Sunday, August 02, 2009
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
I need your help!
I'm working on a new blog, but i'm having trouble coming up with a good name. Any ideas?
Monday, June 01, 2009
June 2009 Prayer Letter - Read this one.
If you're going to read any prayer letter. Read this one. It will probably be my last for a while. To read, go here, and click on the PDF titled June 2009 Prayer Letter.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
While We Were Trekking
Last week I joined Calvin and the Servant Team (a group of five women serving with us for four months) on a trek through the Himalayas. It was incredible to get out of Kathmandu and into the amazing hills and mountains. Fresh air. Green hills. The highest mountains in the world. You can't beat it.
When we got back to Pokhara, a city smaller than Kathmandu, but big enough to have a tourist area, we received some sad and shocking news. Our church, Church of the Assumption, was bombed during the service. Two people died, one a 15 year old girl, and the other a newly married woman visiting from India. About 14 were injured, including our good friend Brother Rakesh. The past couple days we have visited Rakesh in the hospital, as he is being treated for burns on his head and face. Others have been more severely injured.
Please pray for our community, for those who have died and their families, for those who have been injured, and for the rest as they wonder where to go from here.
People believe the bomb was the work of the Nepal Defense Army, a group of Hindu Nationalists who are set on reinstating the Hindu monarchy. This Sunday there will be a peace rally throughout Kathmandu and Nepal, organized by Muslim, Christian, Buddhist and Hindu leaders who are standing up for peace among the diverse faiths in Nepal. Pray for this rally also.
When we got back to Pokhara, a city smaller than Kathmandu, but big enough to have a tourist area, we received some sad and shocking news. Our church, Church of the Assumption, was bombed during the service. Two people died, one a 15 year old girl, and the other a newly married woman visiting from India. About 14 were injured, including our good friend Brother Rakesh. The past couple days we have visited Rakesh in the hospital, as he is being treated for burns on his head and face. Others have been more severely injured.
Please pray for our community, for those who have died and their families, for those who have been injured, and for the rest as they wonder where to go from here.
People believe the bomb was the work of the Nepal Defense Army, a group of Hindu Nationalists who are set on reinstating the Hindu monarchy. This Sunday there will be a peace rally throughout Kathmandu and Nepal, organized by Muslim, Christian, Buddhist and Hindu leaders who are standing up for peace among the diverse faiths in Nepal. Pray for this rally also.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Swine Flu?
Sunday, April 26, 2009
A Letter To A Young Activist, by Trappist Monk, Thomas Merton
Dear Jim,
Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything…
…The big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.
The next step in the process is for you to see that your own thinking about what you are doing is crucially important. You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work, out of your work and your witness. You are using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love. Think of this more and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.
The great thing after all is to live, not to pour out your life in the service of a myth: and we turn the best things into myths. If you can get free from the domination of causes and just serve Christ’s truth, you will be able to do more and will be less crushed by the inevitable disappointments. Because I see nothing whatever in sight but much disappointment, frustration and confusion….
The real hope, then is not in something we think we can do but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. If we can do God’s will, we will be helping in this process. But we will not necessarily know all about it before hand…
Enough of this…it is at least a gesture….I will keep you in my prayers.
All the best, in Christ,
Tom
Friday, April 03, 2009
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Weekend in Nagarkot, a few pics
When I arrived home in Kathmandu, I joined Calvin and the Servant Team on a weekend trip outside the valley, to a place called Nagarkot. The Servant Team is a group here in Nepal for four months, learning the Nepali language, sharing life with Nepali families, and serving among the poor in Kathmandu. Calvin is doing an incredible job leading them closer to God's heart for the call, and God's work in their own lives. Here's a few pics from our time...
From our candlelit dinner in Nagarkot
Devotions
Calvin and I on the roof of a bus
The Servant Team (Beth, Kelsey, Hope, Kim, Blair)
From our candlelit dinner in Nagarkot
Devotions
The man himself. Servant Team Coordinator, Calvin Smothers.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
On March 30, 2009, Word Made Flesh drops the new logo, new website, new look for the Cry, business papers, business cards, etc. I hope you're excited. Because I am. I haven't seen the website, but I'm sure it'll be chic. Check it out...the new site.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
April 2009 Prayer Letter
Dear Friends,
I love to dance. You might not guess it, if you haven’t known me long, or have never seen it yourself. With my quiet, calm, reserved disposition, it might be hard to imagine. But maybe you caught me letting loose at my brothers’ wedding, or the WMF post-board meeting party, or in the small kitchen of my Nepali friends' home after feasting on pizza. I haven’t always been that way. No, in junior high and most of high school I was like most other awkward teenage white boys, doing my best to look cool, but moving very little at the school dances. I don’t know how it happened, but during my senior prom I just let it all go. I danced like a crazy person, and haven’t really stopped since. I assure you I was no less awkward than the early days, but it didn’t matter. On the dance floor, with the music and the crowd, I was free.
Letting loose. It’s an interesting phrase. It’s saved for specific times when we are free to put aside reservation and express ourselves, on the dance floor or elsewhere. The rest of the time, though, we’re not expected to let loose. We’re expected to keep things inside - our emotions or opinions or thoughts. Essentially, ourselves.
