Stand in the Breach

Hello,

I just wanted to say that I’ll try to write a post for this blog once a month at the least.  Life speeds on and my time has all sorts of demands on it at the moment.  For now though, here’s a passage that I’ve been meditating on:

“And I sought for a man among them who should build up the wall and stand in the breach before me for the land, that I should not destroy it, but I found none.” – Ezekial 22:30

May my university and my country always have one to build up the wall and stand in the breach!

cheers,

Steven

In the End…

May Jesus be praised!

In one of his letters to his disciple Timothy, Paul wrote to encourage Timothy to not let go of a spiritual gift he’d received during a previous visit and gave the following reason: “For God has not given us a Spirit of fear, but one of power, of love and of a sound mind” (2 Tim. 1:7).  Why he wrote this has become crystal clear to me this summer.

I have learned more these past four months than I have ever before learned in the same time period; to say nothing of what I’ve experienced.  I have witnessed the power of God; with my own eyes I’ve seen miracles; I’ve heard prophets prophesy; I’ve seen manifestations of the Holy Spirit in phenomenal ways; and the effect in me is a risen and rising confidence in God. May Jesus be glorified!

As I re-read this it sounds crazy; it sounds like foolishness.  Part of me would scoff at myself, but the part of me that is good knows it’s true; and I would be called a fool and liar by the whole world rather than deny my God. This is my testimony!

cheers,

Steven

Guatemala Week 7 and 1/2 and the Campamento

Hello!

My time here in El Tizate, Guatemala has almost come to a close as we leave for Ontario tomorrow afternoon from Guatemala city.  I am sad to be leaving here because of all the great people I’ve had the privilege of meeting and getting to know here, but I’m also very excited to return home to catch up with you, my friends and family.

All the programs that we’ve been running have now come to a close. Our last soccer camp consisted of a tournament where we handed out medals to the tournament winners and lots of candy to everyone.  We have finished helping with construction of the school and the VBS’ have come to a close too.  (Below is a photo from last week when we had the morning devotional up at the construction site of the new school.)

A Morning Devotional at the Construction Site of the New School

On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday our team joined the school for their campamento spiritual retreat.  The theme was “Adoradores in Espiritu y Verdad”, which means “Worshipers in Spirit and Truth”. This is based off Jesus’ words from the gospel of John where he says that “God is spirit and his worshippers must worship him in spirit and in truth.” The camp was put together excellently and God’s presence was manifested there again in ways that were new, strange and uncomfortable for me.

I’m finishing this blog right now on Wednesday evening. I’m back in Ontario for a three day debrief. I’ll write more about the campamento and what I’ve learned this summer soon.

cheers,

Steven

Guatemala Week 6

Hello ,

My sixth week here has passed and the days since my last post have been full.  Last weekend our team took a trip to Semuc Champey, a gorgeous park located 9 hours from El Tizate by car.  We swam in, hiked at and relaxed by these pools on Saturday.  A few of us also went on a two hour cave tour of an underground river which included cliff jumping by candle light. It was amazing and so refreshing!  I’ve attached some pics below:

Semuc Champey

During this past week, we continued our work with construction at the new school facility, running the soccer camp, ESL, movie nights, and VBS program which continue to go well, although this coming Tuesday we’ll be wrapping up a few of these programs as we prepare to return to Ontario on the 24th. I will miss this small village .

Semuc Champey: A View from Above

On Wednesday some of us will be part of a three day spiritual retreat for the 80 kids that attend the school.  We’ve spent a couple mornings fasting and praying in preparation and the expectations are high for God to shower out his blessings on the kids.  Last year was the first year that the school put on this retreat and many kids were powerfully blessed by the presence of God as God worked among them; six had demons cast out of them.  I will be going again to serve the kids, and though I cannot understand Spanish well, I am sure that these up-coming three days will be unlike anything I’ve known before. The presence of the spiritual world as known through the manifestations of the Holy Spirit and the demonic has moved for me from a mere intellectual acquiescence to an experientially validated reality this summer.  Feel comfortable to ask me about this when you see me next.

