Notes from the Overground

C-mail: Germination

2011-09-19T09:11:00.000-06:00

Howdy All!

Well, I know I'm late with the update, but I've got a good excuse: I'm getting married! Which brings me to my first point....

1. I'm getting married!! You might have noticed the status change on Facebook, but just to confirm, yes I am getting married to a wonderful young woman named Zulay (pronounced sue-lie). Zulay is originally from Colombia and has lived in Venezuela for the past six years. We first met when . . . actually, it's better if you read our stories on our wedding site. You can read about how we met, find details about the wedding, see a few photos and learn how you can bless us if you feel so led. The wedding will be held here in Venezuela on December 10th. Lord willing we can procure a visa for Zulay to visit the states for late 2012 so you can have a chance to meet her.

2. A quick update on the hillside. Reconstruction has thankfully been going well. Our main road has been rebuilt and is holding up like a charm. Retention walls are being constructed and life in general is back to normal. There has not been any more settling of the hillside even with recent heavy rains. Thank God for his protection! Some of the families around the country that lost their homes have now received new apartments or houses. However many families continue waiting. Please pray for a quick and efficient end to the massive construction of new residences destined for occupation by those still holed up in refugee shelters.

3. This June we hosted the first ever, Spanish speaking InnerCHANGE apprenticeship orientation. That's a mouthful and what it means is a big step for InnerCHANGE as we begin to see more Latins and international ministers join our ranks. We officially inducted our three team members, Arturo, Lay Yen, and Noretys as part of InnerCHANGE. Also present were two guests from Guatemala City who serve as principle leaders in a wonderful ministry in the barrio of La Limonada. A beautiful recent documentary called Reparando (Repairing) showcases their ministry as well as the difficulties facing the people of Guatemala. Overall, the event was a blessing to all participants and hosts. Our team was glad to be able to pioneer the first among many hoped for orientations for future Latin InnerCHANGE missionaries.

4. At the end of August we hosted a Vacation Bible School focused on the theme of the parable of the sower. At the beginning of the week 47 kids showed up and by the end of the week we had to close door after 85 had entered since we weren't sure if the house would structurally support any more weight. We were seriously blessed by wonderful volunteers from the community and two local churches. We have since continued to meet with the children weekly where we're doing interactive drama based bible studies.

5. This June I returned to the states for a month to spend some time with my parents and attend a conference. CRM sponsored a workshop led by David Watson on Church Planting Movements. I explain a bit about what Church Planting Movements are below. Our team has just started seriously working towards one of these movements and suffice it to say I'm excited and encouraged by what we have seen so far. None the less, the needs are great and the workers are few. Jesus instructed His disciples to pray for more workers. If you would like to be a regular intercessor for Caracas and Venezuela, please email me and I'll put you on a regular prayer update.

That's going to be it for this time. I miss you all and I would love to hear from you. If you would like to financially support InnerCHANGE's ministry in Caracas, you can do so here. If you'd like to pray, write me back and I'll get you praying! If you'd like a hug, ask a nearby friend or family member. Thank you for your prayers and gifts even amidst difficult times. May God abundantly supply all of your needs. Until next time, stay strong, seek the Lord and

Press on for Joy!
Cameron

It was a miracle he was alive. The only direct evidence of the trauma was a silver dollar sized bald spot in the middle of the back of his head where the bullet had entered. The indirect evidence was the wheelchair, a left arm that could feel but not move, and a similar prognosis of the left foot. Three of us were visiting him today: Carlos, Zulema and myself.

Carlos and Zulema are a middle aged couple from the community of San Pablito. Our team met them last March when we did a Bible study in their home. They invited us back and we've been studying the Bible with them for the past six months.

However, today we're in the house of Señor Martin. In early July he was doing some work on top of his house when a stray bullet nailed him square in the back of the head. His brother-in-law was close by and was able to get him into a car to take him to the closest hospital. The closest hospital didn't want to attend to him since all the doctors were on strike. Thankfully, the next closest hospital did attend to him where they managed to save his life. Even so, the doctors were sure he would never walk again. Now six weeks later, he's back home recuperating. We're able to read the story of Jesus healing the paralytic brought to Him by his friends. He likes the story and Carlos points out the miracle sitting right in front of us, and encourages Martin to starting reading the Bible. Martin seems open and receives a prayer for continued healing and restoration of his arm and leg. The next week when we return he tells us that he has started walking a little in therapy and has had some movement in his left arm.

This June, I had the blessing of being able to attend a workshop run by David Watson explaining the basics of CPM's: Church Planting Movements. I guess the best way to explain the methodology is by telling a bit about how David started a movement.

David was the star church planter for the IMB (International Mission Board) of the Southern Baptists. He planted churches in the states and all over Asia until one day the board sent him to plant churches among the bhojpuri people of India. The bhojpuri had been very resistant to the gospel and that region in India had earned the nickname of "the graveyard of missionaries." He began discipling six men in church planting and at the end of 18 months the six had been martyred. David was destroyed and due to various factors had to leave India. He wanted to give up missions, however God kept calling him back. Like a good Baptist, David told God that he would only go back if God showed him the how of planting churches directly from the Bible. Like the good God that He is, He was faithful to do so. After intensive study and preparation based on Matthew 28 and Luke 10, David soon returned to India and began to work anew among the bhojpuri people.

The vision was simple: reach all the bhojpuri with the gospel. Anything less wouldn't be acceptable. After two years of work, there were eight churches. The year after there were 48. The year after 148, then 327, then 526, then 1026, and so on. Now, more than fifteen years later, there are approximately 4 million bhojpuri baptisted believers meeting in well over 40,000 churches and the growth doesn't seem to be slowing.

What exactly is a CPM? A Church Planting Movement according to one author is "a rapid and exponential increase of indigenous churches planting churches within a given people group or population segment." The central idea is that of indigenous churches planting churches. That means that the missionary isn't planting churches, but rather groups of baptized believers creating more groups of baptized believers. The growth is exponential because every group is multiplying itself among those that are open to the message.

There are a number of key elements necessary in order to see movements like this take off, and I want to highlight just a few of them:

Person of Peace: When Jesus sent out his disciples ahead of Him during His ministry He gave them very clear instructions. Two of these are rather odd. The first is that they were not to greet anyone along the road. The second was that they were to find a person of peace (son of peace or a worthy person depending on your translation) and they were to stay with that person and not move around from house to house. It seems like Jesus had the idea that the message was not meant to be shared with just anyone, nor were the disciples to participate in public evangelism except as an act of protest. Rather, they were to focus on the person in the town that God had already prepared ahead of time. This person of peace is the person that opens their house to the disciples in order for them to receive the good news of the Kingdom.

In practice today, this implies that before anything else, the first step is to pray and look for a person of peace. After finding them, it means focusing on them and their household. They are the key to starting the process and once the process has begun, it means a commitment to that person and their household.

Jeff is a person of peace. I had met him a few times, and I got the feeling that he might be open to starting a bible study. I saw him one day in Zulay's church and we got to talking. He had just recently truly converted and was very open to the prospect of studying the Bible. I met with him on a Thursday one-on-one. The next time we met, he brought four friends. That following Sunday he brought two different friends to his church. He's started reaching out in his network of friends (his household) which has opened up many more people to God than I could ever hope to reach individually.

Obedience: As Jesus left this world, he gave a few final instructions to His disciples. One of those was to go making disciples of all nations, teaching them to obey everything that He had commanded them, and baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit. For most of my life, I figured what Jesus meant here was to go and teach; that's all I had ever seen modeled in my Christian walk. However, that is not what He said. He told is disciples to go making disciples, teaching them to observe all of His commandments. Teaching is simply information transfer. Teaching to obey is something radically different.

When I started discipling Jeff, we started with Genesis 1. After understanding what it said, we asked ourselves the question, "What can we do to live in accordance with this passage?" Jeff, after some very general statements, suggested that we not throw trash on the street, in fact we should pick it up off the ground if we see it. Sounds like a plan. Right then and there we started walking around and picking up bits of trash as we went. The next time we met up, Jeff, without any coaxing on my part, went around picking up bags and other bits of rubbish as we walked. His friends noticed and started doing the same.

Chains of Discipleship: During the conference David made a repeated point: A disciple makes more disciples, otherwise, they aren't a disciple. According to that definition, I have spent very little of my Christian life being a disciple. None the less, the point is valid. The chain starts with the Father. Jesus obeyed the Father, and He commanded His disciples to obey Him (Jesus). Paul lived a life imitating Jesus, and asked the Corinthian church to imitate him. During the Bible studies we ask the question: "Who needs to hear this story?" This has led us to three previously non-visited, yet open households in the community of San Pablito.

Discovery Process: The Bible studies in these movements are simple and easily reproducible. The person of peace or the leader in a household is asked to start leading the Bible study after two or three weeks. You might wonder how do you avoid heresy or takeover from someone that's a bit off theologically. One of the fundamental elements of the study is the importance of group discovery. As the group learns, they tend to self correct and see the passage for what it really says. Additionally, one simple question asked at the right time keeps everything on track. While reading Genesis 1 with Jeff, when we got to the part where God gave plants and trees to humans, he protested. "This is what all my rastafari friends use to justify smoking weed. They say that God gave them all the herbs for them to use." I asked him if that was what the passage actually said. He returned to the passage and found that God gave all the seed bearing plants and fruit producing trees for use as food. That's an important part of the story and Jeff was the one to discover it. He won't soon forget it because he himself found it in the passage.

The neat thing about a group discovery process is that the group can learn elements within the story that a single person would otherwise miss. One great example is from our friend Carlos. While studying the story of Abram, he asked a very simple question. "So why did Abram take his nephew with him when God told him to leave his family and his father's house behind?" Excellent question Carlos. It would seem that most of Abram's problems came as a result of bringing Lot with him. I, a college educated professional missionary, had never seen that before, but Carlos, an uneducated country boy that moved to the big city at nine years old who has a hard time reading, caught it.

While these are just a few of the key elements necessary to see churches take off and multiply, there is sadly one element which greatly impedes, if not kills the process: the established church. I've heard this from missionaries all over the globe and here I'm just now beginning to see why as well.

In Venezuela, there is the typical religious guilt that applies to all things related to God. Aka, to be good with God means going to something on Sunday morning. That applies even more so among those that have rotated through the evangelical world. Yet even beyond that, in this culture, there is a felt need for a priest. In the Catholic end of things, it takes the form of the father. In the Pentecostal, it takes the form of the pastor. In the animistic, it takes the form of the witch or witch doctor. In Santeria, it takes the form of the babalawo. In all these cases, there is the one person with spiritual and organizational authority running the show. By being in good with this person, you can be sure they will put a good word in for you with God. Of course I generalize, but the mentality is subtly present. Thus the organic nature of these church planting movements doesn't really provide the formal nature of a catholic or even pentecostal type of structure.

Thus it seems like these types of movements take off like wild fire in unreached people groups that have a marginal or nonexistent Christian presence, but not so much in people groups that already have some sort of cultural Christianity. The outcome in Caracas is yet to be determined. Are these groups that we're starting only going to become a reinforcement for the existing church, or will it develop to occupy a different space in the culture? My guess is that we will begin to see both develop as things progress. In the case of Jeff, his friends are starting to attend to Zulay's youth group. In the case of Carlos, he gets drug along to church with his wife, but he prefers meeting in his or a nearby house.

One interesting constituent which might become the deciding factor are the "apartados" or the separated ones. Evangelicals use this word for those that at one point were part of a church but later drifted away. I believe that these "lost ones" represent a significant chunk of the population. Many people in Caracas that have stopped attending church; not because they're through with God, but rather because they've been burned by the church. A leader that fell into sin, continued insistence on giving to an already rich pastor, internal fighting, incessant gossip, spiritual abuse, and hypocrisy mixed with legalism are elements that drive people away from established congregations. When talking to "apartados" I get the feeling that they still want to be with God, but due to serious wounding, they simply can't or won't bring themselves to return to the church.

One example is Jenifer. She lives just behind and above the house of Carlos and Zulema. Jenifer has been involved in just about every group you can imagine. She first dabbled with the Jehovah's Witnesses. Then she was a long skirt wearing, head covering, make-up shunning pentecostal. Then she got involved with the G12 (think Shepherding Movement mixed with multilevel marketing Latin style) and even lead two groups of 12. She's also left all of these groups. So when one day she came into Carlos and Zulema's house while we were there, she decided to join in on the study. She seemed to like it even though she was a bit perplexed as to why we weren't preaching, but instead simply reading the passage and trying to understand it. A couple weeks later she invited us all to her house and we got to meet her husband. Zulema led the study and Jenifer's husband, who isn't Christian, seemed to be impacted by it, but hasn't come to any more. Soon after that, he was tragically involved in a major traffic accident and has just returned home after spending a couple of months in the hospital. He received a major hit to the head, not to mention two broken legs, and it's unclear as to what point he will recover. Jenifer has completely isolated herself in the tragedy, yet we are praying for them both.

More than anything, the idea is simply to bring people into contact with the word such that they might hear from The Word and fall in love with Him as He reaches out to them. In the beginning studies with Carlos and Zulema, while we were part way through the story of Noah, Carlos blurted in: "Noah got drunk, didn't he." I smiled and told him "Yes he did, and you've been reading ahead!" He confirmed that he had. He said that many nights he would wait up until twelve at night when everyone else had gone to bed so that he could have some time alone to read the Bible. He's falling in love with this God of creation, of floods and of Abraham, and soon we'll be reading about this God that took on flesh and lived among us and even gave His life, yet God raised Him up.

This has encouraged me to keep praying for more workers. This is a process with a slow start but the exponential nature creates rapid growth with time. Even so numbers aren't important. What is important is the people receive God's love through His grace, and that they respond to Him in love as well. We're just now starting to see the first few seeds of this love germinate. I know better than to kid myself into thinking that all seeds make mature plants. But in the right soil, so I've been told, they'll multiply themselves quite well. Until the harvest,

Press on for Joy!
Cameron

C-mail: Roughing it

2011-04-12T20:03:00.001-06:00

Howdy All!

I'm glad to be writing you again from Caracas, Venezuela. The past months have been a bit grueling to say the least, but you can read more about that below in the story section. Thankfully, everything is back to normal, aside from the uncountable number of families who have lost their homes. But allow me to explain:

After my last update explaining the tragic affects due to the heavy rains in Venezuela, things got worse in our barrio. I explain what exactly happened to our hillside in much more detail below, but let's just say Murphy wrote the law and you know how that goes. At the end of it all, I'd guess about 200 homes were lost just below where our team lives leaving a huge scar on our hillside covered with rubble and dirt. For those of us who didn't lose their home, we are almost back to normal: we have running water, working transportation, phone and internet, trash collection, and the dust plague has abated. But most important is that no one lost their life due to the landslide and falling houses. Praise the Lord!
With so many of our neighbors having lost their homes and now displaced, we've continued to minister to them in the refugee shelters. Starting in December, the government set up these shelters all over the country to give temporary housing to the 130,000+ people nationwide who had lost their homes. As the months have rolled on, people have been moved and shifted different shelters all over the city and surrounding areas leaving our neighbors scattered to the four winds. We have been visiting weekly one shelter in particular where the greatest concentration of our neighbors are located. There are many needs and much opportunity for ministry in this and all such shelters. The need is great, but the workers are very few. Please pray for volunteers to come along side to help with and start new ministries in these shelters.
We have recently seen new movement with bible studies and house church groups in the community of San Pablito. I don't want to say too much for the moment, but we're pretty excited to see what is taking place. Please pray for new leaders to rise up to lead bible studies and for us to find households open to reading the bible. More on this in the next C-mail.
Team update: The Shorack family returned from their sabbatical late this January. It was wonderful to receive them back as they are a huge blessing to the team. The Shorack family, and the InnerCHANGE Caracas team, will be celebrating ten years on the ground in Caracas this November. Arturo and LayYen, the Venezuelan couple that joined our team in September, just had their first baby. Grecia was born on the 21st of February after an emergency cesarean. Even though she had defecated in her amniotic fluid, the doctors were able to get her out quickly enough for her to be completely healthy. They are all enjoying being a new family. Noretys, the young Venezuelan woman who also joined our team in September, is getting ready to start her preparation to minister with InnerCHANGE in Africa. Starting in July, she will be studying English in Trinidad for six months. Please email me if you would like information on how you can support the ministry of InnerCHANGE in raising up new and local missionaries.
Personally, I've been feeling swamped as of late. All the instability of the hillside, comings and goings on the team, and the continual adjustments here have been exhausting. At the same, I'm really excited about what God is doing here. At the end of April, our team is going to take a vision retreat to take time to listen to what God would have us chose as our vision. There are many exciting options and needs we can choose to work on, but we need God's help in guiding our process on how to focus our efforts. Please pray for strength and wisdom for me as leader and for our team as we hope to hear from Him.

That's going to be it for now. It is always so encouraging to hear back from you, even if only to know how to be praying. I wish you all the best in everything and miss you all dearly. Until next time, stay strong, seek the Lord and

Press on for Joy!

Cameron

In a nifty little class called Strength of Materials, a young engineering student learns that nothing in this world is rigid. That is to say, everything deforms, everything is elastic. When a force is applied to an object, the object experiences a stress. This stress causes a corresponding deformation in the object. When the stress is removed, the deformation also disappears and the object returns to its original state, assuming that the original stress was not sufficient to permanently deform the object. Some materials deform better than others, aka they are more elastic. For example, ceramics and glass don't deform much before they break. Metals on the other hand are rather elastic and deform nicely until they reach a critical stress at which the metal catastrophically deforms and soon fractures. However, there is a material that I would characterize as being one of the most elastic in existence. Over the past few months, I've had the privilege to both observe and be part of the human material as it underwent stress, the consequent deformation and the return to its original state once the stress was removed.

Things really started going bad back in early December. As I mentioned in my last update, many families had lost their homes due to the landslides. Even though they were continually shuffled around refugee centers and had to deal with serious loss of privilege, they were at times, and from a certain perspective, lucky. The government did an excellent preliminary job of getting people into shelters and getting them the needed resources for basic life. Additionally, the Venezuelan people assembled generous outpourings of donations, but in this particular case, they were largely unnecessary and many donated items never reached their intended recipients. Many cultural groups, churches and other programs flocked in droves to the shelters to do programs and sports with the children. However, since December, their presence has been minimal to nonexistent. In our section of the city, which was heavily hit, schools were converted into temporary shelters with each classroom housing 8-15 families. The loss of privacy was difficult. Women were given shifts to cook for the entire shelter and of course, when someone else cooks for large numbers of people the food never comes just like you want it, nor is it even what you might care to eat. The loss of good food was difficult. In the shelters large lines of students and those with jobs formed outside of the bathrooms at four in the morning. The loss of time for showering, shaving, and everything else was difficult. I won't even mention the paper work involved with beginning the process of securing a new residence, but the loss of time was difficult. The word that has floated around is that most families in the refugee centers are going to be there at least a year and a half before all the houses and apartment buildings are completed.

For those of us on the hill that didn't lose their homes, things were tense. Although the rains had stopped, the hillside continued to move. Everyday, the ground would sink about half an inch. I wish I had a stop motion camera to track the movement of the ground. One road in particular was divided in half by the settlement. Walking up the hill, the section of the road on the right did not move at all. While the left slowly settled little by little until a 15' foot cliff divided the two halves. Check out the attached pictures to see its progress down the hill. It's easy to write about now looking back over the course of the months, but during the process it was a little disconcerting.

At my last update, a post had fallen blocking traffic up the hill. This meant that everyone who lived higher up the hill had to walk to their homes. Thankfully the post was soon repaired and transportation continued on as normal. However, just weeks later, precisely on Christmas day, a huge hole opened up swallowing the post and asphalt alike, leaving only half of the narrow road in tact. Transportation by car and jeep became impossible and the only way to come up the road was by foot or motorcycle. Those of us that lived higher up on the hill were now left with two possible routes to get home: 1. The adventurous route by the gaping hole in the aforementioned road (which also had a broken sewer pipe pumping raw sewage down the mountainside) or 2. Taking a very narrow set of stairs that connected to another road. Many people chose the stairs that first day. However, the not so local criminals from a neighboring sector took advantage of the situation and chain robbed about 60 people over the course of an hour, at which point a more local criminal came to the defense of his neighborhood and chased off the offending criminals with a pistol. After the robbery everyone decided to take the route by the gaping hole.

A meeting was organized on that Sunday to address the situation. Held in the parking lot of a textile factory located just below the gaping hole, we were there informed that the gaping hole was not only a risk to our transportation and neighboring houses, but also to the water pump that services the upper part of our hillside. The hole (located directly in front of the pump station) was bound to grow and and the pump would have to be moved. There were uncertainties of when the pump would be moved, when it would be reinstalled, of how many more days of running water we would have to fill up our tanks, etc. There were also questions about what would be done about the crime and if there would be police stationed on the stairs. These questions were not addressed at the meeting. There were promises to build an alternate road behind the factory that would connect to the rest of the barrio. There were calls for everyone to bring their trash down to the main road below the gapping hole so that it could be collected there instead of disposing of it where the trash trucks no longer had access. There were also a number of women who were not satisfied with the responses of the officials and decided to protest the next day.

My teammate KT and I decided to participate in the protest. What happened there is a story in and of itself, but suffice it to say, the protest, like many protests, was successful, completely unnecessary, and a flop, all at the same time.

There were still issues with the trash. Thankfully everybody collaborated in carrying their trash with them down the hill to the indicated locations, but there were still piles of rotting trash that had not been collected for days left the meeting. One day after buying a few items to make a rainwater collection system, a neighbor asked me if I could help bag up the trash. The textile factory had agreed to let smaller trash trucks pass through the factory on an alternate road to collect the trash, as long as it was bagged up.

I spent that afternoon with a small and eclectic group of neighbors bagging up the dump on the street. Those present included the family of the welder across from us. While he worked with the shovel, his wife and children asked for donations from passersby to buy garbage bags. Also present was the taxi driver whose wife is in charge of the drug trade in our neighborhood. Also present were the moms in the neighboring houses concerned about the plague of flies bothering their children. Also present were a few young men who, as they passed by, decided to throw their strength into the matter. Also present were a couple of crack addicts that live and work on the street and helped out. Also present were 10-20 million maggots about which I don't particularly care to write. After about three hours or so, we had all of our trash bagged up and ready to be taken away. Present in the shower that night was a bottle of bleach.

New years eve was very low key this year due to the lack of water. The aforementioned pump was turned back on the day after the meeting, but a hole in one of the pipes prevented it from reaching anyone. From that moment on, no one would receive water by the traditional means of the pipes in the ground. For the moment however, everyone still had their water tank. The race to save water was on. In my "apartment" I have access to running water inside my house only if the aforementioned pump is on. When the pump is off, I get my water from a tank just outside my door. This tank is shared between four renters, including myself, and their respective families. The tank ran out within days. Even so, we did all we could to save water. The drain pipe below the sink was disconnected to collect the water from washing the dishes for flushing the toilet. Washing clothes was out of the question and thankfully my girlfriend was glad to help me out in that area (although in the barrio where they live, they only get water every two weeks to fill up their tank.) The essentials of showers and doing the dishes became possible with progressively smaller amounts of water.

Eventually everyone's tanks ran dry and it became necessary to get water the hard way. In actuality, there were many hard ways to get water. The first thing to understand is that there are anywhere from 60-45,000 people that live on our hill. When the pump was removed it left at least 20,000 residents without water. The second thing to understand is that our hill is a real hill, and a steep one at that. So the people that live at highest point were going to be in very sore shape if they had to carry water up themselves. But no need to worry, somebody (and no one is really sure who organized this; there were many officials running around with badges of ministries that no one had heard of before) organized to send water trucks up the hill. They managed this with the help of the textile factory that let the trucks pass through the working factory that gave them access to the alternate road. And even then, this "road" has parts that are at least a 30% grade (see the photo if you don't believe me). The water trucks were destined for the highest sectors on the hill. This was frustrating to many who didn't receive water and soon a few trucks fell pray to armed gangs on motorcycles that directed the trucks to their section of the hill. The national guard quickly stepped in and began to escort every truck coming up. I know one well organized sector in particular received water twice a day and had plenty to spare. However, this left the families lower down on the hill waiting, and waiting, and waiting for some truck driver to have mercy on them and fill up their barrels. It was not uncommon to see a group of women wait from 7 in the morning to 9 or later at night, standing guard over a regiment of empty 55 gallon drums. For those not gifted with patience like that, we got to carry the stuff. Everyday a steady stream of men, women, and children pushed, pulled and heaved gallons and gallons of water. 3-4 gallons in a wheeled basket were the choice of children. Men on foot without dollys, like myself, carried 5-6 gallon containers on their shoulder. Those with dollys would mount a few 5-6 gallon containers or jump straight to a large 10 or 15 gallons. Those blessed with cars and trucks used anything and everything. The comunal house in a lower sector that still had access to running water offered their hose at first and then individual homes began to share their water with the dry.

Carrying water every to every other day was good exercise for a week. After a week it turned grueling. It made me think of the proverbial African women that walk for miles every day carrying water on their heads. We weren't walking for miles, but we were carrying it uphill. Neither did any of us know, nor learned how, nor even tried to carry it on our head. All that to say, it wasn't fun. Nor can it be for the women in Africa I imagine.

As the days went on, the ground kept falling just a little bit everyday. The area around the hole began to worsen. Asphalt began to crumple and break apart. Electric and phone lines hung inches off the ground as telephone poles bent and gave way. The houses across the street from the hole began to crack and show fissures at the corners of the windows. One house built on columns fell down in one piece and landed like a trailer in the aftermath of a tornado. Frequently you could hear the structure of the houses cracking as you walked by causing screams and frantic scrambles from the pedestrians. And yet, most chose to take this Indiana Jones route instead of the stairs. The fear of getting robbed or shot was still much greater than that of getting hit by a falling brick or being swept away in a landslide.

Our valiant team of three began to get in really good shape by this time. Walking up and down the hill carrying groceries proved to be wonderful exercise. But we're young; it was the elderly, disabled, and the unhealthy that suffered greatly. The transportation game changed daily. Sometimes there were jeeps in certain locations, other times not. As the hill continued to fall, previously usable roads became impassible and the routes of the jeeps changed. For where we live, it made more sense to walk.

I know this all sounds like a bad Monty Python skit, but things continued to worsen in the same vane. It was about that time that the water works started excavating to place a new pipeline. One Friday morning, a machine with a saw blade the size of a small kiddy pool magically appeared. The still morning was cut to shreds as the carbon tipped teeth dug into the asphalt and lower substrate. The street and all nearby houses filled with dust. The excavation continued for another two weeks, and inundated our street with a heavy yellow dust. Our office transformed into tutankomen's tomb. Jeep drivers and pedestrians alike donned facemasks giving a strangely medical quarantine feel to the street. That is of course, if you could see people's faces through the thick dust fog.

It was also about that time that the textile factory graciously opened its doors and allowed transportation to come through the middle of the factory to access the provisional road with the 30% or more grade. It was a nice gesture, but in practice it left much to be desired. The factory would randomly close their gates leaving long lines of cars waiting to pass for hours. Many people returning from work at night had to find other places to sleep as it became impossible to find transportation up the hill after 8 o'clock in the evening. The other complication with the steep street was that very few cars had the strength get up the road. And forget about it when the road was wet. Traffic up and down became a dangerous journey. Sadly, one jeep lost its brakes on the way down and claimed the life of an elderly woman in the resulting crash. By this time, the gaping hole had taken the entire street and the only accessible pedestrian route was by the stairs. Thankfully the national guard had finally stationed a few soldiers along the stairs, but even then, robberies around the stairs were common place.

By then it was early February, and I took a much needed spiritual retreat I had put off since November. When I returned I didn't recognize the hillside. Heavy machinery had come in and torn down cracked house after crumbling house. The gapping hole was no longer a gapping hole, but a field of rubble. I heard stories of people laying down in front of menacing machinery ready tear down their beloved houses of 40 years that they had built with their own hands. I don't have an exact number, but I would guess around 200 homes were ultimately lost.

It would be a few days after that until the new pipeline would be finished. It would be another two weeks until the water came back with full pressure. It would be another two weeks after that until the machinery had cleared a new road and transportation began to flow as before. And now, aside from a bit of dust from the continual excavation of the hill, things are back to normal.

I've honestly had to think pretty hard about all that happened to be able to remember and then write this. Truth be told, the whole incident seems like a dream that never really happened. Even in the midst of it all, we just adapted. We were all in the same boat and we got used to it: the lack of water, carrying the water, the dust, the trash, the walking, the falling houses, the horrible transportation, etc. It was all just another thing like the rain. And now that it's all over, we're used to that too.

Interestingly enough, no one really talks about what happened. It's not a topic of conversation, precisely because we've all forgotten about it. There are more pressing things to adjust to. The stress is gone and we have elastically adjusted back to where we were at before this whole mess started.

That isn't to say that the stress wasn't, well, stressful, because it really was. Life without stress is much easier, but it isn't necessarily happier or more fulfilling. A stressful life needs to be a shared life. Not shared verbally per se, but shared in experience. The fact that everyone lived the same difficulties made it possible to keep on living, and also return to normal once it was all over.

I wish I could say that I'm hit with a grand sense of gratitude every time I turn on the faucet, or every time the trash gets taken away but honestly I'm not. I'm pretty good at forgetting what things were like. The reality is that no matter how horrible or wonderful the circumstances, the extremity or blandness of the situation, the absolute misery or absolute tranquility of the environment, we can adapt to it and we can live in it. There will always be something to complain about, and there will always be something to be thankful for. That's a choice we all need to make, and it's a choice made much easier together.

Until next time, stay strong, seek the Lord and

Press on for Joy!

Cameron

Protest

2011-04-11T15:39:00.003-06:00

Here's the story of the protest that blocked la redoma on the 27th of December.

My teammate KT and I decided to join the protest. I felt that the authorities were doing as best a job as they could with planning and rebuilding the infrastructure, but they were completely ignoring the issue of crime. There was a rumor that when someone asked the police to come and watch over the stairs, they responded that the community should hire its own delinquents to patrol the stairway.

The protest was my first such event and was an excellent learning space. First, I learned that groups doing something out of the ordinary need strong leaders. Strong leaders are natural leaders. That is to say, they can't help but be leaders regardless of the their own disposition; everyone looks to them for instruction and inspiration. Remove the leaders and the movement dissipates. There were two such natural leaders present at the protest. The second thing I learned is that many times natural leaders are clueless as to their status as natural leaders.

The protest blocked off a major intersection at the base of our hill that feeds the local market place (la redoma) and serves as a major hub for our section of the city. The police showed up immediately, and very naturally ended up being directed towards the leaders. The police briefly chatted with the leaders asking for the demands of the protest and then quietly took a spot in the shade to make sure everything proceeded peacefully. When motorcycles tried breaking the human blockade, one of the leaders asked the police for a caution tape and was quickly rewarded with a full roll. The blockade of the intersection lasted for about three hours. It came to an end when the leaders, obviously unaware that they were the leaders and moral support of the group, went to shore up a road block at a different location and left the main location leaderless. Soon a group of people, who knows who they were, showed up at the scene and began to negotiate with us to unblock the road, and in spite of our verbal protests, completely undid the blockade while the leaderless protesters were left wondering what exactly had happened. A very anti-climatic protest over all. One interesting cultural note, almost all of the protesters were women. Our little group vacillated between 20-40 people, while an equal number of men sat by watching. We later figured that blocking the road as a man can be very dangerous as it leads to many confrontations with other men on motorcycles which can turn deadly in a not so public setting.

The blockade turned out to be actually counter productive in the end, but I chalk it up to the ever present chaos of groups. The blockade first started in a different location much earlier in the morning. A high ranking minister in the government deployed to the scene of the protest immediately and then climbed the hill to survey the damage with two of our neighbors.The arrival of the minister and his action up on the hillside were of course was completely unknown to us. The president of Venezuela, interestingly enough, was immediately informed of the blockade we had made (after the initial protest) and called the minister asking why in the world people were still protesting if he was already on the scene. The poor minister, who to the best of his knowledge thought that the protest had ended, could only respond that all the protesters were part of the opposition against the president. It was a lie to cover himself, but what was to be done? He didn't know we were protesting, and we didn't know he had already showed up. What's more, the people who knew that the minister had arrived were not natural leaders, and even if they had tried to stop the blockade, it would have come to nothing. We only found out these details of the story a week after the protest.

