patmos

We were staying overnight in a cluster of homes – a dusun – in the remote interior of the island of Sumba in Eastern Indonesia.  I had met Pak Stefanus, the dusun leader, many years ago when he worked as a field officer with Yakkersum, so it was wonderful to see him again.  As he walked with ease and I slipped and slid the kilometre or so to visit the spring they were hoping to tap, I attempted to slow Pak Stefanus down by asking questions about life in the dusun.  He told me it’s pretty good; there’s lots he’s thankful for and he’s mostly happy.  But there’s also a hardness to it, and particularly of late.  If the weather is reasonable, his family will have enough through farming their paddy, growing veggies and foraging in the forest.  But it’s been a few years of enough crops failing to make things difficult, so his wife left the island and is working overseas as a house help to boost the family finances.  He and the kids miss her.

Add layers of no electricity or running water, one toilet between many houses, long distances over rough roads to hospitals or markets and a single daily meal of rice and spinach when the dry season comes around, and it’s susa, susa sekali – it’s hard, really hard.

 As Pak Stefanus shared openly about the challenges he faces, a series of questions arose in my mind, ranging from the practical (what programs might help in such a remote location?), to the theological (what’s God’s role in this? Can I pin the crop failures on him?) and the personal (what’s my responsibility to this brother of mine?).  It’s hard not to let sadness, guilt and anger expunge the hope that we were aiming for through the small-but-meaningful water project we were exploring.

This is par for the course in this line of work, and I’m learning to walk alongside the sadness rather than try to ignore it or let it drag me around by the nose.  But sometimes I worry that I’m getting used to the suffering, that callouses of familiarity are deadening my heart – and that scares me too.

Pak Stefanus: a kind and unpretentious man

We headed back to a simple-yet-delicious meal at Pak Stefanus’ house.  As we chatted into the night, to our right a group of men began playing a game of cards, kept primed by home-grown coffee and some small cakes we had brought to share.  They were having a blast, it was absolutely raucous, the fun they were having was unavoidably infectious. Though I had no idea of how the game worked, I found myself laughing out loud with them as well-worn cards were dramatically slapped down on the bamboo mat and met with howls of delight and horror. 

It is also inevitable to come across this reality in this line of work, but it’s taken me much, much longer to accept it.  The economically poor are often swimming in a sea of difficulties that would drown weaker folk like me, and I’ve often struggled to see much beyond that.  But these people also know how to play a rowdy game of cards.  Their dancing and singing is well-practiced.  They’re not afraid to rustle up a feast and celebrate even when the harvest is looking bleak.  Some would say that’s reckless, poor planning, but it feels more like an act of courageous necessity.

In a world that’s leaning towards black and white, I’m reminded through Pak Stefanus and his dusun that paradox, tensions, and ‘both-sides-now’ are not just possible, but incredibly important.  Avoiding the sadness and suffering of poverty is as dangerous as drowning in it. But equally dangerous is a naivety (and I’m not sure that’s what it is, but I hear it quite often) that the economically poor are quite happy in their suffering state. We want to avoid confusing joy in hard places with joy about hard places, for the former deserves our commendation and the latter would do well with a psychological assessment. We need honest eyes that try to see things as they really are – that remembers the hungry as we tuck into an extravagant meal, and is unafraid to get up and dance even as the darkness presses in.

So take time to feel a deep sadness for what’s broken and hurting – in our hearts, homes, community, country and world. Lance those callouses so they bleed again.  But do it while you’re playing cards with all the theatrics you can muster.  Eat cake in ways that delight and horrify the onlookers. 

It’s a special breed of people who can howl in both directions.

And it’s probably the poor who can best teach the rest of us.

This will be included in the upcoming Amos Magazine – if you’d like a free hardcopy mailed to you, let me know and we’ll get one to you!

Hope, and having hope are profoundly important for a well-lived life, but in faith-based development circles, we lean towards focusing on tasks and measurable outcomes; we don’t tend to think about whether our interventions are fostering hope or degenerating hope. We don’t design or evaluate for hope despite they way it is foundational to people’s well-being.  In this episode I have a chat with the wonderful Shirantha Perera about his Masters research looking at the impact that a project has had not just on people’s livelihoods and environment in Timor Leste, but how it has impacted their faith or spirituality, and their hope specifically. You can also access the podcast here.

As you might already, I’m a big fan of the work of Manna Gum, and not just because they included my article in the latest Manna Matters – I recommend reading the whole thing and signing up for future editions (better yet, take a day off and trawl through their back catalogue!). You can read the latest Manna Matters here.

