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           16 October 2006 8:17pm                                                   

I have had a really rough day today. I am really struggling in Hebrew. Simply, its kicking my butt. It seems I can't memorize its words/symbols/whatever. I'm trying. And also I sat in a 'preaching' class today which just took my Hebrew funk and added a superscript 2. So, in an effort to return to normalcy and health, by popular demand, here:

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In April of last year I was filmed as an extra in The Lake House, a movie starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. Yeah I know, I know, this movie sucks. It does. But Warner Bros, or whoever it was, was in Chicago in need for people to show up. I was showing up all over, and so I showed up there full of excitement only to be yelled at and treated like a prop for fourteen hours straight. Well, I guess thats because I was one. By the end of the night, Keanu was getting wasted off shots of Jack and telling lewd stories about his early filming days. Us extras either were passive or laughing, but said nothing because talking to him would get us kicked off the set. The best part of it all was really the food. Oh, and the creepy Keanu double. Seriously, he was a Keanu clone who spoke with a southern accent. Anyways, if you're curious, get the pause button ready and look closely for my entrance into hollywood fame.

           15 October 2006 8:48pm                                                   

           13 October 2006 7:49pm                                                   

Something I have never been around before are child beggars. In Chicago, working at Lawndale, there were plenty of homeless, especially downtown. Usually they were black, mentally disabled, or war veterans. They were always adults.

The kid in the picture is a boy who begs at the shopping center near NEGST. He has been begging in the same spot since I arrived a year ago.

It is so unsettling, since homeless adults can at least be excused. Somehow somewhere they may have made a bad choice that put them on the streets, like Chris on Hubbard Street downtown Chicago who has been living on the streets since he got addicted to crack cocaine during his stay at University of Illinois, crashed his motorcycle while driving high, and lost both his legs. When I left Chicago, Chris had been living in an abandoned apartment building lobby and begging for money to pay for food and his drug habit (only $5 a hit).

But this kid? He is a boy. There is no possible circumstance that he could have chosen that makes him absolutely guilty of the life that he is condemned to. Period. And he is condemned, too. Child poverty (half of the poor in the world are children) is a problem that can be solved through correction at a systemic level, both through social legislation and economic progression (like the US). However, this is never going to happen worldwide. For every country that gets fixed will be ten more growing worse. This, it seems to me, is evidence that God is coming some day in a sweep. The worlds efforts to aid these problems are working and extraordinary (Ashley or Emma's blog on the left), but nothing can take the place of a cessation, a thundering cry that silences this problem once and for all, so I won't have to buy bread while looking into his eyes.

           12 October 2006 8:06pm                                                   

I listened to a man from Benin give his testimony, how he was brought up in the rural part of his country. His parents were thick into the practice of African traditional religions, and he was brought into it as well. One memory he had was being blessed by a shaman by having a chicken killed over him, with the blood poured all over his skin, and the spirits of the shaman were apparent and appeased.

A woman snuck him a bible one day, and from that day forward he hid the bible in his house and read it carefully, becoming a Christian on his own a while later. There was no ritual or anything. He simply saw the evil that had saturated his life, the way his family's life had become corrupted and awful by the appeasement of the shaman's spirits, and he fell down on the dirt floor of his house. He prayed and dedicated his life to the God of the bible, and fifteen years later he is attending this grad school.

I'm overwhelmed by the evil in Africa. Starvation, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, shamans robbing innocent villagers of all their money to appeal to spirits, drought, tribal warfare, corrupt rulers, violence, unbelievable amounts of prostitution.

And still the continent holds an amazing resiliency and goodness, that life somehow continues despite the hardship, and soaked through it all is a profound and simple way of life that remains culturally unspoiled by the modern invasion: community, celebration, traditions, interdependence.

What comes from all this is a very obvious understanding of what it means to follow God. The world seems a sharper place, full of real bad and real good. What there is to learn from all this, I don't know yet.

           10 October 2006 9:52pm                                                   

We, in our nation, have our own poverty. We are desperate for close friends, for a productive life, for people to be genuinely concerned when we don't show up at work. We are needy in regards to our celebration, as few things seem worth celebrating anymore and celebration, when called for, is hindered. Our environment has begun to erode health, where it was intended to heal it. Jesus tells us to not store up treasures on earth because of theives and rust and moths, but we have stopped these, making Jesus's words metaphorical when they were based in being literal.

In Kenya, I am awash in celebration, in simple solid meaningful labor, in concerned community, in healthy ecology, in obvious danger, and in incredible life. Maybe this whole shebang in Kenya is pointing me back home.

           9 October 2006 5:41pm                                                   

I remember, in the ninth grade, when I was on a field trip with the school's choir. A girl named Susan who hated Christians asked me to make a deal, that she would listen to a Steven Curtis Chapmen song from my CD player, and I would listen to a Marilyn Manson song from her CD player. I remember being a little hesitant. After all, Marilyn Manson was said by the church to be the supposed anti-Christ. He had weird contact lenses, wore a body suit, and spoke through screamings and hisses. Well, I thought, I'll just listen, so I agreed to her deal.

So I put on her headphones and listened to Marilyn Manson moan and rage against whatever he was cursing, and to be honest, I really couldn't understand anything he was saying. A second song was halfway done when she stopped the music, surprised there hadn't been some hideous reaction. So I handed her my headphones, flipped it to track 6-Free on SCC's "Signs of Life" album, and pressed the play button. She began listening to the music describe prisoners in jail talking how they are living in freedom because of what God has done in their lives (in soppier words, yes), and when the chorus began talking about, "God's grace had taken off these chains and given me these wings", Susan tore the headphones off and threw them at me. "Taken off chains and given wings," she scoffed.

For something to be disturbing, it has to deeply go against what we hold precious. It wasn't Manson who was disturbing, it was Steven Curtis Chapmen?

I'm just realizing more lately how much truth is completely with God. I see how often I've gotten uptight about ideas which might put my faith in danger, but these facts are finally being heard, and my faith is (strange) more whole from them.

           7 October 2006 12:17pm                                                   

Walking down a sidestreet in Nairobi yesterday, a man in a suit approached me and asked if he could speak. He offered me a tract and began talking about how, one day, we will live with the wild animals. "Have you ever thought of that," he asked me? I told him my Armenian friend here hopes to pet tigers in heaven. "Yes," he said, thoughtfully gazing skyward, "we will be with the wild animals."

This tract was probably the funniest thing I had seen all week. It cover was a laughing African couple surrounded by bushel baskets of pumpkins and apples, behind them was a woman with flowing blonde hair riding a white horse, and behind the people was a log cabin set in front of a colorado autumn. Nestled into this pasture of plenty was its wild animal, not a lion of Kenya, but a tall full-antlered moose.