Glass Half Empty

A glass would be anything but half empty if you left it outside these days. The rainy season has arrived and everyone knows it, each of the last 7 days has had it's share of precipitation, deluge even, and it looks to continue that way.

Recently it has become more obvious to me how deep the wounds are here. The British are famed for their stiff upper lip. That ability to grin and bear it and avoid conflict, emotions or generally anything sensitive at all costs. Yet I find here something that goes far beyond that but it is very hard to place. Perhaps it is just a complete de-sensitisation because the people here have seen so much that they have become numb. Maybe it is the ostrich move of sticking ones head in the sand and pretending that it never happened. Or somehow they have just learned to live with the loss of so much, knowing that all is not lost. For they still have their lives, if not their family, if not their dignity, if not their limbs, if not their pride, if not their happiness, they yet have life in them.

Who knows, perhaps no one, but all the same Rwanda still lives in the ashes of its past, limps on with the scars of yesteryear.

For our team to get anywhere in town we have to get a bus. 20p will get you anywhere in the city. This process involves a 15 minute walk down our local high street to the local bus station which consist of a dirt courtyard packed with people and various buses. You wait on the bus until its full and then hop off at your destination. Simple enough.

However, in the 15 minutes it takes to walk to the station you will pass people who are simply lying in the street in 30 degree heat, sometimes half on the pavement half in the road with a hand stretched out.

When you get to the bus station you have to push through the swarm of street vendors who flock to the white people. You learn the word for 'no' pretty quickly. Occasionally you will actually be grabbed (it is quite a tactile culture) by someone begging for money, though it is closer to demanding than begging really.

Once you have figured out which bus you need and get on the blind man will have managed to find his way on to the bus and will do the rounds as the bus fills up. If you turn your face from him to look out the window you will likely see more vendors trying to sell you anything from bread to USB sticks through the window. Occasionally they will disperse as though someone just started shooting at them. They don't pay taxes because none of their sales are recorded so their practice is illegal and they would rather not be caught by the heavily armed police. In their place you will find at your window a woman waving the stump of an arm that used to have a hand on the end of it gently thudding against your window, demanding your attention, your pity, your money. Eventually the bus fills and you pull away, the conductor will at some point ask for your 20p and you will place it into a scarred hand full of tattered cash. Then you arrive at your destination and start your day. There were many survivors of the genocide but none got through unscathed.

Despite all of this life goes on. They press on and most seem unaffected by what they see. In fairness most have seen far worse and the fact that the country is at peace is a blessing that outshines the scars of the past.

My Grandmother had a heart attack this week. She is several thousand miles away and I am at least 6 weeks away from being able to see her again. I am a very long way from home.

The longest Saturday of all time was probably the Saturday between good Friday and Easter Sunday. The one in whom the disciples had placed all of their hope, whom they had lived with for the past 3 years and who they believed to be the one who would win the victory of victories was brutally and publicly tortured and executed.

But Sunday came.

When all hope was lost and everything was at its darkest. After all the commotion and chaos and fireworks the ashes rested and there was the cold bitter taste of grief without a mote of hope to carry them.

Yet the tomb was empty. The resurrection, so far beyond expectation that even its evidence was met with scepticism but slowly it dawned. There was not just some hope remaining. There was the most secure, the most unwaveringly sure hope ever to have graced the face of this earth.

There is a resurrection.

There is hope like African rain that will fill your glass to overflowing. A hope in the new life, a new, unbroken body, a new heavens and a new earth. A hope that we go on beyond the veil.

Not an empty star gazing hope but a living, active and life changing hope that the glass is not half empty but filled to capacity. 

Broken

I have been in Rwanda now for only two days though it feels like it has been weeks. There is much to take in as we undergo orientation for the first week to prepare us for the work ahead. Having been to Africa before it is a task for me not to simply presume that it will be the same here as elsewhere. Rwanda has a unique people, history, culture, language and nuance that no other country has. I am hoping to gain a fuller knowledge of what it means to be Rwandan in my time here. Not only that but Tearfund is a unique organisation, again having done work with other organisations that are similar it is important for me not to assume that it will be in any way similar to work here.

