The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart: the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever: the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. --Psalm 19:7-9
Spiritual Physics
True Christian mission is a lot like light itself: it has both particle and wave properties. This should not come as a surprise to me, but this morning as I try to bite off the latest chunk of Nutie's and my involvement in the Spirit Stream so as to make a report I find it difficult to mark beginnings and endings. The comparison comes gushing up out of the well of memories from my high school physics class in a big honking revelation. We're tapping into something that is both particle and wave-like. The particles are quantifiable moments, events, even words, when a shift takes place. You can associate them with select portions of God's word and say with conviction, "This is what He is doing. He is faithful to perform His word." You can put your finger right on it. Almost like cause and effect. I did this, that was the result. The waves, however, are the exotic, mysterious ways of God moving in you, through you, and around you over time, connecting lives, events, whole planet things and maybe even something happening in another galaxy (who knows?), things which you can feel, sometimes even break down into rainbows of color with the prism of spiritual gift, but you can never, EVER, say that you grab ahold of it. It grabs ahold of you, you just ride it, the Wave, and are thrilled.
I try to snap off a single wavelength. I can't remember if you're supposed to start with peaks or valleys, but in this God's universe you might find yourself flipped upside down and the peaks become valleys, the valleys peaks. Like people pitching flags on both the North and South poles ... who's really upside down anyway, us or them? For convenience sake, let's just say peak to peek: Sunday April 11 to Thursday, April 22.
During this period of 12 days the Lord allowed us to minister in public (sing worship, preach and teach His word) 11 times in 4 communities, and there were also countless opportunities to counsel and pray for many people individually and in small groups. We saw people accept Jesus as Lord, and in the expressions on countless faces we watched the light go on very visibly as areas of darkness or confusion were removed; still more, many more people just plain got happy with Nutie's infectious singing and the rightness of the Lord's statutes. These are some of the quantifiable particles:
Quema
Evening service, Sunday, April 11, Ulwas. The village just downriver from Waspam. Waspam is a town, they call it "urban." You can walk to Ulwas in a half hour along a gravel road or drive there in 5 minutes, but Ulwas is a rural village. A handful of Miskito extended families totaling maybe 800 souls. They've put up poles and electric wires, but there's no juice in them as yet. The battlement-walled Iglesia Morava Renovada, with its own generator, a couple of 75 watt bulbs, sound system, and musical instruments, is surrounded by village houses, simple wooden structures built up on pine posts and lit by homemade lamps called kiandil-- a mustard jar filled with kerosene and a piece of old rag for a wick. On the wall in back of the church's raised ministry platform are the painted words "YO SOY QUIEN SOY." The villagers call the Renovada church "Quema"--which means "burn"--to distinguish the native pentecostal breakaway from the more staid Bavarian inspired version of the Moravian Church which also boasts a storefront in every community. Quema is the "anything can happen" church in the region, as ostracized as a group of Appalachian snake-handlers by some while considered by others the "live" church; live as opposed to dead, dead religion going on in the others.
I had never been in a QUEMA church in Nicaragua before, but I had met the pastor that very afternoon and decided that I liked him. He said he had known me for a long time and asked me to preach that evening. I had already preached morning service at another church in Waspam; considering that I promised the Lord that I would never decline an opportunity to preach His word unless He told me specifically not to, and that I had about an hour to prepare or bathe, I thought it best to reheat the morning's message. I don't usually do that, but it was a crucial message for people here--James 1:1-17--and I felt I hadn't done a very good job of it the first time around (I had been asked to preach on the spur of the moment). I wanted another crack at it.
