plainspeak

Gifts of the Nativity

2011-12-30T20:36:00.002-06:00

In Christmases past, I've dwelt on the shock of the incarnation.

That God Almighty should come in the vernix-covered flesh of a newborn, and stay with us. In all the muck of our experience, poopy stables to cruel palaces, and every imaginable place between. I remember once speaking at a women's Christmas breakfast and making a pretty pathetic crack about Joseph not having a shoelace (you know, to tie off the umbilical cord; traumatic birth and all). And yes, the more I hunker down with the gospels each year, the more I recognize it's truly there: the shock, the muck, the trauma.

But much, much deeper: the joy. The joy! God has come to share joy.

This year, I've recounted with Mary and Joseph their own little litany of Christmas joy, gifts that only God could have given them in welcoming Jesus...

For Mary, the gift of solidarity with an older woman of faith. The overlap of Elizabeth and Mary's pregnancies, a beautiful symmetry. The bubbling-over joy of these two women, young and old, plumbing the purposes of God in Mary's magnificat. I'm sure Mary stayed through to the arrival of John, gaining exposure, empowerment, and a sense of the strength of surrender to those good purposes in giving birth.

And oh, the gift of Joseph. What a guy! Honorable (and human) enough to agonize over the "immaculate conception," yet God-fearing enough to believe the angelic dream and stand by his girl. He would be her travel companion, co-parent, provider, protector (think of Herod's bloody emissaries to Bethlehem)... and am I imagining too much when I say lover? I only know that obedience to God is a plow that lays down a deep furrow for love.

The gift of their hiatus away from home. Not without hardship, to be sure, but what with the scandal involved, perhaps a nice way to begin married life. By the time they returned to Nazareth, they'd been seasoned by crowds and anonymity, the adoration of shepherds and wise men, the terror of refugee status, the recognition of priest and prophetess. Maybe small-town gossip paled in comparison.

To Joseph, the gift of a name. The angel in Matthew's account gives Joseph the fatherly task of naming the unborn child -- Son of God, yes -- but also Yeshua bar Joseph, son of David, deriving his family name from his earthly Daddy. Jesus would grow to embrace Joseph's trade, as well, living into his father's vocation even while preparing for his other Father's one.

And to back up a bit, what man in first-century Palestine would ever have the honor of delivering a son? Not to mention being the first, with trembling hands outstretched, to touch the Living God? We miss the providence in the nativity story when we notice only the ugliness and grit of the holy family's surroundings. Warm, dim, sheltered, undisturbed and supported by someone she trusted -- tradition and research both show that in these provisions, Mary had everything she needed for a satisfying birth. The bonding gift, to Joseph: that Jesus was the Only-Begotten-of-God, but also the Only-birthed-by-Mary-with-me!

And finally: the wonder of pain cut clean away by joy. It must have seemed to them the whole world was singing, pain cut clean away by joy.

Reuben's Song

2010-11-27T11:21:00.003-06:00

bend low, grey skies

and tenderly descend

a thousand silver

tongues sing praise

lift up your fallen

eyes, you yellow plums

and welcome autumn's

branching silhouette

o let the apples

loose their stems

the waning garden

breathe amen...

I wrote this in the quiet anticipation and celebration of the days surrounding Reuben's birth, watching the fruit in our yard come to fullness and fall. I was intrigued by the almost sombre tone of surrender, thinking, "what kind of a birth poem is this, anyway?" But now I see a prophetic gift in these words: freedom to mourn the easy orbit of a one-child family; to release my eager expectation of being all things to both boys (impossible!); and to lift my heart in worship, even in the wrench of postpartum emotion.

These are the things our second son is teaching me, along with the necessity to drink deep of the fresh joy welling up in his eyes these days. He's a crooner, Reuben is, and I love the songs he sings.

2009-10-15T20:53:00.000-05:00

mommy loves to wr -

2009-10-08T21:09:00.003-05:00

A couple weeks ago, I found a shard of green chalk at the playground while Theo was rooting around in the sand for pine cones. I wrote Theo's name on the sidewalk for him, and after he eloquently scribbled over top of that for a while, started to write my own little message to the world: Mommy loves to wr -

Interrupted by one of those lazy fall wasps, meandering just a touch too near my son's face.

I'm amused by the turnings my mind takes when a piece of chalk turns up in the sand: First, that my son's name comes first; and then, when I'm with him, I'll always write Mommy for me; and if a dash away from his danger means a dash away from my self-expression, so be it.

But also that I still love to write. It's just that, at the moment, my voice is busy singing to a little one, and rediscovering the incredibly complex syllabics of our spoken word with him, and murmuring into the chosen, holy wordlessness of mother's milk.

So be it.

high time (for some new pictures)

2009-08-29T17:00:00.010-05:00

Sorry, no time for captions. As you can see, we have a busy boy on our hands! Most of the pictures are self-explanatory, and if not, have great imaginative content...

growing

2009-06-02T20:57:00.003-05:00

Yes, we're all growing, our little family, more tender and tenacious even than our tomato seedlings...

food, glorious food!

2009-04-20T10:17:00.001-05:00

Kickin back the beets!

2009-02-05T14:29:00.001-06:00

family time

2009-01-16T21:41:00.003-06:00

kicking back with cousin fern...

nightshirt portrait with grandma, grandpa, and sleepy uncle zach

morning good-bye to great-gram and grampa

bright and shiny squeaky-clean with grandma snyder

chatting it up with opa krikke

snoozing with great-auntie heather

mommy time

2009-01-16T21:36:00.003-06:00

tummy time

2009-01-16T21:27:00.002-06:00

holy nativity

2008-12-28T21:29:00.003-06:00

Navigating Christmas with a little one, I'm grounded by the vulnerability of God's arrival among us. He rests himself in the unassuming but very uncommon kindness and loyalty of a young couple, Mary and Joseph.

Our family bonds matter. Here's wishing you and yours a truly holy "holi"day. And here are a few of our nativity pictures :)...

sonlight

2008-11-18T16:13:00.000-06:00

alias...

2008-11-18T15:42:00.003-06:00

Theo has a few new nicknames these days:

Gaseous Clay, in honour of the boxer, because he dances around on his toes (Josh holding him) and flings his arms out, particularly when he's gassy...

Grunther, for the very Germanic grunts and ahems he makes, quite boyish, especially in contrast to his cousin Fern's delicate cries...

Friar Tuck, because he's getting tubby and losing his fine dark newborn-hair, growing in blond, so at the moment he has a monk's tonsure and looks quite pious when he clasps his hands in sleep...

and Guy Smiley, who in the morning is full of big gummy smiles that split his face in two, like the charismatic puppet on Sesame Street.

theo jeremiah

2008-10-23T19:54:00.005-05:00

Our son is a wonder. Such intimacy in caring for his daily needs, and such mystery behind his eyes and in the days and years to come.

As Josh says, "He's good, he's little, and he's a guy... He's a good little guy!" We have other nicknames for him, too, depending on what we're up to: little wonton, dumpling, cabbage roll when he's wrapped and cozy in a blanket; squirmy worm or flopsy when he's working out some gas or being burped; sweetums and son. Funny that I, never a self-professed baby person, am so comfortable in all this baby talk, and so proud of things like healthy burps and regular poos.

Theo came right on time, and he took his time... my water broke on a Friday morning, the day before his due date, and we delivered Sunday evening, the day after. I now know the incredible high that marathon-runners get when they push through the pain and exhaustion to the body's natural answers: endorphins and adrenaline! This isn't to say it was as difficult as it may sound: although it was a nerve-wracking Thanksgiving weekend for our families, active labour probably only lasted about 6 hours for me, and the pushing was a solid half an hour of sweet relief, thinking, "Finally! Our little one is almost here!"

