Raised From Their Beds

It's often endearing to hear non-native speakers try to communicate in English.  Often their childlike word choices are actually quite communicative, yet in ways that we don’t expect.

On my latest trip to the Afar desert, we received the obligatory overview briefing from the field workers before visiting the project sites.  I was pushing the staff to keep this short -- the travelers are often fighting jetlag just to stay awake, and making them sit in a stuffy room after breakfast and follow a too-technical PowerPoint presented with thick accents often brings slumber to the even the hardiest among us.

Buried somewhere in this presentation was almost a throwaway line that sounded so odd that I wrote it down.  (My thumbs get a real workout on these trips as I type furiously into my smartphone.) We heard that people living with the virus that causes AIDS had been "raised from their beds." It struck me as a phrase that only faith healers and pitch men would use in this country, but it was spoken with humility and without any claims of superhuman power or braggadocio.

We heard a great deal more, and then proceeded to make several project visits.  The next day images, not words, flooded into my mind. And then those words made sense...

The faces hang on the wall in my office. And they live in my laptop.  But otherwise, I assumed they were faces of those long since dead.  I can "see" them clearly in my mind just writing this, the nameless man and the woman whose photos I'd taken five years earlier during another HIV Support Group meeting in Afar.  Their faces were so gaunt, eyes pleading and almost visibly losing their light... I would look at the photos and with a little sigh and sense of empathy I'd wonder: How long ago did she/he die?  I didn't see them when I returned two years ago.  I was certain these two had succumbed to the virus and I was looking at "dead men walking" on my wall, almost like seeing a photo of JFK smiling and waving as he drove in his motorcade in Dallas, or Dr. King standing on his motel balcony in Memphis.

Two years ago, in 2010, it was rather shocking to notice the faces I didn't see from my 2007 visit.  So I was hopeful that due to better treatment -- thanks significantly to President Bush's AIDS Initiative -- that there wouldn't be so many additional missing faces this time. 

Then as soon as I walked into the dimly lit room, I recognized a man.  But not a face from 2010.  Though he was older, I'd seen the photo so many times that I was rather certain his was one of the faces on my wall.  "I've… met you, haven't I?" I asked him, still unsure what more to say.  He nodded.

We sat down and went through the usual formalities and introductions.  Then we were invited to speak or ask questions.  Whenever they are willing or can be coaxed into it, I try to let the visitors speak for our group, but this time I felt strongly that this was my turn, and my legs propelled me upward almost involuntarily. 

Yet I could hardly speak.  I didn't want to offend or say the wrong thing, but I felt I needed to tell the story.  Trying not to choke up, I began a public conversation with this man who was now five years older but who looked younger and healthier than when I first met him in 2007.  I expressed my joy, my wonder!, at finding him alive when I was certain he had passed away.  We hugged and took pictures, I found out his name--Saeed Mohammed, and I sat down having had what became my most memorable and poignant experience of the trip.

We then heard several stories from HIV sufferers who had taken small loans averaging about $80 to start businesses, thanks to a $1000 loan pool our 2010 team had donated for this purpose before we left Ethiopia.  It was a real delight to hear the stories of how the loans were being put to use...

One man, Alem, had no source of income. With his loan for $80, he rented a fridge and started selling soft drinks. "Today, I can pay for my children to be in school." He even saves about 50 cents each day.

A woman, Amenot, received a loan of about $100 to start a charcoal business.  She told us that because of heath limitations and discrimination, "Before this, I didn't have any work."

A moment later, as I was scanning the others in the room during the stories, there at the farthest point across the round thatched-roof room was another face…again different but distantly familiar.  I asked and found out that she was in fact the woman from the same 2007 visit—the other face on my wall!  "Ergo" is not only still alive, but her children are now in school.

It's difficult to articulate the feeling I experienced, and I certainly had great difficulty expressing it that day. But I now have a small understanding of the feeling of those who witnessed Lazarus come walking out of his tomb.  Truly, I had seen first-hand that people were honestly being “raised from their beds."

Maybe it’s a good reminder to me to take it easy on the writers of the gospels when their human words seem to fall short in communicating works of God.  That day, I felt that I too was witness to a work of God, a modern day resurrection, and I was speechless.

