Philip Yancey's Blog, page 18

After Shocks

An advancing hurricane you can prepare for, by nailing plywood over windows, fastening shutters or, if necessary, evacuating.  A tornado may strike with little warning, though the darkened skies provide an omen.  A tsunami can roll in on a bright, sunny day, like the one that swept away sunbathers on the beaches of Thailand in 2004.  In a flash, with no forewarning, the world changes.

On March 11, 2011, at 2:46 in the afternoon a 9.0 magnitude earthquake shook the east coast of Japan for three to five minutes.  Roads buckled, bridges cracked, bookcases fell, some buildings collapsed.  The earthquake hit with such force that, incredibly, it jolted the entire large island some eight feet to the east.  All was still for 45 minutes as residents picked themselves up and surveyed the damage.  Then came the wave.  It had started in the ocean, reaching the average velocity of a passenger jet, 500 mph, and as the wave sped across the ocean surface the sea level itself rose.  Already the earthquake had caused coastal land to subside two feet, opening wide the gate for the onrushing sea which, when it slammed into land, crashed over protective sea walls like a giant stepping over a curb, snapping coastal highways and railroad tracks like chopsticks and scattering fishing boats, buses, automobiles, houses, and even passenger planes parked on an airport tarmac.

A British high school teacher heard emergency sirens, looked out on the ocean, and saw a wall of mist.  "This must have been the spray from the tsunami, but it looked so awesome and strange," he said.  "It was as if there had been a massive fire on the ocean, and above it were vast, rolling, white clouds of smoke.  In it, I could see thousands of bits, floating.  They must have been buildings, ships, cars—but they looked so tiny.  It was all so awesome that my brain couldn't compute."  He led his 42 students to safety, but more than a hundred others in the school perished that day.

A pastor was checking for earthquake damage in his home when he got a frantic text message from his daughter in Tokyo: "Escape!  Escape!  Escape!"  It seemed odd at the time, when all was calm, but with electricity off he had no local radio source and so obeyed.  He survived, and for two days lived inside his car in the midst of a debris field.

Another pastor fled to high ground with his wife after the earthquake.  A sudden snow squall hit just as the tsunami rolled in and for a few minutes they could see nothing from their safe perch.  They heard the wave roll in, then surge back out to sea carrying human bodies and tons of debris, the backwash as dangerous as the initial wave.  Repeatedly it rolled in and washed back out, like water sloshing around in a bathtub, seventeen times in all.  Each time they heard frantic cries for help, then at last a loud sucking sound as if from a huge drain, then silence.  When the snow clouds lifted they looked out over an entire neighborhood utterly destroyed, not a building still standing, only the cross from their church sticking up at an unnatural angle like a broken bone.  A few scraggly trees stood by the beach, sentinels of what yesterday had been a dense forest.

Following the laws of hydraulics, when the giant wave found a sheltered cove tucked among hills, it increased in velocity and force, a huge volume of water squeezing into a narrow opening.  On flat land the wave measured 10 to 30 feet high; in hilly country it rose to the unimaginable height of 133 feet, as high as a twelve-story building.  Having a history with tsunamis, Japan had organized evacuation sites long before—schools, hospitals, senior citizens' centers—and many residents fled to them for shelter when the warning sirens went off.  No one had anticipated a tsunami so colossal, however, and in a cruel irony many hundreds died in the evacuation buildings meant to save them.  In one senior citizens' center situated high on a hill, 47 of 67 seniors died; today a pile of wheelchairs, mattresses, and furniture marks a kind of grim memorial to them.  In the same town 61 people climbed to the roof of a three-story evacuation center and most of them got swept away; twenty survived by clinging to railings and a television antenna.  In an elementary school 74 of 105 students died when school officials delayed instructing them to climb a hill just behind the school.  As the first wave hit, some of the children were scrambling upward across snowy ground, only to lose their footing and slip into the wave's certain death.

Exactly one year after the earthquake and tsunami, I spent three days visiting the affected area at the invitation of my Japanese publisher, which was reintroducing a couple of my books, notably Disappointment with God and What Good Is God?  I spoke to somber groups both in the Tohoku region and in Tokyo, and toured the devastated region once known for its picturesque fishing villages and now forever associated with the tsunami of 2011.

The industrious Japanese have repaired or replaced many roads, raising the roadbeds several feet above the sunken land.  Crews have removed most of the lumber and rubble from the 270,000 heavily damaged buildings and only the most durable structures remain, ghost buildings with broken windows and crumbling walls.  Artificial mountains of debris mar the landscape, some of them seventy feet high and the dimensions of a city block.  Other regions of Japan have resisted accepting the 23 million tons of debris for incineration or burial lest it contain contaminants or radiation from the crippled nuclear power plant.

"I wonder how many automobiles were destroyed," I said aloud as we passed yet another mountain of crushed vehicles.  Immediately a Japanese colleague pulled out his iPhone and Googled the answer: 410,000.

Driving into one town we turned a corner and there, a half-mile inland, sat a huge freighter, two-thirds the length of a football field, propped up among the concrete foundations of what used to be a residential area.  Some 17 ships and 1,000 smaller fishing boats had washed ashore in that town and many still remain where the tsunami incongruously deposited them—in rice fields, atop a hotel, on the roof of a hospital.

CNN and other news sources gauge disasters by statistics, and by any measure the tsunami of 2011 ranks as one of the most costly in human lives and financial loss.  On the ground, though, you encounter a disaster as a collection of individual personal stories, not statistics.  The man who watched helplessly from a tall building as his family floated away in their house.  Another family whose house slammed into a bridge, giving all eight family members a chance to leap to safety.  Seven employees of a fish processing plant who jumped into a van and drove toward high ground, only to get stuck in traffic gridlock and have the tsunami churn the van like an object in a washing machine, killing all but two.  A woman who left her two children, 4 and 7, with their grandmother her first day on a new job, now punishing herself because the grandmother was unable to help the children escape.

A Baptist pastor who lived on the coast near Sendai spent four nights on the roof of the church with his wife.  Downstairs all was flooded, and the two resorted to eating dog food in order to stay alive.  Several times he tried to get out but found it impossible to wade in chest-high, frigid water.  The first time he stepped into the water he felt a sharp pain in his side: falling debris had broken two of his ribs during the earthquake, an injury he had not even noticed.  "Mainly I remember the freezing cold," he said.  "We shivered in wet clothes, with no heat and no food, waiting for rescue from the roof."  Two million people lost electricity in the earthquake, some for as long as six weeks.

A few heartwarming stories of survival brought hope the first days after the tsunami.  An 80-year-old grandmother and her 16-year-old son survived nine days before being discovered, hypothermic but uninjured.  A rescue helicopter spotted a 60-year-old man floating on the roof of his house ten miles offshore.  Of course we only hear the stories of survivors and can only imagine the fate of the 20,000 who died.  Emergency response crews who had geared up to treat the injured found relatively few; such is the force of a tsunami that most of its victims die instantly.

To my surprise police had not cordoned off most damaged areas, even a year later.  We visited a junior high school left exactly in the condition of March 11, 2011, the water line clearly visible on the walls.  A large fishing boat lay outside on the athletic field.  Inside, school books, papers, backpacks, and desks were scattered helter-skelter in the classrooms.  March 11 happened to be graduation day, and bright "Smile for graduation!" banners still hung in the hallways.  A mother had written on a blackboard, "Thank you for loving my son"; like many classmates, he had died in the stairwell attempting to flee the rising waters.

Across the street an elementary school gymnasium has become a memorial warehouse for children's objects recovered from the mud.  Four days a week volunteers come to the gym and painstakingly clean textbooks, dolls, trophies, graduation diplomas, coloring books, scrapbooks, loose photos, any memento of the children who were lost.  I stood on steps and watched a YouTube video recorded at that very vantage point, with the death-wave hurtling in and children screaming in the background.  Because we were visiting on a Friday, a rest day for the volunteers, only one person was in the cavernous gymnasium, a mother methodically sifting through the boxes full of mementos, searching for a scrap of reminder of her daughter.

And then there's Fukushima, site of the nuclear power plant that still dominates the news in Japan.  In a reversal of the scenes of destruction, in that region houses, shops, temples, and office buildings stand intact, untouched by the waters but void of human inhabitants.  Due to radiation and the danger of more meltdown, officials have declared a "no go" zone and only stray animals wander the streets.  Within Japan former residents of Fukushima have become pariahs.  Some hospitals refuse to treat them and other regions hesitate to hire employees from that area or even give them shelter.  A mortician became a local hero because he agreed to prepare the bodies of those who had died, an important ritual in Japan but a job no one dared accept for fear of contamination.  "Don't have children!" Fukushima survivors tell their own children, fearful of genetic defects.

