Windows Open, Outward and Upward

I’ve recently been reading a book called Letters by a Modern Mystic.  It’s the (now) more than 80-year-old prayer diary of a missionary named Frank Laubach.  Fun holiday reading, right? :)  Fascinating, actually.  And (I’m finding, at least) remarkably relevant – both to our situation right now and to this time of year.

At the time that he wrote his “letters,” Laubach had just moved to a remote, very strongly Muslim area of the Philippines.  He was alone in a new community, not yet familiar with the people that he felt called to reach, not yet as aware or as appreciative as he would later be of their culture and even their religion.  It was a time that Laubach described as “the lonesomest year, in some ways the hardest year, of [his] life.”  However, he goes on to say that it was a year that was “the most gloriously full of voices from heaven.” 

Looking back on this year, Elias and I would have to echo a few of those sentiments.  It has not been an easy year – in many ways, the hardest of our married life at least.  We have left behind many people whom we love and places that hold some of our dearest memories, a community that has loved and supported us and a work in which we have seen God bringing forth incredible fruit.  And yet we go forward confident in God’s leading -- and thankful that we have all of those things here as well.  To have all of those things on opposite sides of the world – well, it seems almost greedy really. :)

Perhaps more than ever before, in our move here Elias and I have experienced the generosity of people.  We are so thankful for our wonderful family, friends and church community that have always loved and supported and prayed for us and encouraged us in so many remarkable and unexpected ways.  We are truly blessed! 

Elias has now completed (very successfully, I might add) his first semester in his Social Work program at Humber.  He is enjoying the program and finding what he is learning valuable and practical to what he has done in the past and would like to do in the near and distant future. :)  This next semester he will only have to commute to Humber three days a week (oh the blessing of only THREE 4:30 a.m. wake-ups!) as he will be doing his first work placement here in Kitchener, with the Social Planning Council of Kitchener-Waterloo.  He is looking forward to the opportunity and, as you can see from this picture, he is acclimating just fine to Canadian winter – aided and abetted by four or five layers of clothing UNDER his winter jacket. :)

I have completed my first term of teaching at Fellowship Christian School here in Kitchener.  I have a class full of wonderful, unique, very keen individuals.  Over this last month or so they worked hard to raise money to fill 14 Christmas boxes for Samaritan’s Purse’s Operation Christmas Child.  We had the opportunity to drop these off in person at the Operation Christmas Child collection centre and to tour the centre itself.  An incredible experience!  Even more than the massive scale of the centre and the work that is done there, I was impressed with (and blessed by) the generosity of my students and their very sincere desire to reach out to the world in whatever ways they can.  They are already ambitious and selfless workers in God’s kingdom, and I am looking forward to watching them continue to grow in faith, in character and in each and every one of their abilities. 

As we look forward to this Christmas season (my first one spent with THIS part of our family in five years, and Elias’s first EVER!) and to the New Year, we do so with gratitude for what we have experienced of God’s blessing and his presence with us in the experiences of this last year – and with anticipation for what is to come.  Not all of that is certain – such, I have discovered, is life. :) My comfort in that is that, this New Year as in every other, I can say with the Psalmist, “Lord you have assigned me my portion and my cup; you have made my lot secure.  The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance” (Psalm 16:5-6). 

This has been a year in which God has done BIG things for us – he always does, if we bother to pay attention. :)  He has worked miracles through the Canadian visa department (which in itself is a BIG thing!) and has provided for our every need.  We look forward to another year lived in his keeping.

I’d like to close with another thought from my 80-year-old prayer diary.  On the 3^rd of January, 1930, Frank Laubach reflected on the coming of the New Year with these words:

“To be able to look backward and say, ‘This, this has been the finest year of my life’ – that is glorious!  But anticipation!  To be able to look ahead and say, ‘The present year can and shall be better!’ – that is more glorious!  If we said such things about our achievements, we would be consummate egotists.  But if we are speaking of God’s kindness, and we speak truly, we are but grateful.  And this is what I do witness.  I have done nothing but open windows – God has done all the rest.” 

Laubach’s New Year’s resolution, 80 years ago, was this: “to be as wide open toward people and their need as I am toward God.  Windows open outward as well as upward!  Windows especially open downward where people need most!”  I pray that his resolution will be ours as well.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Look After "Our Own"?

