more than your cup of Joe

So, I thought I’d get myself to a strong cup of Joe this morning after last night’s wrestling match with God. I stopped in at the local Caribou for the small dark roast. I think I’ll need it today. However, my sleepy stupor got more than it bargained for. I noticed the one barista’s long white and black falls and I thought, “When did
Caribou let its workers go Goth?” Then I saw the little old lady barista beside her and then remembered, “Oh, it’s Halloween!” I could barely restrain myself from giggling as the little old lady took my order, then handed me my coffee with the old lady, shaky hand tremors. She had put on the whole nine yards: granny shoes, a granny purse with beaded handles, plastic bead necklace in gaudy colors, white hair protruding from under a night cap, and the most outdated outfit you could find. I wonder if she’ll have to drop the shaky hands, duck waddle, granny act when the line at the cash register gets too long.

I waited till I got back to my car before I let out a belly laugh.

By the way wrestling matches with God are good things. If you don’t have them. I do highly recommend them. Life shines brighter if you have them. Life gets put into perspective. Take for example our friend Jacob, son of Issac. He wrestled with God all night one night. The next day he went out to meet his estranged brother. He organized his servants, wives, children and cattle in such a way to appease his brother but also so they had the best chances at surviving a battle. He expected to be killed by his own brother. In the natural course of things, that would likely have happened. But Jacob wrestled with God the night before. What was the wrestling match all about?

squash soup

Sauté:
1-2 Onions
Garlic
2 hot banana peppers
Olive oil

Add flour to sauted veggies till oil is dried up.


Add water and bring to a boil till the following veggies are just soft.

2 cut up, pealed and softened squash
Cinnamon
Orange juice
Zest of orange
Celery
Vegetable seasoning
Soy sauce
Hot pepper to taste

the anguish of the Christ

He came unto his own and his own received him not. He was rejected. He was despised. They threw him out of the temple. Yet his words were gold. They were salvation itself. They were the words of the wisdom of the ages.

He was confined to the vestiges of encumbered humanity. He emptied himself of who he was, pouring out his majesty into the likeness of us. He took the seat of infants in the corridors of our planet. He was subjected to the constraints of existence among us. He was marginalized. He was infantized. We did not see him for who he really was.

He inflicted upon himself the pain of our existence. His hands and arms bore the deep wounds of our grief. His words of love to us, he carved, in the wounds on his own body. He sacrificed himself. He continues to bear our pain.

Rise up oh, Savior of the world! Let your kingdom come. Let your will be done. Throw off the bondages of our vestige. Be our Christ. Be our hope. Recreate your creation. Rise above our rejection of you. Rise above our human infancy. By your wounds we are healed. Reign in your glory. Stand on the stage of our hearts. Speak your words of truth into our souls. May we suffer with you the pain of all humanity. My we return to infancy with you, so that we can grow again into your new kingdom, which shall have no end.

the banquet feast revealed

The church of Christ is like those who came to a banquet feast. In reverence and all orderliness they sat down to dine. The feasting hall was beautifully decorated and the candle light set the mood. Conversation was pleasant and light as everyone waited to be served. The evening wore on and on and the banqueters continued to wait patiently.

Except for one banqueter who couldn’t sit still and insisted on sitting on her heals. She was abrupt and rude, asking when the food would be served. The banqueters responded with an embarrassed silence. “Perhaps she will tire of asking if we ignore her,” they thought to themselves. Yet the rude one persisted, asking again, “Aren’t we going to eat?” Finally she went to help herself to the feast in the raw. She handed the food she had gathered, to the one who could cook it and make it into sustainable sustenance.

Yet despite her rudeness, this banqueter was the only one who ate and she ate heartily. The others starved and did so silently.

rejoice with me

Just a bit of news to rejoice about. Peacefullady, who frequents my blog, has given birth to a beautiful son, Issac. He was born yesterday. Photos are on her Zanga site.

it matters not how it is revealed...

If you are new here at parables or even if you are an old reader that has been following for quite some time, you might find the things I connect a bit odd. However, my friends will tell you that I follow the mystery and I sit and wonder and ponder a lot.

