AnotherThink

Unsound minds

2013-05-23T22:02:59Z

Dr. Mark Powell: I'd like to begin by asking you... if you know why you're here.
Prot: Of course. You think I'm crazy.
Powell: I prefer the term "ill". Do you think you are... ill?
Prot: A little homesick, perhaps.
Powell: Really? Where is home?
Prot: K-PAX.
Powell: K-PAX?
Prot: ... K-PAX is a planet. But don't worry. I'm not going to leap out of your chest. — dialogue from the 2001 film K-PAX

When a man named Prot (Kevin Spacey) is hospitalized in New York City because he claims to be an alien from the planet K-PAX, it is up to Dr. Mark Powell (Jeff Bridges) to determine why he has this delusion. Prot is so convincing in his claims that it isn't long before Dr. Powell, and the audience, begin entertaining the possibility that Prot might just be who he says he is, a being who arrived here on a beam of light.

I once worked with a man who believed he was being hunted by the CIA. He showed me proof in the form of coded messages he had intercepted from newspaper classifieds and from letters sent to him by his parents, who were, he believed, cooperating with the authorities to have him captured. He was extremely competent, even gifted, at his job. Outwardly he gave every indication of being as "normal" as anyone. But as he learned to trust me and felt comfortable sharing his delusions, it became clear that he was not quite right in the head.

The National Institute of Mental Health says that 25% of American adults suffer from a diagnosable form of mental illness in any given year. Whether you know it or not, there are several among your neighbors, friends, and extended family who battle with depression, anxiety disorder, PTSD, OCD, bipolar disease, schizophrenia, and/or scores of other disorders of the mind. Untreated, any of these are debilitating. For the overwhelming majority, there are treatments but no cures. In many cases, mental illness is a lifelong, chronic condition that can be managed but never conquered.

In fact, there are certainly people sitting beside us in church on Sundays who are mentally ill, some of whom are barely holding things together. Rick and Kay Warren's son Matthew committed suicide recently after the pain of his lifelong struggle with depression became too great to bear. I've been there myself several times. I have struggled with depression since my teens, and at times it has filled me with such darkness and despair that I couldn't see a way out. As recently as six months ago, when my usual medication failed me, I wondered if I could escape from the darkness that gripped my mind.

Our theology of mental illness ought to be the same as our theology of physical illness: both are the result of Adam's rebellion and the sin that subsequently tainted creation. Mental illness is no different in its genesis than cancer or stroke or asthma or the common cold, because a mind is only the mysterious and wonderful creation of the brain and all its interactions with the external world over time. We are material beings created to live in a material world, with a soul that will last eternally. That material part of us is fragile and easily broken.

Paul says in Romans 8:24 that while we wait in hope for the transformation of our bodies and minds from material to eternal, the word hope necessarily means we wait for what we do not yet have. The miraculous healing of our minds and bodies is possible — God is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine (Eph 3:20) — but it seems more common for God to say to us, as he said to Paul, My grace is all you need for now, because My power is displayed in your weakness. (2 Cor. 12:9)

Regrettably, society stigmatizes men and women who suffer from mental illness. Popular culture makes it the subject of jokes and ridicule, while the church sometimes mistakenly ascribes a spiritual cause to what is a physical condition, a mistake that heaps guilt and shame on people who are already suffering.

]]> Cancer can be seen with an electronic scan and removed with a scalpel. Blocked arteries can be cut out and replaced by fresh grafts. But no scan can pinpoint the source of delusions, anxiety, depression, or obsessive behaviors, and no surgery can excise them. Because they are invisible, does it follow that they must be the product of some spiritual failing?

I am not denying that sin brings with it spiritual consequences, in addition to emotional byproducts like guilt, shame and self-loathing. Our minds and bodies are integrated and interdependent organisms, and our minds are affected by sin every bit as much as our bodies are.

But when Jesus and his disciples encountered a blind man near the pool of Siloam, the conversation went like this:

His disciples asked [Jesus], "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"
"Neither this man nor his parents sinned," said Jesus, "but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him." — John 9:2-3, NIV

The church needs to be a refuge and a source of support for mental illness suffers and their families, bringing glory to God and the church. Paul reminded us in 2 Corinthians 4:7 that all of us "...have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us."

All of our infirmities, mental as well as physical, are a product of living in these fragile, temporal bodies; but these infirmities, mental and physical, create opportunities to experience God's strength through our weakness.

Society has not always treated those who suffer with mental illness with respect, compassion, or with the dignity that is due all of us who are created in the image of God. The church needs to figure out how to set an example for the rest of society by viewing the mentally ill as fully acceptable and welcome in the community of faith. The church is ill-equipped to provide treatment for mental illness, any more than it is the place to go when you've broken your arm. But the church can and must be a place where it is safe to talk about mental illness, and where suffers can find love, hope, and acceptance.

"Come to me all you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest." (Mat. 11:28) Jesus himself has sent out the invitation; we must not close our doors to those he has welcomed.

Stress cracks

2013-04-19T18:06:23Z

Long after the winter rains had disappeared and the ground had turned pale and dusty from baking in the desert sun, there was a spot not far from my house that remained dark and moist. Sinking the blade of my shovel into the earth, I discovered wet soil well below the surface. Not good news. I knew the water line to the house ran deep right along this very path, and I knew what I would find once I dug it up: a leak.

So I shut off the water and started excavating, not quite as carefully as an archaeologist unearthing ruins, but with all the same curiosity. It had been 33 years since I had laid this pipe in the ground, and I had only the vaguest of recollections about what I would find.

The problem was a stress crack along the inside of a 90 degree joint, a crack so small that it was hard to spot, but under 60 pounds of pressure sprayed like a geyser.

A stress crack — mix time, pressure, slight movements of the earth, perhaps some manufacturing defects, and eventually the PVC becomes stressed beyond what it can withstand. Under the relentless pressure of the water within the pipe a crack forms, water escapes, and a trickle becomes an artesian well.

I think of Adam Lanza, the mentally disturbed young man who killed children and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary school, as suffering from a stress crack. At one time, he was probably a sweet kid, though challenged in ways we can't imagine by his autism. Autism doesn't make you murderous. Some other pressures built up in Adam's life — his parents' divorce, his mom's overprotectiveness, burying himself in the world of violent video games. The sum of these somehow shattered his human decency and pushed him into an inexplicable, callous rage towards innocent school children.

We would like to think that we can prevent such horrors by stricter gun laws or increased access to mental health services — and yes, it's likely that these sorts of legal and medical interventions would reduce the number of blowouts.

But as quickly as we might stop people like Adam Lanza, James Holmes, Eric Harris, Dillon Klebold and Seung-Hui Cho, along come a couple of demented individuals ready to park pressure cookers filled with ball bearings and explosives in the middle of a crowd.

What moves people to such unthinkable disregard for life? What produces such blinding anger and rage that murdering strangers seems a reasonable solution to the fury building up within?