One of our Japanese hosts had brought along a portable radiation detector, and the digital readout, measuring microsieverts per hour, surged from 0.8 to 4.8 as our bullet train sped past Fukushima, well below a harmful level but a clue to the ongoing fears of the Japanese who have learned not to trust their government's pronouncements about the invisible danger still radiating from the ground near the nuclear facility.  The week we visited, the police chief of Fukushima finally admitted that at least six people had starved to death in the days after the disaster.  Four hospital patients and two senior citizens had waited in undamaged buildings for someone to come and rescue them.  No one ever came.

The news media have rightly celebrated the patience and endurance—the longsuffering—of the Japanese people.  Residents voluntarily turned in almost $100 million worth of cash and valuables found in the rubble—a stark contrast to the looting that occurs in many countries after a disaster.  For several months thousands slept in gymnasiums and halls crowded with evacuees and stood in line for hours for a bottle of water and a bowl of rice.  Even now a quarter million Japanese live in temporary housing.  We visited one such home, a modular unit such as you see in some temporary school additions in the U.S.  An elderly couple lives in one of the connected modules in a space about 12 feet by 40 feet; any family larger than four qualifies for two modules.  Even after living there for 10 months, the couple seemed grateful to have a place of their own regardless of size and proudly showed off the microwave oven with the Red Cross symbol on the door.

Enormous problems remain.  The government has yet to decide which towns to rebuild and which to abandon as too vulnerable.  A cloud of fear and gloom hangs over the entire area.  As one counselor told me, "I've learned that PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) is a misnomer.  After something like the tsunami, that syndrome is a sign of health, not a disorder.  Who would not feel trauma and stress?"  Authorities worry about the Japanese suicide rate, already among the world's highest.

We met teams from the Philippines, Germany, Singapore, and the U.S. involved in reconstruction.  Organizations such as Habitat for Humanity and Samaritan's Purse responded immediately and, a year later, still mobilize crews to aid in recovery.  The church in Japan represents only 1 percent of the population, yet Christian organizations have taken a lead in rebuilding efforts, and some Japanese churches have become distribution centers for food and supplies.  One church sheltered more than 1,000 evacuees the first few months after the tsunami.

As a counterbalance to the list of seven deadly sins, the church in the Middle Ages came up with a list of seven works of mercy: to feed the hungry; give drink to the thirsty; clothe the naked; house the homeless; visit the sick; ransom the captive; bury the dead.  Every day a small army of relief workers, military personnel, and volunteers in Tohoku have an opportunity to practice those works of mercy.  As I reminded the staff of the publishing company in Tokyo the day we left, the church later came up with an additional list of spiritual works of mercy: to instruct the ignorant; counsel the doubtful; admonish sinners; bear wrongs patiently; forgive offences willingly; comfort the afflicted; pray for the living and the dead.  The church in Japan, a tiny minority in a suffering nation, is endeavoring to practice those less visible works as well.

One woman drove an hour to hear me speak in a church that, its sanctuary destroyed, now meets in a printing plant.  In a fashion I do not understand, she wore thick white facial makeup, like a Japanese doll.  Her piercing dark eyes rarely blinked.  "I was buried in a pile of garbage and rubble for two days!" she said, suddenly grabbing my hand.  "Then I saw a hand reaching down like this and I grabbed the hand that pulled me out.  I lost everything—my family, my friends, my town.  No one wants to go back.  The town no longer exists.  Please don't forget us!  They forgot me for days, now they forget my town.  I want to know why!"

That last spiritual work of mercy, prayer, is one we can all do.  In a global environment where every crisis makes the news, disaster fatigue can easily set in.  Yet a healthy body, whether physical or corporate, attends to the needs of the weakest part.  I can still see the haunting white face of the woman who grabbed my hand and pled so plaintively.  May we not forget Japan.

 

Following a Trail of Tears

In a globalized world "no country is an island," to paraphrase John Donne.  A colorful map produced by the U.S. government agency NOAA shows that energy waves from the earthquake that devastated parts of Japan on March 11, 2011 reached all the way across the Pacific Ocean to the shores of South and North America.  Soon year-old debris will be washing up on the beaches of California.

On March 5 Janet and I leave for Japan, where I will speak at several events commemorating the earthquake and tsunami.  We've all seen videos that seem taken from a special-effects horror movie: of ships, houses, and trucks tossed down the streets like toys, of a modern airport suddenly submerged under water, of a nuclear reactor tower exploding in a thick black cloud.

While preparing for this trip I've been reminded again of the magnitude of the 2011 disaster in which 20,000 people died.  The wall of water reached a maximum height of 132 feet—as tall as a twelve-story building!—destroying 270,000 buildings in its path and forcing hundreds of thousands of people into temporary housing.  A year later, many still live in those temporary structures, and it will cost at least $200 billion to replace the damaged buildings.  When I think of the enormous effort involved in addressing the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, I can hardly fathom the challenges facing Japan.

We will spend several days in the areas directly affected, which involves a journey of four hours by bullet train and car from Tokyo.  Christians comprise only 1 percent of Japan's population, and these meetings will be small; one church now meets in a printing company, its sanctuary having been washed away by the tsunami.  Mission agencies and local Christians responded quickly to the human tragedy, and the government has gratefully used surviving churches as distribution centers for food and supplies.

I have spoken in some tough places, such as Virginia Tech after the shootings and Mumbai the night after the terrorist attacks.  Never have I faced a tragedy so massive in scale.  I've learned, though, that for the people involved, scale doesn't matter so much.  Pain zooms in very personally: a child swept away from a kindergarten playground, pets and livestock abandoned as their owners had to flee, a family business destroyed in an instant, a teenager terrified by the aftershocks that hit weekly, everyone frightened by the invisible threat of radiation.  For a theme my hosts chose the title of my last book, What Good Is God?—an appropriate question for people who have endured such an event.

We have much to learn from Japanese resilience.  Two of my uncles served in U.S. Army occupation forces just after World War II.  Allied bombs had left some Japanese cities with hardly a building still standing.  My uncle told me of soldiers who tossed away candy wrappers only to see hungry Japanese children scramble to lick the wrapping paper.  Due to the lack of oil, public buses resorted to using charcoal or wood as fuel, with a man perched on the roof to shovel chunks into a steel-barreled tank for burning.  Yet in fifty years that devastated economy rose from the ashes to become the second-largest in the world.  A recent poll shows that most Japanese believe the country will emerge stronger not weaker after the earthquake.

The Japanese responded to this massive tragedy with amazing calm and patience.  I remember the long lines of people waiting to be served rice at the distribution centers and the hundreds sleeping without complaint on mats in gymnasiums.  Residents voluntarily turned in at least $75 million of money and valuables found in safes and drawers as they cleaned up debris.  I cannot help comparing their responses to the chaos and shrillness that followed Hurricane Katrina.

I am attaching a link to a video produced in the earthquake area as a thank-you to the rest of the world: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS-sWdAQsYg.  I confess that I have limited tolerance for watching Youtube videos, which usually hold my attention for about eight seconds.  This one is eight minutes long and I've watched it several times.  If you haven't seen it, you should.

After our visit to the earthquake area, we will return to Tokyo for several meetings, including a National Prayer Dinner involving members of the Japanese Diet, or Parliament.  I look again at the colorful map created by NOAA, and am reminded of a principle I learned from Dr. Paul Brand: a healthy body is one that feels the pain of the weakest part.  On March 11, I hope that prayers of support and care from the U.S. and other countries reverse the energy flow depicted in the map.

The Apostle Paul gave us a clear formula for how we should respond to those in suffering and need: "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.  For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows."  May we channel that comfort to the people of Japan, whose suffering has not ended.

Election-Year Musings: Part Two

Phone calls, advertisements, and visits from candidates have heated up in my state, Colorado, and I'm sure we'll get a steady barrage from now until November. Here are some further thoughts about Christians engaging the broader culture through politics.

3) Christians should fight their battles shrewdly.  Evangelicals do not exactly have the best track record.  On one occasion an engineer working for the Christian Broadcasting Network used satellite-transmission equipment to interrupt the Playboy Channel during its broadcast of American Ecstasy with this message: "Thus sayeth the Lord thy God. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. Repent, the kingdom of God is at hand!"  He was later indicted by a federal grand jury. His boss Pat Robertson has made several outlandish statements over the years, including an infamous quote about the Equal Rights Amendment: "The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, antifamily political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."