So, like I said, the protest was successful in that it caught the attention of the authorities and they responded, unnecessary in that the protest had already achieved its goal when it started the blockade, and a flop in that it was a unresolved ending with no clear outcome.

C-mail: Extended Emergency

2010-12-10T19:50:00.000-07:00

Howdy All,

No reason to delay; time is short and its been way to long since the last update. You'll soon see why its been so long in coming. Here's what we've been up to:

1. In early October we were privileged and honored to have three Venezuelans join our team: Arturo, Lay Yen and Noretys. Arturo and Lay Yen were married last year in December and are both from Caracas. Arturo has a huge heart for and many years of working with the indigenous peoples in the jungle of Venezuela. He hopes to setup a missionary training base in the jungle over the course of the next few years. Lay Yen is studying art in a public university and is excited about the jungle, but her big priority for the moment is her pregnancy and giving birth to their baby girl in early February. Noretys, also from Caracas, has a dream to go to Africa and desires to ultimately work with Muslims and other unreached people groups. She'll be with us on the team while raising funds, learning english and preparing to go. Please pray for us as we are now a bi-cultural team which brings its own benefits and challenges. We give thanks for the blessing it is to see these three Venezuelans as part of InnerCHANGE, as that has been a hope of the team in Caracas for years. Please pray for me as team leader as I learn how to work with and mentor and be mentored by these three talented missionaries.

2. This August we hosted and ran two vacation bible schools in our neighborhood. Each ran for a week and we had tons of kids from ages of 2-12 pass through our doors. In the course of the two weeks, we had well over 100 children participate. We did the standard fare of games, crafts, bible drama, a field day, and all mixed in with snacks and drink. The VBS was a blessing to the parents and children of our hillside, even though it was an exhaustive labor of love on our part.

3. The most exciting bit of the VBS was the participation of some volunteers from our neighborhood. My teammate KT decided to invite a number of youth 13 or older to help out with the details and crowd control of the VBS. It turned out to be an excellent idea as more and more youth volunteers showed up every day. By the end of two weeks, we had a consistent group of 12 that had converted into a little youth group of sorts. We were continuing to meet, hang out, put on events for the neighborhood and begin the slow process of discipleship. But......

4. Venezuela has been hit HARD by the rains this year. And when I say hard, I mean national scale emergency flooding and landslides. As it stands for today, there are over 110,000 people located in government shelters because they have either lost their homes or their homes are no longer inhabitable. The entire country has been affected and the coastal areas have suffered the worst. I don't honestly know how many people have died, but it has been very few thankfully, especially considering the widespread nature of the tragedy.

5. In Caracas, the barrios are at extreme risk as they are built on steep hillsides. Our side of the city has seen the most damage. Our particular hillside has suffered it's fair share as well. The effects came over a long period of months but have been dramatic none the less. As far as I know, no one has lost their life, thanks be to the grace of God! Here's a brief rundown on the current situation:

--The community 16 de Julio (the 16^th of July) where all of the youth volunteers come from has been evacuated. Parts of the hill have fallen off (taking houses with it) while in other parts the houses are left with large cracks in their walls and foundations.
--Two of the main roads up our hillside have been closed as they are no longer safe. The only remaining road is in a bad shape.
--Since the only remaining road is at risk, it has been closed to all heavy transport. This means that there has been no trash collection for at least the previous three weeks. The other troubling factor is that there is no access to gas (everyone here buys propane tanks to cook with).
--Last night a utility pole fell down by itself since the dirt underneath it gave way. The fallen pole blocked access up the main road until late this afternoon.
--Our team members live in three different houses/apartments. One of them is in a section of the hill that is in high risk and the other two are currently ok (actually just at "risk" instead of "high risk"). Our teammate who lives in the structure in high risk is currently on vacation, thankfully.
--The attached photos give an idea as to what things look like here, for today at least. Some places are complete disaster zones while the majority are largely unaffected. So in a big way life goes on as normal while others have lost everything.

6. The government has done an excellent job of getting people in to relocation shelters. The displaced families are receiving decent meals and donations of clothes and other necessities. Still, many of the shelters are crowded and people have to wake up very early to stand in line for the bathroom to bathe and prepare for work. The government has said that it could take up to a year and a half to find/construct housing for everyone in the shelters. The people on our hillside that have left their houses are located in three different shelters around our section of the city. Since we have connections with many of these families, we were able to receive many of their goods that they would have lost otherwise (appliances, furniture, etc). We have also been able to open our house to help them with washing their clothes. Our team has been visiting and coordinating donations from individuals and churches to different shelters.

7. Right before things got really bad (or even knew they were going to get bad), we held a Christmas celebration for the families of the youth volunteers. It was a beautiful celebration to bless them and their families with the traditional Venezuelan Christmas dinner: Hallacas, chicken salad and pan de jamón (rolled ham bread). Many of the mothers were highly appreciative noting that they had never had such a beautiful night in their lives. Sadly enough, two days later, they were forced to leave their houses.

8. Please pray for the following:
--No more rain! Thankfully we've had little rain since the start of December, but things keep shifting underground and leaving more houses at risk at the surface. Any additional rain will put everything at risk.
--For God to hold up the remaining parts of our hillside, for the main road to remain open and for a quick resolution to the trash issue.
--For our team as we are tired and there are a lot of necessities and possibilities in front of us.
--For those in the shelters, especially for security as there has been rumors of children being molested.
--For those who remain in our hillside in situations of risk, that they would be willing to abandon their at risk housing instead of sticking it out stubbornly.

--For everyone that is a bit traumatized by all the events and the uncertain future of our hillside.

We all appreciate your prayers and I hope to hear from you all soon, although it might be a while before I can respond. Also, if you would like to make a donation to help with the costs of the ministry we're doing, including a special Christmas celebration for the families in the shelters, you can make a donation to our Caracas team fund and put "Rains" in the additional information section. Until then, stay strong, seek the Lord and as always

Press on for Joy!

Cameron

Of all the natural disasters, flooding is certainly the most boring. Fires are mesmerizing, earthquakes leave swaths of collapsed buildings and daring rescues, and tornadoes are worthy of movies unto themselves. But water is simply just water. We see it, we drink it, we bathe in it daily. So the novelty of the stuff wears off pretty fast; a factor which makes it all the more destructive.

In 1999, Venezuela suffered one of the worst natural disasters in recent times when days of straight rain brought mudslides screaming down the mountain called El Avila towards the coastline. Between the coastline and the mountain stood the resort and beach capital of Caracas, La Guiara. The mudslides went straight to the beach taking houses, condos, cars, and people with them. The slides killed around 30,000 people and to this day, the area has not recovered it's former glory.

So when the rain started heavy this September, everyone was both thankful that the drought of the previous year had come to a definitive end, and also extremely worried. The ground became saturated and the community of 16 of Julio, built on a steep hillside landfill just below our barrio began to show signs of problems. Some walls of houses collapsed letting tons of dirt into families' kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms. The stairs connecting the barrio the began to settle and sat off kilter. By the time the beginning of October rolled around, some families had already fled to government shelters, but the majority were determined to stay. "Hasta la muerte!" (Until death) they said.

October was thankfully dry, but November was not. Things came to their climax on Monday, the 29th of November with hours and hours of constant rain. That evening, the community of 16 de julio stood huddled under umbrellas and staircases. A few large, abandoned trucks were threating to fall onto the houses and shacks below. As we waited there in the rain with the people of 16 de julio, the local consejo comunal (community counsel) organized and opened up it's doors to receive the families most at risk. We brought down as many mattresses as we could so that people would have something to sleep on that night, and as it turned out, many nights afterwards. We stayed with the families until one in the morning drawing and playing with the kids, and talking with worried mothers. Amazingly enough, the evacuated persons were not worried about themselves, instead they were worried about the rest of the people in the community that were still in potential danger.

The next day, the official government numbers revealed almost 27,000 people across the nation had been received into quickly established shelters. Now, less than two weeks later, the entire community of 16 de Julio is all but evacuated; it's residents who were previously defiant are now among the now 110,000 people in shelters in the long wait for the chance to start anew.

I wish I had more time to write, but for the moment, I'll have to limit myself to one story from the community of San Pablito to illustrate what happened there on the 29th, and the unassuming bravery of one of it's residents.

Rosa is quite the character. Rather obscene, loud, and overweight, accompanied by a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, she tends to make a scene wherever she goes. She's from the community of San Pablito which is one of the most infamous, although not necessarily the worst, barrios in our part of town. All the same, she is a hero.

As I had mentioned, on Monday the 29th, it rained everywhere. San Pablito is built in a very steep ravine and can receive huge quantities of water from the mountainside above at any given moment. So Monday saw the small little stairway that serves as the main thoroughfare of the community under a rushing torrent of water full of mud, rocks, and pacifiers. Pacifiers? The houses highest up the hill were flooding and the residents were seeing their scant possessions whisked away by the water. Rosa lived in front of and thankfully above, one of these flooding houses.

She had just finished an exhausting day of washing and cleaning which necessitates the hooking up of a water pump to the main water line closer to the center of the barrio to get water to the house. As she told it, all she had left to do was to iron when the rain started. Even in spite of her tiredness, when the water from the ravine began to fill the house below, she jumped into action without thinking. Kicking off her sandals, she jumped into the torrent between her house and the other. Once inside the house, she waded through the thigh deep water looking for the people inside. Everything was floating, she said, in dark opaque water: the mattress, cups, plates, diapers, bottles, and so on. On the floating mattress was an eight day old baby girl. At the newborn's side, was a toddler of just over a year of age. Rosa grabbed the closest thing she could to wrap up the newborn. Swaddling the infant in a black plastic bag and holding her in one arm, she instinctively grabbed the sibling in another. Rosa turned around to find the baby's young mother sitting in a chair more than waist deep in the water and very startled. Rosa threw the young mother over her shoulder (only later did she realize that the mother had undergone a cesarean and was very much still recovering) and wading through the water filled house and torrent covered steps, brought all three to her house. She cleaned the newborn and had her soon wrapped up with the pajamas of her own toddler daughter. She was later in tears and hyperventilating coming down from the adrenaline, and wondering how in the world she had the strength to save all three of them, much less cross the newly formed river in front of her house. Soon after, a neighbor came by screaming. She was a relative of the young family that had just been saved. Rosa quickly informed her that she had them in her house and was taking care of them. Rosa didn't tell us the most amazing part of the story until we were just about to leave. Up to the moment of the rescue, Rosa and this family hadn't been talking for well over six months. Long ago, there had erupted some problem between the two houses that was still not resolved. However, in the right moment, God gave Rosa the grace to save her enemy.

Rosa is no saint, but I'm continually amazed how the most unsaintly continually perform the most sacrosanct acts. I'm also incredibly saddened at the slowness of the "saintly" here in Caracas to respond. While visiting San Pablito, we prayed with Rosa for God's protection over the barrio. Together, we gave thanks for His protection over the community and how He had used Rosa to save the lives of her neighbors. She gave thanks that no one had died, and we asked for His goodness and protection for those in the shelters.

Very early one Thursday morning a couple of week before the 29^th, a number of us were independently awoken in the early morning with a calling to pray. It was raining cats and dogs and the fear that something bad was about to happen was thick. We were all praying, each individually unaware that our teammates and various members of a local church were all doing the same. I finally feel asleep at around four in the morning while Arturo and Lay Yen went outside soon after the rain had stopped. An electric orange sky painted with a full double rainbow awaited them. They took some pictures, but the camera couldn't capture the entire wonder. Arturo has taken it as God's promise over this section of the city, that although the ground around us might fall, His promise is greater. We give thanks that there have been so few deaths in the nation and none in our part of the city even though the rain has been at least double of what it was in 1999. We give thanks we still have a place here in the barrio that looks solid for the moment. We give thanks that people have a place they can go when they do lose their house. We give thanks that God has used us in very small ways. We give thanks for His protection and goodness. And Lord willing, we'll keep giving thanks for a long while more. Until that time, keep praying, trust Jesus and

Press on for Joy!

C-mail: Church

2010-06-08T19:09:00.001-06:00

Howdy All,

As always, I hope you are doing well and good. It's been a full few months here in Caracas. There's no way to give a complete update of all that's been going on, nor could I try. But, here are some highlights. Be sure to check out this first item as it has some important information for this summer!

1. I'll be back in the states in July. CRM is holding a world wide conference which everyone in CRM will be attending. Before the conference I'm going to be with my family for two weeks in Texas. Afterwards, I'll be in LA/SoCal from the 24th of July to the 29th of July. From the 30th to the 4th of August, I'm going to be in Boise, ID. If you live in any of those locations and would like to host a missionary in your house or pick one up/drop one off from the airport, please let me know. Also, if you'll be around and would like to catch up, send me an email as I'll be without a cell phone during this trip. I look forward to reconnecting with a number of you soon!

2. Drought and rain. Venezuela went through, and is just now recovering from a severe drought. Water and electricity were rationed for months and all the while it was hot, as in the hottest season that anyone could remember. An idea fell into my head in January, and although it took until the end of March for all the bits to finally fall into place, the idea became concrete. I've put together a presentation presenting the topic of creation care for local churches and community groups. And because no one learns by just sitting on their butt and listening, with the help of some neighbors, I've put together a bicycle generator so that during the presentation people can see how much effort it takes to light up a light bulb. See the attached picture. I've done three presentations thus far in different churches discussing the necessity of living out creation care and have a lot more interest in the presentation from other groups and churches. Venezuela consumes more energy per capita than any other South American country and has a long way to go in order to learn how to adequately take care of the environment. I'm hoping that these presentations help motivating God's people to take care of His creation.

3. A few months ago, a neighbor of ours came to us ready for a change. He had been addicted to crack for 16 years, and he saw the damage he was causing to his mother, girlfriend, and himself. Thankfully, a Venezuelan friend of ours has excellent contacts with a nearby rehab center (therapeutic community as they call it) and we were able to help our neighbor through all the necessary hoops and steps to get him enrolled. He's been in for about three months now and is loving it, loving Jesus, and is super excited about the new life that awaits him after rehab. Our team has been in contact with him for years and it's beautiful to see so much love finally take root and blossom. Please pray for his time in rehab and that God would seal him with his protection and grace.

4. Just before Holy Week, we hosted a passover celebration with our neighbors. Each InnerCHANGE team hosted passover services in their respective contexts. Our small office was filled with neighbors and good friends to participate the celebration. The time went beautifully and the ceremony serves as an excellent vehicle to teach and learn about God's saving power, past and present.

5. During Holy Week, a neighbor's family decided to perform a "via crucis", or stations of the cross, live in their barrio. The neighbors turned amateur actors were gathered together, dressed and then paraded down the highway and up the hillside where Jesus and two others were crucified (really put up on crosses! (without the nails of course)) and then resurrected. I was asked to play guitar during the procession. The event itself was beautifully done, but I was impacted by the change that took place in the actors. In particular, the young man that played Jesus began the day with jokes and comments on the wave length of "If Ricky Martin can do it, why can't I?" After the procession, he reflected with a number of comments like "Jesus suffered a lot for us." There were a number of youngsters that gratuitously and informally played the rolls of the scoffers at the crucifixion. The young man playing Jesus was visibly saddened by their lack of respect. We had an excellent conversation about the forgiveness that Jesus offered to the same scoffers at His crucifixion and even unto the rest of the scoffers today. The evening ended in a break out worship session solicited by the same actors. It was so beautiful to see God show up even amongst these very "unchurched" people.

6. Lots of ministry continues in the neigboring barrio of San Pablito. The school we've been visiting this last year was shut down for two months for repairs, but it's finally been reopened and the kids are back in class. The sixth grade teacher has been emphatic that we return. She told us that if these kids don't have God, they don't have anything, and that the most important thing is that we continue to visit and teach the class about God and how to live out His commandments. We've willingly obliged and continue to visit the classroom weekly. We have also been doing monthly "peace walks" in San Pablito. Through collaboration between a local church and our team, we've given out balloons, planted trees, sang and prayed through the streets. Please pray for a budding cell group in San Pablito and that through it, leaders would be raised up that would desire to work for a change in their community and believe that God wants the same.

Alright, that's plenty for now, but if you have questions, let's talk in person in July! I hope you are all doing great and I can't wait to see a number of you very soon! Please let me know what your prayer requests are and what is going on in your life. Until then, stay strong, seek the Lord and

Press on for Joy!
Cameron

"And now I'd like to introduce you all to a young man from the United States who's serving in Caracas as a missionary. He's going to be helping us all out with our youth group. Kelvin, come up here!" The announcement that I was going to be helping with the youth group came as unwelcome news to me. I had randomly met the pastor of this church just a scant two weeks before. This particular Sunday, I had to drop by the church to work out some details regarding the presentation about creation care. It was my second time in the church and the fact that I showed up in the last five minutes of the service didn't impede the pastor from asking for another sermon from this newly proclaimed, and completely unwilling, youth volunteer: myself.

Church is complicated. Whether it be in Venezuela, the United States, or anywhere in the world, church is one of the most misunderstood, polarizing, and frustrating elements in Christianity. I feel like I could sum up the general religious sentiment of a good majority of the world with "I like God, but save me from church".

Before I can really begin to reflect on the topic of church, I need to define my words and terminology. First, when I say "church", I mean what everyone means when they say, "I'm going to church", ie. a building/organization where Christians gather to worship, pray, and learn the Bible. When I say the "body", I mean, the body of Christ, aka believers, followers of Jesus, the saved, the elect, etc.

Personally, I've been through quite the journey in the past few years regarding church and I finally feel like I'm at a mature place where I can reflect without my own wounding dominating the conversation. In general, as I've seen in my own case and the cases of many North Americans who have grown up evangelical, at one point or another, many of us pass through a personal rebellion against church. There is something about it that rubs us the wrong way. Either it's not biblical enough or it's too traditional, or not traditional enough, or it's too this or not enough that. And I haven't even mentioned the various cases of major conflicts or abuse where the blame lands squarely the church. Whatever the reason, there is a movement away from church and towards.......well something else, and that something else is unique for every person. Some walk away from the body completely while others find different expressions of the body, while others return to their church of origin with a greater appreciation. And yet, in so many cases, wherever someone ends up, it is often defined in opposition to whatever it is that they are walking away from. If the particular church was too traditional, then the something else must be anti-traditional. If church wasn't traditional, then that something else must be traditional. Of course, starting a new expression of the body based purely upon what some church is not, is no expression of freedom. Rather it's nothing more than reaction, a cruel master indeed. But I need to get specific. Let's look at church in Latin America first . . .

Five centuries ago, Latin America was conquered by the Spanish. The rouge mix of conquistadors included soldiers, criminals and priests. The priests carried images of their deity in the throws of death on a piece of wood and a baby in the arms of a young mother. This deity was to be found in the dark stone and wood squarish structures built by the Spanish. The ministers wore long robes and knew how to read from books (a new thing in the new world). They also knew how to get conversions from the natives...death or else. Obviously there were exceptions (Bartolome de las Casas for one), but in general the church was linked with the empire of Spain. The church had its own set of traditions, prayers, rites, and its own calendar dividing up the year, all of which were inevitably adopted by all the natives and the new mestizo race and it all became part of the fabric of the culture.

Centuries later, Latin America was conquered by the North Americans. Sure, the countries don't wave our flag, but empire can take a lot of different forms. Our movies, music, and TV play all over here and materialism reigns supreme. Part of this newest conquest came by way of the pentecostal church. The pentecostal movement was arguably sparked in the Azusa street revival a century ago in Pasadena, California. The new believers now gifted with the the ability to speak in other tongues assumed the gifting meant that they were now empowered and called to go far and wide and preach the gospel to the peoples of the world in their respective language. As they new missionaries arrived in Africa, Latin America, and other far flung locations, the Pentecostals soon realized that although they could speak new languages, no one anywhere in the world could understand them. None the less, the Pentecostals began to evangelize (after learning the local languages) and spread the word of God far and wide. The evangelical church (as the pentecostal church generally came to be known in Latin America) occupies a fringe yet reached status with about 2-5% of the population saved, sanctified and filled with the Holy Ghost in any given country. Numbers aside, the evangelical church is a loud minority and is hence, albeit infamously, known by all.

I actually I need to clarify that last statement. There are generally two types of church in the evangelical latin context: 1).The hard core pentecostal conservative churches that have a strong tendency to engage in spiritual warfare at full volume with bone shaking sound systems and 2). the more "liberal" (they'd feel conservative in the states) modern, North American style evangelical type churches. Both emphatically state that they are NOT based on tradition or rite, unlike the Catholic church. Still, especially for churches in category 1, the do's and do not's (aka traditions) rule the day: many believe it's a sin for women to wear make-up or pants, that it's a sin for men to have long hair, almost daily attendance/involvement in church activity is mandatory, and all members are predisposed to believe whatever the pastor says as the word of God. While I could write a whole series of critiques of these churches, I have to applaud them in that they tend to be fearless and launch evangelistic campaigns in some of the most off the map, forgotten, and dangerous places out there.

Churches in the type 2 category are more relaxed, enjoying new freedoms like letting women wear pants and make-up as they wish. Sadly, this freedom leads to a different problem altogether. During a recent house church gathering, a team member overheard two women talking about how difficult is to go to church (type 2) because of the necessity of wearing a different set of clothes every time in order to not feel embarrassed about a lack of wardrobe. Even though these churches are more open, at least in terms of dress, there is still a lot of religion at work. A recent question by a local pant wearing female church goer is one that I had never been, nor doubt would ever be asked in the states: "Which do you like better: all night prayer and worship vigils, or fasting?"

Leaving Latin America, what is there to say about church at home? It took talking with a Brazilian recounting her trip to China for me to truly understand how we do church in North America (and other places). She was with YWAM and had visited various cites and towns in China. One of her most amazing experiences was visiting a church in Beijing. It was a massive church that met in theater converted by the Chinese government with seating for 5000 people that would fill up every Sunday. Since the church was state sponsored, they couldn't do alter calls, but people came all the same to worship and hear the Word preached from the Bible.

In her description of this particular church, it dawned on me that the Chinese government understood church much better than anyone else. As they looked out at the world of church, observing its practices and functions from an outside perspective, they decided that the best building to house a church is that of the theater: a house of entertainment. And of course, they're right. From an outside perspective, church is just that: everyone walks into the building, they pick their seat, they face the stage, listen to the music, clap, maybe even witness a dance or a drama, listen to a monologue, then leave and go home.

Now, the most interesting detail about this church in Beijing is that the church is only for foreigners. Chinese nationals are prohibited from attending. Essentially, this church was tailored to the West. Of course in the west, this makes sense culturally. We spend all of our spare time enjoying entertainment, it's only natural that our worship should follow suit, even if unconsciously.

Ok, so big deal, you say. You've criticized the church. Everyone does that. It's so easy to criticize and so difficult to create, so why don't you just go ahead and make the perfect church. . .

Well, I can't actually. In fact nobody can. I once heard it best said that if you ever find the perfect church don't go there since it won't be perfect anymore. But more importantly, and don't stone me just yet, but I'm convinced that there is not a "right way" to do church....

Perhaps instead, Jesus has given us some loose guidelines to follow along the way. Because, if there is a "right way" to do church, once we've arrived, or along the journey, we end up making church lord instead of Jesus. It's when we fool ourselves into thinking that our church, our group, our way is the best, the right one, that we fall into religiosity, or worse, heresy.

So what are some of those guidelines? I can't assume to know them all, but I'm going to offer three. Mind you, I haven't gone around the world looking for what makes a church grow or be successful. Nor is this an attempt to suggest some methods to make a church successful. Rather these are some things that I've seen illuminated in scripture over the past few years that have stuck with me.

First, the church has a much different role in society than what we generally think it to be. A pastor in the states once illuminated a key passage in the Bible during a discipleship session. In Matthew 16, Jesus is affirming Peter as the rock upon which He will build his church. Jesus then says something very curious. He says that the gates of Hades (death) will not prevails against it. After reading the passage, the pastor asked me a very simple question: "What are gates for?" Like all good simple questions, I wasn't going to get the answer without help. "They are to keep people out," he explained matter of factly. He continued explaining that hell and death, is actually on the defensive, it's trying to keep God out, but God wants to use his people to break down its doors and set the captives free. However, it seems that in most cases, the church goes on the defense, trying to guard whatever last bit of sanity that exists in this messed up world. And even when I've seen churches trying to engage "the culture", well, the result isn't all that engaging. Either it's a political diatribe or a misguided attempt at outreach. Perhaps a well known parable can give us some direction.

A good while back, I heard a very interesting take on the parable of the good samaritan. The well known parable actually has two heroes. First, the well known samaritan who in his wanderings through dangerous places, finds a traveler in serious need. The second hero of the story is the humble innkeeper, the one who watches over, heals, and restores the beaten down traveler. Many times in church we are asked to be good samaritans, looking for the lost, but how many times are we encouraged to be good inn-keepers, communities that can take in the wounded, be a support and healing presence around them, and see them off once again full of life and ready to help those they come across, either as good samaritans or innkeepers. I feel like many people frustrated in the church are frustrated by this very element. Either they are samaritans told and trying to be innkeepers or innkeepers told and trying to be samaritans, or worse yet, they are implicitly told to be levites to walk on by and not get contaminated. The most important thing about samaratins and innkeepers is that they minister to real needs. That means they have to be aware of the real and felt needs of the world and people around them and that's not something they can do from inside a church world and even less inside a churched mindset. A covered lamp doesn't illuminate, and eventually extinguishes. Speaking of lamps...

I personally feel that the sermon on the mount gives the best clue as to the guidelines of the body. The sermon comes of the heels of a whirlwind ministry of healing, liberation, and preaching. Jesus is swamped by the crowds so He goes up the mountain where his disciples and crowd follow him. He starts with the beatitudes, (which are based upon an understanding of the condition and needs of His listeners) and right afterwards, He has the audacity to say to those around him "You are the light of the world...."

This should raise a question if not four...how in the world were these people qualified to be the light of the world? Jesus had just barely started his ministry, the twelve hadn't even been chosen yet. Those that were differentiated as disciples were probably indistinguishable from the rest of the crowds. Except in one particular way: their location.

Imagine the scene. Jesus stands on the mountain, the center of attention, and the literal center of the multitude. Around Him are the baby disciples who are the light of the world. Beyond these disciples are the crowds and beyond them, the rest of the world (the parallel to the great co-mission in Matthew 27 is staggering). I think Jesus could call these not-even-yet-Christians the light of the world solely because of their position. Jesus was their center, individually and collectively. They were listening to Him, He was their Rabbi and Master and they were learning exactly how to love and live. The rest of His words in the sermon on the mount are both incredibly practical and sadly incredibly forgotten. Still, while Jesus was at their center, these little lights were sandwiched in by the rest of the crowds and "the world". They were very much in complete contact with the world. They were a light that touched the darkness, salt that salted because it was in contact with that which needed salt.

As far as I'm concerned, that position is the Christian life; deepening the Lordship of Jesus over my and my communities life as well as being in full, light filled contact with the surrounding world. I believe that a church is merely that which helps the Christian accomplish those two functions, and that can take a variety of forms. At times I need godly entertainment, at times I need community to encourage me, at times I need a good samaritan to pick me up along with a good innkeeper to restore me, at times I need fellow soldiers of God to help break down the doors of death, at times I need to be reminded to fast, and I need to be those to everyone around me.

Most importantly, I need to remind myself that God's grace is the active agent in salvation and not church in any form what so ever. God's love and grace extends to all regardless of their relation to church. I need to see the body in light of their relationship with Jesus. In Hebrews we are told that "both He who sanctifies and those who are being sanctified are all of one, for which reason He is not ashamed to call them brethren, saying: 'I will declare your name to My brethren; In the midst of the assembly I will sing praise to you'" (Heb 2:11-12). When it mentions those who are being sanctified, it means that we are in process. God is at work on and in us, and we aren't perfect by any stretch of the imagination. And yet, He is not ashamed of us, even in our imperfection. Nor does He leave us where we are at. He is sanctifying us to be more and more like Him of whom with which we are one. May He be our center and guide in all that we are and do in church and out. Until we see His face,

Press on for Joy!
Cameron

It's good to know...

2010-05-02T19:14:00.002-06:00

...that I've moved well beyond one semester of spanish...no progress in the love song department though. The video made me laugh at least. C-mail coming somewhat soon.

Haiti bel anpil

2010-02-22T16:20:00.001-07:00

Howdy All!

I know some of you have been waiting to hear about the experience in Haiti. Well, I've been back from the Dominican Republic for about two weeks, but it's taken quite a while to sort everything out and find the time to write it on the screen. But here it is, finally, better late than never along with the normal update:

1. In January I took some time to discern where God might be taking me in the next few years of my life regarding my continuation with InnerCHANGE, Venezuela, and missions in general. A couple spiritual retreats of silence and working the earth later, I felt like God was giving me the freedom to decide. That said, I've decided to stay another three years with InnerCHANGE in Caracas, Venezuela after my first term ends this September. Missionary work is all about patience. There still are a lot of lessons, mistakes, and experience that I feel can only be learned with more time. More time is exactly what is needed to see people discipled, structures emerge, and leaders developed. I certainly do feel called more and more to this way of life and ministry, and I want to be as faithful as I can in growing during my time in Caracas.

2. In late January and early February, I spent ten days in the Dominican Republic translating for the aid effort. Through a small grassroots effort comprised of various ministries, we helped supply hospitals, orphanages, refugee camps, and various NGO's. We were able to buy, transport, and ship upwards of $150,000 worth of aid from the DR into Haiti. I was part of the second wave and was able to see the operation close out as many of the big NGO's began to reach many of the earthquake victims that were previously unreachable by the big guys.

3. In Venezuela, we are continuing to visit the local public elementary school in the barrio of San Pablito. Many of the students and families had their lives flipped upside down when a five year old's birthday party ended in a shootout. Many were wounded and five were killed (including the five year old girl). One of the boys innocently killed in the firefight attended sixth grade in the elementary school we are visiting. We have been doing a lot of counseling in the class to which the students are responding well. Please pray for God's healing touch on their lives, that our presence in the school would continue to bless many, and for peace to come to San Pablito.

4. Venezuela is experiencing a huge drought. There have been rotating shortages of water, accompanied with rotating blackouts throughout the whole country. Sadly, Venezuela consumes the most electricity per capita of any South American nation except for Suriname which hosts the EU space port and therefore doesn't count. Add to the mess the fact that recycling, and telling people to throw the trash in a trashcan receive similar looks as discourses about nuclear fusion and teletransportation. In this moment of crisis I'm seizing the opportunity to visit churches to teach about creation care and the practical applications of how to save electricity and water. Please pray that all the connections take place soon and that this message can reach enough people to alleviate the problem.

5. In March, I'll be attending the InnerCHANGE leaders community conference in London. I'm looking forward to this chance to meet up with other leaders in InnerCHANGE and soak up their wisdom. Please pray for safe travels and that God would show me how to lead effectively during this upcoming year.

That's enough for today. As always, there is the blog which gets updated every once and a while. Feel free to send me your prayer requests and updates as I am always so blessed to hear about what's going on in your lives. Plus I always love receiving snail mail. Until then, stay strong, seek the Lord and

Press on for Joy!

Cameron Carter
CCS 16019, (819)
PO Box 025323
Miami, FL 33102-523 USA

"So why is it when I say 'Haiti bel anpil' (Haiti is very beautiful), that the 'anpil' (very/a lot) comes after the 'bel', (beautiful) and when I say 'sa se anpil bois' (there are a lot of trees) the 'anpil' comes before?"

My "professor" of the moment looked at me with his open black face and peaceful eyes, and responded to me in perfect English, "It's just like that". On the way to Fort Liberte, I had barely given any attention to the green landscape rolling by both sides of the converted Daihatsu truck. I was trying my best to resurrect my high school French and conquer as much Creole as I good before we got to our destination. My professor was a young Haitian man named Jean. He works in a local factory six days a week, starting at 6:30 in the morning and ending at 7 at night with a 45 minute break for lunch. Saturday is a half day but he works as a taxi driver on a loaned motorcycle in the afternoon. Since it was Saturday, he jumped up into our convoy and was eager to practice his already excellent English. Besides English, he's fluent in Spanish, French, and of course his native Creole.

