this summer i'm going back to baojing for a month and a half. i'm going with a team of other grad students to do an agricultural needs assessment survey, and at night i'm going to try to do some bible studies and ministry. there are two other christians going, one of whom is going as a full-time short-term missionary. as should be expected, i feel really drawn back to the place, and i'm really looking forward to it, and...i don't know. i hope it's different. i hope i don't lapse into mere enjoyment of being back, an enjoyment of people and places. i hope things happen.
i wonder if moses ever thought about what his old friends and acquaintances in egypt would think when he returned to them to bring the message of God. would he have feared their attention, their puzzlement at his new mission? would he have welcomed it, to be able to share the transforming power of God? would he have said, this is my heritage of faith, to which i was previously and willfully blind? would he have felt guilty for his former life of immediate and undeserved privilege among them as an outsider?
no more unholy self-projections. a year in hawaii doesn't really equal 80 years in the desert.
Friday, April 28, 2006
april is the cruelest month,
breeding lilacs out of the dead land,
mixing memory and desire,
stirring dull roots with spring rain.
i don't have a firm grasp on cruelty at the moment. this year, the middle of spring isn't seeming to dredge up too many buried memories and stale desires. the roots feel watered and ready to blossom instead, as if lilacs have actually been bred out of the dead land. i suppose the presence of flowers could steal focus away from the surrounding deadness, or maybe if lilacs are coming to life, the land isn't dead anymore. it seems as if death and cruelty must come from a lifetime of unsatisifed desires and dead-ended adventures of the brain, leading to expanding iso-deso-lation. analysis...just don't think too much.
The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.
- Deuteronomy 29:29
But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.
- 1 Corinthians 2:7
The Lord is my strength and my song, and He has become my salvation.
- Exodus 15: 2
breeding lilacs out of the dead land,
mixing memory and desire,
stirring dull roots with spring rain.
i don't have a firm grasp on cruelty at the moment. this year, the middle of spring isn't seeming to dredge up too many buried memories and stale desires. the roots feel watered and ready to blossom instead, as if lilacs have actually been bred out of the dead land. i suppose the presence of flowers could steal focus away from the surrounding deadness, or maybe if lilacs are coming to life, the land isn't dead anymore. it seems as if death and cruelty must come from a lifetime of unsatisifed desires and dead-ended adventures of the brain, leading to expanding iso-deso-lation. analysis...just don't think too much.
The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.
- Deuteronomy 29:29
But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.
- 1 Corinthians 2:7
The Lord is my strength and my song, and He has become my salvation.
- Exodus 15: 2
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