Reflecciones

I've been back from Cuba for a couple weeks now, and I admit that I allowed my displeasure with the results of the U.S. election (and sheer laziness) to get in the way of sharing about my experience before now. We were disconnected from social media and the news, which was refreshing; but as soon as  I returned, I drowned myself in Daily Show and Late Show clips and read incessantly about the aftermath of the presidental election at home. (I am trying to do better now.)

Apartment complex, Jaguey Grande

Our time in Cuba was very enjoyable, and I learned a lot about Cuban culture and economy as well as the particular challenges that the Church there is facing. Cuba is in so many ways like other parts of Latin America, yet unique and a place all its own. The lack of construction in the past fifty or so years along with the ubiquitous old cars and colonial and mid-century architecture allow you to feel that you have traveled through time. The general feel and architecture remind me so much of places I have visited in Eastern Europe (Romania, Hungary), but I suppose this similiarity is not surprising, given the influence of the Soviet Union.

Matanzas

The majority of our time was spent in Matanzas, visiting and working with Peachtree's partners at the Evangelical Seminary and Central Presbyterian Church as well as a day in Jaguey Grande, to meet with a smaller Presbyterian congregation there. The Church in Cuba has only been "above ground" for about 20 years, and their context is unlike any other that I know. There does not seem to be a traditional system of "evangelism" given their social context, but I can't say that I feel that is a negative, as I have long had an aversion to tracts, door-knocking, street preaching, and the like. Tangible service and organic relationship-building has always been the way of making disciples.

surrounding area, Matanzas

Both the seminary and Central Pres have clean water systems that are available to the public in Matanzas, which opens a door to the wider community. It should be noted that Central Pres was visited by some government officials a few months ago, who asked many questions about the water system; and the leadership at the church is now quite concerned that the government may impose a tax or monetary penalty on them for the water provision. While not overly dramatic, it highlights the oppression that our Cuban brothers and sisters endure, which we are largely unfamiliar with Stateside.

I feel obliged to share that I feel that the socialist structure has had some positive fruit. Healthcare is universal, and the literacy rate of Cubans soars above that of other countries in the region. Crime is low as well. I never once was concerned about my safety. This was quite a stark contrast to my experience in Guatemala, where I was forbidden to take most forms of public transportation and would never venture outside at night other than right across the street to the store.

I am not herein trying to advocate for one system of government over another. But I do feel obliged to share my observation that the fruits of socialism are not all bad. I think the same could be said of democracy. Certainly the United States is proof of that. Perhaps one may conclude that any manmade system of government is inherently flawed. As my worldview expands, I become increasingly convinced that any positive, lasting social change will come from individuals, nonprofits, and the Church. Our hosts in Cuba, whom I am honored to now call friends, are living proof of that.

Mike, Bill, Liz (pastor, Jaguey Grande), Hilda (interpreter), Dayana (SET grad, pastor), me Brad

Destination: Cuba

I am very excited to share that I will be leaving in less than a week to participate in a short-term mission trip to Cuba with Peachtree Presbyterian Church. Peachtree has a long-standing relationship with various partners in Cuba, and I am, in actuality, the only member of our team who has not traveled there before. Cuba has long been on my list of dream destinations, and I am incredibly grateful to Peachtree's missions staff for allowing me to join their team, as I am no longer a member there (Earlier this year, I officially became an Anglican.). 

This trip is, in essence, an opportunity for my fellow team members and I to live out our faith by encouraging our brothers and sisters in a challenging country through both relationship-building and community outreach. We will be going to Jaguey Grande and Matanzas, Cuba to work with partners from the Evangelical Theological Seminary (SET). SET is, in fact, the only seminary in the country, and I am particularly looking forward to learning about "church culture" there and witnessing both the work and challenges of our Cuban Christian brothers and sisters. No doubt, my heart will be changed by the people of Cuba.

While I have traveled a good bit in various parts of Latin America, I anticipate finding Cuba to be quite different from other places I have visited and lived. My intention is to go with an open mind and heart and to be a "sponge." And I look forward to sharing my experience with y'all after I return. 

Please pray for our team as we make final preparations and travel, and that our time there will be successful, enriching, and fun! 

¡Gracias! 

Home

It's my last official night at 6 Revival Street. While it's not my childhood home, it has been "home base" (and my permanent address) for almost eight years. Since my parents moved here after a brief stint in St. Simons, I...