In spite of people like Jean whose kindness and education are exemplar, Haiti as a whole gets a bad rap. The country is already infamously known as the poorest in the western hemisphere. The reputation for voodoo along with a super-corrupt government doesn't do the country any favors. This recent earthquake that took the lives of well over 200,000 was a horrific tragedy, but compounded with everything else, Haiti became a worldwide spectacle. The newspaper here published the unedited pictures of the devastation (physical and human) in the days following the earthquake. Everyone in our neighborhood sent their sympathy to the Haitian people and complained about the slow response to get food and water to the people in Port-au-Prince.

Unbenownst to me, just three days after the earthquake hit, a CRM ministry called Communitas based in New Orleans was en route to the small city of Santiago in the Dominican Republic to start getting aid and supplies into Haiti. Working together with the InnerCHANGE Miami team, and missionaries in Haiti working for FIM and Kids Alive, they connected with hospitals, orphanages, and ministries already established in Haiti. These ministries gave the team in Miami a needs list which then would be scrounged up in the DR and quickly sent into Haiti. The supply chain from this little grassroots effort was able to get gasoline, food, and medicine into Port-au-Prince well before the tons of aid stacked up at the airport could reach the tons of people desperately waiting for it outside. While its impossible to have exact numbers, we think this little operation impacted well over 200,000 lives.

I unwittingly got involved in the operation trying to connect a Venezuelan friend to the relief effort. Instead I found myself drafted to do translation on the DR side of things. By the time I arrived in the DR in late January, the effort was in the fourth quarter, as our leader on the ground put it. The aid from the big NGO's was just about to start to be distributed and our work there would be over. None the less, there were still a number of orders to fill.

The team in the DR had made contact with a Dominican hardware salesman named Lorenzo. After meeting up with the team, he offered his services and began sacrificing his own sales to help out with our little operation. He used his connections to look for rice, beans, gas, diesel, sugar, oil, five gallon buckets, anything we had in the order. He would go out, cut deals, buy the goods, and bring them back to load up on trucks that would then be sent out the next morning.

It was a pretty smooth operation, but there were some difficulties in arranging transportation into Haiti. For one thing, Dominican drivers had no desire whatsoever to go to Haiti because they were convinced that the Haitians were going to eat them. Yes, that's right, eat them. I don't live on the island of Hispanola, but that particular fear seems about as irrational as you can get. But then again, I'm sure a lot of the stuff we've lived through here sounds absurd from an outside point of view. Like that one time the woman on the corner took a pot-shot with a shotgun at the witch that had transformed into some sort of bird-like creature that was flying around on everyone's roofs and killing their dogs and then the next morning the woman up the hill woke up wounded in the leg. That probably sounds just as weird. Guess I shouldn't judge.

So if procuring a Dominican driver and truck was hard, getting a Haitian truck and driver across the boarder involved its own specialty of difficulties. When crossing the boarder, the Haitian truck must be first "disinfected" (read superfluous charge for spraying it with water) plus the Haitian driver must have a visa to enter the DR which is nigh impossible to get at best. Plus, with the distances and the conditions of the roads in Haiti, the only way to make it in one day was to have the Haitian driver spend the night in the DR before they headed out bright and early the next morning. A few times the Haitian drivers would spend the night in the hotel where we were based. It must have been quite the experience for them. For some, it was their first time in the DR, first time in an elevator, first time to feel hot water from a shower head, and who knows what all else was new. I'm sure they brought back a plethora of stories to tell their kids from their odyssey. "No really, the door opened and we were in a different place!" I'm sure that sounded just as weird.

For our last shipment, all of us in the operation accompanied the delivery across the border. It was a big shipment that the mayor of the Haitian town of Fort Liberte had requested for all the refugees arriving from Port-au-Prince.

During the three hour trip to the boarder, I had time to revisit all the stories and tidbits I heard about Haiti: an extremely impoverished country, even to the point that there weren't even trees left standing as they had all been chopped down for firewood. Yet the scene across the boarder was not nearly as post apocalyptic as I had been expecting.

The first thing I noticed crossing the boarder was the activity in river that forms the boarder between the two countries. Hundreds of women squatted working clothes and sheets in and out of the water, wringing them out and spreading them to dry in the blistering sun. Their young children ran and splashed through the clear water, cooling themselves from the heat while finding opportune moments to splash their siblings and run about laughing.

We crossed the bridge over the river on foot while the Dominican truck carrying the supplies came through a few minutes later. Just across the river, a dispatch of UN peacekeepers from Uruguay took refuge in the shade of a large tree next to the customs and immigration buildings. They had accompanied all of our shipments and were great to work with. They quickly agreed to go with our truck to Fort Liberte. The route wasn't dangerous, but we wanted to have some extra peace-keeping while we unloaded the truck in town. They advised us to wait five minutes until their company got back from escorting another convoy. One hour and five sunburned white guys later, we were off.

In that hour of waiting amidst the bustling border, a young man drove up on a motorcycle and asked in perfect English if we were Americans. I responded affirmatively and we quickly became friends. He kindly started to help me with my miserable Creole, and just before we got into gear, he jumped up into the bed of the passenger truck to go with us. Engrossed in language lessons, small villages and varied landscapes flew by. Haiti is surprisingly green, populated with the typical assortment of tropical flora and crisscrossed by small rivers. We arrived at Fort Liberte which, from what I saw of it, seemed like a very small town. The mayor of the city had asked the missionary there to bring in tons of rice, beans, and other essentials to feed the arriving refugees along with the families that took them in. We pulled up to the warehouse which actually was just a house with a wooden door. Strung high across the dirt street hung a white sheet with the words "Adieu Pouchon" tagged in black. I asked my friend who Pouchon was. "He's a singer that died in the earthquake. He sang Haitian music." Other than the presence of our convoy, there was no other indication that the country to which this town belongs had been touched by a tragedy.

Our small caravan of two white UN jeeps, a small semi, and passenger truck quickly drew the attention of the town. Spectators and hopefuls looking for work flocked to the previously abandoned street. A work crew was quickly organized, the container opened, and the unloading process began.

I kept talking with my new Haitian friend while trying the newly taught greetings on passersby. A young girl of ten stood next to us calmly watching the unloading. My friend asked her a few questions and shared her responses with me. She said her family had been been killed in the earthquake and she had come up to Fort Liberte even though she didn't know anybody. It looked like she hadn't found another family to take her in yet either.

As we stood in sun, my friend made an unsolicited comment about how Haitians really love Americans. I found that a little difficult to buy after so much time in Caracas. But he insisted. He was glad that there were troops from the US and from the UN present. He said things weren't good when they weren't here, but now with them present, things had calmed down. He even went so far as to praise the troops hunting down criminals and escaped prisoners, tying their hands behind their backs and shooting them. "There are a lot of wicked people in Haiti." he ended.

The workers finished unloading the truck. Before packing up to go, a woman came out with a five gallon bucket to glean. Some of the rice bags had leaked and grains of rice along with sugar and dust littered the floor of the semi container. She swept up as much as she could with her hand into the bucket she held. We loaded up and were off.

On the ride back, the sun and wind took their toll and I realized I didn't have enough in me to continue with our informal language lessons. The passing countryside deserved a closer look. Every so often we would pass a child on a donkey, the its sides loaded with cut sugar cane or split wood. Where there were no rivers, someone had come through and dug a number of wells which were topped off with a silver pump and long handle. At almost every pump, some small girl not even half the pump's height jumped gaily up and down, arms extended over her head, barely moving the handle up and down as water filled up various plastic bottles and buckets.

I asked my friend about his family. He's single, with no kids, dating a girl but wants to study at the university first before getting married, and lives with his mom. "And your father?" "He died" "When?" "Right now, in the earthquake." He said it with about as much emotion one might mention they had a tuna fish sandwich for lunch. "I'm sorry to hear that. I'm really sorry." Still no reaction. It made me wonder if I heard him right. He confirmed grim the news after another person on our team asked him about it.

"You see that building?" my friend gestured to a large building built well away from the highway. "That's a hospital. American's built it." We passed another hospital and an orphanage, all in the same style.

"Who built this road that we're on?" I had been told by our team that the road between the DR and Fort Liberte had been built by the Italians. Apparently, the road beyond Fort Liberte and between Port-au-Prince was a nightmare that had not been maintained in years that put drivers and passengers in danger of internal bleeding from the unceasing roughness. "The Americans built this road too." my friend said. "Really? I heard the Italians built it." "No, it was the Americans."

"What do you think, what does Haiti need?" It was a question I was uncomfortable asking, but I knew I needed to ask it. I needed to hear it from a Haitian. "I think . . . roads. Good roads. Water, electricity. If we had those things we would be better."

In a similar conversation in the DR at the home of our Dominican hardware salesman, a neighbor of his opined "What Haiti needs is education." In Spanish, the idea behind the word "education" is broader than what we mean in the States. The idea is better captured in the word "upbringing". That is, a person's formation, manners, etiquette, and also partly academic instruction. "The Haitians are so used to receiving aid that all they do is manipulate to get money." the neighbor concluded.

A different day, but the in same theme with some NGO workers serving in Haiti brought out the following "Haiti suffers from donor fatigue. People keep giving, but nothing ever changes. I don't know, maybe it just needs to become a part of the US and be opened to investors that could develop it." I could see the frustration on his face. Years of experience and disappointment had slowly eliminated so many potential possibilities.

Infrastructure, says the Haitian. Upbringing, says the Dominican. Materials economy, says the American.

I had the privilege to hear Oscar Muriu speak at Urbana '06. He gave the knock out talk of the conference. One of the lines in his discourse will always stick with me, not because it was something I completely agreed with at the time, but rather because it was something I didn't understand. He said "When you (Americans/missionaries/NGOs) come to Africa, you want to fix Africa. Well you can't fix Africa." The comment drew riotous applause from a handful in the 22,000+ crowd while the rest of us sat there and wondered what in the world he meant by that.

Perhaps what Oscar says about Africa applies equally in the western hemisphere; we can't fix Haiti. Of course in the short term, Haiti NEEDS the help of the world to recover and mourn the losses from the earthquake. But in the long term, perhaps there isn't quite as much fixing to do as we thought. Yes, Haiti is poor. Yes there are social ills, yes there is a huge spiritual problem. But show me a country that doesn't suffer from poverty, along with social and spiritual ills.

This has been one of the most difficult updates to write because Haiti has forced me reexamine poverty. There are lots of definitions of poverty. I doubt any of them to it justice. In Spanish, the word misery is commonly used to distinguish between extreme poverty and normal poverty, whatever "normal" and "extreme" are. I think that the word misery is useful for me to distinguish the line between economic disadvantage and a way of existence that is an offense to God and humanity. Misery is unjust. Going hungry without recourse is misery. Working extreme hours in dangerous conditions for little to no pay is misery. Living in fear for your own life is misery. Being so economically poor that a family has to sell their own daughter as a prostitute is misery. Being displaced from home and family by war, famine or earthquake is misery. Living empty and depressed every day is misery.

I say these things not because I believe all human beings are entitled to some set of rights, but rather because I believe in the love of God which rightly should flow as love between all His children. Living in misery, propagating misery, and not taking action to end misery are not violations of human rights, rather they are violations of the love of God.

Do the people of Haiti live in misery? The hundreds of thousands that have lost family, friends and home in the earthquake most certainly do. Are the people of Haiti being forced into or kept in misery? That is a difficult question to answer, and I am not an expert to answer it. If you find out, let me know. Although, I can say for certain that spiritually, they are oppressed and miserably so. Does Haiti deserve our pity simply because it has not "progressed" as much as the rest of the world? I would say no. I think technological progress or lack there of is really up to particular individuals and societies at large. If a society really wants to progress, let them do it. If not, respect it. The tricky part comes when a people want to progress but can't. That is a problem that is beyond the scope of this update. For now, I don't know enough to say one way or another if that is the case in Haiti.

We arrived at the boarder and dismounted from the truck. We started our goodbyes before heading toward the bridge. I asked Jean how much I owed him for the lessons. "No no no," he said "but if you ever are in Haiti again and need help with translation let me know." I agreed I would. We shook hands, exchanged our information, and said goodbye.

Practically speaking, I'm sure there are going to be tons of high school missions trips in the following years to go and "rebuild" Haiti. If you find yourself involved in any of these, first understand that Haiti is a mystery. It has confused a lot of people, myself included. At the same time, mysterious tends to be beautiful; be aware that you might actually like the place. Second, please don't go to Haiti as a mom to pity and baby a bunch of competent adults, some of which speak three more languages than you do. Instead, go as their brother and sister, to first be loved and then to love. And finally, I can always get you in contact with Jean if you need someone to translate or Lorenzo if you need some building materials. Until then,

Press on for Joy!

Some Photos

2010-02-12T15:05:00.000-07:00

http://gallery.me.com/mike.brantley#100052&view=grid&bgcolor=black&sel=120
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7962971@N03/sets/72157623389660306/show/

Working on the C-mail, coming soon! Until then, enjoy these photos.

Haiti Relief Effort

2010-01-28T08:32:00.001-07:00

Howdy All,

As you all know, Haiti was rocked by a devastating earthquake sixteen days ago. The devastation is unimaginable and countess lives have been lost and more are left with only the clothes on their back. There has a large influx of aid into the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince but many of the resources are simply not getting to the people. A ministry in Miami called Urban Resurrection which recently joined InnerCHANGE has many contacts with Haitian neighbors and ministries on the ground in Haiti. They have setup a supply chain of donations from Miami, to the Dominican Repulic (to be referred as the "DR" from here on out), and then on to established ministries in Haiti. Here's a quote from the team leader in Miami on the 23rd of this month:

"Our team in DR/Haiti is in the process of delivering another 5000 gallons of fuel, 5 tons of rice, 1600 lbs of beans, 5000 bottles of water, 48 cases of baby formula, lots of medical supplies, $500 worth of evaporated milk and 4 missionaries to Port-au-Prince tonight! That is a massive shipment for an conglomeration of little orgs like ours and it is all God's strength in our backs and His faith in our hearts that sees us through. That makes a total of 7000 gallons of fuel delivered by our supply line to vital ministries who are serving literally thousands of people!"

It's also worth noting that one ministry that received aid through this supply chain was literally within sight of the Port-au-Prince airport but was not able to access the aid stored there. So this work is absolutely crucial!!

This Saturday I will be flying to the DR to help with this grass roots effort to get much needed supplies into Haiti. This will be part of the second wave of volunteers to work things in the DR link of the chain. Praise God that this supply chain has been as effective as it has! This is totally the favor of God and response of His people (who have done above and beyond the call the duty). Please pray for this effort to continue successfully. Also please pray for refreshment and strength for everyone along this chain: the team in Miami coordinating everything, the team in the DR purchasing supplies and shipping them out, and the folks on the ground in Haiti. Everyone has put in a TON of hours and has done a magnificent job, and they are in need of rest. Please pray for their refreshment, health, and safety. Please also pray for the hundreds of thousands of Haitians that are still without homes or tents and with scarce resources.

You can follow the progress of the Haiti relief effort through the Urban Resurrection news section on their website. I'm not sure how much I'll be able to respond to email while I'm there, but please be in prayer! I will return to Venezuela on the 11th of February.

I'll be in the DR for just under two weeks to help with the purchase and transport of supplies. Please pray that this chain continues to function smoothly and safely in the transport of materials through Haiti. Please pray for the volunteers physical strength and health after loading literally tons of aid. Please also pray that the wave of folks with which I'm going would be able to catch up quickly to the situation on the ground and keep the aid rolling.

If you want to help, please check out the Haiti Relief Team page on Facebook or see the information below to see how you can help. Until then, keep praying, seek the Lord and
Press on for Joy!
Cameron

HOW YOU CAN HELP:

If you are associated with a ministry in Port au Prince (PAP)—like an orphanage, medical missionary, etc., you have probably been trying to contact them to find out what they need. The problem is that getting anything to them will be almost impossible for you. So, we are currently building a supply chain that starts in the Dominican Republic, routes aid items into northern Haiti, and flies them into PAP.

Here is how we work together: Find our what your ministry in PAP needs. Don't guess; they need to tell you. Get specifics on foods, medicines, hygiene items, etc. (Use the form attached here) At the top of their list is probably water and fuel. Water is becoming available in Port-au-Prince, and fuel will follow on the black market. This brings up a very important aspect of our effort. Since banks have been wiped out, your ministry is probably running out of cash and has no way of getting more. We could transport cash directly to them. The only thing they would need to do is find a way to meet us at the PAP airport.

You can donate immediately by:
- Going to www.fim.org
- Going to www.urbanresurrection.org
- Mail checks to: Fellowship International Mission - 555 South 24th Street - Allentown, PA 18104 (memo: Haiti Relief Fund)
or
Urban Resurrection – 3158 Carter St. – Miami, FL 33133 (memo: Haiti Relief Fund)

- Call Matt McCormick at 011-509-3900-3105 and 011-509-3663-6520or Michael and Erika Philip at 305-562-7714 and 305-562-7716 or email at Erika@urbanresurrection.org to give directly to them (which would get the money to Haiti the quickest)

-Commit to pray for the people and country of Haiti and all of those affected. Please let us know if you want to be included in a regular prayer updates.

By supporting us, you're in effect supporting your ministries in PAP. We cannot do this without your help! Find out what they need, tell us who they are, and get us funds quickly. Additionally, we still need money just to keep the supply line greased. Even if you do not know anyone in Haiti, but just want to help, please donate to the Haiti Relief Fund. Every dollar in this account will go towards facilitating what I explained above and be accounted for by FIM.
Donate, pass the word, and pray.

In faith and works,

The Haiti Relief Team; a joint venture of FIM, Kids Alive, and Urban Resurrection

The evening of Christmas

2009-12-25T21:10:00.002-07:00

Merry Christmas everybody! I hope you all had a wonderfully blessed day and that the new life of Jesus accompanies you everyday of this year. I haven't had a Christmas in the states for two years now, and being back, I'm not really sure what Christmas feels like, or is supposed to feel like, anymore. None the less, I had a wonderful day. Still, I realize that on an evening like this one, years ago, I'd be over at a good friends house along with a few other good folks having a late-teen/early-twenties hallmark moment. So here's to all the people that I have been blessed to know, even if it was only so short: even if I don't have a physical place to return to that can be considered home, you all, even spread out over time zones and times of life, are the best sense of home anyone could hope for. Thank you for being who you are.

Merry Christmas!

Birthday Song

2009-12-20T20:43:00.003-07:00

So, two years ago, I turned 25 and had a quarter life crisis and spent the night listening to Rosa's from Oreja de Van Gogh. The song has nothing to do with turning 25, and at the time I didn't understand hardly any of the words, but the tune spoke to me.

Now, I feel like this song is appropriate for today.

C-mail: Unbelievable

2009-12-08T23:45:00.001-07:00

Howdy all and Merry Christmas!

Or as they say down here, south of the border, Feliz Navidad. The nativity scenes (the local equivalent of the Christmas tree, although those feral, plastic pine trees are starting to become the rage) are up in homes, metro stations, government buildings, and malls alike. Everybody is walking around town and standing in line to buy gifts for their kids and families that will soon come from niño Jesús (baby Jesus, who is recognized as the magical Christmas gift giver). But just like the Christmas tree to the nativity scene, Santa is slowly making advances into previously held baby Jesus territory. Some malls in Caracas are now even snapping photos with gift-hopeful children seated on the lap of the bearded, fat man wearing socialist red but who moonlights selling materialism by the sleighloads. However, at least for this year, most kids are awaiting something from baby Jesus. But enough of the ebb and flow of culture, here's a quick run down of the past few months:

1. Kids projects have been booming. We've kept the tutoring for basic reading and math going while also hosting another English class. We've had pretty steady attendance and the lessons have been helpful to many kids struggling with their letters, verbs, greetings and pronunciation. We were also invited by a local, public school to come and teach the elementary students to pray, read the bible and do some sort of project with them. We've been going through Max Lucado's "You are Special" and have had a great time ministering to the kids in this school. Praise God for the open invitation on the part of the principal and the teachers! Please pray that our collaboration with the school would continue into the next year and years to follow.

2. We've had quite the outbreak of violence in the past few weeks. In a period of fourteen days our hillside suffered eleven untimely deaths. Please pray for an end to the violence, that God would bring comfort to those morning the loss of loved ones and that we all would learn how to forgive, leave justice to God, and instead seek His peace in the meantime.

3. In October, we hosted a number of visitors: some prospective team members and others leaders in InnerCHANGE. With the former, we were trained in/discussed the topics of raising up local leaders/volunteers from among those whom we minister with, and also tackled the challenges of communicating well in an oral cultural (as opposed to a literate culture like much of our own). As a team we are still digesting this material and seeing where God would have us focus our efforts.

Things coming up:

1. I'll be in Texas with my parents for the rest of the month of December. It's been two years since spending Christmas in the states and I'm certainly looking forward to the time back and the much needed rest that comes along with it.

2. In January, I'll be taking some time in order to discern my future with InnerCHANGE. My three year commitment will be ending in the fall of 2010. However, for continuity purposes on the team I've committed to staying through February of 2011. I'll be prayerfully discerning whether I stay on with InnerCHANGE and in Caracas or if God has something else in mind for me. Please pray that I would clearly hear God's voice in this matter and that I would be open to His leading. Speaking of leading....

3. Our team leaders will begin to take a sabbatical starting in March. InnerCHANGE tries to ensure the sustainability of all its missionaries and taking a much needed and well earned year off to rest and pursue further avenues of growth is both biblical and smart. While they are gone on sabbatical, I've been designated to take over team leadership. Should I decide to continue on in Caracas after 2010, I'll keep serving in that capacity or as a co-leader. Honestly, there are plenty of other things I'd rather be doing than leading and the related back-end work, but taking that responsibility truly is an act of service that is very important to the health and well being of our team and neighbors. I would greatly appreciate your prayers as we transition leadership in February. Also please pray that God would give our team and myself the necessary resources, giftings and vision to minister faithfully His love amongst ourselves and our neighbors in the barrios.

4. I will have some additional expenses to cover as leader plus my existing support is still a little low. If you would like to partner with the ministry here in Caracas through support, prayer or financial, please let me know.

Ok, everybody. I miss you all a ton and would love to hear from you. You all mean the world to me and are a huge source of encouragement and support. Please let me know how I can be praying for you. Have a wonderfully merry Christmas and happy New Year, and as always, stay strong, seek the Lord and

Press on for Joy!

"And that same sensation, that same feeling, that same emotion that is so beautiful and pure, that which is the source of so much of our poetry, art, and music, that same feeling that we call love, that is one of the most sacred things we can experience, has in all of human history, always driven people to do things that are very, very . . . . stupid." The stupid thing I was currently engaged in was preaching at 5:30 in the morning. Not even my foreign accent, my best attempts at humor, and engaging the audience could prevent a large constituent from slipping out the back into the Saturday dawn light.

We had been asked to speak at a "vigilia por las naciones" or a "vigil for the nations" which in our American churches would fall under the category of a missions service. Except that this one started at 10:30PM on a Friday night and ended at 6:30AM the next morning. There was some praise and worship, a lot of prayer, and lots and lots of teaching and testimonies. Normally, I get nervous talking in front of groups, and the nerves were the only thing preventing me from collapsing into a snoring heap in front of a whole bunch of other snoring heaps.

"Let me tell a story. I have a friend named Marcos. About four months ago we celebrated his birthday. Marcos doesn't have a home, but he does have a job in the local market managing a parking lot. We always talk whenever I pass by. I knew his birthday was coming up, and our team had planned a dinner and small party for him at my place. He was excited about the upcoming celebration and mentioned it whenever we ran into each other. . . except, on the actual day of his birthday. When I went to look for him to bring him up the hill to my "apartment", he was beyond mildly intoxicated and somewhere between angry and depressed. Someone had robbed the clothes he was going to wear from where he had hung them on the fence behind him in a plastic bag. 'No worries' I told him, 'you can borrow some clothes up at my place, let's go.' But he didn't want to go. I kept at it. 'It's your birthday, I've got dinner all ready. All you need to do is come on up.' Again a negative response, but I didn't give up and kept persisting that he come with me. He finally acquiesced. We got to the stairs leading up to my place from the street. He stopped...he didn't want to go farther. 'It's close' I assured him and led him by the hand up to the door. But right there at the door, he refused to go in. Thankfully my teammates showed up at this point and sat conversing with him outside the door while I got dinner prepared. An hour later, after much pleading, discussion, pulling and wafting the tempting smell of sizzling pork chops towards him, he finally, finally came in and sat down. We ate together, had a good time, and after dinner, we pulled out a cake of sorts with a candle and sang him the Venezuelan happy birthday song. And as we sang, he cried, and cried, and cried. When the song was finished, and after his tears were more or less finished, he choked out a thank you and explained that today, he was turning 42, and that no one had sang him happy birthday in the past 22 years of his life."

The early morning missions talk continued, when something came out of my mouth which I hadn't planned on saying nor had previously thought about: "Because the most difficult thing for us as human beings is to truly believe that we really are loved." The words impacted me as I realized just how true they were, even at a sleepless 5:30 in the morning. Even later, after more thought and sufficient sleep, I realized that there is something rather deep there. I doubt that idea is original. I'm sure Brennan Manning has said something of the sort. But regardless of who said it, the idea has gotten me thinking:

Perhaps the good news is just too good. It frankly just isn't believable. It paints an extremely different picture that crashes with our very real experience of life. We have all loved and been burned in the process. Conversely, we have all been loved and spurned it's outpouring. We know well the reality that everyone is in this for themselves. We know depression, we know suffering of one sort or another. We know rejection, deception, and unfulfilled expectations. This is our daily experience that doesn't turn off nor takes a break. Even here in Venezuela, many say the world is going down the proverbial tubes; that things are worse than they ever used to be. Even if that isn't true speaking for the whole world, for all the western cultured, post-modern, individualistically formed people out there, I'd be willing to bet that your own world is coming to an end as well. And even if we have hope in God and the future, for right now, for today, our senses tell us very clearly: you're in trouble, and worst of all, you're on your own.

So the idea that God loved the world, that he loved me, that he loved you, that at the most basic root of everything, that we are loved (and by implication, that everyone else is also so lasciviously loved), period, end of story, just does not match with our experience of reality. The idea that anybody, even God, would actually act out of a motivation of love instead of their own selfish interests, is far fetched to say the least. The idea that God is at work today showing us His love, that His Kingdom is near, in terms of reach and not just time, is nothing more than a pipe dream. So like Marcos, we refuse to believe it and resist it at every step.

In my last update, I made reference to Ramon's older brother, Elvis. About a month ago, he was shot. The same people from up the way that apparently were trying to kill him were making a midnight motorcycle ride and took a pot shot at his head, which he luckily (or providentially) deflected with his arm. The bone in his forearm just above the wrist was completely shattered. After spending the night vainly yelling for help in the street, he somehow managed to survive the blood loss and got to the hospital by early morning. That same morning, I heard from the neighbors that he had been shot and I went to visit him the day after that. He was a bit surprised to see me. Our initial interactions were sketchy at best. Even so, no one had yet come to visit him and he literally had nothing with him in his bed, not even a pillow or sheets. I decided to keep visiting and help him out with what I could. The next day and next visit brought a request from the doctors to help him out with the process of procuring the materials he would need for his surgery: a plate, a few pins and a screw. Being in Venezuela for over two years, I've seen the good side of socialized medicine, and I've seen the dark side. Helping out Elvis has been the darkest. You can't pay me to recount the process and paperwork I fought to get him that hardware which now finally, a month after his entrance to the hospital, has shown up. But, if nothing else, the materials were free, as long as you ignore the saying that time is money. Still, the process brought me to visit him multiple times every week. I gave him my bible when he said he would read it, and he actually has been.

After a week, we did a study on the prodigal son. He picked up immediately on how the older brother didn't respond well to the return of the younger brother. We talked about it and how the older brother really didn't seem to know his dad all that well. His dad, from all accounts, looks to be the one of the most loving, generous people out there and yet, the older brother seemed to have a completely different construct of his father as some sort of spendthrift slave-master. One has to ask the question if the older brother ever even asked his dad for anything at all. Instead, he rejected and resisted his father's love, and not only that for himself, but also that for his younger brother. The father's waiting and generous love was not only unbelievable, but also offensive to the eldest. Our conversation opened up to include the patient in the next bed over and his mom. It drifted to the story of how Elvis was shot. In the telling, he quickly became fuming mad and began to tell how the minute he got out he was going to get his .38 and shoot each of those kids right in the forehead. I challenged him right away. "I don't think so, that's the fastest way to get yourself killed out there. There are way more of them than there are of you. Plus you're being just like the older son, rejecting that God loves them too and is welcoming them back home if they would wake up and come back to Him." A shrug was the only response.

I was surprised to see this same disbelief in the goodness of God in a very unexpected place. I have a friend named Rick that sells fruit at the "farmers" (read "resellers") market on Saturdays. He invited me to go surfing with him on my day off and I've gone out with him twice now. I don't know the first thing about surfing, but I do enjoy getting out and paddling around if nothing else. Rick is both a former extreme skateboarder and a former Jehovah's Witness that still clings to their theology with out congregating or abiding by their rules. He's rather outspoken about any topic under the sun and we often talk politics, theology, and in general about God. But after explaining his/the JW's perspective of the good news, (which honestly doesn't bear repeating) I was shocked to see the same resistance to any real expression of God's love. They essentially hold no hope for the present. They hold no recognition of the tactile and concrete love of God in the here and now. It has everything to do with some supposed upcoming intervention of God and nothing to do with the ever present, ever loving God who is an active character and author of the story being written that we call today.

As we draw close to Christmas and pass through advent, the familiar pages in Luke begin to be reread and reflected on. One of the things that is standing out to me the most is the contrast drawn between Zacharias and Mary. Both received tidings of good news, of joy, of big things that God was doing with and through them. They both even questioned Gabriel. But the difference is in the attitude behind the question. Zacharias was apparently praying that he and Elizabeth would have a child when the angel showed up and told him that his prayers had been answered. The first thing Zacharias does is doubt it. He knows they are old, he knows how many years they have been trying to have children to no avail. And so when the joyous tidings come, he doubts and resists them in light of his reality, even though his prayer was being answered in front of his face. The news is too good, and too unbelievable. Yet Mary, in the face of a similar startling announcement, asks concerning the technical means of how this good news was about to take shape. She accepted and believed what God was doing, as off the wall and unlikely as it was. In believing, she put herself in the service of God

The results of the responses of these two to the good news couldn't be more different. Zacharias' doubt provoked the angel to strike him mute for the whole time that God's work was growing inside of Elizabeth. However in the case of Mary, when she came to Elizabeth's house, she was able to proclaim her obedience to the Lord and sing His praises. I don't find it coincidence that doubt led to silence and belief to proclamation and song.

God's love was doing a beautiful, yet slooow, thirty year in the making without much to show for it, work in both of their lives. The question was not whether or not God cared about them and the people of Israel. The question was whether or not they could, or would, believe that He really did love them and was already taking concrete steps to show them as much. I think we need to ask ourselves the same question.

I posed that very idea to Marcos two weeks ago. We had read through the story where Jesus called Peter through the miraculous catch of fish. But Marcos had a different concern than just about fish. "And who is God, what is God?" he asked. I've heard him ask that question a million times, but this time something different came out of my mouth in reply: "God is love." It took awhile to expound on that, to clarify it, but it was something he could finally grasp. As we kept talking, the same thought from the missions talk came out: The most difficult thing for us as humans is to believe is that we truly are loved: that God does really love us, that He has done, is doing and will keep doing good for us. To believe then, means to hold the truth of God's love above all reality, to believe in something so good despite all of our previous experiences, failures, and doubts that scream to the contrary, to risk falling in love and doing something stupid in the process, to hope against hope that God already has something in the works brewing right under our noses even when we're too stuffed up to smell it.

The conversation drifted to creation, to the apostle Paul, and then to who knows where. In the middle of a tangent in our discussion, Marcos stopped a middle aged man passing by: "Hey! You know something?" Marcos called to him, getting his attention, "I'm a child of God." The man started, and after taking a suspicious look at Marcos and his disfigured face, he continued on in silence.

And so, even if so much of what I've seen and known tells me the contrary, I'm going to follow the lesson in faith that Marcos gave me: Hey you, reading this letter. You know something? I'm a child of God! And you are too!

Press on for Joy!

Feels like last time

2009-11-06T15:40:00.003-07:00

I'll come back to Mary presently. But as for now, I'm feel like I'm living a dejavu. When I first came to college, AIM was everything. Everybody was on it, and by my second year, I was spending the wee night hours chatting away.