My New Hero

I'm sitting in the side chapel at St. John Chrysostom church, where Janet and I are spending a reflective hour as part of the Good Friday prayer vigil. Earlier this morning I read a meditation for Holy Saturday which I'd written last year but never sent out. It was concerning an attack on World Vision's office in Afar Ethiopia, which happened just before Holy Week last year. My reflection was that in Afar we were in the in-between time: we knew about the bad news, but we didn't yet know what good would come of it... "This day, the day between Crucifixion Friday and Resurrection Sunday, is the 'not yet' day, the day when the worst had already happened, and no one knew the best that was about to happen.  The disciples thought it was over; the women went to the tomb early Sunday morning simply to dress out Jesus' body, not to check whether his body was still there or had been resurrected.  They could not envision another chapter to a story they thought had ended in tragedy. The best was about to happen.  God was using death to bring life in all its fullness." I'd closed with a twist on Tony Campolo's famous sermon: "In Afar, it's Saturday; but Sunday's comin'!"

But I didn't send it out, partly because it seemed a bit glib and partly because I was concerned that explaining the causes of the attack might be too complicated or risk being misunderstood and derail the piece. I thought about sending it this year but—as I complained to Janet while we drove to our church, it’s a year later and there’s no Easter ending to the story yet.

To start my prayer vigil time, I decided to employ an ancient ritual for focusing the mind on God by "walking" along a handheld labyrinth using my fingers and a stylus.  As usual, my mindset while traveling toward the center of the labyrinth was that of moving into God's presence.  But then it shifted, to a reminder of Christ's arduous but willing journey up to Golgotha, Skull Hill, the place of his ultimate suffering.  My usual joy upon arrival became serious if not ominous.

Then my mind shifted again, to the suffering from last year, and then to what happened a few weeks ago when I was again in Afar...

For the first time, this year I was blessed to take my 16-year-old granddaughter Emmy to Ethiopia! She was an absolute delight to have along and stole everyone's heart, not least her proud grandpa's. Last weekend Emmy and I reflected again on our trip as we prepared to give a talk at University High School in Irvine, which was holding a fundraising event for WV.  I asked Emmy: Who does she remember most when she thinks about Afar. I was expecting her to say the newborn baby she’d held in her arms, or the teen girls she met, or the students she addressed. Maybe even the camel she rode.

But she surprised me by answering, "I always remember Yared. He's my new hero." Yared was WV's project manager in Afar, and one of several hosts for our group. When Emmy learned that Yared had been injured in last year's attack, she was moved to give him a letter and the Valentine's Day teddy bear that her mom had sneaked into my suitcase for her.

After she’d written the letter, we all had a lovely morning at a school, interacting with the kids there (pretending to teach them English while they pretended to learn from us). As we drove back, Emmy and I were able to climb into a vehicle alone with Yared so Emmy could give him her gift. As he read her note, Yared wiped silent tears; they rather streamed down his face. I asked if he would mind telling us about the attack.  The story was dramatic and painful.

An angry mob of young people had attacked a high school teacher, and as the adrenalin-soaked herd headed back into town, they passed the World Vision office and decided to wreak more havoc.  The upshot is that they hit Yared over the head with bricks and though a few of them (the girls!) pressed to do more, he and three other staff were left bleeding and semi-conscious inside the wrecked office.  The wounded were moved out of the area for treatment and recuperation for several months.  Yared told us he'd been reassigned to the regional office, and though he comes back to the office in Afar and has had to give depositions in town, this was the first week he'd been back in the outlying communities where we work.

He became very quiet, turning away toward the window and wiping his face profusely.  When we'd arrived at the school earlier that morning, we had walked the joyous gauntlet of all the students clapping and shaking our hands, hundreds lined up on either side of us.  I flashed back to our interactions.

"Were...any of your attackers at the school we just visited," I asked sheepishly.

"Yes. There were several."

Did they do or say anything? Was any kind of remorse shown?  No, everyone just acted as though nothing had ever happened.

I didn't need to ask him how he was feeling about this; he was doing his best to hide his face from us and furtively dry his tears.  I prayed for him instead.

We returned to the same school the next day for a second morning of “teaching” and, to my surprise and admiration, Yared came with us again, even knowing what he now knew, and he translated in the classroom, though others could have done so.