The fact that evil persists despite all our efforts to eradicate it tells me that better laws and more generous social services are only dealing with the surface issues, while missing the deep internal flaws that are at the heart of these murderous outbursts, not to mention all manner of lesser rages and daily insults that we shrug off. The problem is not inadequate laws, but a growing spiritual vacuum at the heart of our modern societies, a vacuum crying out for the God Who Loves Us, a vacuum that we fill instead with modern skepticism and childish platitudes.

]]> Some of Jesus' best-known but least-considered words are found in the beatitudes from his Sermon on the Mount:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.
Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. — Matthew 5:3-12, NIV

We can, and should, read these words as a prophetic call to live rooted and driven by God's love, God's mercy, and the real hope that God himself and God's kingdom is present, right now, today, not just in the by and by in heaven someday.

But we should also read Jesus' words as a prophetic caution that something has gone terribly and irreparably wrong in the world. We are all too often not "poor in spirit" or "meek" but proud, arrogant, self-aggrandizing and narcissistic. Too many of us mourn because friends and loved ones have been maimed or murdered, wounded both in body and spirit by all manner of hurtful acts and words. Think of the young woman who took her own life after being publicly humiliated by the boys who sexually assaulted her.

In God's abundantly fruitful world millions are hungry because of poverty or war or corrupt governments bent on enriching the privileged at the expense of the powerless. Too many are not "pure in heart" but scheming, deceptive, and manipulative. Too many reject peace in favor of war, whether the small-scale wars of inner city gangs and drug kings whose bullets kill innocent bystanders, or wars fought for political or religious ends.

These things were true in the world that Jesus lived as much as in ours today. History keeps repeating itself, but we keep on blindly putting our hopes in smarter laws, better government programs, a more just society, the eradication of prejudice and inequality, improved job and educational opportunities, more effective medicine and greener technologies, an appeal to our better angels...

Jesus might say that we are trying to fix the world's ills by wrapping duct tape around a pipe that has sprung ten thousand leaks. What is needed instead is a transformation of who and what we are — through the healing work of Christ in our hearts, making it possible to live out Jesus' challenge to love one another.

The beatitudes are a call to realism. They urge us to face the fact that without God, everything cracks, crumbles, and leaks.

The beatitudes are also a call to hope, to a promise that life can be better than this, much better. They are a promise that depends not on some ambitious but doomed design to remake society, but on the difficult recognition of our own failings, and the realization that society will only be remade as each one of us confesses our need for God and turns towards him.

The infrastructure is crumbling all around us and we are crumbling with it. The risen Jesus, the healing Son of God, calls us each to himself, promising abundant living in a time of decay; peace, hope, and strength in the midst of the battering stresses of life.

Photo credit: Chris Klugman Photography, Visual Palate

He saved others

2013-03-29T21:03:12Z

"He saved others," they said, "but he can't save himself! He's the king of Israel! Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God. Let God rescue him now if he wants him, for he said, 'I am the Son of God.'" — Matthew 27:42-43, NIV

A large crowd followed along as Jesus was frog-marched through Jerusalem to Golgotha, the Hill of Skulls, for his execution. After being nailed to the cross and hoisted into the air, soldiers, officials and ordinary citizens gathered close, curious to see what would happen next. The soldiers mocked him and divided up his clothing. Mary and the disciples stood in quiet grief at a distance. The emboldened crowd hurled insults at him and challenged him to perform a miracle to save himself.

Today is Good Friday, the day on which Christians remember the trial and crucifixion of Jesus. He was beaten, flogged, abused in various ways, nailed to a rough wooden cross and raised up among criminals as an example of Roman justice. All four Gospel accounts record overlapping versions of these events, and all agree that he died sometime in mid-afternoon, in time to be taken down and buried before sundown.

The crowd couldn't know what would happen, but they seem to have believed it was possible, if only remotely so, that God would somehow rescue Jesus.

"He saved others" seems to be a straightforward and perhaps unintentional witness to the signs and miracles that Jesus had performed throughout his ministry. In the years of his ministry he restored sight to the blind, cured lepers, healed the sick, gave crippled men back the ability to walk, raised the dead... And always, he claimed to be able to forgive sins, to wash away the wrongs that had erected a barrier between ordinary men and women and the holy God of Israel.

The crowds were always a mix of skepticism and awe, doubt and belief when it came to Jesus' miracles, and that is no less true today. But it's interesting that when he was up on the cross, the crowd seems to have been ready to acknowledge his good works, even as they doubted that he would use that same power to rescue himself. "He saved others, but he can't save himself."

What they didn't know was that he had no intention of saving himself, no desire to save himself. Only the night before as he had been praying in Gethsemane, he is recorded to have asked God to save him from what he knew was coming the following day. He ends that prayer saying, "...not my will, but Your will be done." He was yielded to God's plan. Once the whole terrible last act was set in motion, Jesus willingly submitted himself to all that lay ahead.

"He trusts in God" is again a very strange bit of mockery that acknowledges Jesus' holiness. He was a man devoted to honoring God with his life, with his word, with his actions. Daniel and his friends trusted in God and were thrown into a furnace, only to be rescued from harm by God. Jesus' friend Lazarus died, but was rescued by God from death. Jesus lived a life of prayer, self-denial, and obedience — indeed, the Scriptures say that he led a sinless life. Surely God would be pleased with this man and would reach down and lift him off of the cross? This may have been what was on the mind of the crowd that day.

But it was God's plan, God's intention that he would bleed and die on that cross as the ultimate Paschal Lamb, the final Passover sacrifice, ushering in a new and permanent covenant between humanity and God.

It was God's plan that Christ's death would redeem humanity and make us finally and permanently right with God.

The crowd couldn't begin to imagine the possibility that God would atone for our sins by placing his own Son on the altar of the cross; but if they had connected the dots from Abraham's near-sacrifice of his son Isaac to that hill of death outside of Jerusalem, they would have understood, perhaps in horror, that because of his immense love for humanity, God would not intervene to save his own beloved Son.

"He said, 'I am the Son of God.'" In certain modern-day cultures, and in ancient Israel, this is a blasphemous claim. It implies equality with God. It suggests that God has somehow had sexual relations through which children were born. Jesus constantly drew on familiar earthly things as metaphors to explain the unseen and misunderstood things of God's realm.

It certainly shows the crowd had been paying attention. They may not have believed him, they clearly didn't understand him, but there's no doubt that they heard exactly what Jesus had been saying all along.

Jesus Christ was the eternal God living in the form of an ordinary human being, having come to earth to proclaim God's love and to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Reconciliation between God and humanity depended on Jesus' willingness to be nailed to that cross, and on his humble acceptance of the agony and death that would follow. He quietly placed himself into his executioners' hands out of love for us. He didn't save himself, but on the cross Jesus saved you and me, some 2,000 years ago today on Good Friday.

Image credit: Eugene Delacroix, 1845, Christ on the cross, oil on wood.

