The Qur'an, my time in Israel, and inter-faith thoughts.

a little bit of my initial reaction to India.

January 2002.

I am 20.

This is not India.  This is my reaction.

arrival.

We arrive via a nine hour taxi ride in the small compound of huts that was the home of pastor Vijay Golden, his parents, his younger brother, his older brother, and his older brother's wife.  The noisy greetings initially distracted us from the otherness of the surroundings.  What was the smell?  With Vijay's near fluency in English and our complete lack of Punjabi, it was an unspoken rule that he would be our translator for the duration of our visit.

"Hey!" with a flurry of hellos.

"Praise the Lord!" and hubbub.

"Brother, this is..." and Vijay was pointing to someone else, and we were all shaking hands and embracing.

"Hallo!"

The family cow, for its part, mooed a greeting as well. Vijay's mother beemed a large and toothy smile.  Wearing a dusty purple saree with long gray hair captured by a purple scarf, the deep, dark wrinkles on her hands and face spoke of a life very different than I have ever known.  The smells are more shocking than the sights.  Listening to  the seemingly endless introductions the smells assault me, confuse me.  Shortly we stow our belongings in one of the small huts made of brick and concrete-mortar--just big enough for the two rough but sturdy cots that would be our beds for the next eleven days. 

"Devin, these covers stink."

bathing.

We are both thinking of showers after our 9 hour taxi ride on top of our nine hour flight from Austria.  It has been a long day.

"Vee will get it ready for you vight now."

Vijay's admirable English falls a little short in the pronunciation.  The "bathing area" was built only very recently.  The roofless brick enclosure rises maybe 4 1/2 feet and the simple square design is roughly 5 feet by 5 feet wide.  On one side is a rickety gate made of cheap metal, not wide enough for the opening which allows it.  A passerby on that side would get an eyeful.  The cracked concrete floor was at a slight angle so that the water or refuse would spill into a channel, taking it into the open sewer-ditch on the street leading into the compound.  Conveniently the entire "bathing area" doubled as a bathroom area.  The air is now chilly enough for me to see my own breath as I awkwardly stripped down inside the bathing square.  The wall doesn't even come to the top of my chest, and as I quickly learn--white attracts.  I am attended by the neighborhood children, several of whom have been watching us since our arrival from neighboring rooftops, and who run and hop to nearer buildings to get a better view.  While three or four of them giggle and dart forward and back, I squat lower, feeling rather like a monkey, and splash myself with water from the a tin bucket.  Though the Golden family had graciously stoked a large fire over which to hold the bucket and heat the water, by the time it has hit me and run off I am freezing... I am ever so glad I brought a bar of Dial antibaterial soap and my Pert Plus shampoo.  They afford me a brief sensatino of clean in a strange universe of dirty.  Splash.  Scrub.  Freezing!  Splash.  Laughter from somewhere above and to the my left... my right.

Conveniently, we later learn, the entire area doubles as a large toilet.

a taxi ride.

We are stuffed into the taxi much like our manhandled baggage, albeit voluntarily. Amid elbows and knees and the smell of dirt and old damp things, I watch the Indian terrain run along with dusty road down which we roar at breakneck speed.  A copse here or tree there is the most that would interrupt the field upon field where lush green crops were grown and berries were picked and cotton was harvested and seed was sown by shirtless men stooped low, their pants rolled up to their knees, their faces to the ground.  A deserted brick kiln stands erect in the distance.  The jeep bounces and jerks, unwilling to conform to the surrounding idyllic world.  Its tires assault the uneven rock-strew road, and our driver has no qualms about testing their limits as we sink into another pothole and pop out.  Slim tendrils of wind and dust reach inside through small holes in the metal floor where the ground races frighteningly near.   The seat cushions are torn and flattened, and my head is occasionally jolted into the hard metal interior.  Finally a few walled buildings give notice that we are approaching the next village.  The conversation which had been subdued by the engine's roar and the screeching tires begins to revive and my friends are speaking to one another in Punjabi—and occasionally English to clue us in.  We slow down.

a reception.

As we begin to exit the crowded taxi there was a brief and invisible moment where the amassed villagers simply stared.  The thirty or so people, standing under the bright Indian sun, might have been as nervous as Devin and I.  But nervous grins soon gave way to open laughter (or giggles among the girls) and shouted greetings, and as we walked the 100 feet from our vehicle towards the groups, celebratory drums started beating and rose pedals were being tossed.  Before I can quite make out what is happening, in a flurry of hugs and handshakes, we are ushered into the small, walled front yard of a nearby house.

