That was one of the themes of the pastor's message last night at IBNU--Igreja Batista Nações Unidas, our home church. For example, God told Abraham to leave Ur and head for Canaan, where he would be blessed. When he arrived they threw a big party. Well, not exactly. Abraham's welcome to the Promised Land was a severe famine, which forced him to move to Egypt! How's that for unpredictability! What's going on, God?
In the 21st century, God continues to surprise us.
We just received an email from Gary Bennett, a WorldVenture colleague in Rwanda, East Africa. He is working with an international team from Engineering Ministries International to design several buildings in Rwanda. Gary told us that one of the engineers is a Brazilian, Suellen Maia, from São Paulo. She is a 24-year-old architecture student and helps with the youth ministry at her church here. Suellen has also served as a translator for the Promifé evangelism project, and lives just a few short blocks from our home!
Now, I would like to say that we set up this whole connection, but that would not be true. We had nothing to do with it. We can only admire God's unpredictability as he uses believers in creative ways to build his kingdom around the world!
(The photos show Suellen in her 6-month Africa mission experience.)
There will be no giant cake today for Sao Paulo's birthday celebration.
The traditional cake, which measures one meter for each year of the city's age, would have been 455 meters (five football fields) long this year. But sponsors were unwilling to fork over almost US$100,000 to make the massive treat. It's one more sign that tremors from the worldwide economic earthquake are shaking Brazil.
Shortly after hearing this news, I happened across John Piper's comments on the economic downturn (see video below). He suggests that hardship has the potential of drawing us closer to God, more than prosperity. And much more is at issue than 500 yards of cake!
For me, as a missionary, the question boils down to this: Do I want more funding or do I want more faith? Maybe those gifts are not mutually exclusive, but one thing is certain--without repentance and life-changing faith in Jesus, all the funding in the world will not make an eternal difference.
Among the instruments invented by man, the most impressive is, without a doubt, the book. Other inventions are extensions of our bodies. The microscope and telescope are extensions of our vision. The telephone is an extension of our voice, and finally we have the plow and the sword, extensions of our arms. The book, however, is something else. The book is an extension of our memory and our imagination.
Is it any wonder, then, that God's Word has come to us in the form of a book?
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.
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.
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.
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.
