Category Archives: Journal

When the Olive Tree Fails

What are black swans? No, not the movie and not the waterbird. The term “black swan” is the current buzzword for those catastrophes that occur once in a lifetime, or once in a hundred years, or once in a thousand years or maybe even for the first time ever.

Black swans cannot be predicted in any definite sense. They can be natural like the earthquake in Japan or the recent Southeast tornadoes or the Mississippi floods. They can be economic like the Great Recession that began in 2008. They can include violent solar storms on the sun which may interfere with electric grids on the earth.

After a black swan event, the lives of those affected may change drastically. Such a catastrophe can change whole countries, as the earthquake did in Japan.

Some believe that efforts to avoid the natural rhythm of ups and downs make the inevitable event more catastrophic than it would have been. Flooding from the Mississippi River is supposed to occur fairly regularly, these people say. To attempt to prevent all flooding on the great river only assures that eventually a massive flood will sweep away even the flood controls.

The attempt to prevent all forest fires only means that a huge conflagration eventually will destroy a larger area than would many smaller fires.

Attempting to prevent all business collapses only leads to larger business collapses in the future, so the thinking goes.

I don’t have the expertise to judge these ideas, but I do wonder if we have come to believe that nothing bad is ever supposed to happen. We are never supposed to suffer, never supposed to be depressed, never supposed to be denied our wishes. We have difficulty accepting conditions like unhappiness, old age, death.

To accept that we are finite and vulnerable surely is a mark of wisdom. Spending our resources to fight winnable battles is worthwhile. To think we can conquer all misfortune with material wealth, however, is absurd. Better to invest in our spiritual lives and in our relationships with our families, friends, and communities. These will be of value when the next black swan visits.

 

Life and Death and Grace

I recently was hospitalized for knee surgery. It is almost always successful. As a writer, however, I am gifted or cursed with an imagination.

Suppose they damage my brain with too much anesthesia? Suppose I’m cut off from oxygen too long? Suppose they slip while cutting whatever they have to do to fix the knee? And so on.

The hardest is the point of no return. The anesthesiologist has politely explained exactly what will happen. He appears to be competent, but what do I know? I tell my husband goodbye. They wheel me down the hall. I remind myself that friends and loved ones are praying for me. I try to develop one of the characters in my latest novel in progress to keep my mind off what I have chosen to do. Then I fall off the cliff.

The next minute, as it seems to me, I’m waking up. They are cheerily asking me questions. I appear to be alive and in my right mind. My leg is still there, swathed in bandages.

Later, wheeled to my room, greeted by my husband, who tells me everything went splendidly, I am overwhelmed with gratitude. I thank God that I have access to competent physicians and to health insurance that means the access is affordable.

I am grateful for God’s gift of life. Yet, I ponder, as one is wont to do when confronted by unmerited grace, on both death and life, how one is more certain than the other, when we consider our life spans.

One day the operation won’t be successful or one night I shall go to bed and not wake up or I will be in an accident or my health will finally decline into death. When my time comes, I do not want extraordinary measures. In other words, while I rejoice today in my “new” life, I also know that death will be the final result of having been born.

Yes, as a Christian, I believe I shall live eternally but confrontation with my mortality in this life still sobers. God has given me a gift, a gift to be used, not squandered or buried in fear. Used as the good servants did in the parable of the talents, in risk and joy. The time is short.

 

The Cult of Death

Osama bin Laden’s obituary was featured in The Economist this past week. The article mentioned bin Laden’s famous dictum outlining the fundamental difference between his followers and Americans. Americans love life but his followers love death, he said. Apparently he believed this love of death would defeat those who love life.

Are those who love death stronger than those who love life? The signature act of death worshipers is the suicide bomber. Is this activist a type of courageous martyr, who also makes unwilling martyrs of those innocents he or she kills?

Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist, survived a Nazi concentration camp. Like the victim of a suicide bomber, he suffered because of a fanatic’s belief that his life was not of value. Frankl learned much from his concentration camp suffering, but he wrote in his classic Man’s Search For Meaning: “But let me make it perfectly clear that in no way is suffering necessary to find meaning … To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.”

Jesus did not wish to suffer on the cross. He did so because of love, because he wanted others to live. To die so that others may enjoy better lives, it seems to me, is the only reason to choose death. To love not only our life but the life of our neighbor is the beginning of the strength that defeats evil.

 

Mourning Osama Bin Ladin

I mourn Osama Bin Ladin. Not his death but his life. He wanted to purify the religion, we are told, of his native Saudi Arabia. He thought ideas brought into his country by Western nations were corrupting it. What an awful path he took in his attempt to carry out what in itself could have led to serious discussion and change within his country.

He could have chosen persuasion and a vocation as a peaceful spiritual leader, something like Gandhi. He could have reasoned and debated to bring changes. He could have kept open his own life to spiritual growth and change and listened to others with different opinions.

Instead, like too many people who desire change, he thought he had the right to kill people to bring about those changes. He wasn’t able to understand the rights of others to choose or to understand that no man, however close to God he thinks he may be, is God.

Perhaps humility is the first choice of those who would change others.

 

Meditation on a Saturday before Easter

Theologians may debate the meaning of Jesus’ sacrifice. For me, love is the only force that overcomes evil. Jesus’ willingness to die for us is the love that defeats evil. Love is the action that evil cannot answer.

In the sacrifice of himself, God throws out the challenge for evil’s ultimate defeat.

As we live out that love and compassion, we strike back as part of God’s army against evil.

Recharge

The geography and times in which I live can leave me tongue-tied in the expression of my faith. As readers of this blog know, I live in the Pacific Northwest. Its coffee house milieu is a setting for militant relativism. Speaking within it requires one to learn a new vocabulary. In addition, several friends carry remnants of a childhood religion that bordered on the abusive. Religious phrases that are meaningful to me remind them of intolerance and hurt.

The need to reset my spiritual compass is one reason I attend writers’ conferences that cater to Christian writers. This week I attended such a conference. As in similar professional gatherings, I networked with other writers, agents, and editors and attended seminars on writing. However, this one, set among California redwoods, recharged my batteries and connected me with my center.

On Palm Sunday morning the compass discovered its lost direction. As we sang about love and redemption, I wept as the divine touched me and restraints loosed for a season.

The Danger of Daydreams

Be careful what you dream about, what you wish for.

Once I had a good job as a computer programmer with a large company. The company reimbursed its employees for courses taken toward a college degree. What an opportunity, I thought, to advance my career. The career bored me, but perhaps advancement toward a higher position would vanquish the boredom.

Probably the company had in mind that those studying for degrees would earn them in computer science or business. I dutifully checked out computer and business courses in a local university catalog. Then I made a mistake.

What would I study if I studied what I really wanted to? It seemed innocent enough, thumbing through that catalog. I stopped at the section on geography and examined the courses—maps, other countries and cultures, and the ways different peoples on the globe interact. Before I knew it, temptation sucked me in.

When school began, I enrolled to earn a master’s degree in geography.

“Why are you studying that? What are you going to do with it?” people asked me.

“I don’t know what I’ll do with it. I just like it.”

After the school awarded me my degree, I flipped through a newspaper one day. A career columnist wrote about something called the U. S Foreign Service. The Foreign Service, I learned, was the name of the diplomatic corps of the State Department, the diplomats who serve in embassies and consulates all over the world.

A long shot. But, hey, I can dream, can’t I? So I applied, filled out reams of forms, took the exams, and met other requirements. (The State Department now has a website, making the process easier)

Somehow, (God was in it, I believe) I ended up as a consular officer in the U.S. Foreign Service, serving in places I’d only dreamed of visiting. And changing jobs and countries before I got bored. And continuing to learn in language courses and country studies. And witnessing some momentous events in history. I went to areas of the world I had prepared for without knowing it by studying those areas in my geography classes.