Immigration is an issue that recent events have thrust into the public eye. The arrival of 492 potential migrants on the Sun Sea has made it inevitable that we who ARE Canadians confront the issues that are raised by this sudden influx of those who would like to be. Many of the views that have been expressed on the subject, however, go beyond this one fairly unusual event; they reflect much broader views on the subject of immigration as a whole. And on this subject, unfortunately, I find that much of the public shares the views reflected in the following comment, which was posted at the bottom of a column published in the Toronto Sun (and which was recently echoed by Toronto mayoral candidate Rob Ford): “Stop the immigration and start looking after our own.”

As a patriotic Canadian myself, I recognize and understand the desire of Canadians to have their needs met and their rights protected; what I fail to see is how this is necessarily antithetical to the idea of immigration. To me, comments like the one above reflect a certain ignorance of the realities of our nation and of the nature of immigration itself. They reflect an outdated and prejudicial view of those who come from elsewhere to make our nation their home, a view that these new Canadians will somehow be a “drain” on our nation’s time and resources, that, like children, they will require “baby-sitting,” financial and otherwise, at the expense of “real” Canadians as they acclimate to their new surroundings – the nation that we are so quick to claim as our own with every breath that we are not using to criticize its policies, its policy-makers and what we see as its fundamental flaws.

Recent experience has made me at least somewhat familiar with the realities of the Canadian immigration system. One of these realities, which I think many Canadians fail to understand, is the stringency of the immigration process itself. The requirements of this process are such that, of those applying under the skilled worker category, only the best-educated and most qualified candidates are accepted: the doctors, the lawyers and the engineers who have been trained at other countries’ expense and who now form an integral part of Canada’s economy. In other countries, this is referred to as “the brain drain.” 

What Canadians fail to understand is that other countries’ “drain” is Canada’s gain. These Canadians are not going to be draining the pocketbooks of those who happen to have been here for a few more generations; on the contrary, these Canadians are the ones who are going to be performing our surgeries, designing our homes, developing the technologies that will change the way we work and live, and driving the growth of business across our nation. In my personal experience, the new Canadian families and individuals that I have known are some of the hardest-working, most honourable, most community and family-oriented people that I have ever had the pleasure to meet. They are the ones who have not yet forgotten what a privilege it is to be Canadian.

-- Heather

The Tragedy Next Door

When my husband and I tell people where we live, they usually respond – and this with a certain look on their faces – “WHERE?”

This is because Addis is a city like any other, and in this particular city my husband and I live on the wrong side of the metaphorical tracks; to put it more literally, on the wrong side of the marketplace which, to many residents of Addis, marks the dividing line between part of the city where it is desirable to live, visit, work and play … and the part of the city in which it is, quite frankly, NOT. My husband and I live on the UNdesirable side; in short, we live on the wrong side of the capital city of the ninth poorest nation in the world.

When Elias and I look out on our neighbourhood, we see rusted tin roofs, mud-walled huts, livestock (plenty of livestock), and 260,000 people crammed into an area of 63 square kilometers. (Okay, my non-mathematical brain might not immediately calculate that ratio; however, government statistics tell me that it is so.) We see people striving daily to make a living selling plastic washbasins, crude metal cooking pots and utensils, fabric, fruits and vegetables, or vegetarian samosas on the side of the road. Some merchants even sell second-hand clothes, the cast-offs of the Western world. These resourceful men and women buy their wares in bales, by the kilo, from a warehouse in the middle of Mercato, then bring them back to their neighbourhoods to sell. The clothes are washed, then turned inside-out and strewn over the rocky sidewalks for display. 

Perhaps the only sight more common, in this neighbourhood, than the insides of twenty pairs of Levi’s jeans baking in the sun is that of the maniacal blue and white taxis hurtling over potholes and around corners at break-neck speeds.

This is Kolfe; this is my neighbourhood. Often, my husband and I are awakened in the night by the riotous barking of the huge packs of stray dogs that wander the streets at night. Occasionally, although you do develop an immunity to such things, we are awakened by the competing morning calls to prayer of the local mosque and the Orthodox church, both of which have little respect for the sanctity of the pre-sunrise hours.