Reveal is a survey that is out there. It reveals some things many people have known for quite some time. But more importantly it reveals some things about the modern evangelical church to people who hear it best through systems and measures. Yet there is this story I can tell that says the same thing. I call it the parable of the banquet and you may read it below. You may also watch the explanation of the survey results here. Choose your form of revelation.

the banquet

I was seated at a table at the banquet. Again, I was dilly-dallying around in my chair like a kid. The lights were low. There was candlelight and everything was richly decorated and beautiful. Conversation was at a low hum while everyone was waiting for the food. The food was in the next room: buffet style. We waited and waited…then we waited some more! I grew tired of the waiting and asked my dinner companions when we were going to eat. Nobody responded. They simply continued to wait. Finally, I grew tired of waiting and got up to help myself to the buffet. I was handed a plastic bag with which to gather my food. The food was artistically arranged but it was all in the raw: onions pulled up by the stalks and laid on the table, potatoes with dirt still on them, celery with root and stalk. I was to gather my food then give it to the cook so he could cook it.

This is from an earlier post. I thought it appropriate to repost it.

the happy bride's anguish

I was at a gathering of sorts—sort of a cross between an academic conference and a church gathering. Noise and people were everywhere. They were milling about in the large lecture hall of an academic building. There were 2 or 3 main speakers or guest presenters but I wasn’t much able to hear them on account of the noise and the number of people milling about and talking.

Outside this hub room, I came into what seemed to be a hallway. It also was busy with people passing through. I saw an old friend. She was restrained in a highchair for toddlers. I went over to greet her and noticed in horror that she had carved up her arms with a heavy pocket knife. There were wounds everywhere. It was as if she had carved words/messages into her arms. Some had scabbed over and others were open deep cuts and yet oozing. “What are you doing?” I cried in horror as I tried to cover her arms with my hands in a gesture of healing. Her face responded repeatedly alternating between jolly humor and deep anguish. I ignored her happy face and her joking, expressing my grief over her scars and wounds. Deep grief and anguish emerged.

You who bear the name of Christ, you who would speak his words to others, you who would bless and serve others--you are restrained to infant chairs far beyond your years. Your maturity, oh church, has been stunted to the stage of a toddler. The pain of your wounds have not been healed. Your face cannot express the hurt that you have experienced. You wear only your Sunday happy face. Yet the pain remains, expressed in scars and deep wounds written on the arms that you would use to love and serve others. Your blessing and your help, oh bride of Christ, is scarred. Why then is your face still happy, happy, happy? Why, oh you who suffers with Christ, do you not weep for your anguish is great and your self mutilation is horrendous?

Rise up oversized believer! Break out of your infant chair. Do not be content with your toddler’s diet and the wounds in your soul. Grieve with Christ on his way to Calvary. Be healed by the great physician. Confess your sins to one another, so that your healing may come. Walk into your place in the kingdom. Stand on the platforms of the world. Speak forth the words of God with boldness in the lecture halls of the world. Do not be content any longer to remain sidelined in the hallways and corridors of life, restrained to infant chairs. Who has told you, oh daughter of Israel, that this is your lot? Who has told you that you should not weep and groan for the pain of your past? Do you not notice that your good deeds bear the fruit of your own pain? Do you not hear the great physician’s voice? Rise up, oh you who bear the name of Christ! Be healed. Speak forth his glory. But remember from whence came your healing.

from Matthew 9

1 Jesus stepped into a boat, crossed over and came to his own town. 2 Some men brought to him a paralytic, lying on a mat. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, "Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven." 3 At this, some of the teachers of the law said to themselves, "This fellow is blaspheming!" 4 Knowing their thoughts, Jesus said, "Why do you entertain evil thoughts in your hearts? 5 Which is easier: to say, 'Your sins are forgiven,' or to say, 'Get up and walk'? 6 But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins..." Then he said to the paralytic, "Get up, take your mat and go home." 7 And the man got up and went home. 8 When the crowd saw this, they were filled with awe; and they praised God, who had given such authority to men.

the unintended healing

Have you ever wondered about those stories where people get healed in some supposedly miraculous way? I have. Then you hear stories about how it’s a set-up and all that. People come away from the big event relapsing from their healing or whatever. It makes you think, maybe they were never healed in the first place. Yeah, I’ve wondered also. Then I found myself in the middle of an unintended healing.

The world is full of men who have been damaged by women and have taken into their souls this destruction and in response have hated women. My soul bears the mark of the rebound effect. I don’t know exactly how all of it transpired. I only know vaguely the incidents in which I was damaged. I hold no animosity toward my abusers but I can say what they did to me was wrong.