That dreaming’ll get you in trouble. Your heart may take over.

 

Creation of a Villain

Not long ago I entered the “Clash of the Titles,” a contest which matches passages from recent novels to determine the best fictional devices. Events have ranged from the best romantic scene to the best hook to pull readers into the novel. My particular contest called for the best “character description of an antagonist.”

I quoted a passage about Antun, the antagonist from my novel Singing in Babylon. In explaining how Antun developed in the story, I said he wasn’t anyone I actually knew but someone I would both fear and loathe.

Yet, as Antun’s character grows in the story, we learn that his brother was mistreated and killed a few years before. Antun lived to exact revenge. Like many “villains,” he had suffered a wrong. What made Antun a villain and not a hero is that he chose to react to the wrong by committing more wrongs.

As Jesus indicated in the Sermon on the Mount, to treat someone well who treats you well is no great feat.To overcome hurt, even to love the one who does ill to you is the badge of only a few and exemplifies what Jesus both taught and lived out.

 

Logic and Feeding Multitudes

We can’t even predict the weather accurately beyond a few days. The logical world we know as manageable by our current knowledge—math, physics, and so on—represents only a tiny part of the universe, according to something called chaos theory.

But chaos, so I understand, is not really chaos. It’s part of an order we don’t yet understand, like how to predict the weather.

That’s the way I look at Jesus’ teachings. They sometimes seem against our known wisdom. Giving up to have. Serving instead of accumulating. Putting our trust in what we cannot see rather than in this world’s material objects.

I see Jesus’ miracles in a new way, like the feeding of the five thousand. The disciples studied the crowd and wondered how they were going to feed the people, far from homes and fast food restaurants.

Jesus asked them what they should do.

They answered within the context of the world they knew. The money they had wouldn’t buy what they needed, even if they could find something to buy. They had the lunch a small boy had offered, but how ridiculous to think that could do anything.

Jesus had something else in mind. No one went away hungry.

Surely God knows of powers and systems, of universes and infinities for which we have no inkling.

 

Easter and a Novel

I knew it can’t be scientifically proven, but when Easter arrives later in the year, spring also seems to arrive later. So it is this year. Wasn’t it almost a month ago that bumps appeared on the apple tree limbs below my window? Yet they still have not budded, let alone blossomed.

But God, I trust, is there, in the growing, there in the waiting, which seems forever. A hard winter in some respects, or at least a long one. Lots of rain, more snow than the island’s usual vanishing trace.

Our church’s Lenten writer reminded us today of journeys into the unknown, like the Israelites in Exodus.We enter into the unknown and try to do the things we did before to overcome it, as some Israelites did in the wilderness—working more, going out on their day of rest to harvest manna and finding none. Instead, perhaps the waiting calls for more resting and pondering, less activity.

I have an idea for a story. I find it cannot be forced. Like this season, it comes in its own time.

 

Faith in a Time of Starvation

The life of faith, one of our church writers says in a Lenten devotional, is not for the timid. She discusses the seventh chapter of Luke’s gospel. In this passage, Jesus was astounded at the faith of a Roman commander. Across a chasm of cultural rank and religion, this soldier had faith that Jesus could heal someone he cared for.

God’s creation seems to be rebelling: volcanos halt our flying machines for days. Earthquakes demolish both struggling and developed nations with massive loss of life. Floods in Pakistan, droughts in Russia, unusual levels of snow in the U.S., all reveal our insignificance before such upheavals.

The fuel we pump from the earth has not been without cost: the Gulf Coast knew despair as a spill poured the black liquid for weeks on fishing grounds and beaches before it was halted.

The home, our supposedly one safe investment, triggered a huge recession when abuses led to collapse.

Rebellions take place in countries that supposedly would never have them. Will they lead to democratic governments or more terrorism? We don’t know.