First impressions:

The instant I stepped off the plane the all too familiar  smell of a warm humid country hit me. It was a much needed welcome and put a big smile on my face straight away. As we waited for our baggage from an old and sorry looking conveyer belt I couldn't help myself letting slip ... 'TIA'. It wasn't long (by African standards) before we were on a delightfully cramped bus on the way to the guest house.

In the first few days we have settled in to the relatively comfortable accommodation (running water and consistent  electricity). I am also making friends with the Uk and Rwandan volunteers alike, it is such a privilege to get to meet people like this and serve together with a common goal. I also found a gecko in my room on the first night but I am holding out for seeing a Chameleon because apparently they are relatively common here and I've never seen one in the wild so that is one to hope for...

I have also managed to get a sim with some data on it enabling me to update you all! :) We have also done a tiny bit of language learning and other standard orientation type briefings around security, cultural sensitivity etc.

Today we had our somewhat ruthless baptism into Rwandan culture with a visit to a genocide memorial centre. The history of the atrocities is gruellingly detailed, with the assistance of artefacts, photos and video. It is certainly not an experience for the faint of heart as you pass through a room filled with pictures of victims. As harrowing as the experience might be of walking around such a place it barely scratches the surface of what it must have been to see around 1/7 of the population of your country massacred in just one year. There is just no escaping the fact that this has shaped every person in this country and everyone who is 20 or older lived through it themselves and would have been witness to the most heinous of crimes. The centre that we went to is the burial place of some 250000 genocide victims, under 1/4 of the total.

This is still a very broken country with the sheer number of people who are still struggling to process all that they have seen and that has happened to them. Leaving the memorial centre the question that I was left with was how?

How can anyone be turned to such extreme action against their own people?

How can a person who has seen such horrors ever find healing?

How can Rwanda recover?

How can I even begin to help?

These are questions that may or may not ever be answered but I believe they are still important to ask and mull over.

So while the work that I will be doing day to day may not directly relate to this, it is absolutely the background of every national that I will be working alongside and for and therefore must be taken into consideration in all that we do here.

Theodicy

One day, when I was a child, I lent my relatively new bike to a friend, the friend promptly broke my prized bicycle attempting to go over a jump. In a whirlwind of tears, burning anger and shame at the fact that  I was responsible for a broken bike I ran my it back home. I discarded it on the drive and ran into the house and flung myself on the sofa, barely noticing my fathers presence on the sofa opposite. My dad asked me what was wrong ... To my shame I think I told him to piss off, or at least words to the same effect.

So pretty much a run of the mill tantrum right? Why would I be talking about this now? Because some things about the human condition don't actually change. They change their outfit, sure, but the issue itself remains the same. You, I and every child in the world still have tantrums it's just that most of us dress them up differently now that we have 'grown up'.

When you think about it we have a great number of things to have tantrums over - certainly better reasons than when we were children. We discover poverty, injustice, chronic health conditions, relationship break downs and any other form of suffering that you can think of. There is an in-built trigger of rage and sadness in each of us when we are party to and particularly when we are the target of said suffering.

Of course being grown up we now realise that there is absolutely nothing that our earthly parents can do about these problems, indeed in many cases they are in fact the source of many of these problems. So what do we do? Well all too often we perpetuate the problem, we either internalise and end up imploding turning to self loathing which in turn sabotages all of our closest relationships or we externalise and end up exploding which respectively sabotages all of our closest relationships. Not good.