Theo is healthy and tough (he probably handled his circumcision better than I did), and loves to eat, eat, eat, and sleep, sleep, sleep. Most nights he has what Josh calls "happy hour," when he cluster feeds for about 3 hours, gets more and more riled up, and eventually konks out for a good 5 hour nap. His gassy faces are alternately blissful and agonized, and he sometimes has an Elvis lip-twitch going (he's got the sideburns from Josh to match!). We're enjoying the sleep we manage to get, too; these sleeping pictures are turning into quite a theme...

We named him after Josh's dear friend, Ted Vellenga, and truly believe the meaning of his name: "Gift of God."

plunge

2008-09-24T13:38:00.005-05:00

This summer Josh and I drove across the prairies while they were green. Always I can believe the great plains were once an ocean: they still ripple with waves of light and shadow, and clouds build up like above water. Fieldbirds skim and swim the grasses, and waterfowl use the stars to navigate the clear elements.

We visited friends in a cabin at the edge of the Canadian shield, a Genesis place where the waters are still barely separate from land, and teem with life. Snapping turtles bask in the sun and reveal themselves not stone at the last moment, plunking into the water just as we jet by in a little boat. Ospreys sound the depths for flashes of silver and plummet down for the catch at nearly right angles. Pelicans sift through the evening light, feeding on the same fish we do, and loons break the stillness with their irreducible rippling song.

From the air in Pete's bush plane, it looked more liquid than solid, but both the water and the rock there go deep. And life clings to the rock, too: sprays of wild onion and enough blueberries to exhaust us with the picking. Foxes, wolves, and bears all seem unconcerned, content and munchy. Deer in abundance. The guys camped out on an unnamed island, a perfect microcosm of the place, and we went to visit them.

Now I love the cool sluicing of a good swim, especially an Ontario swim, but invariably I hesitate. I sun myself like a turtle on warm stone and only plunk in at what seems the last moment, long after our friends' boys have given up trying to sweet-talk or splash me in. Then, while they're busy catapulting off the island-edges of granite, I slip over to a gentler slope and slowly whoosh myself into what I've been waiting for all along.

For almost the past nine months now, I've been growing a small ocean inside me, and this ocean, too, teems with life. I know because I can feel every kick and see every ripple. And the past few weeks of rest have been an island of warm granite to me, a place to sun myself and chew on wild chives and let my black swim-suit soak in all the energy I can get. But I know that soon it will be time to let the waters of our baby's birth wash over me, and deeper yet -- for Josh and I to take the plunge into nurturing this new life.

When we drove back across the prairies late this summer, the green seas had ripened to gold; and the roads were amniotic, drenched silver with harvest rains.

polaroids

2007-10-09T21:16:00.000-05:00

I'm working again in the inner city, and as I adjust, life is a still rush of images that wash to clarity in passing, like polaroids.

A young woman curled cross-legged beneath the Remand Centre, her eyes tapping Morse code up at her man, hands flashing over the blue heart chalked on the pavement.

An empty prescription bottle and two syringes left on a windowsill after the long weekend.

Last-minute calls from an election campaigner and a police chief, both aiming to volunteer for a media-covered holiday meal.

A quietly radiant teen volunteer, hair tucked back and falling loose as she tops coffee cups.

Citrus tea in styrofoam: prayer with a guy just off night shift at the men's shelter, and not so long off the street himself.

The man under the neon pink blanket outside the front door; his cracked-white vinyl shoes, his gentle smile.

A gift of small ivy in my window, from a co-worker generous too with her sense of humour, and wisdom.

It's good to be back.

peregrine means pilgrim

2007-08-23T18:56:00.000-05:00

"We think international travel is new, but birds have been doing it for thousands of years."

Josh read about 3 peregrine falcons, tagged in Edmonton, Red Deer, and Calgary. They winter in places like Columbia and the Bahamas...

(but birds eat too)

2007-08-21T20:55:00.001-05:00

This is the thought I had tonight, watching a Swainson's hawk fight just to stay in place. It's windy in Edmonton these days; fall's coming.

Maybe a rebuttal to my last post? Or can I say an extension: because Jesus says the birds always get fed, and we do too.

setting sail

2007-08-19T22:15:00.000-05:00

My husband and I live near a river valley, and no matter what time of day I walk the view, it's morning. Because there are miracles happening, things seen fresh.

The river itself is opaque jade, slow liquid; up close it's a murky green tea, carrying the dregs of prairie silt and always flowing, yet still. Feast on silence, I write on the occasional shelf of sand.

Today Josh and I heard the soft skraw of something in the red-barked bush. Josh joked about a wheeze, a weasel!, and went off to track it, in his keen gentle way. I stayed down by the water's edge, with the hush and the flow, and eventually we both came round to spotting three wrens. Inhabiting the radius of a birch among the dogwoods, minute throats tuned not to song but to -- can we call it scratch? A delicate thrum and rattle, better than any needle on vinyl, and millions of willow-leaves ahead of machine.

So too the gulls. City-work crunches the timeless river with bridge construction, cranes and dozers letting off noise like smoke, but there are seagulls silently riding the breeze. All that unharvested light and breath to soar! Wheeling the air since they first feathered from God's hands, long before someone dreamed the wheel and axle, the engine, the fuel to feed forward! and faster!

Always flowing, yet still. In marriage, I feel this. Like any leap of faith, it's rewarded with both vertigo and clarity, with a sense of motion and a sense of this one moment. Where does the energy come from? Not my chug of consumption, that's for sure. I want to say it's more like catching a draft of light, a push of breath not my own.

Trusting the wind and the water's current and that peculiar scratch in the throat...

oceans immeasurable

2007-03-18T19:22:00.000-05:00

There's a silky mist settling on walkways and roads, and I take this treacherous weather to mean rest. A spruce tree across from our window is crowned with last years' pinecones, waiting for this years' pollination... but instead of thinking summer I am thinking of a choppy winter ocean.

A poem helps --

"H.D." 1886 -

111. Oread

Whirl up, sea --
Whirl your pointed pines.
Splash your great pines
On our rocks.
Hurl your green over us --
Cover us with your pools of fir.

A short while ago, I sat in the same medleyed-orange chair, with the same spruce-view, and spoke of oceans with a school friend. We are washed with such an ebb and flow of books, profs, practicum; people, people, people with needs, needs, needs... I said, ah let it be, what we speak is just a brief boat on a big ocean. We brave the waves but we are small. Plenty of salt-water below us. Tears, if you like.

There are funny things in the ocean, too. Creatures with huge bulbous eyes, and creatures with no eyes at all. Beautiful hues and grotesque teeth. Sometimes humour and danger at the same time, like a puffer fish.

My fiance's mom fished up hilarious things before she passed away, and scary things. Her mind struggled to keep up with her body and spirit in saying good-bye, and what she dredged from her own life's oceans were jokes and sharp emotions. Bright starfish and stinging urchins.

I think we're all oceans immeasurable. Treasure (and terror) untold. A little skiff to skim the top.

Deep calls to deep...
All your waves and breakers
have swept over me.

(Psalm 42)

2006-12-05T17:48:00.000-06:00

where oh where
have i gone?

blogger,
did you delete me?

post-script

2006-10-24T19:41:00.000-05:00

"To address oneself to the other in the language of the other is, it seems, the condition of all possible justice, but apparently, in all rigor, it is... impossible..."
-- Jacques Derrida

(hmmm... sounds like the incarnation.)

2006-10-23T11:09:00.000-05:00

Friday nights on the C-Train are many-hued and noisy. Lovely Filipino nannies speaking Tagalog. Venerably turbaned old men speaking Punjabi. Young people of all sorts wearing the clothes and speaking the languages of whoever's in their headphones.

I, with my pale quiet skin, am probably one of the only people speaking English, just because I happen to bump into a classmate in the crowd (she with an aristocratic Nepalese accent).

We are here in Calgary for two years, to talk about social justice. Our program is predominantly white, with a handful of international students representing the upper economic reaches of their home cultures.

What would happen if we threw open the conversation? A Friday night social justice forum, on the C-Train!