Three years later, my buddy list faded to a permanent gray with only one or two venturing on to chat. I was left behind on AIM and everyone had moved on, to what, I couldn't say.

Then I thought, oh, perhaps blogging is the new thing. So, I started this blog and added friends blog's to my new bloggish buddy list.

Seeing just how frequently everyone updates their blog, I've been left behind again. So, I'm starting a new rule: I only keep links to blog that update at least annually.

As to where everyone's moved on to...I just had a friend show me this video. Who knows if it's true, but interesting to consider.

And what's Twitter anyways?

Notre Dame: Intro

2009-10-13T14:36:00.004-06:00

"Our Lady Queen of Victory, pray for us!" It was our prayer before and after every basketball game in the locker room at Bishop Kelly. I only sometimes said it, since growing up evangelical/baptist, the thought of praying to the Virgin Mary was something that was wrong at best, demonic at the worst.

Mary has been something that I've been trying to avoid for most of my life. It's probably THE defining difference between Catholics and Protestants and all attempts at ecumenical discussion I've seen completely gloss over and ignore the subject. So it isn't with the least bit of fear and trembling that I'm engaging it.

In all honestly, it's been going deeper spiritually in conversations with neighbors, that I am being forced to figure out exactly what I think about Mary. Many of my neighbors are Catholic and put a lot of practice/reverence into Mary. One neighbor almost broke relationship with her evangelical son over Mary. She told him "May God and the virgin bless you". He retorted, "Don't say 'the virgin' since I don't believe in her." That mother does not have a particularly favorable view of evangelicals at as a result of his rejection of what she saw as her blessing.

Also, in a recent discussion, one of my Catholic neighbors asked me what I thought about Mary. I danced around the inquiry and repeated the question to him. He said that as Catholics, they believed that the Holy Spirit came upon Mary and she conceived Jesus as a virgin. . . and then he stopped. I said I completely agreed with that, but that I had some issues with the Catholic doctrine that Mary was born without sin and that she always maintained her virginity. My neighbor looked at me and said, "Well I don't believe that either. Plus, it says in the Bible that Jesus had brothers, doesn't it?" I was a bit dumbfounded, and told him that I was almost sure that Catholic doctrine upheld the former things I was sharing. He seemed a little surprised by that, and I could tell that he didn't feel quite right with those ideas. I know that he couldn't attend all of the catechism classes as a child, and figure that must explain it.

Still, the conversation showed me that the topic and person of Mary is something that I can no longer ignore. As an evangelical, I have never been comfortable with the idea of studying Mary and on purpose avoided coming to any sort of definite belief in her regarding Catholic and ancient Church tradition. I figure my reluctance is a pretty lousy excuse and am devoting my reading and theological reflections to "Mariology" until Christmas. I will be sharing my research findings and thoughts here as time progresses. I want this to be an open conversation to all, so please feel free to leave comments as you read, but please do so in the spirit of love and edification. I hope to tackle the following topics in order and will add to them as time goes on: The Catholic Doctrine surrounding Mary, Mary through history (early church and beyond), My own theological thoughts about Mary in light of Catholic Doctrine and church history, Practice here in Latin America, and final thoughts in terms of my relationships with Catholic neighbors.

Please tag along and take a look at Mary and the thoughts, ideas, and practices surrounding her.

C-mail: Death and Life

2009-09-28T15:44:00.002-06:00

Howdy All!

Well, summerXchange has come and is long gone at this point. I promised a C-mail at the end of it all and I'm already late as it is, so no more delays:

SummerXchange: It went great, thankfully. We focused our efforts in the not-quite-so-neighboring community of San Pablito with a kids club. We trekked over there at least twice a week to lead kids in songs, games, drama and various projects on conflict resolution and other pertinent topics. We had about 15 to 25 kids showing up consistently. One of our teammates put together a great little drama series about three kids on a journey towards "The Mountain of Faith" in search of "The Water of Life" to bring back to their community. We ended our club with an invitation for the kids to take and drink this water that God offers to all of us. They accepted by drinking the water. They were also pretty thirsty at that point, so God knows what will come out of it. None the less, we are blessed to have been able to work with these kids and we pray that the seeds planted in them will grow and bear much fruit. Also, the two interns did amazingly for the summer. I was blessed to be with and work with them for almost two months. I'm excited to see how God has been working in them both and to see the next steps He has for them.
This summer went well because of prayer. Period. I cannot thank you all enough for your prayers. The environment we were in was extremely heavy in many ways, yet God was so faithful in the way He protected each one of us numerous times. Also, seeing some spiritual breakthroughs in our own houses and neighbors was impactful. Keep praying!
Our team member Adrienne completed her two year commitment in August and has returned to the U.S. It certainly was sad to see her go and we miss her a lot. Pray for her in her transition back to life in the United States and for our team as we go from six to five. Pray for God to rise up future team members, especially Venezuelans, and/or other Latinos.
We are starting up tutoring again, but this time will be a little different as we focus on reading and math for younger students and English for Jr. High age kids. English especially is a subject that discourages many kids from continuing their studies. Please pray that God would send us those students that need the help and encouragement to keep going.
A neighboring family invited me to go with them to their small, home village in the Andes mountains during their vacation. I accepted and had a great time. I can't even begin to describe all that happened, but for me it was fundamental in that it solidified two things: 1) The friendship of this neighbor that has made us really good friends. 2) Feeling "at home": I don't feel like a foreigner any more, spending weeks speaking nothing but Spanish didn't bother me in the least, nor did I feel incomplete in any way being apart from North Americans. I feel like I've arrived about as completely as could be possible. Obviously there is still tons to learn and discover, but intuitively, I know I've passed a hump/point of no return.
Prayer requests: Keep praying for a visa. There's been some movement on part of the embassy, not necessarily in the right direction, but at least there is some progress. Pray that God works on and invites the hearts of our neighbors that are inclined toward Jesus but still haven't put full confidence in Him.
Finally, my financial support has dropped a little low. If you feel God so leading and would like to support the ministry here, please pray about it and feel free to contact me via email.

I hope this finds you all well and kicking. I'd love to hear how you're all doing. Please send me an email or even a snail mail. I wish you all the best and know you are all missed and loved. Stay strong, seek the Lord and

Press on for Joy!

Cameron Carter

CCS 16019, (819)
PO Box 025323 Miami, FL 33102-523 USA

In mid 2006, I was a wet-nosed, recent college grad with the hopes of doing something different than the norm: I was going on a short term mission trip and I wanted to send updates that would actually contain some real information. What I meant by "real information" was something a bit more substantive than the all-to-common generalities like "the trip was great", "God was faithful", and "I was challenged". I always wanted to know why the trip was great, where exactly God was faithful and how the participant was challenged. Apparently however, everyone else got a kick out of hearing these generalities, or perhaps more likely, they actually didn't want to hear about these trips at all and were content with a mild report of contentedness. Still, such reporting rubbed me as excruciatingly trite. Even if nobody did care, at least I could put something of substance out there just in case there was someone else like me that did. And thus, the C-mail, mission version, was born.

During the short span of these past three years, I've always tried to hold true to that, tried to truly show something of what life is like in a different place; what the people are like, what they think, or at least, what I am thinking and feeling, even if I couldn't feel at the moment; to show what God is up to and try to capture a bit of His handiwork in progress.

Yet, now I feel like I've come to a place where I honestly can't do that. Too much has been going on. To try to give even any one subject its due would be beyond what reason or readership could bear. Resignedly, I feel tempted to say that this trip is great, that God's been faithful, even in the challenges, and call it an update.

And truth be told, everything is good . . . except for one glaring exception. One of my really good friends, Ramon, was murdered. It happened while I was away in the Andes with my neighbors Mateo and Sara. We all had nightmares that Wednesday night when it happened. Startled awake in the early morning, I prayed for half an hour and purposely forgot about the dream. I didn't want to pay it any attention, believing it to be spiritual attack. I never heard about my neighbors' dreams until after we found out Ramon had been killed. In one, Sara was walking around the neighborhood when she heard someone say, "Forget it lady, he's long dead. All that's left is to call the police now."

He went missing on Thursday. But wait, before I tell the story, I need to tell you about him. Ramon was a friend of everybody, including myself. Everybody got along well with him. Watching the interactions with him you might not think so as you would see him say something and then the other person would pop off a retort and then walk off. But humor, jokes, and light insults is the local love language. A contextualized Louis Armstrong singing "What a Wonderful World" would croon "I see friends shaking hands, saying 'You smell like the poop on your shoe.' when they're really saying, 'I love you'." But even between the jokes, everyone knew he had real character. I respected him and always valued our interactions. I ran into him at least twice a day. First, when I would walk down the stairs from my "apartment". He would be seated in the house that hangs over the walk way, sowing shoes and watching novelas with one of his adopted families. Aside from charity from passersby, sowing shoes was his only income. The second time I would see him was in the afternoon or in the evening when he would be seated at the corner of the house of Mateo and Sara. For the amount of time he spent on the street, I first thought he was homeless. But later, I realized he just never went home because of continual conflicts with his brother. He walked with an almost debilitating limp, the lasting effect of some childhood disease which I can only guess would be similar to polio. It always looked like he was about to fall, but miraculously, never did. He had converted to be a Pentecostal at some point, but then dropped it except for the occasional Bible study. I don't think he ever married, but he still had occasional crushes on some of the women in the barrio. He didn't drink, do drugs, smoke, anything. His only vice was making off-color jokes every once in a while. We celebrated his 50^th birthday this June. Everybody came; he was worth it. I sang him a song I wrote him on the guitar. Everyone danced that night, including him. He was touched. "Gracias", "Thank You", he would say almost abashedly afterwards.

He went missing on Thursday. The day before, Isabel, the mom of the three boys I've mentioned earlier, whose older brother died earlier this year, gave him a shave that day. It was the last time she saw him. Even being distant in the Andes, text messaging kept us in contact with all the neighbors. We soon caught wind of his disappearance and called a few distant family members of his, vainly trying to locate him, but no one knew where he was. Friday was the same. By Saturday night, all the neighbors were outside of his brother's, adjacent house, drawn by a bad smell. The door was broken down against his brother's wishes, and his body was found, brutally murdered. Even after having been missing for a few days, the news was still a shock to us. Fear fell over everyone. How could anyone ever harm, much less murder, someone as innocent and loved as Ramon? Revelations 21:8 took on a new meaning that night.

The details of what happened to him aren't necessary, nor edifying, nor respectful to him. All I can say is that he was finally buried on Monday. His brother was taken away by the police twice, and freed twice. The man who was renting the room where they found Ramon has disappeared and hasn't shown up since. Nobody knew the renter. Everybody blamed the brother as complicit, if not as the murderer himself.

By the time we got back from the Andes on Wednesday afternoon, exactly one week after his death, everyone was still talking about it. I had never seen the whole community so affected and traumatized. It was like a heaviness, a gloomy understanding among everyone. That Thursday began his "nine days of mourning" as I saw it translated in 100 Years of Solitude. It's a tradition that, like so many traditions, everyone follows and very few, if any, understand. It involves praying the rosary once every night for eight nights until the last night where it's prayed nine times. I'm guessing it has something to do with different levels of purgatory if I can remember my Dante correctly. However, I honestly can't say what it truly represents since no one here has been able to explain it to me. Practically, it looks like a bunch of guys standing outside the house of the deceased talking in hushed voices and all the women inside going through the rosary and silently getting mad at the one leading it for not doing it "the right way". I'm not sure what the right way is, but the criticism of the leader seems universal. I personally don't pray the rosary, nor do I believe in purgatory, nor do I have doubts as to where Ramon is. So when I went, I typically found myself outside with the guys. They say it's important to not seclude yourself after experiencing loss. We've seen that these nine nights provide a good excuse to avoid seclusion, be together to mourn, and remember the deceased.

Seclude myself was exactly what I didn't do. In those nine days, I don't think I had ever been more "present" in the neighborhood. Between leading summerXchange, the goodbyes for our beloved teammate transitioning off the team, and the two weeks in the Andes, I had been continuously occupied with responsibilities in other locations and focuses than the street. "Estabas perdido" (You've been "lost") everyone said, noting my lack of presence over the past few months. It felt good to be back and "found".

On Sunday, we held an homage service for Ramon. We shared our memories of him, what we would like to have said to him if we had the chance, laughed and reflected on his life. We read through Psalm 10 which was felt strangely like it was written after the fact. We prayed and asked our neighbors to bring their grief, their fear, their anger and desire for revenge before Jesus. We threw out an invitation to continue meeting and read through and discuss the Bible . . . and got nothing definite. Perseverance.

On Wednesday night, I heard from Mateo that he didn't sleep at all the previous night. He, along with his wife and son were talking when they all heard the sound of a coffee cup crashing to the floor between them. There was no coffee cup between them, nor had anything in house fallen. Later a bad smell invaded the house. A bad smell invaded my landlord's house. The woman in whose house Ramon sewed shoes felt a tug on her pants like Ramon used to do, but nobody was there. Another woman felt someone brush past her arm when she was alone. Everybody, it seemed, was being haunted. Who knows what these incidents were, and I'm sure many would write them off to mass hysteria or grief. Mass hysteria or not, it scared the living daylights out of everybody even to the point of not sleeping. As I told my neighbors, the best thing to do in any situation, known or unknown, understood or not, is to not fear and instead bring it to Jesus. Apparently the room where he had been murdered had not been cleaned up and there was still blood on the floor. Everyone blamed the hauntings on this lack of respect towards Ramon. We organized a small courageous crew of his brother, my landlord, another helper and I to clean it up the next morning after which, our team would enter and pray in the same room.

The room was a disgusting mess, but after an hour, lots of garbage bags, brooms, soap, and bleach, it was about as clean as it could get. The weird thing was that the whole neighborhood had been without water since Monday night. By this Thursday morning, all the pipes were bone dry. When we showed up, water ran out of a hose connected to some system of pipes connected to who knows what. My landlord tried to shut off the valve, but it didn't turn off. When we had finished cleaning, the water stopped flowing. My landlord gave credit to Ramon; I told him I gave credit to God. Our team then prayed in Jesus' name against whatever evil that might have been there and asked Jesus to bless the room and fill it with His Spirit. After the prayer, our team leader challenged the brother directly with the forgiveness offered in Jesus while also warning him that even though this room had been cleaned, unless he fills it and himself with the Spirit of God, whatever evil that was there will come back and stronger. He listened and kind of nodded. Perseverance. The hauntings stopped after that.

The days and the weeks go by, and it's only in the silent moments that it sinks in that he's gone. Grief is strange like it, sometimes it hits harder later than sooner. He brought an intangible joy to our street that is sorely missed. In the days afterward I had difficulty saying hi to his brother, even though I knew I needed to talk with him. It took a few weeks for me to put aside the excuses and sit down with him. I know he didn't do it, and told him as much. I told him that sometimes we do things without knowing or wanting, that we feel the weight of the guilt, and that no amount of work can take that away; it needs to be forgiven. I told him Jesus offers that forgiveness and protection, that He is the only one that can save us. I've overheard that there are people that are trying to kill him, something he confirmed mentioning that someone had tried to kick down his door early in the morning. I said that Jesus is the only one that can truly protect him if he would trust in Him and accept Him. He listened, took it in, and after a moment, shook my hand, thanked me and walked off. Perseverance.

I mentioned to a teammate that it seems like we're in a play. We entered with a certain cast of characters, but that cast is slowly diminishing and dying off. She said she felt the same.

I've been under the weather in the past couple of days, so I've been holed up for the most part reading and trying to get this typed up. I read Bruchko, which is an amazing testimony of missionary Bruce Olsen to native tribes in Venezuela and Colombia, highly recommended. After contemplating the unbelievable suffering Bruce endured, and the incredible transformation that took place among the Motilone people, it made me wonder. I almost have to come to the same conclusion as Bruchko after weighing the difference between all the suffering he and the Motilones had gone through compared with what Jesus had brought to them: "Life has to be like this. It has to be struggling and crying, even dying. . . if it weren't for Jesus there would be no struggle." I wonder if that's what the Beatitudes and their blessing in the midst of suffering are all about. I wonder if that is what the cross, and resurrection is all about. And I also wonder, when, when is our barrio's resurrection coming?

Transitions

2009-08-15T15:18:00.002-06:00

3am tomorrow, Sunday, leave for the andes mountains with good friends/neighbors. Back in Caracas by September 1st L0rd willing.

Yesterday afternoon, Adrienne left for the US and will be staying. Sad to see her go, as was she to leave, but it's her next step. Lots of good byes in the neighborhood and teamwise.

August 7th, cook fried rice for 100+ people for Adrienne's good bye party. And stay up all night hanging out.

August 4th, returned from San Francisco after debrief with summerXchange. LOTS of people to connect with.

July 28th, go to San Francisco for debrief for summerXchange. Good time had by all.

July 23rd, finish kids club in San Pablito. ends well, but I miss the freedom of being able to get out on the street. Kids are great, but kids club are lots of work.

No reason to keep going back in time. Suffice it to say, lots of jumps and jolts in the past few weeks. C-mail coming in September.

Magna Carta

2009-07-13T10:01:00.002-06:00

I found this on Alan Hirsch's blog. Good stuff!

A Magna Carta
for Restoring the Supremacy of
Jesus Christ
a.k.a.
A Jesus Manifesto
for the 21st Century Church
by Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola

Christians have made the gospel about so many things … things other than Christ.
Jesus Christ is the gravitational pull that brings everything together and gives them significance, reality, and meaning. Without him, all things lose their value. Without him, all things are but detached pieces floating around in space.
It is possible to emphasize a spiritual truth, value, virtue, or gift, yet miss Christ . . . who is the embodiment and incarnation of all spiritual truth, values, virtues, and gifts.
Seek a truth, a value, a virtue, or a spiritual gift, and you have obtained something dead.
Seek Christ, embrace Christ, know Christ, and you have touched him who is Life. And in him resides all Truth, Values, Virtues and Gifts in living color. Beauty has its meaning in the beauty of Christ, in whom is found all that makes us lovely and loveable.
What is Christianity? It is Christ. Nothing more. Nothing less. Christianity is not an ideology. Christianity is not a philosophy. Christianity is the “good news” that Beauty, Truth and Goodness are found in a person. Biblical community is founded and found on the connection to that person. Conversion is more than a change in direction; it’s a change in connection. Jesus’ use of the ancient Hebrew word shubh, or its Aramaic equivalent, to call for “repentance” implies not viewing God from a distance, but entering into a relationship where God is command central of the human connection.
In that regard, we feel a massive disconnection in the church today. Thus this manifesto.
We believe that the major disease of the church today is JDD: Jesus Deficit Disorder. The person of Jesus is increasingly politically incorrect, and is being replaced by the language of “justice,” “the kingdom of God,” “values,” and “leadership principles.”
In this hour, the testimony that we feel God has called us to bear centers on the primacy of the Lord Jesus Christ. Specifically . . .
1. The center and circumference of the Christian life is none other than the person of Christ. All other things, including things related to him and about him, are eclipsed by the sight of his peerless worth. Knowing Christ is Eternal Life. And knowing him profoundly, deeply, and in reality, as well as experiencing his unsearchable riches, is the chief pursuit of our lives, as it was for the first Christians. God is not so much about fixing things that have gone wrong in our lives as finding us in our brokenness and giving us Christ.
2. Jesus Christ cannot be separated from his teachings. Aristotle says to his disciples, “Follow my teachings.” Socrates says to his disciples, “Follow my teachings.” Buddha says to his disciples, “Follow my meditations.” Confucius says to his disciples, “Follow my sayings.” Muhammad says to his disciples, “Follow my noble pillars.” Jesus says to his disciples, “Follow me.” In all other religions, a follower can follow the teachings of its founder without having a relationship with that founder. Not so with Jesus Christ. The teachings of Jesus cannot be separated from Jesus himself. Jesus Christ is still alive and he embodies his teachings. It is a profound mistake, therefore, to treat Christ as simply the founder of a set of moral, ethical, or social teaching. The Lord Jesus and his teaching are one. The Medium and the Message are One. Christ is the incarnation of the Kingdom of God and the Sermon on the Mount.
3. God’s grand mission and eternal purpose in the earth and in heaven centers in Christ . . . both the individual Christ (the Head) and the corporate Christ (the Body). This universe is moving towards one final goal – the fullness of Christ where He shall fill all things with himself. To be truly missional, then, means constructing one’s life and ministry on Christ. He is both the heart and bloodstream of God’s plan. To miss this is to miss the plot; indeed, it is to miss everything.
4. Being a follower of Jesus does not involve imitation so much as it does implantation and impartation. Incarnation–the notion that God connects to us in baby form and human touch—is the most shocking doctrine of the Christian religion. The incarnation is both once-and-for-all and ongoing, as the One “who was and is to come” now is and lives his resurrection life in and through us. Incarnation doesn’t just apply to Jesus; it applies to every one of us. Of course, not in the same sacramental way. But close. We have been given God’s “Spirit” which makes Christ “real” in our lives. We have been made, as Peter puts it, “partakers of the divine nature.” How, then, in the face of so great a truth can we ask for toys and trinkets? How can we lust after lesser gifts and itch for religious and spiritual thingys? We’ve been touched from on high by the fires of the Almighty and given divine life. A life that has passed through death – the very resurrection life of the Son of God himself. How can we not be fired up?
To put it in a question: What was the engine, or the accelerator, of the Lord’s amazing life? What was the taproot or the headwaters of his outward behavior? It was this: Jesus lived by an indwelling Father. After his resurrection, the passage has now moved. What God the Father was to Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ is to you and to me. He’s our indwelling Presence, and we share in the life of Jesus’ own relationship with the Father. There is a vast ocean of difference between trying to compel Christians to imitate Jesus and learning how to impart an implanted Christ. The former only ends up in failure and frustration. The latter is the gateway to life and joy in our daying and our dying. We stand with Paul: “Christ lives in me.” Our life is Christ. In him do we live, breathe, and have our being. “What would Jesus do?” is not Christianity. Christianity asks: “What is Christ doing through me … through us? And how is Jesus doing it?” Following Jesus means “trust and obey” (respond), and living by his indwelling life through the power of the Spirit.
5. The “Jesus of history” cannot be disconnected from the “Christ of faith.” The Jesus who walked the shores of Galilee is the same person who indwells the church today. There is no disconnect between the Jesus of Mark’s Gospel and the incredible, all-inclusive, cosmic Christ of Paul’s letter to the Colossians. The Christ who lived in the first century has a pre-existence before time. He also has a post-existence after time. He is Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End, A and Z, all at the same time. He stands in the future and at the end of time at the same moment that He indwells every child of God. Failure to embrace these paradoxical truths has created monumental problems and has diminished the greatness of Christ in the eyes of God’s people.
6. It’s possible to confuse “the cause” of Christ with the person of Christ. When the early church said “Jesus is Lord,” they did not mean “Jesus is my core value.” Jesus isn’t a cause; he is a real and living person who can be known, loved, experienced, enthroned and embodied. Focusing on his cause or mission doesn’t equate focusing on or following him. It’s all too possible to serve “the god” of serving Jesus as opposed to serving him out of an enraptured heart that’s been captivated by his irresistible beauty and unfathomable love. Jesus led us to think of God differently, as relationship, as the God of all relationship.
7. Jesus Christ was not a social activist nor a moral philosopher. To pitch him that way is to drain his glory and dilute his excellence. Justice apart from Christ is a dead thing. The only battering ram that can storm the gates of hell is not the cry of Justice, but the name of Jesus. Jesus Christ is the embodiment of Justice, Peace, Holiness, Righteousness. He is the sum of all spiritual things, the “strange attractor” of the cosmos. When Jesus becomes an abstraction, faith loses its reproductive power. Jesus did not come to make bad people good. He came to make dead people live.
8. It is possible to confuse an academic knowledge or theology about Jesus with a personal knowledge of the living Christ himself. These two stand as far apart as do the hundred thousand million galaxies. The fullness of Christ can never be accessed through the frontal lobe alone. Christian faith claims to be rational, but also to reach out to touch ultimate mysteries. The cure for a big head is a big heart.
Jesus does not leave his disciples with CliffsNotes for a systematic theology. He leaves his disciples with breath and body.
Jesus does not leave his disciples with a coherent and clear belief system by which to love God and others. Jesus gives his disciples wounds to touch and hands to heal.
Jesus does not leave his disciples with intellectual belief or a “Christian worldview.” He leaves his disciples with a relational faith.
Christians don’t follow a book. Christians follow a person, and this library of divinely inspired books we call “The Holy Bible” best help us follow that person. The Written Word is a map that leads us to The Living Word. Or as Jesus himself put it, “All Scripture testifies of me.” The Bible is not the destination; it’s a compass that points to Christ, heaven’s North Star.
The Bible does not offer a plan or a blueprint for living. The “good news” was not a new set of laws, or a new set of ethical injunctions, or a new and better PLAN. The “good news” was the story of a person’s life, as reflected in The Apostle’s Creed. The Mystery of Faith proclaims this narrative: “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.” The meaning of Christianity does not come from allegiance to complex theological doctrines, but a passionate love for a way of living in the world that revolves around following Jesus, who taught that love is what makes life a success . . . not wealth or health or anything else: but love. And God is love.
9. Only Jesus can transfix and then transfigure the void at the heart of the church. Jesus Christ cannot be separated from his church. While Jesus is distinct from his Bride, he is not separate from her. She is in fact his very own Body in the earth. God has chosen to vest all of power, authority, and life in the living Christ. And God in Christ is only known fully in and through his church. (As Paul said, “The manifold wisdom of God – which is Christ – is known through the ekklesia.”)
The Christian life, therefore, is not an individual pursuit. It’s a corporate journey. Knowing Christ and making him known is not an individual prospect. Those who insist on flying life solo will be brought to earth, with a crash. Thus Christ and his church are intimately joined and connected. What God has joined together, let no person put asunder. We were made for life with God; our only happiness is found in life with God. And God’s own pleasure and delight is found therein as well.
10. In a world which sings, “Oh, who is this Jesus?” and a church which sings, “Oh, let’s all be like Jesus,” who will sing with lungs of leather, “Oh, how we love Jesus!”
If Jesus could rise from the dead, we can at least rise from our bed, get off our couches and pews, and respond to the Lord’s resurrection life within us, joining Jesus in what he’s up to in the world. We call on others to join us—not in removing ourselves from planet Earth, but to plant our feet more firmly on the Earth while our spirits soar in the heavens of God’s pleasure and purpose. We are not of this world, but we live in this world for the Lord’s rights and interests. We, collectively, as the ekklesia of God, are Christ in and to this world.
May God have a people on this earth who are a people of Christ, through Christ, and for Christ. A people of the cross. A people who are consumed with God’s eternal passion, which is to make his Son preeminent, supreme, and the head over all things visible and invisible. A people who have discovered the touch of the Almighty in the face of his glorious Son. A people who wish to know only Christ and him crucified, and to let everything else fall by the wayside. A people who are laying hold of his depths, discovering his riches, touching his life, and receiving his love, and making HIM in all of his unfathomable glory known to others.
The two of us may disagree about many things—be they ecclesiology, eschatology, soteriology, not to mention economics, globalism and politics.
But in our two most recent books—From Eternity to Here and So Beautiful—we have sounded forth a united trumpet. These books are the Manifests to this Manifesto. They each present the vision that has captured our hearts and that we wish to impart to the Body of Christ— “This ONE THING I know” (Jn.9:25) that is the ONE THING that unites us all:
Jesus the Christ.
Christians don’t follow Christianity; Christians follow Christ.
Christians don’t preach themselves; Christians proclaim Christ.
Christians don’t point people to core values; Christians point people to the cross.
Christians don’t preach about Christ: Christians preach Christ.
Over 300 years ago a German pastor wrote a hymn that built around the Name above all names:
Ask ye what great thing I know,
that delights and stirs me so?
What the high reward I win?
Whose the name I glory in?
Jesus Christ, the crucified.
This is that great thing I know;
this delights and stirs me so:
faith in him who died to save,
His who triumphed o’er the grave:
Jesus Christ, the crucified.
—
Jesus Christ – the crucified, resurrected, enthroned, triumphant, living Lord.
He is our Pursuit, our Passion, and our Life.
Amen.

Max Weber

2009-06-21T10:04:00.002-06:00

Since I'm "leading" a group for this summer, I figure I'm going to focus my posts on leadership. Everybody's all about leadership these days, or maybe we've swung the opposite and we're all NOT about leadership. In any case, it's something worth some thought. I'm writing a list of lessons I'm learning/failing at. I don't have that list with me, so let me go ahead and put down lesson one:

1. ORGANIZE!

On a different theme, Alan Hirsch had a good post recently. But it got me reading about the three forms of authority studied by Max Weber:

Charismatic Authority
Traditional Authority
Rational/Legal Authority

Interesting stuff. Can you identify all the different types of authority you pass under in any given day? Any ideas where the Kingdom of God fits, if it fits?

First thoughts on leadership for this summer:

2009-06-16T23:10:00.001-06:00

It sucks.

Compy 1 2 1 2

2009-06-04T12:57:00.004-06:00

Well, I made it to San Francisco, but I have other news: I have a new computer. If you're wondering from the last update how I was able to write something from 38,000 feet in the air, it's because of this little beauty:

I got it on Amazon for a steal ($275) and had a friend bring it down for me. I needed a way to write updates/emails in my house (even though I don't have internet) and this is perfect.

It is an Asus 901 EeePC. It's a netbook so it's really tiny but really awesome as well. See picture for size comparision.

It doesn't have a hard drive (solid state drive instead, 20GB) nor does it have a CD/DVD drive (to small), but it does have linux!!! I installed Ubuntu on it and it's running great! What's not to like about four desktops on a rotating cube. Overall, I'm highly satified with the computer and it's letting me live my inner nerd. Plus it's turned a few heads at the airport.

Alright, that's it for bring and brag. But Lord willing with this, I can get more updates out with more frequency. And hopefully, you think that's a good thing.

C-mail: Three Encounters

2009-06-04T12:40:00.001-06:00

Howdy All!

I'm 38,000 feet in the air somewhere above the Caribbean. This aluminum enveloped travel community is comprised of the standard complement of well to do Venezuelans, a few scattered North American tourists, honeymooners and business men while I'm seated next to two friendly Venezuelan women who have the gift to be able to talk and understand each other at the same time. Yet, despite all of our diversity, we are all united in our ambivalence towards our in-flight movie, Race to Witch Mountain. This plane is a completely foreign world to all of my neighbors, but I doubt they're missing much. You probably aren't super envious of my spot either, but I figure I should let you in anyway. In any case, here is the C-mail:

1. InnerCHANGE hosts a 40 day summer missions experience called summerXchange. This year we have four sites: LA, San Francisco, Miami and Caracas. I'm leading the team for Caracas. We start on the 6^th of June in San Francisco for orientation (hence the plane flight) and we finish at the end of July. During our time in Caracas, we'll be focusing our efforts in a community called San Pablito. It's one of the oldest barrios on our side of Caracas and is also featured in the InnerCHANGE video. We'll be doing a kids club twice a week as well as doing visits to get a feel for some areas that are unknown to us. It is a pretty heavy place both in terms of the violence that passes through and spiritual oppression. I would highly appreciate prayer for our protection: physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Pray that God's light would shine through us and that His Kingdom would grow there. Also pray for me as I balance leadership for this summer with all the relationships I have in our own neighborhood. Speaking of prayer....

2. I'm feeling led to ask for more intercessors. If you would like to commit to praying regularly for our ministry, our neighbors and myself, shoot me an email.

3. In April, our team had the privilege to host to InnerCHANGE's yearly leader's community. It was a real blessing to get to see a number of these leaders and soak up bits of their experience and wisdom. Still, hosting over twenty some foreigners for a couple weeks is nothing short of formidable. None the less, our team did awesome getting everyone around from the airport and conference site, keeping food rolling, and opening our houses as need arose. I am extremely thankful that everything went well, the logistics came together and everyone had a great time.

4. I'm starting a compost project!!! Our barrio, amongst many, is plagued by trash problems. Many times the city is inconsistent in picking up the trash while the amount being produced is staggering. I've long wanted to try to start something to help alleviate the issue and I finally got up the gumption to go ahead and start experimenting. The goal: find ways to turn organic trash into usable soil in an urban setting (ie, homes with no usable land). I'll spare the technical stuff 'til later, but I'm going to need some time and experimentation to figure out something workable. Lord willing, I later hope to try composting with a few willing test families later this year. If all goes well, with a little bit of good ol' community organizing and/or word-of-mouth style campaigning, we can all help to alleviate some of our trash issues.