To gain the hearing of a society already skeptical about religion will take hard and careful work. We must, in Jesus' words, be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. I fear that our clumsy pronouncements, our name-calling, our hysteria about important issues—in short, our lack of grace—may in the end prove so damaging that society no longer looks to us for the guidance it needs. Such tactics, let alone comments about hurricanes and terrorism as acts of God's judgment, undermine the credibility of Christians engaging culture.

Meanwhile, out of the media spotlight other Christians have found creative ways to fight moral battles.  For example, Prison Fellowship International has had such success in caring for prisoners (another biblical mandate) that several governments have asked them to take over entire prisons. Another organization, International Justice Mission, tackles sexual trafficking overseas by working with local authorities. An I.J.M. representative learns about a corrupt mayor and visits his office. "We know what you are doing, getting kickbacks from a prostitution ring. And we both know that your own laws forbid that. We can handle it one of two ways. We can bring in cameras and expose you to the press. Or we can make you a hero, letting you partner with us in a public campaign to break up this ring. Your choice."

In the 1960s Martin Luther King Jr. devised a creative strategy of engagement that has since been adapted to many causes.  He fused together the power of love as described in the Sermon on the Mount and Mahatma Gandhi's method of nonviolent resistance. "Prior to reading Gandhi," he said, "I had about concluded that the ethics of Jesus were only effective in individual relationships." Gandhi showed him that a movement on behalf of a moral cause could be expressed in a loving way. "I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom."

In another shrewd tactic, Protestant Christians have recently formed alliances with Catholics, Jews, and Muslims on some issues.  All these groups share a belief in one God who has revealed moral principles we ought to live by, and in engaging culture each group has something to contribute.  Even the self-described fundamentalist Tim LaHaye agrees that "we have more in common with each other than we ever will with the secularizers of this country."  It has become common to see Orthodox rabbis, Catholic priests, and evangelical pastors linking arms in protests outside abortion clinics.  These religious leaders are willing to set aside their differences in common cause because they sense a desperate need for a coherent moral vision.

4) In engaging with culture, Christians should distinguish the immoral from the illegal. Whatever his personal failings, former President Bill Clinton tried to make that distinction. As a Christian, he said, he sought guidance on moral issues from the Bible. As President of the United States, though, he could not automatically propose that everything immoral should therefore be made illegal. A well-known national columnist seized on that comment and devoted an entire column to attacking Clinton's "situational ethics and false religiosity."

Yet Clinton was surely right. "Thou shalt not covet" is a moral issue that ranks as one of the Ten Commandments; what government could enforce a law against coveting? Pride is a sin, perhaps the worst sin, but can we make pride illegal? Jesus summed up the Old Testament law in the command, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind"; what human authority could police such a commandment?

Christians have the obligation to obey God's commands but it does not automatically follow that we should enact those moral commands into law.  Not even Calvin's Geneva would dare adopt the legal code of the Sermon on the Mount.  The late Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical American author, wrote: "For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the beatitudes. But—often with tears in their eyes—they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the beatitudes, be posted anywhere."

An Alabama Supreme Court chief justice made headlines a few years ago when he defied authority by installing a 5,280 pound granite monument of the Ten Commandments in his courthouse. The Ten Commandments constitute a bedrock on which laws should be based, he explained. As a Christian I too accept the Ten Commandments as a God-given rule for life, especially since Jesus repeated all but one (the Sabbath). Yet as I stared at a news photo of the judge standing beside his monument, it struck me that only two of the ten ("You shall not murder" and "You shall not steal") are illegal. The other eight, regardless how important, no pluralistic society can codify into law.

Christians are currently debating the pros and cons of gay rights—a moral issue, as both sides would agree. A few decades ago the Church of England debated an issue with close parallels: divorce. The Bible has far more to say about the sanctity of marriage and the wrongness of divorce than it says about homosexuality.  C. S. Lewis shocked many people in his day when he came out in favor of allowing divorce, on the grounds that we Christians have no right to impose our morality on society at large.  Although he would continue to oppose divorce on moral grounds, he maintained the distinction between morality and legality.

5) The church must use caution in its dealings with the state. Edward Gibbon said that in ancient Rome all religions were to the people equally true, to the philosophers equally false, and to the government equally useful. Society needs the restraint offered by religion, and the state welcomes it as long as it can call the shots.

In Russia, Stalin required the church to grant the state full control over religious instruction, seminary education, and the appointment of bishops. In China today the communist government pays the salaries of official Three-Self pastors, a way of keeping them under its thumb. However, the church works best as a force of resistance, a conscience to society that keeps itself at arm's length from the state. The closer it gets, the less effectively it can challenge the surrounding culture and the more perilously it risks losing its central message.

In contrast to the world's normal pattern, Christians exalt individuals but view institutions warily.  Jesus left his followers the command to make disciples from all nations.  We can baptize, teach, and hold accountable individuals, but not a government, school, or court system. We have no mandate to "Christianize" the United States or any other country—an impossible goal in any case.

Reinhold Niebuhr drew a contrast between the individual and the institution. Institutions cannot really express love; justice is as close as they come.  While in medical school, a doctor friend of mine heard an address with the memorable title "The Doctor, the Clergy, and the Prostitute."  All three, said the speaker, have in common a commitment to value the individual above the society.  The prostitute honors her client's desires despite the stigma society puts on her; the doctor treats venereal disease and gunshot wounds no matter how they were acquired; the clergy bars no sinner from the confessional booth.

A news event in 1995 shocked both sides in the culture war controversy. Norma Leah McCorvey, the "Jane Roe" in the famous Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case of 1973, converted to Christ, got baptized, and joined the pro-life campaign. Most astoundingly, it was the director of Operation Rescue who assisted her.  Yet as she tells the story, the change came about when that director stopped treating her like an antagonist and treated her like a person.  He apologized for publicly calling her "baby-killer" and started spending time with her on her smoking breaks. Later, McCorvey accepted an invitation to church from a seven-year-old girl whose mother also worked at Operation Rescue. Pro-abortion forces had dismissed McCorvey—her dubious record of drug-dealing, alcohol and lesbianism made bad public relations—but Christian leaders took the time to counsel her in the faith, keeping her out of the public spotlight for half a year. "Ultimately, God is the one who changes hearts," says McCorvey now. "A Christian witness is the biggest tool in effecting change."

When the church accepts as its main goal the reform of the broader culture, we risk obscuring the gospel of grace and becoming one more power broker.  In the process, the gospel itself changes, for civil religion tends to sink to the lowest common denominator. "To justify Christianity because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion," cautioned T. S. Eliot.

Civil religion would never elect as its leaders a cowardly traitor and a violent human rights abuser, but those men, Peter and Paul, are the ones God chose to carry the message of grace to the world.  Civil religion invites us to share in a nation's military glory; the gospel calls us to take up a cross. Civil religion offers prestige and influence; the gospel calls us to serve. Civil religion rewards success; the gospel forgives failure.  Civil religion values respectability; the gospel calls us to be "fools for Christ."

During the Brezhnev era at the height of the Cold War, Billy Graham visited Russia and met with government and church leaders. Conservatives in the West harshly criticized him for treating the Russians with such courtesy and respect. He should have taken on a more prophetic role, they said, condemning the abuses of human rights and religious liberty. One of his critics said, "Dr. Graham, you have set the church back fifty years!" Graham lowered his head and replied, "I am deeply ashamed.  I have been trying very hard to set the church back 2,000 years."

Election-Year Musings: Part One

I'm so sick of hearing about this year's election that I decided to write some of my own thoughts on the subject.  I've just finished reading two excellent books that caution Christians about trusting too much in politics: A Public Faith, by Miroslav Volf, and To Change the World, by James Davison Hunter.  Even more alarming, unChristian by David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons details the overall effect of Christians' courtship with politics: as recently as 1996, 85 percent of "outsiders" who claim no religious belief had a favorable impression of Christianity whereas now only 16 percent of young outsiders have a favorable impression of Christianity and only 3 percent have a good impression of evangelicals.

So how do Christians living in a diverse society respond to moral issues?  Do we focus on our personal morality and leave the public morality to secular politicians?  Or can we perform some civic role that helps guide the broader culture and do so in a constructive, not off-putting way?  Rather than propose a single path, I will instead make a series of observations and suggestions for Christians to consider as we interact with a world that does not necessarily share our views.