• Took a semester off from college and served as an intern with Global Missions at Peachtree Presbyterian.
• Watched my big brother overcome one of his greatest challenges and begin and maintain an incredible journey of sobriety.
• Spent a semester in Argentina, where I lived with an amazing host family, gained some precious friends, and made lifelong memories.
• Spent a month in Spain to get some much-needed college credits and had my first black-out drunk experience.
• Graduated from Clemson University...twice.
• Had my beloved cat, Abby, put to sleep. 
• Made the decision to pursue a career in counseling.
• Lived for three months in Ecuador, during which I spent my days hanging out in a nursing home.
• Lived for a year in Guatemala City, working with IJM and being challenged in ways that I never could have imagined.
• Returned from Guatemala jobless, carless, and without a clue about what the future held. 
• Accepted my first grown-up job. 
• Began and ended my first serious dating relationship. 

So many of the aforementioned events occurred in other places, but this has always been the place I have come back to. There is comfort in the familiarity of this place, and I will miss that. This house has been the scene for countless memories, difficulties, joys, tears, and laughs. Above all, it has been my home and a place of incredible growth. And for that I am grateful. 

Band-Aids in a Broken System

I've officially been back a week. From Honduras, that is. I tagged along with my dad, aunt and uncle and a few other folks on a trip to check in on current and potential projects with Salt and Light (Honduran-American NGO). It was nice to get away from the winter weather here and to practice my Spanish, but the best part for me was the two days we spent in La Paz, working in a small prison.

Dad and Uncle Slade had installed a water filtration system there last year, and I was their assistant/translator as they added a new water tank and ran the water line out in to the "yard" so that the inmates can fill buckets and get water without having to be let in to the front part of the building. (Having to do this is an inconvenience for both the guards and the inmates.) We did successfully install two spigots, which will greatly improve the situation.

Overall, the prison has a pretty chill feel to it. There are about 400 guys, and they live in a 5-room bunk house. While they are locked up from 5:30pm-5:30am, they spend their days out and about in the large yard. And many of them make crafts that they sell to visitors, who are a common site. There is also a small chapel, and many of them are fierce believers.

As we cut the PVC pipes, re-routed the water line, and explained the system changes to a few of the inmates, I couldn't stop thinking about how much better these guys had it within the prison's walls. None of their families even have clean water in their homes, for crying out loud! One of the guys who has been trained to maintain the system said to us, "Thank you for taking time to do this for us. So many people don't even care about this place." 

The whole week in Honduras we confronted poverty and struggle, neither of which are new scenes for me. But I kept thinking about how we have failed so many people. "We" being all of us. With regards to the men in the prison, it is shameful that penal systems do not provide the rehabilitation that so many of their occupants need. We have not invested resources into programs that will affect lasting change and address underlying causes of poverty and crime. That's not to say that people should not be held responsible for their actions. But I think it's more complicated than that.

Rather than addressing social ills within the confines of society and modern economic systems, we should admit that the whole system itself is broken. I'm not saying that I have the answer to global poverty or even any concrete ways to better address it. But I do believe that what we need is a total overhaul rather than band-aids. The band-aids are good and necessary, but they are not enough.

Let's hope and pray that we will have the wisdom and strength to do enough. 

Christmas songs, revisited

In light of my recent trip to Palestine/Israel, I've found that Christmas songs have all new meaning for me. This past weekend was the "Lessons and Carols" service at Trinity Anglican Mission. The choir has been practicing since October; however, due to a severe sinus infection and resulting fever and stomach upset, I was unable to perform. Needless to say, I was disappointed, but it was a gift to be able to listen to the songs we had practiced for so long...and to hear them in a new way, given all that I learned and witnessed in the Holy Land.

One song in particular was very impactful: "O Sing a Song of Bethlehem."

O sing a song of Bethlehem, of shepherds watching there,

And of the news that came to them from angels in the air.

The light that shone on Bethlehem fills all the world today;

Of Jesus’ birth and peace on earth the angels sing alway. 

So many of us hold an idyllic image of Bethlehem. We see it in our minds as a small, peaceful town known only as the place of Jesus' birth. I used to hold this image, but I now know better. The Bethlehem of today is a densely populated city, with three refugee camps and multiple illegal settlements, surrounded by the 27 foot separation wall. It is a place of great injustice and not the cartoon-like Biblical town that we sing of. 

The injustice evident in Bethlehem today is, I believe, the very injustice that Jesus came to defeat.  He came to set the captives free, to liberate us from evil, and to show us an alternate way to live- to reject evil, revenge, and oppression, and to act with justice and mercy. How terrible and ironic that the very place He was born is today a flashpoint for one of the greatest injustices in the world. He would not have us build walls to separate people from their neighbors and families and to confiscate their land. He would not have us banish our fellow humans to densely-populated, poverty-stricken refugee camps. He would not have us value one people group over all others. Yet this is exactly what we see in Bethlehem today. 

I no longer sing of Bethlehem with a naive smile on my face; rather, I sing with tears in my eyes and an ache in my heart, knowing it as a place of great suffering and oppression. And I ask Jesus, who was born there over 2000 years ago, to keep me from despair and to be a witness for truth and justice. 