5.Our team is growing! In early April, we received a new team member: Beth Carter (no relation to me or Jimmy). However, in writing about a new addition to the team, I realize that I've rudely never introduced you to any of our team in first place. So here they are: we currently have six team members, not including three teenagers, a dog, and a cat. The three teenagers, dog and cat belong to John and Birgit Shorack our team leaders. They've been in Caracas for well over seven years now. Adrienne Carlson, KT McClure and myself arrived over a year and a half ago and up until recently, we were the new guys. We also have some more people interested, (including a Venezuelan) but I'll introduce them to you as they come aboard

Well, that's it for now. There's been about a billion more things that have been going on, but this is sufficient for one update. I'll send out another C-mail at the end of summerXchange with a summer summary. Until then, I covet your prayers, I'd love to hear back from you, and let me know how I can pray for you. I might even throw something up on the blog this time. Till then, Stay strong, seek the Lord and

Press on for Joy!

Cameron

Here are three significant encounters from recent life that have been impactful to me. Not all of life is this deep, but it's good to look at the highlights from time to time. These three encounters fall loosely into three currents of life we as InnerCHANGE try to focus on: the prophetic, the missionary, and the contemplative. I hope you enjoy them.

"Get on your knees." He was right; it was the only way to communicate it to her. She was mute, and quite possibly deaf, but all we could tell was that our previous attempts at gestures and sign language were not being well received.

It was a Sunday and we had brought one of the visiting InnerCHANGE leaders to come to the local church. He's Central American but now ministers in the States with youth in gangs and those coming out of Juvinille. After the service, a woman none of us had met before, came up attracted by his shirt emblazoned with the face of Monsignor Romero.

She began to motion and gesticulate in order to him to show her admiration for the matyr of the americas. In high school, I had seen the movie chronicling his life and death in El Salvador. In order to establish some sort of communication with her, I began to act out how he was shot as he was offering the Eucharist. She noticed me, and nodded in agreement with the pantomime. However, it was just a minute later when she finally noticed that two of the three of us standing there were white, and specifically North American. That's when everything changed.

She began by pointing to our skin, then comparing it to our Central American friend. She pointed to his arms and coloring with a smile, and then pointed to ours with a repugnant face. She then pantomimed us (or someone of our coloring, I should say) walking around, not giving a care about anybody. She acted out a suffering child, begging and going hungry and then after pointing at us, she acted out a person walking past up while turning their nose.

Our Latin friend began to take the initiative to begin the "dialog". He began to point to us and smile, trying to correct her. He put our arms side by side showing the different colors of our skin. He did it with a smile, and drove the point home by giving each of us a hug, and even gave me a big ol' kiss right in the ribs (we have a mild height difference). But she would not be budged. She acted out people shooting other people, and then turning up their nose and primping their jackets as they moved on with a poorly uttered "hmph". I don't know if she had ever met North Americans before or where she got her ideas, but whatever her history and whatever her thoughts, no matter how wrong or right, our responsibility as ambassadors of Christ is to seek reconciliation.

The convenience of verbal communication, regardless of language, allows for the conveyance of a particular message while still communicating something completely different by the word choice, expression, and nuance of the delivery. For example, I can tell you I agree with you completely that chocolate ice cream is better than vanilla, but in the telling, I'm going to convince you that this isn't just a black and white issue. I might even use a little sarcasm in saying that since chocolate is so far superior, it explains exactly why so many stores now days no longer even bother carrying vanilla. There are a million ways to overtly, or even worse, subtly, justify myself in my words . However, that type of justification is simply not possible with actions and crude pantomimes.

So, after clasping our hands in a penitent manner and putting on a sorry face only availed a skeptical look or two, our visiting friend guided us to our knees. We could not offer any defense of "we're not like that!" Nor were there opportunities to share personal stories of how absolutely no North American I know acts like she thought. Instead, we could say nothing. All we had was our silent, prostrated humiliation.

Our friend then interceded for us, stood us up and brought us each individually into a hug with the mute woman. Her face of suspicion melted away after that embrace. She lit up and gestured a question as to whether our friend was staying or not. (Think Napoleon Dynamite happy hands to represent flying away). We arranged the details for him to be able to send her a shirt of Romero and bid our farewells on good terms.

Our friend gave us some advice afterwards. "You guys should bring her a flower next time. And if she turns you down, keep trying to reconcile with her. And if she turns you down again, then keep trying. If you give up, then you're not good missionaries." It's good advice. I haven't seen her since, but some of my other teammates have. She had saved them a seat in church and was overjoyed to see them.

-------------------------

"Why do you want to live tomorrow? It is because there is some one who loves you, and whom you want to see tomorrow, and be with, and love back. There is no other reason why we should live on than that we love and are beloved. It is when a man has no one to love him that he commits suicide. So long as he has friends, those who love him and whom he loves, he will live; because to live is to love. Be it but the love of a dog, it will keep him in life; but let that go and he has no contact with life, no reason to live." --Henry Drummond, The Greatest Thing in the World.

Although I always verbally disagree with his self degrading opinion, I grudgingly have to admit that Marcos is ugly. His face bears multiple scars, depressions, and swellings framing two yellow, vertically offset eyes. He would win a "face with the most character" contest in a second. But that same face coupled with an alcohol addiction disqualifies him from any serious participation in "normal" society. Today, he sat slumped over on a stump/stool in the "parking lot" where he works directing clients parking their cars and motorcycles.

After noticing my presence, he gets out a mumbled "Hey Shaggy." (with my long hair I've been pegged as the spitting image of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo). We exchange the universal greeting banter, except that when I ask how he's doing, he responds honestly:

"Bad." he says.

"Why is it bad?"

"I don't feel good, I'm sick." He shows me a rubber tube coming out of his abdomen collecting his urine in a bag he keeps in his pocket: they're all leftovers from some complication with kidney stones. "I'm rotting on the inside. I'm just waiting to die and go to heaven . . . I'm here by myself without anybody."

I protest. I remind him that we've been here for him for a while now, and will continue to be here for him. Plus, there are doctors that can help him and treat him. He takes it in stride and continues. "At night, I crawl in my little hideaway, my place on the street and sleep there. The only thing that I have is a rat, you know, like this big (he indicates the length of a decent size rat). Every night it comes and sleeps with me. It crawls in there and curls up right on top of me. I don't know why it does that, but it keeps me warm and I keep it warm. That's the only friend I got." It's tragic, but we joke about it a bit, figuring out names for his pet.

My teammate KT met Marcos in the market place just down the hill from where we live about two months ago. Ever since, our team has been dropping by individually as we pass through there to say hi and give him encouragement. When I first met him, he had been helped out by some local evangelicals who were trying to connect him with a rehab program. He went to their church a few times, but for one reason or another he stopped going and lost contact with them. None the less, the experience left him with a question: What exactly does God feel like? We frequently talk about it in our conversations but I find my own experience of feeling God shallow at best for such a daring and honest inquiry. The very valid and essential lesson of having faith even without feeling God seems lacking even as I continually offer it to him. I'm just glad he's asking the right question: It's one thing to talk about Jesus; it's something completely different to introduce someone to Him. We've all prayed with Marcos and at times he's felt a sense of peace, but it isn't the fullness of what he's looking for. So, as we wait on God, we keep visiting whenever we happen to be there, every two to four days, five to thirty minutes at a time.

"Maybe God doesn't want you to be alone," I offer up "so he's given you that rat. God's sent you that rat to keep you company. And although you can't "feel" God, He's sending you messengers of His love. He's sent you that rat, KT, myself, all of us so that you won't be alone." The idea elicits in him a shrug and an invitation to continue. "I also want to feel God's love the way you do, but sometimes I have to accept and trust that God has sent me people, or even rats, as agents of His love. And even if you don't believe it, Jesus is sending you His love, although it looks and feels different than what we hope for."

Yeah, I know, it sounds a little cheezy and preachy, but somehow God's working through it. Through our friendship, both serious and lighthearted, and God's steadfast love, Marcos' days where he responds that waits to die are becoming less and less. His most frequent response to "Como estas?" is now "mejor!" (better) accompanied by a beautiful, toothy smile. He's been to the doctor and they've been working to cure him as well. We prayed that day and while praying for Jesus to make Himself real to him, Marcos said he felt a tingling in his hand. I can't say that it was God, but I do know that Jesus is showing Marcos more of Himself everyday. His faith and his life are growing. Where it's going, I honestly don't know, but I do know that the Kingdom of God is taking root in his heart.

-----------------------------

"Let's do something a little different. Let's break up into pairs and pray for each other." I haven't been for a while so I'm glad to be here tonight. Tuesday night is Holy Spirit night. It's a free time to worship, pray, and receive from God. After a good time of worship, we broke up into pairs and listened before praying for each other. After we had all but finished, I asked if there was a word or anything else God wanted to show me for my partner. I normally don't get words, but this time I got a very clear and distinct word: "cow tongue". It was a weird word to be sure, but after asking what that could possibly mean, I was immediately transported back to a scene from my childhood.

Somewhere in Washington state, my parents and I were walking around a dairy farm. I couldn't have been more than eight at the time. We had wandered (although, anything with eight year olds usually involves direct sprints) into a barn or stable that held some young cows. The classic hay and manure smell permeated the structure. One young cow, too old to be a calf but nowhere near full grown either, caught my attention. I stood facing the cow, his eyes started back inquisitively through the bars designed to separate man and bovine, to ensure that the two should never meet. None the less, with my mom's careful watch by my side, I partially closed the gap between myself and the young cow who had put his head up to the bars. And that's when it started.

The cow slowly, innocently, and more than anything, steadily, began to extend its tongue. Its black cow lips were parted, its head titled so that one dark, black eye could stare directly into mine. All the while, the little pink tip began a slow journey towards an intrigued eight year old. At first, it looked like any old tongue extension: one with the purpose to lick it's lips or nose or both. But as the little-tongue-that-could kept up its direct trajectory, it became a wonder to behold. It unpacked itself like forty clowns jumping out of a VW beetle: you wait for it to be over, but it just keeps coming. Reason, logic, experience, even your own tongue bears testimony that it has to stop, right now, no now, I mean now . . .that this just isn't physically possible. And yet, the tongue just kept coming. My unbelief was expressed by my mom's stifled yelp of shock. Thankfully, her yelp phased me out of my tongue induced hypnosis and I was able to jump out of the way of the impending lick. Even after my jump back, the cow didn't give up and gave the tongue a few more seconds of unchecked growth before retiring it's head from the bars.

I wasn't scarred from the experience, but it was one that has obviously stuck with me. Thus when I heard "cow tongue" and the associated story, I knew exactly what it meant. I think it was a word for me than for my partner but I shared it with him anyways. Personally, I often unquestioningly fall in to living as if God is finished, that there is no more to expect, to receive, that what I've seen is enough, that I can't reasonably expect to see him grow anything else around or in me. I certainly would never claim to believe that, but I end up living like that somehow. However, the love of God is just like that cow tongue, it will keep growing and extending, well beyond what anyone could ever imagine or believe to be realistic. And, it will reach you if you let it. Just don't mooove out of the way (sorry). So here's to expecting and waiting for more of Jesus and more of Him within us. Until we are complete in Him and with Him, stay strong, expect more and more from Him and

Press on for Joy!

Cameron

C-mail: My Brother

2009-02-23T17:26:00.001-07:00

Howdy All!

Happy February everybody! Here are the happenings in Caracas:

1. On January 6th, I had the joy of helping out one of our neighbors put together a community event for the kids of our barrio. We had a big soccer tournament, a "marathon", various other races, and an impromptu dance contest. I was so happy to see him put forth the initiative for organizing the event as well as give many of his own resources for the benefit of the community. It was rather symbolic as the tournament was held on the day of "Los Reyes Magos" or as we know them, The Three Wise Men. These kings gave of their own resources to the baby Jesus just as our neighbor was able to give to the youth of our community. The day went extremely well and everyone poured out to watch the kids play. Check out the attached pictures.

2. I've been doing a lot of teaching recently. Twice a week, our team continues to hold tutoring sessions for children that are behind or completely lost in their education. We open with a prayer and close by reading a story with some critical reflection. We've had a number of kids showing up just so they can hear a story read to them! We're hoping to build a solid Venezuelan volunteer base so we can work with more kids and give them the individual attention they need. Pray that God would provide good volunteers. In addition, I'm two months into teaching English to a group of neighbors. I've really enjoyed the English class as it's been a wonderful way to meet with these neighbors on a weekly basis. It has led to lots of good discussions, spiritual and otherwise. I'm really excited about what God is doing in their lives and am hopeful for the gospel to take root in them. Pray for more hunger and growth in them spiritually. Pictures are attached.

3. I'm a little late in doing it, but there is someone I'd like to introduce you all to . . . Gracie, my girlfriend. Gracie and I have been dating for just over a year now. We met in 2006 during InterVarsity's Global Urban Trek in Lima. She felt God calling her back there and has been serving with a Peruvian organization called Paz y Esperanza for just over four months. The distance thing is not easy, but over the past year, we've been able to coordinate and meet up a few different times. In fact, she just came to visit Venezuela for a week and we were able to celebrate Valentines together. Yet another attached picture.

4. Keep praying for our visas! We're trying everything possible, but nothing is going quick or easy. We're soon hoping to find out if it even is a realistic expectation to get visas. Pray that we would know quickly if we can get religious worker visas or if we need to look at other options. But even better, pray that God would grant us visas and soon!

5. This summer, our team will be hosting a summerXchange site. What is summerXchange? It's a 40 day internship through InnerCHANGE where participants will live with a team and engage in their day to day ministry. I'll be leading the Venezuela site which is a bit scary, but I'm excited to do it. Pray that God would prepare the hearts of the participants that are supposed to come, prepare my heart, and for all the preparations to go well according to His plans. If you want more info, check out the summerXchange website.

Well, that's it for now. Don't forget to check the blog. I update there with much more frequency than with email, plus the updates tend to be shorter. Also, if you ever wanted to send a letter or a card, the address is:
Cameron Carter
CCS 16019, (819)
PO Box 025323
Miami, FL 33102-523 USA
And that will get here with just a plain ol' USPS style stamp.

Please let me know how I can be praying for you. I know things are tough back home and I want to thank you for your continued giving and prayers. God is faithful and He will supply all your needs. May you be filled with all love, faith, and hope and may they always endure in your life and the lives around you. Stay strong, seek the Lord and
Press on for Joy!
Cameron

Monday, February 2^nd, 2009

"Finally!" Alejandro shouts. Except he doesn't exactly shout. Alejandro can't shout: he's 18 and has muscular dystrophy. It's a hereditary disease that progressively weakens all skeletal muscles. He can move his hands to make stick figure drawings, feed himself, and change the channel with the remote. But for the most part, he's immobile.

"It's because of the rain." his brother Osvaldo chimes in. There are four brothers in total: Alejandro 18, Lucio 16, Osvaldo 14, and the youngest, Armando 11. They are all affected by the same disease. The youngest is still ambulatory and is quite the handful with the attitude to match.

It's a standard Monday night: hanging out with the boys. I've been coming here for over five months now and these boys and their family have become endearing to me. Sometimes we'll do drawings, sometimes make things with play dough, many times just hang out. Tonight, they are hoping to watch the first game of the Caribbean series. Baseball is THE sport here. The finals between the Lions of Caracas and the Tigers of Aragua finished last week. Tonight, the champion Tigers, representing Venezuela, are playing the Dominican Republic. However, the game isn't on. Chavez is giving yet another speech before the upcoming election. Providentially, he's finishing early due to the heavy rain falling on everyone at the rally. The game comes on and I quickly catch the brothers up on the score and inning.

"Venezuela's winning!" one shouts and smiles breakout across their faces. We chat a bit, I ask them how they've been doing, what's been going on. They return the questions, and ask about my girlfriend. "She's coming this Saturday. You want to meet her?" I look at Armando. He's not exactly the most charming or mild mannered around the feminine gender. Once when a female team member and I stopped by, we sensed a fair bit of awkwardness. She asked the boys if they were waiting for anything. Armando snapped back "For you to leave!"

He doesn't respond to my question. Looking at Alejandro however, I think I can tell that he wants to meet her. He, unlike Armando, turns red when girls talk to him.

"I actually need to leave early tonight since it's her birthday and I want to talk with her." I tell them.

"How old is she turning?" Alejandro asks.

"26, same as me."

Mateo drops by. He's the boy's uncle who lives in the house constructed directly above their own. I was just about to leave, but we fall into a good conversation. We hold the English class in his house and he's always asking me for more words in English. Tonight though, he's curious to know why I would come to live in their barrio instead of stay in the states and earn money in a good job. I get to tell him the story of the rich young ruler and how much of an impact Jesus has on my life. His questions are on the theme of my "religion" but I'm hoping to show that I'm just trying to know and follow Jesus. He has been asking me questions of this vein recently, and it gives me hope for his future faith. Or, he could just think I'm a spy; he does work for the government.

Venezuela is rocking the Dominicans in the sixth inning and I bid my farewells to the boys and their family and head up to our "office" to wish a Happy Birthday to Gracie over Skype.

Friday, February 6^th, 2009

It's late. Walking across the street from the closing bodega, I find Alejandro seated facing the doorway, his face covered by a respirator mask from which little wisps of medicated vapor escape. He's ringed by numerous observers, all asking him questions to which he doesn't respond. His brothers are mixed in the crowd, not participating in the spectacle. Lucio is busy looking around at everyone, taking it all in. Osvaldo is glued to the baseball game. Venezuela is playing against Mexico, and if they win tonight, they'll win the series. Armando is tottering around causing a ruckus and trying to avoid the attention of a group of women from a nearby household who seem intent on tormenting and ridiculing him until he begins to like them.

Alejandro doesn't look good. His aunt Sara is there with him, and his mom, Isabel, comes in and out at regular intervals. The crowd takes turns asking him questions. "Do you want to vomit? Do you want to vomit??" and they all utter their opinions about his condition and needs in unified disharmony. I push my way in and sit down next to him, trying to give him as much space as possible while acting calm. I tell the people around him a few times to let him be, but they aren't in any sort of mood to listen. Everybody wants to help.

After listening to the steady chatter, it seems that at some point in the early morning, Alejandro began to have difficulty breathing. His muscles were too weak for him to breath while lying down. This was somehow linked to an issue in his colon. Mateo and Sara rushed him to the hospital where the doctors examined him and then pumped his stomach. He had spent the day without food, without sleep and now is back "home" although this is not the warm, maternal environment every sick person longs for. He takes a few offered spoonfuls of liquefied soup. The vomiting interrogation begins again and stops the feeding.

The environment is overwhelming for me. I'm not sure what to do, and honestly feel tired. But, like everyone else, I too want to do something. I lean over and tell him "Look, you are very tired, you haven't eaten all day and you just want to rest. Every pain you feel is magnified. I understand how terrible it feels to be surrounded by everyone staring at you, asking questions and telling you what to do. But listen, that it is their way of showing their love and compassion for you. You'll get rest soon, but for now, you need to eat and get your energy back" I'm having a bad Spanish day and with all the commotion in the room, I'm not sure what he heard.

"Kelvin, Mira!" Osvaldo yells at me with a smile. Venezuela had just scored another run.

"Where's mom?" Alejandro asks.

"She's not here yet but, she'll be here quickly" put in his aunt. His "mom" is actually his grandma, Rafaela. She is their main caretaker since their real mom is always working. Right now, she is coming back from the funeral of a distant relative in the Andes Mountains, about twelve hours away. Thankfully, she's already made it to Caracas.

"My stomach hurts! Take me to the hospital" Alejandro cries out with frustration. Sara and I look at each other, we aren't sure what to do. We all think his stomach pain comes from the fact that he hasn't eaten in such a long time. She puts my hand on his chest to feel his heart running a mile a minute. I ask him where his pain is, but he isn't in any sort of condition to answer. One of the women walk over and begin to message his abdomen. She had deduced the pain he's feeling comes from a build up of gases. The messaging begins to calm him down, some color comes back into his face, and his heart rate slows to something normal. Rafaela shows up just a minute later and it makes all the difference in the room. She looks at Alejandro and his demeanor changes for the better. The crowd's running commentary agrees that he was just a little spooked by all the people and now he's going to be ok. More people are beginning to crowd in. I figure the least I can do is get out to give him some space. Stepping outside, I run into Mateo.

"How are you doing?" I ask.

"Good, although we were scared this morning." He says.

As we talk through what had just happened with Alejandro, I begin to realize that he had probably just gone through shock. I mention this to Mateo, and note that normally in shock, when people turn pale, you lie them on their back, but this wasn't a possibility with him since he can't breath while lying down. "Eet eez problemateec." Mateo quips in his English. But we agree that it looks like he is getting better.

He's made it through this ordeal, but I'm more scared for what happens later. It all depends if he can learn to sleep upright or if he can start breathing while lying down. But for now, there's nothing else to do except pray. So, I make my way home. In bed, about an hour later, I hear some shouts, then maybe ten minutes later, I hear the booms of fireworks and firecrackers, more shouts, and a few rounds of gunfire. Venezuela had won the series.

Sunday, February 8^th, 2009

I had told Gracie to come over to my place by eight am. She had flown in Saturday afternoon and we spent the evening meeting a few folks and catching up. I learned earlier that Alejandro had been taken to the hospital about an hour after I left on Friday night. He was in critical condition with an appendicitis caused by complications from his colon. They still can't operate because he is too unstable. The whole family had relocated to a spot closer the hospital leaving their house locked down. Visiting hours at the hospital start at five.

Until then, I'm making plans to take Gracie to a local church and have a relaxing lunch until our "convivencia", or house church meeting, later in the afternoon. I'm a bit behind in breakfast preparations when she arrives from my near by, teammate's place. We ask each other how we're doing and I respond that I'm feeling good yet heavy with Alejandro's situation. The conversation moves us to the topic of healing prayer. Which is relevant for the hour. In the middle of our discussion and eating, my landlord's wife calls through her kitchen window, "Kelvin? Kelvin?"

"Ah hah? Dime." (Tell me)

Her face looks tired. Her eyes are red. "Alejandro died."

"No . . . When?"

"At eight, right now"

We just stare at each other. What else can you do? It honestly doesn't hit me. We were just talking about healing, having faith in God's ultimate power, and it all just doesn't seem real. At least three more people drop by in the next few minutes to ask if we've heard. It's awkward conversation.

"Did you hear about Alejandro?"

"Teresa just told me." Silence for a moment while we both look at each other or look away. "Oh, hey, this is my girlfriend. She's visiting for a week."

"Oh, nice to meet you." and they smile, greet each other, and do a bit of small talk.

We walk down to church and get there just in time. This particular church is led by a charismatic, ecumenical, catholic priest which, for many of my Baptist friends, is three strikes too many. But, in his quest to be a reformer within the Catholic church, he has been a man seeking first the Kingdom of God. And for that, I trust him. He has earned the nickname "the evangelical priest" from the Pentecostals in the area since on any given Sunday you might hear him expound upon the priesthood of all believers, caution against rote prayers, emphasize the necessity of walking by the Spirit, and continually uphold the Lordship of Christ and all its implications. Even the church itself, with its brick-honeycombed walls devoid of icons and statues, its lack of windows and stain-glass, and its uncathedral-like, squarish layout would trick the naïve to believe they had wandered into a mainstream, denomination church. I once even saw a young man carrying around a translation of "The Purpose Driven Life."

The mass is wonderful. I know it's wonderful because I breakdown halfway through. The homily follows the Gospel reading from Mark 1:29-39. He points out that when Jesus saw Peter's mother-in-law he did three things. First, he came to her: he became present with her and entered her reality. Second, he took her hand: he showed compassion and reached out to her. And third, he lifted her up: he healed and restored her completely. The priest says any ministry must include these three things: coming close, extending compassion, and lifting people up. When he mentions lifting her up, I lose it. My cheeks stay drenched until we pass the peace.

I can't be certain, but I'd be willing to bet that most people, in the face of loosing a loved one, imagine that they could come back. We've seen people here that probably should have died and yet through God's grace and lots of prayer, they end up living. So what's just another step for all powerful God to bring someone back? But, I need to tell you right now, this isn't that kind of story.

We leave mass, prepare lunch, and arrive for the meeting. In light of Alejandro's passing, and the death of a woman up the road, we hold the convivencia as a time for the community to come together and pray. Tons of people show up, many who have never come to any meeting of ours before. We have a long time of worship, we pray, we do a scripture reflection. I try to keep myself busy ushering the door for those showing up. I'm not ready to fully engage; I feel physically exhausted. Crying is tiring.

In the evening we attend Alejandro's "velorio". I'm not really sure what to equate this ceremony to: perhaps a funeral, a wake, a showing? I've never attended any of these in the states. This is my eighth in Venezuela. Everyone from the community packs out the sadly frequented funeral home. Inside where the family is gathered, the three boys are hungrily working away on pieces of fried chicken. With all the preparations and stress, I'm sure it has been a while since they have eaten. Their "mom", Rafaela, shuffles between the three of them, helping them drink from cups, cleaning up smudges of grease. Her eyes are red but otherwise she looks ok. The normal details of life are never ending and all consuming.

Rafaela's mom, the boys great-grandmother, on the other hand . . . I approach and hug her. She holds on and cries and beats her fists in all directions. I've been told losing a parent is hard. Loosing a son or daughter must be infinitely more difficult. So, I can't even begin to imagine what it must be like to loose a great-grandson.

Isabel, is by the casket. We walk over to her, but she's a mess. I wish I was a mess, but the emotions aren't there, the tears either. Alejandro is there, a glass wall between us and him. He looks normal, like he's asleep. They do such a good job with the makeup that sometimes folks look better dead than alive. He could just open his eyes, and it wouldn't even be surprising. More family and neighbors arrive to pay their respects, lining up behind the casket to see him.

We spend about three hours there. In this culture, simply being present, both in life, and in death, is the sign of friendship. The funeral home begins to shut down and we head back with Hector, who owns the local bodega. He has a truck with a cargo section and we squeeze ten folks in the back. The ride back in the dark of the container is pleasant. Life here is intense, but it's also enjoyed to the fullest. Smiles, laughter, camaraderie fill the darkness. I'm still not sure what to think about it.

Monday February 9^th, 2009

We're at the cemetery outside of the city. The open casket sits on the ground in the middle of the crowd while a final ceremony is performed. For some reason, I feel like I need to drink in this last sight of him. It's hitting that I won't ever see him again, at least in this world. They lower him into the ground, everyone watching. His brothers are there by the graveside, wide-eyed; they don't get out much and being out this far must be quite the adventure. They watch him go down, the cement lid laid over the casket, and the grave diggers working to fill in the hole. The sod is put back in place and everyone wanders off to their respective rides back to the city.

Gracie and I take a detour in the city. We walk around a bit before returning to the barrio. It's about just dark when we get back, and I just want to walk by their house and say hi to anyone who happens to be at home. Rafaela comes to the door and beckons us in, while I weakly protest, "I just wanted to . . ." and I don't finish the sentence.

It's a standard Monday evening, but there's nothing standard about it. The two oldest boys are engrossed in a movie that everyone else was only half-heartedly obeying. Armando is quiet, sullen, shy, playing with some little toy. Gracie sits down next to him. "What's that?" she asks pointing at the object. He pauses, and for one reason or another, actually responds without resentment. They start talking, he brightens up a bit. Mateo asks Gracie about her work, her religion, and how she lives. Rafaela serves us all some coffee while mentioning to Gracie and I how Alejandro really wanted to meet her, and it's a shame that it didn't work out. Mateo and Sara are deservedly tired from the countless funeral and burial preparations and their lack of sleep from sadness. They excuse themselves and we take the opportunity to exchange a few silent hugs with the family and leave.

Later, I confess to Gracie that I can't understand how a family could ever take in a stranger, and allow even a foreigner to be with them in their most intimate moment of trouble and grief. I can feel like an impostor. She tells me I shouldn't feel that way. She says we have the audacity to believe that Jesus has made us all into one family. No matter the country, no matter the earthly family, we, through Christ, have been adopted as our Father's sons and daughters. I think she's right.

So now, I'm learning how to mourn my brother, how to let Christ lift me up, lift us up, and how to follow Him in binding up the brokenhearted, and in place of mourning, giving the oil of gladness.

A mi me Gusta

2009-01-16T16:04:00.004-07:00

Wednesday was my second time in the Venezuelan Theater. Not play type theater, but the movie and popcorn type. I've been missing Jeff's posts from Iraq (come back safe and soon bro!) and in honor of his first tour's movie reviews, I figured, what the heck, why not go for one here? So, welcome, and take a seat in, "The Critic's Cranny."

Our film today is "A mi me Gusta". Our film is one from the fledgling Venezuelan movie industry. Sponsored by the president, Venezuela is trying to break out of it's dominating role in the Telanovela world (soap opera) and storm the silver screen. Let's see how one of their first efforts fare.

First the title is a bit of a pun: Translated literally: "To me, it tastes good to me", or if you'll allow a bit of liberty in translation: "I like it". The word "Gustar" is the verb both for tasting and for liking, AKA being to one's taste. If you couldn't guess from the picture already, our film is a romantic comedy involving chefs. That means food, since chefs cook food. Food involves taste since food is eaten. Taste in in the title. It's a pun. Laugh.

The story starts by following Margartia Garcia, a young Venezuelan who has moved to London for an internship under top chef Paul Welsare. Sadly our top chef is too busy with his own work and projects to even meet his interns. But no matter, Margarita is promptly dismissed from the program and sent back to Venezuela since she now lacks work and a subsequent work visa to stay in London. The scene with the prim and proper immigration woman in London makes one frustrated at the plight of the immigrant and the unending, unbeatable obstacles they face. I hope the person reading my visa application watches this movie.

Margarita returns to her work in her hotel kitchen as the head chef and is warmly greeted by all. After reentering the drama of family, work, and life, she learns that by sheer chance, our British top chef is coming to participate in a fusion food project in their very own kitchen.

Here is where our our story really starts. It starts with the standard cross cultural conflict, the argument that leads to the two spending time together, and in the process of understanding one another (actually Paul understanding Maragarita and Venezuela) they fall in love. But shock, their initial emotions don't win over their own individual ambitions and dreams which are by now seriously clashing. There is a falling out, a rejected attempt at restoration, then an even greater realization of wrong on the second party's part (this time, Margarita's), and a mad dash to the airport to declare to Paul her undying love over the PA system before he leaves for London. He of course comes back, and everybody's happy.

Aside from the trite plot, there are both artefacts and treasures to mine here. In the "outside of reality category", it appears that Paul is won over by Venezuelan cuisine. Sadly, Venezuelan cuisine is really nothing to talk about. In Peru, I once met a man from the Czech Republic who was in Lima for the sole purpose of eating. You don't meet people like that in Venezuela. But no matter, perhaps the food in Britain is just as banal. However, I will give Venezuela the benefit of the doubt on some of their fruit which to us in the Northern Hemisphere seems a bit exotic. Yet on the other hand, after talking to world travelers, it seems that this too is nothing special. Beyond the quality of the cuisine, it was interesting to note the quality of the produce that the movie showed off. I had never seen any vegetables or fruits so decent looking for sale anywhere here. Much of the food in Venezuela is imported and therefore the quality is seriously lacking. And yet, even though this is a movie, I really want to know where they went shopping!

Aside from food, the film demonstrated a strong, almost religious, belief found among almost all Venezuelans: the beach. I'm really white, so I'm frequently told to get my white self to the beach for a while and I'll come back nearly black. The problem is, I don't have a drop of African blood in me. I just come back the color of seven of the stripes in our flag. Yet, for the Venezuelan, the beach is something magical. The beach is where our culinary couple fall in love and where the Englishman falls in love with Venezuela. Because, of course, ANYBODY who comes to Venezuela will always fall in love with it. So says our romantic comedy. And while our romantic comedy doesn't show any shots of barrios, crime, pollution, poor quality produce, or prim and proper Venezuelan immigration officers, it certainly shows a nice beach. What else do you need?