Pausing in the center of my labyrinth, my heart went out to Yared and his colleagues as they continue in their slow healing process, and I decided to travel back out of the center “walking” in Yared's shoes, walking down from that mount of pain, taking the circuitous route one must follow out of the labyrinth, sweeping away from the center, practically around in circles, back toward the now-unwelcome center, and finally, finally out...to freedom.


I told the story to Janet as we drove away from the prayer vigil, and I pondered that Yared was clearly still in pain; he hadn't “arrived” or done anything outwardly "heroic".  Then I thought again: but he came back.  And, every day at our early morning devotions in the desert, Yared was one of the most enlivened worshippers.

Now I saw where the analogy to Holy Saturday, that place between the pain of Good Friday and the redeeming miracle of Easter Sunday, fits authentically.  Here is the place where we still don't know Sunday's comin', except by faith.

Yared is facing and walking through the pain from his own Friday; and while it's Saturday he's holding firmly onto faith in the God who redeems all things.

Maybe he's my new hero, too.

Cory
April 2012

Gut Checks

This past week, I experienced a real gut check. Mark Feiner, the new but fantastically competent conductor of our South County Sound barbershop chorus, died in his sleep at age 55 over the weekend. We were all shocked.

We met as a chorus the next Tuesday night, to honor and talk about Mark and his impact on us; and then we talked about the future, our future. You see, we've been preparing--thanks to Mark's prodding and encouragement--to compete for the first time ever just 6 weeks from now, at a district competition. We'd been working hard and were beginning to feel we could actually do this, and place respectably.

When Mark died, our board chair immediately assumed we should cancel our participation, as he told me by phone a couple hours after we got the news. But he asked for group discussion about it on Tuesday. The discussion started as a seesaw. "If we do poorly on our first competition, we'll be known as a low performing group and will have a reputation, a hole to dig ourselves out of. That's how these things work." "No, we need to do this for Mark, no matter how we score in the competition."

Finally I felt a churning and spoke up. "Maybe this is a gut check time. True, the idea of competing was Mark's idea. He finally talked us into believing we could do it. Now he is gone. So it's our choice... will we decide this was Mark's dream and it dies with him, or will we now make it our dream? This could be a touchstone for SCS. If we do gather ourselves and compete, we may well look back for years and say this was a defining moment for our group, in giving us confidence and cohesiveness."

Finally, the Chair asked for a show of hands. Of the 40 guys there, as far as I could tell, when asked who wanted to press forward and perform at contest, 40 hands went up. It was amazing. Afterwards, a longtime barbershopper told me he'd never been in a group that has such commitment and cohesion.

A few days later at a vision trip orientation, I was reminded of a much more dramatic gut-check moment. The moment happened 10 years earlier, on a drive out to the Afar desert in Ethiopia, about a year before I became involved in the project, and directly related to how I did. In the early days of this project, which serve the fiercely independent, Kalishnikov-toting Muslim Afari people, the 300-mile road was hardly paved at all. The first visitor group was going out to meet the people and explore starting the project. That group was so large and the partnership so undefined that a non- WV vehicle with a non- WV driver was added to the caravan. This vehicle was forced by oncoming trucks onto the soft, slanted shoulder of the road, and it then flipped over, landing upside down. Two passengers were seriously hurt, (including my WV predecessor, who never fully recovered). Eventually, the passengers were extracted from the upside-down vehicle and transported back to the capital.

And that's when it happened: The remaining group gathered in the midday desert heat and asked: "In light of this major setback, should we see this as a warning and turn back, or do we press on?" After prayer and discussion, the decision was unanimous: we press on! The skeptical, resistant Afar people heard about it and came out en masse the next day to meet the visitors. The governor kept repeating with wonder, "But you came anyway..." As a result, new doors opened, walls came down, and a long-term bond was formed.

Every year I hear this story from Pastor Tom Theriault. And each year I am reminded this story is a key part of the history in the genesis of this amazing 12-year partnership.

We've all had gut-check times. These are "moments of truth", to a road we are traveling, to our faith, marriage, or job, and they are rarely orchestrated by us.

The first one I remember was when my 17-year old girlfriend emerged from the doctor's office and told me she was pregnant, equal parts excitement and fear. I was 18, and about as capable of taking care of her as Rolf in "The Sound of Music" when he sings "You are 16 [but] I am 17 going on 18; I'll take care of you." Yet I acted just as self-assured: we bought our first baby toy and began making plans for marriage. Thirty-eight great wedded years later, those solidarity responses still seem more mundane than heroic to me, but Janet would disagree.

