ma'ulu'ulu (Sitting Dance)

Remembering good times past, I came across some fun videos yesterday. Our school's (in Ma'ufanga) final performance of our Sitting Dance was a really great day in Tonga. We spent hours and hours learning the song and the motions-some of my favorite hours after our move to the 'ol T-Top. Here it is (and here we are-in the back row) in all it's glory:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUfxCLP5iThttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUfxCLP5iTY&feature=youtu.beY&feature=youtu.be 

 

 

Churchgoing and Being Home

It's been a while...thought I'd share some thoughts.

Serving in the Peace Corps has changed us in countless ways, and our views about God and the church are among the things that have been impacted the most. When folks ask us what was most difficult, we always seem to mention, in some way or another, the lack of an English-speaking spiritual community. Church was a huge part of our lives in Tonga, but the vast cultural differences (not to mention the language barrier) made it very, very different. We missed everything about church - worshipping corporately in our native language, enjoying fellowship and community with a group of people that share the most foundational part of our worldview, listening to a trained and dedicated preacher teach about the Bible and theology.

Needless to say, we returned to the U.S. with a hunger for church. And, over the past few months, we have gotten to attend a lot of church services - We've actually been to five different churches in four different states. We've also had so many great, life-giving moments of spiritual communion with friends and family spread across the States. Throughout all of these experiences, my reflections about church and community have been different than in the past.

My thoughts are summed up pretty well in a passage I re-read recently from C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters - his satiric, stylized correspondence between two tempter demons that brilliantly turns ideas on their heads to make readers think about things in a different way. In one letter on the subject of church, the mentor Screwtape advises his novice nephew in his temptation of a young Christian:

Surely you know that if a man can't be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighborhood looking for the church that 'suits' him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches. The reasons are obvious. In the first place the parochial organization should always be attacked, because, being a unity of place and not of likings, it brings people of different classes and psychology together in the kind of unity the Enemy (God) desires...In the second place, the search for a 'suitable' church makes the man a critic where the Enemy wants him to be a pupil.

I (and much of my generation, I fear) have at times considered myself this kind of "church connoisseur." I shudder to think about the countless, prideful conversations I've had, somehow believing that I had figured everything out, that all who had gone before me had gotten it wrong.

As Lewis cleverly points out, it is so easy to miss the point of church, especially when you live in a place with a veritable buffet of different churches. He warns us that our focus should not be finding a church with a style that suits our preferences and people that are nearly identical to us. In the words of Screwtape, it is so important that we approach church as a pupil, not a critic, and that we embrace, not shy away from, the diversity and great differences of people within a congregation.

In my post-Peace Corps church hunger, I've found myself looking at church with baptized eyes. Regardless of music style, I have joyfully joined others in corporate song, remembering the times when we would save our IPad battery just to listen to a couple English worship songs on Sunday mornings in Tonga. I have been challenged by and learned from preachers of very different backgrounds and theological bents, remembering all the times I would zone out during a Tongan sermon because my brain could translate no longer. I have rejoiced at the opportunity to reconnect and talk with family and old friends, remembering the thousands of repeated, surface-level Tongan conversations when my vocabulary had been completely exhausted.

The most powerful and memorable moment that I felt these things most deeply was when we participated in the Eucharist at Hope, our old, wonderful church in Denver. As I prepared my heart for this, the most powerful and beautiful of all sacraments instituted by Christ himself, I was moved to tears as I gazed around the room. It was a brilliantly beautiful portrait in my mind as I reflected on the meaning of this ritual - people of a wide variety of age, background, and belief standing with Christians all over the world and throughout the centuries of history, eating bread and drinking wine, remembering our Savior's sacrifice and professing together that we belong to this global body of Christ followers. And as I took the bread and the wine, I thought of my brothers and sisters in Tonga, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, California, Thailand, and all over the world, doing the same thing and professing these same truths. Despite our differences and our preferences, we are a part of this beautifully broken thing that Christ himself instituted to be his chosen instrument of bringing redemption and his upside-down Kingdom to this world.

