Belief and Bad news

So the EPA limits state's sovereignty in car emissions. Middle east peace talks revisit us. And the Obama overtakes Hillary in the latest poll.

I blow my nose and choke down sinus pills, listening to Uncle Tupelo's 'No depression' on repeat. My bosses mother-in-law is diagnosed with cancer.

What a world! Bad news-- good news-- blah news--the internal and external problems in the headlines; the internal and external problems in our lives.

Do I expect peace to be the de-facto state of the world? That peace is humankind's natural equilibrium? As if this suffering and war and injustice is an aberration in the plan. In a way, it is. From the original perfect plan. But now sin has been spliced into every molecule. Still there a yearning to return to the realm where perfect justice will reign. The eternity in all our hearts longs for it!

I long for steadfast belief in my God, and not just a wavering belief dependent on circumstances and headlines. I've been reading through Exodus and find Israel's wavering is a perfect example of the instability of my heart. They were under harsh slavery in Egypt for ~430 years after Joseph died, and God made himself known to Moses, declaring He would deliver them.

4:31 And the people believed; and when they heard that the Lord had visited the people of Israel and that he had seen their affliction, they bowed their heads and worshiped.

God hardens Pharaoh's heart against Israel; he harshly increases their work load.

5:20-21 They met Moses and Aaron, who were waiting for them as they came out from Pharaoh; and they said to them, "The Lord look on you and judge, because you have made us stink in the sight of Pharaoh and his servants, and have put a sword in their hand to kill us."

Israel freaks. Moses worries. God answers with the GOSPEL: his promises!

6:2, 7 God spoke to Moses and said to him, "I am the Lord...I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians"...

Israel disbelieves.

6:9 Moses spoke thus to the people of Israel, but they did not listen to Moses, because of their broken spirit and harsh slavery.

God shows his power through the ten plagues and deliverance to the wilderness; Pharaoh's armies pursue them to a dead end at the Red Sea.

14:11 they said to Moses, "Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? .. For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness."

But man's dead end is God's tunnel; they go through the Sea and Pharaoh's armies are utterly destroyed.

14:30 Thus the Lord saved Israel that day from the hand of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore. Israel saw the great power that the Lord had used against the Egyptians, so the people fear the Lord, and they believed in the Lord and in his servant Moses.

This battle of belief wages; the tide comes in and there is despair, the tide leaves and there is hope. Again and again.

And that's the bad news-- our natural tendency is one of self-reliance. So once the way gets a little rough, or the road a little foggy, we freak. We can't handle it on our own, so we revert to a hopeless, godless outlook. Oh how obvious it looks in hindsight! But in the moment, I am the same as Israel, believing that God has abandoned me, and that Egypt would have been better. Lord, Forgive me for my unbelief! God, the Lord, is surely the faithful God; full of grace and mercy to Israel, and to all who believe on Jesus Christ today. He does not leave or forsake us in the wilderness. He is the Redeemer, the Deliverer, the ONLY Savior.

The Bad news-- good news-- blah news--the internal and external problems in the headlines; the internal and external problems in our lives so often quake our little faith. O, help our unbelief!

confessions of holiday ugliness

Scrungy.

That's how I feel. I detest myself. As I ruminate about a boy. As I evaluate the end-of-year cds I'm going to buy. As I complain in my head. As I crab at my loved ones.

Somethings not right here. The veil has fallen again. I don't see Him rightly. So everything is out of perspective.

So I'll blame the Christmas season, the rush and bustle and expectations, the to-do lists.

Then I wonder about the uncertainties of the future. About a job. About development work. About graduate school.

I wonder what I have accomplished. I wonder if it matters.

I wonder at the meaning of all of this pain and suffering. The assassinations. The hatred. The fear. The terrorism. The hungry. The poor. The prostitutes. The gluttons. The slothful. The consumers. The materialistic. The drunks. The disabled. The dying. The sick. The hospitalized. The weak. The proud.

I don't know what to say. I am all of these ugly things.

But I felt a little relief when I read a friend's blog, about her work in Asia. She drove over 9 hours, across hundreds of miles of switchbacks, to get to the 10-member mountain village. She got there on Christmas Eve and found that she had no means of communicating on her own through the dialects! But she also found that He had made a way, and had made Himself known! Reading about her situation I felt a some relief from despair; Nothing is impossible with God. Indeed. My current funk, my scrungyiness, above all my SIN is not a barricade to Him. He pierced the impossible dividing wall-- He made a way-- with the Cross... This is the only remedy to my despair.

I am driven to despair, but He doesn't leave me there. I end with praise. Amen.

Rocking on

the beautiful AC Newman comments to the lovely Nic Hardcourt on "Morning Becomes Eclectic" about the New Pornographers evolution. Now on their 4th album, he summed up their progression as "it feels like we've been slowly becoming more of what we are."

I love that. They are making music which expressing more truly, more fully, more completely, what their collaboration as musicians means. They are progressing to a truer form of new pornographers. It strikes me as right on. They are not swaying with the trends, not bent on endlessly reinventing themselves, or making concept albums.