Another seminal gut-check was when at age 26 I began to think more deeply about my dad's death at only 40 years old. In very good health, he died in his sleep of a brain aneurysm, and the doctor said those can run in families.

I started imagining dying at forty: will my life have made any difference? Yes, for my family, but I wasn't at all sure I was being faithful to "whatever God put me here to do." I recall sitting in church one day asking God to reveal that to me.

Then it hit me: What if God tells me? Will I actually do it?! It was then I decided to be "all in." I think that answering "yes" to God like that, before I knew the question, was the turning point in my life, from a place where Jesus' worldview was a suggestion, to understanding it was his invitation to me personally.

That's been a decisive difference in my life. And now it's part of my personal (and our marital) history. And though my singing group isn't making such heavy decisions as that, it quite likely will become part of our group's story, something recited to each new member ...like the Afar accident is recited each year to orient those traveling, as part of the history they are now continuing.

I think it's very easy to overlook these personal "history making" moments, to not see the invitation. Practical considerations overtake our thinking, we "stay in our head", we calculate the tradeoffs and mark off Pro and Con columns in our mind. Those are very helpful in most decisions, such as determining which couch or car to buy.

The trick is to keep our eyes (and hearts) open for the gut checks. Whether they are tests of our resolve or of our courage, they are invitations not to be missed, decisive touchstones and altars that many times actually become the most important trail markers we leave behind.

Cory
Addis Ababa
Feb, 2012

Building Altars

A couple weeks ago while on a plane headed for Ethiopia, I was thinking and writing about Ethiopia's forlorn neighbor, Somalia. The UN had just officially declared an "end" to the famine conditions there.

Last summer, the UN had slapped the "Famine" label on Somalia, declaring this the first major African famine since the Ethiopia/Sudan famine of 1984-85. Granted, everything is relative. According to the World Food Programme, the "famine classification requires that rates of malnutrition are greater than 30%; mortality rates are greater than two deaths per day per 10,000 people; and access to food and water is limited to less than 2,100 kilocalories and four litres a day, respectively."

So... when 30% of children under age five are underweight, the FAMINE warning light starts flashing. When only 29.9% are underweight, the light quits flashing. Call it a "tipping point". Exact science, no, but we need these markers. Recession and bear market labels are based on crossing specific thresholds. And don't we celebrate when the indicators begin to oh-so-slowly tip back toward the positive?

So it should be with the news that the UN has officially un-declared a famine in Somalia, meaning that hunger is diminishing to the point that something under 30% of the children under age five are severely malnourished and underweight.

I'm not being sarcastic here; quite the opposite. My point is that even though there is still much work to do, let's pause to build an altar of thanksgiving to God that the dread stamp "FAMINE" has been washed away, due in part to effective, coordinated relief operations, and in part due to good rains over the past few months. Rains mean food (usually) in areas like this which are completely dependent on showers from heaven. Their dependence on rainwater is not a positive thing; their dependence on heaven is something from which we could learn a thing or two.

Building altars isn't something we do very often. But the patriarchs did, when God acted on their behalf. When God appeared to him in Shechem and at Bethel, Abraham built an altar. (Gen 12:7-8) When God brought him bounty, he built another altar. (Gen 13:4) Isaac, Moses, Noah. When God came through, they stopped and marked the place and time with a monument for posterity, “as something to remember” (Gen 17:14).

Knowing as St. Paul says that all things are being brought under subjection to Christ, let's give credit both to God and to the tools God employed in bringing a quick end to the Somali famine: the rain, the international community and humanitarian agencies. In 1984-'85, it is estimated that over one million Ethiopians perished due to famine there. Bad rains, bad government, tragic results. Again we had bad rains and bad government in Somalia, and yet only some "few" thousand died.

I ended my time in Ethiopia with a short visit to the Antsokia Valley, where World Vision had operated a huge relief camp during that famine 25+ years ago. I first visited Antsokia in early 1986, just as the rains were returning and our work was shifting from relief to rehabilitation. Antsokia's total devastation became the mother of invention, as WV innovated our signature Area Development Program model from this very place. I'll write some other time about how Antsokia was transformed from being a basket case to becoming the breadbasket of northern Ethiopia.