I have often returned to a few verses in the Bible from one of the “minor” prophets, Habakkuk:

“Though the fig tree do not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation.” (RSV)

Faith in a time of starvation, physical or spiritual, gives courage that sustains and transforms.

 

Thoughts on Japan

So what’s the lesson for us in the horrible tragedy that shook Japan (literally and figuratively )? For me it’s the negation of the idea that life is always upwardly progressive, both personally and nationally.

Who goes through life without problems? Death of a loved one, a debilitating illness or handicap, or a job loss may afflict us quite suddenly. In Japan in a few seconds, the lives of multitudes, including whole families, were wiped out.

Of all people, however, Christians have the resources to deal with these traumas, nor should we act surprised when they happen. Read Jesus’s story in the gospels. It includes torture, crucifixion, and death. But it ends in resurrection and life.

The Christian call is not to a trouble-free life. Yes, we know times when God answers miraculously. But we are not always healed. We may suffer traumatic experiences. Physically, we all die. The best marriage in the world will end.

Yet Jesus, in the midst of a life far from the glory he knew since the beginning with the Father, enjoyed life. He knew what was coming, but he still attended gatherings and feasts. He never condemned having a good time with friends.

Jesus knew how to separate the transient, both joys and sorrows, from the eternal life and triumph that we are made for.

 

Out of Our Comfort Zone

In my current Pacific Northwest home, many do not view Christianity with the favor it enjoyed in my earlier life in the American South. Indeed, the religious landscape has changed everywhere. Judaeo-Christian beliefs are no longer taken for granted. In addition, I landed here through a circuitous route that included several years in Muslim-majority countries.

As might be expected, the journey tested my beliefs and gave me new insights. The process, however, strengthened core beliefs, bolstered by the agape love modeled by Jesus.

Perhaps my journey mirrors the journey of Christianity in America. We Christians were once favored; now we have to earn that favor. We have to compete with other views. Our Christian convictions must stand on their own merit.

In the long run, such a process may strengthen our faith.

 

Visas and Stereotypes

For a time in my life, I was a U.S. Foreign Service officer and interviewed foreigners from a North African country applying for temporary visas to visit the United States. Since the country at the time was in a period of instability (and still is), many of those being interviewed saw a “temporary” visa to Europe or the U.S. as a path to a better life. Go “temporarily” and then remain, illegally if necessary.

As one who knows many blessings, I approached my job with humility. How could I not sympathize with the applicants and their problems? However, U.S. law required me to give temporary visas only to temporary visitors. The rules for permanent residence were more stringent, requiring sufficient family or employer support, among other requirements.

I had to refuse many, including one man who evidenced little reason to leave the U.S. if he were given a visa. Shortly after the refusal, the man’s relative living in the U.S. called to complain. As we talked, I tried to assure him that I had given the applicant a fair hearing, but that U.S. law forbade me to issue in this case. The caller’s parting shot at me was that since I had a Southern accent, I must be prejudiced against his relative.

I thought it ironic that he himself prejudged me. His idea, I suppose, is that if some Southerners are prejudiced, all Southerners are prejudiced, presumably against—well, against anyone not a native-born American, I suppose. Ironic also because, in another function of my job, I awarded immigrant visas to those of his nationality which allowed them to live legally and permanently in the United States. The difference did not concern origin but whether or not the applicant met the required legal standards.

The heart of prejudice is the attitude that assigns a stereotype to an individual because of his or her accent or nationality or color or political preference or whatever. The list is long. How much better if we remove the filters of group and relate as one individual to another.

 

Memories of Bahrain

The unrest in the Middle East has spread to the small multi-island country of Bahrain, off the east coast of Saudi Arabia and connected to it by a causeway. My husband and I were married in Bahrain in a Christian church.

We met in Saudi Arabia the year before through a mutual friend at the U.S. consulate where I was assigned by the U.S. State Department. My future husband, a fellow American expatriate, worked for an airline. Our whirlwind courtship included weekend runs in the desert with other expatriates. Or rather, he ran. I walked with the slower group over the goat trails wending through the rocky terrain.

