HOME SWEET HOME

Ben and I worked all weekend cleaning our new home. We came across many cockroach families but Ben is very good at killing them. We now have a kitchen and although American foods are rare here we have made grilled cheese and pasta. I have even made cookies. I crunched up some Caterbury bars and made chocolate chip cookies YUM! Our room is almost complete but we have found that it is so much hotter living in the city and specifically in this room that we will have to invest in some form of room a/c due to the fact that Ben and I cannot seem to sleep and wake up drenched in our own sweat. We did not use a/c in our old room but it was much cooler than our new 95 degree home. Ben and I got to check in to a hotel for Ben’s bday night and truly had an amazing time of rest and relaxation. Praise the Lord this is just what we needed after a long month of settling in.
I have really been missing my family lately so when you see any of them please give them a hug for me. I do not know what I would do without the support they have continually given Ben and I. As you know, I have really been struggling with fear while being here and my dad, mom and grandmother have continually prayed for me. I also feel so blessed to have families from pathways who have given me bible verses and prayed for me over email. These acts of love have kept Ben and I going. Ben and I feel our trip is just beginning now that we are in our permanent living situation. We have a lot to learn and look forward to forming a community here. The church here is full of mostly young boys so I am sure Ben will do a great job of getting to know them all and I have offered to make cookies and brownies so we hope these treats will help relationships form easily. All of the members of our ten person church hahah speak English so this helps as well. We are also going to be doing our first outreach event for the community in August. We will be putting on a show involving a very talented Karate Guy from the states who will also share his testimony. Please be praying that this will bring new members to our church.
Ben and I have also been busy working for the Sri Lanka unites conference which is in August as well. We are helping create a book for students to take home after the conference. This book will help them create a club on campus which addresses the issues of ethnic conflict and reconciliation in everyday life. We miss you all dearly and love hearing from you so please continue to email us. Our prayer requests are for good health for Ben and I, for our marriage as we grow and learn how to love each other through challenging times and for my fear of sickness that I will learn to rely on God and trust in his plan.

Learning to Trust God every day

I feel I can just start to see the sunlight after our most challenging week yet. I have now recovered from two days of constant trips to the toilet but praise God it did not last very long and was not very aggressive. This week I have felt completely inadequate for work abroad. The Bola girls just left and the three days prior to their trip home a few of the girls came down with an extremely aggressive stomach virus and had to go to the hospital. I lived in fear for these three days that Ben and I would get the virus as well and have to go to the hospital. Praise God we did not get come down with this very challenging sickness. This past week has felt very spiritually oppressive as person after person in the church falls ill and it seems like we are being hit from all sides. Pastor Adrian was hospitalized overnight for very bad asthma. He is currently taking medicine but cannot sleep and has a very hard time breathing. The pain he has been feeling for over a month now was just starting to get better and then he was hit with this. The Kithu Sevena Church in the South was attacked and had to be shut down due to Buddhist extremism. The pastor and his family had to flee for their lives. I have never had to be so dependent on the Lord for every single day (except in Peru). It is challenging here in a very different way as the spiritual warfare feels so real. 

We are going to try to move into our new home Saturday. We had our first cockroach in our room last night. He was very big but Ben did a great job killing him. We also saw our first snake at the farm yesterday. We have had water for the past few days Praise God! And hopefully our new home will have it as well. Please pray for the transition to the English speaking church. It will be challenging at first to adjust to a new area, group of people and a way of life. Please also pray for the recovery of my stomach and protection for Ben and I against sickness. We will be able to cook our own food at the English speaking church so hopefully some of our tummy issues will be lessened. Despite the extreme challenges of fear and sickness last week I am amazed at how good God is. He has given me a peace today that I can only attribute to him. Praise the Lord! Ben and I have been working a lot and we have been able to help the church with many tasks they do not have time to do. We feel so blessed to be busy and have a purpose here. P.S. It is Ben’s birthday on Monday July 27th so if you remember send him an email! Applebee.benjamin1@gmail.com