Against the tide

2013-03-23T20:13:25Z

A new survey by Pew Research shows that more American adults now favor than oppose same-sex marriage, by a margin of 49% to 43%. In 2003 the same survey showed the opposite: 58% opposed vs. 33% in favor. Pew attributes the shift primarily to the coming of age of the Millennial generation — those born after 1980 — 70% of whom support same-sex marriage. But Americans across the board have been changing their opinions on this issue. Pew has found that more than one-quarter of those who now favor same-sex marriage admitted that they had previously held the opposite view.

Republican Senator Rob Portman made headlines when he recently announced his support for same-sex marriage, a change that came about, he says, as a result of learning that he has a homosexual son. When Pew asked those who had reversed themselves why they had changed their minds about same-sex marriage, one-third explained that it was because they know someone who is gay.

These shifting public opinions have been coaxed along by Hollywood and the popular media, both of which have done their utmost to depict homosexuality as a healthy, natural, legitimate lifestyle choice. The messaging has been effective, and as the flood of stories depicting homosexuality positively have worked their way into the cultural psyche, as closeted homosexual shame has been replaced by gay pride, and as lifestyle advocates have re-framed their same-sex marriage arguments using terms like "civil rights" and "equality," ordinary Americans have yielded to the PR onslaught.

Americans are a generous, compassionate and fair-minded people. We love to see the underdog triumph. We hate injustice and unfair play; our founding document declares that "all men are created equal," and though we have often failed to live up to that vision, it remains our conviction that we must create such a society.

To many Americans, and especially to homosexuals, it seems a violation of that declaration to deny them a privilege that is freely enjoyed by heterosexuals, namely marriage. Increasingly, many Americans, the young especially, are responding to the constant demand for marriage equality by saying, why not?

Even Pastor Rob Bell, former head of the mega-congregation know as Mars Hill Bible Church, was quoted a few days ago in favor of same-sex marriage:

I am for marriage. I am for fidelity. I am for love, whether it's a man and a woman, a woman and a woman, a man and a man. I think the ship has sailed and I think that the church needs to adjust... this is the world that we are living in and we need to affirm people wherever they are. — Rob Bell in a comment as part of a forum at Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco

Where Bell and many others have gone off the rails is by focusing on modern notions about love and fairness and equality, without first looking hard at what marriage is really all about and what purpose it is meant to serve in society.

]]> A relationship between any two people, whether they are hetero- or homosexual, having as its purpose the mutual expression of love and affection can take many forms and does not require any legal framework whatsoever for its support and encouragement. To any extent two individuals desire, they may formalize their relationship with binding legal agreements that include the combining and sharing of their wealth and assets. Or, as so many who cohabit well know, couples without such agreements are free to leave everything as loose and whimsical as their hearts desire. Love and the expression of love does not need the social institution of marriage to thrive.

But marriage is not principally about love, though love is unquestionably crucial to its success. The institution of marriage is society's way of demonstrating its commitment to future generations by creating a safehouse for procreation and child rearing.

This is why marriage includes public vows of commitment, in which the couple and those who witness the ceremony pledge to support and safeguard this relationship for life. This is also why marriage has historically been established and sanctioned by the church, where a commitment is made before God to faithfulness and sexual fruitfulness, just as the first couple, Adam and Eve, were joined together by God to love and support each other, and to enjoy sexual intimacy aimed at producing children to populate God's earth.

The fact that not all marriages produce children only underlines and highlights the fact that children are the normal and expected result of every marriage. That same-sex "marriage" is a non-sequitur can be shown quite simply: if everyone married someone of the same sex, life on earth would quickly die out. Same-sex marriage is a corruption of a long-held societal norm and a distortion of the fundamental design and intent of the marital commitment.

Americans have generous hearts. The shift in opinion in light of the gay rights media blitz of the past decades is proof of the generous, but entirely emotional (read: irrational), response to the heartfelt pleas of those who have chosen to embrace their homosexual desires in very public ways. This widespread change of heart is built on a reflexive but misplaced sense of compassion among heterosexuals for a very vocal homosexual minority. It represents a complete failure to consider the damage that will result from changing marriage into something it was never meant to be.

Liberalized divorce laws have already done terrible harm to children and the stable, nurturing environment that the two-parent family was intended to provide. Study after study confirms that children of single-parent families do worse on a wide range of metrics than their peers in two-parent, heterosexual families.

Our societal understanding of marriage has already been damaged by high levels of divorce and children born to unmarried, cohabiting couples. If we further erode the cultural understanding of marriage's procreative roots by including a non-procreative set of relationships under the same umbrella, marriage will ultimately cease to mean anything at all. Same-sex marriage will be one more cultural message to young men and women that we are not really serious about creating and parenting the next generation.

One more thing needs to be stated plainly. It is a complete misunderstanding of Christianity to treat homosexual men and women with anything but love. Many things have been prohibited by God — we call those things sin — and homosexual acts are among them. So are heterosexual acts when not practiced in the context of marriage. God calls all of us to avoid sinful actions and thoughts, but we are also called to love sinful people, because we, too, are sinners saved by the grace of God in Christ.

Same-sex marriage is gaining ground because too many are responding emotionally instead of thinking critically. But it's a sad fact that liberalized divorce laws and the disturbing trend for men to abandon their sons and daughters show that we are increasingly driven by narcissistic self-love rather than the more difficult, adult willingness to put our children ahead of our selfish desires.

Same-sex marriage is only the latest threat to the health of this vitally important social institution. It will further weaken marriage at a time when we desperately need to do all that we can to strengthen it, for the sake of our children, for the sake of our future.

Look up!

2013-03-18T15:01:10Z

The heavens proclaim the glory of God. The skies display His craftsmanship.
Day after day they continue to speak; night after night they make Him known.
They speak without a sound or word; their voice is never heard.
Yet their message has gone throughout the earth, and their words to all the world.
— Psalm 19:1-4, NLT, a Psalm of King David

On Tuesday night, my friend Parks set his camera up on a hillside and captured an image of the comet Pan-STARRS, below. On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I attempted the same thing, but failed to even see the comet much less get a photo. Millions of people around the globe saw the comet, but not me. Thousands of people on every continent photographed this visitor as it passed by, but I completely missed it.

The problem, of course (aside from my bad eyes) is that while the heavens are busy proclaiming the glory of God, they do it silently and subtly. What I needed were icons, arrows, and flashing pop-up messages in the sky. If I had been wearing one of those Google Spectacle™ gizmos, I could have turned my head in the general direction of the comet Pan-STARRS and an animated Google Doodle™ would have directed me right to it. Oh brave new world.

Because the heavens "speak" of God's glory "without a sound or word," their message is admittedly ambiguous. As David looked up at the night sky, especially on those long night watches in the fields as a shepherd, he had the time to really study what he was seeing, time to ponder what it all meant. He saw beauty. He would have observed the way the stars moved across the sky night after night, always returning to their places for the next night's performance. He saw the faster-moving planets, the cyclical phases of the moon, streaking meteors, perhaps even a comet or two. When you take the time to look deep and long into the night sky, the universe seems almost alive, immense, ordered but sprinkled with random acts of unpredictability and surprise.