When the courtship led to engagement, we decided to fly to Bahrain to be married, since no church existed in Saudi Arabia to marry us. We took our vows before an Egyptian pastor in a Christian mission begun in the 1800’s. We spent our honeymoon in the (then) relaxed atmosphere of the tiny island nation beside the Persian/Arabian Gulf.

I have a book spread before me, one of those coffee table types, that we bought then. One of its many photos illustrates Pearl Square, where the demonstrators now gather.

 

Wilderness Wanderings

Wilderness is a popular theme in stories of great leaders. Abraham Lincoln came out of the wilderness to usher the United States through the Civil War. George Washington suffered in Valley Forge before eventually bringing American troops to success . Winston Churchill knew his wilderness years when he lost political power for a decade before emerging to guide Britain to victory in World War II.

Jesus is no exception. After all, he was afflicted like one of us. After the blinding glory of his baptism, the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness. Who hasn’t known wilderness days, sometimes years? Christian leaders like Charles Spurgeon and Amy Carmichael struggled with depression and illness over long periods.

What are these seemingly fruitless periods so many of us experience? We may ask the age-old question, where is God?

Jesus heard that his friend Lazarus was sick (New Testament, John 11), and we would expect him to rush off to heal his friend. After all Jesus healed in an instant others who came to him with illnesses. But though John tells us that Jesus loved Lazarus and his sisters, he stayed where he was for two days before finally traveling to the family and ministering to them. He loved them, but he stayed.
Oswald Chambers, in his classic My Utmost for His Highest, uses this passage to talk of God’s silence. The silence, Chambers says, is something God trusts us with. We receive no audible answer; perhaps we are in a wilderness of sorts and—nothing. Chambers suggests that the first sign of God’s intimacy may be his silence.

His silence isn’t a lack of love, but a tough love that trusts us.

 

Tide Tables and Moral Choices

I learn from my beach walks why we moderns so often forget God. We are not many of us farmers or fishers anymore. Our lives and livelihoods are no longer directly bound to sun and rain, weather and seasons, tides and storms—forces we cannot control.

When we are hungry, we buy food at the grocery store; when we want light, we flip a switch; when we want clothes, we shop at the mall. The temporary abundance of the industrialized world has deluded us into believing we are in control and can do as we want.

Before I stroll on the beach, I should consult a tide table. Otherwise I risk, if not actually drowning, a slippery climb up crumbling bluffs to escape rising water. For the tide, as the saying goes, waits for no one. And therein lies its fascination. No matter how the times of the tides inconvenience us, we must abide by their immutable goings and comings.

Consequences of moral choices may not intrude so abruptly as consequences of physical ones. The effects of moral choices can be subtle, over years of tide turnings. For decades we chose bigger cars, bigger houses, mindless entertainment, and instant relationships. Then one day we realize gas is no longer affordable, the house is being foreclosed, world events that we have ignored threaten our country, and the problems of our neglected children overwhelm us.

In my beach wanderings I consider the lessons of history, biblical admonitions, my own choices and consequences over a lifetime. I ponder and am convinced that God’s moral laws are as sure as the running and turning of the tide.

 

Memories of Tunisia

I lived in Tunisia, the small North African nation now in the news for its civil unrest, from 1997 to 2000. I served at the U.S. embassy in Tunis, the capital city. At that time, a tour there was an enjoyable assignment for U.S Foreign Service officers choosing the sometimes unsettled Middle East.

Young women dressed in the latest Paris fashions. I don’t recall any of them wearing a head scarf. Many were students in Tunisian universities. Our friends and family from the States visited us for trips to the Sahara and to stroll the nearby ancient city of Carthage. We took them to see the desert movie setting for the original Star Wars films. We boarded the train in downtown Tunis for the short ride to Carthage and a visit to the cemetery for American military personnel killed in Tunisia during Second World War campaigns against the Nazis.