So this is why I started with this story - because my bike fiasco did not end this way. In response to being told where to go my dad could have taken offence and left me to cry it out on the sofa. Fortunately for me however, I have a good father. He told me that I could tell him what happened and that he could try and help. In my infinite wisdom  I had already concluded that the damage to my bike was beyond repair and as a result there was really nothing that my dad could offer me as consolation in this situation, hence I felt the need to rebuff him. I articulated the conundrum quite effectively - 'my bike is broken'. Of course my dads knowledge of bikes was far superior to mine and so he decided that rather than solving the small problem of my bike he would fix the bigger issue of my attitude. He came over to my sofa and wrapped his arms around me.

Of course he assured me that he would do his best to fix my bike but he was far more interested in letting me know that a much healthier way for me to resolve my issues was to come to him and explain my problem rather than believing the lie that all hope was lost. I had tried to fix my bike myself and couldn't - that doesn't mean my bike is beyond repair. But more important than any of that, my relationship with my dad was of far greater value than any bike I could own. The refrain that shaped my childhood came out once again. 'I might not always like what you do but I will always love you, no matter what.'

After some time on the sofa I calmed down a bit and apologised to my dad, we went out together to get my bike and of course my dad showed me how it could be fixed easily without even needing any tools.

Ok, time to bring this back to us adults. We experience the 'broken bike' in our lives and it hurts, we don't really have any human relationships that are able to fix those hurts but we certainly try. We marry people who 'complete' us, we drink, gamble, sleep around, advance our career, work harder, get stronger be better all in an attempt to fix our broken bike. The issue is that at best we only break our bike further. We divorce, become alcoholics, get into debt, traffick modern day salves, get addicted to porn and cheat to get ahead in the game. Sooner or later we come to the end of our self destructive resources and we have to face the fact that our bike is broken and there is nothing we can do to fix it.

Now comes the equivalent of telling your dad to piss off... We blame God, we say that he cannot exist because of all this mess. We become frustrated with him and run away from him, we throw one heck of a tantrum.

Now here religion can do some seriously weird things, as Christians we often feel the need to cover up our problems. We can't possibly throw a tantrum that is beneath us. God is good and we know it but this situation makes it feel like God is not good. Both cannot be right so I will just bury the feelings and say God is great, YAY, praise the lord! We sell God short and don't actually take our frustration and anger and pain and anxiety to him we just say he is good and busily try and figure out how to patch ourselves up so we can look pretty on Sunday. We even create whole schools of theology to explain why there can be suffering  and a good God (we call it a theodicy) instead of facing our problems. Well this is a Faberge egg. We can do great at making it look pretty on the outside for a bit but it is paper thin and has absolutely no substance to it and just ends up propagating the problem. What's more this is not what the God of the bible tells us to do at all. It is some weird twisted, dismembered, decaffeinated version of what Christ has given us.

 Fortunately for all of us as good as my dad is he is not even a touch on how good God is. While we are far off trying to sort ourselves out and failing miserably he asks 'what is wrong?' it's not that he doesn't know the answer. He is giving you the opportunity to cry out and admit to him and to yourself 'my bike is BROKEN!'.

I can assure you when you make that admission to God, as painful and messy as it can be there is release. For some reason western Christianity has completely forgotten the place of lament, of unashamedly calling it like you see it. Life sucks some times and God is absolutely big enough to handle us screaming at him every now and again. When you are honest with God you give him the opportunity to wrap his arms around you and be enough for you. Now despite the fact that your bike is still in pieces on the drive things are looking better. Why? Because the far more important issue of your relationship with God is improving and that will set you free! The fact that God is also able to put your bike back together (and improve it too) becomes a small side issue by comparison to the fact that you have discovered something better than life itself. The love of God.

Gatekeeper

 

Who are the gatekeepers, the guards at the door of your life?

Who are the stoic fortress wardens, armed with wisdom?

Who stands watch, remains vigilant through the night?

Who sees with perspective, the inside and the out?

Who are the key keepers that discern, to enter or not?

Recently my life has come under a certain amount of trial. I say 'my life' meaning more than simply my immediate experience, because while this trial had me at the centre it affected the majority of the people connected to me.