After a meeting there about a new innovation, which is bringing together Evangelical pastors, Orthodox priests and Muslim imams to work jointly for the wellbeing of children, I had a moment to wander through the old relief camp... the corrugated tin buildings still standing like historic relics: the “wet feeding center” for infants and nursing mothers, the food warehouse, the old shower I had used in 1986 along with the staff who were stationed there. Some 40-60 souls perished EACH DAY during the height of the disaster, just in this one location. I felt as though I were in an ancient burial ground, with literally thousands of bodies lying in repose all around.

In late 1984, World Vision had to fly in the BBC film crew that broke the story of the Ethiopia famine to the world. Back then, there were no sophisticated Early Warning Systems that monitored and graphed the prices of grains and livestock as reliable harbingers of looming disaster, there was less coordination of NGOs and less effective oversight by UN agencies, and far less access to information.

This is yet another result of the world "getting smaller." When people ask me if there's any hope in my work, with all the reports of disaster, hunger and suffering, I tell them that when I started 30 years ago, 45,000 children were dying of unnecessary causes every day. Today, with a billion more people on our planet, about 22,000 die daily. Without question, 22,000 is a terrible number. But the improvement is stunning.

So, if in heaven's accounting the difference between the Ethiopia famine of the mid-80's and the Somalia famine of 2010-'11 is that maybe eight hundred thousand fewer people died, who of us will take the time to pay attention, to build the altar, to pause and mark this moment?

The other thing I point out is how much smaller the world is becoming. People are reading and hearing about conflicts and tragedies from all over the globe. And as a result, they often care enough to act and be involved in the solution! We all can suffer at times from compassion fatigue, that sense of overload and even emotional exhaustion at the needs in this far-flung world. But the fact that we are even aware of these needs, and with a stunning speed and diversity of news sources, is amazing. And this knowledge makes a huge difference in the ability of groups like World Vision to respond faster, better and in wiser coordination with other caring groups.*

This is no small matter. If you were one of the 800,000 people who didn't die this time but would have died 25 years ago, you'd see my point. You'd build an altar. You'd stop and thank God for sparing you. And sparing others.

And that's where we come in, too. Because some of us responded with funds which helped save lives, some of us prayed, some of us read the news and didn't avert our eyes for happier stories.

Much work remains to make these areas and these people truly "food secure" like Antsokia Valley -- not so vulnerable to drought, and also work to tamp down global speculation in foodstuffs which is again pricing the poor right out of the food line. The situation in Somalia remains precarious; famine could return with another poor rainy season. And today I read a report that three countries in West Africa are now very vulnerable because of drought and high global food prices; every one of our 19 ADPs in Niger is impacted.

But this time when "Famine" was declared, the dreaded scourge did not lead to mass starvation of so-called biblical proportions. So let's take a page from our bibles and build an altar of gratitude with our prayers of thanksgiving.

Cory
March 2012

A Little Child Shall Lead Them

Friends,


I think this meditation deserves a repeat-performance. It's a lovely story about Lilly and how her mom taught her a bit about malaria, and compassion. I was with Lilly and her folks recently and brought her an actual malaria net, like we use in Africa. She's a busy 7-year-old now and couldn't remember the entire incident, so I promised to find what I'd written and send it to her. Re-reading it blessed me and I thought you might enjoy it too...
----
A Little Child Shall Lead Them

This year, we all agreed to forgo the typical presents for our adult extended family members and instead choose gifts from the World Vision Gift Catalog. We'd given some similar "gifts" previously, but this year there was a special abandon to it, a desire to really make these "thoughtful" gifts for each receiver, a criteria very close to Janet's heart.

It's about time we did this--several donor friends had "made the switch" already and told me wonderful stories of how even their grandchildren "get into it" and draw pictures of the goats and ducks and school uniforms that are being given in Grandma and Grandpa's name. For young and old, these "gifts" can really bring to life our help for those in need, and at the same time they move our gift exchange focus off of ourselves. I read a quote by a woman this week who said that she gives her grandchildren only gifts from the Gift Catalog, as a way to change the theme of Christmas "from getting to giving." When I read this, I was convicted that we'd missed it a little, that we'd somewhat excluded our grandchildren from this new gift theme and thereby cheated them out of this shift in focus so as not to let them down in the "getting" department.