1) Clashes between Christ and culture are unavoidable.  John Howard Yoder records 51 separate times in which Jesus himself confronted injustices, and throughout history his followers have followed suit.  Early Christians were instrumental in ending cruel Roman practices like gladiator games and infanticide, and ever since, Christians have led moral campaigns against abuses such as slavery.  Even minority groups like the Anabaptists who seem isolationist must engage with culture—their pacifism, for example, stands as a powerful moral judgment on society.

Christians must always discern which injustices merit a fight, but a pietistic withdrawal is bad for both church and state.  Nazi Germany posed the severest test to Luther's doctrine of two kingdoms, a test which the church mostly failed.  Practicing an individualistic faith, with no strong tradition of opposing the state, German church leaders waited far too late to protest.  Indeed, many Protestant leaders initially welcomed the Nazis as an alternative to communism and Christians adopted a motto which now seems incomprehensible: "The Swastika on our breasts, the Cross in our hearts."

Eventually a minority did wake up to the threat.  Martin Niemöller published a series of sermons with the in-your-face title Christus ist mein Führer ("Christ [not Hitler] is my Führer").  He spent seven years in a concentration camp; Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed in another. Hermann Maas, who is counted as among the The Righteous of the Nations by Yad Vashem, spent the last year of the war in a forced labor camp.  In the end, faithful Christians were the only significant group to oppose Hitler within Germany.  Trade unions, Parliament, politicians, doctors, scientists, university professors, lawyers—all these capitulated.  Only Christians who understood their loyalty to a higher power resisted.  Their courageous stand attracted the world's attention: from 1933 to 1937, the New York Times ran nearly a thousand news accounts on the German church struggle.

When the war ended, the eastern part of Germany found itself under a different kind of totalitarian rule, the beginning of four decades of Soviet domination.  A few years ago I interviewed a pastor in Saxony who recounted personal stories of the difficulties that Christians faced under communism.  His children had limited educational opportunities, and he had to work as a plumber to supplement his meager pastor's salary.  "After the wall came down…" (a phrase I often heard), everything changed.  Although less than 20 percent of Saxony's citizens now belong to a church, he estimates that 70 percent of those in parliament are active, practicing Christians.  Having lived under Nazism and then communism, Christians quickly stepped into a cultural vacuum to help the newly free society lay a foundation for morality and legal structure.  They knew all too well what can happen when Christians are excluded from the public square.

As that pastor has since learned, effecting change in a democracy is messy, tedious work, a challenge far different from surviving totalitarianism.  To bring about a moral consensus in a democracy requires cunning, persuasion, and compromise.  Stephen Monsma, a Christian who served in the Michigan state legislature, has written of the painstaking struggles to get drunk-driving legislation—an issue that invites a clear moral consensus—passed in his state.  He likened his original vision of doing good to sitting by a cozy fire in his living room choosing luscious vegetables and beautiful flowers from a seed catalog; the actual work, he said, more resembled the gardener's chores of digging, pulling weeds, and fighting off insects.

Moral issues tend to present themselves in absolute terms of right vs. wrong, yet by its very nature democratic politics depends on bargaining and compromise.  While he was in office, Surgeon General Koop attracted heated opposition from conservatives who had an all-or-nothing approach to morality and opposed any compromise on abortion.  Koop, who shared their iron-clad belief that all abortion is wrong, came to conclude, "One of the problems with the pro-life movement is that they are 100-percenters.  Historically it is true that if the pro-life movement had sat down in, say, 1970 or 1972 with the pro-choice people, we might have ended up with an agreement on abortion for the life of the mother, defective child, rape and incest, and nothing more.  That would have saved ninety-seven percent of the abortions since then."  Only after losing the absolute battle did the pro-life movement shift tactics to restrict abortion funding, require parental consent, and limit late-term abortions; since then hundreds of such laws have passed in state legislatures.

Democracy requires us to recognize others' rights even when we fundamentally disagree with them.  It requires a civility in which I respect a person's ultimate worth, and seek to persuade but not to coerce.  For this reason modern democracy grew out of Christian soil.  We must exercise the skill of ethical surgeons in deciding which moral principles apply to society at large.

2) Christians should choose their battles wisely.  Peter Berger has written of the "world maintaining" and "world shaking" functions of religion.  Founders of the United States recognized that a democracy, with less imposed order and more freedom, needs a religious foundation to guide and motivate its citizens.  In John Adams' words, "We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion…. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other."  The nation's leaders counted on the church for this world-maintaining function, to teach and equip citizens to be good.

When the church moves into the world-shaking business, though, it needs to do so wisely and with care.  Alas, Christians involved in politics have tended historically to go off on tangents.  In the 1840s and 1850s a major campaign with the odd name "Know-Nothing movement" demonized Catholics and raised hysterical fears about them.  Historian Mark Noll has written about a Philadelphia fracas in 1844 sparked when a Catholic bishop requested that Catholic schools be allowed to read from their own version of the Bible rather than the King James Version; rioters burned several Catholic churches and killed more than a dozen people.  As late as 1960 the National Association of Evangelicals urged all evangelical clergy to proclaim the dangers of a Catholic president on Reformation Day, just before the election.

The landmark moral campaign by churches was Prohibition, which absorbed more sheer energy from evangelicals than any other political effort.  To their credit, the leaders understood well how democracy works and how to attain a public consensus.  Prohibition succeeded because of a relentless campaign of education, skilled organization, and effective lobbying.  Its advocates persuaded the general public that drinking had dire costs in terms of health, life expectancy, poverty, family breakdown, inefficient workers, and social decay.  Early feminists joined the campaign, broadening its base.  A Prohibition party actually ran candidates for President, and in two decades the United States went from having five dry states to passing a constitutional amendment for the entire nation; 46 of 48 states ratified the amendment.

For five years the nation mostly complied with the new law.  Then drinking slowly began to rise again, accompanied this time by mob activity, political corruption, and crime.  The legislation was too severe, and it alienated other religious groups such as Jews and Catholics.  In the final analysis, judges historian Paul Johnson, "what looked at first like the greatest victory for American evangelicalism turned instead into its greatest defeat."  The failure of this moral crusade drove Protestants out of the political area, and not until the late twentieth century would they return in large numbers.

The more we focus on tangential issues, the less effective we will be in addressing matters of true moral significance.  I hear very little from evangelicals about the impact of gun proliferation on violent crime, much less an issue like nuclear disarmament.  I hear almost nothing about health care for the poor and protecting widows and orphans, both biblical mandates, and scant mention of the thirteen million children who die worldwide from malnutrition in a year.  I hear talk about family values, but when an administration proposed legislation to allow mothers to take unpaid leave after childbirth, conservative religious groups opposed it.

Too often the agenda of conservative religious groups matches line for line the agenda of conservative politics and does not base its priorities on the Bible.  Much of society's alarm about conservative Christians getting involved in politics now traces back to tangential campaigns and a loud silence about important issues.

(More to come)

 

The Two Most Disarming Words

For a number of years a friend of mine named Craig Detweiler has been taking his communications students from Biola University and Pepperdine University to the Sundance festival of independent films.  One year the festival featured a sold-out showing of a film scathing in its portrayal of American evangelicals.  The film tells the story of a white-bread suburban family killed in a car wreck on the way to a Southern Baptist church meeting.  Upon their arrival in heaven a tattooed Jesus dispatches them again to earth, this time stripped of original sin, and they celebrate their new shamelessness by walking around naked and doing things that shock their friends and neighbors.  Eventually at a Bible study the Christian community hatches a plan to give the family an apple pie laced with poison, sending them promptly back to heaven.

According to Craig, the audience laughed uproariously throughout the film, relishing the depiction of Christians as repressed, intolerant, even homicidal.  The director enjoyed a standing ovation and then fielded questions from the audience.  Someone asked if any conservative Christians had seen it.  "I'm ready for that fight," the director replied.

I'll let Craig relate what happened next, as reported in his book A Purple State of Mind:

I struggled to compose my words.  My voice cracked slightly.  I eked out, "Jay, thank you for this film.  As a native of North Carolina, a fellow filmmaker, and an evangelical Christian…"

I never use the word evangelical.  It is so loaded with negative baggage that I usually attempt to distance myself from such associations.  But in this instance, it seemed quite right.  I was speaking for my community, responding to a particular stance we'd staked out for ourselves.  Jay stepped back, ready for that fight.  He tensed up, preparing to launch a counterattack.  The crowd sensed that things were about to get ugly.  My next words caught them off guard:

"Jay, I apologize for anything ever done to you in the name of God."