James is an epistle that bridges the gap between what we know to be true from Catechism and our effectively living it out with power. In the 16th verse of that first chapter, the author pleads, "Do not err, my beloved brothers..." and then the famous verse about every good and perfect gift coming down from the Father of Lights. When I considered that heartrending appeal not to make the mistake of denying the great and unchanging goodness of God, I knew that I had something very important to say. There is such a difference between the truth that everyone knows from catechism--GOD IS GOOD--and the deep bitterness that overtakes these dear people as they travel from the cradle to the grave, from carefree days of bathing in the river and shooting at lizards with slingshots to the days when the hardship of poverty sinks in as children and grandchildren die from preventable diseases, spouses break open each others' heads, and political promises are discovered to be air; rank, foul smelling breath flowing out over bad false teeth. I told the people in attendance that there was a terrible war being fought over their souls, in the air around them and in their own hearts. You can see it: just ask children whether God is good or not and they'll all happily respond without even thinking about it. But try asking people when they're old. Ask them, "Naksa? (how are you?)" and not even one in ten will give you more than a qualified "wiiiiiiria bitar (a little bit better)". Why is this so? Why is it so hard to believe, really believe, the simplest answer in catechism?
The answer is in verses 1-15. There are 3 principal reasons why people give up on believing God's goodness: we misunderstand God's purpose in trials (verses 2-8), we undervalue eternal rewards (verses 9-11), and we blame God and/or others for the consequences of our own mistakes (verses 12-15). I briefly shared my own story with the people of Ulwas. A Job story, a Naomi story. I told them how much I had struggled with some of these very issues and how much more God in his mercy showed me His goodness and love in this land of the living.
A shift took place. When Pastor Jacobo gave the call, only one brave young man came forward, but a shift had certainly taken place. You could feel it. The following morning Pastor Jacobo came over to Waspam to pick up some Bibles I had promised those in the congregation who needed them. Excitedly he told me that two men had appeared at the parsonage early in the morning, asking how they might be saved. I am told that in the days following 10 more came to the Lord.
Downriver
Friday, April 16th, downriver, I took the same message and addressed the Seek the Lamb teachers, only this time, my goal was to show them how they might study their Bibles and find these principles for themselves. I made them look directly into God's word. Nutie sang and heaven softly bowed down very low to the ground, like the white clouds when you drive all the way across flat Nebraska from the East to the West, climbing imperceptibly to an elevation of 5,000 ft. When we were done there was a shift; silence, and then sudden, spontaneous applause. We did not ask for it, nor is it customary for these teachers to applaud after a workshop. The Holy Spirit was working, and there was a cleanness and a clearness to the atmosphere in the classroom, like the Nebraska border going into Wyoming. It was so very pleasing.
From Monday the 19th to Thursday the 22nd we supervised classrooms. We observed Bible lessons the teachers were giving their students as part of the school curriculum. Lower grades in the morning and upper grades in the afternoon. We observed a class, making notes, and then had a meeting with the teacher. The following day I taught a model class demonstrating my recommendations, while the teacher observed and took notes. This is important. The teachers have a right to see whether my highfalutin' ideas work on this river where nothing seems to work. The master must drink the cool aid first; if he lives, thrives even, then the student might be expected to try it.
Victory from the Jaws of Defeat
Tuesday morning I taught 19 second graders that God prepares hearts to receive Jesus, taking from Mark 1:1-8. Professor Pablo had taught the same text the day before like a history lesson about John the Baptist, giving some facts and writing many questions on the board. We had discussed his lesson and now I redid it with a principle to live by, on the level of second graders, applying Spanish as a second language techniques, with new vocabulary and assisted sight reading. I had taken the text and rewritten it in special Spanish the night before, the New Keogh Paraphrase, and read it aloud to the students pantomiming the action of the story. I drew a picture of John the Baptist on the chalk board and gave a vibrant description of his dress and diet that children could relate to, talking of tunu bark cloth and sani rope belts. I drove home the point: that God must prepare our hearts to receive Jesus, just like he did back in that time. Everything a rousing success and Professor Pablo perceived the difference.