And here’s a prayer I wrote for the latest Amos Magazine that’s just been printed – if you’d like a hard copy, let me know and I’ll get one sent to you (such are my sweeping powers).

A prayer for help in hospitality

Father, Son and Spirit

We’re so comfortable living in your creation and presence

That we hardly notice your generous hospitality

Or the space you carved out for us.

You have crafted so thoughtful a welcome

So warm and gentle an embrace

That at times we start thinking your world belongs to us, and is our handiwork.

Forgive us for those times and restore us:

Sit us back down at your bountiful table

Teach us again the basics of hospitality

And the artistry of your neighbourliness.

Drill us in the craft of making space for those

Who are told – one way or another – that they don’t belong

Make us masters of making room for them

So that the lie of not-belonging is simply untenable

Because they feel your open-armed welcome

Is genuine and present in us.

Make them no longer strangers or enemies or guests

But friends, dearly beloved friends.

We need your help

and rather a lot of it

So guide our stumbling feet

And embolden our trembling hearts.

Strap us in, cover us with grace

and make it loads and loads of fun

For the sake of Jesus

Amen

I’m keenly aware that the bad news columns of our proverbial newspapers are resorting to smaller fonts and shrinking margins to fit everything in these days, while the good news sections are looking increasingly sparse. But history – and I’d argue the Gospel – demonstrate that even when there’s much to lament about, there have always also been parallel pockets of defiant goodness and beauty (think Jesus’ work in the face of the Roman Empire). It’s important that we take the time to share these stories as a means of encouraging one another ‘towards love and good deeds’ of the type that plods on without falling into the traps of optimism, triumphalism or naivety. Here’s one such story of defiant goodness from one of Amos Australia’s partner orgs.

CONNECT is a community-based drug rehabilitation support ministry of a little church in a slum area of Phnom Phen where people have built their shanties over the top of an old cemetery.  CONNECT uses a creative, collaborative model and isn’t a rehab.  Instead, it has a small network of volunteers who live in the slum, running workshops there on the impacts of drug and alcohol abuse.  They often come into contact with people who are in addiction, and when they request it, CONNECT assists them in their recovery.  CONNECT covers the year-long cost of an addict living at the Teen Challenge rehab 40 minutes away – a cost that they and their families simply can’t afford.  CONNECT walks with them through their recovery by mentoring, visiting regularly and bringing family members for monthly visits.  Prior to the person exiting rehab, CONNECT assists in preparing the family and community for the person’s re-entering into regular life – it’s a big adjustment, and re-entry is a difficult period for everyone.  The church that CONNECT is supported by is primarily made up of people from the slum, and has a high percentage of ex-users as well – so it’s a supportive community where the men tend to feel at home.

We recently visited this good work, and met Rahul who was initially supported by CONNECT and now works for them.  He has a wife and young child, and splits his time between CONNECT, serving at the church and working for Justees, a fantastic social enterprise that offers employment pathways for men in recovery from addiction.  We also headed out of town to Teen Challenge and met Bona who was in his second or third week of rehab, supported by CONNECT.  Bona had a posture I’ve seen many times in people who are early in their recovery from addiction: eyes downcast, shoulders slumped, mostly avoiding eye contact and a short, nervous smile – perhaps struggling with shame and regret. But it’s a courageous person who takes the hard step of dealing with their addiction, and I tried to tell him as such.

A few days later we joined the Sunday morning church service and Rahul was preaching.  He was energetic and confident, with the air of someone who has found that beautiful place where their gifts line up with a need in the world.  I couldn’t help remembering Bona and reflecting on the odds that Rahul had a similar posture at the start of his recovery – the man we heard preaching that morning was a walking testimony to the support that CONNECT provides.  My prayer was that Bona’s recovery will be similarly restorative, and the high success rates of CONNECT-supported people give me hope.

CONNECT runs on a shoe-string budget.  None of the staff are paid and they share a tiny office with Justees.  All funding they receive goes towards covering rehab costs, supporting people in their recovery and ferrying people to and from Teen Challenge. Somewhere on the road I asked Phanna – who heads up CONNECT – how things were going.  ‘Great!’ he said, ‘We’ve managed to support more people than we normally could this past year.’  I asked him how they’re travelling financially.  He replied, “Well, we always have enough.  Last week we had $120 in the bank, and had to pay a bill, so now we have $80 [he laughs]. But we haven’t run out of money yet.”