Everyone needs to negotiate these waters in their own way, and this actually isn't a commercial for World Vision's Gift Catalog, nor anyone else's.

It's a contrast between two events that happened for me last Monday, at the end of a lovely visit to Chico, CA where I stayed with my brother and his sweet young daughters as we celebrated our Mom's 75th birthday. We also celebrated Christmas early, and afterwards five-year-old Maya and I were in the kitchen, where I showed her the picture in the Gift Catalog of the ducks and chickens we bought her parents. Her dad asked her jokingly if they should keep the poultry in her bedroom, and I was trying without much success to explain to her who actually receives these animals. She was a good sport, but I'm not sure she really understood me. I think she'd rather have enjoyed keeping ducks in her bedroom.

We said goodbye a few hours later and were on the plane home that evening when I read the following email from a young couple who give to World Vision and whom I'd visited the prior week, along with their four-year-old, Lilly. The mom wrote: "On Friday, Lilly wanted to make believe we were in the desert. She then started to say, 'Look out for the mosquitoes; they'll bite you.' I told her sometimes mosquito bites make people sick. I asked her how we could help the pretend people not get bit. She thought about it and said, 'a cover?' I explained that, yes, they can use nets to cover themselves. I then told her that we could help real people, by buying them nets for Christmas. She asked where we could buy the nets, and I replied that we could buy them through World Vision. She sat for a second, then gasped and whispered 'Mr. Cory!' It was priceless... She is paying attention;-) I truly believe this will be a family affair in no time at all. So this year for the family we are buying mosquito nets, per Lilly's request."

The hero in this story without question is Lilly's mom. It's her worldview, her "world vision", which seamlessly transforms playtimes like this into teachable moments. In the process, Lilly is transformed in her own understanding. And somewhere along the line, a child's world becomes bigger, more inclusive, more expansive. "Neighbor" begins to mean to her something of what it means to God.

And in the transformation, another Christmas prophecy becomes real: A little child shall lead them.

Isaiah chapter 11 prophecies of the "shoot of Jesse", one coming from David's lineage. And the Spirit of the Lord will rest upon him. With justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth. (There it is again--God's special concern for the least and the last.)

The wolf will live with the lamb,
the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling together;
and a little child will lead them.

The Peaceable Kingdom; led by a child. A very special Child. A child raised up in the way he should go. A child who grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men.

Christmas is about a Child. Children can be immensely self-centered. And children can put us to shame in their unabashed generosity. Which tendency will we feed?

This Christmas, may our children and our grandchildren grow in wisdom and stature, and may their world get a little bigger, like Lilly's did. I think the Child of Christmas would be pleased. And maybe they'll even lead us somewhere where treasure lies.

Christmas blessings,
Cory

2011 Update: Janet and I are trying a new idea for our family this year... we picked out a gift from the WV catalog for each person, and then bought or made a little 'matching' remembrance for the person which would represent and remind them of the gift that was being in their honor. It's been fun to do the "pairing" and we recruited our oldest grandchild to help us pick out the matching items...and we've all really enjoyed it.

The Rest of the Story

Last night Janet and I watched a recording of a recent World Vision weekly chapel service. It started with a faded documentary-style video, circa 1979, chronicling a dramatic moment when World Vision’s ship Seasweep rescued a floundering vessel crammed with Vietnamese boat people. One four-year-old boy who was on that boat that day …then stood up and spoke to the chapel crowd! Now in his mid-30’s, Vinh is a graduate of Harvard Medical School and a skin cancer surgeon in Colorado. He said, “Without a doubt, if it had it not been for World Vision, the story of my life would have ended anonymously at the age of 4 in the South China Sea.”


Vinh’s parents had 11 children (he has only three of his own, thank you very much), and of the 11, five have Masters’ degrees and five have doctorates. The youngest recently graduated from Stanford and is on his way to medical school at Penn. Dad worked every hour he could as a laborer for a company that manufactures air conditioners, though the plant was not air conditioned and he stood all day on the assembly line through Arkansas summers. As Vinh told the audience, thanks to his father’s commitment, today he and his siblings all sit in offices, make their living based on their minds, and work in air conditioned facilities.


