Frost (the Poet), a Nagging Refrigerator Door, and Rumors of a Pulpit

I'm haunted by a refrigerator door, and it's not even ours. Hopefully before this night is over, I will have laid the ghost to rest; I don't look forward to continue dragging it around with me any longer.

As I said, it's not even our refrigerator door. Paz, one of the members of our church, sold her house and moved to another apartment closer to the center of Caniço, a town about halfway between Funchal and the airport, a move necessitated in large part because her husband left her and Sara, their 9-yr. old daughter. While at the "new" apartment one day, I went to get something out of the refrigerator and noticed that the door opens "backwards", that is, it was purchased new and set into the corner of the kitchen at the left end of the cabinets, and no one bothered to switch the hinges so that the door would open against the wall. Very few refrigerators are sold here that you can't reverse the hinges on. (The same thing happened when we finished our new kitchen. The new place for the refrigerator meant the doors opened backwards. After several weeks, I finally had enough and one night I spent an hour and reversed the whole setup. Actually I did it after Abbie had gone to bed, so the next morning she nearly tore the ligaments in her hand when she tried to pull the door open from the side where the hinges were newly installed.)

What has Frost got to do with it?

In his poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", the final stanza says, "I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep." You see, I promised Paz I would fix the door for her. That was a long time before Christmas, and for the two or three times that might have been an opportunity to go over and do the job, there was something that hindered and she said it was no problem. "Do it later."

Two months after I said I would change the hinges, they remain unchanged; how many more miles will I have to go before I sleep? OK, I haven't lost any sleep over this, but the fact that I have not fulfilled a promise nags me. I've been willing; she is the one who couldn't work in the time to let me do the job. It's not my fault, but there will be one less "to-do" item on my conscience.

The Bible says we're to bear one another's burdens; I guess in a way I'm carrying a refrigerator door. We've been invited to Paz's to have supper tonight and she said I could work on the door afterwards. We'll see. I hope so. Like Frost wrote, I have promises to keep, and although most are more eternal and crucial than the position of those hinges on that particular refrigerator in Caniço, Madeira, I cannot help but feel responsible for being faithful in the little things, also.

This feeling is all the more acute because the young man who offered to build the pulpit for our new building has already on at least four occasions set a specific time and place to deliver it, and I have rescheduled my calendar and waited each time. Each time no show. No telephone call to let me know. The next time we meet, a different excuse and apology. He insists the pulpit is built; I wonder if that's just a line, and he continually fails appointments because he's too embarrassed to confess the truth. I would have built it myself, I but held off when he offered to do it. Back in November, when he started coming to the church, he made a profession of faith. We pray to God that he did truly accept the Lord as Savior, but he will have to learn that as followers of Jesus we must be people of our word. Even hinges on a refrigerator door can become a heavy burden.

P.S. -- Jan. 29 -- Mission accomplished; hinges reversed; promise kept.

Is Happiness Really the Goal?

In writing about the inauguration of President Bush, and the way even the most die-hard Democrats have not carried through on their resolution to emigrate to Canada in the event of a Bush victory, NY Times Op-Ed Contributor Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, analyzed the fact that "human beings have a remarkable ability to manufacture happiness." His article, published on Jan. 20, and entitled "Four More Years of Happiness", deals with examples of how we tend to look for the silver linings in unfortunate circumstances, and end up discovering enough positive factors to satisfy our need to be "happy".

The point in context is that most everyone gets back into the routine of life, even if the "wrong person" won, but "of course not everyone will be happy today, because not everyone has this talent for reasoning his way to happiness....Many of the heroes and redeemers we most admire were unhappy people who found it impossible to change how they felt about the world - which left them no choice but to change the world itself."

I thought about Jesus, THE Redeemer. I don't recall any instance of His being described as "happy" in the gospels. He rejoiced, yes, but was He happy in the sense most of us think of happiness? He was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief; He wept...more than once; His soul was troubled; He had compassion on the multitudes that were lost and had no shepherd. In 2 Cor. 12:10, Paul wrote that he "took pleasure...in distresses" for Christ's sake.

"Rejoice in the Lord always" but "weep with them that weep." "Blessed are they that mourn..." and we cannot help but mourn with them. In our church at the moment, there are any number of cases that are distressing to the members. How can we not be distressed, too? Volodya, a Ukrainian brother, without work since August; Izaías, a Brazilian brother who had saved his money and planned to return to Brazil to see his wife, who went back in February---but the man who took Izaias's money for the ticket pocketed it and never arranged a plane ticket. Result: Izaias has no money, no job, and no ticket. The economic downturn is putting pressure on several church families...there's no work, or there's work and no pay. Every day they sink a bit further into the quicksand of debt, and there's no relief in sight. Jackie has been ill since last March and for a while was on the brink of death, but doctors have never discovered her problem, despite innumerable tests. She's better, but not cured. So the church comes together and prays, and waits, and continues to pray.

In concluding his article, Daniel Gilbert emphasizes the point that it is the unhappy people who take action to change the world, and writes, "Perhaps over the next four years we would all be wise to suppress our natural talent for happiness and strive instead to be truly, deeply distressed." He has a point, and to me, that distress is the starting point of salvation and conversion, the beginning of revival in God's people. Jesus told us not to worry, but He didn't say "Don't worry, be happy."

Everyone's in Town Tonight

At odd moments I sit down and poke around the various menus of Blogger and experiment tweaking the HTML. I have a goal in mind; it's just a matter of time (and trial and error) before I get there. I did post a picture of our new church building today, but there's more I want to do with it when I get the chance. As the name indicates, the church is located in Funchal, the capital city of the island of Madeira. We live in Santa Cruz, the town closest to the airport, about 20 minutes east of Funchal.