I read a short but exceptionally powerful book by H.A. Baker last night entitled “Visions behind the Veil” which related vivid visions of the spiritual world which a group of Chinese orphans had in Southeastern China following an outpouring of the Holy Spirit.  I highly recommend it.

Jasmin and Carolyn

Here’s a photo of Jasmin, my excellent Spanish teacher and the grade one teacher at the school with Carolyn, her beautiful daughter .

I’ll write more later .

cheers,

Steven

Guatemala Week 4 (and a Half)

Hola ,

Saturday has come again and our fourth week in Guatemala has passed us.  Life here continues to go well in terms of the programs we’re running, though some of the team has continued to get sick.  But that’s to be expected I suppose.

On Monday evenings we have our team meeting.  One of the neighbors of the Ark, Janice, a very sweet mom, had sent us a letter from Ontario and Kat read it to us last night.  I often wonder what people think about and how they think, and it was refreshing and intriguing for me to hear a heartfelt letter from a lady with whom I personally have only had a few conversations. She wrote with touching sincerity in a way that was endearing and often humorous.  For example, she told us of how she was visiting an elderly man named Harold who choked on his food often because he didn’t chew enough.  She said that she told him to put his hands up and praise the Lord when he started choking.  When he asked her why, she said, “You’ll stop choking.  If you don’t, you’ll die praising the Lord.”

I appreciated her perspective on life – a perspective which was so different (at least in expression) than mine.  Being a student in part means that I live to study, and so life is sometimes reduced to ideas and abstractions.  As a mom who’d been out of school for a long time, her perspective on life focused on the mundane, yet through the lens of eternity.

Her letter also gave me an appreciation for letters which I haven’t had before.  I may have to write one sometime in the not too distant future.

On Friday our team is going on a three day trip to Semuc Champey, a breath-taking national park here in Guatemala.  I’m really looking forward to that.

I’ve been thinking a lot about emotion and the role it should play in my life this summer- a line of thought sparked by some conversations and remarks. I’ve often heard the refrain that “God doesn’t just love you, he likes you too.” It’s become almost a motto to some.  But I got thinking about that and came to the conclusion that it’s false.  ”Does God love everyone the same?” I think most Christians would say “yes”.  I would too.  The reason we can say “yes” is because the agape love that I’m referring to is a choice.  It is dependent only on the lover and not on the beloved.  It depends only on the person and character of the lover. It cannot therefore be earned or merited or in other way obtained from the lover.  We are told in one of John’s letters that “We love because he first loved us.”  God loved us before we loved him and independent of anything we did or can do.

The matter is different when we speak of “like”.  By using the word “like” I refer to “warm affection”.  To “like” someone or something is to feel a positive emotion towards the liked person or object.  If a guy “likes”a girl, he feels warm affection for her. Emotion is evoked.  A person does not choose to feel.  People feel whether they wish to or not; and often despite wishing that they wouldn’t feel.  Biblically, we are told that it is possible to please and displease God.  A human can affect the emotional disposition of God. But if we are flippant in saying that “God doesn’t just love everyone, he likes everyone”, we are essentially saying that everything pleases God.  This undermines the Biblical claim that man is fallen and needs Christ.  I do not think that everyone pleases God.

I want to live my life in such a way that when I die and have stood before God and have given an account to God for my life, he will say to me, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”  In the security of knowing one is loved, there is freedom to seek to please the lover.  In a good marriage the husband seeks to please his wife within the security of their wedding vow.  Relationships that depend on pleasing the other inorder to secure love will never be secure in love.

And if we believe it’s impossible to please God, the result is apathy. “If I can’t succeed or already have, why try?”

Introspectively, I’ve realized that my emotions are instinctive responses to my environment and thoughts.  In my mind I hold a system of propositions at a conscious and subconscious level which I believe to be true.  I feel emotion relative to this system of beliefs.  I belief that it is wrong to rape and therefore when I hear of a rape I feel anger towards the raper and pity and compassion for the raped.