There are also the systems of oppression that I run into time and time again in my own culture as well as others’. Maybe I was super sensitive and it effected me more than it would have another. However it happened, the effects were with me. There were physical symptoms. Symptoms that had odd symbolic character connections to the issue. There were times I went deaf or dumb. Whenever a crass joke with misogynous character was spoken in my presence, I would either not be able to hear it or I would loose my ability to respond or speak. I didn’t exactly know what was the matter with me or exactly what the symptoms were but I knew things could be better in my soul.

Then, I found a group of believers who said they would pray and discern with me. As I prayed with them about the scars on my soul, it was as if the scales dropped from my lips. My jaw was unhinged. I felt set free. But isn’t this interesting, that misogyny, oppression of women, hatred of woman turns into an oppressive silencing of the woman. In the weeks thereafter, I noticed a physical change in my lips. Before, I had never really seen their natural color. I’d always battled with chapped lips, in the summer and in the winter. It didn’t matter how much water I drank or how much Chap Stick I used, they were always bleeding or peeling. But now, suddenly, they were perfect. I habitually ran my nail across them to check for loose edges and there simply were none. It was completely unbelievable. I doubted and decided to dehydrate myself and test this unintended “healing.” After a week of diet coke and coffee my lips did get a bit chapped but not anything like before. I thanked the Lord and decided to embrace my healing.

I was so excited I took a pictures for proof.

This is not to say that I haven’t struggled with chapped lips since then. I have. Currently, I having a terrible time with them. The healing was instant but it is also progressing and relapsing. I had to choose into it in moments of doubt. Oddly enough, I had the worst case of chapped bleeding lips after a friend confessed a secret affair to me and vented to me about the anger and hatred she had for her partner. 1. Praying for God’s healing of my own soul and praying for the forgiveness and healing for a couple that had fallen into destructive relational habits became one and the same. I had never imagined the effects would be written on my lips. I had never thought that my lips would be the barometer. My mouth which would speak God’s blessing and truth into the world of chaos and negativity. How oddly symbolic that the marks of this sin would muzzle the mouth.

1. If you are reading this and you just felt a stabbing in the gutt because you think I’m talking about you, I assure you, I am not. There are a number of people that could fit this confession in my life over the past year and those of you who read this—this is not you. But if you feel stabbing guilt…Confess your sin. Grieve it. And if you already have, Christ declares you forgiven and I declare you forgiven also. Walk in your forgiveness.

thanks to my readers

Thanks to all you readers that have taken a personal interest in me and what I write here. I appreciate that very much. I’ve enjoyed your emails. These have been redemptive relational experiences in cybertic medium.

Who chooses the things over which they sweat?

choice is a luxury, friends. Be careful with it. Be very careful.

get out of my bus...

In Seminary we studied leadership, going through various models put together by researchers who studied successful businesses, secular and faith based materials aiming at discovering how to lead more successfully. One image that was used was the bus model. Good leaders put the right people on the bus and get the wrong people off. I was disturbed by this analogy for numerous reasons. I was also told that it is essential to mentor the promising if a leader was to pass on his/her legacy. I've always struggled with this advice because I read in the New Testament how Jesus did not choose those that would have fit into the promising category. In fact, I think he may have scraped the bottom of the barrel. And then there is the beauty of the kingdom of God being brought to those that are rejected and the last being first and Isaiah 53 and all that stuff. How does one take that seriously?

Kicking people off the bus evokes in me images of the “wrong people” standing beside the road. Are they the lame the crippled the mentally ill that can’t contribute to the bus’ destination? Or perhaps they are just ordinary people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Does this mean they don’t get to go to wherever it is the bus is going.

The analogy is too narrow. But I fear it mirrors the reality of the scope of most leaders and theorists as well.

So I put out a challenging analogy, just to reveal my own narrowness and inept attempt at expounding on leadership.

The barn raising image. Successful leadership is like a barn raising. The entire community is involved, irrespective of age, talent or disability. What matters is that you are born and that you are a participant in this community. Various “leaders” emerge based on talent and experience in construction. The youth and younger are mentored on-site, on the job. The lunch committee feeds the community. Children laugh and play and do mischief, turning the event into a social gathering. Many hands make the work lighter, as they say. I’ve also seen my father come home from these work day, rejuvenated, with a hopeful gleam in his eye.