The embassy during my assignment was located in downtown Tunis. On weekends, I would drive to the Embassy and park, then walk from there into the old city to worship in a centuries-old Christian church. The walk took me past a Muslim mosque and a Jewish synagogue. The Jewish settlement in Tunisia was ancient; some said it began with refugees from the conquest of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in 605 B.C.

During the week, work load permitting, I enjoyed riding the bus from my home to work. Once in a while, for exercise, I walked all the way. We ate in local restaurants and visited ancient ruins scattered throughout the country. Tunisia at that time was perceived as a stable, progressive country, its beaches a destination for tourists from Germany and other countries. Golfers played on the links in Tunisia’s mostly sunny weather.

Now the tourists are being evacuated. The U.S. embassy moved to a newer facility in a safer location out from Tunis after the terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in east Africa. I notice from news pictures that some of the women appear to be wearing head scarves. The train station where my friends and I took the train was burned by rioters. The Tunisian president fled to Saudi Arabia.

What happened? Why the sudden changes?

Unemployment and economic needs are cited as reasons. However, more than the economy is involved. Hard economic times can be endured if all perceive the suffering as shared. In Tunisia, for years, as average citizens struggled for decent jobs, the country’s rulers lived in luxury and used their power to grab wealth in corrupt business deals.

In the over half a century since Tunisia gained its independence from France, the country has had only two presidents, the last, Ben Ali, seizing power in a bloodless coup. Only one political party was allowed to rule, jailing and sometimes torturing any perceived opposition. Now the country has need of leaders not tainted by the old regime, but few have had experience in governing a country or understanding the democratic process.

How much better if those in power govern justly, not using their positions for their own gain, but understanding their responsibility to serve. Best if they rule in humility, allowing others to participate, realizing that no single group is all-wise. Both the political system and the economic one should be perceived as fair.

 

Lessons From Ignorance

When I was about three or so, I thought little people lived inside the radio that grownups listened to and made the voices that I heard from there. At that age, I had no capacity to understand radio transmission waves. Little people inside a radio seemed reasonable based on my knowledge that people made voices.

Perhaps that is why, today, I suspect that all our theories and discoveries and knowledge are akin to those of a three-year-old trying to understand how people speak through a radio. God gave us brains and the ability to explore with our minds. To do so surely is one of our joys. We should advance our ideas, however, with much humility. Whatever ideas we advance are finite explanations dealing with the infinite.

The only thing I’m certain of is the value of what the Greeks called agape love. Jesus the Christ, whose birth we just celebrated, modeled this love. It values another as one values oneself.

One can’t have agape love if one doesn’t love oneself. Do remember, Jesus didn’t want to die. Not for him the self-loathing of suicide bombers or those whose rage leads them to murder fellow workers or strangers in a crowded restaurant or school children. His death was for others, out of love.

Jesus loved life. He turned water into wine so a marriage feast might progress. He spoke of his Father’s kingdom with metaphors of feasting and banquets.

Jesus knew the Father’s love and could love himself and know himself of worth and carry out the purpose God had for him. It seems to me that’s the pattern laid out for us: somebody loves us—God, if we will accept it. When we realize that we are of value, we can love ourselves, then love God, then those around us, and, if we allow God’s love to grow in us, even our enemies.

 

Called TO as well as FROM

Jesus came, not only to call us FROM our sins but TO a new life of purpose, meaning, direction.

Whether from the lure of drugs or prostitution or from the entanglements of anger or envy, Jesus calls us away from them, surely, but he gives us new tasks.

Releasing the exploited from the grip of the exploiters is not enough. Many revolts against despotic regimes flounder once the despots are gone. Too often the liberators become the new despots.

To simply “free” people is not enough; they become like the person in Jesus’ parable who was freed of unclean spirits only to have other spirits take over in the vacuum left by the departing evil. We need nurture as well as salvation, to discover, in community, our particular gifts and talents, a lifelong journey.