Hippocrates says, "answer the question"

Tonight I performed a ritual; an age old requisite that has been around for more than a hundred years. I brushed my teeth.

I even flossed! And while the latter is more of a rare occurrence, the whole experience (if you can call it that) was somewhat eye-opening given our most recent classroom experience. Today we had a class that is required for our "global health" certificate called major diseases in global health and it was this class that suddenly addressed a new sense of awareness for me about hygiene. You see, this after rising and before laying to rest activity although somewhat subsumed by its general re-occurrence, is actually quite unique. It is unique, as it were, because there are a very numbered amount of people who are not yet "in the know" about the benefits of preserving ones teeth and protecting ones gums.

In other words there are people and children who are "out there" who do not know about brushing their teeth! Now this information had first become available to my consciousness when we traveled to Peru and the people who led the medical campaigns would stand with tribal children and show them the basics of brushing and they would explain to them just why it was so important-this odd and foreign practice of preservation. But for some reason it struck me all over again as we heard our professor lecture about the disparity between those people who do not have 5,000 to 7,000 dollars (the average amount Americans spend on health) to spare on health care and those who do. In our other global health class today we heard that of the 100 billion or so dollars that are spent on healthcare in the United states, 10% of it goes towards pharmaceuticals and plastic surgery. Thousands upon thousands with die of preventable diseases, transmittable and the like, and we will put another couple thousand towards botox.

I'm not talking about the "healthcare debate" here nor am I alluding to a political conundrum, to phrase this realization as a political debate would cheapen it in a major way. More what I am honestly asking is whether or not health is a human right? In a very real way, as I am trying to decide for myself the implications of this question. And though it means very different things in the United States from what it means in Bangladesh, Kenya and Guatemala (although I did hear on the radio this morning that the state of Mississippi currently contains the most impoverished amount of people out of all states in the Union with more than 20% of the population being poor, coincidentally they are also ranked dead last in terms of state healthcare) I am also asking us to observe the potential implications. Again, the implications are tied together with the answer to the question: do we care if others live or die. While it is true that states and cultures place value on human beings' heads, in essence, determining whether humans who are fit to carry on or whether they aren't, we, as the public, human community must answer the question. We have to answer the question because that is what comes with the territory of being alive during a time where someone, some place else is in the midst of dying.

What I am saying is that we cannot allow for 100 billion dollars of healthcare resources and funds to go to plastic surgery and superfluous pharmaceuticals. What I'm saying is that we cannot afford a lukewarm position on this one.What I am saying is that we cannot choose to halfway advocate life or death for others who are in a totally preventable state of dying, we cannot choose clean water for the poor without choosing education. . .even if that education is concerned with brushing ones teeth.

Answer the Question.

what to do with the exclusives in life

What does one do with exclusivity? I mean how do you handle it? Unfortunately the playground memory of be excluded from a game or activity does not oft fade nor the familiar feeling that follows when you become an adult. Once slighted in that same old familiar fashion it is not hard to feel flat out left out. Its amazing how that reaction, that sinking feeling must be so instinctively attached to the childhood experience. Moreover, its amazing that you can still feel those feelings even as a secure, grownup adult. So again I pose the question: how do you deal? Do you march right up to the individual (when I say march I mean email, or if you're really brave and only slightly less old fashion call) and tell them, "you said this and that, and it hurt my feelings?" No, I don't think that really flies, or even if it does I think it is not the gracious way to go about things because it feels very much like keeping score and while there is nothing wrong with be open about what exactly it was that hurt, I have to agree with my wife when she says that stick the exact words and phrases back in the person's face would just be a little more harsh and unforgiving. So again, what do you do? What do you do if the person or body or entity that seems exclusive is a church?

Ahha! So its true that churches can be just as exclusive as any group, often times offering up qualifiers of what even allows a person to join the church let alone one of their fellowship groups, small groups or what have you. Should not churches be limitlessly permeable? Shouldn't they be accessible for the masses regardless of where people are coming from? Hmmm... Is that heresy I speak of, blasphemy perhaps? Not atall! I should hope that people having admitted that they are interested in a church body or a church group, gathering, fellowship that this implies something about the very fact that they should not and cannot be turned away! They, whoever these unassuming people are and from a variety of backgrounds perhaps believers, non-believers, people who have been hurt by the church or never hurt, are already in a vulnerable place as new comers, as people who are hoping, just hoping for some welcome sign or some iota of hospitality. And I get that now, I get why gracious hospitality is such a necessary motif for scripture and for our practice in the daily life of reaching out to human beings. Reaching out. The art of reaching out, for it is with our call that we reach out and grab those "people" if and when they do approach with all apprehension and misgiving. It should not be a question, the question that I have posed should not exist, we should have to do without it. Because for a person to feel not accepted let alone rejected should not and cannot be an option if we are to be the living, breathing, hospitable bride. And in our brideship we can only hope to mirror Christ in that relationship. In that regard I will leave you with the very apt words of Bonhoeffer:

It is not Christ who has to justify himself before the world by acknowledging the values of justice, truth, and freedom. Instead, it is these values that find themselves in need of justification, and their justification is Jesus Christ alone. It is not a 'Christian culture' that still has to make the name of Jesus Christ acceptable to the world; instead, the crucified Christ has become the refuge, justification , protection, and claim for these higher values and their defenders who have been made to suffer. It is with the Christ, persecuted and suffering together with his church-community, that justice, truth, humanity and freedom seek refuge. It is the Christ who is unable to find shelter in the world, the Christ of the manger and the cross who is cast out of the world, who is the shelter to whom one flees for protection; only thus is the full breadth of Christ's power revealed. The cross of Christ makes both sayings true: 'whoever is not for me is against me' and 'whoever is not against us is for us.'

Home and left Alone. . . with our thoughts

With a rather abrupt but sensible decision we have returned home from our "journey for peace." We left Asia about two weeks ago and we have since been running about in classic busy-life fashion looking for work and seeing family and friends and getting organized but it has not been an altogether harsh come back. Almost always after trips like these you come to expect a certain degree of reverse culture shock. Sometimes it takes a week and other times it can take a month to get used to your new-old climate, to get re-acclimated with the pace, the people, the food, the culture, the politics-the life that it just so happens was not so far removed. Well this time around, probably not much unlike other times around, we find an integral part of this experience of returning home to be about asking questions. Questions like: what now? what purpose is/was there? and what does the future hold? all are seemingly relevant whether connected to our recent chapter or not. The Questions are important. It is all part of the process of 'stumbling towards the light together.' Our experiences were too incredibly rich to list and the lessons that we have gathered will probably take years to fully extrapolate and surely we would not have it any other way. We encountered a people within the Asian context so wholly oriented towards grace and hospitality that I feel this too will take years to grasp in all of its theological gravity. Beautiful people; so ransoming your heart that I have learnt to explain their stories in exactly that tense: when you go abroad to a place like Sri Lanka, Peru, South Africa or Uganda you will certainly leave a fragment of your heart in that place with those people and it is right that it should be this way. Because as one of our great forefathers, Henri Nouwen, urges, our only hope is to open the doors of our hearts and allow others in.

Ultimately we worked between two non-profit organizations. The one-a church so highly involved in social development and so intimately sympathetic to the subversive message of the Gospel that the shame of the widow and the cold felt by the orphan is made real. The second-a youth movement for peace and reconciliation where young children who have grown up knowing war and carnage and vengeance, stopped for a moment and collectively (both sides of the ethnic divide) agreed that there futures would no longer be determined by hatred and such things. In short, it was a hopeful message all around. We can testify that you should not be dismayed for as surely as power is being used in all places right now to promulgate violence there is a more powerful and more transcendent power that is being used to spread true messages of hope. It is alive and well . . .in the love advocate from northern africa, in the peace advocate from Sri Lanka, in the Gospel monger from South Korea, and in the Christian revolutionary from South America. Well, our chapter was very much to do with all of this, we were challenged and pushed and yet we grew closer still-closer to one another and our God in ways that we definitely could not imagine. We thought that we might be in Sri Lanka for a longer time but as it turns out God had different plans from our own, HIS were/are right of course. But it was very hard to except that notion when we had already been so determined in explaining to our supporters that we would be gone for a year on our journey. We spoke at length about what God had meant to do for our lives in that decisive moment and we came away with several things.

If there was one thing we had gathered during our deliberation about a rather abrupt exit it was this: it was premature for us to tell people that we would be gone a year altogether. We found that that timeline had become wholly artificial because in telling people this was our goal it was as if to say, "we have determined the time necessary for us to experience whatever it is that God has in store for us" rather than committing to a posture that says, "we are going to see what God has in store for us." What an amazing banner right? What if that was posted ahead of all of our decisions and deliberations in life from the extraordinary to the completely mundane? We have to wonder.