In all that wondrous beauty and ordered chaos, David saw God at work. But what about today?

Well, for one thing, half of us live in the midst of so much artificial light pollution that we never see the stars at all. And even when we might have a chance to look up, there are so many wondrous things dragging our gaze downward that we seldom do.

I ate lunch yesterday at a Thai restaurant with some friends, and during the meal I noticed a table of four young men, all with their heads bowed. I smiled, assuming they were praying together. On closer inspection I could see that each of them was hunched over his smart phone, oblivious to the others sitting nearby, lost in the artificial wonders to be found in a tiny glowing screen.

That may be an apt metaphor for our times: the heavens still declare the glory of God, but we're all engrossed in our cell phones, too busy surfing and chatting and tweeting to look up.

God is speaking. Are you listening? God's glory is displayed in the heavens. When was the last time you paused to look up?

Photo credit: Parks Squyres, SaddleBrooke, AZ, March 12, 2013.

Second chances

2012-11-09T15:59:37Z

People make bad choices. It happens to individuals, it happens to nations. For some reason, Americans have given a failed President a second term. Those who elected him, and Mr. Obama himself, are convinced that all of his past and present troubles should rightly be laid at the feet of former President Bush and uncooperative Republicans in Congress. It's not his fault!

It's a common human temptation to play the helpless victim and shift the blame for our failures onto others, and Mr. Obama has certainly made an art form out of the "my dog ate my homework" excuse. Even among adults — abusive husbands, drug addicts, cheating Tour de France winners — blaming others for our own failures is perfectly human, and all too common.

The people have spoken and the people will live with the consequences of their choices, though I think we all are smart enough to be able to predict that bad luck and bad Republicans will continue to get the blame for the past and future failings of the Obama administration, with the President taking the credit for whatever happens to go right. To a greater or lesser degree, this is and always has been the way politics works.

Our universal need for second chances is what the Christian Gospel is all about. As Paul says in Romans 3:23 "...all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God..." Sin is a universal human disease that has infected every single one of us. But Paul continues in verse 24 with the promise of a second chance: "...and all are justified freely by [God's] grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus."

Just as sin has infected us all, God has offered to inject us free of charge with the antidote to sin, which is the redemptive sacrifice of Jesus, whose death on the cross paid for our sins.

In effect, we are washed free from sin by shifting the blame for what we have done to Christ, who accepts the blame and the punishment for us. The important difference here, made clear elsewhere in Scripture, is that we have to actually admit to our failures, admit to our mistakes, face the reality of our sinfulness and the many creative ways we have broken the laws of God. And then, having humbled ourselves before God, He lifts us up, Christ accepts our blame, and we are set free from sin and sin's judgment.

The Christian Gospel treats us like adults. No excuses are accepted. No blame-shifting is tolerated. It's a very tough Gospel that requires us to face up to our actions and inactions before God and come clean.

But once we have done so, we find that God is tremendously generous. The Apostle John put it this way:

See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! — 1 John 3:1, NIV

We have no way of knowing how Barack Obama's second chance will work out. For the sake of our nation, we should pray that he does well and is able to make decisions that reduce economic suffering, protect religious freedoms, and secure life, peace and prosperity for our children.

And then, there are the eternal issues. American politics is enormously consequential for our individual lives and the path of world history. But of far greater consequence is the question of the state of our hearts and souls. The living and generous God of the Bible invites us to lay aside our childish excuses and enter into a life-changing relationship with Him. Have you considered His offer?

There is no better time than today to consider your need for forgiveness and salvation — to accept God's invitation to become a member of his eternal family.

47%? Mitt Was Being Optimistic

2012-11-07T15:44:39Z

Sometime after 2004, America crossed a tipping point, and the Sandra Flukes and Occupiers and Obama-phone ladies and all the others who live, or want to live, supported by the bankrupt welfare state, became a majority. These modern Democrats are not the party of JFK, who challenged his generation to "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

The American experiment was built around the assumption that we have been granted rights by God, and that our republic is sustained by the sweat and hard work of millions of citizens who labor to pursue success in order to benefit themselves, their families, and accidentally, this nation. The Entitlement Party headed by President Obama sees government as the source of all rights, and the only proper beneficiary of all of the fruits of the labor of its citizens, who ultimately exist to support the State and all those who suckle at its teats.

This is not the America the founders created. What lies ahead for Obama's America is more statism, more crushing debt, more class warfare, more demonization of the haves by the have-nots, less and less individual liberty, more and more centralized control over the details of our individual lives. And, incidentally, in Obama's America the right to abort your children will remain absolute, because the national religion of the Democratic party is narcissism.

Conservatism has the superior moral argument to state-centered progressivism, and I remain hopeful that conservatives can make their argument convincing to enough Americans that we can reverse course in 2014. We need to try, because even as we careen towards fiscal and social ruin, the America as conceived by our founders is a great treasure worth preserving.

Another 'Dewey Defeats Truman' Moment?

2012-11-05T16:49:13Z

In the months leading up to the 1948 US presidential elections, incumbent Harry S Truman was routinely predicted as having no chance of defeating his challenger, Thomas Dewey. On the night before election day, every single one of the political reporters who had been with Truman as he campaigned back and forth across the country predicted that he would be soundly defeated.

But a strange thing had been happening in the final weeks and months of the campaign: at every whistle stop and every city, the crowds gathering to listen to Harry Truman had been swelling, growing more and more enthusiastic about the candidate and his message with each appearance. The polls kept predicting a Dewey sweep, despite the fact that Dewey's rallies had been shrinking as Truman's had grown.

So certain were the media pundits that the Chicago Tribune wrote its famous "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline early on election day, and stubbornly stuck with it, until it finally became embarrassingly clear that the voters, ignoring the headlines and the pundits, had swept Truman back into office for another term.

It was one of those rare times when people made up their minds at the very last minute, and hundreds of thousands of voters swung from being undecided to supporting Harry Truman almost as they made their way to the polls. But the signs had been there all along. Dewey was having trouble connecting, he seemed aloof and detached from the concerns and troubles of ordinary Americans, and the better the voters got to know him, the less they liked him.

Truman was a man of the people, an uncomplicated, honest, straight-talking candidate who was instantly liked and trusted once people had an opportunity to see him, hear him, and shake his hand.

I believe the American people had been withholding judgment on Mitt Romney until that first debate in Denver. The President's campaign advisers had made Romney into a caricature of himself — a cold-hearted capitalist who loved nothing better than throwing workers out on the street while he shipped their jobs to China.

The Mitt Romney the voters met in Denver was no cartoon cutout created by Democratic focus groups. He seemed to be the quintessential American, a man who loves his family and has worked to provide a good life for them. In Denver, Mitt Romney seemed competent, reasonable, measured, confident, a man with sensible ideas, a man who inspires trust.