I certainly did appreciate the value of team placed in the movie. While the desparate Maragarita has to break past the airport security to find Paul before he heads back to London, her and her crack team of chefs put their heads together. After formulating a plan, she ends with "Team always wins". I would never see this in an american movie that did not have a title akin to "Remember the Mightibles". Venezuela is certainly still on the side of the world that values family, unity, and togetherity. And while talking about morals, there was even a strong anti-abortion message placed in the film. (oh yeah, the government here is super against abortion, in fact, it's illegal. And yet the right will still rag on Chavez.) There was no swearing either in our film which is, for this country, something to be said. Overall, I think this movie is something akin to the black and white films that came out with Katharine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart that focused on the rich class and didn't show much at all of what America was really like in the day yet still held to some sort of moral standard.

In technicalities, the editing left a little to be desired, and the acting falls straight out of a telanovela. But still, for a new film making industry, it's a little whiz bang of a flick. I give it 7/10. I doubt you can find it in the states, but if you can, give it a shot. Until then, I'll be in the Cranny.

New Blog

2009-01-09T17:15:00.004-07:00

In Spanish!!!

We're hoping and planing and praying to have Venezuelans on our team. Americans as missionaries are cool, but honestly we're a little weak. It takes us a year or years to adjust to a mission field, learn the language and build up a strong enough immune system to pass less than 50% of our time on the toilet...assuming there is a toilet. (We have toilets here, thankfully!) But someone from their own country is already adjusted, and more so than any foreigner could ever hope to be. Don't get me wrong, cross cultural missions are super necessary, biblical, and needed. Sometimes you need an outside view point and way of thinking. The American church would probably benefit from African or Indian missionaries.

Still, in house missionaries will outlast foreigners and we definitely want Venezuelans/latins on our team. We're planing a few events with some of our Venezuelan friends and we're trying to push it as much as possible. Advertise, advertise and advertise. So, I had the pleasure of putting together a new blog, in Spanish!!!

We're hoping and planing and praying... wait, I think I've done this already. In any case, check it out. It's called Luz en el Barrio. That means Light in the Barrio. (Barrio means neighborhood, but better translated as the hood.) Hopefully our whole team will be adding to this blog and improving our spanish vocab as we try our hands at writing.

In other news, I had the privilege to spend a day or two with a young man from Fresno. I was super encouraged by his journey and person. A real good guy. He is in my prayers as he goes back home and makes some big decisions. He's in the pic below, but just as a fun exercise, there are both Americans and Venezuelans in the photo below. Can you tell who is from where?

I'll post the answer in a few days, but just know Venezuela is (wonderfully) probably one of the most racially diverse countries I've ever seen aside from the states. But that's another post for later.

Press on for Joy!

Happy New Year!!!

2008-12-31T16:47:00.002-07:00

Happy New Year everybody! As the fireworks go off in the background and everyone gets ready to celebrate, I pray that God blesses you immensely in the year to come. For now, here's the song that everyone is listening to here in Caracas.

Well,,,

2008-12-11T18:36:00.002-07:00

It's been a while since I've written anything. So, guess I should say something. Um.

Yep.

Lots going on with Christmas coming up. A lot of folks have set up their mangers. Sometimes the mangers can take up a significant portion of the room; they are quite the works of art. Not yet present in the manger is baby Jesus seeing as He hasn't been born yet. At midnight on Christmas Eve, they'll put Him in there and keep Him around till the sixth of December.

I've been trying to learn some local Christmas songs for a play some of the kids from a nearby barrio are putting on with the help of teammate KT and a local woman who is part of another order. The songs here are usually sung by little kids (at least on the CD's) but I'm not finding it too obnoxious so far. Maybe we can throw up a video of the play coming up this monday.

Other than that, it's really cold. I'm actually having to heat up water for showering for the first time ever. Also, lots of preparations for Christmas! Including...Visa applications!!!! YAY! This seriously needs a lot of prayer, so if you have a second, I would really appreciate prayer that this third application doesn't get rejected.

Alright, that's it for now. Merry Christmas and to all good night!

The Ugly American

2008-11-24T16:26:00.002-07:00

I finished the "Ugly American" today. What a great book! It might be fifty years old, but the lessons it holds are still just a true. It's wonderfully written and very hard to put down. The title is a bit of a double "entendre". It first points to the physically handsome, yet ugly in their manner or life Americans living the high life abroad. It also points to one of many protagonists in the book, an ugly american engineer who helps on a very small level, working with the people in the fictional country of Sarkhan, and as such makes a huge impact. (Not to mention his wife.) It's a must read.

One of the things that impacted me about the book, was the ease and rapidity of making changes once the people "ate the food, spoke the language, and walked around in the fields." I don't see that level of cultural, not to mention language learning, happening quiet that fast. Also I really don't see that level of influence play out that quickly or efficiently either. But the authors had their points to make.

None the less, it makes me start to think about all that "intentionality" business, and examine it in the light of God's intentionality. Position is crucial, critical and above-all-else important, but I think I'm learning that position alone is not enough.

On another note, I'm wondering what Naruto's new technique will be....

The day after

2008-11-05T21:08:00.009-07:00

Today, the most common overheard or direct comments about Obama were:

1. His election was predicted in Bible. "You mean Nostradamus?" "Yeah, same thing." oy vey.
2. He's from Kenya, or Haiti, or at least has family in Haiti.
3. Venezuela/US relations are going to really improve. And of course that will affect oil (not sure how though.)

In other news, I think I'm really starting to like photography. I'm a total amateur and I've fallen for the trap of thinking black and white is the most "artistic". Still, here a few I took with the little cheapo Nikon I have. These come from a park here in Caracas, and a monastery near Caracas where we do our spiritual retreats.

Sí_mail!---Year One in Caracas

2008-10-27T08:58:00.001-06:00

Howdy All!

1. First of all, I think these updates are being caught in spam filters (hence the funky title) and that means the C-mail goes out and no one knows about it since it doesn't reach their inbox. Obviously, if this is happening to you, then you aren't reading this right now and you have my sincerest apologies. But more importantly, on behalf of those recipients that actually might want to read this and now can't, instead of marking this as spam, just let me know you don't want the update (something to the effect of "stop" will do just fine) and I'll take you off the list. Simple as that. Moving on to other news....

2. I've been in Caracas for a year! And man did it go by fast! It's amazing how much one can learn in a year: Language, culture, food, theology, etc. It's weird to think how awkward and difficult life was when I first arrived. Now I feel very comfortable, and the act of living is not the challenge it used to be. Thankfully, Spanish is an easy language to learn. However, the process of language and cultural acclimatization can take up to three years in environments that are significantly different than our own. Truthfully, missionary work is a serious commitment and it's only after long periods of investment in learning and exposure that any real returns can be seen. I feel that I am now moving into this period. Still, I'm thankful that God has been faithful through this past year of frustration and great transition and is now bringing my teammates and myself into a position where we can have a voice to speak and hands to serve in the community. More on what that looks like below.

3. I was in the states in August for a vacation with my folks in Texas and also an InnerChange conference in California. The time went wonderfully. At the conference, I enjoyed getting to meet all the folks in InnerChange, hearing their stories and wisdom, and seeing God moving us all through similar trials, lessons, and experiences even in different contexts and continents. One of the areas where we were all challenged to grow, was that of prayer. Based off of an overheard suggestion to a friend, I got hold of a copy of Richard Foster's book "Prayer". But don't let the simplistic title fool you, the book is actually about prayer. When I was young in my walk with Christ and very legalistic and overly wary of deception, I was scared that reading anything from Foster would soon have me channeling with lemurians and filming horrible self help movies. Instead, the book has been incredibly helpful even though I'm only three chapters into it. It's a book I would highly recommend not just to read, but rather to practice with diligence.

4. Ministry-wise, we've stopped doing the kids-clubs and transitioned to a more sustainable, and more tailored to our gifting, service of tutoring twice a week. I've enjoyed tutoring immensely, but we have all been frustrated at the low level of education that children receive here. A small minority have never been to school at all. It all means we've been learning how to teach the three R's (Reading, Riting, and Rithmetic. Whoever came up with the three R's obviously never mastered the fourth R of Rpelling). And of course, we do a fair bit of English work as well. I'm really enjoying the challenge of it all and seeing kids grasping concepts is such a high.

5. As for prayer points, give thanks for a recent visit of prospective teammates. We had a great time meeting them and seeing them interact with the barrio. There is a picture of all of us attached below. Pray for them as they decide where God is leading them next. Secondly, pray for my interactions with the men in the community as I'm starting to focus my ministry in that direction. Also pray for four boys from a near by family that have muscular dystrophy. Praise God for the great times I've had visiting them, but pray that God would speak to them and their whole household through our visits. Pray for the oldest who is 18 and for his deteriorating health to turn around.

Alright, sorry about dropping off the map there for the past few months. Things pick up here and hardly ever stop, and when they do, God has taught me rest is pretty crucial. But my suggestion is check the blog for updates. Alright, I wish you all the best and can't wait to here back from you all as well. Let me know how I can be praying for you and what is going in your life. Til then, stay strong, seek the Lord and

Press on for Joy!
Cameron

Friday night finds me in Hector's Bodega. It's crowded. The smell of sweat and beer mingle together like the whistles of the slot machines and the yells from the kids playing them. I'm sitting on the stairs with my neighbor, or at least that's what we call each other even if we aren't so geographically situated. One of the guys pantomimes walking around with a rifle, checking around corners, ducking. "He looks like he's in the war" I joke to my neighbor. "Oh yeah, the war" he says. "Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, and I think, Oh! the war!" He's not joking. It's just a small insight into the history of this country, and the lasting effects on the population of this small community.

It's been a year. The immersion into the pool of Venezuela has left me soaked with insights and perspectives beyond comprehension and summary. And yet, why not try? I'm only going to touch on a few topics, but the fun ones: Religion, Politics, and Social Structure. It might be a little long, but it's been a few months, so I'm going to take some leeway on this one.

Religion: If I were to drop you in the middle of downtown and ask you to guess the predominate religion of Venezuela, you'd be tempted to say something similar to the states: that of materialistic satisfaction. But then you'd hear the Spanish and quickly change your mind after seeing a small cathedral, and you'd think that Venezuela is a Catholic country. And of course, you'd be wrong. While so much of Venezuela is nominally Catholic, in practice, it is highly animistic. When my neighbor's pet dies well before it's age would rationally allow, there's a good chance he's going to say it died because someone put a curse on him. The curse didn't fall on him and luckily got deflected onto his cat or dog or whatever they happen to have. The curse was probably put on him by a witch (male or female) who was jealous of his success. From the western mindset, you tend to think it's all nonsense, but after a few pets die in a row, you meet a few witches, and then you begin to realize there really is something to it. And then you pray for protection for your neighbor, or for healing, or for deliverance and then you realize there is something to this Jesus guy as well.

Much of this animism is expressed in the Venezuelan blend of witchcraft. There are some basic common tenets and figures within witchcraft, but in practice it can take many different forms. The most common is that of healing. When someone gets sick and the doctors have done all they can do to no result, the next and logical plan of attack, here at least, is to look for a witchdoctor. After a consultation is made, the witch will prescribe a plan of action. As the person buys the necessary implements and follows through their advice, the sick person usually gets better. The whole consultation is very expensive and the objects required by the witchdoctor are incredibly costly. Hence there is quite the bustling industry with various objects for healing and witchcraft. Consumerism at its finest.

Aside from the Venezuelan blend of witchcraft, there is another, more organized and official religion that has been growing in popularity especially both in Venezuela and Colombia. Santeria was started by African, specifically Nigerian, slaves in Cuba that were prohibited from practicing their Yoruba religion. In defense and defiance, they hid their gods and idols underneath the broad dresses and outfits of the Catholic saints of the day. They gave the saints additional names so that they could identify among themselves what god was behind what saint. And a religion is born. To the untrained eye, it looks Catholic, but it is certainly not Catholic as all practitioners of Santeria will plainly tell you. The beliefs of santeros are almost reminiscent of the Greek Parthenon, yet very African in flavor. Their practices range from the benign wearing of white for year for initiates to ritual animal sacrifice. One time while waiting for a jeep to go up the hill from the market, I stood next to an older woman thumbing through a Santeria magazine. It was full of advertisements for goats and chickens which all boasted more power and spiritual potency than the others. Deals on statues and idols were at a premium. Santeria is big business. Again, consumerism at its finest.

The linchpin that shapes the Venezuelan religious landscape is the attitude of Venezuelans: They are incredibly spiritual, but not in the least religious. Sure witchcraft and Santeria have their committed disciples, but the majority of the population are content with amateurish dabbling and delegation to the committed when it's time to get serious. None the less, dabbling with the devil has serious consequences.

We as a team have needed to learn about these spiritual forces not just for our own understanding, but so that we can call out the evil behind them and point people to the true God. Everybody here "believes" in God and heaven. No one believes Him enough to seek Him out when their kids are sick, when their pets are dying, or when they get angry enough to put a curse on their neighbor. That's the department of witches and santeros. Our challenge is to not only present, but show that God is also a God of the ordinary and is not just locked "up there" in the clouds; that He does care and will act when people are sick, when injustice occurs and reconciliation is far away. Thankfully, Jesus IS more powerful than any spiritual darkness or deception and He has been showing Himself as such. His death on the cross was His victory over Satan and all the powers of this world. Still, we long for the day when God would receive more awe and adoration than these false gods that people think they can control for their own purposes.

Politics: I'm sure you've all been waiting eagerly for this one. The state and municipal elections are coming up and everyone is just a little bundle of anticipation! But seriously, who cares about city elections when we have presidents to talk about? After living here for a year, I guess I can chime in. I'm sure the basic question everyone is asking is: Is Chavez a fascist dictator? The answer is of course, no. Nor is he the devil incarnate, nor is he Saddam Hussein reincarnated. He is just a normal guy like everyone else, even if he does talk a lot.

I've just finished reading Tolstoy's War and Peace. It's taken me a year, but is has been worth it. One of the major points Tolstoy makes towards the end of the novel is his description of the false idea of history we take to be the truth. We assume that individuals (so called "great" or "terrible" by history) rise to a position of power, and from this position of power, mandate the world according to their vision and purposes and thus create the grand movements of history. Tolstoy calls out this farce of a description and says that the movements of history happen independent of those in "power". Ad priori, these movements require someone at the head of them. Whether it was Napoleon or his 2nd cousin is of no importance: the movement would have happened regardless of who was supposedly "in charge". I believe the same is happening here and with Chavez. The question that needs to be asked is: What is the movement now occurring in Latin America?.

From my experience in Peru, Guatemala, and certainly here in Venezuela I think I've heard enough voices to be able to transmit the sentiment of this movement. It is a movement against corporate and US intervention in Latin America. If I was to hear that a year ago, I would have said they're all nuts down there and there never has been corporate nor US intervention in Latin America. I can't say the same now. I'll let you do the research. My goal is to simply share how the people here see it. They see their land mined, drilled, cut, farmed, and stripped of whatever natural resource happens to be in their country. They see some big foreign company doing all of it and all the profits leaving their borders. They see people getting sick from the pollution, kicked off their land, and forced into the city. Eventually they'll react and protest against such companies, many times in the political arena. A leader will, by necessity, ride the wave of the movement and might even become elected president of that particular country. After being elected, many times the leader falls in the with companies they supposedly opposed, and serves them instead of the people who elected them. Other times the leader will hold true to his or her promises, and later die to freak causes, be outrightly assassinated, or the country will undergo a coup where said leader is replaced by someone a bit more inclined to cooperate with the companies. The pattern has been played out time and again, each time with enough differences according to the country and region, but the plot is basically the same. It might not seem real, but trust me that one of the major challenges we face here is overcoming the mistrust so many people have of us as Americans. They think we're all part of the CIA.

Chavez found himself in the exact same story line, except with the significant and notable difference that when the coup took place in 2002, he survived it and stayed in power. The real credit of his survival goes to the citizens of Caracas that poured out by the thousands to demand his return. But who knows if history will record that. Ever since, he has committed himself to seeing this movement through. So when threats of another coup were sounded, it was no surprise that Chavez responded the way he did.. (one note about the coup planning, if you watch the video up to where the phone conversations take place, you can hear some generals talking about what personnel are with who, the layout of the presidential palace, what number of and where troops are stationed around the palace and also which captain of the F-16 division is with the coup and again where they are located in relation to the presidential palace, aka Miraflores. The video should raise a few questions. First: Why in the world would you plan a coup on the telephone? The stupidity of the opposition here has never ceased to amaze me here. (or the other possibility that needs to be entertained is that this planning was not real and was faked for another purpose). The second question, and perhaps more profound is: Why in the world does Venezuela have an American made, Lockheed Martin, F-16? (24 of them to be precise). I'm not even going to try to explain that, so I'll let your congressman take a shot at it.)

When Chavez responded to this tape, he was responding for the movement of the people. He calls this movement the "Revolution" and if you ever come to Venezuela, you're bound to see it advertised everywhere. . . even all the way to the guy outside the big university selling blow up dolls of Chavez that are weighted in the bottom and can't be knocked over. Opportunistic commercialism, again. There are things about the Revolution that are really great and wonderful. For example, any citizen can call Chavez during a call in TV show on Sunday with a complaint and he usually gets something done about the complaint on the spot. Basic medical care is "accessible" (read "waiting in lines" in the quote marks. But to be fair, there are lines for everything here) for those that can't pay for private doctors.

Of course, there are a number of Venezuelans and Latins abroad that are not on board with Chavez. Admittedly as a political figure, he's polarizing. However, I don't think that takes away from the general movement and sentiment of the population south of the border, especially those that don't have a voice, access to power, or substantial wealth. Still, the biggest critique I have against the Revolution is the critique I have against all Revolutions: they are fueled on animosity. The American revolution against the British was the same. Yes, there were injustices being committed against the colonies, but the spirit of movement itself was one to spite the British empire. I have to wonder what the average English citizen thought or even heard of the Boston tea party. They probably wrote off the incident to those hot-blooded Americans and never gave the actual impetus behind it a second thought. The same is happening here. There are grave injustices being committed against Latin America by the large corporations and the governments that back them up, but the counter movement is one that has its fair share of spite. I hate to say it, but there is nothing new going on here.

One could argue whether the Socialist-Democratic form of government Chavez is promoting here is a step forward or backward in political evolution. Chavez argues that Democracy, in the truest sense of the word, can only exist within the construct of Socialism. We Americans tend to think our blend of Democracy is the be all and end all of government. The Church was told to think the same of the Roman empire, and it did. After that, Monarchy was God's greatest gift to the world (when actually He warned Israel against it). Who knows if this blend of Socialism being experimented with here will supersede our own version of Capitalism, and if the Church would jump on board with it as well. Frankly, I couldn't care less. For my part, I do not believe that any government/political/economical system can truly revolutionize the world. I believe only in the Kingdom of God to bring any lasting change not only to the systems of this world, but to each person and community within them.

Where does that put us as a team of Americans in Latin America? We're the bridge between our two respective worlds. On a near daily basis, we're telling the people here that the folks back home in the US are not part of a fascist dictatorship, nor are they the devil incarnate, nor are they Richard Nixon reincarnated. The people here understand that and they can see that there is a huge difference between the people and the government/those in power, but they don't understand why it can be that way. (and I seriously doubt changing the president changes the situation). That is the question they pose to you. But since we're acting as bridges, it's only fair to open the channel both ways. So faithful readers who have made it this far down without giving up, I ask you: What would you say to the people here? What would you ask them? As for us as a team, this political reality means proclaiming the good news that Jesus is Lord: that there is no president, no system, no government, no ideology that can save, and save in the truest sense of the word. Only Jesus, Lord of all.

Social Structure: This topic might seem a little odd to discuss, but it is a very important one to consider. If you've had much contact with Latin America, you've probably heard of machismo, or the idea of guys acting tough (macho even) to prove themselves. Out of this idea, it could be a very deduction that Latin America is a patriarchal society. I can't speak for all of Latin America, nor for all of Venezuela, nor even all the barrios, but I can say that many and possibly even the majority of the families in the barrios are matriarchal. It is pretty common to see a family with four generations of women present in the house. Usually there is the grandmother who is around and does what she can in her old age, then her daughter(s) who are in middle age and raising their own children. Sometimes it is the grandmother raising the children in the house while her daughters go out to work or study. The third generation children span almost any age and there's a good chance they might have children of their own. At the most basic level, the women keep this society running. They work to support themselves and their family, clean the house, do the laundry (and after doing a few by hand, you understand where the term "load" comes from), nurse babies, cook for the rest of the kids, get them off to school, do the shopping, and manage to keep up a social life on top of all that. They have my complete respect and admiration. But this all begs the question, where are the men?

In the barrios, many of the older men have settled down, taken a job and are doing the normal life thing. However, many aren't present or part of the family. Either they have left the wife, the wife left them, they died, they were killed, or they are just never home except to sleep. Although, I can certainly sympathize with the pull of the street when your house is rather small and rambunctious. But men are conspicuously absent in other realms as well. Whenever we've had a house church meeting, the only older male presence is usually us, the missionaries. This pattern holds true in almost all small, cell group style, Christian gatherings I've seen. Women and children? Check, present. The men? AWOL, or actually outside the walls, playing dominoes, riding motorcycles and/or drinking beer.

The males here definitely play by a different set of rules than I'm used to. This is especially true regarding "romantic" relationships. A typical conversation took place at a birthday party a week ago Sunday. A young man, perhaps a bit older than myself, sat down a chair away from me. We knew each other only in a cursory fashion, but he opened up a little bit and asked me if I had a girlfriend. I responded that I did, (yes, it's true. Newsflash!) but that she just moved to Peru. Then he asked me if I had a girlfriend. He understood my Spanish, but he didn't understand the fact that a girlfriend that wasn't sitting in the room still counted as a valid girlfriend. So I told him, that no, I don't have a Venezuelan girlfriend. Returning the favor, I asked him if he had one. He answered affirmatively, and then nonchalantly mentioned that he had four of them. Normally, the number is bigger than one and less than six. Supposedly, his girlfriends don't know each other, or even about each other, supposedly. I simply joke that one woman is already more than enough. (No comments, please.)

This past year, I've been frustrated to see the guys of these barrios living this way. And of course, when young boys have no good example to follow, they just go along with everyone else. There are a few notable exceptions, and they are rare gems. As for my role, instead of just criticizing and shaking my head as the world gets carted off in the proverbial hand basket, I feel pulled to minister and befriend the guys that stand on the disrespected side of the fence. Not simply so that they would be moral and responsible, but so that they would follow Jesus and do so much more for the Kingdom of God than we as a group of foreigners could ever imagine. I honestly don't know if it's going to happen or not since this idea is entirely dependent upon them and what God is doing with them. Still, I feel like it's worth the shot. This will be my focus for the next year at least. That means hanging out with the "sinners" in their environment and trusting Jesus as my center and foundation. I believe through this juxtaposition of light in the darkness, the world will see hope in Jesus. I would sincerely appreciate your prayers in this endeavor as this is something well beyond my experience and strength.

Standing out in the street, I'm talking with our revolutionary friend who has been much more of an encouragement to us than us to him. We're talking about Jesus, justice, love, his heart for the community, God's heart for him, mercy, hunger in Africa, art, truth etc. God has already been at work in him even if he doesn't know it. With so much joy, I have to wonder where God is going to take him from his turbid past and what He is going to do through him. And it hits me that there is nothing else in this world that can be so paramount and yet completely enchanting in the same moment. Being sought by God and...

Pressing on for Joy!
Cameron

One Year Anniversary!!

2008-10-09T17:05:00.002-06:00

Today I celebrated my one year anniversary in Caracas. On the agenda: Sleep, trying to recover from the latest cold/fever, receive a few teas and herbs from my concerned neighbor who overhears my coughing, trying in vain to finish War and Peace (100 pages left), sleep, recover from the prospective team member visits, and watch an interview with John Perkins of Economic Hit Man fame.

I'm also working on another C-mail, hopefully out within the next week or so. But who knows.

That went by fast.

9/11

2008-09-11T06:50:00.003-06:00

Seven years ago, we were driving through the desert in Nevada, headed off to my first year of college and a quick trip through San Francisco on the way. When we turned the radio on, the first thing we heard was "A second plane has hit the South Tower." We didn't know if it was a joke, a preview for a movie, but we soon found out the gruesome reality of it all. I started shaking. We turned around and went home.

2,992 people died in the attacks, plane crashes and rescue efforts. It was an attack against America, but it was more an attack of ideals. The World Trade Center. The world traded there. The world did business there. That was what was attacked.

Thirty-five years ago, a number of jets were bombing the presidential palace in Santiago, Chile. They were part of a coup against Salvador Allende, the president of Chile elected three years prior. The coup led to the detention of 40 to 50,000 people, many of whom were tortured and then disappeared. The military regime of Augusto Pinochet that took the place of the government and ruled until 1988.

2,700 people, at least, were confirmed killed during Pinochet's rule. It was an attack against Chile, but it was more an attack of ideals. Salvador Allende was a socialist. The way he led and the policies he implemented brought opposition from some Chilean business owners and from the United States government. He proposed socialism, and that was what was attacked.

5,693 people dead. All killed on one date in history. Killed in a debate of ideals; an economic debate that took the form of planes and fire. Lord forgive us all.

If you have a dollar bill, or any form of money, look at it. Examine it. Weigh it, touch it, feel it. Now ask yourself, is this really worth anyone's life? Would I give my own life for this paper in my hands? Would I defend it, kill for it?

If have learned anything in the past year, it's this:
I am not a capitalist.
I am not a socialist.
I am not a communist.
I am not for democracy, republic, monarchy, dictatorship nor any form of human rule.
I am not a rightist, a leftist, a libertarian or a pacifist.
I am not a citizen of America, Venezuela, Israel, Rome or any country on this Earth.
I am only a citizen of Heaven, seeking the rule of God, and the Kingdom of His Son.

My heart and prayers go out to all those who have lost their loves today. I am so sorry. We won't forget.

Notes...

2008-07-13T20:02:00.005-06:00

I'm scared. I'm scared to go back to the states. I don't say back home, because home is nothing more than a feeling and wherever that feeling shows up, that's home. None the less, I'm scared that I don't fit there anymore. Actually, I'm afriad that who I've become and what I've learned have so radically deviated from what most citizens call "normal" that I can no longer see people as I did when I lived there nor can they see me as they did then.

I'm scared I'm getting angry. I guess maybe I'm angry at myself. I feel like there's more that I could do aside from doing less bad. But who am I to say. Perhaps anger is needed right now.

I feel like perhaps I'm supposed to start over. See the world through new eyes, then discover Jesus in this new world in a new way, as a true savior. I'm just not quite sure when he's going to show up.

I don't know where this is going, yet I feel that God is within it, pulling me through it to show me something. Like going off to war to really appreciate home. It will be appreciated more than ever, yet nothing will ever be the same again. This is so completely different from everything else I've experienced in my walk with Christ, and that's why I think He's directing it.

Everyone, have mercy on me when I get back.

Tonight.....

2008-07-10T20:41:00.002-06:00

....while walking home, I was bit by a horse.

If that's the worst act of violence I've experienced here in a nine months, then I have a lot for which to be very thankful to God.

More updates to come later. Right now, business is prevailing.

It was an ugly horse.

C-mail: Cost

2008-06-02T20:38:00.000-06:00

Howdy All!

Wow, it's been a while hasn't it? It's amazing how time goes by when you've had lots of things to keep you down, out, busy, running around, and generally occupied. But no more delays, on to the update!

1. I want to say THANK YOU!! to everyone for their prayers while I was sick. I KNOW I wouldn't be in the condition I'm in now without your prayers. I attribute so much of the goodness I've experienced through this two month plus journey of sickness to the time you have all spent in prayer. I can't thank you enough and I am so grateful to know people like yourselves that are willing to pray. Be encouraged to keep praying diligently like that for the folks you know! More about those months of sickness below.

2. I've finally moved into the new place. Actually, moved is a relative term and you understand exactly how relative if you've ever moved before. Thankfully, there was a lot of stuff left to me by my teammate (Thanks bro!) so I could sleep there without too much hassle. However, everything involving cooking was another matter. I won't go into the details, but I feel like I'm fairing only slightly better than Tom Hanks in the Money Pit. No Carebear sightings yet. Still, I'm really excited to be living there and will be very happy once all the bits and bolts are done so I can cook and invite the new neighbors and other friends over. Pray for God's presence within this place.

3. Our team has been focusing on evangelism and visits. This has been a good opportunity for us to grow in evangelism and examine what the good news means in the context of the barrios. It's been pretty exciting and it feels like God is at work in a number of our neighbors. Pray for a neighbor that just received a Bible and is starting to read it. Also pray for a budding community of faith in the barrio of San Pablito.

4. The world is getting rough these days: food shortages, the earthquake in China, the cyclone in Burma and the consequent complete neglect of the government, rising oil prices, etc. At least Iraq is looking hopeful. So what exactly is one to do in the midst of crazy change and disaster? The easy thing to do is to be comfortable, tell the world to eat cake, and go play Wii. The other easy option is lose all hope in the world, and then go play Wii. The opposite extreme is to become a completely self sufficient, hard core, and cynical activist that just eventually burns out in frustration and anger. I'm certainly not buddhist by any means, but sometimes the middle path has some advantages. That's why I wrote Kelvin's Fair to Middlin' List of Things YOU Can Do to Help. I tried to address a lot of the stuff above with simple changes that can easily be made by anyone. Take and look and add any suggestions you have.

5. This summer I'll be back in the states for August. First all members of InnerCHANGE will be meeting for a conference for a week in So Cal starting the 3rd. I'll be flying into LA on the 31st of July and if anyone is interested in to putting up a roaming missionary for a night or two, let me know. After that, I'll be headed "home" to my parent's house under construction in Texas for a bit of rest and help with the construction. I would love to catch up with you all even if it only is by phone. If you want to talk or catch up, let me know and we'll set up a time.

Alright that's it for now. Enjoy the start of summer, end of school (for some of you) and
Press on for Joy!
Cameron

I'd prefer not to write what I'm about to write. I don't like to write about sickness, much less my own. Yet sickness has been a very large part of my life these past months and to simply avoid the issue would be less than honest. In these updates I want to share what happens here and specifically those things with which I have first hand experience. It is my hope that I can share what motivated me throughout the sickness with the goal of explaining the decisions I made. I'm not writing to convince or in the hopes that you agree. I'm writing to share and offer some thoughts for consideration. That said, the sickness played out as follows:

In the last update, I briefly mentioned how I had been bedridden for a week with a nasty case of bronchitis. This meant fever, pain, no energy or stamina, coughing up lots of phlegm, and feeling generally horrible. When I mean horrible, I mean pretty horrible. As it is, I really hate being sick. Between the options of a stuffy nose and a broken finger, I'd take a compound fractured finger any day of the week. So, I was very glad when after a number of days of antibiotics, I was improving and just about back to perfect health. I completed the treatment and returned to the States for a brief midyear retreat and visa run in late March/early April. However, after a few days there, I fell sick again, and almost with the same severity and symptoms. Thankfully, I was surrounded by amazing company that took very good care of me. You all know who you are and I am extremely grateful to you. I thought I began to feel marginally better while I was there, but I was still extremely sick. With the acuity of hindsight, I now realize how easy it is to lie to yourself about how you feel; I thought I was a lot better than I actually was.

When I returned to Caracas, I recovered from the trip and then entered a stage of treatment I'll call the Cuban stage. Venezuela has a doctor exchange program with Cuba. Venezuelans can travel to Cuba to learn medicine and the Cuban doctors come here to work in clinics for two or more years. All of the treatment at the clinics is free to the public. I had heard before that Cuban doctors are some of the best in the world at working in low technology medical treatment. The Cuban doctors and nurses I met said the same of course, but I was still curious to see if this was the case.

It started with a visit to a neighbor who is a Cuban doctor. He listened, looked, asked, and thought. He sent me off to get an X-ray. At the medical facility, with freshly developed X-ray in hand, we ran into a different doctor that was shocked and pleased to meet some Americans. He sat us down and tried his hand at English that wasn't half bad. After looking at the X-ray, he said I actually had a case of bronchial-pneumonia (aka pneumonia) and suggested seven days of injections with antibiotics. (He gave me the whole week's worth of medicine right there on the spot. Obviously I couldn't use it myself since I didn't have any needles nor would I know how to inject myself. None the less, I was surprised by this entirely different method for getting medicine compared to the states). We got a second opinion with our neighbor doctor and he agreed with the prognosis and treatment.