They are making rock. And it is good.

It is true on a personal level, too. I think each of us, everyday, is becoming more of who we are. We are making choices everyday which reinforce or alter our identity. The choices I make today affect who the 80-year-old Christine will be. Will she be a hopeful, loving, wise, godly woman who has persevered through the troubles and suffering? Who still loves Jesus and lives for him? Will she endure to the end?

I can't assume I will. I've felt the temptations of the present age quite heavily the last few days... that darn three letter word... and what guarantees that I will become who I want to be?
Only his promise... "that all things work together for the good of those who love him, who are called according to his purpose." Romans 8:28. Only God's faithfulness. He will bring us to the end. And that is the rock to trust in.

When world leaders are powerless.. we get to our knees

Unsettling and revealing article... that makes me humbled and crying out to Him who is SOVEREIGN over every nation and transforms men, one heart at a time.

Can the world stop genocide?

A conference in the Canadian city of Montreal has been discussing ways to prevent genocide. BBC world affairs correspondent Mark Doyle, attending the meeting, asks whether this can be done.

The 75-year-old woman sat on stage in front of hundreds of United Nations officials, legal experts and academics.

The day before, Marika Nene had travelled from Hungary to Canada - the first plane she had ever taken on her first journey outside Hungary.

She was not intimidated by the gathering. Her long hair was lit up by a stage light and her facial features were strong.

But the strongest thing about Marika Nene, a Roma - or Gypsy - woman who was trapped in the anti-Gypsy pogroms during World War II, was her determination to tell her story.

"I had no choice. I had to give myself up to the soldiers," Marika Nene said through a translator.

"I was a very pretty little gypsy woman and of course the soldiers took me very often to the room with a bed in it where they violated me. I still have nightmares about it".

Many members of Marika Nene's Roma family died in the work camps and the ghettos.

She had travelled to Montreal to give a reality check to the experts and UN officials at the "Global Conference on the Prevention of Genocide".

We do not need to have a legal finding that genocide has been committed in order to take preventive action Payam Akhavan Former war crimes prosecutor

She was joined by other survivors - from Rwanda, Cambodia and the Jewish holocaust. They all told their horrific stories bravely.

But there was something especially extraordinary about the elderly Roma who had transported herself from a village in eastern Hungary into the glare of an international conference in one of the most modern cities in the world.

It was an example of what Nigerian Nobel Prize-winning author Wole Soyinka would later describe to me as one of those points where people meet each other in a spirit of "egalitarian awareness".

Six million Jews or one million Tutsis are just numbers. But this strong Roma woman was a human being who was not ashamed to tell her story.

Betrayal

The Montreal conference drew personalities from the UN, academia and the legal profession.

The general aim was to build pressure on politicians to take mass killings - even in far-off places about which we know little and sometimes care less - far more seriously.

If that sounds like a fuzzy and vague ambition, Canadian Gen Romeo Dallaire, who commanded a UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, begged to differ.

Gen Dallaire led a force in Rwanda which was betrayed by UN headquarters in New York - his mission was starved of resources and so forced to observe genocide rather than stop it.

Since that failed mission, he has made a career out of lobbying politicians to do better on issues like peacekeeping, abolishing the use of child soldiers and nuclear disarmament.

"This conference is aimed especially at young people," said Gen Dallaire from a hotel surrounded by the campus buildings of McGill University, which organised the conference.

"If these young people became politically active," he continued, "they could dictate a whole new concept of what national interest should be and what humanity should be."

What is genocide?

Payam Akhavan, professor of international law at McGill and a former prosecutor at the UN war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, said defining genocide mattered from a legal point of view - but that analysing how it could be prevented was the real point.

"The legal definition of genocide is contained in the 1948 Genocide convention," he told me.

"In simple terms, it is the intentional, collective destruction of an entire human group based on national, racial, religious or ethnic identity."

"But the key point", Mr Akhavan continued, "is that we do not need to have a legal finding that genocide has been committed in order to take preventive action."

That is because, of course, by the time the lawyers have decided a mass killing fits their definition, it is usually too late to act.

The Iranian-born professor said it was necessary to think about the ingredients of genocide, which he listed as:

• incitement to ethnic hatred
• demonisation of the target group
• radicalisation along ethnic or religious lines
• distribution of weapons to extremist groups
• preparation of lists of those to be exterminated

Similarities

As someone who personally witnessed and reported on the Rwandan genocide, I found it quite disturbing to read about other mass killings.

Genocides can only be stopped by the people directly involved Gerard Prunier

It was not the details which I found shocking, but the spooky similarities that kept cropping up across the world.

The lists prepared by the Hutu extremists in Rwanda, for example, were mirrored by the obsessive recording of the details of victims by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

The yellow identity stars Jews were forced to wear in World War II were the equivalent of the ethnic identity cards every Rwandan had to carry.

This is the grim opposite of Wole Soyinka's "egalitarian awareness". It is the social science of genocide, which appears to have common features across history.

The conference aimed to isolate and analyse Mr Akhavan's "early warning" factors to raise awareness.