“If one falls down, his friend can help him up…” Ecclesiastes 4.10

“Hey Miss.”

She stirred and slowly looked up at me like a hibernating creature might from inside its previously undisturbed den.

“…Hey…” she responded slowly—the sort of slow that meant I could not really tell when she started speaking or when she stopped, and if she had attempted more than a simple greeting, I’m sure I wouldn’t have understood it.  She smiled softly.

There’s something to be said for simply being in the presence of a friend—for being in close proximity to someone you know and trust—whether you are speaking, or laughing, or doing nothing at all.  Often, dare I say most of the time, I am encouraged not so much by someone’s well-intentioned words or Sunday morning sermons or even great and purposeful things—deep books and challenging conferences—I have come to realize that much more important to me are the small spaces in between the great, the quiet moments in between the loud, and the simple in the midst of the complex.  But these things are over my head. 

Thanks.

May all my moments bring glory to You.

Waiting on God

I was waiting on God for the service to end.  I was contemplating what I might do when my father decided we could leave.  I was abiding in our family’s second home: the small, sparsely-populated Pentecostal church in our small, sparsely-populated town of Bowling Green.  The simple church might have seated 100 in its polished and cushion-less pews, if the 100 were a friendly bunch.  On Sunday, however, one would find 15 or 20 church goers arranging themselves with mathematical predictably each week.  The times of waiting on God were not the Pentecostal extravaganza one might stumble into on a Sunday morning (though times of an outsider stumbling in at any time were rare indeed).  While the Tuesday and Thursday evening prayer times might very well contain moments of speaking in tongues or bits of Holy Spirit-inspired dancing which often accompanied the larger gathering, and nearly always included one or two lively hymns from the church’s small but meaningful repertoire—hymns sung again and again, year after year, on every occasion—the evening prayer times were marked with a degree of austerity and stillness.  During those evenings—so often involving my eyelids drooping and beginning to obscure the wood-lettered “Jesus” which was affixed to the front wall, just behind the humble pulpit platform and the minister’s chair—I wasn’t mystically receiving revelation. 

I was waiting on God for the service to end.  Though certainly I was in the presence of God, it was unbeknownst to me—all the tongues and laughter and dancing might as well have been a Greek wedding festival.  To me revelation was mediated solely through my father.  “I’m going to go to the church to pray?  Do you want to come?” he would ask.  Sometimes the evening would play out a heated drama that made a quick exit to church quite appealing; sometimes boredom by my father’s side narrowly beat out boredom at home.  And there in the middle of my impatient waiting, Jesus snuck up on me.  Something of my father’s love for quiet prayer, his quickness to listen, his slowness to speak, something of his respect for sacred space, something of his steady side and firm hands, showed me the Prince of Peace in ways far exceeding analytical reflection.  In many other ways, those years bore (and are yet bearing) fruit in my life.  I myself have since learned to embrace not only sacred stillness—to wait for something more than the service to end—but the fullness of unashamed Pentecostal enthusiasm.

I am still learning about God’s already-answer.  I have since often found that right in the middle of my waiting on God—in the heat of my fervent prayers and expectations—He quietly slips in, He secretly does it, He softly reveals, in ways that it takes many years to understand and acknowledge.  Perhaps when the grand service ends, in the age when struggling prayers and embattled faith give way to simple face to face friendship and better perspective on this brief earthly life, we will see He has always done it—during the whole of our lives He was sneaking in undisclosed and giving us what we needed before we knew it, what we wanted before we wanted it, revealing love before we knew what love was.

I'm a poor friend to my friends,

a poor son to my parents,

a poor brother to my siblings,

a poor witness for the gospel,

a poor ambassador for the kingdom,

a poor citizen of my country,

a poor lover my neighbors,

a poor defender of the defenseless.

I thank God for redemption,

for making dead things live,

for making lost things found,

for making messes into beauty,

for making water come from rocks,

for making gardens from deserts,

for forgiving the sins of yesterday,

for forgiving the screw-ups of today,

for forgiving what I'll do wrong tomorrow,

for making me into something new,

for drowning the record of my wrongs in the sea of His love and rewriting my dossier to be His blood-washed beloved...