Category Archives: Ministry of Reconciliation

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The Fixer

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In a recent post I asked the question, ‘How does it feel to know you are part of God’s plan to save the world?’

This could be meaningless for you, I suppose, if you haven’t yet responded to Christ. Or if you have, but don’t believe that He’s active in the world. Or, it could be taken as a jest.

But what does ‘saving the world’ mean, exactly? It sure seems to mean a lot of different things, depending on whom you ask. Some people think they are saving the world by not eating meat. Others by fighting human trafficking. Still others take up arms. Some are pacifists. What they all have in common is that they are willing to fight for what they believe in. Most of us have a hill we will die on, as the saying goes.

The ones who fight for things we believe in become our heroes: Martin Luther King on one hand, or Malcolm X on the other; the RAF in 1940; today’s culture warriors, either left or right; maybe a soul-winner like Aimee Semple McPherson or Reinhardt Bonnke; perhaps a fictional world-beater like Lara Croft or Frodo Baggins or Hari Seldon.

You undoubtedly have a list of your own.

But when we say ‘saving the world’, it doesn’t actually mean ‘saving the world.’ It means ‘fixing a problem’, a completely different matter. Even the most influential world beaters are limited to one time and one place. The world is changed in a limited way for a time, and then quickly reverts to what it was before: broken and in need of saving again. And again. And again.

When the world is broken it needs saving, not fixing. And that leads to the most important name missing from the list above: Jesus Christ. He is the one and only exception.

Maybe you think that Jesus’ life, death and supposed resurrection didn’t fix anything. The poor and weak are still exploited by the rich and powerful just as they were before Jesus’ time. Natural and economic resources still remain under threat. They are still a source of contention among nations and within societies.

Human beings, individually and collectively, are forever in trouble. This is because we tend to break things. We also love to try fixing things. Yet, no matter how hard we work at it, any victory in the face of trouble is limited and temporary. Does that mean we shouldn’t try? Of course not. But when we limit ourselves to fix ourselves by ourselves we get nowhere.

It’s not about fixing something, or solving a problem. It’s about salvation. Any fixing we do is temporary. But salvation is eternal. That leads me to the belief that the world isn’t broken. It’s desperately lost.

Before I had a relationship with Jesus Christ, I was in Fix-it Mode. I was Mr. Fixit McFixface. I’d dive right in and strive for that best outcome. And, I would usually fail miserably.

So, if the world is lost, not broken, it can be saved. It can be remade. We are needy and desperate beings. As philosopher Karl Barth understatedly put it, we are ‘in distress’, and God is eager to ‘grant…assistance.’ 1

So, for my part, I’ll dig into His handbook and when there’s an instruction I don’t understand, I’ll raise my hand and ask a question.

Meanwhile, I can happily stop trying to fix my friends and family. They aren’t broken. They aren’t projects. They are just needy people like me, who need a little love. And when I love them – I’m doing my part to save the world.

1. Quoted by Eugene Peterson in A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, (Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 1980)

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Sifting The Evidence

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A year ago I wrote and published a poem called ‘White Silence Drowns Out Black Voices.’ I just re-read it for the first time in many months.

I can’t read my own work in a vacuum. I must bounce it against The Current Conversation to see if it remains relevant, is now dated, or is in danger of being misapplied.

A poem, like any other piece of art, lives in danger of being appropriated or interpreted in ways the artist does not sanction. But that’s the way of art. Art is nothing but an opinion, after all. Artists create art and launch it into the world. How the art is received is up to the receiver.

How art is received also says more about the receiver than the art itself or the artist.

As an artist, I reflect my own opinion or observation, or lay out memoir-as-verse. All my creations are photograph-like. They are static snapshots, reflecting a moment, a vision, a feeling. They aren’t likely to stand for all time. They aren’t likely to create a movement, only a mood.

I cook the dish and you taste. Then you decide whether you like it or send it back to the kitchen.