The Mysterious Workings of God

I am currently laughing as I write this blog because God works in mysterious ways. Ben and I had our first trip to the hospital yesterday. I was walking down the stairs at the Church and took a very bad fall. I went into shock for about five minutes and was unable to see and then was taken to the hospital for x-rays. Nothing is broken and I can now proudly say I have had an x-ray done of my buttock. Sri Lanka’s churches are currently fighting on the front lines of the spiritual battlefield. Both Pastor Adrian and his wife, Auntie Ophilia, have been sick for over a month now and deal with extreme pain on a daily basis. Two weeks ago a young women who has worked in the business world for years decided to make the change over to full time ministry. She is an amazing asset to the Kithu Sevena Team and will certainly bring order to a somewhat chaotic working environment. Since her decision she has caught filaria, a mosquito born illness and also experienced horrific vomiting and was rushed to the hospital. Another staff member just caught Dengue fever. Kithu Sevena has started working a great deal in the North and many devout Buddhists have come to know the Lord. Yesterday we had the opportunity to hear multiple testimonies from pastors working in the refugee camps. One pastor has even been able to set up a church in the middle of a camp. This is truly a miracle. This is a revolutionary time for the church as the church prays for a revival in this country. As the churches hard work continues the devil is continually trying to get in the way using sickness, pain, depression and discouragement. After I fell yesterday the Kithu Sevena team prayed continually for my healing and although I feel extremely sore today I feel much better than yesterday. One of the Pastors at our church came to me this morning and said he was praying for me all night and that God had given him a word for me. Pastor Shri said ‘That although I thought I knew God's vision for my life that it would become blurred while in Sri Lanka but that God would slowly show us what we are called to do. So not to worry." He encouraged us to work on our prayer life and to continue leaning on each other in difficult times. This was so powerful to me. This is exactly how I have been feeling. I no longer know where Ben and I are called to work but I am assured he will make it clear. Now I just need the courage and strength to listen. Through this challenge came many amazing spiritual moments. I feel a new bond with the Sri Lankan team and I believe they feel a new bond with us. They view this challenge as a spiritual attack and have taken Ben and I under their arm. We are now fighting the spiritual fight with them. We are no longer just the white visitors but on their team. It is a truly amazing feeling! Please pray for the spiritual attacks currently taking place on the Kithu Sevena Church Staff. Another prayer request is for Ben and my visas. We only received a two-month visa when we asked for a twelve-month visa. They show great prejudice to Christians here and so Pastor Adrian will have to try to use his political connections to get us a longer visa. Please pray he will be successful. There is an Australian team here currently and it has been very fun for Ben and I to get to know people from this part of the world. Please pray for quick healing over my body so we can travel to the farm on Monday. We have not moved to the English speaking church yet but hopefully we will move their soon. We are very excited about beginning our work there. Thank you for the emails you have sent. Your prayers and encouragement are truly what helps us make it through.

God Is Sovereign

The Lord has definitely been growing Ben and I. For those of you who know me well, you know I hate throw-up. I have a completely irrational fear of throw-up. The fact that I fear throw up does not work well with working abroad. I often find myself in awe of the fact that God has given Ben and I a heart to work abroad because in so many ways I am ill equipped. I hate bugs and things that are dirty, have a specialized diet and hate throw up (an almost inevitable part of traveling abroad). This week the Lord truly threw a challenge my way. We traveled to the English speaking church with the girls who live at the church and during the 45 minute drive 7 people threw up. Although this was very challenging, God came through calming my anxiety and giving me joy despite my surroundings. Ben and I were just asked to move to the English speaking church near Colombo. We are sad in one sense because we will be much more secluded from our community but on the other hand we feel this is our calling and the place where we can serve the most. The English speaking church is just starting to get on its feet and due to the language barrier it is the place we will be able to help the most. Pastor Adrian told us that 10% of Sri Lanka’s population speaks English as their first language. These are the people the English speaking church seeks to reach. Many of the English speakers are the educated and elite of Sri Lanka. Kitu Sevena wants to reach this population in order to aid its work for the poor. It also wants to reach this group of people because no one is currently trying to. We are excited and scared to begin the moving process. The new home we will be staying in needs a great deal of cleaning, furniture and work. So we have a lot ahead of us. Please be praying for this transition. 