Get out of my bus...and into my barn. Sung to the tune of “Get out of My Dreams” (and into my car). No thank you,...mister Amishman...I like my bus...I very, very...like my...charter bus casino. I feel included while it lasts.

the fight is passionate...

On occasion some of my girlfriends have had the bad taste and desperation to use me as a conduit to get themselves a date or two with the male friends I’ve had. These realizations came as a surprise to me. Maybe I’m naïve to this reality, but truly, I think I prefer to be naïve in these cases. Mostly, I’ve just trusted people to be honest and to hold my best interest in sway with their own if not higher than their own. The cruel reality is many people would sell their grandmother into prostitution if it meant that they could secure a few moments of happiness for themselves. I have contemplated what it might mean to live in such a world, where there are such easy sales on essential relationships.

One thing has come to me. Friendship. Amistad. Brotherhood. Sisterhood. These are the answers. These are abundant and giving and one cannot have too many partners in these types of relationships if one is willing. These relationships may evoke jealousy among its participants. I’ve seen this too, yet generally the explosions are a bit smaller and not as permanently destructive as romantic relationships. While I, admittedly, have often hidden behind friendships with men, I have also benefited profoundly from them. I would say I have benefited more than many of my own sex. Men understand things, do things and describe things in ways I am challenged by. Because I like to partner up things and fit people and pieces together, I delight in the particular contributions men make to the whole. But in order to do this well, I would near kill myself should I be banished to working closely with only one man and relate to the rest of the world through him. The stereotypical image of a Muslim woman’s world would drive me mad. This aspect of my own culture of origin drove me mad. Yet in this culture of the “free,” I find many women and men choosing to see the other sex only through the eyes of the possibility of ultimate copulation. I figured out, with one girlfriend, that she was strangely and violently repulsed by one portion of available males she encountered. The remaining portion she dated or had some sort of sexual relationship with. Another woman struggled with placing a man who was not her husband into sexual partner possibility category, when he was clearly blessing her in a father-to-daughter relationship.

As for my one friend who would have sold me up the river for a fling with my male friend, well, she got married to another. And guess what, I’m still his friend. And the blessing is that I get to share with him in his joys and sorrows. I was invited to the wedding. I celebrated their children with them. But she can’t. She lit the wrong fire and it went bang.

It was painful to find out that she intended to deceive me and snatch away from me something I held with an open hand. It is the parable of the gift given but stolen a moment before it is offered. We have spoken, my friend and I. We have both wept over this passing on of betrayal. We have forgiven. Yet all the more, I have resolved to make the pursuit of brotherhood and sisterhood my highest banner. But how can one fly such a banner in a world that has no category for brother or for sister? Comrades! Come! Fight on! He who called us his friends bids us come and join him.

calibration

I was working the graveyard shift at a job in a manufacturing company soon after I graduated from college. Every night I was required to run a machine that would coat glass with various chemicals. The machine was a robot of sorts with an arm that would pick up the round circles of glass and place them at various stations along the conveyer. The problem with the machine was that it wasn’t calibrated to place the glass plates in exactly the right position and so the operator, me, would have to take off the guards and tip the glass into the right position before the machine could continue its process. I put in several requests to have the machine calibrated, to no avail. Eventually I gave up and one night the inevitable happened. I had taken all the protective guards off so that I could easily tip each glass into place. It was 2 am and I was a bit groggy. Unthinkingly, I reached under the machine arm to tip the glass in, when suddenly I realized the clearance between the arm and the table wasn’t enough to accommodate my arm. The strong arm of the robot had securely pinched my arm to the solid surface of the counter. I was securely stuck.

When we are young and impressionable our parents or our parent calibrates us to a particular rhythm. Generally, they can calibrate us to nearly any system of being. Later as we mature, we get knocked about and loose our calibration. Or sometimes we’re landed into a situation where the earlier calibration won’t serve us well anymore. So, we need to be recalibrated.

I often think of cross-cultural translating as recalibrating myself to a new way of being. The hope is that I will be able to keep the old calibration settings intact for those times when I return to the other culture. I think of it as rewiring my switches. So that when someone flips a certain switch, it can evoke a reaction of a. b. or c. depending upon my context. I enjoy the complexity of this.