All in one generation. It’s a great illustration of the incredible opportunity possible in America—with sufficient parental sacrifice, a strong work ethic cascading down to the children, (yes, let’s acknowledge serious IQs and study habits!) …and the kindness of others, especially the amazing church which sponsored them from the refugee camp, helped them into an apartment, likely found the father a job, and told them all about Jesus.


World Vision played but one tiny, yet also decisive, role…saving the lives of 93 people that fateful day caught on film, including this entire family. What an amazing privilege for our staff to hear “the rest of the story” from Vinh and to have played a small yet critical role in it.


Somewhere in here is a lesson on gratitude. Vinh was thanking “people I will never meet”: not only the World Vision staff, but also the donors who supported this risky, reckless and costly venture. WV put a ship on the South China Sea to resupply Vietnamese refugee boats at a time when no governments wanted to get involved. Then the crew superseded the rules of the ship’s registration by following the law of their conscience, dramatically hoisting these 93 people aboard the Seasweep when their refugee boat was irreparable and had been floundering helplessly for six days, now out of food. Vinh’s mother was so beside herself at being unable to meet her children’s needs that “she would have given her blood” to nourish them; she has since admitted that she considered drowning the youngest ones to save them an agonizingly slow death. Such was the desperation of their situation when Seasweep found them.


How do we—you and I—get the privilege of being part of stories like this, and of literally millions more we’ll never hear this side of eternity? Rich Stearns went up to the podium to close chapel after Vinh sat down, and he became emotional. He wondered if maybe this is what the entertainment will be in heaven, hearing such testimonies.


In the meantime, it’s a huge blessing to savor the representative gratitude of one young father, husband, doctor, and son. He was on his way to becoming a statistic, simply a rounding error to add to the estimated three hundred thousand souls who had by then already been lost at sea as Vietnamese boat people.


Often, this is what life is like. We do our one part, we respond to an inner prompting of the heart and provide a helping hand—a touch, a word, a gift, and we have no idea how the story of that life ends. We never learn the rest of the story. Granted, the story isn’t usually as dramatic as Vinh’s—certainly my own story is not, though someone I’ll never meet provided the scholarship which allowed me to finish college summa cum laude and land a great corporate job that fed my young family and gave me skills and clarity of purpose which I employ every day.

This Thanksgiving, it’s worth taking time to go beyond the more obvious and visible objects of my gratitude—family, friends, my life today—and remember those unknown people who helped me along my way, maybe even without knowing me, to have the life I enjoy now.


And perhaps I’ll even take a moment to thank God for those people like Vinh, those I’ve personally or vicariously been able to somehow touch, bless, and strengthen on their journey, often without even knowing them. The apostle Paul encourages us, “Let us not grow weary in doing good, for at the proper time we shall reap a harvest if we do not give up.” (Gal 6:9)


Giving thanks isn’t just a way to honor God by recalling our own life’s blessings, but also an opportunity to encourage ourselves by recalling the privilege God has given us of helping others in our own outpourings of time, talent and treasure. And what a great way to not grow weary in doing good!


Who knows—maybe a long ago passerby or someone you or I haven’t even met, like Vinh, will be thanking God this week for a decisive impact in their life in which we had a hand.


Understanding that, Vinh’s story is a Thanksgiving gift to us all.

Cory

Thanksgiving, 2011

Deeper Than Beauty

Deeper Than Beauty

I recently presented one of our supporters with a piece of original artwork, World Vision style. It was a lovely depiction of what appeared to be a peaceful village scene from rural Bangladesh, drawn by a Bangladeshi child…

Jim and I admired it together, wondering about the couple sitting on the ground in marriage attire in front of a tiny home, a child near another small hut, and what was clearly a church right smack in the center, replete with a cross on the peak of the roof beams. We both really liked the piece.

Then he asked, "I wonder what the wording on the signs say?" I told him I'd try to find out and get back to him, then took a photo of the piece with my trusty mobile phone to send on to my Bangladesh colleague. The reply I received sent my mind spinning for several days, until I remembered a moving experience.