President Obama, unfortunately, has seemed anything but competent. He does not inspire trust. He does not seem to know what to do to get our nation back on its feet again. It has been painfully obvious to most Americans that Barack Obama has made our problems worse, far worse, during the past 4 years, through a combination of failed leadership and political policies that a throwback to the 1930's.

It sounds harsh, but the fact is that Barack Obama has been a terrible President. He is a typical college professor, full of grandiose ideas formulated in an ivory tower far removed from the daily realities of ordinary American life. He had 4 years to prove that his ideas could work, 2 of those years with complete control of the US Congress. He did what Democrats do best — he threw trillions of your dollars at the problems. And today, the country is hurting worse than when he took office.

I believe the national mood has been shifting quietly and steadily in favor of Mitt Romney. I believe we are going to see another "Dewey Defeats Truman" moment, when the pundits and pollsters will be surprised to find that the country has been lifted by a quietly rising tide of confidence that Mitt Romney is the decent and competent leader who can guide America out of this morass.

Get out tomorrow and vote for change, vote for competent leadership, vote to say "no more" to the failed policies of bigger and bigger government, more and more debt, a continuation of the politics of cronyism and gridlock. Mitt Romney has the experience and the proven policies to get America working again.

Four More Years?

2012-09-07T04:16:38Z

The President's acceptance speech tonight can be summed up very simply: "I have faith in America; if Americans put their faith in me, things will get better. Cross my heart."

Left unexplained is why, if Barack Obama is re-elected, the next four years should be any different from the past four years. Has the failure of his administration to put people back to work been because America had too little faith or insufficient hope? Or are there more concrete reasons, such as policies that have stifled entrepreneurship, policies that have put more faith and hope in big government instead of strengthening private enterprise?

The President's speech was a laundry list of things he hopes to accomplish. It was long on promises, plans, dreams and a grand vision of a robust and thriving economy, all things possible if he is re-elected. Having a vision is a vital first step to effective leadership. But after he has articulated a vision, an effective leader has to have the skills to accomplish it, to take that vision from gauzy dream to gritty reality.

Though the President implied in his speech that it was an uncooperative Congress that has frustrated his plans, one suspects the real problem is a failure at the top, a failure to translate dreams into actions.

Let's not forget that Barack Obama came into the presidency with no private sector experience, no experience creating jobs, little legislative experience, and with a philosophical bent for solving problems with big, ambitious government programs. In the first two years of his presidency, with an undivided Congress, Obama was able to pass nearly every legislative initiative he wanted. He ran up debt faster than any President in history.

The result? The economy is in the toilet, unemployment is stuck at unacceptably high levels, our children have been saddled with staggering levels of future debt, America's credit rating has fallen... and Obama's solution is to continue with the same policies that ran us into the ditch in the first place. He asks for more time, he asks for a little more faith, he asks us to close our eyes and cross our fingers and believe with all of our hearts.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. If America hasn't gone insane, this November we will vote for a President who can bring competence, experience and economic common sense back to the White House. It's time to thank Barack Obama for his service and show him the door.

Photo credit: Damian Dovarganes/AP

Rainbows

2012-08-20T16:02:29Z

We are in the midst of our summer monsoons here in Arizona, a time where the heat of the day creates violent afternoon thunderstorms that come rushing through in a fury, dropping rain willy-nilly across the desert floor. Last week, one such storm cleared quickly to the west just before sundown and created the gorgeous double rainbow that I was able to capture in this photo.

Rainbows are common enough after storms, of course, but in many places the horizon is too obscured by trees or buildings to see more than a piece of the arch. Here in the west, where the horizon is uncluttered for dozens of miles in all directions, we often see both ends of the rainbow at once, and sometimes a faint second arch above the first, which you can see at the left and right edges of the photo.

Early in the book of Genesis, following God's judgment against the earth and the great flood that only Noah and his family escaped, God creates the rainbow as a permanent, natural sign of his covenant promise of mercy towards the earth and humanity. He explains it this way:

"I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life." — Genesis 9:13-15

We understand the mechanics of the rainbow phenomenon as sunlight split into its component colors by the prismatic action that takes place as it passes through raindrops. All very cold, precise and correct, of course, but an explanation that fails to account for a rainbow's intrinsic beauty, or for the awe and wonder rainbows inspire in us.

As with many beautiful and wondrous things in nature, their ultimate purpose is to draw our thoughts and hearts towards the merciful and loving God who created them, and us.

Naaman and pride

2012-08-01T07:45:18Z

He would not grab the life ring offered him by a chum-soaked fisherman in a bunged up scow; if he must be rescued, he would wait to be helped aboard the lush, teak deck of a Scandinavian sloop, piloted by a sun-drenched blonde named Astrid. After all, even a drowning man has his pride. So he turned his back on the old fisherman and swam off in search of a better offer. And when no other boat happened along, he grew tired, cursed the Fates, and disappeared beneath the waves.

Likewise Naaman — a Syrian general whose power as the head of his King's armies had made him known and feared throughout the ancient middle east — found himself stricken with an incurable and dreaded disease, leprosy. With a disease like that, even a decorated general would have very few invitations to Syrian cocktail parties.

Deeply concerned for Naaman's health, the King of Syria, in an act of desperation, sent him to Israel, to the prophet Elisha, sending with him a caravan laden with gold and silver to grease the prophet's palm.

But when the great commander arrived at Elisha's tumbledown doorstep, God's prophet showed contemptible manners by leaving Naaman standing in the hot sun and dispatching a lowly servant to communicate a rather strange message:

"Go and wash yourself seven times in the Jordan River. Then your skin will be restored, and you will be healed of your leprosy." — 2 Kings 5:10, NLT

You can imagine what happened next. Naaman was greatly offended. He was, after all, the General McArthur of his day, a man used to being treated with deference and respect.

Whatever he might have imagined while trekking across the boiling desert to that god-forsaken little burg, being left standing at the door of a broken down hovel and ordered to bathe in an insignificant little river was not among them. Naaman spun around in a huff and stormed off, ready to leave the disrespectful prophet in his dust.

His entourage jumped in and tried desperately to change his mind:

But his officers tried to reason with him and said, "Sir, if the prophet had told you to do something very difficult, wouldn't you have done it? So you should certainly obey him when he says simply, 'Go and wash and be cured!'" So Naaman went down to the Jordan River and dipped himself seven times, as the man of God had instructed him. And his skin became as healthy as the skin of a young child's, and he was healed! — 2 Kings 5:13,14, NLT

Our pride gets in God's way. We want God, at least some of God, but only on our terms. We set conditions. We bargain. We dig in our heels and say, "Yes" to this but "No way!" to that. Unconditional surrender is always a bitter pill to swallow, so we try our best to negotiate a better deal for ourselves; anything would be better than a complete capitulation to God's terms.

God apparently found Naaman's reputation underwhelming. Hard to imagine that. You mean to tell me that the creator of heaven and earth, the inventor of the elusive Higgs boson, is just a smidge less impressed by all of my accomplishments than I am?