I hope and pray that when we inevitably join another church community, this time in Bangkok Thailand, we will remember these lessons, stay hungry, and guard ourselves from the ease and dangers of missing the point...

- Mark

Lately, I've been Reading:

 

1.       And Life Comes Back: A Wife’s Story of Love, Loss, and Hope Reclaimed by Tricia Lott Williford

I fell in love with Tricia’s writing a few years ago when I stumbled upon her blog via a friend on Facebook. This is Tricia’s first book- it is truly moving. You can get a taste of her writing style and incredible journey at teachingtuckandty.blogspot.com and tricialotwilliford.wordpress.com.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_13?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=and+life+comes+back+by+tricia+lott+williford&sprefix=and+life+come%2Cstripbooks%2C207&rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3Aand+life+comes+back+by+tricia+lott+williford

 

2.       Red Letter Revolution: What if Jesus Really Meant What He Said? By Shane Claiborne and Tony Campolo

This book discusses many hot-topic issues in today’s world-on homosexuality, on being pro- life, on immigration, etc. It was challenging and motivating. I highly recommend it. I was most touched by reading some of the sections that I didn’t already have strong opinions about, for example, Liturgy, Saints, and Empire. Read this book-and then let’s talk about it!

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_4_10?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=shane%20claiborne%20tony%20campolo&sprefix=shane+clai%2Cstripbooks%2C266

 

3.       The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls

 

 

4.       Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexander Fuller

 

 

5.       Little Bee: A Novel by Chris Cleave

From Tonga to Thailand (Part 1)

To all those who will read this, whether you know all or nothing about our next steps, the purpose of this blog is to share some very big news with you. But before we do that, we first want to say thank you. I don't think either of us knew what it would look like to try to stay connected with family and friends from various stages of our lives during these last two years, but it's been hard. We've done our best to be invested in the present and in our current home, but we have also strived not to forgot those from our past and those far away. And I know I've written a couple times about the dangers of technology, but we can't express how meaningful a quick email, message, or comment can be when things get hard. So, to all those who have supported us and continue to love us well, we say thank you.

Also, before we share our news, I feel the need to share this. For the past five or so years, both Alissa and I have wanted to live and work in Southeast Asia. Call it what you wish...a calling, a dream, a vision, a goal...we've certainly used all of those words ourselves. Whatever the case, based on countless prayers, conversations, and events, that is what we want, and that is where we believe that God wants us to go.

So, the first part of our news is that we are finished with our Peace Corps service, and are now home in the U.S.. We've shared briefly on our blog, and more extensively with close friends and family, that Peace Corps' decision to move us from our island was a pretty negative experience. Still as we look back, we feel that we were moved for very inconsequential reasons, and that the process was done very hurriedly and insensitively. Once we arrived to our new site, we were disappointed to find that Peace Corps did not develop our worksite and was nowhere near finding us a house to live in.

We do feel that we went into this new situation with as open of a mind as we could, but since we were over a year into our service, we ultimately made the decision to leave Peace Corps early. It was a very hard decision, but we felt a lot of peace about it very quickly. When the day came for us to talk about it with our Country Director, he was very understanding and supportive about it. In the end, we were released from our commitment through what Peace Corps calls "interrupted service", stating basically that our service ended because Peace Corps did not hold up their end of the deal and provide us with satisfactory housing and worksite. All in all, we left Tonga on good terms, at peace, but with heavy hearts, remembering all we had done and all the amazing people we crossed paths with.

Peace Corps has been such a blessing in so many ways, but we were and have remained a little disappointed that we were not sent to Asia. However, for many reasons both practical and idealistic, we said yes to the South Pacific. And we are so glad that we did. We wanted a cross-cultural immersion experience. We wanted to learn a different language We wanted to live as part of a small, village community. We wanted to experience living without our many modern amenities. We wanted to know what it was like to live at the same standard, wages, and cultural expectations as those we are serving. We wanted many things from this experience, and whether or not we wanted them with the best intentions or experienced them to the fullest degree, we got everything that we wanted in our wonderful, tiny island.