While trials in this life are both inevitable and uncomfortable they are also often moments of decisive clarity. They provide a unique perspective on ones view of themselves but also give an opportunity for us to see how our friends and acquaintances will respond.

Jaffa Gate - Jerusalem, Israel

To borrow a parable it is often not easy to tell whether we have built our house on the rock or on the sand until the rains come down and the floods come up. If your house is still standing by then end - you built it right.  It is the storms of life that are proving of our relationships.

If we take Job as an example (no I am not likening myself to Job) he experiences a trial the like of which most of us will never have to endure, unfortunately for him the people surrounding him were less than perfect in their response. Even his wife (one of his few remaining relatives) tells him to just give up and die! Hardly the kind of encouragement needed to persist through life's trials.

Abandoned Syrian Bunker - Golan Heights, Israel

Thankfully my story is very different! Over the past few days it has become blindingly obvious how well 'insulated' I am by a great number of people around me who care, pray for and support me, often in ways that I never even see. Many of them will in fact be the ones reading this and so to you I say thank you.

Among my friends and family there are a few who have the position in my life to speak louder and clearer to me than many others, their position in my life is decided by me. They may not even realise it but they have more influence over me than most other people. They are in many ways gatekeepers that have the power to discipline, correct, encourage and shape me in ways that most will simply never be able to.

Derelict Shack - Gloucester, England 

The truth is that we all have people like this in our lives, the question is whether they are good gatekeepers or not. Are they wise, discerning, kind? Do they have your best interests at heart? For most people when they are born it is at least initially their parents who fulfil this role - they protect, nurture and direct their children. Or at least they should. Because we are all human we have all experienced disappointment with our gatekeepers, times when we needed them to be looking out for us but they were absent. Or for some of us we found out the hard way that someone we had given the role of gatekeeper to was toxic. They did not have our best interests at heart and they did not just not protect us but attacked us.

What do we do when our gatekeepers fail us? - We fall onto God.

Jobs gatekeepers were pretty useless but he cried out to God and while the response he had was not what he had hoped for it was exactly what he needed. You may have been let down by your parents right from day one but God is the father in heaven who never fails to love you. Your friends and colleagues might be like sand around you but Christ is the rock on whom you can build your life. You may be in the midst of a storm but He can be the anchor.

You may be under siege from all sides but God can be your gatekeeper.

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Cold Cold

Define: Cold

/kōld/

Adjective

Of a relatively low temperature when compared to the human body

Adverb

Completely; totally

There is much to be said for the cold. I think that the first thing that comes to mind when I think of coldness is 

beauty. Stunning snow capped mountain range vistas, delicately formed snow flakes and white gilded leaves.

Winter is an amazing season, I have fond childhood memories of going for walks all wrapped up like the

michelin man. The crunch of frozen ground under foot. That feeling of crisp cool air against your cheeks and

the satisfaction that I still get of being able to see your own steamy breath reminding you that you are still

warm on the inside.

However there is another very prominent association with the cold. Death. Those white gilded leaves are not

on trees, they are on the floor. The reason I am able to enjoy walks in the cold is because I know that it will

be followed by a warm house and probably tea. If that was not the case then a definite sense of fear would

accompany the cold bite of Winter knowing that before long the cold begins to hurt and if left untreated is

irreversible.

Cold has also long been aptly used to describe our spirituality and emotions. There are many parallels; the

brittle nature of things that are cold, numbness or lifelessness, close associations with darkness and of course

pain. 

The difference in the parallel is that we don't always know where home is. This kind of cold is internal, we

can't just run away from it because we are it. We start to dislike our reflection and muffle the sound of warm

words.

And before you know it you are cold cold. Absolutely, completely, totally cold. Dead. Like a leaf on the floor.

 If you are reading this and you are cold cold then know this, Winter is a season, that's good news. And just

like the seasons you are not in control, no matter how you strive they will last as long as they do.

Fortunately there is one who does control the seasons and he knows you. You might not know him yet but

he is inviting you into the warm to have a cup of tea with him. The choice is yours.

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