Back to the poem, which is about how my choices not to speak against injustice help injustice flourish. In The Current Conversation, it might be easy to read this work as only being about the Black Lives Matter movement (whatever that is any more), or the larger historical struggle for equity and equality.

While the poem does speak to these matters, and indeed was inspired by The Previous Conversations about them, it was written as a much broader expression.

We get so distracted arguing dualities: black versus white, black versus ‘not black enough’; white versus ‘institutional racism’, ‘content of our character’ versus ‘anti-racism’, etc.

All these dualities are, by virtue of our Twitterfied society, merely fields of combat – places where we can line up and yell at one another meaninglessly and stoke division and fan the flames of strife. They don’t address the problem, which is human sinfulness stemming from human pride. The idea that I’m better than you.

None of those dualities touch the meaning of ‘White Silence Drowns Out Black Voices.’ The meaning is a simple acknowledgement of the need for reconciliation. Yes, between different ethnic groups, philosophies and methodologies. But more generally, among all people of disparate views.

Here’s the key stanza:

I’ve been silent far too long,
And my silence kept me from traveling
The hard road to redemption,
That is best walked with a brother.

Read it as a sentence: I’ve been silent far too long, and my silence kept me from traveling the hard road to redemption that is best walked with a brother.

For you, that redemption might be seen as racial reconciliation. For another, it could be the seeming unfairness of captalism toward the poor. For still another, it could be the fact she only earns 65% of what’s given her male colleague. For me, we could consider the wounds inflicted in my childhood from sexual abuse or those that came from my own bad choices around drugs and alcohol.

One person’s reconciliation is another person’s outrage. One person’s weakness is another person’s strength. One person’s faith is another person’s encouragement.

In my own case, I couldn’t have gotten sober alone, and I surely was unable to come to faith alone, even with God’s help. I need brothers and sisters to walk the hard road to redemption with me. I need their faith, and I hope they need mine.

We need discipleship in all things worthwhile. So let’s speak up for one another, especially in the hard things. Otherwise we are just opposing lines, on someone else’s field of play, yelling at one another, to no effect.

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Another View of Poverty

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(An eight minute read)

Billions of us live in physical poverty: hungry, thirsty, exposed to the elements. And billions of us live in spiritual poverty, searching only for those things around us to make us comfortable.

Grasping a billion challenges is impossible, but when I boil it down to just one person’s, perhaps I can see a way through.

Smurfy

I was ministering to the poor on California streets some years ago when I ran across a man called Smurfy. He was disheveled and stank. The stale crumbs in his beard were mixed with other things, probably from sleeping rough on the pavement. He had been so drunk for so long his ability to communicate was reduced to a series of grunts.

The one thing he could still say intelligibly was, ‘Fifty cent? Got fifty cent?’

I offered him a dollar but he turned it down. He knew what he wanted. He wanted fifty cents. Continually being knocked about by life and his own bad choices, he’d set his own bar lower and lower. Smurfy’s view of the world was so overwhelmed by poverty his idea of treasure was four bits.

Here in front of me in London, I speak with men and women every day sitting on the pavement asking for money. Some of them are in it for the next fix: the strung out ones covered with scabs and scars; the shaky alcoholics who need comfort from their friend Stella Artois; those few whose hope still remains as long as they can get £18 per day for a shelter instead of sleeping rough. Not surprisingly, almost all of them welcome prayer. Deep down they know what they need more than money, more than a worldly fix.

For those sleeping rough or hoping to avoid it, food isn’t the issue. It’s opportunity. Plenty of passers-by assuage their consciences by buying these floor-dwellers packaged sandwiches or coffee. After all, they aren’t to be trusted with money, are they? I mean, they might spend it on something we disapprove of. Like Stella, or tobacco, or weed, or heroin.

Rory and Frankie

I had an enlightening conversation a few weeks ago with a young man named Rory. We were on the street outside one of London’s larger railway stations. Rory left home at 15. It was that or be beaten one time too many. That was eight years ago. He’s now living on those sandwiches and coffee and saving his money for needle drugs.