This week we spent 3 days at Ape Kadella farm and took part in the Asian Access Conference, a conference that seeks to equip Asian pastors for ministry. It was an extremely enlightening time. During our stay we had many visitors to our room. I wish I had a video of Ben and I trying to remove the hoping frog and crazy lizard from our room. Although we succeeded in removing them, we looked up fifteen minutes later to see their eyes staring back at us. So we decided to share our home with them. The farm accommodations have many creatures and their poop. It is always an adventure when we sleep there. Today I have been deeply saddened by the ever present pain in Sri Lanka. Ben and I have heard story after story of sexual, physical and emotional abuse. I met a beautiful 30 year old women who has been living at the widows home at Ape Kadella for 8 months her entire face is burned from the acid her enraged husband threw on her one evening. Ben and I also heard the horrific stories of some of the orphans. A young boy of only 13 was given to the Buddhist monks at a very young age. His mother is a prostitute and his father is dead. He was sexually abused by the monks at night. This is a reality for many boys of poor families. Families give their sons to the monks because they will feed and educate them but sexual abuse is rampant. This young boy now lives at Ape Kadella, he is too emotionally damaged to attend school and sometimes tries to abuse the younger boys at the home. The depth of the brokenness and pain of the thousands of orphans in Sri Lanka is truly unbearable. Sri Lanka is truly a country full of abandon children due to the tsunami and war. Pray for the Orphans and Widows of the broken world we live in. Even though we often cannot see God among the horrific tragedies of our world, HE is Sovereign.

Coconut Skins

It has been brought to my attention that there is some due contextualization for some of my words thus put forward. When I say, "my words" it should not be too difficult to ascertain the identity of which writer belongs to which entry. (Actually, we were joking about that the other day but we both agree that this is a nice compliment that Rylee might catalogue all the experiences that we are having as they candidly occur and that I chime in about some of these other issues and vice versa to be sure.) Some things I wish to add to the account concerning Job, suffering and war; some important things. For example, there are two important factors about Job's overall story that are quite relevant to understanding the presence of human suffering. For one thing, the story opens with what kind of suffering Yahweh might permit in the life of Job- a point that does not rest well with pretty much any of us-believer or not. In other words, the question that we often face: why on earth would God allow evil things to happen (e.g. immense suffering and war)? And one of the conclusions that we come to in the midst of this question is that we cannot comprehend the whys or hows and yet we still believe that HE is omnipotent and wholly good-one simple yet profound definition of what faith is. However, just because we conclude that our minds are too small to understand does not mean that our hearts are too small to sympathize. (When I use the word sympathy, I mean the literal translation, which is 'to suffer with another'.) Additionally, while I cannot necessarily understand the paradox of why God allows us to carry  on in this way I can, I think, understand some of the reasons that man chooses to wage war and these points are the the ones that I wish to seek out and question very intentionally through some posts on the blog especially to our Christian brothers and sisters. For me and for this particular discourse, to revisit Nouwen's Reaching Out is quite helpful for direction,

"Maybe, for the time being, we have to accept the many fluctuations between knowing and not knowing, seeing and not seeing, feeling and not feeling, between days in which our hearts seem tied to a millstone, between moments of ecstatic joy and moments of gloomy depression, between the humble confession that the newspaper holds more than our souls can bear and the realization that it is only through facing up to the reality of our world that we can grow into our own responsibility."