This realization that emotions occur in response to an internal system of propositional beliefs is exceptionally useful.  Now when I feel an emotion, I can work backwards to identify and then evaluate my beliefs at the conscious and subconscious level.  If I feel gladness at meeting a new person, I can think about what belief is behind the emotion. Let’s say I feel gladness to meet the person because that person is an honest person.  I can then evaluate whether it is good to delight in an honest person.  I think it is, so I would approve of my belief; but if I think my belief is wrong, then I would change my belief. I would also afterwards know that I had completely changed my belief if my accompanying emotions also changed.

Therefore, as a diagnostic tool to evaluate and perfect one’s beliefs emotion is immensely useful.

I thought a lot more about this but I need to go to bed.  I hope this discovery is as helpful to you as it has been to me and I’ll write more about this later.

cheers,

Steven

Encuentro

Hello,

Last post I talked a little about how my experience with blindness has taught me to see clearly.  In keeping with this theme, another lesson I continue to learn is how my presumptions prevent me from seeing clearly.  It is difficult to see the young woman when you’re looking at the old one (http://www.coolopticalillusions.com/optical_illusions_images_2/young_woman2.htm).

At 4:00 on Saturday afternoon we arrived at Avivando El Fuego church in Jocotenango to leave for an Encuentro.  The church holds an Encuentro once a month and the theme of this one was “Breaking Chains.”  Of our group of twelve, six chose to go to receive and the other six chose to serve by praying, helping in the kitchen and wherever else help was needed.  In total there were eight Guatemalans and six Canadians who went to receive and an equal number who went to serve. I was with the latter.

I don’t know what I was expecting to see at a Guatemalan church retreat devoted to breaking chains in the lives of those going.  I don’t know what I was expecting from a church retreat where there were at least as many people coming to pray and minister as there were individuals to be ministered to.  But that God was going to work could only be expected when those going to minister prepared with days of fasting and full nights spent in prayer.

Somewhere in the gospels Jesus concludes a discussion with the Pharisees by saying, “But wisdom is known by her children.”  He was answering the charge of being “a glutton and a drunkard” by conducting his ministry by having dinner with the prostitutes, drunkards and tax-collectors.  When it comes to judging the ministries of the church, it seems best to judge them only by their fruit.  For reality can prove a theory; but a theory can never prove reality.

I recalled that quip of Jesus last night at I heard the testimonies of those people at church immediately after getting off the bus which took the group of us from San Luis, the location of the Encuentro, back to the church in Jocotenango because many of the methods used by the leaders at this Encuentro were so weird to me that I was having a real struggle to discern their goodness.

There’s no need for me to elaborate on these methods which were so foreign to my ear, eye, and mind.  You can ask me about them in person.  It is sufficient to say that they accomplished their end for nearly all of the individuals who went to break chains saw their chains broken.  Who am I, who knows very little of the chains which sin, past physical and emotional abuse and spiritual oppression can forge in an individual’s life, to judge the methods? It would be tantamount to me judging the methods of a doctor without knowledge of medicine and the patient.  The fruit was that every one who claimed to have chains broken in their lives praised God for it; praise God!

Miss you all!

Steven

Week 3 in Guatemala

Hello,

It’s 9:06 on a beautifully sunny Saturday morning, I’m listening to Switchfoot’s Nothing is Sound cd and I feel quite strongly that right now is the perfect time to write.

This week has passed quickly, but that’s a thing worth my gratitude because its also been the most intense week for me yet.  I was team member number seven to fall victim to the illnesses that so faithfully afflict Canadian visitors to Guatemala.  I was on my back all Tuesday with the worst headache I can remember every having; fortunately the intensity was balanced by brevity.  I don’t know the cause, but I suspect it was the culmination of a number of factors – exposure to heat, lack of sleep, busyness and viral or bacterial factors.

Have you ever gone blind?  Going blind is the scariest experience I’ve been subjected to, yet once blind it’s perhaps the most liberating.  The first and only time I’ve gone completely blind was in grade four when while wrestling with a friend I smashed the back of my skull against a concrete floor.  At first I simply had an intense headache but as time slowly elapsed I distinctly remember losing my ability to focus my eyes while my brain simultaneously began to fail to be able interpret the sensory input of the rod and cone cells of my eyes, with the effect that it appeared to me that individual pixels were disappearing in the television screen of my sensory experience.  It culminated in complete blindness and a throbbing headache. Fortunately 24 hours later, a trip to the emergency room and a night spent in the hospital restored my vision.

