Matters of the Heart: from heavy to hallelujah

An amazing thing happened last week: I read another book. Like the first one, it was a Christmas present; unlike the first one, it had only 35 chapters (but 261 pages in the Portuguese translation). If you read my posting on the first book, you remember it was not exactly a bright and cheery journey through sunlit fields of flowers. It did, however, have its bright moments and gave plenty of weighty material to think about. This second book was a long walk through a dark valley, with something of a ray of light at the end.

Shame, by Jasvinder Sanghera, offers us a look into the culture of the Sikh communities of the UK, through the words of a girl (now a woman) that describe the depths of human suffering, words that can only come from one who experienced the pain. Read the book (you can find it at Amazon, and I'm sure at any bookstore), but do not expect to be entertained; it is a portrait of mankind alienated from God. But you can expect to be inspired by the courage of one person who takes a stand against obvious evil and overwhelming odds.

In the end, it doesn't matter if it is Sikhs that are alienated from God, or "Christians" alienated from God: the wages of sin and rebellion against God are paid in all currencies and cultures. I know there are "Christians" that have suffered many of the things Jasvinder describes; the shock, I think, is realizing that such humiliations are "programmed" into the Sikh culture. Read the book. Be challenged to take a stand for right where God asks you to.

With a heart still heavy, I came to Sunday morning, time to bring a message from the Word of God. In the end I settled on a simple message from Psalm 145. "I will extol thee, my God, O king: and I will bless thy name for ever and ever." (v 1) What is there we can say about our God? I saw the effects of the Sikh god(s) on its followers...but what kind of God do we serve?

The Psalmist says (our) God is:
v. 3 = Great in His works
v. 8 = Gracious and full of compassion
v. 9 = Good to all
v. 17 = Righteous and holy in His ways and works
v. 18 = Near to those who call on Him

The sermon was simple and reflected a bit on each of the points above. Among those attending was an elderly couple from Scotland. They said they had visited once before, but I didn't remember them. Turns out they were here 9 years ago. After the service they both mentioned what a blessing the sermon was to them; he added that he was almost at the point of shouting "Hallelujah!" as I preached. It would have been most appropriate if he had, and some others of us would have joined in, I'm sure.

I still say it was not a great sermon, but it was a great message, because it pointed to a great God...great not only in power, but in grace and holiness; a message that uplifts the hearts of those who heed it.

From heavy to hallelujah: read the book...and read Psalm 145, as well.

On the difficulty of keeping a low profile

I had only been in the consular agency 7 months when the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks took place in the US. In those first hours and days of confusion, no one really knew what, if anything, would be happening in sequence. In line with the policy drawn up the US State Department, I got a call from my supervisor, the Consul-General in Lisbon. Americans, as a whole, and anyone directly identified with the State Department or US Gov't. were considered especially at risk. I was therefore told that, among other things, I should "keep a low profile." I smiled to myself when the CG said that.

At 1.94m (6'4"), my profile when I walk on the streets of Funchal is anything but low. How often I have been painfully reminded of that with a knock on the head when walking through low doorways in old houses! Plus, we've lived here since 1976, thousands of students sat in my English classes over the 15 years I taught, and we had a bookstore and stationery shop in a downtown shopping center for over 10 years; we are known by people we don't recognize. "Keep a low profile." Maybe if I crawled along the sidewalks, no one would notice me.

It's no use. People always noticed us. When we first came, we stood out, not because of color---Madeira is close to Africa, but it was settled by Portuguese, so there were practically no black people on the island when we came (we only knew of 4 or 5 personally), a situation that has changed in recent years with the influx of immigrants---but because we were one of the few American families on the island (the only one with young children that we knew of), and because we were the first Baptists to come to Madeira.