I would like to have Nouwen explain away this entire concept but alas his own instruction suggests that we search our innermost selves in order to live the questions. 

That is what I have committed to do for our time here in Sri Lanka and it is what I am committed to do for the rest of my life: live the questions. I will risk vulnerability, irrelevancy and uncertainty if it means that my fellow brothers and sisters might begin to live the questions themselves; the, "questions about why we live and love, work and die" and the question of suffering-that will not soon escape my own heart. And I can say that as I find myself presently pondering this question, I am neither cast into a severe bitterness about those who wage war or inflict pain nor am I subdued by a false sense of contentment that there is nothing we can do to affect the great sufferings of others. That is the difference in my question about suffering: I am not suggesting that you search your hearts with the intention of solving the problem of evil (for that task is left for HIM alone) rather what I am asking of us all is to consider what role we are playing in coming alongside our fellow image bearers.  

Perhaps something else that I want to accomplish through this post is to say: some of the things that I write about will come across as outspoken; some of the things will not sit well with you at first or at all; some of the things might seem politically polarized but I can assure you that all of the things that I write about will be thoroughly thought through. The things that I write about are coming from a sincere passion to share and to share in an honest, real and forthright manner. In another way, I am trying to empty myself in order that I might be filled through this service; I am trying to empty my heart and my mind in order that I might experience an internal poverty that is open and willing to be fed and filled once again. I want to become like the so many coconut skins that we have come across-lying there cracked and open, empty and broken, and yet still useful in some way or another. Part of this experience is what Nouwen calls the 'solitude of heart' and so just as I began with the words of Henri Nouwen, I cannot help but finish with his words simply because they appear to make sense of these issues with such acute articulation,

"In the solitude of the heart we can truly listen to the pains of the world because there we can recognize them not as strange and unfamiliar pains, but as pains that are indeed our own. There we can see that what is most universal is most personal and that indeed nothing human is strange to us. There we can feel that the cruel reality of history is indeed the reality of the human heart, our own included, and that to protest asks, first of all, for a confession of our own participation in the human condition."

A Week and Three days

Wow...I do not even know where to begin. It is truly amazing how busy we are here. We have now been here a week and three days and already have visited the south, where the tsunami hit, and Ape Kedella, Kithu Sevena’s farm which includes two orphanages, a home for widows and their children, job training and a missiological research and training center with housing for the students. In addition we were able to visit an elephant orphanage for war affected elephants. Some of the elephants were injured in the war (a leg destroyed by a land mine or eyes shot by poachers) others had lost their families. It is amazing how the war has affected so many aspects of Sri Lankan society. Our shower and toilet was fixed and we spent hours cleaning the room and making it feel like home. Last night we were told that we would no longer be living in that room and that we would have a “new permanent” room. This was very challenging for Ben and I. When you are experiencing culture shock you tend to hold tightly to certain comforts. The room had become our home and it was challenging to embrace the move with grace and love. But we made it through and we spent this morning cleaning everything. In the end, this is a much better place for us. So praise God for his providence.
Today was also laundry day. And yes there needs to be a whole day dedicated to laundry. In general men are never seen doing laundry here so the girls at the house got quite a kick out of Ben scrubbing away. It is amazing how much time it takes to do your laundry by hand. Not only does it take forever the outcome is barely cleaner than what you started with. All of our white clothing is now blue somehow...But luckily Blue matches pretty much all of the clothing we brought. Currently there is a Biola team working here, there are about 10 girls, and staying at the church. So between the girls at the orphanage, me and the Biola girls Ben is extremely outnumbered. Today is our fourth of July we will be going to a BBQ at the American embassy which I imagine will be small seeing that I have not seen any other white people here besides the Biola girls. It is extremely challenging to get visas here and Pastor Adrian said that there are very few missionaries living and working in Sri Lanka. It is very different than Africa, where you are likely to come into contact with multiple missionary families.
Ben and I are working very closely with Pastor Adrian and are basically his personal assistants and are capturing video footage and pictures of all of the projects for their future website. I am continually awed by pastor Adrian’s faith. Kithu Sevena, although in a poor area, has worked very hard and funds almost all of its work on its own. They establish projects without the funds and watch as God continually provides. The church has set up programs to train people how to breed pigs, chickens and even flowers. Ben and I are very happy to be working with Pastor Adrian because we feel our strengths are truly being used. We feel we actually can help the church which is an amazing feeling. My bed is currently broken and breaks when I sit on it. Ben just sat on it and fell to the ground...oh the joys of living abroad. Our feet have stopped swelling and the bug bites have lessened ever since we fumigated our room with extra strength bug killer. We are really settling in which is a great feeling.

