in the homes in these communities.  The parents do not have an authority over their children--even the youngest of children view their parents as powerless, and thus do not respond to their parents' begging for proper behavior.  So the paradox then, would be that the home is a very controlled environment, but the children are constantly operating outside of that control.
Amid both the churches and the homes, there seems to generally be an acceptable level of public disrespect and gentle back-biting among all members of the communities.  Individuals openly mock and diminish each other to me (a complete stranger) and do not defend nor build each other's dignity.  The mutual respect between members often seems mere formality, an instrument of containment rather than a genuine appreciation.  Married couples we see often make sarcastic or even snide remarks about each other, both behind their backs and in their faces.  I get the sense that many individuals are embarassed of their spouse.

These of course are not universal descriptive truths about the churches and homes in white communities, but they are prevalent in nearly all of these communities I have entered, at least to some degree.

In the black communities we have seen, the structure and tenets of the group are quite different.  Members of the white community that I have described may say that the black communities have less structure, but indeed I find that it is just a different structure.  I promise you, the absence of structure is an illusion and is in fact a veil for what actually stands.

The black churches we have seen do have what looks like a male-supremacist hierarchy as well, but I would contend that the women in leadership in the church actually hold more influence and respect than their white church counterparts.  The wives of pastors are known as "First Lady," and are just as actively involved in the goings-on and counsel of the church body as their husbands.  They are greeted with a reverence that in white churches are reserved for only the most cherished of members, usually clergymen.
While a male may hold the highest leadership position in the church, and male deacons may also have privileges that female members do not, the women clearly hold their place in the facilitation and care of the church.  The tiers of leadership just below the pastor are often filled exclusively by women, and they dictate the activities, procedures, and counsel.  There is often a less linear protocol to activities than white churches, but this allows freedom for relationship in the place of time spent following arbitrary protocols.  Altogether, black churches generally give me a sense of the highest value of communing together is joyful relation, rather than proper worship.
Black church has a different relationship to black Americans as white church does to white Americans.  Learning about the relationship between black Americans and black church can illuminate greatly why this structure is in place.
The black home is clearly a shared-authority structure.  The mother may be the more outgoing and relational of the two in the home, but the male is more apt to share in housework, discipline of the children, and reinforcing the authority of the parental units.  The children in the black homes tend to be more freely sharing of their space, their belongings, and their time.  They also respond more immediately to the beckoning of their parents, and seem to have a higher sense of respect for their fathers.
Fathers in the black homes that I have seen seem to speak more in the sense of "to" their children and opposed to "at" their children.  They are less concerned with impressing their children, wife, and guests than they are making everyone feel valued and strengthened by their relationship with him.
The children in the black communities do not dictate to the parents, they respond with obedience.  They by no means live under some sort of martial law, but their parents do not beg their children for obedience--they command it.

As you can probably gather from how I've reported these findings, I favor what I've seen in the black communities.  It seems that in many cases, worship and relationship are lost in white church--and then, if not worship and relationship, why come together for church at all?  And granted, just because I don't identify personally with the forms of worship & relationship that the white churches I've seen foster, doesn't mean they aren't filled with reality and truth for those who seek them there.
I appreciated being in the black churches where I felt as though I was at home and valued because everyone around me had the sense that every human soul is created and loved by God.  And that being the case, every body is worthy of respect and joyful admiration, without filter or restraint.  I really appreciate that kind of environment.
And in the homes, I appreciate that even though the black homes might be just as controlled an environment as the white homes, this control is built on earned respect and unconditional love.  The control in the white homes may very well be built on those same things, but for whatever reason, the parents often do not seem to have the control of the environment that they desire.

My hope for my future of being a member of a church, a home, and a community, is that worship & relationship, love & respect would be the cornerstones.  Unfiltered and generous.

I've just written a long, blabbering run of words that may seem ridiculous or asinine or immaturely generalistic to some of you, but I'm just thinking out loud here.  Being that I have been in the homes of about 60 families now (granted, for only an average of 3 days each), I feel as though I have at least some frame of reference from which to write.

I hope that all you white folks reading out there don't take any offense to this.  I didn't write this to cast aspersions on white churches and white families--please do not stand in petty defense of your race as a whole.  If you feel defensive about the observations I've made that I see as problematic, then the best way to respond would be to rise above those behaviors.

Expel this from your consideration if you like, but let me know your thoughts, if you have any.  What a journey I'm on!  I'm loving it.

Lost in translation?

Today I noticed that the two Ugandan staff members on tour were carrying & using very old and ragged bibles.  The bindings were broken, pages were loose, and they just looked cheap to begin with.  As I left to run errands today, I looked for a bookstore to purchase new bibles for the two Ugandan gals.

I came across an Evangelical Bookstore in San Diego, and went in to find some bibles.  The 10 children with us were all given bibles from a church in September, using the NIV translation, so I figured I'd get the gals NIV also.  It would be easier then to lead the children in bible readings if they had the same translation.

As I was perousing the NIV section of bibles, an older gentleman who worked at the store came to me and suggested I look at the ESV section of bibles.  I said, "Thank you" and carried on with my business.  He continued to promote the ESV bible to me, telling me not only that "it's a better translation," but that I "really should get the ESV."  He even went so far as to give me his opinion as to why the NIV translation was untrustworthy.  I said "Thank you, but I'm fine here," in an attempt to get him to leave me alone.

I very nearly just walked out of the store without purchasing anything.  Instead I turned to Sherae and said, "Don't tell me which bible to read.  They think they're the only Christians and everyone else is hellbound."  That reaction was probably a little over-the-top (2 wrongs = 1 right?), but I still am bothered by this gentleman's words long after walking out of his store.  It's just another case of feeling more scrutinized and condescended to by christians than I do by people who aren't christians.  It's a shame that we couldn't get through one bible purchase without having someone condescend to me for some arbitrary reason in the name of God.  If anyone wants a clear example of taking God's name in vain, it is behavior like this.  I purchased the bibles for the gals (with copies of Going Rogue staring at me at the POS register), and walked out of the store as quickly as possible.

Do we really need to concern ourselves with these arbitrary details?  Do we really need to condescend to others (christians or otherwise)?

I guess then you could ask, "Do you really need to use your blog to vent about condescending christians?"  And the answer would be, "No, I don't.  I'll end now."