Would we careen off-track, or find a better groove?

My confession is that I'm still afraid, most of the time, of what that better groove might be. What it might demand of me. I like my quiet neighborhood, and the nearby space of land and sky where I can go to escape the city. Deer there, and porcupines in abundance. Mountains in the distance.

The C-Train and its environs are okay when I need a gritty fix of the street, to remind me why I'm in social work. But could I move in? The only hint of wildlife there is in the skeletal heaps of shopping carts dumped under pedways.

Fresh air, maybe, with the wind.

human music

2006-09-11T17:00:00.000-05:00

I take the bus to university these days, and have noticed that at my local bus stop, three out of four people are always plugged into their ipods. Everybody has their own floating soundtrack coming from a little digital box...

One night last week my roommates and I piled into a car and drove downtown to see the Orchestra. What struck me about that huge gathering of people, layered up in the vast soaring lines of the concert hall, was how personal it was. I felt the sighs and creaks of the people around me, kept time along with the Asian guys murmuring composers' names and bobbing to the music in the next row. We enjoyed the conductor's French-Canadian jokes and the profound elegance of his hands.

And the musicians! A reminder that music is so tangibly tied to human breath and bone and fingertip. Our spirits, our minds, our lungs and elbows and wrists and thumbs -- our imperfect persons and our idisyncratic personalities -- all matter in music. Something's lost when the music's tidily packaged and mass-produced and served up without the people who made it. Which isn't to say I don't appreciate a good CD, but we all know the real stuff is better, even more real, in fact, when it's live.

Half-way through the concert, a particular oboist played a particular solo from a particular piece by Dvorjak. All these things conspired to make me cry. Down on the main floor, a woman in a wheelchair arched back and shouted aloud for the beauty of it.

She was the music, too.

he said... she said...

2006-09-01T12:57:00.000-05:00

"Yes!"

(we're engaged :)

where there's smoke...

2006-08-10T06:37:00.000-05:00

The other day my little brother and I noticed a wisp of smoke spiralling from a poplar tree. But as we passed by, we saw it was really a swirl of bees.

I thought of the people milling around in white, gathering honey from the edge of a familiar field of weeds I didn't know hived bees.

I thought, too, of the kids we know here at the shelter, the unexpected places of sweetness and fury.

Lord grant us your grace and your truth. Honey and flame.

Ever Present Need - Steve Bell
Lyrics adapted from Daniel Ladinski’s translation of ‘Our Need for Thee’ in Love Poems from God.
Original poem by St. Francis of Assisi.

Darkness is an unlit wick
A simple spark would vanquish it
Truly I could burst to flame
Every time you call my name
Do I do for you the same

God is like a honey bee
Penetrates the soul of me
Dearly draws the sweetness in
Nectar of the meek love is
He in me and I in him

In our ever present need of thee
Grant we fathom peace
Fashion instruments of souls set free
For don’t the caged ones weep...

© 2003 Signpost Music.

flatlander learns to lean

2006-08-02T03:18:00.000-05:00

The marvelous thing about a walking stick is this: it leans you into the strength of a mountain, and the resilience of a tree, and the surprising energy of your own small self putting one foot in front of the other, all the way up and back down again...

Thanks to my brother, Rob, and Turtle Mountain, for the lesson in leaning.

2006-07-28T02:39:00.000-05:00

can't sleep.

My body obviously resents me working nights and is choosing revenge precisely now, when the house is empty and I have eight whole hours of potential rest, alone with my exhausted self.

but no.

Sleep is a naughty child with tangled hair who will run through the social crowd of my weekend with her screaming absence, popping all our conversation bubbles and smearing discontented pink gum on ruined hopes of fun.

oh dear.

The funny thing is, I may miss these quiet moments with myself in the very near future. It's just right now, these moments seem malicious, determined to rob me of my glorious time off with Josh --

I imagine every moment awake now ticking off an equally long and precious moment with him on the sun-drenched road to Calgary...

(yes, I am delusional, in both my hopes and my fears.)

sigh. poor, confused body.
poor, frantic mind.
poor, determined heart.

mother-of-pearl

2006-07-28T02:22:00.000-05:00

The sunset tonight was as subtle as a shell.

I wish our atmosphere could make pearls from pollutants, like oysters do.

if i had my way...

2006-07-21T15:01:00.000-05:00

I'd be a walking 5' balloon, because I'd eat tangy lemon bars every day (sigh... and other sweet churchy recipes).

I wouldn't recognize love. I'd be stuck on a hamster-wheel of emotional thrills and spills.

I'd miss a lot of spectacular weather, in the interest of comfort and warmth.

's wounds

2006-07-19T04:53:00.000-05:00

"If God had a face, what would it look like? And would you want to see, if seeing meant that you would have to believe...?" (Joan Osborne)

Let's call him Rothchild. Rothchild is an old man who only sometimes seems infantile. He wears a knitted rainbow toque all seasons of the year and plucks at his prophetic white beard. Maybe you've seen him sailing the streets of Edmonton with his ship of three shopping carts lashed together, piled high with recyclables. A beautiful way to make a living. Yesterday he was navigating his fleet down the steep curve of 101 St, tenacious and systematic, nosing each cart into the bush off the sidewalk, inching them, equal distances apart, closer to the river. One night he came to the shelter and signed for me to fill an empty milk bottle with water. HOT, he scratched on the pavement with his ancient fingernails, cradling the milk jug like a baby. And curled up with it outside the door until the sun rose.

But if you try to give Rothchild a hug, he'll grope you.

Aiden is much younger, perhaps much less hardened. Unlike Rothchild, he still speaks to the world in general. Speaks with a fuzzy lisp because his teeth are so crooked, sometimes flashes a crooked grin. He's so tall he looks like a Roald Dahl character. Lately he's been wearing shorts, for summer days, and long socks, for air-conditioned shelter nights. He pulls them up to his knees to sleep, and always leaves smudges of mud and dried blood on his pillowcases. Aiden's younger sister won the lottery so he buys tickets every day, and communicates his discontent. F---. Why are you people never prepared? -- when we're out of milk and cereal. Yeah, whatever, leave me alone. -- when we're counting him down to morning wake-up. Nice girls' clothes... -- when we're looking through donations for a jacket that'll fit. Last night I did my own share of grumbling and clung to patience, playing solitaire at the same table as him until he conversed in the only way that seems possible these days: Hey, do you guys have a pair of shorts? These ones have a hole.

Oh, Aiden. So much of you is tattered.

Kevin is proud of his scars, boasts of being "white trash." Scares us all, sometimes, with his conspiracy theories -- alien abductions, terrorists everywhere -- and his imaginations of manliness, basically slaughter and rape. I wonder what rampaging music he's plugged into as he rolls his cigarrettes, wonder what wounding was done to him as a young child, to barricade him into these schizoid episodes. Jean Vanier would say Kevin is more true to the logic of his being than I am. Someone stabbed Kevin's sense of value early on, and he's been bleeding self-hatred ever since. I've been shown more love by family and friends than I know what to do with, but instead of freely giving what I've been freely given, I often let that love slide. Nevertheless, there's a clear shine in Kevin's eyes when he talks about his job at Chili's, and I think he just may be the most faithful dishwasher there.

So love can trump logic, even in Kevin.

These are the shuttered, the torn, the crazy faces of God's boys, and I have to believe his healing gleam, even in their wounds. I have to respond to the jagged bits of love that spill out.

For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. (St. John)

the work of your hands

2006-07-16T04:00:00.000-05:00

I didn't speed on the way to work tonight. Instead I listened to loud music and watched the clouds slouching, Simpons-esque, in the sky (though I'm sure there are even better things up there than yellow cartoon letters).

Here at the shelter we got to see a perfectly executed kickflip. Got to hear some really good advice, from a guy who was silent for about four months, and then suddenly sprung loose with all sorts of wandering wisdom: "In the winter, you know you need sunshine. So you just gotta take the summer in while it's here, because winter will come again...". Another guy talked about playing Ponyboy in his school's production of The Outsiders (best jr. high book ever).

