Thoughts on a Return

So this one is long but I haven't posted anything in a while. A lot has been happening and some ideas just need to find release...

Today marks one month until I return home. A seemingly miniscule amount of time when reflecting upon the past six months I have spent away. As much as I have been attempting to be fully present here, my mind has not ceased to dwell upon what my life will be like when I return. I guess that it is only natural to think about the next step before we have taken it. God has changed a lot in me over the past six months, a lot that four years of university and the building up of my intellect could never do. That intellect has not disappeared, but has been illuminated by experience, a deep leaning upon God and a humbling of any prideful claim to ability or power I once thought I had. I used to want to DO big things, now I want to BE in whom God is doing something big. At times I feel a guilt for not being one of those people who seem to effortlessly do extraordinary things, that reek of compassion, that are driven, that change things. I actually started to study Development at university because I thought that the only noble thing to do with one's life was to serve others, to help those who cannot help themselves, and to improve another's life. I still desire these things, I just see them a bit more holistically now. I had it in my mind four years ago that I was going to graduate university, join the PeaceCorps, and move to some village in Latin America. Now I am in Strakonice, Czech Republic hanging out with teenagers, playing card games, eating in high school cafeterias, and having sleep overs. A bit of a detour. I have to confess I have struggled with being here, with being in a place so comfortable, so developed. Or rather just to not be involved in directly working with development. It seems that a part of my heart still dwells in that former vision for my life. In a way being here feels like a cleavage from my passion for development, but this passion is but a symptom of greater ones. You see I am beginning to become convinced that I should mind more how I live rather than what I do. Not to say that what we choose to do has no effect. Being here has taught me something of the radical affects of living life as ministry and of seeing all opportunities as spiritual. Of not seeing a difference between personal life and public ministry. Both are personal, both are my living act of worship. So as I think about going home, I think about how I want to live, what patterns that have been started in my life now that I want to continue, what kind of follower of Jesus Christ and lover of people that I desire to be transformed into. I don't think Jesus called us to do something I think he called us to be something, to be something so radically different from our surroundings that regardless of what we do we would be living lives that produce transformation and change. When I think about going home I think about what I am going to do, where I will live, what will be important to me. I know that in my heart God has placed a passion and a desire to advocate, to see justice happen, to improve the lives of others, to see people's needs met. I see a few ways that I can act upon these passions. But lately something really transformative has taken hold of my heart and I am starting to think that God doesn't just call me to sacrifice some of my time in my schedule to do things to help others, but to live in such a way that my life is not separated from what I care about. I could volunteer at a homeless shelter, I could be a leader at a youth group, I could be a mentor for refugees, I could do any number of noble things. Or I could live in the same apartment complex as refugees, I could choose to live in the forgotten and run down neighborhoods, I could actually be friends with the youth around me, spend time where they are at, do the things they like to do with them. I think both approaches are necessary, but I have learned here that there is a great freedom in living ministry and not just doing ministry, in loving and serving others as an interwoven action of everyday activity as opposed to a formal interruption to it. Ministry looks like inviting people into my home,  like watching movies and having sleep overs, like playing Dutch Blitz around the coffee table, like eating pancakes and watching Beyoncé music videos on Youtube. How awesome when ministry is life. When serving another looks like living life with them, like friendship. Just because in a month my "job" won't specifically be ministry doesn't mean that my life has to stop being that. 

How I view poverty and oppression must change too. It would be too shortsighted to see these things as simply existing in the physical realm. In fact, the reason why they exists in the physical world is because they originate in the spiritual. I want to be one that, as Isaiah 58 describes, looses the chains of injustice, that sets the oppressed free, that provides for the poor, and shares with the hungry. I know that when God says this he is most certainly speaking in literal terms, but their is a deeper spiritual reality to this. I am starting to see that we cannot separate the physical need form the spiritual. They are married together as one. So if I am going to be about one I must be about both. Their is no exclusivity in God's notion of freedom from the perversions of life like poverty, oppression, and injustice. Freedom from these things must be spiritual above all. I need to see things from a spiritual reality, even poverty, especially poverty.

I have always loved the way that words can invoke transformation in our hearts and spur us towards action. Here are some words that challenge me, words I want to live by:

"What is therefore our task today? Shall I answer 'Faith, Hope, and Love'? That sounds beautiful. But I would say courage- no, even that is not challenging enough to be the whole truth. Our task today is recklessness. For what we Christians lack is not psychology or literature...we lack a holy rage- the recklessness that comes from the knowledge of God and humanity. The ability to rage when justice lies prostrate on the streets,  and when the lie rages across the face of the Earth...a holy anger about the things that are wrong...To rage against complacency. To restlessly seek that recklessness that will challenge and seek to change human history until it conforms to the norms of the Kingdom of God."

~Kaj Munk

"We cannot do great things, only small things with great love. It is not how much you do, but how much love you put into doing it."

~Mother Teresa

"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that a system that produces beggars needs to be repaved. We are called to be the Good Samaritan, but after you lift so many people out of the ditch you start to ask, maybe the whole road to Jericho needs to be repaved." 

~Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

"Love without courage and wisdom is sentimentality, as with the ordinary church member. Courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness, as with the ordinary soldier. Wisdom without love and courage is cowardice, as with the ordinary intellectual. But the one who has love, courage, and wisdom moves the world."

~Ammon Hennacy

"We need converts in the best sense of the word, people who are marked by the renewing of their minds and imagination, who no longer conform to the patterns that are destroying our world...What the world needs is people who believe so much in another world that they cannot help but begin enacting it now."

~Shane Claiborne

"For children are innocent and love justice, while most are wicked and love mercy."

~G.K. Chesterton