Mansa Musa is the name of my blog... my name is Arley, and I'm learning and studying in Rwanda this semester.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Perlin Smoke
Sunday, April 18, 2010
late night poem
and the corroded metal of nickel wound six strings
my lips are dry with the ended sweetness of a browned cigar
and the dried perspiration from hours of flame
my abode is a catacomb; grounds of arabica scattered carefree
light is dim, earth is nearby. i taste it so sweetly and serenely.
perhaps only at this hour, when all but a few birds are resting completely.
my eyes at rest, my fingers at rest, my body at rest, my soul at rest.
my god is my rest, always. oh how in love with him i am.
This has been a reoccurring sentiment for some time.
Friday, February 12, 2010
The Conference - part 1
I knew would have to do this sometime. Today's the day! I'm going to document everything (or at least some for now) I received at the Faith and International Development Conference last weekend. All while sipping Maxwell House with a touch of CoffeeMate French Vanilla, and listening to some brutal, face-pummeling, hardcore. The band's name is Belie My Burial, you should look them up and buy their EP. My favorite song is "Paper Idol"; it has a sick video too. Their music is, for lack of more appropriate terms, destructive, inspiring, and beautiful. Yes.
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?
10 and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
and your night will become like the noonday."
The rest of the chapter is worth reading. If we claim to be God's people but don't care for the poor, we are not his people. It is God's intention for his people to care for the poor, as noted above. Our faith calls us to action (1 John 3:17-18). I wish that more emphasis was placed on the poor in our churches and communities; the same amount of emphasis found in the Bible.
For the next segment of my blog, I will be listening to Switchfoot, Hello Hurricane. I will stop drinking coffee. I will be missing chapel, but this is far more rewarding. I love Jesus!
There was a dude, pretty sure his name was Milton, or something Milton, who talked about world health, it's improvements and downfalls. He mentioned that many science and political dollars have been spent in the past towards world health. Things like PEPFAR, PMI, The Global Fund, The Gate's Foundation, and the Global Health Initiative have made significant progress against HIV/AIDS, malaria, TB, and malnutrition. However, the work is far from done. Milton had some sad statistics: 36% of all babies born in Bangladesh are low birth weight, 43% of under 5's are stunted because of malnutrition, and 48% of under 5's are underweight. This was just one example of malnutrition and deprivation in the world.
One of the most interesting portions of this presentation was his chart of behavioral determinants: Communities and Societies surround Organizations, which surrounds Social Networks, which surrounds Individuals. It was interesting to see in pictorial form how people are affected. This chart is something that I will remember in the future, simply because it is insightful as to how people are accessed and affected.
Milton showed a few charts; one of them was a chart of GNP, gross national product, with relation to life expectancy. It was surprising to see that life expectancy was very much the same down to a certain point, when GNP fell to terribly low numbers. Essentially, it is not necessary to have a high GNP in order to have equally high life expectancies in the world; the poor can live just as long, provided they have basic health care. The question that Milton posed was this: can the developing world get healthy before it gets wealthy? The missing pieces are you and me. Everyone is in some way responsible for health in the world.
I am always yours. ~Switchfoot, "Always".
One more part of the conference before I run to class. We watched the film Pray the Devil Back to Hell, an inspiring story about a woman in Liberia who rose up with other women to protest war and injustice there. She worked with both Muslims and Christians to end suffering. It was touching and powerful. The film addressed some of my deepest concerns about social justice and evangelism, as to how they work together or contradict each other. I've hesitated in the past to swallow up social justice issues, because it seems like a waste in comparison with the terror of hell--why do these issues matter, when eternal salvation is bigger. However, because of the film, I can now see that Christ won't reach anyone until bullets stop flying; Christ won't reach anyone because bullets don't pick and choose. If people are dying anyway, it would be wrong to reach their souls alone. I will not refuse people justice because they don't accept the truth.
Sing it out, sing out loud. I can't find the words to sing. You be my remedy, my song. I see you with what's left of me. ~Switchfoot, "Sing It Out".