Job

We all know that the start of Job's story is a horrible tale, a truly sad beginning. Some of us receive this but then simply dismiss it as purely allegorical; then perhaps it didn't really happen and this was not a real man's pain. Many of us actually do interpret the story as rooted in time-that is to say-factual, not merely symbolic and because it is an infamous part of the Pentateuch, we sort of marginalize it into some Sunday school category. The point is: this story of tremendous loss is real. It happens every single day all around the world. Take, for example, these two stories that we have come across within one week of our stay here. First, the testimony of a Sri Lankan girl, named Thulasi, from the Northern territories (the area most afflicted with the war as this was the rebel headquarters) who is currently taking care of her younger sister. This young girl is no older than ten years of age and the title of her report from the North reads, "a baby carrying a baby"-surely this is an appropriate caption as Thulasi is now her sister's primary caretaker in a land riddled with chaos and desperation. As the story goes Thulasi's family was huddled inside a homemade bunker when her parents ran out to retrieve something from their home just yards away. Thulasi lost her parents to an air force raid that day and her story is not the only one of its kind. 

Another example are the the girls that live beneath us-the girls who have been rescued from abusive situations. I like to refer to them as the, "church girls" because they live here on the campus and they are involved in serving the church in numerous capacities: from laying out the mats during communion to cooking and cleaning-they are amazingly strong and courageous people. As orphans, these girls have one another, they have the Church and they have their Abba; beyond that they know no biological kin. 

You see there are several stories like this; stories of loss and suffering and unimaginable pain. My time, my experience has not afforded me the luxury of being apologetic about these encounters. And that is why, even though I bear in mind my own junior highers back home who may read this, I cannot spare the details of this last story. The details about how children just like them have been abducted (or falsely adopted rather) into sex slavery. Apparently, after the tsunami swept through the Southern villages, some people from the West came through the camps (that had been setup up for survival in the aftermath) and found children who had no one to take care of them. These people from the West were allowed to adopt these kids who had just lost their parents, siblings, families, in some cases-everyone. Consequently, they were then sold into slavery, their bodies into bondage. Bearing in mind this dastardly record, I ask myself why I was meant to ponder such things; I ask God what sense there is in His plan for this type of exposure. The questions I should also be asking myself are what am I going to do about it; what was I meant to do with this knowledge? The answer to that question is still very much in the works; it is a question that I won't let a day go to waist for. 

The challenge that I will pose to any readers out there is to think about these people for a moment; consider them and then read about Job again as if it were about a real man's true and deep pain. Maybe you will understand why Job's friends wept as they did when they approached him. Then think about everything you know about war; everything you've ever heard about warfare. Are the realities of warfare constructive? Or is war a necessary medium for construction; resolution; communication? Or if you believe in peace? Love? the Gospel. . . ? Where do they fit in? And if you're thinking to yourself: haven't men warred since the beginning of time? The truth is: that statement is fundamentally false; not all men have waged war against another. That presumption is a Western recollection that is not rooted in a global, historic record as many civilizations have posited themselves wholly opposed to war. And in case this orientation against war appears a neo-hippie ideology, I assure you the Prince of Peace would have been a lifetime subscriber.