I have spent the past couple weeks receiving counseling, which has been an incredible experience. A lot has come to the surface. I am learning things about myself, the patterns I have developed for living, the ways that I keep myself safe and assure acceptance by others. I realized, also, why I love to dance. When I dance, it is as if all of the emotions that I have learned to avoid, repress or ignore are finally bursting out. I have a similar feeling after a good cry. It is a feeling of freedom. When most other days I hold myself inside, in a prison, these moments I let myself feel and I allow those feelings to come pouring out. It is the feeling of connection, of my body being connected to my soul. It is the feeling of truth, of my outer actions staying true to my inner being. It is the feeling of wholeness.
I have moments of these feelings. When I dance. When I cry. When I laugh so hard I cry some more. But most of the time I hold myself in. I’m really good at it. And I have started to recognize the ways I keep myself disconnected. My hope is to continue walking towards wholeness, allowing myself to feel, so that my body and soul become one, as God intended them to be. This doesn’t mean that I need a huge emotional reaction in every situation. But I do believe I am disconnected inside, and the more connected I become the more I will feel and the more I’ll let those feelings out.
Have you ever seen a clip in a movie taking place in another culture or another country, where women gather together to mourn the death of someone in the community? I think you could find this in much of the world besides the West. I remember seeing this in movies and wondering at the eery wailing of the community. The grief so great that sobbing and groaning come uninhibitedly. It’s a different scene in our own movies, where people quietly stand by the casket as it is lowered into the earth. Some might suggest that this is because we have hope of life after death, and that others without that hope mourn with despair. While I trust that mourning with hope is different from mourning in despair, I wonder if we have learned to hold back our emotions. If we have embraced the dualism of body and soul so that we don’t know how to live as one connected person. Jesus wept when his friend, Lazarus died. I have heard some say this is because his friends had no faith, not actually sad about his death. But either way you look at it, Jesus felt sad inside. And he wept outside. Wholeness.
I know that personality plays in here. And surely, with a little more freedom I don’t expect to become chatty-kathy, or the life of the party. I am also learning to trust that God made me who I am. And he made me good. But I believe that I am disconnected. And I long for connectedness. I feel in many ways imprisoned. And I long for freedom. Pray for me and walk with me as I continue to journey towards wholeness and freedom.
Peace to you sisters and brothers.
Love,
Andrew
I love to dance. You might not guess it, if you haven’t known me long, or have never seen it yourself. With my quiet, calm, reserved disposition, it might be hard to imagine. But maybe you caught me letting loose at my brothers’ wedding, or the WMF post-board meeting party, or in the small kitchen of my Nepali friends' home after feasting on pizza. I haven’t always been that way. No, in junior high and most of high school I was like most other awkward teenage white boys, doing my best to look cool, but moving very little at the school dances. I don’t know how it happened, but during my senior prom I just let it all go. I danced like a crazy person, and haven’t really stopped since. I assure you I was no less awkward than the early days, but it didn’t matter. On the dance floor, with the music and the crowd, I was free.
Letting loose. It’s an interesting phrase. It’s saved for specific times when we are free to put aside reservation and express ourselves, on the dance floor or elsewhere. The rest of the time, though, we’re not expected to let loose. We’re expected to keep things inside - our emotions or opinions or thoughts. Essentially, ourselves.
I have spent the past couple weeks receiving counseling, which has been an incredible experience. A lot has come to the surface. I am learning things about myself, the patterns I have developed for living, the ways that I keep myself safe and assure acceptance by others. I realized, also, why I love to dance. When I dance, it is as if all of the emotions that I have learned to avoid, repress or ignore are finally bursting out. I have a similar feeling after a good cry. It is a feeling of freedom. When most other days I hold myself inside, in a prison, these moments I let myself feel and I allow those feelings to come pouring out. It is the feeling of connection, of my body being connected to my soul. It is the feeling of truth, of my outer actions staying true to my inner being. It is the feeling of wholeness.
I have moments of these feelings. When I dance. When I cry. When I laugh so hard I cry some more. But most of the time I hold myself in. I’m really good at it. And I have started to recognize the ways I keep myself disconnected. My hope is to continue walking towards wholeness, allowing myself to feel, so that my body and soul become one, as God intended them to be. This doesn’t mean that I need a huge emotional reaction in every situation. But I do believe I am disconnected inside, and the more connected I become the more I will feel and the more I’ll let those feelings out.
Have you ever seen a clip in a movie taking place in another culture or another country, where women gather together to mourn the death of someone in the community? I think you could find this in much of the world besides the West. I remember seeing this in movies and wondering at the eery wailing of the community. The grief so great that sobbing and groaning come uninhibitedly. It’s a different scene in our own movies, where people quietly stand by the casket as it is lowered into the earth. Some might suggest that this is because we have hope of life after death, and that others without that hope mourn with despair. While I trust that mourning with hope is different from mourning in despair, I wonder if we have learned to hold back our emotions. If we have embraced the dualism of body and soul so that we don’t know how to live as one connected person. Jesus wept when his friend, Lazarus died. I have heard some say this is because his friends had no faith, not actually sad about his death. But either way you look at it, Jesus felt sad inside. And he wept outside. Wholeness.
I know that personality plays in here. And surely, with a little more freedom I don’t expect to become chatty-kathy, or the life of the party. I am also learning to trust that God made me who I am. And he made me good. But I believe that I am disconnected. And I long for connectedness. I feel in many ways imprisoned. And I long for freedom. Pray for me and walk with me as I continue to journey towards wholeness and freedom.
Peace to you sisters and brothers.
Love,
Andrew
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