More soon.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Some conference thoughts
Man, the conference was frickin sweet! In addition to stimulating my thoughts, there are a few things that I would like to change about my lifestyle. These are a few preliminary thoughts:
I would like to eat less food. I realize how many people have no food whatsoever to eat, and often the food they do eat is insufficient. I think about the meal that we ate collectively at the conference when we ate porridge that World Vision provides for people in malnourished areas of the world, and it opened my eyes; to taste what so many people consume every day, to know and experience for a moment in time the nothing that people have was powerful. When I think about that food, and consider the food I eat every day, I am saddened. I no longer want to consume as much as I do. Maybe it won’t make a tangible difference for them, but it will remind me how much I have, and remind me that I have so much more than so many. When I want to reach for more food that I don’t need, I will instead pray to the Lord for the people that couldn’t eat in the first place. God hears my prayers. He loves his people; whether they have food or not. Especially those with nothing: “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” So, I will eat only what I need. This is easier said than done, but right now I refuse to consume that which I do not need; it is so sad to think that I can eat whatever, whenever I want, when some would give up anything for a bite for one day.
Another thing that I want to change is how much water I use. Often, sometimes I use a crapload of water in the shower and for other random stuff that I don’t need. Again, it wont make much difference for people who don’t have water in this world, but it will continually remind me of the need in this world for water. It’s sad to think about how I can run the shower for minutes and minutes, and absolutely nothing will come of it, when people elsewhere travel miles everyday for water that isn’t even clean for drinking. So, I will remember the people in this world who suffer by lack of water. I can pray and God will act. He is faithful!
I’m not going to buy anything unless I really really need it. Maybe this seems prudish or snobby or stuck up or something, but think about how much money I’ll save, think about how much money won’t be wasted. I’ve already spent a lot of money this semester, some on books that I need, some on items that I kind of need, like a coffee maker so I can wake up in the morning for devotions and my morning classes, and some items that I don’t need at all. My point is that I don’t want to give money away to places that don’t really do anything positive for me or for anyone but themselves. It would be nice to not support companies that I don’t know how they treat their workers. It’ll save me money, and be morally safe, eh? Oh yeah.
Along with that, I want to steer clear of institutions that treat workers unfairly, perpetuate poverty, and oppress the poor further. I’m going to do some research on this, but I’m pretty dang sure that companies like American Eagle don’t pay their workers in Indonesia the same wages their store employees get. I’m pretty dang sure that the shirt I’m wearing was stitched and assembled and printed by someone or some people that didn’t get paid much more than $20 for their day. Maybe that’s being generous. Maybe they do get paid well. All I’m saying is that I’d rather know and make a decision based on that rather than buy whatever for too much and have that overly expensive item have been made by someone stuck in a cycle of abject poverty. It’s not my place to buy that shirt, especially if I don’t know who made it. It’ll be a lot easier if I just don’t buy stuff in the first place, eh? Yumsaboss.
Again, this is easier said than done. I just ate a handful of Swedish fish without thinking. I didn’t need those fish. Yeah they were tasty, chewy, and delicious. In the end, however, it’s likely just going to rot my teeth and make a little chubbier. As pleasant as it was to throw those little red suckers into my hungry, salivating mouth, I didn’t need them. It’ll be small choices like this, to just live better, to just treat my body better, to be a little more careful about who I support with my dollars. I encourage anyone who reads this to keep me accountable—this really is how I’d rather live my life, knowing that I am doing everything, absolutely everything, in my power to follow Jesus. Not just in my social and spiritual realms, but also in my physical, consumptive, and private ones too.
Living for Christ, because of this conference, has become more than an outward lifestyle, and is now far more of a holistic, balanced approach to taking up my cross. One of the most impacting things that I realized at this conference was that participation in sinful structures, socially unjust systems, and essentially evil establishments is just as sinful as committing devastating personal sins. In the west, it’s often stressed about how terrible things like murder, lust, covetousness, greed, and other sins are. However, I have never heard a word about social sin in church, when in fact, the Father despises it just as much. I wouldn’t support an adulterous marriage, so why would I support a company that exploits children workers or keeps workers suffering in poverty? I hope it doesn’t sound like I’ve gone off the deep end, but shouldn’t it be a little more offensive that structural evil affects many many more people than just myself and my personal sin? I think I need to be more mindful of that kind of thing.