The afternoon lesson was quite different, however. In the morning, Nutie had taken the bulk of the students over to the church next door to sing with them so that the their teachers could observe the lesson. The problem was that the discussion with the teachers afterward went long, and by the time we got over to relieve Nutie an hour later, she was absolutely drenched from head to toe and 10 pounds lighter. Horsefly Hordes drawn to sweat like sharks after blood had held a feeding frenzy at Nutie's expense, earning her serious frequent flyer miles in heaven. Considering that there would surely be nothing left of her if she were to repeat that procedure in the more intense afternoon heat, I decided to take all of the students from grades 4 to 6 into my "model class" so that the teachers might observe the Master Teacher. I had gotten some little pocket New Testaments from Onofre the Gideon, and decided that the students would actually read the account of the birth of Jesus in Matthew, in which Joseph is encouraged to take Mary for his wife. Pretty racy material--the teenage girl getting pregnant and the guy's loss of face, knowing that he wasn't the father--but this is the stuff of every day life in the land of child brides and pregnant 15 year-old third graders. I had my key principle ready: "God won't fail in His plans, so He must choose participants who will trust and obey."
The lesson was a debacle. With over 50 students in the classroom, the kids were timid and unresponsive. Anticipating at most a dozen, I hadn't planned to break them into small groups for rotating directed lesson. The tiny print and the antiquated Spanish of Reina Valera were anti-pedagogical, producing in 8 short verses an entire glossary of new vocabulary words related to the reproductive process--in the second language no less. The game I had devised to illustrate the lesson, complete with a "doll baby" borrowed from a neighbor, flopped completely because one of the 2 volunteers who stepped forward turned out to have a serious learning disability and wasn't able to carry out the instructions. What a disaster! And the teachers were busy taking notes.
The discussion that followed, however, was one of the richest sessions I've ever had with the teachers. The white gods had been debunked, brought down to the level of Wangki rivermen; dysfunction and failure once again retook their thrones, reigning uncontested. Roll on you chocolate river. Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us! There must be sense made out of this. The teachers began to read from their observations and make suggestions. Together in humility we identified and tossed out the factors which had caused my lesson to crash and burn, and out of the pieces we built up again a modest, simple thing whose name was wisdom. Glory be to God!
Line Upon Line
On Wednesday morning we went up to Klampa, but the 3 room schoolhouse was being occupied by someone from the government health ministry giving a charla to a group of women, so we simply met with the teachers to discuss how I might deliver a model class on the following morning. The teachers decided I should give a second grade lesson. Professor Lucio Vicente's behavioral objective: God is sovereign. Soberano. I looked at his Bible verse. 1 John 2:6. "...the one who says he abides in Him ought himself to walk in the same manner as He walked." I'm wondering how he's going to relate that verse to the objective. If God is sovereign and I ought to walk as He walked, am I then to go around acting like I'm sovereign also? I asked the teachers what the word sovereign meant.
"Pri laka alsa laka ra iwi ba."
"Living in freedom and unity."
I explained to them the meaning of the word sovereign and promised that in the morning I would teach a class on this subject to the second graders. In the half hour it takes the mahogany longboat to get back down to Sawa, the Lord had already given me my lesson. My verse would be Matthew 28:18. "All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth." I would teach the children with the aid of an animated folk tale that the Holy Spirit had made up and whispered underneath the droning of a 40 HP outboard.
Fernando Valezuela es el Diablo
There was enemy activity that night back in Sawa, at the concrete shell of a building in which we were literally camped out. Miskitos believe that the spirit Waihwan manifests itself as a black dog. But the starving, black, thieving carcass that had been skulking around our camp for days belonged to one Sawa boy nicknamed "Paasin" (Miskito for Parson). It was a real dog alright, a poor, droop-teated mongrel mom trying to save herself. Sometime after midnight she succeeded in opening a heavy wooden gate at the front steps put there specifically to keep her kind out, and subsequently got by the door of rough-cut lumber that hung heavily on hinges at the entrance to the room where we had pitched our tent as a buffer to the insect kingdom. I awoke abruptly at the sound of plastic being dragged across the raspy concrete floor, but the dog was already outside. Inside the tightly zipped tent, I realized that to get out I had to crawl over Nutie's body and have her unzip and then re-zip the flap so as not to let one mosquito enter (Nutie's adamant about that). I had already gotten out of bed twice that evening, the first time because I had left the gate open and Nutie ran through her checklist and busted me. The second time I made sure the gate was closed. So when I asked her if she wanted me to get up and address this latest problem she'd answered, "What does it matter now?" I felt a passive/agressive stab and rolled over again on my mat. Minutes later I was awake or aware again--I'm not sure which--listening to the sound of Nutie outside the tent murmuring to herself, "He got a bag of my clothes and some bone bones."