Twice a day for the next week I made my way down to the clinic to get poked. It was supposedly a ten minute injection which gave me lots of time to talk with the Cuban nurses. It was nice to talk to another "foreigner" and compare thoughts about Venezuelan culture and cuisine. I found it interesting that nearly all of them looked forward to the day when they could return back home. I understand the nostalgia of home, but the debacle of Elian Gonzales and the footage of Cubans on homemade rafts headed toward Miami wasn't jiving with the desire of the nurses to go back. They even thought there were more resources in Venezuela. I didn't really understand why until one Sunday morning.

The manager of a car wash directly across the street was shot three times by a man on a motorcycle. I showed up about ten minutes after the shooting to find everyone at the car wash nervously standing around a large red puddle. I wrote off the color to some car wax or polish, but as I walked across the street, it became clear that it really was blood from the large drops every inch leading from the car wash to the doors of the clinic and continuing inside. The clinic was abuzz with nurses and doctors running around in emergency mode. Even though the man had lost a lot of blood and it took about two hours to get more blood into him (mess of a system where all the blood in Caracas is stored somewhere downtown.) they managed to save his life right there somehow. Thankfully, he should have a full recovery, if he already isn't back at work. The nurses told me later that the doctors aren't trained to treat gunshot wounds; supposedly, random violence like that isn't a problem in Cuba. That's why they want to go back.

During these injections I began to feel a lot better. The fever and aches went away and I coughed up less and less phlegm. After seven days, I felt almost exactly how I felt before I came back to states. Since I fell sick the first time after treatment, I begged them to keep going for fear of regression. Another X-ray and they agreed. After twelve days, I felt much better, was hardly coughing up anything and I thought I was done.

Thought. Five days later I was sick again. Well, actually not really sick, but I was coughing up phlegm again in a color that suggested infection and my energy had significantly dropped. It was time to bite the bullet, get a specialist, and see what was up. After a visit with a respected internist, a slew of blood tests and a catscan (only $60, plus a two hour wait on a holiday), and another visit to review the results, I was diagnosed with a condition called Bronchiectasis. Basically, some of the tubes in my lungs (my left lower lobe to be precise) are enlarged because the cilia (little hairs) that remove secretions or foreign objects don't work well if at all. This explained why I kept getting sick after treatments. Some batch of gunk down in there hadn't been touched by the antibiotics and hadn't been coughed out, even after a lot of expectorant. The bacteria was released and caused another infection.

The cause of this condition is unknown. It could have been caused by this particular sickness, exposure to chemicals (mind thinks back to lots of super glue and epoxy exposure from model scale planes, rockets, etc.) a previous sickness or some genetic issue. Whatever the cause, the net effect is that I'm rather susceptible to lung infections. Thankfully, the doctor seemed to think my case is pretty light and aside from being a deep sea diver or astronaut, I can live a totally normal life. As of right now, I'm on a spay for my lungs, I just finished my last round of antibiotics, and will soon be taking some immunizations for pneumonia and other lung infections.

So the question everyone is, and was, asking is why didn't you come back to the states for treatment? That's not an easy question to answer. Not because the answer is hard, but because it is difficult to explain without misinterpretation. None the less, the answer is easy enough: I didn't go to the states for treatment because none of my neighbors have the option of going the states for treatment. The explanation is a bit more esoteric: Christmas.

Jesus, who was God, became a human. He became human in a very, well, human sort of way: the slow way. He was conceived and spent nine months in Mary's womb doing nothing more notable than kicking when Elizabeth showed up. He grew up just like everybody else, a crying baby, a terrible two, all the way to "increasing in wisdom and stature" and then who knows what until His baptism. Basically, for most of Jesus' life, he was highly normal. The all powerful God of the universe gave up His power to be dependent on his parents. God who knows all, spent thirty years doing hardly anything note worthy except learning how to walk, talk, read, work, and communicate. We always jump to Jesus the superhero, healing the sick and casting out demons with a single breath, silencing Pharisees and lawyers alike with a single phrase, walking on water and spending all night in prayer, and so on. But it is so easy to forget the Jesus without divine rights, without divine power, and the time spent powerless waiting, growing, learning, and simply being united with the suffering people he one day would reach in the power of the Spirit.

Likewise, I'm learning that an absolutely crucial part of being a missionary is the time spent learning, time spent being sick, time spent entering into the culture, time spent being with the people, and time spent experiencing what they experience. A Dutch missionary couple here in Venezuela recently said it well: If you know how to do missionary work, don't. Anyone who "knows" what they are doing won't be able to learn once they are on the ground. This prevents any sort of relationship that can be built with the community aside from paternalism. It is only by entering as a learner, as dependent, as weak, that true relationships can form and true learning can take place.

When I got sick, I had the option to fly back to the states and get really good care and have it all covered by insurance. None of my neighbors have that option. As it is, I already felt so many barriers and distinctions between myself and them. To add one more would have been just too much. So I stayed. And as I stayed, I was blessed. I was blessed by our neighbor's inquiries into my health and all their suggested home remedies. I was blessed to hear of their own bouts with sickness and then share the bizarre respect that comes from similar suffering. I was blessed to be able to explain my visits to the clinic, the long lines, the endless run around for tests and consultations, and then be able to end with a "tu sabes" (you know). Inevitably, they did know and would immediately start on a tirade of curses or praises for the Cubans based on their own experiences and end with a recommendation for a particular doctor, hospital, or treatment.

Those are certainly not easy blessings to attain, nor ones I would honestly choose knowing their cost. Yet the cost is not all that great in comparison to Jesus. Paul uses one of the oldest hymns in Philippians to encourage his readers. "Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. " (2:5-11). May you all be encouraged as well to follow Christ and follow Him in His humility. It's not easy, but it's good. So stay strong, seek the Lord and

Press on for Joy!
Cameron

Kelvin's Fair to Middlin' List of Things YOU Can Do to Help

2008-05-29T19:21:00.011-06:00

Introduction

This guide is intended to help the average joe american who wants to do something small that can help out and adapt to the growing world problems like food shortages, high oil prices/energy crisis, oppression, etc. This is all rooted in my faith in Jesus and God's heart for the poor and oppressed. If you don't care a wit about Jesus, but are still interested in doing something, keep reading. If you care a lot about Jesus and are not sure how the poor and oppressed fit in with Him (like myself years ago) keep reading. Nor matter where you stand, I would highly suggest reading the gospel of Luke and/or the book of Amos to see more of why God is concerned for the poor and oppressed. And always feel more than free to contact me.

This is just a list of ideas that I've tried to incorporate or wanted to incorporate into my life over the years. Like any set of ideas or suggestions, if you try to do all of them at once, it can be daunting and everything gets dropped in frustration. Rather, try picking up one, mastering it, and then adding something else. The guide is broken up into sections and I hope to add to them as time goes on. Please add comments about any other ideas, activities, or suggestions.

Food:

The world is running short of food and it's not going to get any better. World population continues to increase and supplies are already stretched thin. Also, with the cyclone in Burma wiping out 90% of Southeast Asia's rice supply, and the regime's blocking of aid that has effectively prevented anyone from having the resources for planting for next year (much less eating), rice is going to be a hot commodity in the world. Prices for other foodstuffs are rising as well. So what can be done?

Don't eat/limit eating of rice. There are a lot of people in Asia that depend on rice for their livelihood and without rice, they are going to be in trouble (ie. starving). We in the states have options like pasta and couscous.
Eat lower on the food chain. Every link lower you eat at, the more efficient you consume. For example, when you eat meat, you've eaten a lot of grain that was feed to the animal instead of going directly to you. Obviously, no one is eating feed grade grain in the states, but with changing demand comes changing supply. The environmental cost of meat production is staggering as well. Remember all those save the rain forest campaigns from the eighties? The rainforest in Brazil is actually being cut down right now for grazing land. A lot of that beef gets exported to the states, Europe, Russia and Chile. As for the cows in the states, a typical feed lot can produce more urine and feces than a good sized metropolis (~148lbs of well, you know, per cow per day). That's a huge effect on the environment. So instead of beef, focus on chicken, or heck, try lentils. They have more protein per ounce than beef anyway (dry count Lentils compared to Sirloin). And I think they are tasty too.
Drop the fast food and processed food. It's just bad for you. And Ronald McDonald is a clown . . . and clowns are scary.
Plant a garden. It's fun, it's a good way to threaten punishment for the kids, and you get to eat something you grew yourself. If you're really hard core, you might try raising some chickens or even composting.
Check out the farmer's market. Locally grown stuff doesn't need to be transported for miles and it helps out the local folks.
(Added suggestion). Instead of heading out to restaurants, invite people over for dinner. Start a dinner club with friends or possible friends and rotate making dinner. Have people over and discuss riveting subjects or pass on your passions. (See the section on Oppression).

Transportation:

Oil prices are crazy. If you really want to get yourself in a funk, try Googleing the peak oil theory. Sadly, most American cities are built around the car, aside from a few notable exceptions, like Jamestown. So, if you plan to live in the states, you're pretty much stuck unless you got wheels. But there are somethings you can do to save on gas.

Prioritize and plan trips. This is obvious.
Walk and bike where you can, whenever you can. Walking is incredibly efficient, biking even more so. Check out this comparison between biking and driving in terms of overall time spent between the two. Very revealing.
Stay away from ethanol based fuels. When the oil spent to make the fertilizer, drive the tractors, process the crops, etc, is counted, ethanol is actually energy negative. That means more gallons of fuel are thrown into the process than are taken out. Especially now when the poor can't afford to eat, food should be grown for food, not fuel.
Keep the car up to tip top shape. If your car can take it (make sure it can before you try this. Otherwise you're in big trouble), I HIGHLY recommend Sea Foam and the Chinese water torture procedure described here. I got at least 3-5 more MPG out of my old volvo. It'll run like new. Keep the tires inflated, the oil changed, the outside clean and waxed, and don't carry around any extra stuff not needed.
If you need to ditch the old car, get one that is more gas efficient (I don't know what to make about the Prius/hybrids. Any final word out there?). Or even better, get a scooter or Vespa. 60-90MPG sound good?
Take public transportation if it exists. If it doesn't exist, (ie Boise), call the folks down at the City Hall. They're supposed to listen to you. (and if you say something, they assume there are 10-30 people that feel the same but haven't taken the time to say it. You voice actually counts for more than your voice).
(Added Suggestion). If you live with other people, think about sharing a car. It would cut down on overall maintenance costs and helps with carpooling.

Oppression

There are a lot of really messed up things in the world and people are suffering like crazy because of it. I certainly can't cover all of them and neither can you! Ha! What I've heard recommended, is to pick "a", that is one, issue and be well informed and active about it.

First step is finding some injustice to work against. This can come from anywhere. Perhaps a personal contact with someone suffering an injustice, something on the news, something you heard at church or from missionaries, something you saw on the internet, etc. It could be sweatshops or child soldiers or racism or genocide or extreme poverty or whatever. Most importantly, it should hit you, otherwise it won't stick. Sometimes it takes multiple contacts with the same issue for it to take hold. Honestly though, I've been told that issues will find you, not the other way around. So just be open to whatever God might put on your heart.
Second, get educated. The internet is a excellent resource, but people who have had experience with the injustice or have looked into it are even better. Which is the next step...
Get to know somebody, build some friendships. If you're heart is with the poor, get to know some poor folks. Become their good friends. Learning from someone is so much more important than learning about someone.
Get involved. This will be different for every issue. Obviously, somethings are harder to be super active in than others. For example, I've been extremely frustrated at the response of the Burmese government in the wake of the cyclone. I can't go over there and fix things, and even if I tried, I wouldn't be able to get into a spot to do much good. But I can at least be apart of an advocacy group and send emails to folks in positions of power. The greatest thing I can do is commit to pray.
Spread the word! Let your friends know how they can join you in this expression of God's heart for justice. Again, with the example of Burma, I would challenge you to not watch the Olympics this summer. The reason is that China, acting on the UN security council, has blocked any attempts to force aid into Burma to help the survivors. They have also blocked any measures to try to change any of the injustices occurring in Burma. China is pretty much the only block between the Burmese Military Regime and the international community. So, I've decided to not watch the Olympics and boycott the sponsors as well. I'd ask you to pray about doing the same. Simple as that.
Don't get frustrated. These are long, hard fights and things aren't going to change overnight. Stay consistent, stay committed and press on for God's Kingdom to come and for His will to be done here on earth.

Consumption

I have bad news for you: you are an addict. You are addicted to stuff. I much as I want to lie to myself, I am too. We've been brought up in a world designed around the consumption of goods. It is our god to consume and from what I understand of scripture, it seems like nobody's happy when they have two gods. So what can be done to tear down a god?

Recognition is the first step. I'd highly recommend The Story of Stuff for a full picture of where our stuff comes from and where it goes and why we are part of this consumptive culture.
Buy less stuff. That sounds really simple, but it all boils down to that. Here are a few ideas to make that happen.

Don't buy the latest and greatest. Don't pursue keeping up to date in technology or fashion. Consider buying used clothes or other used things. Cultivate contentedness with what you have and contentedness for living without the things you don't have.
Repair, remake, and convert trash into usefulness. Keep stuff maintained and it won't need to be replaced as quickly.
Consider a luxury tithe. This idea came to me last week. I wanted some speakers for my new place to plug into the disc man style CD player I have. I found a good deal, but on the way out of the store, I ran into a street kid asking for money. I offered to buy him some food or go with him, but there was nothing close and he seemed done with food from the street. So I pulled out a bill to give him. It ended up being a tenth of what I spent on the speakers. I figured if I was going to spend money on something to indulge myself, the least I could do is give a tenth of the cost of the luxury. Obviously this gets harder with more expensive items, but perhaps that's the point.
Work less for stuff/toys. Basically, that might mean working fewer hours. That probably seems crazy, but I'm serious. Sit down and take a look at how many hours you work and how much of that goes to pay for stuff. Then think about how those hours could be spent with your family, friends, serving etc. This is a question of lordship that usually isn't raised because working is a cultural value in the states. But if the majority of your hours at work are spent for stuff that is here today and gone tomorrow, then I think Jesus might ask for some examination. This is certainly NOT to say that you shouldn't work to provide for your family. That is SUPER important as well as Biblical and I see the horrible consequences of not following that here in the barrios. But there is a huge difference in providing for your family and substituting your presence with expensive toys all those hours of work have bought.

Make simple living popular. Consumerism wins because it has a lot more advertising time and dollars. Simple living only has grassroots commitment to propagate itself. Model simple living and pass it on.
Throw a brick through the TV. 'nuff said.

House And Energy

With oil prices rising, additional energy consumers, and more demand per user, energy is becoming a scarce commodity. Since most electrical energy gets spent around the house, that's the best place to save.

Put on a jacket. Actually, not for the winter, but for the water heater. The water heater is by far the largest consumer of energy in a house. There are a number of ways to address this. The easiest is to buy a thermal blanket to throw around the heater. This prevents excessive heat loss. You can find these at most hardware stores. Also consider going solar with a solar preheater. This is a great little project to save lots of water heating energy. Do some research and look for some plans and you're set to go. If you need to replace the water heater, look into a tankless system. Although they cost a bit more upfront, the energy savings will pay off over time. And if you really want to save on hot water, take cold showers.
Insulate. Fill any cracks around windows and doors with caulking or spray insulation. This will help with heating and cooling. If you have old windows (like the aluminum frames) consider upgrading to vinyl.
Save rainwater. You can save the rain water that falls off the roof into buckets or drums and use the water for plants or watering the lawn.
The Dept. of Energy has a lot more resources than I can fit on here. Check it out.

That's it for now. I can't think of any other categories or items, but please add comments and additions and I'll throw them up here.

InnerCHANGE Storybook Contributions

2008-05-26T20:11:00.003-06:00

Here are two "stories" that'll be going into the InnerCHANGE storybook; a time capsule of sorts. The first is simple enough and the second is a song I wrote (the first and only song I've written in fact) after "witnessing" a lot of the violence here in Caracas. Thinking about the violence, I was struck by the fact that there are a whole lot of songs against violence, but ironically the people committing violence never listen to them. On the other side, the song writers/singers typically don't have any real experience with violence either. So it's about that if the lyrics aren't obvious enough. Maybe I'll take a video of the song or something and put it up. Maybe. None the less, here are the stories:

Lime

I like to cook. While taking Spanish classes in Guatemala this past summer, I picked up a recipe for a simple salad of shredded carrots, onions, and tomatoes with nothing more than a generous helping of fresh squeezed lime and a pinch of salt for the dressing. Upon arriving in Caracas, I was happy to find the same ingredients and promptly added the salad to the meal repertoire.

This salad needs a lot of lime. I'd cut the limes in half and squeeze it over the carrots. Only the limes didn't behave well. The juice never fell straight down into the bowel or plate. Rather it shot out in spurts and streams to the side in a completely unpredictable fashion. I tried to adapt as best as I could, tilting the limes to the side, rotating and manipulating them until I had curved my arm into a knot. But alas, the counter and my torso would come away with more citrus than the salad. This went on for weeks. I smelled delightful.

One day I needed some things from the market. I happened to be buying cabbage from one particular stand and noticed some limes. The very pregnant woman at the stand handed me the cabbage and I asked for half a kilo of limes as well. As she placed them in the bag, she looked at me and said "You have to cut them down from the top, not from the side" and illustrated with her hands. I nodded my head and heard myself say "oh yeah, I know". Only the thing was, I didn't know. I'd been cutting my limes from the side, not cutting them from ends with the nibs.

When I started learning Spanish, I picked up a bad habit of nodding like I understood everything. At that time, I usually only understood about ten percent of what was being said, but I knew I couldn't improve unless people talked to me. So I lied. I learned to bob my head understandingly and throw in a lot of "si" and "claro" (clearly). It's a bad habit, especially now when I have a much better grasp of what is being said. Yet as much as I'd like to blame that habit for my response to the woman, the honest truth is I couldn't stand the humiliation of being taught something as simple as how to cut a lime.

When I got home, I tried it. The knife sang right through the two nibs without a thought of resistance. I picked up an oblong hemisphere, gave it a squeeze and behold! Lime juice, more than I had ever thought possible, poured out in a simple stream without any unruly outbursts. I was floored. I had no idea that a better way to cut a lime was even possible.

Life post-vertical-lime-cutting-discovery has been good. However, I'm never sure if I should tell others about this method. I have a feeling that they already know. But, if I ever notice someone cutting one from the side, I'll offer my own story, and tell of the lady that taught me how to cut a lime. They'll just not smell as fresh as they did before.

Song

It's just another song in vain to stop all the violence
It hears the stories, screams the news and still can't break the silence
With ironic lyrics and emotional cries
It's impotent to change a thing or dry tear filled eyes.

They'll sing it by the fire, they'll play it in their Ipods
Hippies bounce their heads in approval and folks singers sing along
Everyone who hears it is predisposed to agree
But friends of fists and triggers will never even hear it in the breeze.

There's a verse about war where innocent children are being killed
Where both sides are really brothers as they meet with their guts spilled
There's a cry of meaninglessness with a call to stop
But the verses' author has never even seen real blood drop.

When the bullet came in the door, I should have care a little more
But it's real hard to care when there's no blood on the floor.
My God what can I do once the man's been shot?
Where's an act of love so violent that makes all other acts not?

It's just another song in vain to stop all the violence
It hears the stories, screams the news and still can't break the silence
With ironic lyrics and emotional cries
It's impotent to change a thing or dry tear filled eyes.

Desperation

2008-05-10T19:52:00.003-06:00

Howdy all.

I hope you get a chance to check out the email below from the US campaign for Burma and act. The situation is beyond desparate and help is needed immediately. Also, I'd encourage a lot of prayer. Honestly, there isn't a whole lot that anyone can do from over here, and I'm sure the folks on the ground feel the same. However, God calls on us to pray and not give up, especially in cases of injustice. Pray that God's Kingdom would come in power upon Burma, that justice would be done, that the needy and oppressed would be lifted up. Pray that aid would quickly reach survivors of the cyclone, and that if aid can't reach them, that food and water would be multiplied. Also pray hard against the spread of disease and for the hearts of everyone who has lost family and whole villages. Also, pass this message along so that people can see and hear what is going on, speak out, and pray.

Tell China: Time for Intervention - Send Aid to Burma NOW

**Please spread this message as far and wide as you possibly can.**

Dear friends and supporters,

We are asking for your urgent help, again. We need to send a strong message to China. We are running out of time before a massive wave of disease rushes over the surivors of the Burma cyclone.

We are in a very unusual situation -- the world is trying to rush aid to the Burmese people hit by the Cyclone but the regime is refusing all support, leaving hundreds of thousands in imminent danger of disease and death.

We are hearing repeated, urgent cries from inside Burma pleading with caring countries to ignore Burma's military regime and send immediate aid to the Burmese people. Burmese Buddhist monks, student leaders, and others, yesterday issued a public appeal for countries to stop waiting for permission from the Burmese military regime and immediately dispatch relief.

The United Nations Security Council has the power to authorize the provision of aid even if the Burmese regime resists -- this would permit countries to deliver aid directly to the Burmese people. Tragically, China is blocking this effort at the UN.

Will you help us by sending an urgent email to China's Ambassador to the UN? It is unconcsionable that China would continue to block desperately needed humanitarian assistance.

Please email China's UN ambassador NOW! Or, read more details below.

Aung Din, Jeremy Woodrum, Jennifer Quigley, Thelma Young

===========================
More Information

The situation in Burma is extremly grave. Eight days after the Cyclone struck Burma and up to 100,000 have been killed, Burma's military regime is still refusing adequate international aid. Dr. Chris Beyrer, an reknown doctor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, yesterday said that tens of thousands of more people are at immediate risk of death from hunger, lack of adequate water, and disease. A great deal of aid is literally sitting at the airport in Rangoon, because the military regime won't allow the U.N. and others to distribute the aid.

The United States and the rest of the world have essentially offered a Tsunami-style response to the Cyclone, yet the regime -- and their ally at the UN Security Council, China -- is blocking the aid. The United States has several C-130 transports planes ready to deliver aid inside Burma, and is also ready with assistance from 23 helicopters -- all this is being refused, with the exception of one single C-130 transport aircraft. We believe the regime approved this single flight in order to give the appearance of accepting aid when the vast majority is still being refused.

The world can not wait any longer for permission from Burma's military leader Than Shwe -- this is a man that has already recruited up to 70,000 child soldiers, destroyed 3,200 ethnic minority villages, and tortured to death many, many human rights activists.

We ask you to email the Chinese UN Ambassador, because under this extraordinary circumstance, while we do support countries entering Burma to provide aid without the approval of Burmese regime approval or UN approval - UN approval would still be the best way . It is especially imperative that aid reach the Irrawaddy Delta region -- helicopters, ships, and all other manner of supplies should be dispatched immediately to help the Burmese people.

Links and videos

2008-05-01T20:29:00.003-06:00

So it's been awhile since any news came out from here. Lot to say, and not much I can say, sad to say. But I'm still recovering and visiting doctors and doing exams. I'm pretty tired of it all, but not sure what else I can do. Hopefully there will be something a bit more definitive next week with exam results. In the mean time, here are some cool links and videos:

This is a video from the US campaign for Burma. They are hoping to get a million people to pledge to boycott the Beijing Olympics and not buy from the sponsors. Why would you do that you ask? First, to put the Protest back into to Protestant. Second, this video explains the reasons very well.

I heard a passing missionary talk about Thailand and Burma while I was in college. He was snuck into Burma to see the situation that many of the ethnic groups (the largest group being the Karen) face. I was surprised to learn that many of these people are Christian, Baptists even. He explained that the Burmese military is trying to exterminate these groups. In their villages, they manage to eek out a very meager existence with subsistence farming. However, right before any harvest can take place, the military will come in, burn the crops, burn the village, and kill anyone they find. The only building the military leaves standing is the church. They know that any escaped villager will immediately run to the church to pray when they return. So they ring the entrance to the church with landmines designed to maim and leave of a record of their brutality. Thankfully there is a group called the Free Burma Rangers. They track the movements of the Burmese military and help Karen people to escape before they arrive. They also return to the village and sweep for mines to make sure the area is safe. They do a lot of other stuff in terms of human rights abuse documentation and emergency aid.

Also on the link list is something I've seen on Facebook, but never did until tonight. It's a little online vocab game called Free Rice. You define the word and every time you get it right, 20 grains of rice get donated to some UN food program from the banner ad sponsors. I got curious how many grains of rice make a kilo and it's a lot, like anywhere from 14,000 to 50,000 after a brief google survey. So don't expect to be doing any great shakes for humanity by playing it (although everyone playing does add up) but it's still fun and educational. It's Edutainment! I can't get past level 44.

Finally, we've been talking a lot about evangelism in our context. We watched this video as an example of a gospel presentation contextualized for college students. I actually saw an early version of this in IV my last year. I'm not going to comment on it just because I'm curious as to what people think. That means leave a comment:)

Alright, that's it for now, but up and coming is a song I wrote and am practicing. It's the first song I'll have ever written so hopefully it turns out alright. Thanks for reading!

Lo Salvamos

2008-04-14T08:00:00.002-06:00

They saved him. When I got there today, the nurses had received hand made cards from his mom and family thanking them for saving their son. Apparently the wound I saw near his ear went out or came in through his mouth, he was hit in the leg, and he got a third shot somewhere else in the torso that ended in his spine. They don't know if he's paralyzed or not. Still, it looks like he's going to make it. They've transfered him from the clinic to an official hospital after he got out of critical mode yesterday.

I left the clinic really happy. There were 18 murders this last weekend (including three police officers) but I'm so glad he wasn't counted with them. I don't even know the guy, but I'm still glad he's alive. Thank you Lord for your mercy. Heal him completely and restore him anew.

Sunday Morning

2008-04-13T09:14:00.002-06:00

Note: I'm not correcting this. This is pure processing that I need to do and I hope however incoherent my thoughts are, that they help explain my own thought process. I just needed to write this down.

Every twelve hours I'm making a trip to a local clinic to get antibiotic injections for my pnemonia. The journey starts with a jeep ride down the hill to the "redoma" the market place here but also central hub for transportation and then a van/bus ride up another hill to the clinic. Four legs of a journey in total. This morning I thought I'd stop in la redoma and eat an empanada. I got one and like any good Venezuelan I was putting some sauce on it. Specifically, guasaca (which is really fun to say, gua-saw-KA-ka) which is made from avocado, cilantro, garlic and other stuff. The top was a little plugged though and when I squeezed the bottle, I put a little to much into it and shot a stream of guasacaca straight into a strangers arm, shirt and pants. I apologized profusely, helped to clean up and offered to pay for his food. He was cool about it and the girls at the counter all smiled and laughed. I tried to pay for his food, but he wouldn't let me. Thankfully, he was able to clean everything off too. Oh mornings.

After that I was off to the bus to the clinic. On the bus already was one of the nurses at the clinic I had already met. She had just completed a 24 hour shift the day before and I asked her if she was working. She said she wasn't. Then another nurse I had met jumped in to. One thing to note about this particular medical program is that Venezuela has a medical exchange program with cuba. This means that all the doctors that work in the government medical system, specifically in the barrios, are cuban. They come to work for two years and then go back. At least that's the idea. Some stay.

When the bus got to the clinic it stopped directly in front of a car washing place. As I exited the bus, there were no cars being washed and all the workers were talking and standing in a circle more or less. Except, it was the kind of talking that happens after a major event: some people don't move, some can't stop moving and everyone looks unsure. In the middle of their circle was a pool of water stained red. It was bright, but my immediate thought was that of blood. But then I thought it could be paint or dye from a car. It's amazing how much you can pick up in a second with one glance. Stepping away from the door of the bus and going around it to cross the street, I noticed huge drops of what was now clearly blood on the street. They made a clear trail, they were close together, but not overlapping. My path to the clinic and the trail of blood drops were the same and I couldn't help but notice them.

The clinic was abuzz when I got there. I'm not sure how I learned exactly what had happened, but amid the tears of family and patients and doctors, it was thick in the air that the mad had been shot twice, and just minutes ago. One doctor walked up to me. He had helped diagnose/perscribe me when I first came there days ago. When he learned we were from the states, he jumped at his chance to practice his cuban learned english. Today he spoke in his mildly accented english too. "What kind of f#%@ing country is this?"He mentioned how Cuba isn't like this and ran off to some important task.

Sitting outside the room where I normally get my injection, they started to wheel the shot man out on a stretcher for surgery. I decided I'd better look. I've never seen anyone shot before and it honestly didn't seem that bad. His ear was covered in red and blood along with that whole area of his head. He had also been shot in the led, but his legs looked perfect to me. He must have been shot in the back.

A lot of family came in and out. One of the nurses I had seen on the bus told some guys that they needed blood, O+. I'm that blood type and I've given a lot of blood in my day. I volunteered, but they said it had to be processed. The next 30 minutes I spent waiting I saw her calling everywhere trying to get blood. Apparently all the blood for the city is held in one spot and then gets sent out when needed. After my injection, she informed me kinda how I can donate blood here. I certainly want to since it looks like there is no donation program at all here.

My nurse for the injection mentioned that the man's wounds were very serious. She said the doctors aren't accustomed to this kind of violence and consequent injuries. She said there are no guns in Cuba and if you get caught with one, you go to jail for 13 years. She has a year and three months left here and then she's heading back to Cuba. Everytime I say something she doesn't understand. I think she's partially deaf.

I left and there was a huge crowd gathered outside the clinic. There were more women crying, and seriously crying. There were a lot of people just standing around. I couldn't do anything and a van was there ready to go so I jumped in it. On the way down, I saw the ambulance coming up. It was for the blood. I thought that maybe it would have the blood in it. Except when I was back at the redoma, it passed me going the other way. They had mentioned they needed it to go look for the blood. Crazy system.

I'll find out tonight what happened to him. I felt pretty dazed after getting back. There was a lot of blood. I have blood that can help, but it wasn't useful/usable. I didn't know what if anything I could say to the crying women. I prayed; only because there was nothing else I could do. Thankfully, the reason the nurses that were there was that sunday morning, all the doctors and nurses show up to clean the grounds around the clinic. Good thing they were there.

Who shot the guy? They also said that a man on a motorcycle came by and shot four times. I don't know why or if he was specifically targeted, but I don't think it matters. I could say I was lucky to get an empanada before hand or I could have been there when it happened, but this doesn't concern me on bit. I hope he lives. I wanted to do something. There are still so many walls too, language, recovering from sickness. Somehow when I'm weak He is strong, but I don't know how that actually played out at all.

Shallow?

2008-04-11T21:08:00.004-06:00

So, I actually wasn't getting better. I was just getting better to get sick again. Unfortunately that second fall hit while I was in the states. I have so many people to be thankful for that helped me in so many ways while I was there. I was greatly blessed by them. After getting back to VZ, a lot of visits with cuban doctors, official and not, I'm finally coming around and hopefully for good. Turns out what I had really wasn't bronchitis, it's actually pneumonia, but spread all over the lungs instead of being concentrated in one place. Broncho-nemonia as they've called it here. Now I'm getting anti-biotic injections every 12 hours at a local clinic (totally free by the way).

Also in the process I found a scale in a pharmacy. 73 and some kilos---160 and some pounds! Ouch. I've never been that thin/light in my life. Consequently, I've been researching weight gaining techniques. You'd think just eating more would be the solution, except that didn't work for me at all between December and now. I was very hungry and eating huge meals that would probably feed a small family, and still getting skinnier. That led to the first trip to the doctor and an unsure diagnosis of parasites. Now even after the prescribed medicine, I'm not sure if all the parasites I've managed to accumulate are dead, but I feel like I have a shot at putting on some weight before the stragglers take notice. And I got a trick up my sleeve them but that's for later.
Now is the time to really put on some weight. I think what I did wrong earlier was how and what I was eating. Only today did I learn that your body can only digest so much in one sitting. So instead of huge plates of food every 8 hours, smaller plates every three hours do much better. Six meals a day is what they (being the body building community) recommends. There are also a ton of formulas for how many calories one needs and how that breaks into proteins, carbs, and fats. All that to say, my near vegetarian ways are over here. I will have to buy chicken and figure out a way to eat it/store it without getting sick. (only real stomach problems came from "old" chicken and ham. Food goes bad very fast here.) But for now, I'm just getting over the sickness and trying to eat what I can.

In other news, I'm excited to grow my hair out. I've never had long hair and I'm kinda curious to see how it turns out. I haven't cut it for about five months and it still has a ways to go before I can even think of a pony tail. Ideally I'd like to do locks of love when I come back in August, but I probably won't have enough hair by then. Although, the diet that will help me gain weight will also help me grow hair faster. So there's hope. At least by Christmas.