If I’d had cash that day I’d have given it to him. I know what it is like to really, really need a fix. Sure – you can condemn me for that if you like. But I also know what it’s like to hit rock bottom and need radical change. Do you?

In my own neighborhood a few days ago a fellow named Frankie was freshly released from prison. He’s one of those who still has hope – his sign told me he needed £18 a day for shelter. I gave him 20 quid. When he left prison in May he was given back his possessions, handed £46 and told to have a nice day. This is government-induced poverty. And we wonder why our prisons have a revolving door?

Frankie wants more than a kip. He also wants a job. He wants a chance, an opportunity. He’s willing. He still sees a future for himself, and wants to leave his past behind. But how long will we ask him to live in hope?

Giving him my money helped him get through one day. What if I had given him half my life savings? Would he spend it responsibly? Is he ready for that?

If we can meet Frankie where he is – and give him an opportunity (read: dignity) – his life can change for the better, probably faster than we’d expect.

Meanwhile, Rory doesn’t yet know what he wants. He knows he’s trapped but believes he’s powerless to find a way out. What if I’d given him half my life savings? Would he have ultimately used it to OD? Or would he have marched right up to a private drug rehabilitation facility? Rory too needs an opportunity, but needs to be shown first that there is a better way.

Unseen But Not Forgotten

Then there are those I’ll never meet, who are the victims of geopolitical forces that leave them chronically hungry. Imagine a child in Timor-Leste, a small island nation between Indonesia and Australia. Like half her village she’s grown up stunted due to malnutrition. Her younger brother suffers from wasting, which will likely emaciate him until his dies. What if I gave her (or her village) half my life savings? In the long run would it help them build a new life? Or would it run through their fingers like water?

Food alone and money alone, or both together, don’t solve the problem.

Do we want to help these unfortunates? Of course! We are moved to act. But so often we only see outward action as the way to make a change. Adopt an orphan, support Charity Water, pay for schools in rural Africa, support your local homeless shelter, donate to your church’s mission work. This outward action feels good, but doesn’t seem to change the playing field for those trapped there.

I believe it’s our inward action that helps us all make more real and lasting change. At the bottom of it all is the need for reconciliation. And it begins with me.

In affluent countries, mostly in the global north and west, it’s on me and you to begin the conversation and take action. We are the ones who ask our governments to send aid elsewhere. We are the ones who send NGOs to help and missionaries to teach.

Making It Personal

We do these things administratively and impersonally. We send aid elsewhere in an abstract fashion, for example, pushing to share Covid-19 vaccines with other countries. It’s a generous thing to do. It’s the ‘right thing to do’. It’s ‘moral and ethical’. It’s ‘good policy.’ It’s proper use of our ‘privilege’. And yet, it’s not personal. These things cost me nothing. Even before my tax dollars leave my hand I stop thinking about them.

And my charity? That probably costs me nothing either. I’m not motivated to give until it hurts, are you? I don’t want to reduce my comfort, after all. Oh, I’ll vote for those who will spend tax dollars the way I want. Or perhaps I’ll volunteer or even work for an organization that fights poverty. But I won’t choose to go without.

At the end of all my charitable doing and heartfelt giving, I’ll go home to my comfortable flat for a dinner containing as much protein as my young friend in Timor-Leste eats in three days. Then I’ll park myself in front of the telly because I had such a hard day.

See? There are many types of poverty, and many ways in which our growth can be stunted. Billions of us live in physical poverty while billions of the affluent live in spiritual poverty, searching only for those things that make us comfortable. That is, those things that insulate us from the realities those other billions suffer constantly and without cease.

I think each group has something to learn from the other. Both have a mindset that screams ‘poverty’. I can be saved from my poverty mindset, but it takes a long time, or supernatural intervention.

Read more in this series.

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