The Apostle Peter gained some insight into God's perspective while visiting Cornelius, a Roman officer and a Gentile who was eager to hear Peter's testimony about Jesus. Peter was a Jew, a member of God's elect people. He was rightly proud of his favored position with the Almighty.

Jews didn't mingle with Gentiles, and Peter was reluctant to associate with Cornelius, but God startled him with a vision that told him that all men and women stand as equals before God — even Jews and Gentiles — and all are equally in need of His mercy.

Then Peter replied, "I see very clearly that God shows no favoritism. In every nation He accepts those who fear Him and do what is right." — Acts 10:34,35, NLT

That phrase "God shows no favoritism" is famously translated "God is no respecter of persons" in the old King James. It doesn't mean that he has no respect for us, but that there is nothing about any one of us that merits any special favor over anyone else. None of us can stand on privilege. We're all drowning, whether we will admit it or not.

We all need to be rescued, but most of us, myself included, are too proud to take the hand that is extended to us. We want to approach God in a way that allows us to hold on to our autonomy, our self-control, our independence, our pride.

Forget it, says God. Go dip yourself in that little stream called Jordan, then come back here and worship Me. That's My deal. Take it or leave it.

Naaman, the great general, wisely relented, set aside his pride and waded into the river, just as the prophet had instructed. And when he came out, his leprous and decaying skin had become like new.

Pride that holds God at arm's length is nothing but pure foolishness.

Illustration credit: Theodore Gericault, The Raft of the Medussa, 1818

Monuments Men: Living redemptively

2012-07-01T02:54:50Z

"Can anyone hide from Me in a secret place? Am I not everywhere in all the heavens and earth?" says the LORD. — Jeremiah 23:24, NLT

War is the application of violence against an enemy for political ends. It's a brutal business, but in the midst of the killing and destruction men can act with honor, decency, even altruism. In fact, we demand it from our professional soldiers and are disappointed when the brutality of war leads them to become brutes themselves.

As western Europe crumbled before Germany's blitzkrieg in the opening months of WWII, it became clear that Allied armies would have to invade Europe to liberate it. Loosening the Nazis' grip would mean raining down frightening quantities of high explosives on cities, and unleashing tens of thousands of heavily-armed soldiers in the countryside. The fighting would begin in Italy and France, in places containing some of the world's most revered artistic, historic and architectural treasures.

President Franklin D Roosevelt was a patron of the arts; the last thing he wanted was to win the war while destroying Europe's cultural heritage.

Because of FDR's concerns, the American military began recruiting a small corps of architects, sculptors, art restorers and museum curators to work alongside the advancing armies. Known as the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives commission, or MFAA, these soldiers were to enlist the help of military commanders, soldiers and civilians to protect Europe's historical and cultural treasures from harm.

To give their mission some teeth, General Dwight Eisenhower issued an order making it "the responsibility of every commander to protect and respect" all historical monuments and cultural centers that lay in the path of the invasion, unless their destruction was found to be a matter of "military necessity." Prior to the invasion, the Monuments Men, as the MFAA soldiers became known, plotted the location of hundreds of cultural heritage sites in order to make local commanders aware of the treasures that would be in the path of the battle. As soon as Allied forces secured an area, Monuments Men moved in to evaluate the condition of cathedrals, libraries, historic ruins and the like, recruiting civilians to prevent further damage.

The story of this unprecedented humanitarian effort has been told by Robert M Edsel in his 2009 book Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History.

The Allies sought to protect Europe's cultural treasures in situ, but Adolf Hitler saw Europe's artistic treasures as a means to political legitimacy. As part of his vision for the Third Reich, Hitler planned to build a great art museum at Linz, Austria, his adopted home. The Fuhrer was an aficionado of the arts, and the conquest of Europe gave him an opportunity to acquire a world class collection. As Hitler's armies swept across Europe, a special unit of the German SS stripped towns and cities of their artistic treasures and shipped them back to Germany by the trainload.

]]> The Nazis had made it illegal for Jews to own art, which provided legal cover for the confiscation of any valuables owned by Jewish families. The smaller museums in conquered countries were emptied, others were permitted to keep their collections — with the understanding that they would now be owned and managed by the Third Reich. The only thing the Nazis didn't confiscate was the so-called "degenerate" art of the modernists — those pieces they burned.

Fast forward to the liberation of France. The Allies were closing in on Germany, and the big question for the Monuments Men was, Where had all the art gone? The SS art collection operation was highly secret, and the Nazis had hidden their loot in dozens of heavily guarded locations in Germany and Austria — for instance in Reichsmarshall Herman Göring's homes and in Hitler's Eagle's Nest chalet in Berchtesgaden.

But most of it was underground, buried in fields, crammed into bomb shelters, hidden in mines. One of the largest collections was found packed into miles of dark tunnels in the famous Altaussee, Austria, salt mine. Monuments Men Robert Posey and Lincoln Kerstein were the first to discover its secrets on May 16, 1945.

A guide led them deep into the cold heart of the mountain, past branching passageways, to a large rock-vaulted chamber. Their torchlight, swinging into the gloom, illuminated rack after rack of plain pine boxes filled with some of the world's great artistic masterpieces before falling, finally, on the milky white surface of Michelangelo's Bruges Madonna. She was lying on her side on a filthy brown-and-white-striped mattress...

A few days later, in a deep chamber, the Monuments Men discovered the remaining four panels of the Ghent Altarpiece, Vermeer's The Artist's Studio, and, farther into the dark recesses of the chamber, the Rothschild family's Vermeer, The Astronomer. — The Monuments Men, Robert M Edsel, Center Street Publishers, 2009

When the Americans completed the Altaussee inventory less than a month later, the tally for this one repository was 6577 paintings, 230 drawings or watercolors, 137 pieces of sculpture, plus historical artifacts, books, tapestries, furniture, and much more.

When Germany surrendered, the MFAA continued its work, cataloging and repatriating the stolen art to its rightful owners. Of course, the owners of much Jewish-owned art had been murdered in the concentration camps. Hundreds of thousands of other items remain missing to this day. Some were undoubtedly destroyed, some were buried and never found. A great many were illicitly placed in private collections and given forged provenances. For the most part, though, the rich artistic and cultural heritage of Europe was restored to its pre-war glory, thanks to the Monuments Men.

I think the commitment of Roosevelt and Eisenhower to protect Europe's cultural riches, and the efforts on the ground to fight a war while honoring those commitments, shows us something interesting about human nature. We can be in the midst of the most gut-wrenching events and still find the power within us to act honorably, altruistically, nobly. It is why the military does not excuse atrocities committed by its soldiers, or law enforcement by its officers. It is why we fight our political battles with words and ballots, and strive to treat our political opponents decently and with respect.

The Monuments Men were part of an American military effort to restore and heal what the Nazis had tried to steal and destroy. The world is savaged by sin, and yet, we are able to rise above that savagery and act redemptively, when we want to. That's the challenging legacy left by the Monuments Men.