"Whaaa?" I asked groggily.
"I said he took a bag with some of my clothes in it and some bone bones."
"We don't have any food up here," I thought to myself, "much less any meat. We've had nothing but gallo pinto for the last 5 days, and what would we be holding onto bones for anyway? I'm not that hungry."
"BONE BONES?" I called out to Nutie in I-don't-know-what-kind-of-voice. "Waddaya mean he took some bone bones?"
Nutie sounded perturbed: "I put some bone bones in the bag with my clothes. You can hear him chomping down on them now."
I listened intently. In the stillness of the night I could hear a set of jaws cracking open hard candy. "Oh. Bombón," I mumbled, rendering the regional Spanish word for sucker with the proper accent, and rolled over again. I had offered to go outside and deal with it. If she wants to make me feel bad, it's her problem, the dog's not coming back until tomorrow night anyway.
In the morning Nutie was all quiet.
"You mad at me because I didn't go after that dog?"
"I'm not mad at you for that. You didn't have to yell at me," she said, hurt-like.
"What? I didn't yell at you..."
She contorted her face. "BONE BONES? WADDAYAMEAN, BONE BONES," she repeated, with exaggerated gruffness.
Sleepy gruff maybe, I thought to myself, but not mad gruff. I was alseep ... dead to the world ... That's BIBLICAL! "I'm sorry," I said, but I still kind of half-believed that she was mad at me because she thought I had left the gate open.
We both knew that Parson's dog wasn't the only visitor we'd had Tuesday night. It was a spiritual attack; perhaps it really was Waihwan who had been stalking us. It was aware of Nutie's need to be gently entreated and my default feeling of being blamed for everything. Brokenness handed down to us from our ancestors and learned before our ABC's were firmly in place. The devil is like an old pitcher whose stuff is mostly gone but who can still give you serious innings. He's crafty, a student of the game; he knows how to pitch, and he's got the book on every hitter. I can hear the voice of the prophet Isaiah speaking of the time when he will be bound: "Those who see you will gaze at you. They will ponder over you saying, is this the man who made the earth tremble?" They will see him and he will look like Fernando Valenzuela.
Nutie and I each prayed silently to ourselves. If I had indeed been entrusted with the gospel of Jesus Christ to the school teachers and children of Klampa, I needed to at least be sweet to my own wife. I pondered this as we made ready to take the longboat back up the river. Once underway, Nutie began to pray aloud, thanking God for the beautiful day and the lush greenery on the river banks without making mention of the swarms of horseflies which were making her welt up. I bowed my head, and wondered whether I was more wounded than she or just plain prouder. I did know that God was with me in spite of myself.
Precept Upon Precept
There were only about 30 students in attendance Wednesday morning from grades one to three. The teachers had allowed them to escape the day before in order to accommodate community health education. The kids are like Miskito ponies: once you let them loose, you have to chase them down and rope them to get them back. We corralled the 30 into one room. Nutie led the group in praise as I wrote on the board. Scruffy looking men and women from the community came and looked in through the cyclone mesh at the windows. I felt gladness breaking out behind me as I wrote, like sun on my back. When at last I turned around I saw a sea of smiles. Beautiful teeth, rotten teeth, missing teeth--there was no covering of mouths with hands of shame as people young and old sang out.
I introduced the key word, read it with the kids, broke it down into syllables: so-be-ra-no. I said clear enough so the teachers could hear: "It's not good enough to read a word if you don't know what it means." I launched into my lesson, speaking in Miskito: "Once upon a time there was a ground that was bare, and then all of a sudden there were ... what's the shortest plant in the whole world?" I pointed to some moss growing on the classroom wall.
