Christmas in Brazil

In Brazil, as in the United States, Christmas is a time for family reunions. Here, Alan (left) reconnects with two cousins: Tony and Nelsinho.

Below, Lalia (right) chats with her sister-in-law, Rosa.

Extreme makeover: A baby changes everything

Thanks to Marie Foote, fellow WorldVenture missionary, for a reminder of how babies break into our life story, and of how a certain baby changed history.

Marie's insightful comments can be found on her Facebook profile.

Marie, in turn, was inspired by singer Faith Hill's song, "A Baby Changes Everything."

My inspiration comes from a variety of sources. Every Christmas season I try to reread Philip Yancey's "Birth: The Visited Planet," from one of his best books, The Jesus I Never Knew. (You can find most of this chapter and more at Google Books.) Yancey contrasts the cheeriness of our Christmas greeting cards with "the starkness of the Gospels."

We get a Herod's-eye-view of the first Christmas when Yancey quotes a vivid W. H. Auden:

Today has been one of those perfect winter days, cold, brilliant, and utterly still, when the bark of a shepherd's dog carries for miles, and the great wild mountains come up quite close to the city walls, and the mind feels intensely awake, and this evening as I stand at this window high up in the citadel there is nothing in the whole magnificent panorama of plain and mountains to indicate that the Empire is threatened by a danger more dreadful than any invasion of Tartar on racing camels or conspiracy of the Praetorian Guard...
O dear, Why couldn't this wretched infant be born somewhere else?

Yancey jolts his readers with another startling paradigm shift:

"'God is great,' the cry of the Moslems, is a truth which needed no supernatural being to teach men," writes Father Neville Figgis. "That God is little, that is the truth which Jesus taught man." The God who roared, who could order armies and empires about like pawns on a chessboard, this God emerged in Palestine as a baby who could not speak or eat solid food or control his bladder, who depended on a teenage couple for shelter, food, and love.

Another book that Lalia and I are reading through again this year is The Handel's Messiah Family Advent Reader. It has 28 readings which cover each day of the four weeks of Advent. Each reading is accompanied by a musical selection from Handel's Messiah, on a CD included with the book.

Yesterday's reading about swaddling clothes was an eye-opener:

Everywhere, parents swaddled their babies because they loved them and wanted to protect them. Swaddling is a loving act, but it also means to tie up, control, hold down, restrict, and restrain. And... can you imagine? God was swaddled!

If swaddling clothes were so common, why did the angel mention them to the shepherds? Our theory goes something like this: If the shepherds were merely looking for a baby in a manger, they might think that it was an abandoned child. But the detail of the swaddling cloths told them that someone loved the baby and was taking care of him, in spite of the spartan conditions in which he would be found.

We challenge you to take some time this month to escape the ubiquitous year-end craziness and recapture the wonder of the incarnation.

25 years and counting

One third of a lifetime ago I arrived in Brazil, wet behind the ears, terrified.

I didn’t speak Portuguese, and didn’t know if I could learn. Not being a pastor, I was an atypical missionary. Would I be accepted? Could I do the job? Would my rigid Scandinavian worldview flex to the exuberant Brazilian heartbeat?

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Twenty-five years ago I would have read that verse and told you about my goals for the future. Today I see that “the things hoped for” are not about my pet projects, but about what God plans to accomplish in me! “And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.”

Incredible! God says that faith is about drawing near to him. What about all the important stuff that I do every day? Extraneous at best.

How, then, do I write my 25-year report? In fear—that all of the stuff I have done is the only thing I have to show to God and to our steady ministry partners. In that spirit, Lalia and I send Christmas joy and thanks to all of you.

(In the photo above, Richard Sturz, right, wraps 25 years into 5 minutes at a celebration of Curt’s time with WorldVenture in Brazil.)

Intuition, wisdom and beauty. From left to right, Lucimar Davis, Jennifer Kierstead, Karen Sipes, Lalia Kregness, Mirian Sturz, Corine Thorp and Lois McKinney. At a recent WorldVenture fellowship near São Paulo.