It's been a good week, bittersweet. I miss my sisters -- the newly wed Mrs. Rachel Tomalty!!! (honeymooning it up in Cuba), and the not-so-newly wed Mrs. Katie Wong (teaching again in Thailand).

So I've mellowed out a lot in the past few days. Moped, slept, barely "help!"-ed my way into prayer (as if it's "my way"). Baked bread and ate it, honey-spread, by the river with Josh one night. Visited Ratch in Tofield and went for a bike ride on a flat highway, then a flat gravel road (the extremes of rural Alberta!). Intended to fold laundry, clean the bathroom. Sat chatting and eating Gouda cheese with visiting relatives instead. Picked lettuce from the garden and got bit by stinging nettle.

In the field behind our house I saw an albino thistle. Those recessive blades of grass that look like they've been dipped half-way in red paint. A dandelion gone to seed, the size of a mini-basketball. Robins grown hefty like the high school football team, prepping for fall. A fuzzy Remy-orange caterpillar, primed only to win the gorge-yourself-on-a-leaf race. A beetle with a green shell, as tough as the top-coat nail polish Katie forgot in the bathroom drawer, but shimmery like velvet. Dragonflies with cool maneuvers that would beat a fleet of helicopters hands-down, any day.

It may be a blithe assumption, but in these, the details of my days, I can't help translating care. There's something intricate and generous and a little bit stunning in the people and places I love.

O Lord,
our Lord,
how majestic is Your Name
in all the earth...

When we consider the work of your hands...
who are we, that You are mindful of us?

How to Cook a Green Banana

2006-07-01T07:11:00.000-05:00

1. Grab the aforementioned fruit on the way out the door in the morning.

2. Toss the banana on the passenger seat of your car and forget about it.

3. Park in a sunny location and leave for approximately 8 hours.

4. Return to car, and now fragrant banana.

5. Shuffle around on the seat, encounter warm brown fruit.

6. Mmmm... Enjoy!

blink

2006-06-24T00:33:00.000-05:00

A seep of exhausted tears on the way home from work today...

Am I enough? I often wonder. Have I done enough?
These are lying questions, I know, knowing God, but there you are (there I am).

I am reading Ezekial lately. I find comfort in his vision of the cherubim in the presence of the Lord. Covered on all sides in eyes -- to apprehend all of God's glory? all of human suffering?

This is a mystery to me. I am stunned by both.

Another mystery to me, and another comfort: all of God's glory weeping out in all of human suffering...

Christ crucified.
Enough.

Where’s the scrawl?

2006-06-15T04:25:00.000-05:00

you ask. How do you cover it all? I reply. --Sarah Harmer

So many moments.

Just hard to hold to, scrubbed down by nightshifts, mind polished smooth as the ballroom floor in this renovated office building. Conscience restless as the people out there on the floor, tossing and turning in the air-conditioned hum of nearly 4 a.m.

One of our beautiful boys came in tonight with nothing on him but a pieced-together crack pipe. Nothing else to his name these days.

Another boy got a job and brought everybody two flats of doughnuts, which we crowed over and feasted on.

"Good-night, shelter parents," says another as he heads to his mat.

And the girls, the girls are women who follow these boys...

One craving apples in her first trimester.
Another with a tiny daughter in ICU, born just this week.
Yet another, eight months pregnant, whose shirt reads Future Development -- an arrow pointing to her tummy!

rue and gladness

2006-06-14T03:01:00.000-05:00

western meadow rue and wild ripe strawberries,
both in the fields and ditches close to home.

meanwhile, back at the ranch...

2006-06-01T10:53:00.000-05:00

A month here already? The aerial view, brown velvet and biege cuordory fields, has shifted to green ground I like hiking with Josh, and I am breathing poplar fuzz.

Driving to work I see whole fields of dandelion fluff lit up by big Alberta skies.

At work I do the rounds, count off kids sleeping on blue vinyl mats, bare feet scarred by Edmonton concrete and cocaine. Crystal meth, too, bites open wounds in people's faces and feet.

One guy came in late last night, said he'd got lost in the gospel of Mark and read chapter after chapter, circling the inner city bus route a few times as he willed the words of Jesus to fill him on the inside. He's sick of filling himself with liquor.

His memory's a garden, everything rooting.

"You know, if good seed finds good soil," he said, "the fruit will be thirty, sixty, even a hundred times as much!"

housekeeping 2

2006-05-29T06:25:00.000-05:00

A picture I can't leave on the shelf...

housekeeping

2006-05-16T04:21:00.000-05:00

Every time I move home again, I realize how ridiculously full my closet is.

Oh... no, I didn't intentionally mean I realize how ridiculously much I have, though I do have way more than I need.

I was simply noticing that my closet is crammed with stuff, and I seriously need to clean it out and/or quit bringing home new stacks of photos to put on the already-sagging shelf.

One day it will collapse! A beautiful mess of sarongs and old journals...

That closet has collected bits and pieces of my life for sixteen years now, and it's still the pale yellow I asked to paint my room back then. Sometime in junior high I inscribed some favourite quotes in there. You know, for whoever might go looking around the corner in a suburban closet for inspiration. Or for my biographer, once I turned famous.

I thought about painting over the adolescent-purple ink, an embarrassment now,

but I'm still figuring out what to keep and what to chuck.

oh my word!

2006-04-25T04:13:00.000-05:00

do I ever need an editor... :)

what follows is my "bye for now" to Thailand. bear with me as i process this...

peace out,
s

a cup of cold water

2006-04-25T03:48:00.000-05:00

“Eight million in this country of 65 million earn less than the equivalent of $100 (US) a year. Yet twelve of the world’s hundred richest billionaires are listed as Thai citizens. We have the third highest sales of Mercedes Benz cars in the world, but in our countryside, royal foundations are lending money to people for whom the most important thing is to own just one pig.”

-- King Bhumibol, Ninth Rama of Thailand,
in 1996, just before economic collapse.

Last night I was at a birthday BBQ in the scorched border town of Aranyaprathet. Five of us sat on kindergarten-sized stools around a clay pot of coals with a grill on top. The day’s heat oozed up through the thin lino rolled out to make a restaurant of this empty parking lot. As the sun sank and the mosquitoes came out, garbled Thaiglish techno music pumped up with the daily aerobics session happening not far away, on the same tarmac.

Back in Bangkok now, I’m alone with a load of laundry in the wash and leftovers I love anytime: pomello, jackfruit, papaya, dragonfruit… Peanut butter and crackers, noodles and green-curry tuna in the cupboard. I don’t want to go shopping because I’m leaving Thailand again soon.

Sitting stalled on the bus in city traffic this morning, I noticed a few days’ progress in the huge condo complexes rising out of our area’s shrinking wetlands. These high-rises are riding on the backs of migrant labourers, I need to add. I’ve seen toddlers in nothing but dirty undershirts playing on piles of sand while their parents haul buckets of wet cement up storeys of bamboo scaffolding.

A bit of a breeze sent a breath of fresh marshy air through the bus as we passed a small clutch of green not yet gone. The contrast was striking and soothing at once – I’d like to say breath-taking, but it was obviously just the opposite. Bus drivers here wear masks like the one I used to have to put over my mouth and nose to go into an isolation unit when I worked at a Canadian hospital. City air is toxic.

Why do you like the countryside so much better? I asked Auntie Gaow yesterday, over lunch. The air is good and my heart is happy, she replied simply. I wanted to take a picture of this tiny woman’s toughened feet, which have packed down so many proud paths through her patches of spring onion, dill weed, corn, long beans, tomatoes, Chinese parsley, chilies… But a picture of an old woman’s callused feet would be the height of immodesty in Thai culture, so I asked another question instead: What jobs do find hard, farming here?