The entire tenor in the room shifted.  Audience members turned around.  "Did I hear that correctly?"  They craned their necks.  "Who said that?"  Jay fumbled for words, not knowing how to respond.  He was ready to be attacked.  He was not prepared for an apology.  He offered a modest, "Thank you."  The audience was literally disarmed….

Audience members approached me afterward with hugs.  A lesbian couple thanked me.  Gay men kissed me.  One person said, "If that is true, I might consider giving Christianity another chance."  Tears were shed far and wide.  All it took were two little words: "I apologize."

My students leaped at the occasion, talking to the cast and crew, inviting them to join us for further conversation.  Our "enemies" became fast friends, joining us for lunch.  The cast came to our class the next day, answering questions for an hour.  An actor admitted how scared he was to enter our church meeting place.  Onstage, he confided, "Coming into this building, my heart was beating more than at any audition I've ever had."  The producer said, "This was the most significant moment of our week."   A simple apology set off a series of conversations and exchanges about our faith and how we live it.

In the years since, Craig and his students have hosted the cast and crew of other movies that touch on spiritual themes, including some that mock Christians.  The writer of Higher Ground reported, "I was invited to speak at their rented church for a Q and A and it was honestly the most moving experience I can remember in a long time.  They were the antithesis of judgment…"  Experiences such as these help convince me that the approach of admitting our errors, besides being most true to a gospel of grace, is also most effective at expressing who we are.  Propaganda turns people off; humbly admitting mistakes disarms.  Far from claiming to have it all together, Christians regularly confess that we do not.  After all, Jesus said he came for the sick and not the well, for sinners and not for saints.

Leadership magazine reported on four complaints heard from spiritual seekers.  You don't listen to me.  You judge me.  Your faith confuses me.  You talk about what's wrong instead of making it right.  Pondering those complaints, it occurs to me that Christians often fail to communicate to others because we ignore basic principles in relationship.  Jesus, Paul, and John, and James each stressed one principle above all others: Love God and love your neighbor.  By not listening, by judging, by speaking lofty words that don't translate into action, we deter a thirsty world from the Living Water that can truly satisfy.

 

Poland’s Three Uprisings

The new/old look of downtown Warsaw

The week before Thanksgiving, my favorite American holiday, I visited Poland to help the publisher of my books there, Credo, celebrate their tenth anniversary. Warsaw is a lovely city, situated along a broad river. Its main street, now a cobblestone pedestrian mall, winds past baroque churches, a university, the royal palace, and an Old Town of narrow alleys and medieval-style buildings. The visitor quickly learns, however, that these “old” buildings are actually new, rebuilt after the destruction of World War II.

Thanks to movies like Roman Polanski’s The Pianist and books like Leon Uris’s Mila 18, many of us know about the 1943 uprising of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. German Nazis first corralled Warsaw’s Jewish population of more than 300,000 into a dense central area of the city surrounded by concrete walls and barbed wire. For three years the Jews suffered disease, overcrowding, and starvation. Then the Nazis began a program to transport them all to extermination camps.

Warsaw Jews rounded up for extermination

After some 250,000 Ghetto residents had been rounded up and killed at Treblinka, the survivors rose up in the largest single revolt by Jews during the Holocaust. Poorly armed but fighting for their lives, the rebels held off the Germans for four months until finally the SS brutally crushed the uprising. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising stands as the strongest refutation of the common perception that all Jews went “like sheep to the slaughter” during the Holocaust. Nevertheless, the resistance was futile: in the end only 100,000 of Poland’s three million Jews survived the war and Hitler’s extermination policies.

The following year, in an event far less known, Warsaw’s Gentile population also rose up against the Nazi occupiers.  By the autumn of 1944, Germany’s defeat seemed inevitable. After the D-Day invasion, Allied forces had proceeded to reclaim much of Western Europe and Soviet forces had rolled back German advances to the East. Indeed, the Soviet Red Army had marched to the very suburbs of Warsaw, less than ten miles from the capital. The Polish Home Army, an underground network of 50,000 insurgents, chose August 1 as a day to begin the liberation of their city. Bands played, the red-and-white Polish flag suddenly appeared all over the city, and women gaily danced with Polish soldiers in the streets. Surely, they thought, the Russian army would support their revolt, or at the least the American and British allies would provide air support or airdrop needed weapons.

Neither happened. Instead, the Soviets halted their advance, dug in, and watched. The Home Army won a few skirmishes in the early days, infuriating SS chief Heinrich Himmler, who decided to destroy the city as a lesson to the rest of Europe. The German army rushed tanks, rocket launchers, and machine guns to the city, and the German air force filled the skies with bombers.

Why did no one come to the Poles’ defense? Josef Stalin harbored a personal hatred of the Poles because of bitter memories from the Soviet-Polish War, and he also had plans to incorporate Poland into the Soviet empire. Already the Russians had slaughtered 8,000 Polish army officers in the infamous Katyn incident. Poles who rebelled against Hitler’s occupying army may well rebel against the Soviets who would displace them, so why not let the Germans do the dirty work of destroying the rebels?  The Allies asked Stalin for permission to use nearby airbases or at least make airdrops; he refused. When Churchill proposed aid missions despite Stalin’s objections, Franklin Roosevelt responded, “I do not consider it advantageous to the long-range general war prospect for me to join you in the proposed message to Uncle Joe [Stalin].”

Free from outside interference, the Germans began a systematic program of slaughter and destruction.  On one bloody day known as the Wola massacre, they executed at least 30,000 civilians including women, children, and the elderly. For 63 days the Polish Home Army held out, starved of food and ammunition, often hiding in Warsaw’s sewers as a protection against the relentless bombing. In all, some 200,000 civilians died in the fighting. The SS chief Himmler decreed, “The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation.” He got his wish. The entire population of Warsaw was sent to transit camps and German engineers moved from building to building, dynamiting each one. In all, 85 percent of the buildings in Warsaw were destroyed.

Central Warsaw destroyed by the Germans

Here are three eyewitness reports from those 63 tragic days:

“Imagine the scene: executions here, houses ablaze there—and then they burnt the bodies. You don’t forget a smell like that.”

“Imagine a narrow tunnel the shape of an egg, and having to run bow-legged with one foot on each inner shell of that egg, over sediment of toxic chemicals and decomposing bodies of the many who died down there, from suffocation or carbide gases the Germans used.”

“We did not only grow up quickly during those days, we grew old. At first it was a big adventure.  But we hadn’t thought what it would be like to see your comrades lying on the ground, their entrails lying beside them, begging their friends to kill them, to put them out of their pain.”

I learned about the Warsaw Uprising by visiting a museum opened in 2004 on the 60th anniversary of the revolt. According to my Polish guides, the aftermath of the war ushered in a new kind of atrocity, the execution of truth, as the Soviet conquerors nearly obliterated this tragic/heroic event from memory. In a bitter irony, once Stalin’s forces took over Poland they arrested leaders of the Polish Underground State, accused them of being fascists and Nazi sympathizers (!) and wrote history books portraying them as traitors to the Polish people. Until the fall of the Soviet empire in 1989, Polish schoolchildren learned this revisionist history, a view corrected only by the whispered contradictions of their parents.  The name of the Home Army never appeared in print and propaganda films reinforced the official Soviet line.

Monument to the Warsaw Uprising

I visited the museum on a Sunday, and earlier that day I had slipped into a couple of churches in downtown Warsaw. Poland is 96 percent Catholic and both churches were packed with worshipers, a rare sight in modern Europe. I could not understand the language, but as I stood at the back I thought of the devout Poles who had prayed first for deliverance from the Germans and then from the Soviets.  Appropriately, my first book translated into Polish was Disappointment with God. Poland has the misfortune of being a relatively flat, fertile land positioned between two great empires, and its history records many invasions from both directions. 

Today the sun shines more brightly over Poland. Its economy is growing, a contrast to most European countries. Sipping coffee in Starbucks, I watched Polish young people in jeans and leather jackets laughing together as they strolled a mall populated with Western shops and fast-food restaurants. After nearly a half-century under Soviet rule the Poles rose up again, a revolt led this time by shipyard workers and coal miners and the very first Polish pope. Improbably, this gunless revolution set their nation free at last.

I returned to the U.S. just in time for Thanksgiving, with renewed reason to give thanks for a country that since independence has not lived under foreign occupation. Like most Americans, I am fed up with a dysfunctional Congress and a presidential campaign filled with pettiness and over-the-top rhetoric. Living in a democracy, we have no one to blame but ourselves. The citizens of Poland are still relishing that privilege.