For more information, take a look at the website Robert Edsel has created to tell the story of the Monuments Men.

A heart like His

2012-06-07T15:10:25Z

Even if you've never darkened the door of a Sunday school class in your life, you will have grown up with a culturally-formed understanding of the biblical allusion to David and Goliath; every kid with a slingshot in his back pocket is confident he can slay any foe. In sports, politics, or whenever the little guy, against all odds, takes on a powerful opponent, David and Goliath is the literary metaphor of choice, and evidence of how the Bible has quietly shaped our culture and informed our thinking.

But there is much more to David than the heroic tale of a boy with a pocketful of smooth stones and a good arm. Even more than the rags to riches, Horatio Alger story of a runt-of-the-litter shepherd who became Israel's greatest and most revered ruler.

In A Heart Like His: Intimate reflections on the life of David, author and Bible teacher Beth Moore walks us through a deeply moving examination of David's remarkable life. Here was a man who knew the lowest lows of betrayal, grief, doubt and personal failure, any of which might have destroyed him. Yet if anything these setbacks pushed him to pursue God more zealously and gave him a reputation as a faithful, powerful but humble servant of the God of Israel.

The Bible doesn't airbrush out the imperfections in its portrait of David. He is not a larger-than-life Jewish superhero but a flawed and ordinary man chosen by God to lead. He screwed up, big time, but he knew God's heart, and he lived day by day in the richness of God's grace.

Anyone who walks in evangelical circles knows Beth Moore's reputation as a gifted teacher of the Word. Through her Living Proof Ministries, Beth Moore has had a significant ministry to women through books and seminars for nearly 20 years. Yet, I find A Heart Like His to be a book that has significant things to say to men as well, in part because the Bible lays out David's life with such honesty. There is much here that we can each identify with.

We see David as a young man trying to earn the respect of the adults in his life, and later, called upon to assume a man-sized role before anyone thought he was ready. We see him waiting, serving and respectfully enduring the abuse of a cruel King. We see him lead men into battle, and later, when praise and power has gone to his head, abusing the trust and authority he had been given. There is a lot to be learned from David, and Beth Moore takes her time, encouraging her readers to make application from David's life to our own.

If you've never studied the life of David systematically, A Heart Like His is a book I would highly recommend. As I followed Moore's lead, I found many ways in which David and I are alike. We all struggle to live uncompromisingly before God in a world where compromise is de rigueur. We live in an age where we are expected to push faith into a private corner of our lives, and in David we see some of the terrible consequences of faith lived out selectively and halfheartedly. But we also see what a man or woman can become when we submit our lives and hearts to God without holding back.

In A Heart Like His, Beth Moore challenges us to measure ourselves against a man whom God loved and honored, a man who, despite his many failings, lived out his life in the constant pursuit of a deeper relationship with his Lord.

(Illustration note: David has been the subject of a great many sculptures and paintings. One of my favorites is this one by Caravaggio from 1606, showing David returning to Saul's forces with the head of Goliath. You see in this painting David's youth, but also the strength and confidence that would make him into a great warrior and leader of men.)

The new face of human slavery

2012-05-27T04:36:01Z

Men want sex; some men are willing to pay for it. Recognizing a financial opportunity, some women enter into the sex trades or pornographic films hoping to make money. Hollywood has helped ease our consciences about prostitution with tales of bright and pretty entrepreneurs armed with a business plan to make a killing and quit the business young and rich.

So when the US Secret Service was rocked by the news that some of its agents, while on foreign assignment to protect the President, trolled strip clubs and brought women back to their hotel rooms, there was outrage but not much surprise. It would be naïve to think that such things haven't happened before.

It was a story of men behaving badly. As for the women, the assumption seems to be that they were young entrepreneurs earning a living in a trade that has been practiced for thousands of years.

But there might be more to the story. Most of the world's sex workers do not sell themselves willingly. They are forced to do so by abusive boyfriends, or to feed expensive drug habits, or out of pressure to raise their families out of poverty. In too many cases, they are bought, sold and traded like used clothing, caught up in the web of the worldwide demand for anonymous, unskilled laborers and sex workers known as human trafficking.

Olga, 23, came to Dubai from Moldova on a visitor visa after hearing about a job opportunity there. A Russian woman and an Indian man picked her up at the airport when she arrived. They took her to their apartment and told her she would instead be prostituted. When she refused, they beat her and threatened to kill her and bury her in the desert. They threatened to harm her if she did not pay them back for her travel expenses, and then sent Olga to a local hotel to meet customers and collect money from them. — from "Trafficking in Persons 2011," US State Department

I have just returned from a trip to Thailand and wrote here about some of my experiences. As a tourist, you tend to experience a country and its people superficially; you come away from a visit with quick impressions that fail to take into account a culture's complexities and the darkness that can hide beneath the surface.

I got a few glimpses of those hidden realities at a Thai restaurant where a middle-aged, silver-haired German man was ordering every expensive item on the menu for his young Thai "date," and earlier that same day when an Australian man walked out of my hotel in the arms of a fashionably dressed Thai woman one-third his age.

As I strolled the city in the evenings, I would walk past the 'go-go bars' where young women in short skirts sat perched on sidewalk bar stools, waiting to be chosen by the parade of young men stopping to look them over.

Thailand is one of the world's hot sex tourism destinations, an industry which thrives thanks to Thailand's major human trafficking problem. The US State Department has placed Thailand on its "tier 2 watch list," a recognition that the problem there is large, growing, and is not being addressed effectively by either the government or the courts.

Poor immigrants from neighboring Burma, Laos and Cambodia come looking for jobs. Lacking any legal standing, they are easily entrapped as laborers in sweatshops or on fishing boats. Many report being threatened and physically abused. Some have been murdered. Thousands more are forced into Thailand's sex trades.

Maira was 15 when two well-dressed men driving a nice car approached her and two friends in a small Honduran village. They told the girls they were businessmen and offered to take them to the United States to work in a textile factory. Maira thought it was the perfect opportunity to help her single mother, who struggled to support seven children.

But upon arriving in Houston, the girls were held captive, beaten, raped, and forced to work in cantinas that doubled as brothels. ... The captors beat the girls daily if they did not make enough money.

After six years, Maira was able to escape the cantina and return to her mother with the help of a kind American family. Her two friends remain missing. — from "Trafficking in Persons 2011," US State Department

]]> Human trafficking is growing at alarming rates here in the US, too, as a recent BBC report documents. Mexican and Central American women are being lured to the US with the promise of jobs and forced instead into sexual slavery. Pimps advertise their services by handing out fliers on New York City sidewalks.