None! she said, Everything is easy, now that we have our own well of water. Auntie Gaow’s few acres of vegetables have been so profitable that last year she and her husband were able to purchase some cattle, as well. Friend and neighbor, Sister Lii, similarly used garden earnings to buy not one, but four pigs.

Most of these older ladies have been to Bangkok, many to visit sons or daughters who have settled in the city. A high ratio of these sons and daughters send their own children back to the country, to be cared for by ailing grandparents. Auntie Gaow herself makes the three-hour trip every week, for medical reasons – she’s seeking help from a specialist for her tired and twisting feet.

With a dismissive shake of her head, Auntie started talking about Bangkok: If you want to eat supper there, you have to fight traffic to go buy something -- expensive, and probably not good for you, anyways... Here at home, we just walk out to the pond for some fish, grab some vegetables -- and all for free! We’d just made green papaya salad from all home-grown ingredients, and I knew her words were true. I’d helped pick the tomatoes.

Not that this is untouched paradise. These hard-working, gracious women returned again and again in the course of our conversation to my white skin and foreign “beauty.” I was reminded of once counting how many commercials for skin-whitening cleansers and creams were aired on Thai TV – four out of seven ads, in a run sandwiched between a popular soap opera and the evening news. Even warm-hearted friends will usually describe someone first by the shade of their skin: Sister Noi’s husband? Oh, he’s so dark! And his son is just like him! Very good workers, though…

And I can sense the boredom of the granddaughters. On school holidays right now, they’re conscripted to help cook and clean, but otherwise spend muggy hours taking turns in the hammock in the shade, reading a glossy magazine from Bangkok and playing games on their mobile phone. Their trendy t-shirts belie the lumpy cross-shaped scars they have on their shoulders from infant vaccinations performed by the village doctor. Younger cousins bury their feet in the dry red dirt. A big event is the sound of the motorcycle man, who has the fixings for sweet slushy drinks strapped to the side of his bike.

Driving through any number of these villages, we saw what was a comparative villa every once in a while, with blue-tiled roof and SUV parked out front. That’s so-and-so’s new house, my host would say. She went to Pattaya and found a husband. Meaning the young woman worked the bars there and managed to bring a sex tourist home. These “husbands” are usually older men, wanting to retire in Thailand, or perhaps happy to have a house and mistress for annual holidays. The houses they finance are looked upon as impressive dowries and envied accordingly.

Family survival and sustenance and status are such a tangle. A couple days ago, we took roads turned livid-red-mud by thunderstorms to a village very near the Cambodian border. So near that in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s the land was free to anybody wanting to farm it. This frontier resettlement paid for with funds from both Thai and European governments concerned about border defense. We were unused to the grid-like layout of the town, and got lost trying to find our friends’ cinder-block home among all the others, but eventually pulled up to their little gas station booth, hidden in the hedge.

A chatty elderly couple welcomed us in. The man was wearing carefully folded fisherman pants, and always placed his prosthetic leg away from us. I don’t know the story of his missing leg; but I’ve heard that during the Cold War, American planes dropped a payload of bombs every eight minutes for nine years on the countries bordering Thailand. In any case, this couple was happy to see us and paused in their daily tasks to visit. The woman had been winding spools from larger skeins of silk to be used in their daughter Nang’s weaving.

In response to their calls, Nang brought some swaths of silk out from the shadows of their concrete house. Peacock blues, wine reds, coal blacks, threads of gold and coral pink and lime green hit the daylight like unearthed gems.

But Nang’s khol-lined eyes, precious in their own right, were sad. Later I asked about children, and was told that she's raising her two kids alone, since divorcing her husband. People in the village said Nang’s mother forced the divorce, and that Nang’s spirit was broken and her mind wandering as a result. Nang and her husband had previously emigrated to Korea, where they worked as labourers in a textiles factory. Nang sent all her earnings home, and when her husband asked that she give only a portion of her wages to her parents, her mother got angry and demanded she come home. Nang did so, silently. And silently weaves her silk.

Survival. Sustenance. Status. Such a tangle.

Many tourists who visit Aranyaprathet will marvel at the beautiful silk to be had, and haggle the price down. Most will walk straight on through the border crossing to catch a ride to Angkor Wat. My brother remembers being mobbed by scores of Khmer kids, who turned on the tears and called him a “bad man” when he declined their bleating offers of ten (poorly made) postcards for a dollar. But the land around Aran is scattered with so many lives mostly invisible to us: people hearty, hopeful, harrowed by whatever circumstances have landed them there.

I myself caught a cheap casino bus to Bangkok today. Gambling is illegal in Thailand. The immense casino hotels situated a dusty stone’s-throw from the border remedy the situation nicely for urban Thais who want a week-end getaway, and gave me a handy ride back to the city.

It’s almost four o’clock, and the temperature inside my apartment has climbed to thirty-one degrees. 35ºC outside in the shade. I’m thinking of the green-clad workers six storeys down, young guys digging trenches for my water pipes. I’m wishing all my thinking could do something. The sun is so hot. But I’ve been burned in my own way, too, and have learned not to linger. The glow of my skin was too much for one guy, who exploded into violence when a friend asked him to leave me alone on the bus. We had to jump off, run away, flag a taxi home.

Still. I’m wishing all my thinking could do something. A couple of cold water, in the name of Christ? A cup of cold water, for the ones who labour on my pipes...

The hot sun. The glow of my skin. A cup of cold water. Christ?

Doan

2006-04-11T02:11:00.000-05:00

Doan seems like a pretty normal fourteen-year-old.

His dark hair’s a bit bleached at the ends, and he likes to slick it up in a lopsided wave on the top of his head. He’s good at math, languages, and playing soccer. He’s done a lot of odd jobs here and there, from moving furniture to bathing his neighbors’ dogs.

Photos of him and his friends show them posing in sunglasses and boxing gloves. For fun they play around-the-world ping-pong, elimination style. Losers have to do push-ups. When there are adults visiting, they congregate at the table to eavesdrop and tease and get a share of the snacks: Thai rice krispies squares, salted nuts, Pepsi, freezies in the heat…

In other ways Doan is more than normal, really special. He loves to worship God on the djembe drum, and chokes up easily in prayer-times. He’s got a clear sense of God’s presence and wants to follow hard.

Doan’s teacher says he’s the smartest kid in the whole group, though he hasn’t had much schooling. In truth, he flunked grade four a couple times and finally quit to sniff glue with other people from his slum. The teachers at that school beat him.

He’s got a scar from a knife wound, a drug deal gone wrong. Usually Doan’s dad is in jail, but he used to beat Doan with chains when he wasn’t locked away. Doan’s lived most of his life with his grandmother on his father’s side. He was born upcountry but sent to live in Klong Toey, one of Bangkok’s more infamous slums, when he was still just a baby.

Action movies, he likes, but says they’re a little too much like his life sometimes. Fear of pursuit, and not always getting away in time. He learned to smoke, ironically, in youth prison.

When he got out, he knew he wanted to quit drugs, and thought his friend was taking him to a temple where he could detox. Instead this friend brought him to The Shelter, Project L.I.F.E.'s drug rehab home. It’s been nine weeks already and Doan is doing much better.

He’s put on a lot of healthy weight, for a scrappy fourteen-year-old. He’s learned to sing, and pray, and apologize, and wash dishes with the other guys. Ordinary stuff, extraordinary progress for this more-than-normal, really special kid.

keep me truckin' for the Lord

2006-04-10T03:40:00.000-05:00

We recently got back from a road trip.
9 days, 2200 kms, 12 provinces.

We visited refugees and NGO's, bamboo huts and air-con offices.
Marble-floored hotels, red-dirt churches. Burlap-sack schools.
Hand-shaking hill-tribe people.

Kids, everywhere. The shell-shocked and the now abundantly cared-for. And so many in-between...

tourist-team t-shirts

2006-04-10T03:36:00.000-05:00

our beast of burden

2006-04-10T03:34:00.000-05:00

their beast of burden

2006-04-10T03:21:00.000-05:00

behind barbed wire

2006-04-10T02:16:00.000-05:00

Roughly 100 000 people live in this
re-settlement camp, Thai-side of
the border.