Phanna wasn’t groveling.  He wasn’t asking for money.  He was smiling (he does that a lot) and stating some faith-filled facts that are grounded in a genuine trust in God’s provision for the work Phanna believes God has given him to do. The slum-dwellers face complex, almost insurmountable challenges that extend well beyond the substance abuse that CONNECT seeks to address. But CONNECT presses on, faithfully doing the work they’ve been called to, and handing over the rest for God to sort out. 

These small pockets of defiant good are worthy of all the support and encouragement we can provide.  And I’m hoping that as our partnership develops and deepens, some of Phanna’s faith, Rahul’s vocational sweet spot and Bona’s courage will rub off on me and help shape the other little org that I dearly love called Amos Australia.

This article will be published in the upcoming Amos Magazine. You can access previous digital versions here, or let us know here if you’d like to receive a free copy fresh off the printer in a few weeks!

We were walking as a family through one of the canyons of Purnululu – I feel like the word ‘profound’ captures but a gram of the place – and it seemed the right place for a dose of the peace of wild things that Wendell Berry so aptly captures in his poem of that title.  This particular canyon was the kind of place that if you tried to absorb and observe the grandeur, you’d simply never leave.  The canyon walls are made of some kind of sandstone embedded with river stones – those rocks that take so long to become smooth and rounded.  Small ferns and trees cling to ledges in the canyon walls, spiders cast their gentle webs across cracks, and the calls of tiny birds reverberate as they flit from tree to tree.  No camera can capture it and my descriptions are inadequate – you know the kinds of places – they can only be experienced.  Whatever your position on how these things came into being, a reasonable, common response is one of humbled amazement.

Presented with this deep beauty, I leaned in, ready to bathe for a while in the peace of wild things.

The challenge was that we were walking as a family, with four kids under the age of thirteen.  The eldest’s current obsession is cars, and he regaled me with how cool it would be to race something (cars, bikes, anything really, provided it was fast) through the narrow canyon.  The second – a newly minted twitcher – was giving a rather detailed run-through of a new bird seen the previous day.  We’d spotted it together, but she felt it best to retell the story to everyone who had been there with her, and in doing so, scare off any birds we might see in the canyon.  The third child wondered out loud and sought my expert opinion on what kind of machinery would be most suitable for digging future, similarly sized canyons – and how much dynamite did I think we would need?  The last child ached every ten steps or so for a lolly break and advocated quite loudly and regularly to that effect, but – to his credit – said he was willing to settle for a dried apricot should I be open to negotiation.

I love my kids – they really are wonderful people – but I may have loved them a little less at this point.  They were getting in the way of my peace of wild things, and I channeled a nameless someone who – at what could only have been similar, regular points in my own childhood – once declared: ‘Oh, won’t you just blow-up and bust!’

I settled for something like an angry: ‘Oh, won’t you all just grow up and quietly enjoy this place!’

In the minutes that followed, I was reminded of Jesus’ words that, ‘Unless you become like one of these children, you cannot enter the kingdom of God.’  I pondered that instruction with a generous dose of frustration and a pinch of anger as we continued to wander up the gorge.

But – not surprisingly – he’s right.  My kids (perhaps excepting the youngest at this point in the walk) were enjoying the canyon.  They just weren’t enjoying in the way that I wanted to enjoy it – turns out there’s more than one way to walk a canyon.  You can aim for some profound experience of peace, or you can dream about races, birds, machinery and lolly snakes.  Canyons can be places of serious contemplation.  But they’re also ripe for ridiculous and wild wanderings of the imagination.

So I attempted to enter into their ‘childish’ playfulness, and saw the canyon in a different – dare I say – equally important way.  Life doesn’t need to be – shouldn’t be – all serious contemplation.  We need times of recalling detailed beauty – remembering the plumage and colouring of the birds from yesterday.  It’s good and healthy to long for and enjoy treats or yummy food.  There should be space for adrenaline rushes – hurtling towards rock-faces or blowing them up.  Turns out that the kids weren’t the one with a problem: I was the one who needed to grow up to be more like them; imaginative, playful, wild.  I needed a piece of wild things, kid-style (with apologies to Mr. Berry).

Well, we got to the end of the canyon, and an unforced silence settled over us while we snacked on those much-longed-for apricots and drank in some of the beauty and grandeur that the canyon generously offered us. And – with a childlike wonder that I also need to learn – our youngest son interrupted the silence at some point with a quiet and unprompted, but fitting: “Thank-you Jesus.” 