Perhaps the one incident that most strikingly illustrates how evident our presence was in those early years was the reception of a picture post card. It was written in German, and I read German sufficiently well enough to know that the writer said he and his wife would be seeing us in two weeks' time. I tried matching the sender's name with a German-speaking tourist that might have come once to our church services, but that was getting me nowhere. I studied the postcard more carefully: it had been mailed from the Algarve, the southernmost region of Portugal, which is very popular with German and English tourists, because of the mild weather and sandy beaches. I looked at the addressee: "Bernhard Potter", but that was the sum total of the address...no street, no city, no country...just the name of a person. Suddenly it became very clear: the card wasn't meant for me. A German tourist had gone to the Algarve for a vacation, bought postcards to send to his friends back home ("wonderful time...see you in a couple of weeks"), forgotten to put an address under the name of his neighbor, Bernhard Potter, and the Portuguese Post Office delivered it to the only Potter they could find in Portugal. (Bernhard? Edgar? What's the difference? It's Potter all the same.) Chalk one up for the post office of that time; I'm sure it wouldn't happen today. Too often, even correctly addressed mail never gets delivered!

The implications on mission work are obvious. I spoke about pioneer mission work to a group at the Baptist Seminary near Lisbon last November when we were there. Among the particular aspects of pioneer church-planting missions is the fact that the lives of the missionary and his family set the standards for the new work in the minds of the people. For good or for bad, our lives defined "Baptist" to the Madeirans who had never heard of Baptists, much less seen any.

Joy, our youngest, was born in Madeira and did all her studies through secondary school here. You can read some of her impressions on the subject on her blog, where she has written about living "Where everybody knows your name...or your address..." Low profile? Not likely.

In fact, the afternoon of Sept. 11, just hours after the WTC so dramatically collapsed, and with a police guard dispatched to stake out our house as a precautionary measure, the local TV rushed out for an interview. The interview was inside the house, but when the piece aired on the news that night, there was a view of our "White House on Hill Where Cars Crash" as Joy described it in her blog. Maybe the TV did that on purpose in case terrorists were planning to blow up our house: the locals wanted to make sure Al-Qaeda got the right one.

He said, She said (2)

Continuing the thought from the previous post, lest someone think there is no way out of life, but through the door of doubt, despair, and defeat, I felt I should add the "last words" of one who was not included in the book I read. These words were recorded in another Book:

"For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing." -- The Apostle Paul, 2 Tim. 4:6-8

Or in other words, "It was worth it."

He said, She said

I read a book in one sitting last week...150+ chapters. Before you become too awe-struck at my reading prowess, I should explain that they were very short chapters, usually no more than a short phrase or a few sentences. You'll get the idea from the title of the book: "Famous Last Words: Fond Farewells, Deathbed Diatribes and Exclamations upon Expiration", compiled by Ray Robinson.

The book, a Christmas gift from one of the church members, purports to be a collection of the last recorded words of persons, many of whom were famous and well-known, but some not. Some remarks were witty, others despondent (suicide notes), while others were downright mundane, especially in the case of persons who left this life unexpectedly right in the middle of something they were saying or doing.

The remark that made the greatest impression on me were the words attributed to Louis B. Mayer, the movie mogul of MGM fame. As he lay dying in a hospital, he said, "It wasn't worth it."

No context is given, so I'm not sure exactly what "It" he was referring to, but I assume he meant life itself. Almost 3000 years ago, the writer of Ecclesiastes came to the same conclusion, "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity." And Jesus put it very clearly when he said, "For what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole work, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" Mt. 16:26

What would I say if I knew my time had come? What will your last words be? How sad that anyone should come to the end and say, "It wasn't worth it."

Non-fatal Attraction --- Then and Now

History repeats itself, or so the saying goes. I don't really believe that; I think people just keep making the same, stupid mistakes. Like going to a saint's day festival, getting drunk, then trying to negotiate the curve in front of our house at 60 or 70 mph at 5:30 a.m. It happened in June of 2003, on the Feast of St. Peter's. At 5:45 we were awakened by a crash and awoke to find our green Opel on its side and totalled. I wrote about it here and posted these pictures last June on the 4th anniversary of the event.




This weekend is the St. Amaro Feast, and this morning it was 5:30. Same sort of thud, but our Opel is red, and it wasn't totaled. The difference: we had built a pillar at the corner of the driveway, which kept the speeding vehicle from plowing directly into our car. At the speed he was going, the shock would have totaled the red car and possibly the gray one parked beside it (just barely visible in lower left corner of the first photo). As it is, the pillar fell over and dented the back door, but otherwise, the car is OK. The pillar will have to be replaced, as well as the wall (again).

This is at least the 6th accident we've been the victims of on this curve in the 30 years we've lived here. Three of those times, our cars have been hit. Fortunately, whatever attraction there is has been non-fatal, so far.