Poland's Three Uprisings

The new/old look of downtown Warsaw

The week before Thanksgiving, my favorite American holiday, I visited Poland to help the publisher of my books there, Credo, celebrate their tenth anniversary. Warsaw is a lovely city, situated along a broad river. Its main street, now a cobblestone pedestrian mall, winds past baroque churches, a university, the royal palace, and an Old Town of narrow alleys and medieval-style buildings. The visitor quickly learns, however, that these "old" buildings are actually new, rebuilt after the destruction of World War II.

Thanks to movies like Roman Polanski's The Pianist and books like Leon Uris's Mila 18, many of us know about the 1943 uprising of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. German Nazis first corralled Warsaw's Jewish population of more than 300,000 into a dense central area of the city surrounded by concrete walls and barbed wire. For three years the Jews suffered disease, overcrowding, and starvation. Then the Nazis began a program to transport them all to extermination camps.

Warsaw Jews rounded up for extermination

After some 250,000 Ghetto residents had been rounded up and killed at Treblinka, the survivors rose up in the largest single revolt by Jews during the Holocaust. Poorly armed but fighting for their lives, the rebels held off the Germans for four months until finally the SS brutally crushed the uprising. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising stands as the strongest refutation of the common perception that all Jews went "like sheep to the slaughter" during the Holocaust. Nevertheless, the resistance was futile: in the end only 100,000 of Poland's three million Jews survived the war and Hitler's extermination policies.

The following year, in an event far less known, Warsaw's Gentile population also rose up against the Nazi occupiers.  By the autumn of 1944, Germany's defeat seemed inevitable. After the D-Day invasion, Allied forces had proceeded to reclaim much of Western Europe and Soviet forces had rolled back German advances to the East. Indeed, the Soviet Red Army had marched to the very suburbs of Warsaw, less than ten miles from the capital. The Polish Home Army, an underground network of 50,000 insurgents, chose August 1 as a day to begin the liberation of their city. Bands played, the red-and-white Polish flag suddenly appeared all over the city, and women gaily danced with Polish soldiers in the streets. Surely, they thought, the Russian army would support their revolt, or at the least the American and British allies would provide air support or airdrop needed weapons.

Neither happened. Instead, the Soviets halted their advance, dug in, and watched. The Home Army won a few skirmishes in the early days, infuriating SS chief Heinrich Himmler, who decided to destroy the city as a lesson to the rest of Europe. The German army rushed tanks, rocket launchers, and machine guns to the city, and the German air force filled the skies with bombers.

Why did no one come to the Poles' defense? Josef Stalin harbored a personal hatred of the Poles because of bitter memories from the Soviet-Polish War, and he also had plans to incorporate Poland into the Soviet empire. Already the Russians had slaughtered 8,000 Polish army officers in the infamous Katyn incident. Poles who rebelled against Hitler's occupying army may well rebel against the Soviets who would displace them, so why not let the Germans do the dirty work of destroying the rebels?  The Allies asked Stalin for permission to use nearby airbases or at least make airdrops; he refused. When Churchill proposed aid missions despite Stalin's objections, Franklin Roosevelt responded, "I do not consider it advantageous to the long-range general war prospect for me to join you in the proposed message to Uncle Joe [Stalin]."

Free from outside interference, the Germans began a systematic program of slaughter and destruction.  On one bloody day known as the Wola massacre, they executed at least 30,000 civilians including women, children, and the elderly. For 63 days the Polish Home Army held out, starved of food and ammunition, often hiding in Warsaw's sewers as a protection against the relentless bombing. In all, some 200,000 civilians died in the fighting. The SS chief Himmler decreed, "The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation." He got his wish. The entire population of Warsaw was sent to transit camps and German engineers moved from building to building, dynamiting each one. In all, 85 percent of the buildings in Warsaw were destroyed.

Central Warsaw destroyed by the Germans

Here are three eyewitness reports from those 63 tragic days:

"Imagine the scene: executions here, houses ablaze there—and then they burnt the bodies. You don't forget a smell like that."

"Imagine a narrow tunnel the shape of an egg, and having to run bow-legged with one foot on each inner shell of that egg, over sediment of toxic chemicals and decomposing bodies of the many who died down there, from suffocation or carbide gases the Germans used."

"We did not only grow up quickly during those days, we grew old. At first it was a big adventure.  But we hadn't thought what it would be like to see your comrades lying on the ground, their entrails lying beside them, begging their friends to kill them, to put them out of their pain."

I learned about the Warsaw Uprising by visiting a museum opened in 2004 on the 60th anniversary of the revolt. According to my Polish guides, the aftermath of the war ushered in a new kind of atrocity, the execution of truth, as the Soviet conquerors nearly obliterated this tragic/heroic event from memory. In a bitter irony, once Stalin's forces took over Poland they arrested leaders of the Polish Underground State, accused them of being fascists and Nazi sympathizers (!) and wrote history books portraying them as traitors to the Polish people. Until the fall of the Soviet empire in 1989, Polish schoolchildren learned this revisionist history, a view corrected only by the whispered contradictions of their parents.  The name of the Home Army never appeared in print and propaganda films reinforced the official Soviet line.

Monument to the Warsaw Uprising

I visited the museum on a Sunday, and earlier that day I had slipped into a couple of churches in downtown Warsaw. Poland is 96 percent Catholic and both churches were packed with worshipers, a rare sight in modern Europe. I could not understand the language, but as I stood at the back I thought of the devout Poles who had prayed first for deliverance from the Germans and then from the Soviets.  Appropriately, my first book translated into Polish was Disappointment with God. Poland has the misfortune of being a relatively flat, fertile land positioned between two great empires, and its history records many invasions from both directions. 

Today the sun shines more brightly over Poland. Its economy is growing, a contrast to most European countries. Sipping coffee in Starbucks, I watched Polish young people in jeans and leather jackets laughing together as they strolled a mall populated with Western shops and fast-food restaurants. After nearly a half-century under Soviet rule the Poles rose up again, a revolt led this time by shipyard workers and coal miners and the very first Polish pope. Improbably, this gunless revolution set their nation free at last.

I returned to the U.S. just in time for Thanksgiving, with renewed reason to give thanks for a country that since independence has not lived under foreign occupation. Like most Americans, I am fed up with a dysfunctional Congress and a presidential campaign filled with pettiness and over-the-top rhetoric. Living in a democracy, we have no one to blame but ourselves. The citizens of Poland are still relishing that privilege.

Movin’ Down the Road

You haven’t seen a new posting from me for a while and for a good reason. We have moved, and I’ve spent the last few weeks first packing then unpacking boxes, and in between times negotiating over help lines to the Philippines and India in order to get network, phone, cable, and computer systems up and running in a new house. Nineteen years in the same place leads to a lot of accumulation, and we’ve used this opportunity to winnow our belongings. As we’re learning, it takes almost as much work to move one mile as it does to move a thousand.

It is a good thing, I’ve found, to suspend the life of the mind for a few weeks and join the world of manual labor; after all, far more people in the world spend their work hours using muscles than using brain synapses. You sleep better, end the day sore yet with a feeling of measurable accomplishment, and eat anything you want without gaining weight.

I remember vividly our 1992 move from downtown Chicago to a forest in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies. We loved our life in the city, filled with concerts, theater, great restaurants, ethnic diversity, and a grace-filled church. Over time, though, the busy and crowded urban scene complicated my writing life. I had moved to Chicago as a young journalist and found the metropolis a marvelous place for journalism: I needed only to walk outdoors to find a mugging in process, or someone having an epileptic fit, or a homeless person eager to be interviewed. Eventually, though, I wanted my writing to move in a more reflective, personal direction, which the noise and frenetic pace of the city worked against.

We looked all over the United States and made what seemed at the time a risky decision to relocate to rural Colorado, where we knew no one, and begin a life dramatically different from what we had known in Chicago. We found a house on a hill with a view of snowcapped mountains to the west. We had to look hard to see signs of any other houses poking through the trees. We arrived a few days before the moving truck, and after unloading a U-Haul trailer with a mattress, two plates, two place settings, two suitcases, and my computer, we spent the first night in an empty, echoey house. Accustomed to the background noise of the city, we found it difficult to sleep amid such silence. The next day we awoke to a stunning sight: six inches of fresh snow had transformed the landscape into a glistening white wonderland. Think Narnia at Christmas—that was our front yard.

The view we lose.

