Nomadic Ruminations

I am in Boston, just three and a half days from a flight to Bangkok and most people want to know whether or not I am excited. I cannot honestly answer that in neither the affirmative nor the negative. I have not any interest in accelerating myself toward Saturday nor am I tempted to tap the breaks. My expectations have been neutralized by a lack of specific information and the business of accomplishing remaining tasks. I am coasting and I am comfortable with that.

"The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and to try to realize it. But God's grace speedily shatters such dreams." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

It may seem fanciful to make much of a four month experience of close community, but one could say the same about the experience in its four month entirety. Why make anything of it at all? The reality is that this short mission's construction, inasmuch as I anticipate encountering depravity and captivity at a level about which I have heretofore been ignorant, is fairly grave. The same gravity extends to being jarringly bound together with other Christians in close quarters.

I have lived the past two years alone and have been thinking a lot about how this small community will operate practically. I suppose I entertain something of a monastic fantasy, because I like to picture myself as an austere, reverent, holy man. My psyche is really that warped. This rebuke of Bonhoeffer's serves as an important reminder to me that God's decreed will is holier than my sinfully flawed imagination. I do foresee us being daily joined together in prayer and sharing all that is essential about daily life: eating, working, resting. And I am looking forward to this, but beyond that, I have no vision, nor do I want to impose one.

"Christ was led by His love for others into the world, to forget himself in the needs of others...[This] means not that we should live one life, but a thousand lives - binding ourselves to a thousand souls by the filaments of so l oving a sympathy that their lives become ours." - B.B. Warfield

The above quote comes from a book by Tim Keller called Ministries of Mercy in a section titled "Imitating the Incarnation." Earlier last week, I was marveling at the fine line between a bankrupt liberation theology and a robustly orthodox incarnational theology. Both include an aim to work the restorative kingdom of God in and around the world's broken, oppressed communities, but only the latter has the faith to extend the victory to the soul.

Recently, I have been despairing about my lack of compassionate feelings, having the sense that my relationship to concepts such as compassion and mercy are purely academic or intellectual. Here I come to that craggy pit that presently consumes much of modern evangelicalism, that of the primacy of personal experience. Ultimately, it matters not a wit how merciful I feel. Christ is mercy. Christ is compassion. Christ is the good shepherd. Salvation belongs to Christ alone. Salvation is accomplished in Christ alone. Christ alone is my righteousness. So, when I despair of my fundamentally defective emotions, it should only give me cause to praise more my Lord in heaven with whom I have died, resurrected, and ascended; who stands at the throne, eternally holly mediator.

Prayer needs:

--That I would accomplish the few remaining tasks I have (malaria medication, quality footwear, required reading) in the next few days and without sinful worry.

--That God would bless me with firmer knowledge and vision of Christ's compassion.

--That God would guard me from sexual indiscretions while in Bangkok. I have heard too many stories in the past several weeks and I am loathe to be of the faithless who, Paul observes, did not "take heed" and thus fell. I and my fellow team members cannot afford to have any illusions about ourselves as holy people. We are, at our core, enemies of God saved by grace exhibiting a righteousness that is not our own.