Like every village and settlement on the island, Santa Cruz has its own patron saint, and holds an annual feast in honor of its saint. Today is Santo Amaro's feast day, and tonight the village is full of people from all over the island who have come for the music and the food. Some may have come in homage to the saint, but I suspect they are in the not-so-vast minority. There was a procession last night, when the image was taken from its chapel at the east edge of the village and marched in solemn procession to the parish church. The devout follow along silently, carrying long candles, or wax representations of body parts (legs, feet, heads, arms, or babies) they have paid for as a vow to the saint for some answer to prayer they've received...or hope to receive.

The main attraction, however, is the grilled meat, popcorn, fried doughnuts (or a reasonable facsimile thereof), and music played loudly from a bandstand. And the people gather to visit with friends, neighbors, and strangers, and they drink. And they eat. And they drink. And some of them drink some more. It's not uncommon to read a report in the paper the next morning after one of these local feasts that the police had to be called to break up a fight fueled by alcohol. And sooner or later, one of those fights will lead to one of the parties involved killing the other, usually with a knife or club. One of the men I minister to in the prison is from Ukraine; he killed a fellow Ukrainian during a festival the immigrants were celebrating last summer. He was so drunk he doesn't really remember doing it, but he does remember waking up completely covered in blood.

The highway in front of our house is almost completely blocked with cars parked on both sides. There isn't room in the village for all those who have come from near and far to party. The noise from the village below will go on until 1:00 or so in the morning (hopefully not until 2:00 a.m., as it has many years), and we may get to rest after that. If faith in God and a desire to know about His Word were the main (only) attraction offered, how many of these people would show up? Everyone's in town tonight; how many will be in church tomorrow?

Out Jogging --- Exercises of Another Sort -1

Thoughts running through a mind jogged by the news

This posting (and others similarly titled) is not directly related to Madeira or our work here. It is rather an outlet for commentary on events and remarks in the news.

#1 - "A catastrophe of Biblical proportions"
This is a phrase heard many times in relation to the tsunami in Asia. I pondered on what is required for a disaster to acquire a "Biblical" rating. Film ratings are based on certain criteria, but who decides the criteria for a "Biblical" catastrophe? What are the other categories? Personal? Economic? Does God automatically get credited for calamities that affect a number of persons above a certain limit, or a geographic area greater than a certain size?

Those were the questions I dealt with in messages to the church earlier this month. More importantly, I dealt with one other issue raised in my mind by the statement. Why haven't we ever heard about "blessings of Biblical proportions"? I encouraged us all to seek God and pray for just that: blessings of Biblical proportions!

#2 - The importance of a name

From the NY Times Opinion Page, Jan. 14, 2005: IDENTITIES LOST AT SEA, by Op-Ed Contributor Amitav Ghosh

Realizing eventually that Father Johnson knew no more than they did, the refugees reduced their demands to a single, modest query: could they have some paper and a few pens? No sooner had this request been met than another uproar broke out: those who'd been given pens and paper now became the center of the siege. People began to push and jostle, clamoring to have their names written down. It seemed to occur to them simultaneously that identity was now no more than a matter of assertion, and nothing seemed to matter more than to create a trail of paper. Somehow they had come to believe that on this, the random scribbling of a name on a sheet of paper in a refugee camp, depended the eventual reclamation of a life.

The scene described took place in a refugee camp in Port Blair on Jan. 1. The refugees were not natives of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, having come originally from other areas of India. The author noted that not only had these people lost all their possessions, they had lost every physical trace of their existence as persons. They were stranded on a desolate island, far from their original family ties, demanding answers from the only authority figure they could identify, who himself obviously was without answers to their questions.

A piece of paper. A pen. An urgent need to write something down. My name. I am. I exist. Various Bible passages come to mind: Jesus the Good Shepherd knows His sheep and calls them by name (John 10:3); the promised blessing of receiving a new name written on a white stone in the Kingdom (Rev. 2:17); the words of Jesus telling us not to rejoice in what we do for God, or what He does through us, but rather "rejoice because your names are written in heaven." (Luke 10:20) It is a great blessing to know God; but how important it is to be assured that He knows me, and He has recorded my name in His book.

Starting Somewhere

Humanly speaking, I would say I got it from from my father. Evidently my brother did, too. Small, otherwise insignificant pieces of wood are our unwitting victims, as we are driven by some inner force to carry these small sticks or blocks of wood around in our pockets, and at odd moments begin to carve out some object or figure with our pocket knives. (Moral issues are involved here, too, such as, what do you do with the small wood shavings that get all over the floor of the doctor's waiting room?)

The process of achieving a completed form usually includes phases that seem more like obstacles to the creative urge, rather than an integral part of it. One of the hardest, I've found, is simply starting. There must be, obviously, a vague notion of what one expects to produce, but that can exist for a long time before the knife blade is purposefully plunged into the wood.

I'm not certain this posting is that "purposeful plunge" into the project that has formed in my mind. I intend for it to be that. I have ideas about what this blog can be, about what it could become; now comes the hard part---crafting it into existence. As you can tell, from the previous posting, the stick of wood sometimes gets carried in the pocket for long periods of time without any work done on it. That posting was done back in June, before our trip to the US and our daughter's wedding, before we returned at the end of July to work day and night on the church building. There are pictures of the wedding and the church project that I want to share with you, and one challenge is to find the best way to do that.

Of course, I will also have to let people know we're here. By the time you have found us, you will probably be able to judge just how purposeful this plunge really is. Hopefully, there will be a lot of subsequent material to accompany it. As with every project in life, one has to start somewhere, sometime.