I’ll write more about the conference soon, some other great things to think about.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Discomfort
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Winter break
Let me back up a bit. The end of my senior year in high school and into the summer of 2009 I had such fantastic motivation--I was ready to make a difference in the world. I was so excited to have a new beginning in a foreign land (Greenville). It was a new place, a new start, a new opportunity to learn who I was supposed to become. Those days were filled with desire to change the world for the better. My focus was on God, and on the world, and how he wanted me to engage and change it for the better. There was so much I could do, and I was so ready to do it. I trusted wholeheartedly that Greenville could help me do these things.
When I arrived at Greenville, I was encouraged by Norm Hall's opening words: "We are world-changers." I was so pleased to hear that the leadership at Greenville desired similar things that I did. I started the semester with high hopes.
I don't think my hopes diminished, but I do think that I gained other interests. My social life, my academics, my entertainment, other things consumed my time and thought. As the semester went on, priorities were added. Priorities that made my original hopes shrink to make space for new ones. At the start of this winter break, I was a person who cared a little bit about a lot of stuff... and a lot of that stuff is not worth caring about.
Then an earthquake annihilated Haiti. The earthquake shook my reality. It made me question myself, my future, and my existence. It made me reflect and look ahead. I saw the fallacy of my worldly desires-- my wants like: new jeans, to be entertained, to engage in slothful activities, to eat restaurant food, to go shopping, to just have a good time. Maybe these are healthy desires, in their place. But when I saw thousands of Haitians trapped below concrete, and when I saw bodies lining the streets, I felt sick to my stomach. Not because I have a weak stomach and I can't stand to see suffering and people perishing, but because I realized what a bigger world there is around me-- the world that needs every bit of my resources, my time, and my energy, if it is to move away from injustice, poverty, suffering, and damnation. The world needs me. I don't need me. Jesus desires that I be in the world serving him. How could I make this life about me? How narrow! How short-sighted!
My confidence in the future is shaken-- I really don't know now what I'm going to do. I trust that the Lord will direct me. I'm thankful for his use of tragedy to mess with my mind. I loved last semester, I loved break, but I hope and pray to the Lord that this semester can be different. I'm more wary of my self now... I know how easy it is for me to fall into a superficial routine. This semester, I want to make conscious effort to think about the world, to pray about the world, and to remember how much bigger the world is, how infinitely larger the truth of Jesus Christ is than my life. Thank the Lord Jesus for caring about this life and using it for his kingdom; I will not let my worldly cares pollute his work in me and through me. I ask that he make himself my rest, and let no other thing take his place-- not my visions and plans for my future, not my entertainment, not my computer, not my passion, not my dorm room, not my bed. Jesus Christ alone be my constant. This semester is going to rock!
And there you have a couple late night reflections and visions.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Haiti
I want to help.
I was posed with a question though-- why does the tragedy of Haiti sadden me and offend me and frighten me and inspire me more than the thought of the tragedy of hell? I thought about how terrifying situations like these are. Hundreds and thousands of people utterly broken, with everything taken from them. I think about Darfur, about Haiti, about other places in the world with terrible injustices and wrongs. How awful. Then I think about hell. Hell is like the same thing, only it's forever. And worse. Believe me, I do not, in any way, want to minimize the size and importance of issues like these, but I have to wonder about my priorities. Even if I were able to "fix", heal, restore the people of Haiti back to health and the way it was, even if it were possible to end injustice in Sudan right now, even if I could give fair wages end the injustices in all the world, hell would still be there. Souls that are not redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ would still suffer for all eternity.
I want to heal, restore, and redeem. I want people to live lives of joy. I think it's awful for Haiti. I'm utterly broken by it. But at the same time, I question whether going to rebuild and show love there is absolutely his desire for me. Yes, in the end, "the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me. I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me'" (Matthew 25). Yes, by doing so, I would be doing it unto Jesus Christ the Lord. Yet I don't know how effective it would be in saving souls for the kingdom of God.
Why does the thought of human suffering offend and motivate me more than the thought of eternal separation from Christ?
I hope I don't fluster and anger anybody, but I want to approach all things from a godly standpoint. I hope and pray to God that whatever I do, I do to save souls from damnation. I hope to God I don't confuse that idea with the idea of saving people from suffering in this life. Isn't it more glorifying to God to bring people into the saving knowledge of Christ than to bring them into comfort for the rest of their earthly life?
I will be praying and trusting that I will be able to reconcile my desire to help the suffering with my desire for their salvation. I think it's possible to fulfill both.