Last semester at UBC while playing ultimate frisbee I partially lost my vision a second time when I was accidentally kicked in the back of the head as I dove to catch the frisbee.  That time I retained my ability to see color but completely lost my ability to focus on any particular point.  When I looked at the frisbee flying toward me I could see it, but my eyes would not focus on it.  The experience is somewhat comparable to looking directly at the sun for a few seconds and then trying to read this sentence or to catch a frisbee flying toward you.

On Tuesday morning when I woke up I had a headache similar to the one that I had experienced on these two previous experiences of blindness and noticed that I had again lost my ability focus on any particular object, and as I tested my vision loss further I realized that I’d also completely lost peripheral vision in my left eye.  As I said though, rest restored my vision to me.

These three experiences of vision loss as well as the fact that I naturally need prescription glasses have strongly shaped my conception of vision and perspective.  Blindness has taught me just how much bearing I have placed upon vision; how much I care about what other people think; and generally, just how formative my ability to see has been and is on my world-view.  I naturally place an enormous amount of trust in what appears clear and distinct to me.  Blindness; however, has taught me that if I truly wish to see perfectly, I must see beyond what merely is immediately clear and distinct to me at any given moment.

Indeed, to live in the understanding of this last statement is of utmost importance.

Plato, Descartes but most importantly, the word of God have resonated unanimously in this truth.  There is always more that meets the eyes.

As I lay in my bed in my room on this warm Guatemalan Tuesday, praying that my pain would cease and my vision would return, this question entered my mind, “What am I blind to at this moment?” I have always found meaning in suffering; God is no sadist.

My thoughts turned to some ideas of Immanual Kant.  An eminent philosopher, he considered the knowledge of scientific principles to be synthetic a priori knowledge.  A priori knowledge is the necessary and universal knowledge which we have independent of experience (such as mathematical knowledge) and is distinguished from a posteriori knowledge which is known through experience.  Analytic judgments are definitional in nature, where the idea of the predicate is contained in the idea of the subject.  For example, “All circles are round.”  The idea of roundness is intrinsic within the idea of a circle.  Synthetic judgments are informative in nature.  ”My backpack is black.”  Blackness is not an idea intrinsic to the idea of a backpack; a backpack could be blue and still be a backpack.

Kant considered mathematics and the principles of science to be synthetic a priori. They are a priori because they are universally known and independent of experience and synthetic because what we have on the right side of a mathematical equation doesn’t necessitate what’s on the left side.  For example, 5+7=12.  The sum of 5 and 7 must be 12, but given 12, it is not at all true that we obtained 12 from 5 and 7.  We could just as easily obtained 12 from 2 and 10.

As I was thinking about synthetic a priori knowledge with this example of 5+7=12 in mind, I began to think of the philosophical problem of God’s sovereignty versus free will which I’ve been turning over in my mind every now and again ever since it occurred to me.  The problem is basically this: If God both knows everything and controls everything, how is it possible that humans can in actuality have any free will at all?

The idea I got from Kant was the possibility that human free will may function more like a+b=12 that 5+7=?.  In the second case, the solution has only one possible correct answer.  This is analogous with the idea of scientific determinism which simplistically put says that every choice we make is a necessary and inevitable consequence of the net sum of molecular reactions occurring in our bodies according to the natural laws of nature. It implies that our conception of free will is a facade and not actual reality.  The first case seems more analogous in my mind to the actual situation, where free will is actually a reality and yet one also recognizes the that the human body is a least partially physical and obeys the laws of nature.

I don’t mean this to be in any way a comprehensive answer to the paradox of determinism/God’s sovereignty and free will, but only an idea that has helped me understand how it might be possible to explain this phenomenon.