Book Review: The Shack

William P. Young. The Shack. Los Angeles: Windblown Media, 2007. (248 pages)

When a friend said that he had been profoundly touched by The Shack, my natural curiosity kicked in. A quick online search told me that he was not alone: others were also singing the praises of the book. Eugene Peterson (The Message) compares it to John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. But lurking between the glowing endorsements were the detractors, who denounce The Shack as fuzzy theology or even heresy.

Before I jumped on either bandwagon, I decided to read the book. Conclusion number one: controversy sells books, sometimes regardless of their literary content! (Hmm, that reminds me of a guy named Dan Brown…) Anyway, here’s my two cents.

First, a quick synopsis for those who haven’t read the book. The Shack is the fictional tale of Mack, an Oregon salesman who is trying to figure out the meaning of life after his daughter Missy suffers a violent death at the hands of a serial killer. Three years later Mack receives a mysterious note, summoning him to the remote cabin where Missy died. There he has an encounter that changes him forever.

At the shack, Mack meets a large effusive black woman, a small ephemeral Asian woman, and an unassuming Middle Eastern carpenter. He soon figures out that he is face to face with the Trinity. More than half the book is a type of therapeutic dialogue between Mack and the three. They break his paradigms right and left, in order to leave him with an eternal perspective on his tragic loss. At the end, Mack is not sure if his memorable encounter was real, or just a dream. But it has given him the closure that he needed to continue living.

Any evaluation of The Shack needs to meet the book on its own terms, as a work of fiction. When I read a fictional story—let’s say one of John Grisham’s novels—I expect to be entertained, surprised and emotionally moved. There is usually a problem to be resolved, a process toward the solution and some type of closure at the end. Besides the plot, we expect the characters to display the human triumphs and foibles that will cause us to identify with them and to live the story vicariously. We hope the good guys win and the bad guys lose. A good work of fiction will have all of these elements.

Incidentally, I may learn something new in a novel (Grisham’s The Testament has some good information about the great Brazilian wetland called the Pantanal), but this is usually not the main reason I choose to read a work of fiction.

Okay, so unless the book is in the fantasy genre, I expect the story to be realistic, believable. Here is where many readers of The Shack feel some tension. The book starts out like a John Grisham novel and then moves into some murky territory when Mack and “Papa” God listen to “Eurasian funk and blues” in the kitchen. Now that’s pushing our envelope! Could this really happen? What do we do with this? Do we require the book to line up with Systematic Theology 101 or do we meet it on its own terms, as a work of fiction literature?

Of course, Young is rattling our cage and he knows it. It’s a literary device to get our attention. He can do this because he’s not writing a seminary textbook. Is he treading on thin ice? Maybe, but we only get bent out of shape if we force the book to do more than it sets out to do.

Is God really a jolly black woman with a charming Southern accent? Young would be the first to say no, and he lets “Papa” explain with her own words:

…I am neither male nor female, even though both genders are derived from my nature. If I choose to appear to you as a man or a woman, it’s because I love you. For me to appear to you as a man or a woman and suggest that you call me Papa is simply to mix metaphors, to help you keep from falling so easily back into your religious conditioning.(1)

Besides looking at genre, we can also evaluate a book from the perspective of the author’s purpose in writing the story. The Shack doesn’t directly give us this information, so we have to read between the lines. We could assume that the author has experienced some traumatic losses in his life, and the book is his way of helping others work through the grief process. Young’s personal testimony on the book-related website seems to confirm this analysis:

While I have extensively written for business, creating web content, business plans, white papers etc., The Shack was a story written for my six children, with no thought or intention to publish. It is as much a surprise to me as to anyone else that I am now an ‘author’. […] The journey has been both incredible and unbearable, a desperate grasping after grace and wholeness. These facts don’t tell you about the pain of trying to adjust to different cultures, of life losses that were almost too staggering to bear, of walking down railroad tracks at night in the middle of winter screaming into the windstorm, of living with an underlying volume of shame so deep and loud that it constantly threatened any sense of sanity, of dreams not only destroyed but obliterated by personal failure, of hope so tenuous that only the trigger seemed to offer a solution. These few facts also do not speak to the potency of love and forgiveness, the arduous road of reconciliation, the surprises of grace and community, of transformational healing and the unexpected emergence of joy. Facts alone might help you understand where a person has been, but often hide who they actually are. The Shack will tell you much more about me than a few facts ever could. In some ways my life is partly revealed in both characters—Willie and Mack. But an author is always more. (2)

I get the feeling that The Shack is a parable, a metaphor of Young’s spiritual journey. He’s not giving us facts about God and the doctrine of the Trinity. Instead, he expresses a type of relational truth in a story. The Shack is not about theology; it’s about experience.

Will readers of The Shack start adopting strange ideas about the Trinity? I doubt it. But they might conclude that God is deeply aware of their painful losses. That God is saddened by human violence, but this does not diminish his sovereignty. That he can help us in our suffering because he has also suffered at the hands of violent men. That our ideas about him are probably still too small. That the life of faith is not about following a set of rules, but about walking daily with Jesus. That doctrine can sometimes get in the way of devotion.

---

1 The Shack, p. 93. Italics are the author’s.

2 Online: http://www.theshackbook.com/willie.html accessed on 15 November 2008.

ESV Study Bible worth a look

I haven't put my hands on the real thing, but the online version of the ESV (English Standard Version) Study Bible looks great (click on the image below). Crossway has opened the entire book of Matthew for virtual tourists, with all its notes, maps, articles and other resources. Apparently everyone who buys a paper copy will also receive a code which will allow full access to the complete online version.




At the site, by clicking on the Features tab, you can browse the introductions to several books, including Psalms, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Luke, Ephesians, Colossians and Revelation. In addition, the entire book of Jonah is available for download as a PDF file.

A postscript for all of you with mobile devices: The ESV Study Bible will soon be available in a variety of platforms for your smartphone or PDA.

Great Expectations

Barack Obama's election was greeted with optimism here in Brazil.

Actually, that's an understatement. If Obama succeeds in doing half of the things that this part of the world expects from him, Mount Rushmore will need another sculpture.

While he fixes the economic crisis, he will reactivate full diplomatic relations with Cuba, Iran, North Korea and a few other rogue states. Over lunch, he will figure out how to quickly withdraw U.S. troops from the Middle East without triggering chaos in the region.

During afternoon coffee, he will reconcile the global warming issue while figuring out how to give the U.S. energy independence by 2020. He will also cut importation taxes on Brazilian ethanol produced from sugar cane (oh, that was McCain's line).

You get the idea. But here is my two cents.

We should expect great things from our leaders. However, let's not delude ourselves.

Change doesn't start in the White House. It starts at my house.

The gospel is about transformation from the inside out. Consider John the Baptist's words...

John said to the crowds coming out to be baptized by him, "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our father.' For I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. The axe is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire."

"What should we do then?" the crowd asked.

John answered, "The man with two tunics should share with him who has none, and the one who has food should do the same."

Tax collectors also came to be baptized. "Teacher," they asked, "what should we do?"

"Don't collect any more than you are required to," he told them. Then some soldiers asked him, "And what should we do?"
He replied, "Don't extort money and don't accuse people falsely—be content with your pay." (Luke 3:7-14, NIV)

The bottom line

We called in the experts! Gilmar and Gilberto (left) examined the financial reports of the Vida Nova publishing house in a recent meeting, and concluded that the ministry/business is healthy. In fact, they evaluated our efficiency ratio (income per employee) and found that it is on par with many successful multi-national corporations!

Our CEO, Ken Davis (right) is the one who keeps us on track. His conservative management has kept Vida Nova viable in a turbulent market. As vice president, I observe and advise as much as possible, although some of the finance-speak is a bit over my head!