Yet there are times when I loose my calibration a little because of negligence. Sometimes I run into folks who serve as my calibrators and it ends up a little off. Whatever the case, the machine still does its job despite its little calibration problem. All I need to do is take the protective guards off and tip the glass into place and all is well for quite some time. Until some night or groggy morning makes me a little careless and I make a false move. Suddenly, I’m immobilized under the heavy arm of the system I a trying to work with against its own laws.

As for what happened at the factory...

I looked around frantically for options. There was a window to and adjacent room that my only co-worker went to occasionally. But he would enter only every 2 hours for a duration of 15 seconds tops. I looked at the clock and decided I would yell his name only every 10 seconds as he would be the only one who could possibly hear me through the thick walls of the clean room lab. If he didn’t hear me, I would be stuck there until 6 am when the day crew came in for their shift. There was also another window that faced the main production floor. Yet few people walked past it. But I began taking off my shoes so that I could throw them at the window with my free arm, should a person walk past. There I was, pinched to the chemical counter for an hour before my co-worker heard me as he entered the adjacent room for the 15 seconds. My arm was completely numb by the time he came to rescue me. I will never forget the look on his face as he entered the room. He turned white as I immediately began giving him orders on what buttons to push to get the arm to raise. He was so flustered that he shut off the machine and it would have taken 5 minutes for it to start up again. In the end, he simply lifted the arm a few millimeters with his upper body strength and I yanked my arm out.

I returned to work the next evening to operate a calibrated machine.

remembering Alminda

I’ll always remember Alminda, a fierce looking, weathered, strong Christian woman who was originally from Haiti. She raised a family of 12 there. I met her at a conference I was scoping out. She too was pretty skeptical of this conference and its rock-concert style but somehow she was there. While there we both also met this interesting and refreshingly weird guy who had traveled from Texas. He was in his 50s. He was a jolly, white haired fellow, who wore his pants up too high, held in place by rainbow suspenders. He had the energy of a hyperactive teenager and wasn’t embarrassed to walk up to anyone and tell them their life story...Yes, you heard me right, he told them “everything they ever did.” John 4:29. The crazy thing was that he was always right. So, he walked up to this hardened, skeptical Haitian woman and told her all she had been through. It became a turning point in her life. I watched him do this to several other people. It was amazing. He blessed people in ways they couldn’t describe. He told them their secrets and then told them what God was saying to them. Then he disappeared.

Nobody gave him a prize even though he was better than Benny Hinn. Nobody lauded him. Nobody put him on the main stage. And it seemed to me that if they would have—he would have been ruined and he wouldn’t have been able to do what he did with much success.

Yet Alminda stayed in my life after the conference. She lived in an apartment she had no income to pay for. I would on occasion drive her places. She was a very perceptive lady. And she spent a lot of time in prayer. Her whole life was a life of prayer. On occasion she would tell me her stories. While she lived in Haiti and was raising her family, she would go to church any time the doors were opened. Outside of that she prayed. There for a time, every Saturday she would pray for the Sunday service. Every Saturday, God would reveal to her the exact message that was going to be preached on Sunday. She would then go to her pastor’s house and tell him what God had revealed to her. Repeatedly, it was the exact sermon he had prepared for that coming Sunday.

She talked about the effects this had on the young, sometimes insecure pastor. Needless to say he was a little freaked out. We would then talk about ways to not get tripped up in the insecurities (our own or another’s) but to instead live in and project a message of God’s ever present love and closeness to others. He is the water. I am the conduit. He is the potter. I am the clay.

do unto others...

I was once at a festival walking down the street with a friend, when she suddenly blurted out, “All these people look really stupid. I mean look at them. Their hair. Their clothes. Don’t you think so?”

I don’t really remember how I got out of that one but not much time later she blurted out the next few lines. “I wonder what people think of us?” she said in a pensive tone. I think they think we look weird and stupid,” she continued as though she was encountering a new realization.

At that point I gaped at her a bit. She was a smart woman and I was surprised she had no realization of her own projection. I had to think to my self later—quite often we are blind to our own participation in things we have cognitive knowledge above.