Ok, I started this on Saturday morning but am finishing it on Monday morning.  This weekend our whole team attended an “Encuentro”, which mean “Meeting”.  It was a retreat for the church here with the theme of “Breaking Chains”.  Because of this, my Saturday evening and Sunday were the wierdest day and a bit of my life.  I’ll write more soon.

cheers,

Steven

Week 2 in Guatemala :)

Hello,

Our second week in Guatemala has now passed and it’s continuing well with only a few health related upsets.   The construction, VBS, soccer camp and relief work are all going well.  I forgot to mention last week that a couple of the girls on our team, Leah and Heather, and myself are running ESL classes on Tuesday and Thursday evenings; and all of our team works on Sunday mornings in the farm fields which some local families maintain on the side of the neighboring mountains.

Yesterday I planted peanuts in these fields with a neighboring family.  We got up at 5ish, went up to the fields at 5:30 and finished by 8ish.  Today it was just me and the mom of the family, Mari, and since we were working in different parts of the field  I spent the morning basically alone, hoeing.  And so I had a couple hours this morning to simply think, which has been the first time I’ve not thought about Spanish or the things we’ve been doing since getting here; it was refreshing. On Sunday afternoons our team runs a VBS program in a neighboring town for the kids there.  Last week there were over a hundred kids, but this week, due to the rain, their were about thirty or forty.  The first one last week was a little disorganized for a variety of reasons, the number of kids not being the least of these; but yesterday’s went more smoothly.  I can’t understand the message, which is given in Spanish, but the kids seemed to respond well.  Pray that the seeds which have been planted will grow.

Ok, it’s 7:20 right now which means that chapel at the school here is about to start, so I’m going to cut this off here. I’ll write more later!

cheers,

Steven

One Week in Guatemala!

Hello from El Tizate, Guatemala!

Our team of twelve arrived safely in El Tizate, Guatemala this past Sunday afternoon, and lots has happened since.

El Tizate is a small town of about three hundred.  There are a few things which I find very striking about El Tizate. There are lots of kids here and they have a unanimous love for soccer. The houses are very simple and closely packed, with the result that El Tizate has a small town feel unlike anything I’ve experienced in Canada.  Everybody knows each other.  The majority of houses lack the luxuries and time-saving conveniences that are ubiquitous in Canada and I suspect this is the primary reason for El Tizate’s charm.  In most houses for instance there’s no hot water, no washing machines, dishwashers, bathtubs or computers, let alone internet. Right now, I’m using the school’s satellite internet connection.  Most homes have ‘pilas’, which are large concrete basins where dishes and clothes are washed.  Cooking is done in brick ovens using wood for fuel.  It seems like every other house is a ‘tienda’, a small family business selling a variety of items from tortillas to candy to cell phones.  Home-made tortillas are eaten at nearly every meal and since one of the dads where I live is a baker, I also get fresh bread at every meal.  Yummm!

I live with an elderly couple, Santos and Mina.  Two of their married children, Eduardo and Ofelia with children Henry (5) and Ever (6 months), and Rual and Marseilles with children Raphael (4) and Parti (2) live in rooms in the housing compound with us as well.  The rooms open to a concrete open area; imagine a bunch of rooms arranged roughly in a square and open to each other.  Since the temperature here never really gets below 15 deg. C, none of the rooms have insulation.  In addition, Eduardo, who is a baker, has his one-room bakery similarly arranged.  My room does have a light, electricity and is painted blue.  The rooms are made of concrete bricks with metal lamina for roofs.  Henry, who is 5, and his cousin Wilfred who’s 6 and also lives in El Tizate though not in the same housing compound have been my faithful and energetic companions when I’m at home.  They chatter away at me in Spanish and are greatly amused by my digital camera, my computer and my frequent evocation of “Repita, por favor”, which means “Repeat, please”.  They also are quite ticklish and love being thrown in the air or twirled in circles , some things cross all cultures.

The town is full of mangy dogs which makes one realize the fertility of un-neutered dogs, and taking care of the environment is not valued here.  People are much, much more commercially-minded here as well; no doubt due to the fact that there is little or no paperwork involved in selling whatever you want.  All prices seem negotiable, and the cost of living seems ridiculously low.  A liter of coke or pepsi in a class bottle here costs between 3 to 6 quetzales, which is about 36 to 72 cents; the average monthly wage for a full-time construction worker is about $120 Canadian.  It’s obvious to me now why people from central america will go to the US or Canada in order to work minimum wage jobs.

