Pella, Poverty, Hope, and a Thank You.

I am in Iowa fund raising this weekend.  Most of the staff from the region are here working on developing their support base, sending emails and making calls.  It feels great to be sitting here inside 3rd reformed, the church I grew up in.  What an amazing place.  I am so thankful for the leaders here who have invested in me and this city.  I started coming here when I moved to Pella in 4th grade, and our building was near the square, where the library now stands.  We had cadets and sunday school in the house next door.  It has been a powerful testimony and example to me to watch this church become the ministry that it now is.   I just told an old man story.  Oh to be young again…

When I get the chance to come back and visit, I am always struck by what an amazing place Pella is.  Some out-of-town friends I have taken with me on some of these visits have lovingly referred to it as ‘the shire.’   While I do know that, like every place on earth, Pella is full of broken and hurting souls in need of a good God…this place is special.

I experience such a variety of emotions as I drive the clean streets here.  It is a community I grew up in, I know, and I love.  It is my home.  I can’t help but contrast Pella with that of the places I have been since leaving.  I have seen smoggy streets packed beyond capacity strewn with diseased and discarded children begging for food or too near death to move or speak.  I remember being approached by the bare feet of a 5 year old girl with a baby awkwardly burdening her tiny arms.  She knocks on the window of the taxi and looks right at me.  “Please uncle, no family.  No food.”  Motioning that she has no food to feed the baby.  This was not a rare occurrence in Calcutta.  In fact, it was commonplace.  There are literally hundreds of thousands of orphaned children, homeless, diseased, and hungry roaming the streets of that city.  Many are enslaved and abused by rich men to whom all their begging profits go.  In Thailand, countless thousands buzzing piously in and out of the ornate temples, burning incense and bowing down to man-made objects.  In Jakarta we shared the gospel with a widow who lives on top of a garbage mountain.  Almost all of the people she knows will die of tuberculosis as a result of the burning waste constantly filling the air with smog and disease.  The flies are maddening after 10 minutes.  The smell is overwhelming.  There is no sewer system.  The children use mountains of festering trash as their playground, and the adults are payed 90 cents for 10 hours of picking through the burning rubble to find recyclables.  In that same neighborhood we cannot paint a cross in our mural because the local pastor must remain under-cover for fear of death.  In sunny, beautiful, Oceanside Perth, Australia more young people are killing themselves than ever before.  Depression, cutting, and hardcore drug use are rampant.  Racial segregation continues.  The gospel is mocked.  Violent crimes continue to plague inner city America.  And the economy….oooh the economy….

So often in the midst of all those experiences abroad, and now watching the evening news in St. Louis, I felt hopelessness.  I felt like I wanted nothing more than to forget about the world and collapse in on myself like a dieing star.  At times I felt like I could not deal with the emotional trauma, especially in Calcutta while working at the Mother Theresa home for handicapped men and boys.  Every day I walked by human beings laying prostrate on the curbside in front of the home, hoping there would be room for the nuns to take them in.  Some were so sick and lifeless I honestly could not tell if they were alive.  Others were coherent enough to watch their own bodies be slowly ravaged by leprosy and diseased sores.  How could I offer these people anything?  How can I bring a message of hope when my own spirit is so overcome by hopelessness?

I think perhaps it was no coincidence that I was reading Lord of the Rings at the time.  It did, I must admit, serve at times as an escape from the overwhelming reality around me.  But in looking back I can see how the Lord used that story and that imagery to encourage my soul.  As I came to him discouraged and afraid, I spent time in prayer and spent time in his word.  I asked him for hope.  I asked for hope to return to my own spirit and hope for the burdened and seemingly forgotten people of Calcutta.  And I read what I now think are the most beautiful words in Tolkien’s story:

"There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a  dark tor
 high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle
 for a while. The  beauty of it smote his heart, as he
looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope  returned
to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought
pierced him that  in the end the Shadow was only a small
and passing thing: there was light and  high beauty for
ever beyond its reach."

There, in the depths of despair, Sam and Frodo continued to put one foot in front of the other as they faced impossible circumstance.  An army of evil between them and their goal, and nothing to boast of themselves.  Two small, ordinary hobbits: Me and my team in Calcutta.  Death and failure seemed imminent.  And then, as he looked up and saw a white star twinkle, Sam’s heart was encouraged with the thought of eternal goodness and of enduring beauty.  This is not unlike the Psalmist, who sings, “My flesh and my heart may fail, But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (73:26).

What a great encouragement it is to me to know that there are places of worship and even communities of people on this earth that stand as beacons of light to a darkening world.  I am so incredibly thankful for Third Reformed and have come to think of Lake Forest Church in NC in the same manner.  These are places where God is honored, where people are loved, and from which missionaries are sent.  I love that Lake Forest is a Church for the unchurched.  I love that Third Reformed exists to “send out servant hearted disciples with a passion for God and the world.”

I love that rather than living in excess Christians in these places are both living the gospel and they are going.  They are going to Haiti, as missionaries to college campus’, to unreached people groups in Nepal, to teach in Universities, to plant Churches in surrounding communities, to orphanages in South America.  They are going to work at Vermeer and Wachovia and Pella Corp, and testifying to the truth in their everyday actions.  I am so happy to reflect upon the blessings that these communities have been to me and to the world.  I am so thankful that the living God we serve motivates our hearts to this end.

More than anything, I am thankful that we serve a God who, even when every worldly reason has been exhausted, gives us a reason to hope.  The shadow is only small and passing thing.  There is light and beauty eternal.  And we are going to take part in this glorious inheritance.  Right now the economy is giving many of us a good opportunity to feel hopeless.  Savings are evaporating into nothing, jobs are being lost, salaries are being cut, financial obligations are going unmet.  My prayer for you and I in the midst of this difficulty is that we will put our hope in him, the only worthy end on which our hope must rest.  And I pray that wherever we are, the beauty of our unwavering hope in him will pierce the hearts of those around us – at work, on campus, at home – as a testimony that there is in fact a good God who is our Father and will bring us through this into glory.

¹Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. ²Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. ³Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. Hebrews 12:1-3