Yet regardless of what we wanted or gained from our experience, far and above the most lasting and important part of our last two years abroad has to do with the people in our lives. We realized very quickly that the most meaningful, sustainable, and precious part of our service was our relationships with the Tongan people on our island. What we learned and how we grew as a result of knowing these people that are so entirely different from us is what we will remember the most. I still assert the statement that I made very early in our service - that cultural differences are much more significant and run much deeper than I ever imagined. And that challenge, that beautiful struggle to build meaningful, give and take relationships with those wonderful people was, to say the least, life changing.

Lastly, something else that I realized early on is that our Peace Corps Tonga service would be much more of a team effort than we had originally imagined. Because Tonga is such a small place, the roles of the members of our Peace Corps group extended much further than us simply being trained together. Our group was very much, for lack of a better world, our community. And it was a community made up of people that at times felt more different from us than the Tongans we were living with. But, it was such a journey and such a joy getting to know each and every one of them. We are leaving Tonga with some amazing relationships with some incredible people that it's hard to imagine we didn't know at all just a year and a half ago. We will manatu'ofa (remember and cherish with love) all of them, and we know that these relationships will endure.

Mark

On Technology and Reverse Culture Shock

It's not hard to believe, I'm sure, but one of our observations and struggles after coming home after a year and half abroad had to do with re-entering a culture that is obsessed with technology and being "plugged-in" to the online world. Of course, most of us realize and freely admit this, but it was something that was a glaringly stark contrast to how we had lived on our island. I came across this quote from Thoreau's Walden a while back, and it kept coming to mind over and over again during our time in America.


"Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at."


(side note: unsurprisingly, these sentiments seem to be right in line with the spirit of this famously subversive "fight the man by finding the meaning of life alone in the woods" piece of literature. But, it's also funny to realize that the "pretty new inventions" that Thoreau was ranting about were railroads and the telegraph. I wonder what ole Henry D. would think of Facebook and iPhones...)

Now, it may seem trite and predictable for us to pretend that we have come back enlightened and elevated above the evils and distractions of contemporary America after our short time abroad. But the true, saddening reality was how easy it became to fall right back in to the temptations that our technology offered us. How easy it was to disconnect from real conversation when there was wireless internet to be had. How easy it was to care more about how people on Facebook perceived me than fully loving the actual people around me.

The other funny and interesting thing to notice was how other people talked about this phenomenon. It seemed like everywhere we went, people would make remarks completely on their own about "how lucky we were to have lived so simply" or "how damaging our society's obsession with technology is." It is as though we are addicts who are fully comfortable admitting that we have a problem, but helplessly floundering as if we don't have the tools to fix ourselves.

Yet, I will always believe it is an unbelievably tough subject, because of all the benefits of modern technology. It was amazing to be able to share our stories, pictures, and experiences with all our family and friends. It was so cool to be able to correspond with and hear from friends living and serving the Lord, literally, all over the world. I believe that globalization and the growing smallness of our world has the potential to connect us in ways never before possible, drawing us to be more compassionate, understanding, and informed people. But, of course, there are dangers on the other side of that coin.

Meditating on Thoreau's quote brings up so many important questions for us. What are the "serious things" that our pretty toys distract us from? Genuine community? Vulnerable relationships? Deeply embracing nature and beauty? Denying consumerism and embracing simplicity? True intimacy with God?

And while our technology has continued to improve and develop at an astounding rate, what is the "unimproved end" that we are striving for in our use of these fancy gadgets? Are we spending time using our inventions for healthy or unhealthy things? Are we choosing to engage with people and the world through online personas rather than genuine, face-to-face interactions? Are we capable of embracing life-giving simplicity while finding a proper balance in our technologically-oriented world?

I'm certainly still very far away from understanding this balance and putting it into action. But, more than ever, I realize that it is so important that we guard ourselves against the temptations of modern technology and strive to live genuine lives free from these easy-to-fasten chains.

Mark