As a team, we’re closely involved with “Fanning the Flame” Christian school.  In the mornings we work at the construction site of school’s new building and in the afternoons we’re running a VBS program and a soccer camp.  We’ve also had a very popular movie night where we shower “Ice Age” by utilizing the school’s projector and we’ve helped out a family whose home was affected by the recent earthquake and rain.  Everything is going well in regards to all these.  A couple of people on the team have gotten sick though, from heat stroke and probably from eating or drinking unsanitary food or water; so keep them in prayer.

We get to have private Spanish lessons five days a week for two hours each day from the teacher at the school, and in combination with immersion in the Spanish-speaking culture, I think that I’m learning the language very fast, at least compared to the rate I would learning it in a classroom in Canada. Latin has been very useful for this since the grammar of Spanish is based off Latin, though Spanish seems much more simple and Latin; granted this is coming from someone who has only been learning the language for five days. Spanish seems to me like a cross between Latin and English and I’m really enjoying learning it.

We’ve twice attended El Calvario church, which is also closely affiliated with the school here and has a service on Wednesday and several on Sunday.  It is located in Jocotenango, a nearby town.  The Guatemalan people seem to be much more physically expressive in the things they do and this is especially evident in El Calvario.  The church is full of joy as evidenced by the dancing, singing, clapping and other types of enthusiasm in worship. The life of most Canadians is self-sufficient at the physical level, but this is not true here.  Life is harder here so the freedom and abundance of life found in Jesus is more impactful for them; those who have been forgiven more will be more grateful.  Jesus’ opening line from the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall inherit the kingdom of God”, makes much more sense to me now after experiencing this culture. Actually, a lot of things Jesus said make more sense now.  His proscriptive admonition or else descriptive warning that it’s easier for a camel to enter through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, especially, carries a lot more weight.  By Guatemalan standards, nearly every Canadian is a “rich man”.

Well, there’s a lot more that could be said, but all in all I think what’s been said covers the major stuff.  God is evidently at work in this culture, and being here has greatly impacted the gratitude that I have for God’s blessings in my own life. Living with the poor and spending most of your day with little children is really turning into a blessing and I’ve enjoyed every hour here . Thank-you for your prayers!

cheers,

Steven

To Guatemala!

Hello!

Asparagus season has come and gone, and now the team is on the eve of heading down to El Tizate, Guatemala! We leave on Saturday at 6 am from Detroit and I am so excited!  We’ll be running a soccer camp as an outreach for the younger boys there, running a VBS program, teaching english, and helping out with the construction of the new school facility for Fanning the Flame Christian school.  Each member of our team is billeted out to a family, and we may be doing some disaster relief work is the need arises considering the recent earthquakes that have affected Guatemala.

I don’t know how often I’ll be able to access internet, but I have been told that the internet access is more reliable down there than up here. But in case you want to know more, here is the website of the organization (GSO) and the blogs of a few of my teammates:

a) http://www.globalshore.org/home/student-program/alumni/students2010/ Here are a few thoughts by myself and the rest of the team in reply to the question “What are you expecting?”

b) http://blog.leahtan.com/ Leah Tan is a friend of mine from Vancouver and is the one who told me about this program. She’s a visual arts student at UBC with a passion for photography.

http://leahinguate.blogspot.com/

c) http://www.stophsanz.blogspot.com/ Stoph, short for Christoph is cool.  He’s an English major at Trinity Western University, an avid and talented photographer and a Vancouver native. Yeah!

d)  http://julisastuart.com/ Juice, as we call her, is from here in Ontario and is a film and animation design student of Durham College.  She’s something of a movie guru with a passion for Guatemala.

e) http://katjanzen.blogspot.com/ Kat is our team leader. She has a passion for the Lord, for discipleship and the integrity to back it.

Hopefully their blogs and the website will help you get a better idea of life here.

cheers,

Steven