But what to do with the information?

As speaker after speaker reminded the Montreal conference, the US government, among others, has asserted that genocide is being committed right now in the Darfur region of Sudan.

It was continuing even as we sipped our coffee in softly carpeted rooms and nibbled our Canadian canapes.

Everyone has known about it for several years but virtually nothing had been done to stop it.

A dissident voice

So all the talk about "early warnings" and "United Nations peacekeeping forces" and "the will of the international community" could be said to amount to little.

At this point, a controversial scholar intervened with comments which challenged the entire conference.

French author Gerard Prunier, like the proverbial ghost at a wedding, said genocides could not be prevented by the international community.

"When you see a dictatorial regime heating up, everyone starts talking, talking, talking ... and by the time the talking stops, either matters have quietened down or they have happened."

And that is the crux of the matter, according to Mr Prunier - it is difficult for politicians or the military to intervene in a situation that has not yet evolved into a crisis.

Give war a chance?

So what is Mr Prunier's solution?

"Genocides can only be stopped by the people directly involved - and usually that means people involved in the war that accompanies most mass killings."

And if it is the government committing the genocide, the solution is "arm the rebels", he says.

"It won't be clean - it will be messy," the French author said, "but it is more likely to stop the mass killing than international intervention."

To a large extent, Mr Prunier has history on his side. The Holocaust only ended when the allies destroyed Hitler's regime.

The killing fields of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge were only stopped when the Vietnamese army moved in. And the genocide in Rwanda only ended when the Tutsi rebels overthrew the extremist Hutu regime.

Against this, it could be argued that some interventions have worked - for example the Nigerian intervention in Liberia, which was followed up by a UN peacekeeping mission.

It seems that resolving dramatic human rights abuses may require some of the diplomacy and the "international good will" that flowed so freely in Montreal.

But as well as what Winston Churchill called "Jaw Jaw", some situations, it seems, may only be resolved by "War War".

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/7043411.stm

Published: 2007/10/13 18:25:03 GMT

© BBC MMVII

Lightening Bolt Struck in a Cubicle

I just had an idea.
Would it be possible to do pre-climate change research by:
1. finding a poor urban area likely to be affected by global warming, either fisheries (economics, natural resources) rising tides or even increased likelihood of hurricanes
2. partner with community to make preventative measures against likely events to come in future. Of course it's difficult to predict the future. But we can try, for this hypothetical purpose at least.
--You could even do this in New Orleans, possibly?

Now THE question: Could this get funded? Is there any likelihood of getting funding for the "pre-emergent" as opposed to the gaping wounds that plague the groaning world of today?

Get Comfortable

Are we all insecure with our beliefs? Specifically, are we insecure that people believe differently than us? Yes. I think so. I think to a large extent we are threatened by these beliefs that are different than our own, even when the different beliefs are not actually threatening our own. Is it because we don't understand the other person? The Christian doesn't understand their atheist classmate, as the conservative doesn't understand their liberal cousin... And all of the misunderstanding lead to fear and assumptions.

This undercurrent of insecurity appears to be pretty constant, especially in our polar political climate. Therefore I was refreshed by reading this from Dennis Prager's article "Ann Coulter Wants Jews to Become Christian -- So What?"

"As a practicing Jew, I do not agree with Ann Coulter's theology any more than those attacking her do. But I am neither offended by her nor frightened by her or her beliefs. She believes that Christianity is better than Judaism. So what? Why is that in any way different from liberals thinking that liberalism is truer and morally superior to conservatism? Or conservatives thinking that their values are superior to liberal values?"

Prager's transparency is refreshing. Sometimes being candid about the elephants in the room-- such as our polar beliefs-- is just what is needed. And it reminds me to step back, and accept that it's okay for people to believe differently. I don't need to freak out or immediately become defensive, my natural response. I don't need to be fearful when my co-workers are secure in their belief in evolution-- as I am secure in my belief in creationism. I guess I am arguing for a holistic tolerance-- one that accepts not just the politically correct queer student group but also the so-called politically incorrect pro-family group.

Is this possible?

And even more importantly, is this Biblical and honoring to God?

Quotidian

In my GRE studies I ran across the word 'quotidian.' What a good word. So in order for it to be cemented in my brain, I dusted off the blog. It induced a coughing fit (A year of sitting around will do that) but I think it's good to be back rambling & thinking & processing the world in light of the gospel in this format again-- it's almost like talking out loud. I'm more accountable to what I say.
So here it goes...
I would argue that the gospel is quotidian. That is, the gospel belongs to each day. Each and EVERY day. It's not just a Sunday thing. Everyday I need to belong to the good news that Jesus is for me-- 100% for me-- and that his death and life opened the way to forgiveness and hope and joy and fulfillment in God. This daily "appropriation" of the gospel (As Jerry Bridges says) is NECESSARY. And the constancy of it does not make it commonplace or ordinary-- not in the least! Rather it increases my joy, because as I know myself more and more (and the depth of my sin and unbelief) I am more and more amazed at God's mercy to me...Mercy that is quotidian.