...as you would have them be to you.

leadership: consensus style or hierarchical style

I was once challenged by my mentor, “Leadership is real. It’s in nature. It happens everywhere. Some lead and others follow.” He was referring to strong leadership of a more hierarchical nature. Leaders are champions, in his mind. Yet this was why I asked him to mentor me. He was a challenge and a perceived threat to my way of thinking. I didn’t like his style much. It was so institutional. So top down. A friend of mine and I joked around about his strong style. We called him the general. It’s not surprising, since he was in the marines before he took this desk job. But, I reasoned, this is how half the world works, I would do well to learn to interact with it and learn to love the people who operate in these styles of leadership and being.

So I rose to the challenge and began looking around in nature for non-hierarchical leadership. Geese flying south is non-hierarchical or, rather, a sharing of leadership. All able geese take their turn at the helm. And all have a common understanding of destination/ “the goal”. This is just one example of a distribution of power/responsibility leadership style. Its opposite extreme is the hierarchical leadership. Various cultures seem to pick their place on the continuum but I would argue there are elements of both in every culture. There doesn’t seem to be much information or research on leadership styles within other cultures, however, the differences are observed within our own culture in dialogs about gender specific leadership styles.. One style is stereotypically attributed to the feminine and the later the masculine. I would prefer to refer to the differences as consensus vs. hierarchy leaderships styles. There is a leadership theorist, Mary Parker Follett who popularizes a distribution of power management style. Circular theory of power is the theory upon which she bases her consensus style of leadership. It turns the “power-over” of hierarchy leadership into “power with.” You can read about it here. Thanks to a new friend, Mr. Kriss who is doing his dissertation on her leadership style.

Some questions to respond to.
Which style is more Christ-like: hierarchy or consensus? Is this even a good question? Are there ways to make either style Christ centered? What are the pitfalls (sins) of either style? Are there any other sites out there that address these questions? Has anyone seen any great consensus leadership in practice?

Deuteronomy 10:14

Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens is the LORD'S thy God, the earth also, with all that therein is.

more cake

So I couldn't stay away from the cake making endevours since that first big attempt with my sister's wedding cake. Everything since then was a cake walk by comparison. These are the latest two birthday cakes.
 

 

forgivness first

There is a principle in popular psychology that I have often disagreed with. The principle assumes forgiveness is reached after a lot of work and a lot of expressed anger and hurt. The principle is mentioned in the article entitled “Forgiveness First.”

"Thousands were burned at the stake or decapitated or tortured in other ways until they died," Dr. Kraybill said. "When the martyrs were dying, they would offer prayers out loud, begging God to forgive their executioners."

Their belief that they should immediately forgive anyone who harms them is in stark contrast to popular ideas, Dr. Kraybill said. While many Americans see forgiveness as the end of a long emotional process, the Amish believe it's the start. They understand that they may feel angry and depressed, but they do not believe they should let painful feelings dictate their conduct toward others.

One of the primary reasons “working through” hurt and grief via bold expressions of anger and wishing harm upon the one who has done you wrong is that it is very simply practice in unforgiveness. It proclaims the making of a person who has been sinned against into an object of wrath toward his persecutors. Bold expressions of hate which pour out of hurt are formative for the persecutor and the persecuted. It turns the identity of the persecuted into yet another persecutor. It isn’t just venting. It isn’t just an expression of hurt. It is the start of a practice in unforgiveness.

Forgiveness begins with bold expressions of grace, before they are actualized. Christ did not secure the forgiveness of his particular persecutors before he declared it. He was yet alive when he cried, “Father forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing.” The Creator did not declare there was light after it already came to be. As co-creators with Christ, should we not take up our responsibility of co-creation in his kingdom.

the meek shall inherit the earth

I’ve often read this and wondered how and where this has ever occurred. I have seen the meek steamrolled, taken advantage of, anything but inheriting the earth. Quite frankly it’s rather maddening and puts the lines between your eyes on a pensive evening at home alone.

Last year after the Nickel Mines shooting was publicized worldwide. I saw a little bit of how “the meek inherits the earth” might be true. I remember being in the check-out line at the local gas station, a dirty unkempt corner between downtown, the interstate and my neighborhood. My eyes scanned the magazine rack and I stopped in my tracks. There on the cover of People were my people. What were they doing on there? I felt the shock run through my body. It would have been just as shocking to see my mother’s face on there—a place reserved for the faces of vanity of the most worldly sort. But it wasn’t even their faces depicted there. It was the backs of two teen girls walking together across a field.