I have always found the natural world nourishing to creativity and, more, a pathway to worship. “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands,” wrote the psalmist. It baffles me that places of great natural beauty do not foster religious faith—how can Oregon and Washington have the lowest church attendance of any states? Nature was one of the key forces that brought me back to God, for I wanted to know the Artist responsible for beauty such as I saw on grand scale in photos from space telescopes or on minute scale such as in the intricate designs on a butterfly wing.

When I would hit a block in writing, or experience grief and sadness over a friend’s illness or death, I would hike up to a pile of rocks behind my home and sit, looking out over an unspoiled landscape which reminded me that the world goes on in its fierce beauty, regardless of any crisis great or small. Several times a curious red fox discovered me sitting on that rock and squatted warily nearby, his golden eyes and twitching ears alert to any movement I might make. Once I stumbled upon a cluster of Calypso orchids, a rare plant that I had come across in the writings of John Muir, who recounted the two greatest days of his life as the time when he camped in Yosemite Valley with Ralph Waldo Emerson…and when he found a Calypso orchid on a hike. And I only had to look in my back yard.

My writing did take a more personal turn. My first books composed in Colorado were The Jesus I Never Knew and What’s So Amazing About Grace?, and then came others like Soul Survivor and Reaching for the Invisible God. Soon Janet and I began traveling internationally, more than seventy countries in all, and this too informed my writing. Home became a refuge, allowing us to venture to other places because we knew we could return to the welcoming solace of Colorado.

Initially the move took a toll on Janet, who had thrived in Chicago as a social worker heading up a senior citizens’ program. After a few months in Colorado she accepted new and challenging work as a hospice chaplain. Many nights a jarring phone call would interrupt our sleep (people die at inopportune times) and she would make the trek down the hill into Denver to attend the bedside of a dying person. Later she worked at an assisted living facility managed by Orthodox Jews.

Why, then, did we decide to move again this year? In a word, age caught up with us. We had lived on several acres, which meant managing a Ponderosa pine forest subject to beetle kill and blizzards. In the locally famous blizzard of 2003 seven feet of snow fell over a two-day period. As Elihu reminded Job, “He [God] says to the snow, ‘Fall on the earth,’ and to the rain shower, ‘Be a mighty downpour.’ So that all men he has made may know his work, he stops every man from his labor.” Indeed, everything stopped in our part of the world that week.

I went snowshoeing, lunging in the soft powder to make each arduous step, and stood atop a hill listening to what sounded like rifle shots echoing through the canyon. With a start I realized they were tree branches and whole trees snapping from the weight of snow and falling to the ground with a great whoosh. We had no electricity for a week, which meant no heat and no water since the well pump had lost power too. We stayed warm by burning wood and running a small gas fireplace around the clock. Each night for a few minutes we turned on a battery-powered radio and listened to reports of war, for that was the very week the U.S. had invaded Iraq. Reports from the desert seemed very far away as I looked out my window on the moonlit whiteness.

Shoveling snow, sawing trees, pushing a lawnmower up a 30-degree slope—all these things took a toll, so this year we decided to look for a place to spend the next season of life. Once again we considered other parts of the country, especially the Southeast where our families live. Frankly, we could not find a place more appealing than Colorado. We have spectacular mountain scenery, great snow, plentiful wildlife, few bugs, 300 days of sunshine annually, no air-conditioning, and wide open spaces with few traffic jams. Why go anywhere else? (I know, I know, I sound like a hack writer for the tourist bureau.)

At the same time we wanted to simplify our lives and find a more, ahem, age-appropriate place. In our search we found a townhouse that will involve much less maintenance. We traded in a well and septic tank for treated water and a sewer system. We gave away the lawnmower and now leave snow removal to professionals. We even know the folks in the adjacent townhouse who will share a wall with us. And I have room for my twenty-six bookcases in a large downstairs office area.

The view we gain.

Life always involves tradeoffs. We have lost a view of year-round snowcaps but gained a mountain stream in our front yard. A fly fisherman with a strong arm and good aim could fish from our balcony; we’ll probably just sit on the deck and enjoy the view and the sound of rushing water.

The day before we moved, as if to remind us of that first magical day in Colorado in 1992, a freak October storm dumped a foot of fresh snow on our town. It delayed the move by several hours, as the moving truck had to send for chains to make it up our driveway, but when I took the first carload to the new place, I saw a sight reminiscent of our first morning in Colorado nineteen years before. I’ve included a photo of the stream cutting through fresh-fallen snow. As I stood at the window and watched, a herd of elk kicked their way through the snow to the creek for a drink. To my left, a kingfisher perched on a branch in search of trout small enough to swallow. Nature itself was sending a committee to welcome us.

The welcoming committee

We hope the future years in our new home prove as pleasant and productive as our last two decades have been. We still miss many things about Chicago and the urban life, yet Colorado has replaced those qualities with peace and solitude as well as a greater appreciation for the outdoors. We’re grateful for those advantages, and plan to enjoy them for, oh, the next nineteen years or so.

Movin' Down the Road

You haven't seen a new posting from me for a while and for a good reason. We have moved, and I've spent the last few weeks first packing then unpacking boxes, and in between times negotiating over help lines to the Philippines and India in order to get network, phone, cable, and computer systems up and running in a new house. Nineteen years in the same place leads to a lot of accumulation, and we've used this opportunity to winnow our belongings. As we're learning, it takes almost as much work to move one mile as it does to move a thousand.

It is a good thing, I've found, to suspend the life of the mind for a few weeks and join the world of manual labor; after all, far more people in the world spend their work hours using muscles than using brain synapses. You sleep better, end the day sore yet with a feeling of measurable accomplishment, and eat anything you want without gaining weight.

I remember vividly our 1992 move from downtown Chicago to a forest in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies. We loved our life in the city, filled with concerts, theater, great restaurants, ethnic diversity, and a grace-filled church. Over time, though, the busy and crowded urban scene complicated my writing life. I had moved to Chicago as a young journalist and found the metropolis a marvelous place for journalism: I needed only to walk outdoors to find a mugging in process, or someone having an epileptic fit, or a homeless person eager to be interviewed. Eventually, though, I wanted my writing to move in a more reflective, personal direction, which the noise and frenetic pace of the city worked against.

We looked all over the United States and made what seemed at the time a risky decision to relocate to rural Colorado, where we knew no one, and begin a life dramatically different from what we had known in Chicago. We found a house on a hill with a view of snowcapped mountains to the west. We had to look hard to see signs of any other houses poking through the trees. We arrived a few days before the moving truck, and after unloading a U-Haul trailer with a mattress, two plates, two place settings, two suitcases, and my computer, we spent the first night in an empty, echoey house. Accustomed to the background noise of the city, we found it difficult to sleep amid such silence. The next day we awoke to a stunning sight: six inches of fresh snow had transformed the landscape into a glistening white wonderland. Think Narnia at Christmas—that was our front yard.

The view we lose.

I have always found the natural world nourishing to creativity and, more, a pathway to worship. "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands," wrote the psalmist. It baffles me that places of great natural beauty do not foster religious faith—how can Oregon and Washington have the lowest church attendance of any states? Nature was one of the key forces that brought me back to God, for I wanted to know the Artist responsible for beauty such as I saw on grand scale in photos from space telescopes or on minute scale such as in the intricate designs on a butterfly wing.

When I would hit a block in writing, or experience grief and sadness over a friend's illness or death, I would hike up to a pile of rocks behind my home and sit, looking out over an unspoiled landscape which reminded me that the world goes on in its fierce beauty, regardless of any crisis great or small. Several times a curious red fox discovered me sitting on that rock and squatted warily nearby, his golden eyes and twitching ears alert to any movement I might make. Once I stumbled upon a cluster of Calypso orchids, a rare plant that I had come across in the writings of John Muir, who recounted the two greatest days of his life as the time when he camped in Yosemite Valley with Ralph Waldo Emerson…and when he found a Calypso orchid on a hike. And I only had to look in my back yard.

My writing did take a more personal turn. My first books composed in Colorado were The Jesus I Never Knew and What's So Amazing About Grace?, and then came others like Soul Survivor and Reaching for the Invisible God. Soon Janet and I began traveling internationally, more than seventy countries in all, and this too informed my writing. Home became a refuge, allowing us to venture to other places because we knew we could return to the welcoming solace of Colorado.

Initially the move took a toll on Janet, who had thrived in Chicago as a social worker heading up a senior citizens' program. After a few months in Colorado she accepted new and challenging work as a hospice chaplain. Many nights a jarring phone call would interrupt our sleep (people die at inopportune times) and she would make the trek down the hill into Denver to attend the bedside of a dying person. Later she worked at an assisted living facility managed by Orthodox Jews.