On the morning of January 19^th, however, we awoke to quite a different sound: sirens (unusual for any reason in the streets of Addis, let alone of Kolfe), whistles and the sounds of people screaming shattered the morning stillness. As unbelievable as it may seem, the din only partially penetrated my sleep-addled brain – just enough so that, for the rest of the night, I dreamed of kidnappings, plane crashes, death and destruction.

It was not until the next morning that I was able to fully distinguish the subjects of my dreams from the nightmare that had been. My husband went out, that morning, to buy some bananas from the little souk up the street.

Just outside of the gates of the school compound where we live stands a six-storey building – one of the only six-storey buildings in a neighbourhood in which most shops are the size of a large closet and ten square meters can house a relatively profitable café. This building accommodates a number of small shops, a restaurant and café, a movie rental business, and a large hall which shows Premier League soccer games on its big screen for the viewing pleasure of local fans (of which there are many) for an entrance fee of a few birr – and blares them on its powerful sound system for the benefit of the neighbourhood.

In place of this building stood a colossal pillar of charcoal. Shocked residents of the neighbourhood had congregated around its base, taking in the sight, discussing quietly amongst themselves the events of the previous night. Scattered at their feet were fragments of burned tablecloths and fabric and piles of broken glass from shattered windows.

From these windows, it was being said, several people had jumped to escape the fire that had raged throughout the building in the early hours of the morning. Some of these had jumped from the fourth storey or above. At least one death was being reported. Little was known, at that time at least, of the condition of those who had survived.

Several weeks have passed now, and the building still stands charred and virtually empty, a monument to the terrible events of that night. It has been estimated that between six and seven hundred neighbourhood residents have been impacted, in one way or another, by the fire’s devastation.

Directly across the street from this building stands the school where I happen to teach and where my husband and I happen to live, a school that is known in our (predominantly Muslim) neighbourhood to be Christian. The students who attend here, if by no other standard than the fact that they don’t have to shine shoes or sell tissue on street corners to feed themselves and their families, are well-off in comparison with the children and adults of the neighbourhood. How do we, then, respond to such devastation in our immediate surroundings? How do we respond to the almost unimaginable suffering of our closest neighbours?

The students, when they arrived at school the following morning, were full of questions. A fire on such a grand scale, when it is not on the news but in one’s own neighbourhood, is a shock and a curiosity. But to say so would not give enough credit to the compassion of these students. They learned of the fire on a Wednesday. By the next Tuesday afternoon, the students had raised and personally donated enough money to pay for the surgery of the man most severely injured in the fire. He had jumped from a fourth storey window, shattering the bones in at least one of his legs and severely injuring his spine. Several school staff members went to visit this man and his friend, who was also injured, in their homes; they arranged for transportation to the hospital and for proper medical care; they spoke to the men and their families and to the doctors who would be involved in the cases. By the Friday, the students had raised more than 10,000 birr.

But in the face of such unspeakable tragedy, one might ask, even of that sum, is it enough? If our standard is the teachings of Jesus, perhaps not. It is doubtful that any one of the students (or teachers) gave or sold his own coat in his fundraising efforts. On the other hand, several students did bring in the equivalent of several months’ or even a year’s worth of their own pocket money. To my knowledge, not one of the students has the ability to go tell the men authoritatively to just get up and walk. But these students have, to the extent that they can, provided for these men to have the best medical care available to them. Is it enough? It’s what we can do. And when and if the opportunity arises to do more, I hope and pray that we will have the compassion to do that too.

It occurs to me that sometimes Jesus fed the crowds spectacularly; sometimes he touched one man; and sometimes he simply cried with those who were hurting. And in no one of those actions was his compassion any greater or less than the other. That does not excuse us from acting where and whenever we can to relieve the suffering around us. Jesus calls us to action; but he calls us first and foremost to compassion. Action motivated by anything less powerful will be less powerful than what he intended.

We here in Kolfe pray that God will use these doctors to restore two suffering men to full health; we pray also that God will use the suffering of our world to restore us to full compassion – the full measure of the compassion that God had for our world – and in so doing, work through us to restore our world to himself.

-- Heather