Revelation 2:10

2006-04-10T02:10:00.000-05:00

(Internally Displaced Persons Settlement,
Burma-side of the border)

Above the cross in their church:

Stand fast, even to the point of death,
and I will give you the crown of life.

balloon stomp

2006-04-10T02:08:00.000-05:00

(universal fun!)

narrow road

2006-04-10T02:05:00.000-05:00

(Discipleship Training School)

precious

2006-04-10T01:56:00.000-05:00

(she poked shy
fingers through a
hole in our fence,
found treasure --

a pink balloon)

more please...

2006-04-10T01:52:00.000-05:00

(Home of Joy)

beeyutifull!

2006-04-10T01:49:00.000-05:00

(House of Refuge)

2006-04-07T02:33:00.000-05:00

(so this photo album is still under construction -- good things come to those who...)

colouring book

2006-04-07T02:29:00.000-05:00

(Eden House)

thai football league

2006-04-07T02:24:00.000-05:00

(kids & nanny at Home of the
Open Heart)

watering hole

2006-04-07T02:22:00.000-05:00

(some fish bite!)

mini hoodoos

2006-04-07T02:20:00.000-05:00

treading mountains

2006-04-07T02:08:00.000-05:00

(look close

we're there!)

with faith like a seed...

2006-04-07T02:06:00.000-05:00

Love each other / Unite for freedom, justice, and peace / Forgive and don't hate each other / Pray with faith, act with courage / Never surrender

2006-03-30T09:30:00.000-06:00

http://www.freeburmarangers.org/

http://www.partnersworld.org/

a couple websites that explain what i've seen a little of in the past week, and more importantly, what these other people are up to... really good stuff!

more later.
s

Trat

2006-03-22T04:18:00.000-06:00

“What’s your name?” Trat keeps asking, and then repeats my name every few seconds, just to check, just to cement this connection with the foreigner sitting next to him on the green tarp.

He’s excited and excitable, tugging at his “Crow Sports” t-shirt, rubbing the back of his recently shaved head, fiddling with the Buddhist amulet around his neck. We are here on this hot Saturday morning with about thirty other kids and a handful of club staff and volunteers, hunkered down in a bit of shade near the cemetery slum where Trat lives for some songs, games, stories, and snacks.

Even so close to the old Chinese cemetery, signs of life abound: green, leafy trees which soften the glare of sun on hard red earth; an impressive pile of garbage which testifies to the community inside the cement cinder-block wall sprawled around the slum; blue jeans on the line; toothbrushes and toothpaste jammed into the crook of a light-post; and an adorable dimpled baby being passed from grandmother to aunt to sister to cousin…

Life’s a crowd here, and Trat is often lost in all the noise. He’s keeping half an eye on the story turning page by page in the hands of the club leader, but mostly he’s busy flipping and catching his 5 baht coin. Finally! He spots the ice cream vendor pulling up on a bike, and is off like a shot.

When he wanders back, I ask him a few questions. “Chocolate” seems to work its way in to many of his answers, and he’s also a big soccer fan. He’s lived here his whole life, with his parents and older brothers. His mother sells birds to people wanting to release them on the beach for good merit. His father works not far away, at a hotel in Pattaya, but if it’s glitzy, it is, in truth, a far cry from where they live. Trat wants to be a soldier when he grows up… see Thailand, serve the king, eat well and dress sharp.

Does Trat know Jesus? It’s hard for Trat to even hear this question, in all the kids’ club hubbub, and his eyes glaze over a bit. Finally he nods non-committally: “I’ve heard of him…” Jesus is the man he coloured a few minutes ago on a picture of Psalm 23. The guy taking care of fourteen sheep, which Trat and his friends garbed in international flags – the colours of Thailand, Brazil, Italy, Germany, and some other favourite soccer teams.

Maybe the boys aren’t far off; after all, Jesus is the good shepherd to sheep of all stripes. He’s more than heard of Trat, knows his penchant for chocolate and his future hopes; knows the shadow cast by the cemetery over his slum home.

Knows all the other shadows cast here, and walks beside Trat anyway.

Noi

2006-03-22T04:11:00.000-06:00

Noi, on the other hand, is full of questions for me:

--“Why does God love the whole world?”

--“Does Jesus especially love kids?”

--“Why did he have to die?”

-- “Will you be at church tomorrow?”

Noi listens carefully to make sure my answers are good’n’orthodox, interested not so much in me as in the consistency of this Jesus she’s heard so much about.

God loves the WHOLE world because it all belongs to him! So he wants to take care of it, just like you want to take care of your cat and your dog, right? Noi smiles and buries her nose in the front of my shirt. Apparently this sniffing is an affectionate thing around here. And somehow Noi does manage to give her cat, Mai, and her dog, Mee, the same kind of affection, even though 10-odd people live in their shack.

Jesus very VERY especially loves kids. One time his grown-up friends tried to stop some kids that came running to see him, just like you and all your friends came running to see us today! But Jesus told his friends to be quiet, and guess what he did? He let them sit on his lap, just like you’re sitting here with me! I wonder if Noi, at eight years old, has had the chance to do this very much. Her father is a question mark, though an uncle of sorts is in and out -- busy with drugs. The mother-figure in their home is usually gone, selling helium balloons up and down the Pattaya coast. Older sisters beat on the little ones until they move out in search of dubious jobs, and Noi’s grandmother is worn threadbare keeping the remaining kids together, so there may not be a lot of room in her lap for someone small needing a snuggle.

Can YOU tell me why Jesus had to die? Noi is in her element here, and fires off a no-fail answer – “Love!” She also fires off today’s memory verse, complete with actions: “Don’t be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good!” And that’s just it, because Jesus’ action on the cross is the best example we’ll ever see, of good overcoming bad. Noi and her next-oldest sister, Nung, are sharp as tacks and both so diligent in filing away these gleaming bits of God’s word. The difference He makes is palpable, and sometimes seemingly impossible. Will Noi and Nung be free to follow their minds all the way through school? Instead of stopping after grade six, like so many of their friends, to sell gum on the beach? -- or worse things, in worse places? Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good…

(Pause) I’m sorry, Noi; I won’t be at church tomorrow. I’m only here one day. She’s disappointed, but starts counting off everyone else who will be there: her and Nung; their older cousin Mem; Khun LeeAnn, who first told them about Jesus; Pi Bon, who plays guitar for their songs and has a really cool tattoo; Nong Boom, who can only see from one eye because his dad hit him; and maybe even Baifern, though she has to work a lot more, now that she’s twelve.

She’s in good company, this little girl who asks big questions.

Pattaya

2006-03-20T03:51:00.000-06:00

Flabby old white guy, his No Money No Honey wife-beater showing off a bad sun-burn. Crammed next to him in the pick-up truck taxi is a young Thai girl, hair streaked orange and plucked eye-brows growing back in again. She jockeys her mini-skirt closer and throws an arm around him.

A more middle-aged Thai woman with warm brown eyes and a wide smile sits on a bench in a local shopping mall. Grocery bags are sprawled all around, and an ironing board is propped up behind her. She’s waiting for her more-than-middle-aged German boyfriend to finish up his emails home from the internet café.

Two-year-old Daniel is fidgety in the afternoon heat, fussing in his mom’s friend’s lap while she gets her hair straightened at a local salon. His pale skin and light hair prove his connection to a father who doesn’t know he exists. He’s an obvious step-brother to five-year-old Tim, who’s hyped up on Pepsi! and also missing a dad -- but that doesn’t put a damper on their brotherly scraps, even here in the salon…

Eve uses a plastic bucket to douse herself with cool water before she puts on a pink t-shirt and some striped orange pants. She doesn’t want to smell like home when she goes in to work tonight, and it’s been stinking hot lately. Swamp land is free, so this is where she’s lived all her life, but they might be able to move soon. When she finished grade six her mom asked her to go work at Naughty Girl. Eve’s been making pretty good money since then.