Why, then, did we decide to move again this year? In a word, age caught up with us. We had lived on several acres, which meant managing a Ponderosa pine forest subject to beetle kill and blizzards. In the locally famous blizzard of 2003 seven feet of snow fell over a two-day period. As Elihu reminded Job, "He [God] says to the snow, 'Fall on the earth,' and to the rain shower, 'Be a mighty downpour.' So that all men he has made may know his work, he stops every man from his labor." Indeed, everything stopped in our part of the world that week.

I went snowshoeing, lunging in the soft powder to make each arduous step, and stood atop a hill listening to what sounded like rifle shots echoing through the canyon. With a start I realized they were tree branches and whole trees snapping from the weight of snow and falling to the ground with a great whoosh. We had no electricity for a week, which meant no heat and no water since the well pump had lost power too. We stayed warm by burning wood and running a small gas fireplace around the clock. Each night for a few minutes we turned on a battery-powered radio and listened to reports of war, for that was the very week the U.S. had invaded Iraq. Reports from the desert seemed very far away as I looked out my window on the moonlit whiteness.

Shoveling snow, sawing trees, pushing a lawnmower up a 30-degree slope—all these things took a toll, so this year we decided to look for a place to spend the next season of life. Once again we considered other parts of the country, especially the Southeast where our families live. Frankly, we could not find a place more appealing than Colorado. We have spectacular mountain scenery, great snow, plentiful wildlife, few bugs, 300 days of sunshine annually, no air-conditioning, and wide open spaces with few traffic jams. Why go anywhere else? (I know, I know, I sound like a hack writer for the tourist bureau.)

At the same time we wanted to simplify our lives and find a more, ahem, age-appropriate place. In our search we found a townhouse that will involve much less maintenance. We traded in a well and septic tank for treated water and a sewer system. We gave away the lawnmower and now leave snow removal to professionals. We even know the folks in the adjacent townhouse who will share a wall with us. And I have room for my twenty-six bookcases in a large downstairs office area.

The view we gain.

Life always involves tradeoffs. We have lost a view of year-round snowcaps but gained a mountain stream in our front yard. A fly fisherman with a strong arm and good aim could fish from our balcony; we'll probably just sit on the deck and enjoy the view and the sound of rushing water.

The day before we moved, as if to remind us of that first magical day in Colorado in 1992, a freak October storm dumped a foot of fresh snow on our town. It delayed the move by several hours, as the moving truck had to send for chains to make it up our driveway, but when I took the first carload to the new place, I saw a sight reminiscent of our first morning in Colorado nineteen years before. I've included a photo of the stream cutting through fresh-fallen snow. As I stood at the window and watched, a herd of elk kicked their way through the snow to the creek for a drink. To my left, a kingfisher perched on a branch in search of trout small enough to swallow. Nature itself was sending a committee to welcome us.

The welcoming committee

We hope the future years in our new home prove as pleasant and productive as our last two decades have been. We still miss many things about Chicago and the urban life, yet Colorado has replaced those qualities with peace and solitude as well as a greater appreciation for the outdoors. We're grateful for those advantages, and plan to enjoy them for, oh, the next nineteen years or so.

Notes from the Great Southland

In September I spoke eight times in Australia and twice in New Zealand, sharing a platform with the actors from the U.K. with whom we've toured previously.  The only kangaroo we saw in Australia outside of a petting zoo was a dead one, a big red joey that had been hit by a car.  We saw plenty of exotic birds, though, and had a thrilling boat ride in Sydney Harbor.  On our last night I attended a piano concert by Evgeny Kissin in the Sydney Opera House, a splendid building which, I learned, pleases the eye far more than the ear.

Earlier this year a study included both Australia and New Zealand on a list of nine countries where, if current trends continue, religion will go extinct within thirty years.  As in Europe, church attendance Down Under has declined precipitously in the past fifty years and society has grown increasingly more secular.  The current Prime Minister of Australia, though raised Baptist, openly professes her atheism.

Our presentations followed a similar format to the May tour in Britain (see the blog posted on May 25 at http://www.philipyancey.com/archives/2687).  In the course of the evening we went through four Seasons of the Soul, beginning with the new life of spring and proceeding through the joy of summer, the doubts and struggles of autumn and finally the hard times of winter.  As judged from comments afterward at the book signings, audiences responded most intensely to the "winter season" of faith.  Western Australia is suffering from an extended drought while the eastern part of the country is still recovering from a devastating flood that covered an area larger than Europe.  A century-and-a-half ago Matthew Arnold wrote of the ebbing of the Sea of Faith in modern times, a retreat that leaves the world with "neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain."  That last void, nor help for pain, may edge people back to faith, especially those who live in developed countries with so many allurements to pleasure and entertainment.  Sexy advertisements and a shallow celebrity culture somehow lose their appeal when your three-year-old child lies dying in a hospital, or when you do.  I heard story after heart-breaking story of cancer and flood victims and teenage suicides and drug overdoses and Alzheimer's-afflicted parents.  Where else do you turn but to God when all of life seems frozen in a perpetual winter?

One of the sketches performed by the actors comes from the play Shadowlands.  "Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world," proclaims the confident professor C. S. Lewis from a lectern.  Yet later in the sketch, as he comes to terms with Joy Davidman's imminent death, and then tries to comfort her son Douglas, his confidence has melted into confusion and doubt.  The book he wrote about Joy's illness and death, A Grief Observed, has a very different tone than his earlier treatise The Problem of Pain.

Rather than megaphone, I prefer the image of pain as a hearing aid: while the Bible generally ignores the messy question of causation, it encourages us to "tune in" to the redemptive power of suffering.  Some respond by switching off the hearing aid and turning away from God.  Others follow the Apostle Paul's example in allowing God to wrest goodness and growth from the bad things of this world.  Even wintry times offer reasons for hope.  We saw this most clearly at the site of our last event, held in New Zealand's second largest city, Christchurch, site of a devastating earthquake last February.

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o the casual visitor New Zealanders seem shyer, more introverted than their Australian cousins, more British in personality than American.  First impressions may deceive.  An Australian described for me the difference between Aussies and "Kiwis," as they call their neighbors.  "We Australians like to present a macho image, but the Kiwis are the real tough ones.  I think it's because they don't have many natural enemies: no snakes, few venomous spiders, no dangerous mammals, no droughts in the Outback or floods in the plains.  So they invent their own physical challenges.  The first man to climb Mt. Everest hailed from New Zealand.  Outward Bound started there.  You can bungee jump off bridges or even a TV tower in downtown Auckland.  The more adventurous go for 'black-water rafting' in which you ride the rapids in total darkness inside a cave."

On this trip we tried neither bungee jumping nor black-water rafting, though we did have an unscheduled adventure.  As our plane descended through a storm toward Auckland, suddenly a ball of light smashed into the window with a loud bang that shook the entire aircraft.  A moment later the Air New Zealand pilot reported dryly, "You may have noticed that our plane has been hit by lightning.  No worries.  These things happen, and all our instruments appear to be working correctly."  The few Americans on the plane were already jittery in view of the date: September 11.

After one night in Auckland we flew on to Christchurch in the South Island.  The earthquake there made front-page news until it got dwarfed by the much more deadly earthquake and tsunami in Japan a month later.  We toured the downtown area, much of it cordoned off, and saw heaps of rubble where skyscrapers had recently stood.  The famed Anglican cathedral lost its spire and may have to be demolished, while only a buttress of steel containers keeps the main Catholic church from collapsing.  More than a thousand buildings in Christchurch face demolition.

Often after a natural disaster, communities look to churches for help.  For example, six years after Hurricane Katrina, long after the federal government has moved on, churches in Houston and Dallas still send weekend teams to repair and rebuild houses in New Orleans.  In New Zealand, denominations banded together, assigned response teams to the neediest areas, and organized a food bank and tool bank.  More than 700 aftershocks have hit the area, creating an oppressive mood of fear and anxiety.  In a city whose very name expresses their identity, the churches hope to convey "the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God" (2 Corinthians 1:3).

As I told the group gathered in Christchurch, on the surface winter looks like death.  Trees once resplendent with leaves now appear as dead sticks.  Yet botanists tell us that most plant growth occurs during winter, below the surface, as roots spread out and absorb the moisture and nutrients they will need for the vitality of spring and summer.  May it be so, not just in Christchurch, New Zealand, but all across that nation and its larger cousin Australia, once known as "the great Southland of the Holy Spirit."