Wee Shannon's Stirring Idealism

The sunset tonight was absolutely unreal. It’s like if I had a dream, a decision to make of what a sunset should absolutely, Platonically look like, and there it was, appearing in the sky. A perfect, rosy mountain of Zion, with brilliant, apocalyptic rays shooting out from behind. And the zealous red heat of the sky god himself, showing the back side of his glory. I only saw it for a few seconds because the sun was already so low and the sky is always transitory. I had no camera to capture it with, and I’m so thankful. God forbid I should try to steal that sunset’s soul. I also found this flower with an intoxicating aroma, it was bright yellow and made up of these brassy little trumpets and I felt like we had met somewhere before. The campus of SIM has this row of rose bushes right along the side of the main building that I deeply covet. They remind me of the roses that grew in our neighborhood in Australia and of the ones that grew outside our dear old house in California. And I got spider webs in my hair, walking down by the creek. I continue to try to be fully alive to the world, wherever I find myself. And I do think it pisses God off when you walk by the color purple and don’t see it.

Today was a very full day, full of orienting type speeches and head-spinning information and too much to take in. It was a good day, though, and I ended it by walking out to where there were, inexplicably except perhaps by glacier or very expensive landscaping, these big boulders at the edge of this little copse. And I climbed up on one of the boulders and I read the Princess Bride for awhile, because of course you have the Princess Bride with you if you’re going to Nigeria for two months, and then I lay back on the boulder for a goodly long while under the oaken tree and I watched the sky through the leaves. I had this sense, finally, that I was exactly where I was supposed to be, doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing, laying on a boulder, watching the sky and breathing quietly. And I felt absolutely no fear.

Today I also learned that it is harder to climb boulders when you’re wearing a skirt. At least modestly; that’s what makes it hard.

It has been good for me to be here right now. It is good to be in a place where people do not think you are crazy for wanting to go to a “third world” country and deal with “primitive” living conditions because you want to do good in the world. They are, in fact, crazier than you are, because they want to do it for years at a time. I didn’t realize how illegitimate what I wanted to do seemed to be in the eyes of everybody until I came to a place where it was the norm. Where, in fact, I am not radical, but just a short-termer, a person of lesser commitment than many. This is good in my life, I need to go to more places where I am the least radical person. That would be very refreshing, but it mean that I would have to spend a lot of time in places that are a little bit strange and scary.

I have many, many more thoughts resulting from today’s reflection, but tonight I will give only one more. Not that it is getting late, it is tragically only about 10:30. But through some bizarre combination of Jet Lag Lite and not getting enough sleep last night through being silly, I am already very tired. So: the thing that I have already discovered about this particular group of people is that they seem to share a passionate belief that the world is very screwed up and very dark, and the only way things are going to improve is through people hearing the gospel.

At first pass, this seems almost incendiary. What, the people are starving and sick and the governments are corrupt, and you say give them Jesus and everything will get better? You jerks! But, perhaps even more curiously, I find myself in agreement with this strange belief. I guess it all depends on what you mean when you say “give them Jesus.” I guess if the goal were to simple present the ABC’s of salvation and get people to say their majick evangelical Jesus prayer and win their ticket to heaven and then pack up and go home, white man, this would be an extremely incendiary thing to say. I do believe I would start throwing things around the room, and I would not be at all comfortable with going to the mini-mart with such folk, let alone all the way to Africa.

But I think, I hope, I believe that they mean much more than what I have outlined above when they talk about bringing “the gospel.” I will share with you what I comprehend in this term, and we can all hope and pray that they have the same sorts of things in mind. The gospel isn’t just the gospel as we have so often presented it: accept some legal fiction that you’ve paid for all the bad stuff you’ve done because somebody else paid for it and then wait till swing-low-sweet-chariot to hit paydirt. (I suppose I should not be so flippant about atonement. It has been way over emphasized, but it’s not like atonement isn’t important. I think I can denigrate it because I don’t think I quite understand or appreciate atonement. Someday I will and then I will repent of such flippant speeches.) When I talk about sharing the gospel, I mean drawing people into the kingdom of God. It is a curious place, this kingdom, and it is the place we are called to try and be building as Christians. It is a kingdom in which everyone is striving to behave and think and believe and want and love in the same way as the king as much as they possibly can. And that ought to change things, not just in the ways that people talk and think, but in the way they live. Husbands who follow the king will not go to the cities and be unfaithful, contract AIDS and come home and spread it to their wives. Governments who follow the king will not act in corrupt and violent ways. They will not persecute minority people groups and with hold food from their people. In the kingdom, children will not grow up not knowing their parents and feeling worthless. Young people who follow the king will not rebel and refuse to follow the traditional ways of their elders and drift into lives of dissipation, drugs, and alcohol. Genocide and chasms of class difference will no longer exist. People will not be put in prison because of their political views or killed because of their religion.

This is, obviously, extremely simplistic, and I don’t really think that this kind of utopian achievement will happen this side of the apocalypse. Working towards the kingdom is complicated and difficult and frustrating for pretty much every one involved. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth the pursuit. Africa needs to be moving closer to what I have described, and not much else seems to be helping this battered continent to get there. Someone made the very observant point that money is obviously not the answer because a number of nations have been pouring money into Africa for at least a couple of decades and problems do not seem to have improved greatly. And let me say this, if I did not believe that this scenario was not the eventual outworking of the message of Jesus, that the purpose of the gospel was not holistic life change, that Jesus was not the wisest person who ever lived and taught a way of life that was simply for the sake of moral purity, not for the fulfillment and restoration of everything that a human was meant to be, body, mind, and spirit, then I would be looking for something else to follow.

Instead I’m spending two months serving the gospel in Nigeria. You do the math.

Oh, and if you think I’m full of crap, you can always check back here in two months to see if my resolves and outlook have been shattered. I expect they will have been. Several times. But they have this way of coming back together...