It makes one wonder, why where the laws of the universe altered for this moment.

Since the incident, “the meek inherit the earth has become even more evident, at least from what is reported in the silent almost hidden stories. Atheism turned into hope for faith for one in the global audience. Read the article here. Among others in the audience were an Iranian delegation and leaders from the World Council of Churches. That is just crazy to the little Beachy girl inside me, who is accustomed to being forgotten and ignored by the world.

what to do about Walmart

I’ve been on the verge of doing a post on why Amish and Conservative Mennonites don’t have the same sentiments toward Walmart, as compared to upper middle class folks. According to popular uppre middle class knowledge, Walmart exploits its workers, it monopolizes communities, robbing the poor so that tax dollars have to fill in the gaps.

Some folks are shocked to see the scene depicted above. Some find it ironic. Yet in many places, where there is a high population density of Amish, Walmart caters to the Amish community, and yes Amish and Conservative Mennonites shop there. I’ve even been in places where Mennonites have referred to WalMart as the Mennonite store. Dorcas Smucker, a conservative Mennonite writer, approaches the question from a comparative consumer’s perspective, pointing out how other companies exploit their own consumers, with scandalous advertising themes and prices in addition to doing everything that WalMart has done. Hmm.

So Walmart exploits their own workers by not providing affordable health care to its workers and their families. If you were to tell an Amish woman that this is a reason she shouldn’t support Walmart by shopping there, she would respond by noting that she has never had any health insurance nor has her family nor has any of her predecessors. “How is that exploitation?” she would wonder.

Walmart also underpays its employees. To this an Amish man would ask, “How much do they get paid?” The response is usually minimum wage, which is generally twice as much or three times as much as an Amish man would get paid. And the Amish man would humbly tell you so too, with a confused look on his face.

Walmart also exploits foreign workers who make very little profit off of their labor. Smucker rightly notes and we know this too—who doesn’t? I know of only a few fair trade organizations and products. There simply aren’t any alternatives.

It seems to me that as we look at this exchange, we encounter a phenomenon that often happens cross-culturally. Judgments don’t translate directly. Sometimes they’re entirely irrelevant. Sometimes they expose even greater injustices that have been ignored. Walmart might be the giant that becomes the object of a lot of stone throwing. But I think they are simply a representation of what we ultimately hate about ourselves and the system we’ve become entangled in.

serving soup

We served each other bad soup at the Lord’s supper. We would have served it to our neighbors. Nobody was willing. Self-love kept us from it. And we poisoned only ourselves. The covenant we had made to our neighbors remained unfulfilled that supper night. In a strange coincidence we alone were poisoned. The neighbors were spared. Yet the fact remains, our kitchen is contaminated. What to do with future batches of soup from it? Do we call the health inspectors to inspect our kitchen? Do we reason that we are too busy cooking when they knock? Do we shut down our own kitchen or do we wait for incrimination or disaster to discontinue our services. Do we cover the stench of rotting soup with sweet spices making due with what we can with what we’ve got? Do we reason that grace will cover our stench? Do we shut down our kitchen or will it be shut down for us?

celebrations in summer

 

... in the country

 
 

Summer picnics in the home town community. Adults chatter. Kids pitter patter. And everyone has a good time.

 

Jungle gyms for kids.
Can this girl defy gravity with her skirts. Absolutely! Hanging up-side-down is a childhood necesity. No skirts left behind.

 
 

Volleyball games for youth and the benches for the mothers babies and the wanna be youths.

... in the city

 

 

Neighborhood block parties in the heart of the city have a little different feel to them. Tons of kids. Off course! The adults seem to invite all their relatives too.

 
 

This is the favorite activity in our island's block parties. The blow-up bouncy pens for the tons of kids that show up. The neighbor kids who moved away are now, well, very nearly hansom young men. They didn't want to miss out. It's strange that I used to swing them around by their ankles and now I have to look up to make eye contact. And that looks like a very neatly trimmed beard he's sporting. Oh, my goodness! How they've grown. But nobody's too old to get knocked around in the bouncy pen reserved for the rough stuff. A few adults braved the "fighting pen" for the teen boys and the girls who could handle it. I only sustained a finger jam as the ref, the instigator, and the one who it was most fun to take out. Our block parties are the best!