A few years ago Janet and I had the privilege of decompressing for a few precious days at a friend's beach house, perched on a cliff right over the ocean. It was our final morning there, wispy clouds laying a blanket of quiet over the calm grey water, and hundreds of gulls and other seabirds were circling the sky half a mile out to sea. There was a telescope by the picture window, so I used it to see the birds more closely. After awhile, I discovered the magic of following just one bird in flight. The telescope pivoted back and forth, lilting up and down as it went, tracking a singular bird along its circular journey. There was tremendous visual beauty in this, an airborne ballet of white feathers against the distant outline of Catalina Island... everything simply backdrop as I momentarily entered the reality for the one chosen flier.

In the sanctuary of that living room, watching the sky ballet outside, I noticed my eyes moistening from the stunning beauty on the other side of the picture window.

I was indoors because of the cool, cloudy weather, spying the birds from the warmth and peace of the comfortable home, a CD of soft piano music playing in the background. Then Janet opened the door and a cacophony of their distant squawking blew in on the bracing breeze, waking me to the realization that, in all likelihood, barring this gull being a direct descendant of Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, my bird was probably flying not to create beauty in the eye of my beholding, but simply continuing its never-ending search for its daily bread, for sustenance to stay alive. These gulls hold no savings accounts, have no bigger barns to build for storing their bounties. Their stomachs ask every day, "What have you done for me lately?" The scene became a complicated mix of the mundane, the beautiful, and possibly the desperate all at the same time. Clearly, there was a deeper reality than simply the beauty I was enjoying, although beauty was definitely in it, as real in my mind’s eye today as on the day I witnessed it.

I remembered this experience when I re-read the translation sent by my Bangladeshi colleague of the child's artwork...

Dear Brother,
Greetings from Bangladesh. I am so much excited to know that the gift you chose to give was an art work of a child of Bangladesh. I am very happy and honored to illustrate the artwork. Please, find it as follows:


1. We see a man is exploiting a woman in the drawing (from left)...This is one of the social issues by which the life of the children is affected much. The wording says, " Stop repression on women..or stop exploitation of women...The first word is pronounced as "Nari" which means 'women'...the second one is as 'Nirjaton' that means 'repression' and the last wording as 'Bhondaya kor' which means 'to stop'...or stop it.


2. Now let's point to the corner where a boy and a girl are in bride and bridegroom dress. This is another social issue in Bangladesh that affects the lives of children....Early marriage/child marriage is very common in rural areas, especially in poor families who consider their daughters merely burdens...Where there is ministry involvement through our ADPs or special projects, we have programs to empower the children in most vulnerable situations to combat the issues...They are working to stop early marriage through Child Forums. The little child with a play card represents the child forum's participation in community development activities. The wording means...'Stop Child Marriage' The words reads as 'Ballu' that means 'child'...Bibaha..which means 'marriage'...and the last word is again 'Bhondaya kor' which means 'to stop'...or just stop it.


Yes, there is a church in the middle of the village...We have church in a Christian village...I think the child wants to say about his/her dream for the future....he/she wants to tell us about a society where there will be no 'repression on women'...where there will be no 'early marriage'...Finally, maybe it finds its expression in Kingdom of God values where there will be fullness of life...love and dignity.

To be honest, I struggled whether to share this translation with Jim. He and I had shared such a nice, idealized interpretation of the artwork, very pastoral, very peaceful, very pleasant… very nice to glance at and remember fondly one’s involvement with World Vision!

But in the midst of what appeared to be only a pleasant scene there was also drama, especially when one remembers this drawing was made by a child… a child who has had to learn about these social issues, a child growing up surrounded by very real dangers from those issues. I imagine this as something similar to a child living in the inner-city, creating art that depicts neighborhood violence: Only the uninitiated would see it only as beautiful, no matter how stunning the skill of the artist.

After a few days, I realized that’s exactly why I must share the translation of the scene with this supporter—because clearly we are uninitiated, because we are not aware. Because we need to walk a mile in this child’s shoes, and now Jim has both a lovely and a disturbing reminder on his wall of that child’s reality… as well as perhaps a glimpse of the artist’s childlike hopes for the Peaceable Kingdom.

Just like those gulls circling the grey waters, here drama and beauty are intermingled. The presence of one does not cancel out the other. There is beauty in every culture, and there is drama in every one. The presence of beauty does not negate our responsibility to understand the trauma. And the reality of trauma does not negate the invitation to appreciate the beauty.

Cory