"SRAP," the children shouted out.
I pantomimed as I spoke. "Srap. And Srap said to herself, 'i tower above the bare ground. I can see far and wide and there's nothing over me to block my vision or to tell me what to do. I am SOVEREIGN."
Going through the tiers and layers of the tropical forest outside in ascending order while drawing each plant on the board and mimicking it's boast of dominance until being supplanted by the next, the children also identified and called out the names of species in their native language, squealing with delight each time the proud fell from their thrones. We finally got to the greatest tree in the jungle, the mighty SISIN, the silk cotton tree to which the Miskito people ascribe supernatural powers. I drew colonies of graceful basket nests of the Montezuma's Oropendula hanging from its branches, stretching out my arms pantomiming them swaying in the breeze. The children knew that there was no tree that could surpass the sisin. What would happen next?
BAM! I drew a bolt of lightning coming down out of heaven; the silk cotton tree split in two, and rotted away. GOD ALMIGHTY IS SOVEREIGN!
We did the same with the food chain, naming all the fish of the river, lagoon and ocean, from the minnow to the hammerhead shark, with the same result. God alone is sovereign, over plants, animals, people, and the spirits of the wood.
"Jesus came up and spoke to them, 'All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth."
Nutie began to sing "He's got the Whole World in His Hands" in Miskito and the glory fell on a decrepit little classroom in the middle of a swamp at the tail end of the earth. The teachers were as the children. We had arrived at the ground floor of their level of understanding. They were getting it in a way they could receive it. Now the teachers knew how to teach the concept of God's sovereignty.
What about the next concept?
The truth of the matter is that there are no shortcuts here on the river. Just as the Wangki meanders through the coastal swamp, taking its sweet silty time, so also is it in these matters: it's got to be precept upon precept, line upon line, until enough is built up underfoot that this generation of native people will be equipped to face the onslaught of global change with the eternal truth of God's word. The Word itself is alive, and once comprehended will do the spiritual work of heart transformation on its own as the farmer wakes and sleeps. There is a lot of work that must be done in the trenches by faithful people, even people of stammering lips and another tongue, and no amount of quick-fix stadium preachers is going to simply stretch out their hands and confer it upon them with a show of amperage, light and sound. It's a work that's way greater than Nutie and I ... we certainly can't bear the weight of it ... but with the Holy Spirit of God, your prayers, and many reinforcements The Lord of HOSTS (that means everybody whom the Lord calls) an enormous miracle is taking shape like building clouds of a tropical deluge. Herein lies the wave property of Christian Mission: the HEAD fitly joining together the BODY, together making disciples over the whole earth.
"Whom shall he teach knowledge? and whom shall he make to understand doctrine? them that are weaned from the milk, and drawn from the breasts. For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, here a little, there a little; for with stammering lips and another tongue will he speak to his people." Isaiah 28:9-11
You must love knowing that you are exactly where God would have you and Nutie. I smile as I think now the bulk of the Melrose family is now in Sebring, FL. The county once know with the highest median age group in the nation, is now filled with youth filled with God's spirit and love. We miss you and think of you both so often. Until we see you again our thoughts and prayers are with you. God speed. Patrick and Marilyn
Posted by: Patrick and Marilyn Michaud | July 19, 2011 at 09:17 PM
Yes indeed. We feel absolutely vital and complimentary to each other in what we do. We daily hope for things we cannot see. We miss you fiercely, and our times together in Sebring, but realize that by our absence we each do our part to lower that median age thing. Pretty soon it should be safe to return, however, if not for a brief visit. Do you guys plan to be there at year's end?
Posted by: Thomas W Keogh | July 20, 2011 at 05:45 AM
Ok. I used the whole cauliflower and got 5 cups! I had such a great time making these...
Definitely making these this week!
...
Posted by: Justin Bieber Shoes | October 27, 2011 at 07:29 PM