Holy Land: final day, reflection

Today is our final day here in the Holy Land. Before heading out, we will hold a simple worship service and time of sharing and reflection. I am looking forward to hearing the others' thoughts on the past couple weeks. We'll also see a few more sites and, I'm sure, eat more hummus, cucumbers, and tomatoes. 

Over the past couple days, there has been a good deal of unrest in Jerusalem and the West Bank. A Palestinian-American teenager was shot dead in the West Bank, and there were arrests made at the Al-Aqsa mosque. I know that this unrest and the injustice will continue after we leave; however, we know that the work of these peacemakers whom we have met will continue as well. Theirs is the difficult work of reconciliation, resistance, and sowing peace. It is slow and difficult, for they are up against a strong, oppressive force.

In regards to this long battle for justice, I keep coming back to something that Daoud (at Tent of Nations) said to us: "God says 'blessed are the peacemakers, not the peacetalkers.'" At first glance, that seems like a "duh" kind of statement, but I think that a lot of us (myself included) are guilty of talking about peace more than actually sowing it. And why not? It's way easier to sit around and criticize and just wish that things were different than to get our hands dirty and engage others in the work of reconciliation and understanding.

Working for peace is tough. I see that in the work that is done at Wi'am, Tent of Nations, Diyar, Mar Elias, and all those who are working to achieve a just peace in this place. They are like that "voice in the wilderness," speaking truth, planting seeds of peace, and refusing to hate. This issue has become personal, and I am honored to have met these amazing peacemakers. 

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a difficult issue to care about: those opposed to justice are loud and powerful, and I am often tempted to throw in the towel and to wish that I didn't know or care. But after seeing the long, difficult fight of our partners here-and, more importantly, their faith- I feel a renewed sense of purpose and drive to continue to advocate for them- to be a voice for them, to call out injustice, and to make peace, not just talk about it. 

I will, again, share a quote from my man, Shane Claiborne: 

"Even as we see the horror of death, may we be reminded that in the end, love wins. Mercy triumphs. Life is more powerful than death. And even those who have committed great violence can have the image of God come to life again within them as they hear the whisper of love. May the whisper of love grow louder than the thunder of violence. May we love loudly."

Holy Land: holy sites, Blood Brothers, & Syria

Greetings from Ibillin, Israel! We're here in the Galilee visiting the Mar Elias Educational Institution as well as various holy sites in the region. Just today we went to the Mount of the Beatitudes, Capernaum, and the Sea of Galilee. As with so many things on this trip, only photos will do justice to what I have seen here; however, in Capernaum, we saw Peter's mother's house as well as the foundation blocks of the synagogue in which Jesus taught. Staring at those stones, I was brought to tears.

Our first stop today was the destroyed Palestinian village of Biram, where Father Elias Chacour spent the first years of his life. (Father Chacour is the former Archbishop of the Melkite Catholic Church here, has been nominated numerous times for the Nobel Peace Prize, and his autobiography, Blood Brothers, is worth a read.) Like 300 other Palestinian villages, Biram was destroyed soon after the state of Israel was created. All that is left are the ruins of the homes, school, and church; the area is now a national park.

One of Abuna ("father") Chacour's friends was with us as well, and as they showed us around, I could not stop thinking about what a strange and tragic situation this is for them. Imagine it: your family has lived in this land practically forever, been followers of Jesus since He walked around here, and upon the creation of a new country on the land of your family, you are all forced to flee, while many of your compatriots are systematically murdered. That is exactly what happened in this land in 1948.

The Galilee, where we are right now, was not intended to become Israeli territory according to the UN partition plan, which divided up this region in 1948 for both an Israeli and a Palestinian state. It was, like a lot of other land, taken by force. And then in 1967, Israel took over the remainder of historic Palestine- Gaza and the West Bank, which it occupies to this day. There is another small piece (or not so small) to this story...

This afternoon, after spending time at the Sea of Galilee, we headed back towards Ibillin. Or so I thought. We drove west rather than east, and all of a sudden, the bus pulled over, and we were told that we were in Syria. No checkpoint. No passport control. Nothing. We simply crossed the Jordan River. "How can this be?" you may ask. Well, in 1967, Israel annexed the Golan Heights from Syria, and to this day, it maintains a military occupation there.

This whole situation is, in my mind, absurd. I feel sorrow for those wronged. And anger towards those who perpetrated these injustices (as well as those who continue to do so today). But Abuna Chacour said to me today "We must not hate." If a man who lost his home due to no fault of his own can say those words as he stands next to the ruins of that home, I too can choose to not hate.

It may sound cheesy, but my Palestinian Christian brothers and sisters are teaching me what it truly means to follow Jesus- to forgive, persevere, and love your enemy.