Nicha’s a nice girl from Sukhothai who finished grade nine. She moved down to Pattaya five years ago in hopes of snagging a rich American boyfriend like her friend Lutti did. Nicha would love to have a place like Jeff and Lutti’s, with plenty of space for cute little half-foreign kids to run around in. Maybe plant some fruit trees – her favorite is papaya. Nicha’s still mixing drinks in Pattaya, though, a few papaya slings thrown in for good measure, and hoping for the best.

Maow has been a mother to them all, every one of these obnoxious boys lounging around the table in their heels and lipstick, competing for the best joke. Teenagers! she thinks, and sighs. She’s glad she had a few drinks before she came to this party. The food is always great and the people mean well, but she’s been working the bars seventeen years and can’t always handle these smiling Christians and their hope. What?! Seventeen years already, since Bo died? Her young-married-farm-wife days are that long gone? Maow shifts her seafood salad around on her plate. Shrugs and smiles a bit apologetically at the young white church-girl sitting next to her at the banquet.

Rose is stunning in red, and unashamed to stand and ask for prayer. Nervous nonetheless, she is stunned herself when a small foreigner comes up and begins praying in broken Thai. Tears flow with the simple words she repeats with all her heart: Thank you, God. You love me. You give me new life. You see the good in me and you can take away the bad. We can walk together every day. Thank you, God. You love me...

Hello, I'd Like to Introduce My Favourite Tree

2006-03-10T05:30:00.000-06:00

Cassia fistula,

a.k.a. "Pudding pipe tree,"

or in Thai, Ratchaphruek.

"Golden Shower" fits too.

(With deep apologies to my former favourite trees)

Chaiwat

2006-03-07T22:34:00.000-06:00

In the picture, five-year-old Chaiwat is twisted sideways and laughing gleefully into his friend’s face, nudging him with an armload of books and toys. But his legs are so slight, dangling from the edge of his mother’s bed, and her smile from behind him is somewhat forced and wistful. She is dying of AIDS.

Six years later, I meet Chaiwat in the principal’s office at the Temple school he’s sponsored to attend. Outside, a golden Buddha gleams in the heavy press of sunlight; inside, Chaiwat perches uncomfortably on the edge of the vinyl couch. Gone is the hyper five-year-old grin. He is cautious with his eyes, reticent with his words… and maybe disappointed to be missing some of his recess time.

He shrugs off the healing bruise under one of his eyes -- from a boxing match, he says, with a friend -- but cannot shrug away the sad shadow in his eyes. Chaiwat resembles his grandfather in so many ways: the fine, high cheekbones; the politely deferential nod of his head; the fidgety fingers; and most poignantly, this haunted composure of defeat. Haunted again by death.

Not long ago, Chaiwat’s grandmother lost her mobility and much of her spirit to a stroke. I have just come from their patchy plywood home, which leans precariously over a polluted canal, where she lies silently weeping and plucking the sparse hair from her scalp. Chaiwait’s grandfather labours every day to the Temple to pick up some free food for his small family, but he is slowly starving himself in mourning for his wife. His thin frame is tattooed over with emblems of death – skulls, crossbones, devouring snakes.

Chaiwat spends all his free time and what pocket change he has escaping into video games with his friends. A troupe of them will wander down to the local hole-in-the-wall internet place and pay about fifty cents to take turns playing and watching one computer screen for an hour. Chaiwat doesn’t care much about school, contrary to the letters he sends to his sponsors, and plans only to finish grade nine.

After that, he’ll follow some of his relatives in becoming a monk, which is a respectable – and more importantly, inexpensive – lifestyle for an impoverished young man with few options. Perhaps he’s intent on leaving home because he knows his grandparents are dying and will leave him first.

The small miracle is: he hasn't left yet.

Not yet.

Som & Yin

2006-03-07T22:28:00.000-06:00

“Auntie” Som pulls up a stool in the front stoop of her home. “Sorry about the mosquitoes,” she says. “At night there are so many! They get fat eating while we’re sleeping!” Flashing her tired toothless grin, she wipes her hands on her Pokémon apron and gestures inside. “Last year the roof was full of rats, but it seems they’ve found a better home now!” Again that grin.

Auntie is one of Bangkok’s countless food vendors, and a glance inside makes it plain to see. The small, dark room she rents for herself and her granddaughter is piled high with cooking supplies: oil for deep-frying the battered banana tidbits she sells, sweet and spicy sauces to serve with the satay pork skewers, lifters and strainers and stacks and stacks of dishes… All of which she hauls daily to a busy street-corner just beyond the corrugated tin fence so commonly used to separate slum-dwellings like hers from public space. Out there under the ubiquitous coca-cola umbrellas, the steady scream of passing traffic makes it hard to chat; hence the invite back home.

She has a bit of a limp because she lost a couple toes in an accident not long ago, but the walk isn’t far. It’s here we await the after-school return of her granddaughter, Yin, who is part of the child sponsorship program. But it’s a Friday afternoon, and Yin appears to be having fun somewhere! Nearly finished grade five, she’s an energetic tomboy unafraid to join in on rowdy matches of soccer, handball, even takraaw – an acrobatic no-hands version of something like volleyball. Just as we’re regretfully eyeing the traffic jams, thinking we should start heading off, Yin saunters in off the falling-apart sidewalk, hair in a hurried ponytail, shirt disheveled and untucked from her pleated schoolgirl skirt.

Yin is happy to see Mac, the child sponsorship field worker. She gives him a casual wai, laughing easily like her grandmother as she explains that her marks in science and math aren’t so good, but otherwise she’s doing okay. Her voice is clear and strong, and she comfortably cracks her knuckles while we talk, nodding, “Yeah!” to Mac’s query as to whether or not she’ll be at church on Sunday.

In reality, Yin has walked so much farther than just to and from school. Labeled as a “naughty girl” and foisted on her grandmother by the neglect of her mother, who works as a “contemporary employee” somewhere in Bangkok, she’s come such a long way. She still has a long way to go: odds are, she will be tempted by money and pressured family to quit school and work as a bar girl once she’s done grade nine, if not before. Auntie Som, her sole care-giver, is aging rapidly, and will need her support soon. Yin’s path is indeed a falling-down sidewalk.

Oh God our only path, grant that she continue the daily trek so safely, so confidently…

outside the gate

2006-03-01T21:10:00.000-06:00

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever…

[He] suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through his own blood. Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore. For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.

Hebrews 13: 8, 12-14

They’re digging up the road outside the gate of my apartment complex. Silty mud dries to a fine rusty dust that coats everything. A snake lies squished near the ditch. Of all the balding dogs that laze and wander, one in particular stuns my heart: such impossibly tiny perfect bones, such wretched, nonchalant eyes. He is lame in one hind leg and limps indifferently through the constant traffic.

The women, too, are indifferent. Swathed against the sun in dark layered clothing and wide-brimmed hats, they squat to rest their backs awhile. Meet my eyes but don’t smile. They are construction labourers, who, along with their husbands, haul the many loads of bricks needed to build high-rise condos like mine. Slap up tin-roofed shanties for their children to sleep in until they move on to a new job-site.

Someone still remembers to water the clutch of orange poppies growing lopsided out of a rubbish heap, and if I follow a rutted path off the road, through a tangle of tall grass and reeds, I will find a swamp profuse with wind-blown water lilies. A tough-skinned palm tree streaming ragged fronds in the sunlight. It’s here I can trace the flight-paths of birds from below.

The window back at my apartment is often even higher than the birds’-eye view. Plumeria trees, bougainvillea shrubs, coconut palms are all religiously manicured, and the only dog I see is a wrinkled pug yapping at me from behind the tinted window of his owner’s air-conditioned SUV. Outside, this SUV shares the same road as a mother pushing her kids to work in a hand-cart.