We rode imaginary motorbikes back down the canyon stairs, jumped tumbling boulders that exploded under us and needed heavy machinery. We pretended that we had discovered a brand-new species of bird (keep an eye out for the lottian bergsmacus, it’s a quiet but sweet little bird), and made it home to a sumptuous meal of ten hundred thousand kilos of lolly snakes that don’t give you belly-aches. 

And I didn’t lose out on the peace of the wild things, for in amongst it all, I felt that too.

This is the fourth podcast I’ve recorded with Steve Bradbury, and in this episode, Steve shares stories from his final years in his role as Director of TEAR Australia (now Tearfund Australia). He shares about his work in bringing international faith-based development organisations together, how and when he came to the decision to leave TEAR, and shares a bit about what he felt were the hallmarks of faith-integrated development as he exited TEAR.

You can listen to episode 1 here, episode 2 here or episode 3 here or by scrolling down to earlier posts. You can also listen to all of the episodes here.

Dave had told me a few times in the preceding weeks that he couldn’t find the flight I had booked, and so he’d bought a ticket with the same airline leaving a few hours earlier.  I put it down to one of the great mysteries of travel arrangements and used the extra few hours to visit the gents at Justees – a social enterprise that provides employment and mentoring for at-risk youth and folks in recovery from addiction in one of the slum areas of Phnom Penh.  Great guys, great program.

Turns out my airline had cancelled the flight and shifted me to an earlier time – the flight Dave was on. They had told me a month or so earlier, but I had forgotten to print the updated ticket.  With no more flights available that night, I re-booked for the morning, and arranged a six-hour taxi ride for the next day – the change of flights meant I would miss my connecting flight to the north of Thailand.  It was a beautiful drive, particularly the last hour or so as we climbed into the mountainous areas.  I arrived five hours later than planned and had a quick chat with my friend before walking a short way up the hill to the Bible College for a Christmas service. They had held off starting for a few hours until I arrived. I’m not sure we’d be that hospitable back home in Freo.

We didn’t stay in that place for long – a whole 72 hours or so, and 72 hours is too short a time to draw any firm conclusions.  But we heard a lot of stories about the challenges and difficult decisions Karen people fleeing conflict in Myanmar have to make.  They have the choice of living in the refugee camps in Thailand and hope for resettlement (5, 10 years? never?) or live a risky but freer existence outside the refugee camp with no rights and an ever-present threat of arrest or trumped up fines.  The contrast between the choices available to me and my friend couldn’t be more stark.  He shared stories about the tenuous existence his people have wedged between the ever-present danger in Myanmar and living as undocumented migrants in Thailand.  I found myself angry, unsettled and ashamed that Australia has largely forgotten and passed over a terrible injustice so close to home.  The folks I met nodded quietly when I apologised for this – they’re keenly aware of this reality and feel that the world has forgotten their plight.

Yet the hard stories I heard were peppered with profoundly beautiful moments.  A sunset over the Myanmar mountain range just across the border.  The singing – I am on the spectrum of Christmas grinchs, but the voices of the Bible College students transformed those Christmas carols from something I detest to wanting more.  We enjoyed a delicious Thai barbeque picnic under the stars while the students sang and danced – hilarious moves by one of the more serious faculty will remain etched in all our minds.  We were serenaded the following night at the front door by a dozen young people armed with a guitar and beautiful harmonies.  I may have even worn a Christmas hat at one point.

As we boarded the flight home I got thinking about the contrast between hard stories and profound beauty we’d experienced.  I have trouble reconciling them in my mind, but my sense wasn’t that the singing and fun were some sort of glossing over the difficult.  It didn’t feel like they were trying to shout down the difficulties or escape for a while – at least it didn’t seem that way.  I’ve heard somewhere that 72 hours is never enough time to draw hard conclusions. But it felt different.  Like they could somehow weep and dance at the same time, feel oppressed or overwhelmed and sing up-lifting songs at the top of their lungs. They could look their situation in the eye while telling jokes and belly-laughing.

I tend to gravitate towards one or the other. I drown in cynicism or seek out chocolate and pop music in hopes of being bouyed by sugar rushes and uplifting chord progressions.  These folks seemed able to stand a middle ground and hold beauty and the beast at the same time. 

I’d like to develop that ability.

p.s. I’ve not shared my friend’s name or the specific location we visited for his safety.

This is the third podcast I’ve recorded with Steve Bradbury, and in this episode, Steve shares more stories from about 5 years into his role with Tear Australia (now Tearfund Australia), with particular attention to the creative ways that Tear engaged with its supporters and how that was received.

You can listen to episode 1 here, or episode 2 here or by scrolling down to earlier posts. You can also listen to all of the episodes here.