Send President Obama a note via IJM

Dear Robert,

The inauguration of President Barack Obama has historic significance that citizens across the political spectrum can appreciate and celebrate. With at least nine new Senators and 52 new Congressional Representatives coming to Capitol Hill, change is in the air in Washington.

But there are some things that haven’t changed. Beyond our borders, the poorest of the poor are victimized by violent crime – sexual violence, slavery, trafficking, police brutality, and property theft from widows and orphans. And justice systems in poor countries are ill-equipped to protect victims of violent oppression and apprehend and prosecute perpetrators. Add your name to a letter bringing these important issues to President Obama’s attention.

IJM works in twelve countries to investigate and prosecute exploitation of poor and vulnerable children, women and men, but we alone cannot provide relief for all the victims who desperately need it.

WHAT YOU CAN DO: Make sure that the Obama Administration and the 111th Congress help make public justice systems capable of protecting the poorest of the poor, and the most vulnerable among them: children and women.

Please add your name to a letter bringing these important issues to President Obama’s attention – and share this message with others. Thank you for raising your voice.

Warmly,
Eileen Campbell
Director of Justice Campaigns

Adoption - Gratefully Wrecked

I'm pretty sure no one reads these posts, so I'm just putting this out there for my own sense of sanity as I try to purge every sense of selfishness in order to discern clearly what it is that God wants to have me do. 

I fully believe that God often reveals things to us when we stop asking questions like, "What's going to happen?" or "If I do this then what?"  Often my desire is to be 100% secure in the results before I make a choice.  I try to guarantee that I will know how a new TV will perform in my home in real life situations before I buy it.  I try to guarantee I will make the most money possible by waiting to the absolutely last moment to cash in on a stock trade.  I try to guarantee that if I go to an expensive all you can eat place that I will see to it that I get my money's worth (it's one reason why I've quit going to buffets).

Often the results of my mountain of research and desire to be as close to 100% confident as possible is disappointment.  I've often waited too long to sell a stock or to buy a stock. I still have not bought a TV because I'm looking for that perfect combination between flawless picture and really low price.  And I haven't been to an "all you can eat" place in some time.  In other words, my desire for confidence, my desire for reduced risk...for the sure thing has caused me to miss out on huge opportunities for growth.  And I'm not just talking about opportunities that are financial or for pleasure.  I'm talking about everyday life opportunities have been missed because I failed to make a decision.  The key to my indecisiveness has been that I have failed to seek the opinions, commands, and wisdom of God in my decisions.

On Friday this came to a head.  I'm sitting on a plane that eventually never takes off.  While sitting there waiting for it to be fixed I get a call from Jill Baker, our adoption agent.  She updated me on the situation and it was more of the same concerning that Alex, our soon to be son is ready and we can move on him at any moment.  Fiona, our soon to be daughter; however, is still a big unknown.  In Uganda they are very prudent in making sure that when they can a child isn't being traffiked.  So, they interview all of the living relatives to make sure that all of them are willing to allow the child to be adopted.  This is a really good thing when those in authority do their job.  Fiona's family lives a couple of hours away from the probation officer, aka social worker.  He has been unwilling to follow through with his interviews.  The mother, dying of AIDS, even came to meet with the probation officer and he disappeared for a week.  So, here this little girl sits in limbo, but of course she has no idea any of this is happening behind the scenes.

It's caused me to see a new perspective as God looks down on His people, His kids, and He knows what could be and yet because of our refusal to follow through on being diligent in aligning ourselves with the commands of God we and those around us remain in an orphanage thinking that this is as good as it gets.  I'm beginning to see co-workers and friends as orphans, and I believe I need to begin helping them see what's going on behind the scenes so that they can go home.

Back to the story.  After the update Jill springs, "Alex's mother has been coming to the orphanage asking them to take Alex's little sister.  I think that we could get things turned around pretty quickly on her if you wanted to go that route."

Now if you were to read my last post (http://18dollars.blogspot.com/2008_09_01_archive.html) you'd know how we go to this point.  So, there is now a plan C, a plan D, and a plan E.

Plan C involves forsaking Fiona and adopting Alex and his little sister.  Still two kids, still in the age range, and still in need of a home.  Plan D involves sticking with Fiona and Alex and maybe considering Alex's sister once she comes to the orphanage.  Plan E involves bringing home all three.  That's right...three.

There was an awkward moment of silence on my end, but I immediately knew that I was done trying to guarantee the results of this process.  Instead I need to discern the will and heart of God for my family and for these children.  I told Jill that my head wanted more data, but my heart knew that the only solution to this problem was the Holy Spirit.

I'll blog about this later, but I'm now into day five of my fasting and praying and I feel no closer to the choice than I did when I got the news.  At the same time I am being transformed, and the new perspectives I am getting is only a product of trusting God for sustenance.  Now may He who knows what my future would look like with never adopting, as well as what it would look like with one, two, or three reveal to me the BEST choice...the choice that will bring Him glory.  Any of you out there reading this...I'd covet your prayers too.

Times Article: "As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God"

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From The Times

December 27, 2008

As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God

Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa's biggest problem - the crushing passivity of the people's mindset

Matthew Parris

Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.

It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya, four student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi.

We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the more populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission.

Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers - in some ways less so - but more open.

This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. “Privately” because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.

It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.

There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.

I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.

Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.

How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

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