Some of the dust out here settles into the embroidery of my embarrassingly white brand-name peasant blouse. I step back through the gate, sweating and heavy with the burden of cheap ice cream I’ve bought to share with the other missionaries who live on the inside.

ears to hear

2006-02-24T02:46:00.000-06:00

There’s a Be Good Tanya’s song that says the littlest birds sing the prettiest songs.

I think I have to agree.

Some co-workers and I were locked out of the office one morning this week, and waiting for a key: sitting on the curb chatting, eating watermelon, flicking away ants, sweating, feeling a bit guilty and wondering when the boss would show up…

when suddenly we heard such a beautiful song! Pat was the first to spot its source, pointing and laughing and exclaiming – “veLy sa-mall!!!”

Sure enough, a tiny bird was perched up there and singing so hard its throat was throbbing. Imagine something the size of a hummingbird come to rest on a power line, and barely able to balance for the joy inside. Imagine the strength of its song, as clear and undiluted as the blue sky behind it.

(These imaginations are true, I promise, even though some other things are true, too -- ungrounded electrical lines and nasty Bangkok smog! But I’ve never yet seen a bird electrocuted and the rain here lately makes morning air gentle, and yes, even a good clear blue…)

I am delighted when the same bird visits the tamarind tree outside my balcony window, or flits through the trees which are ripening bananas not far from the front step, or stops a moment in the stand of bamboo piled up with all the broken bottles we should be recycling.

There's a part of me that wants to run out and buy a "Birds of Southeast Asia" book so I can name that bird for myself, capture the brilliance of that morning memory, file it away somewhere special.

But Jesus says things like "you never know where the spirit's coming from, or where it's going..." (cf. John 3:8), and so there's this other part of me that's content to let that shining song stay up there with its tiny bearer, somewhere in the yet-wild Bangkok blue...

Naa

2006-02-19T22:15:00.000-06:00

There’s a cool breeze sweeping through the narrow walkways that wind around these ramshackle homes in the slums. This breeze lifts the heavy smell of the canals and refreshes both the home-dwellers and their laundry, which is hung out to dry on twine lines.

28-year-old Naa and her 6-month-old son, Beam, are enjoying the fresh air. Two of her nephews ride their bikes around in a small concrete courtyard, and another little neighbor girl runs from shrub to shrub naming all the brightly-colored flowers that gracefully persist in these surroundings.

Tomorrow in church, Naa will dedicate Beam to God. He’s a tiny, bright-eyed miracle, born premature but fighting through to life. Even last night, he cried for hours with a fever. But Naa, too, is a fighter. In spite of her own poor health since the delivery, she maintains a healthy routine for her family.

Every night before bed, she and her 6-year-old daughter, Bua, pray together: Bua prays that Beam will grow up to be a good brother, and Naa laughs and prays that Bua, too, will be a good sister. Already Bua is an enthusiastic student who loves to go to church.

Hope Cards is a crucial link in all this – providing supplementary money to help send Bua to school, to buy milk for Beam; and most importantly, providing the hope that keeps Naa faithfully worshipping God, despite strong resistance from her husband, who works in a night club. They came from rural Thailand with high hopes for a good secure life in Bangkok, the city of so many poor young couples’ dreams, but Naa is thankful to have found her security in God.

“We make these cards with all our hearts,” she says, “and if you buy one, you won’t be disappointed!”

Bee

2006-02-19T22:12:00.000-06:00

Bee’s shy smile is beautiful, and lights up the dim interior of the wood-frame room she rents in one of Bangkok’s slums. She is gracious, quick to offer the only cushion in the room to a guest. We sit on a patched and sagging lino floor above a smelly canal.

This is home for Bee, her two youngest children, and the man she calls husband, who neglected her as ‘minor wife’ for years before returning to her care. He is wasting away under a green mosquito net, weak and lethargic from diabetes or something worse. But this is family, this is home, and Bee is determined to do what she can to provide. Her mother gave her some rice last time she visited her other children in a small up-country city, and today some neighbors shared their morning-glory greens, pumpkin, and eggs. She carefully rations the sweetened condensed milk she waters down to put in her nearly-4-year-old daughter’s bottle.

All these things help, but Bee is most thankful for the work she has, and proudly points out the makeshift table – a small board resting on a bucket – where she creates her Hope Cards. When asked which one is her favorite to make, she says, “I like them all! I’d just like more!” At present, Hope Cards only has enough orders to give Bee about twenty cards to make per week. She loves her work so much that she usually finishes those twenty cards in one afternoon.

Her desire for her children is simple: a good education, so they won’t have to start working in the city at twelve years old, like she did. Hope Cards might seem like a drop in that bucket she overturns to craft the saa-paper cards, but the hope is so important, and it’s breaking through… “I want to change,” says Bee. “I want to give my life to this.”

hi's and lo's

2006-02-19T00:26:00.000-06:00

umm... so by request i'm posting a recent email here. i hope to make some introductions, soon, so you can all meet some of the people i'm living and working with!

and: post-script to "rice of life": last week in church we did communion with, you guessed it, bowls of rice!

**************

Many things have made me laugh in the last week, and some things have made me cry, too. I'll start with the funny stuff...

-signs posted in the first class lounge bathroom in beijing, reading something like:

SINK PLANK TOILET STOOL
WALL FACE URINE POND
LOOKING GLASS

USE YELLOW CLOTH USE RED CLOTH

...so, when in need of a handy cloth, don't grab the red one!

-the amazing service i had flying first class, including the last leg of the flight when i got 2 personal attendants to serve me caviar etc. i actually felt pretty weird...

-thai taxi drivers, and their jokes, e.g. an elderly driver dolefully saying, "ah, but my wife... she is my truly master..." (meaning she wears the pants in the marriage, i guess!)

-the fact that there are kwaai, yes, that means water buffalo, grazing not far from my posh suburban apartment.

-coworker Pat and i nearly falling off her rickety old motorbike going over a speed bump!

-saying yes to a lumpy-looking "sauce" for my noodle soup and realizing that it was blood when my server dumped it in and it "cooked" into clumps.

i've been a strange combination of overwhelmingly busy with adjusting to the office work at Project LIFE, and achingly lonely when i go home to my apartment -- it's a wonderful place; i've just never lived alone before. however, i can see already that these two things (the busyness and the quiet) will probably end up being a good balance.

Congratulations and bless you if you've made it, reading this far!

onward...

sarah

rice of life

2006-02-08T22:28:00.000-06:00

every sunday, we eat bread -- to remind us that god is as close & necessary as chewing & swallowing.

in thailand, where i'm going in a couple days, it's rice:
when you want to go eat, you say, bai gin kaow, which means, let's eat rice.

and what have any of us ever done to deserve the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe? it's so darned human to think we get what we deserve; to think we can coast along on our plenty of good intentions, doing the best we can, and things will balance out. in thailand, this happens to fit into the buddhist system of pun (merit).

but what have any of us ever done to deserve what we get?

oh christ, be as close & necessary to us there, too...

i can't help thinking of all the dear thai friends who have shared their rice with me, some even giving me bags of good farm grain to smuggle back to canada when i return!

oh lord, be as generous to them as they are to me.

2006-02-08T22:18:00.000-06:00

shine

2006-02-08T22:15:00.000-06:00

holy spirit

2006-02-08T22:11:00.000-06:00

beachsquint

still nearly wordless

2006-02-07T21:42:00.000-06:00

i am so excited to have a blog!
but so exhausted, at the moment, by all the technical details.

can we say country girl?... sigh

to stave off the wordlessness, i tried to share an image or two, but the pictures uploaded instead as blank canvases of tv snow.

static static static

my brother's watching hockey and the sportcaster's a poet: adjectives like "fresh, sticky" (ice). there goes the foghorn, here come the cheers; the game's over.

god bless us, every one

testing the mic

2006-01-22T11:50:00.000-06:00

uhh... imagine high-toned feedback...