So, that's it. This is a very shallow post, but the physical world is not something to just look down upon as inferior to the spiritual. Rather they need to be seen together, both as good, creations of God, and the reality we live in. Boo to dualism. So eat well everybody and may your hair grow fast and full.

C-mail...better late than never

2008-03-24T09:41:00.001-06:00

Howdy All!

Well, it certainly has been awhile. Time just up and runs without much notice and adding to it, these months have been busy. None the less, the update is here and there's lots of ground to cover so here goes:

1). This last week has been rough as I was sacked out and bedridden with bronchitis. I'll spare you the details, but thankfully the antibiotics kicked in on thursday, broke the fever, and I've been gaining energy ever since. Thank you so much for all of those who were praying.

2). Happy Easter! Before Easter of course is Lent and before Lent is Mardi Gras or Carnival as they call it here. It is the holiday of the mischievous. Water balloons filled with who knows what are chucked with reckless abandon at anybody and everybody. As for Lent, I couldn't see any major cultural distinctive between Caracas and the states. However for Semana Santa or Holy Week, there are a number of processions of the Nazarenes. The Nazarenes are folks who have made a promise to God in exchange for healing or protection for a loved one. During the week they pay that promise by visiting various cathedrals wearing purple. Some wear a crown of thorns and carry a cross. At least so I'm told. I haven't seen anyone paying their promises since they didn't happen pass in front of my bed while I was sick. For everyone else, the week is vacation. Easter in the barrio was celebrated by burning an effigy of Judas in the evening. Despite my initial reservations, it was actually a pretty neat community event. Judas had his will read aloud where he bequeathed various articles of clothing to people in the community, usually making a joke out of it. Then, his firecracker filled form is set on fire and everybody watches and jumps from the explosions. So aside from detracting from the main focus of Easter, I enjoyed it. Maybe I'm just getting too well adjusted here.

3). We've just completed another kids club. We focused on interactive drama with Bible stories highlighting the basic narrative (creation, the fall, incarnation, life of Jesus, crucifixion, resurrection.) We ended with a drama for the community. You can see a video on the blog. For never having done acting before, I think the kids did pretty good. More importantly, our goal was to love on the kids in very concrete ways. We all considered this part of the escuelita big success. So many times the kids don't have any older presence in their lives or sadly it is only an abusive presence. It was a joy to offer something different that extends into their lives.

4). Praise God for a prayer time with a neighbor! The woman had been confined to her house for three weeks. She was suffering from a lot of pain in her back and would randomly fall/faint. The doctors didn't know what to make of it. We visited and prayed with her and her husband for healing. I saw her a few days later walking around and she said she hadn't fallen since. Praise God for His work in her life and pray that she and her husband would continue to be open to knowing and following this healing God that has touched her.

4). Our teammate and good friend Ryan is leaving. He'll be returning back to the states and there will begin work/study/permaculture and life. It is very sad for all of us to see him go; he was a true blessing and smile bringer to everyone here. I ask that you join us in prayer for his closure and for his time of reentry into the states. Unfortunately, that leaves me the only guy of my age/status on the team. It would be beyond nice to have another guy here, and I ask for prayer in that too.

5). This Wednesday I'll be heading out for a short visa run/midyear retreat in California. I'll be back in very early in April. Also I'll be moving into a new "apartment" when I return. More about that when I get there.

Alright, well, that's it for now. I hope you are all doing really great and are excited for spring. Let me know what's happening with you.

Stay strong, seek the Lord and
Press on for Joy!
Cameron

traaAACCKK sang the hooked blade with the bull nose as it was pulled down the spine of the bamboo. It's wielder was hunkered down next to a pile of uncut bamboo poles and the cut strips were laid in another pile. There were three of them working and from the rate they were going, it looked like they could put together a section of bamboo thatching in about an hour. They would sell it for just under three dollars. By this point in our short conversation, I was invisible and it seemed clear my presence wasn't appreciated. I was looking for their son; he was as lost to them as he was to me. Except I wanted to find him, and it was looking like that it was not going to be possible.

As an "Estadounidense" (United Statsian) living in Venezuela, I have been unable to get a real visa. Legally, I need to leave the country every three months to renew a tourist visa. With the first set of three months coming to a close, I jumped at the chance to return to Peru. While I couldn't even begin to explain what happened the first time I went to Lima in 2006, nor during this short trip, I can say that they both ended the same way: deeply shaken by the unchangability of the poor as personified by one extremely lost and tragic life. I returned to Caracas not sure how nor even wanting to deal with it. It has been months since that trip, and only now am I not so hesitant to think of it. Yet, at the end of both trips I have found myself reflecting on the life of Elijah. I know I usually try to share a story in my updates, but this time I want to share a bit of what I've been learning in some times of study and reflection.

The life of Elijah might be basically familiar, but if not, here's a rough summary of what takes place in chapters 17-19 of 1st Kings. Elijah lived in the middle of the very turbulent nation of Israel about 900 years before our calendar started counting up. Israel had seen about six lousy changes in leadership during the reign of one good king in the bordering nation of Judah. The current King Ahab was the worst: he had turned away completely from the God of Israel and was worshiping other gods from other countries, something the Israelite God had completely forbidden when talking to Moses on Mount Sinai. King Ahab finds himself confronted by Elijah who literally showed up out of nowhere. Elijah tells Ahab that it will not rain in his nation until Elijah says so. Consequently, at the word of God, Elijah runs and hides for the next three and a half years. That time is divided between a brook being fed by ravens bringing bits of bread and meat, and with an impoverished widow who lived just north of the border of Israel. In both cases, God provided water and food for Elijah in miraculous ways. Finally God directed Elijah to talk with Ahab with the promise of bringing back rain. Elijah finds Ahab, and summons a contest between the God of Israel and the foreign gods. Whoever can get their God to light up a sacrifice with fire wins. The priests of the foreign gods fail to get their god to speak with fire while God sends fire upon the sacrifice of Elijah . . . even after he completely drenched it in water. Elijah rallies the people of Israel watching and proceeds to execute the priests of the foreign gods, 850 in total. Ahab's wife, Jezebel, soon finds out about the slaughter. She sends a messenger to Elijah swearing to kill him. Ironically, she swears by the same gods that just got defeated. Elijah flees the country, prays to die, and in the middle of the night is given food and water by an angel. From there he walks 40 days and nights to the mountain of God. While in a cave, God asks Elijah why he is there, to which he responds of his zealousness for God and Israel's failure to follow Him. Then while Elijah is in the cave, an earthquake, a strong wind, and a fire pass by. It is noted that God is not in any of these things. Then Elijah hears a still small voice, leaves the cave and receives the same question from God and gives the same response. God then gives him specific directions which he more or less goes and fulfills.

Whew, long story! So what's the big deal? Before the looking at the story itself, the person of Elijah merits some attention. First, they guy had some guts. There seem to be a number of times where he just throws himself out there before really hearing from God. It is only AFTER he confronts Ahab the first time that the record shows that the word of the Lord came to him. Also, it appears that he independently comes up with the idea of the contest between him and prophets. Again God responded in Elijah's behalf.

I think that contest also reveals how Elijah's faith and guts extended to how God spoke to him. I was surprised to discover that every single time God speaks to Elijah before the "still small voice" on the mountain, there is an element of water mentioned. Perhaps more specifically, what is mentioned is God's provision of water. I'm beginning to doubt that Elijah's pouring of the water on the sacrifice was to show off God's power. Perhaps it was more that Elijah knew from experience how God had always spoken to him about water and he used water in order to let God speak. The contest in Chapter 18 is presented as a contest of whose god will speak. The account mentions twice the the foreign gods never spoke. Yet Elijah's God did.

Finally, Elijah was a waiter. Not of the restaurant type, but of the patience type. No one knows what Elijah did before he jumped up in front of Ahab, or how old he was when he did it either. But after a one sentence proclamation, he runs to a brook to be fed by ravens for a very long time. Perhaps a year, perhaps more. I'm not sure I could keep my sanity just hiding by a stream and letting some birds drop me a bit of bread and meat for breakfast and dinner. There's nothing to do except wait. Even after bidding the ravens nevermore, Elijah waits again at the house of a widow in a foreign country. We don't know what he did there either if anything, except that he became acquainted with the grief and sorrow that this drought was taking. (17:20)

Now, to the story. I think there are two main hinge points. First, when Elijah prays to die after the contest, it looks like he has given up on Israel. He says he is no better than his fathers. After all that had been shown to Israel and the complete victory over the foreign gods, the fact that the leadership of Israel had not changed was too much for Elijah. Nothing had changed and he knew it.

I think I have fraction of an understanding of how he felt. There are times I walk around La Montanita, and I'm completely clueless as to how to engage, how to even imagine anything could be different, that God could truly be their God. I get excited about a family taking me in and a discussion about God, but then they turn distant, and I see their sons dressed in all white, a sign of Santeria. After coming back from Peru, I too gave up hope for change. It wasn't anything specific I could point at, but somehow everything was different.

However, God's response to Elijah's resignation is extremely significant. God sends him bread and water. God still provided for him, talked to him, and in the exact same way He always had. Even though Elijah gave up on Israel, God had not given up on Elijah.

A few significant points came on the mountain itself. The imagery describing how God passed by Elijah on the mountain with wind, earthquake, and fire is a direct tie to the encounter Moses had with God on the same mountain. Both of them talked to a formless voice that was preceded by fire and fear inspiring manifestations. (As a side note, it's interesting that both Moses and Elijah end up talking with a voice on a mountain later, but this time the formless voice has taken the form of Christ during the transfiguration.) This voice asks Elijah twice why he is there. Elijah responds the same way both times: "I have been very zealous for the LORD God of hosts(armies); for the children of Israel have forsaken Your covenant, torn down Your altars, and killed Your prophets with the sword. I alone am left; and they seek to take my life." Elijah is addressing God in the matter of zeal, of action, of passion let loose. The cause is that Elijah's own nation and people had failed to do what God had asked them to do on this same mountain with Moses.

It was just below this mountain where the people of Israel made their image of a god while Moses was talking with the imageless God. For their rebellion, God told Moses he would kill off the people and make a new nation out of him. Instead of going along with the plan, Moses threw himself on his face without eating or drinking for 40 days and nights, pleading that God would not carry out His plan. At the end of that time, God heard Moses and did not destroy Israel. I'm honestly not sure what Elijah was asking of God or even if he knew exactly, but he does stay consistent. Both he and Moses were not willing to let God off the hook. They essentially protested against God, wrestled with Him, demanded from Him something different. Moses begged for mercy; Elijah for restoration. And God responded both times. I don't pray like this. Even if I try, I give up after a few days. And yet, I have to consider that God sustained both these guys for impossibly long periods of fasting in order that they could pray. I don't pray like this, but I need to.

I think something very amazing about the character of God is revealed both times in the encounters on the mountain. Both times, the mountain is surrounded by destruction: earthquakes, smoke, wind, and ultimately fire. And yet, when these things passed by Elijah, God was not in them. Rather, He was in the still small voice. When Moses talked with this same voice, it revealed its name to him: "The LORD, the LORD God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth; keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty," (Exodus 34:6-7) This God surrounded by destruction, at the center, is kindness, is affection, is love, is mercy and justice. He does bring change, and often in a manner that is utterly destructive. And yet somehow, in the midst of the destruction, at the focus is a potent kindness. To say or even view God as only just/destructive or as only merciful/kind, puts a form on a formless God. It's only in that paradox that God exists. As Dosteyevsky penned in "The Idiot": "We degrade God too much, ascribing to Him our ideas, in vexation at being unable to understand Him."

So what is to be taken away from Elijah? For me, two things: A) Act in zeal. That means to know the heart of God, what He desires, and to act in it with the faith that God is already there. B) Pray before, when and after zeal fails. I truly am only one person and even though everyone says our little actions can add up to be something big, one can only deceive themselves for so long. Many changes are far beyond mine or any collective's abilities, and for that only an God surrounded by power and a God with a heart of love can suffice. This formless, adjective breaking God wants our obstinate cries; I don't want to disappoint Him. There is hope in that. Until then, keep wrestling and,
Press on for Joy!

Drama!!!

2008-03-21T11:09:00.004-06:00

The second escuelita has come and gone. I couldn't be part of it this week as I was laid out with bronchitis. However, here's the "culmination" (the real goal was to love the kids and that has no end or visibility.) If you want the story in english, let me know. It comes in two videos but nothing happens between the first and second. Enjoy!

Brief Update..

2008-03-07T19:32:00.003-07:00

So, I've been very lax in getting out any sort of updates, but here's a shot. I do have a C-mail kind of written up, but it still needs reviewing. It's been sitting like that for a while now, and its getting out of date before it even ships. Oh well.

I've been a bit sick. Most recently, I've had an annoying cough turned bronchitis that won't seem to leave. Second, I've been losing weight despite lots of eating on my part. The doctor was pretty useless for this one and after a number of tests and much assurance that I am in wonderful health, he gave me some parasite medicine. Actually, he told me to buy some. I don't know any doctor that really "gives" medicine, socialized or not. I don't expect the medicine to do much, but hopefully it'll let me gain some weight in the next month before I get back to the states for a week (mid year retreat and visa run). There I'm hoping to get some good herbal stuff to knock the little buggers out.

We've been doing a lot of stuff with the kids recently too. We've been doing a kids club in two communities that has been good and the kids seem to like it too. We're hoping to do a drama during holy week with them for the community too. I've ended every sentence in this paragraph with the word too, too.

Also, teammate Ryan is leaving at the end of March which is extremely sad. Like, very sad. He is a very good friend and will be sorely missed. I'm not sure how I'll do since I'll be the only young guy here at that point. Pray for more men to join the mission field.

Second to last, Ryan and I have been discussing a lot about Anarchy, specifically the Christian variety. Before you go off and call Homeland Security, hear this out. If Jesus really was against all the powers and principalities, and we are to seek His Kingdom first, how can be part of or participate in the systems of the world? In Ephesians 6:12, Paul says that we wrestle against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. The NIV uses rulers and authorities to describe powers and principalities. We however do not wrestle against flesh and blood. I'm toying with the idea that this leads to a fight against the systems, but not against the people in them. We love our enemies, we love our friends, we love strangers and acquaintances alike. In six months time, I'll be an illegal immigrant here. I'm not obeying the goverment, but if they fine me, I should pay it as sign of love to them; as an example of how I submit to my true Goverment. As such, we do not participate in any such structure or system, but we still submit to their authority. An example would be Jesus not responding to the Sanhedrin as they questioned them (for all the accusations were false and He was under no obligation to reply) but yet still submitted to their judgment and punishment. I guess the point is that Jesus is King over all. And if He is King over all, we only submit to Him, or as some put it, we only pledge allegiance to Him as any sort of ruler or authority. And yet we still follow His lead in loving those in positions of worldly authority. I realize this is controversial and half of you will jump up with Romans 13, and it is a valid critique. I don't claim to say I have this altogether, but it is interesting discussion and very interesting ramifications as well. Suggested reading is Ivan Illich.

And finally, a friend of a friend found this. Seems pretty accurate.

Alright, that is it for now. Stay strong, seek the Lord and
Press on for Joy!
Cameron

Glimpses of Consciousness

2008-03-01T20:04:00.002-07:00

I've been having more experiences of waking up. I'll be cooking dinner, riding a bus, cleaning. All of a sudden I realize I'm living in South America. I realize I'm not from here. I realize this life isn't normal to what I've known as normal. I don't know what to make of this discovery. Thankfully, I usually fall back asleep after a few minutes.

Global Urban Trek Lima 2006: Follow Up

2008-01-24T10:57:00.000-07:00

Howdy All!

Well, I got back from a brief trip to Lima on Wednesday and I figured I ought to share it with you all since you've all been there. I'm shamelessly copying my friend's brilliant travel log in the format I'm presenting the trip. (I'm even shamelessly copying the phrase "shamelessly copying" in reference to the writers he shamelessly copies.) Finally, I'm really bad about taking photos. I really should have taken a lot more, and more of relevant subjects but I'm sharing what I got. With that, here we go:

Being an American in Venezuela brings the cursed blessing of having to leave the country every three months to renew a tourist visa. Since we all got to know Lima and some Peruvian folk about a year and a half ago, and since I was seriously missing the food, the decision to go to there was pretty easy. However, getting the trip meticulously planned out in great minutia didn't quite happen. Actually, aside from a plane ticket and a lunch with Chris Conti, I didn't have anything planned out.

None the less, I arrived at Lima with little to no problems by 2 in the afternoon on Saturday. I figured I'd try the AGEUP house to see if anyone was there, and see if they had any space to stay a few nights thanks to a tip from Eli. Unfortunately, I didn't have their address, only a phone number Eli had sent. I managed to find a map of Lima and all the sectors online. I was pretty sure that the Chinese church we stayed at, which I remember being somewhat close to the AGEUP office, was in the sector of Pueblo Libre. Pretty sure. Later I remembered that there was that park we walked by that had the face of Jesus carved in the tree. I had a slight inclination that the park might be named Parque Bolivar. There are probably a billion Parque Bolivars in Caracas alone, not to mention all of Latin America or Lima. But, it was what I had to go on and worth a shot.

At the airport I asked a taxi driver if there was A Parque Bolivar in Pueblo Libre. And miracle, there was! So off we went. I think we all remember that the drivers in Lima are crazy. At the time, I figured that it was that way everywhere outside the states. Now after being to three other countries outside the US, I can easily say the craziest drivers are in Lima. We drove a bit and nothing was looking familiar. Then everything looked familiar which really made me doubt if I had hit the right spot. Finally, we passed a park, and then another park with a sculptured head of Bolivar the size of my bedroom. Low and behold, it was the one.

If you're wondering what's up with that smiling paper drawing stuck in Jesus' braid, you'll need to ask Markietta from Dana's 5th Grade class. He shows up in a lot of pictures.

Thankfully I had found "the place" without yet finding "the place". I spent the next hour and a half walking around trying to find the AGEUP office. It really felt like that one day in orientation where we had to go and find the park, the Jesus carving above, the AGEUP office, then the smoke detector price (I didn't bother to check this, there were slightly more important things to do). I remembered the office was really hard to find, and so only after crisscrossing the whole area for an hour did I finally decide to give in an call the number I had. I was off by 12 blocks and I headed over and found the correct street. It is amazing how the neighborhoods all look the same. They are really nice too. I kind of felt like I was in the states. There were a lot of pet dogs, but not like adopted street dogs. No, these were pure bred, small lap dogs, ie. Schnauzers. I even saw a number of signs like....

The glare is a little bad, but the sign says: Whatever your dog does is your responsibility. Avoid the Fines. Pick up their solid waste! That would be a useful sign here in the barrios.

So, I managed to find the AGEUP house and upon entering . . .

Whoa! Did you guys switch hair? Actually I took this picture later, since Nemo and Pilar (Civil Engineering student girl that joined us later in the trip. She's in the picture at the top) were there when I came in. Cesar was upstairs sleeping/recovering from Dengue. They along with some other students were there doing some national planning stuff for AGEUP. Pilar was gracious enough to ask me if I was staying there and I gladly accepted. I went upstairs, caught up with Cesar and rested a bit. Later that night they invited me to a wedding. I didn't know the people getting married, nor did I have anything nice to wear. Cesar's shoes didn't match his suit so he decided to go casual, and one of the other students going didn't have nice clothes with him either. So, what the heck? I went.

The wedding was held in a small church between a Pollo a la Brasa restaurant and a hardware store. The neighborhood was in total darkness when we arrived. One of the groomsmen was in the middle of the street, trying to throw an electrical chord onto the power lines to get the power back on. I didn't understand what he was doing until he succeeded and the weight of the cord (still in his hands) brought two power lines together, and all the lights came back on.

The wedding and journey there and back was an excellent time to catch up with Cesar, Nemo, Pilar and a number of other students I hadn't met before. I forgot how funny these guys are. Like really funny. Cesar was talking all through the wedding which I found hilarious, even though we were talking about serious stuff. (Serious like theology serious). I was also struck by how nice the Peruvians are. The culture here in Caracas is very harsh (think stereotypical New Yorkers on a bad day), and I really do love it and it is starting to wear off on me. However in Peru, everyone is very accommodating and friendly. A random guy I met in a restaurant the last day I was there led and accompanied me to the airport of his own good will. That's hospitality.

The wedding went alright although there wasn't any dancing to speak of, but it was a good time over all simply to hang out, hear about life, and eat amazingly delicious chicken. Pilar is still studying Civil Engineering and has about two years left. I think she's also the President of AGEUP. Cesar and Nemo are still studying anthropology at the University in Cusco and hope to get a masters with a focus in missions. They are hoping to eventually find undiscovered people groups in the Amazon and live with them and develop a proper native theology. All our theology mostly comes from the stream of dead white guys. Having a native/indigenous theology is really cool and a much welcomed and needed voice. I hope they can do it.

The next day in the AGEUP house, I woke up to take a shower and:

Irony: Spending three weeks in Peru without ever taking a warm shower; spending three months in Venezuela without ever taking a warm shower; the first morning back in Peru: taking a warm shower. It felt so weird, like I was getting a shower in soup. I honestly didn't like it, but I still did it.

I met up with Chris Conti for lunch that Sunday. I didn't bring my camera, but she's doing excellent and is very happy to be living in Peru and is confident that it is where she is supposed to be. I think you all get her updates so I won't say much else. We ate Lomo Saltado; it was divine. In fact, all the food I ate was amazing. I met a guy from the Checz Republic during a unfortunate side trip to Panama. He's quite the traveler, but came to Peru this time just to eat. I don't blame him, that's half the reason I went as well.

Later that afternoon I ran into Jaime (again didn't have my camera on me.) He's also doing very well, but he was very tired. He had been up translating at church for some short term group and had been showing them all around. Translating and watching over a group of foreigners is hard work. You never actually realize it until you're on the other side doing the showing around. Jaime's currently working down in Pisco, one of the towns majorly affected by the earthquake. He's using his architecture abilities to show the people how to rebuild their houses out of locally available and inexpensive materials. The problem is, the people have a huge process to go through before they can get funds from the government to build their houses. There have been a lot of questions as to where the funds have gone, or not gone as is the case. The situation is still pretty dire down there with lots of folks without housing, and more donations aren't going to help at this point. But Jaime's at work and doing an amazing job from what I hear. Also, thankfully its summer there and the weather is rather warm. And that's why Lima built this:

I wish I had taken this picture, but I found it on the web. (I forgot my camera again, but Nemo has some pictures if I ever get in contact with him). This is now, the biggest fountain park/complex in the world; thirteen fountains in all. One has really cool images splayed on it and some with lasers and some are interactive and some you walk through and some are a little overdone, but really, really awesome overall. If you go to Lima again, you have to visit. And bring a towel just in case. Cesar, Nemo, Pilar, a number of other students and myself explored the park until way to late, tried to find dinner, got separated in the process, reunited walked the streets looking for food on a Sunday at now midnight and finally found a small burger/sandwich joint (not McDonalds or the like). Again, I was blessed to be able to hang out with them and just felt a strong camaraderie. Being able to understand and communicate probably had a lot to do with it. Hanging out with college students again probably had a lot to do with it. Pilar saying she should marry me probably had something to do with it (the comment came out of left field. We're not involved in anyway that I'm aware of, but still, THAT'S hospitality!). So, it was really sad to say goodbye to them the next day as they all had to leave to their own cities. But they all ask how all of you are doing, what's going on in your lives and were sad that no one's visited them yet. They send all their greetings to all of you and would probably love to hear from you too. For some reason we were under the impression that we had each others email addresses, but I don't think we do. So, if you have Cesar/Nemo/Pilar's info, let me know.

Monday I went up to San Martin and San Antonio. I left later than I would have preferred, but saying goodbyes are important. I got there just before 1 so it worked out. It was nice to make the trip in the day to see the city and the change from the center to the outskirts. The walk from the road to San Martin was nice, but I forgot how long of a walk it was. On the way, at a bluish house on the right, I ran into a guy who was perplexed by my appearance, (like all the people there). I explained where I was going and that I had been there before. He warned me that there were a number of troublesome youth in the area and that they would rob me if they got the chance, especially in the area where they keep the pigs. I figured things must have gone downhill in San Martin, but kept going.

When I got there, the community looked dead. No one was walking around, not even a dog. The community center we built looked a heck a lot nicer with some paintings on the front and AGEUP's symbol on the door. Also there was a new roof of the corrugated plastic variety. I went to Ema's house and knocked. Nothing. I knocked again, and same response. I tried a third time, shouted her name and finally sat down. A minute later, her daughter came to the tienda window and we talked a bit. Ema had left and would be returning at some point. An older woman sauntered up and we talked a bit and caught up. She seemed glad to see me and it was nice to see that there were still people living there.

After about thirty minutes, I decided to see if the playground was still in tact. I walked over (now accompanied by a few small kids) and lo and behold, everything was still there. I had expected the whole thing to be in tatters, but it was in good repair, even the paint. The swing was gone and the bridge was a bit lopsided, but in amazing condition overall. Not even one rock missing from the surrounding pole/fence/mound thing we built. I didn't take a picture since I was still a bit sketched out about the supposed trouble makers. I didn't recognize the kids I was with, but they were content to chat away:

"I bet I can cross! Or, or, I can put my legs in there. (She was on the jungle gym part) I don't like it when my parents fight. My dad drinks and threatens my mom and they fight. He was at the river and said he would kill my mom."
"What!? When?"
"Now. He had a broken bottle and was yelling. Ayyy!! I'm falling!"
I helped her down and she skipped back to the steps to try and cross again.
"Where are they?"
"He's at the river."

Another girl joined in the conversation. Somehow we ended up talking about their folks fighting, how they felt about it, and we did a brief prayer session for their trauma. Right after the prayer, they saw their dad amid the shacks. They took off for their house, the smallest one leading me by the hand. It was only when we got there (the house to the right of Emma's) that they actually acted like little girls and instead of running into battle, they quickly ran away. From what I could see, the couple was gesticulating at each other and I didn't see a broken bottle in the hand of the guy. I wasn't really sure what to do, but Isabel found me just as we arrived. She greeted me with a big hug and smile. I asked her if we should do something for them and explained what the girls had said. She laughed and quickly pulled me away. Aside from a few select cases, that has been the same reaction I've had from almost everyone I've told that story to.

Ema was back at her house. She's doing well. She just had another child and he's only four months old.

Man could that kid fart. Like for a solid 15 seconds and like all babies, he was totally oblivious to it. But he was in good health aside from being a bit grumpy in the heat. I think he's named Nixon, but I could be wrong (I'm really bad with names). Ema brought out the team photo she had of us and asked how you all were doing and what's happened in your lives. I updated her as best as I could and from what I remembered. She then asked what I had brought to give her. I had totally forgot about gifts but after sorting through my empty backpack, I found a flashlight and a small bible. I tried to make up for my failure to bring a real gift by writing her a poem. Isabel got the bible and Ema the flashlight; two forms of light I told them and we had a bit of a follow up conversation on that topic which went pretty well.

I asked everyone there where Brady and Angel were at. From the kids, they said Brady had gone away by himself somewhere south and his family somewhere else. Ema said the family had gone somewhere north and made no special mention of Brady. I don't know how long they have been gone. I also got to see Sr. Lorrenzo (again, not positive on name, maybe its Martin) but he was the guy that helped us clear out that ditch on the last day. Correction: we helped him clear out the ditch. Correction: he pretty much just cleared out the last portion of the ditch by himself. He too is doing well and looked to be in good health and spirits in spite of some pretty dusty clothes.

Ema showed me the community center we had a part in constructing. Another group of gringos, from Colorado none the less, had come and laid a concrete floor and put the new roof on the center. It looked pretty nice. However, as Ema tells it, they just ate sandwiches made from bread from Metro (the big super market there) and never ate anything truly Peruvian. I quickly begged her forgiveness on behalf of our country. There has also been a teacher that has been able to come and teach in the center as well, and also do classes for the adults in literacy. Ema took me past the playground over to the river. I never had been back here before and had no idea there even was a river.

And the beloved pigs too. Ema explained a lot of folks from different areas come and swim in the river. That's why its dangerous on the road. However, they don't enter into San Martin.
"What would happen if they did come here?" I asked Ema.
"I'd kill 'em!"
She seemed to be only half joking. That's NOT hospitality. But defending your community does have value, even if the methods are rather contestable.

We walked back into town, said our goodbyes and I was on my way to track down a mototaxi. In transit, I ran into the two gringo kids and their dad. (the girl was the one that nailed Jonathan right in the Pooh suit.) They were returning from the river in a newer looking van and were totally soaked. The girl really didn't respond to any salutations or questions except at the command of her dad. The boy was mildly friendly and seemed in good health as well. Their dad was very gregarious and I wish I had more time to spend there, but San Antonio was still ahead.

By the time I got up to the World Vision center, it was 4:30 and it would be getting dark by 7. I walked in the center and was greeted by the guard. He gave a huge smile and was very glad to see me again. Unfortunately, I didn't recognize him at all, but it was still great to talk with him. I remembered one of the guard's names was Jose, but this guy was Manuel. He asked where everyone else was, if I was by myself, and how you're all doing. He let me step in the bathroom to freshen up a bit.

Bet that looks familiar. Actually, it was very clean in there. The smell was unchanged and was almost comforting in some sort of Stockholm syndrome manner. Thankfully, I did not have the big D while I was there, but I did manage to get it on Tuesday.

Exiting the bathroom, Manuel conducted me upstairs to talk with the director. Ronald is now working at a regional level in the national office in Lima with World Vision. The new director is very nice and professional. She informed me that this center is actually going to close down in just under two years (Sept. 2009). They've pretty much accomplished their mission here and are now in the process of closing and transferring remaining projects to the community. They also have a main water line so no more relying on the water truck. After talking with her a bit more and thanking her for all the good work and information, I headed up to the track to say hi to the kids.

Somehow one of the kids remembered my name and I remembered almost none of theirs. I don't really know what to say about the kids except that it was cool to see them and they all wanted to see you all. At first they were very shy and didn't respond to any questions but they started to open up after an hour. The overt ones laughed at my Spanish and my use of words that are normal here but that are swear words there (without my knowledge). Jenifer and her brother are still there and doing good. Luis and Jasmine as well. Annie B, I didn't see Leida (was that her name?). The girl that really liked when Emily danced to Jonathon's Ou-Ou song was there too. We sat together, watched a five year old tussle and dance for attention, played a bit of tag, and we briefly visited a family; it didn't go so well but that's another story. Overall, they look like they are all doing great. They all asked for you, where you are, what you're doing, when you'll visit etc etc. Jasmine asked me to sing Victory and then I had to leave. On the way down I saw Jose, the guard, heading up. We talked for only for a second; it was getting dark.

That's the relevant part of the trip. There's a lot more, but I won't bore you with the details except with a parting picture:

Any guesses? Yep, that's the Panama Canal. I didn't want to go to Panama, but thanks to Copa Airlines (Latin Continental), I ended up there for the night. Actually a few hours in the early morning at a resort two hours drive away from the airport. Nice place, but the long travel is a killer late at night. At least I got to cross the canal even if I didn't know it the first time.

Well, all I can say is that both I and Peru miss you all and I hope you all miss Peru as well. At least that's what I told everyone there, and I'd hate to be lying. I know I miss it even though I am very glad to be back "home". But whenever you want to make another trip down there, let me know and I'd be glad to tag along. They'll keep the arroz con leche waiting. Till then, stay strong, seek the Lord and
Press on for Joy!
Cameron

Dan's the Man!

2008-01-15T19:59:00.000-07:00

My friend just messaged me about this: an anime viewing/Christian themed discussion group he's hosting at his church. Apparently the news picked up on it and so have the anime fans. The anime series is called "Haibane Renmei" ("Grey Winged Federation") and follows the story of kids in a town that are birthed as angels; fallen from some previous existence about which little is known. My friend showed me the series and led me through his then accompanying study. I thought it was a great series (confession: I like anime, I'm a nerd! But I'm not addicted, I swear.) and there are many Christian references which are great topics for discussion and further study. I'm personally praying for my friend that this goes really well and that lots of people who might not normally have anything to do with God beyond a personal philosophy level find something solid to chew, wrestle with and come to knowledge of the Only and true God. Pray for it as well!

Re: C-mail: January

2008-01-11T20:30:00.001-07:00

Pictures didn't attach, but hopefully they're here now.