Thrown out on the street

It was about 8:00 last night when the phone rang. The caller ID showed it was a call from Santa Cruz, the village where we live, but the voice was strange, Portuguese spoken in a heavy foreign accent. Then some Russian/Ukrainian was thrown in, and I could not think of any Russian or Ukrainian we knew in our village. The person was obviously perturbed and it made conversation worse. Finally, the message got through: it was Misha, one of the Ukrainian prisoners who attends the weekly Bible studies.

But I had just been at the prison with him and two others from 4:30-5:30! Now at 8:00, he was telling me he was at the airport, and in the intervening two hours since I had seen him, he had been told to go to his cell, get his belongings, and go home! Home!? Ukraine...!

I told him to sit tight and I went to get him. "Sitting" was the last thing he could do. He was in a state of shock. A prison guard had given him a lift to the airport, but he had no ticket, no reservations, only €300 (about $450), and a paper saying he had 30 days to leave the country and get resettled in Ukraine! He was arrested on the mainland and after 4 years in prison there, was transferred to the island 2 and a half years ago. He knows no one here...never worked here, never lived here. He called the only person he knew: me.

He was nervous and worried. He had no place to spend the night and couldn't see how he was going to get "home". Before the night was over, he repeated a hundred times, "I can't believe it. It's a dream." (See Psalm 126:1) He stood in our front yard in the light, misty rain and rubbed the hibiscus leaves between his fingers..."It's been over 6 years since I could touch flowers."

We took him on a quick ride through Funchal and back...he had only seen images of the island on the TV, now for the first time it was real. We let him use our apartment and told him that this morning we would go to a travel agency and see about a ticket.

On the way to town this morning, it seemed to me that his eyes were not used to the sunlight; he had to keep shielding them. We walked to the travel agency. "I haven't walked down the street of a city in 6 1/2 years," as if he had to learn all over again.

Things at the travel agency didn't go smoothly at first. For the first 30 or 45 minutes, the only options were to wait a week for the next direct flight from Lisbon to Kiev (€385) or pay €590 to go on Friday, but via Germany and Poland. Misha (short for Mikhaylo---Michael) was discouraged. "Maybe I should just go back to the prison and knock on the door and ask them to let me back in....I'm worried."

In the end, one of the weekly direct flights was tonight, and there was a seat. He would be in Kiev tomorrow morning, and home (350 miles from Kiev) before nightfall. The money? I told him I would pay his ticket and he could give me €150, which would leave him something for travel in Ukraine. "My soul is crying," he said, obviously overcome by the fact that he would be seeing his family tomorrow. His girls were 4 and 6 years old the last time he saw them almost 7 years ago. On the phone, the younger one tells him she doesn't remember him. "I don't know what to do when I see them!" Something else to worry about.

Everything went smoothly at the airport check-in this afternoon. Misha left for Lisbon at 4:00, where he would have to wait 5 hours or so for the overnight flight to Kiev. He should have left an hour ago now, making it two of the four Ukrainians in the prison Bible studies who have gone since the first of the year. Valeriy left last week, as the new Penal Code went into effect and facilitated the early release of many classes of prisoners. But the two Ukrainians who are left will not be leaving so soon. Alex and Oleg are both serving 18-year sentences and will have to serve one-half before being eligible for release. One has served 5 years and the other only 3, so I expect I will be seeing them many times before they go home.

Footnotes:
1) A similar situation happened back in 2005 with Romeo. It was interesting to see the parallels as I re-read that posting.
2) Misha is the one who gave me a drawing for Christmas last year. You can see a close-up of it here. Now, he was unexpectedly at the house, so I asked him to stand beside his work of art. He very reluctantly agreed, but here is the photo:




He told me this morning that he studied art in high school: painting, drawing and sculpting. Since he didn't have the money to pursue his interest at a proper School of Art, he took a vocational course in welding, a job he hates, but it was what he could find. I pray that he not only continues to carry the Word of God in his heart, but that God would allow him to express his love for beauty and art somehow when he gets home. I am resigned to the fact that we will probably never know in this life what happens to Misha from here on out. It will not be easy for him to go back into a traditional Orthodox culture and follow the Bible, but we have given him to the Lord to be watched over. Your prayers for him are appreciated.