Pimps use a variety of psychological methods, sometimes referred to as "seasoning" or "grooming," to gain full control. They recruit vulnerable women or girls, pretend to be in love with them, ply them with alcohol or drugs, build their dependencies for basic needs or chemical escapes, place other women in supervisory roles over them and encourage them to compete for affection and favor, use an interlocking system of reward and punishment reminiscent of a battering relationship, and threaten their recruits with the shame of their families and a punitive, rather than protective, law enforcement response. — from "Trafficking in Persons 2011," US State Department

America's human trafficking problem is a natural, predictable consequence of our lax immigration policies. When men and women enter the US illegally looking for work, they are forced to enter the shady, underground economy where payments for services are kept off the books. They cannot complain about their treatment to the authorities without risking deportation. The weakest of these — primarily women — wind up in the hands of criminals who force them into prostitution. In a place where they don't speak the language, where they have no friends, and where they fear the authorities, thousands of these strangers are forced into slavery in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Phoenix... in every major US city, right under our noses.

As long as we permit a porous border, as long as our immigration policies fail to provide people who want to work with the legal protections of a guest worker visa, we can expect tens of thousands to continue to risk their lives to get here, and we can expect many of them to become the easy victims of criminals eager to exploit their vulnerabilities.

Because of budget cuts, law enforcement agencies in many cities have cut back their vice departments. Human trafficking flourishes because the victims come from far away places with funny names and have no one pounding on the doors of the local police station looking for them.

That could change, if in every city in America, good men and women decided to become informed about the problem of human trafficking. It will change when good men and women begin asking questions of government and law enforcement about their priorities, about what they are doing to ensure that the weak, the young, and the foreigners among us are not exploited.

It isn't enough just to live rightly. Eliminating the scourge of human trafficking requires good men and women to educated themselves, and to have the courage to speak up for those who don't have a voice.

If you are interested in learning more, here are some good places to start:

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes.

The US State Department Trafficking in Persons Report for 2011.

The FBI - Human Trafficking website

Street Light Tucson.

Not For Sale Campaign.

UPDATE:Municipal Court Judge Paul Herbert became increasingly convinced that the courts were not helping women caught up in prostitution find a way out. After a good deal of prayer, he established "CATCH Court" — Changing Attitudes to Change Habits, a two-year program to try to rehabilitate women and give them the skills, relationships and new habits needed to start a new life. Christianity Today has a great article on Herbert's work and this innovative program here.

In the land of tigers and elephants

2012-05-10T09:41:56Z

Sawat-dee-kahp. Good health and salutations from Chiang Mai, Thailand, where I have been attending a conference for the past ten days and playing the tourist in my spare time. My travels usually take me to Latin America, especially Mexico. My first visit to Thailand has been a unique and enjoyable experience.

Thais are hospitable, gracious and kindhearted towards the thousands of foreigners like me who come here to enjoy the amazing food, the tropical gardens, and the exotic wonders of this land of silk and tigers, ancient temples and elephants. Thai script is completely unintelligible to westerners and the Thai language is very complex. But because tourism is such a huge part of Chiang Mai's income, stores and restaurants often (mercifully) print signs and menus in both Thai and English, and many people here speak enough English to communicate with you on very basic levels. This makes the place quite accessible to a drop-in tourist like myself.

Chiang Mai is in the northern forests of Thailand, about equidistant between Burma and Laos. It was established as a trading center in 1296, and constructed as a walled city surrounded by a moat to protect against Burmese invasions. The moat, parts of the wall and its gates still survive, and have been re-purposed as a linear park that surrounds the city's core, a place where families and couples gather, and vendors set up tables in the cool of the evening to sell their wares.

Thailand's forests have been a major source of teak, a wood prized in boat building because if its resistance to rot. Around the turn of the century, Thai labor gangs felled heavy teak trees and used elephants to move the logs to a river, where they were floated to sawmills downstream. The British built a railroad into the area to encourage greater commerce, with the unintended effect of exposing the beauty of this country to the outside world and stimulating the tourist industry, still a major part of the economy to this day.

Thailand is about 95% Buddhist. Ornate Buddhist wats are found throughout the city, usually guarded by golden dragons and other mythological monsters. I took some time to visit the Wat Phrasingha where the huge Sing Buddha towers peacefully over the quiet room as men and women kneel down in prayer, or are blessed by monks sitting in meditation around the edge of the room. The Sing Buddha was a gift from a prince at the end of WWII, and has a particular pose that you see frequently in local Buddha statues: sitting in the typical cross-legged posture with the right hand draped over the knee and the left upturned in the Buddha's lap. When you enter the wat you leave your shoes outside, and a sign asks foreigners to "dress politely," offering wraps to women who are not adequately covered. There was no prohibition against taking photos, but I did so quietly and to the side, trying not to disturb the worshipers.

The standard greeting in Thailand is not a wave or a handshake but a wai: palms together with fingers pointing at the chin and thumbs against the chest, ended with a slight bow of the head. Even the Ronald McDonald statues in the ubiquitous fast food chain greet customers with a wai.

Thailand is a very respectful culture, and Thais pay special respect to the elderly, to Buddhist monks, and especially to their much beloved King, whose photo is displayed everywhere. Shop keepers will offer a wai when you enter the store and are delighted if you take the initiative to wai them upon entering. I watched an old man walking ahead of me on the sidewalk as he had to divert because of an obstruction by slightly moving into the entry of a Buddhist wat. Before continuing on, he stopped and bowed towards the temple, then continued on his way. A man sitting on a bench gave a bow to a friend passing by on a motorcycle. Thais seem to be used to tourists neglecting the wai, but appreciate it when we make the attempt. With a little practice, bowing becomes second nature.

On one of my walks through the city it occurred to me how quiet and orderly traffic was compared to Latin America. I don't think I've yet heard a horn honk here, and I haven't seen anyone driving aggressively. Getting across the busy streets as a pedestrian is challenging, but more because of the sheer flood of cars and motorbikes and tuk tuks pouring down the road, not because everyone is driving as fast as they can.

]]> The flavors in Thai food are just amazing. I've always loved Thai cooking, which is frequently spicy and often makes liberal use of curry and coconut milk. I've tried a number of small, family run restaurants here, and the food has always been fresh and delicious. In many of these places the kitchen is out in the dining area, so you get to watch the cook preparing the meal, always in a wok heated over a gas flame. I had a Thai curry prawn dish where the prawns were a good six inches long from nose to tail. A friend took advantage of a day-long class in Thai cooking and came away with a better understanding of the local ingredients used. Of course, there are lots of places that cater to tourists, such as one restaurant positioned near the Tae Phae gate that claimed to have the best burritos this side of the Rio Grande River.

At sundown along the eastern side of the city, vendors set up tables and booths up and down the sidewalks, opening the popular "night market" to tourists and Thais alike. You'll find silk ties and Thai boxing shorts, silver and jade and turquoise jewelry, hand-painted enamelware, wood carvings of elephants and Buddhas, delicate flowers carved from bars of soap, knock off Rolex watches, art work, handicrafts, and t-shirts of every description. Prices are usually marked, but sticker price is just the starting point — vendors assume you will ask for a better price. "Just for you, American man, we give special discount."

It's the rainy season now, with thunderstorms coming through almost every day. As I went out to stroll through the city on Sunday, a storm rolled in and I didn't have an umbrella. I ducked into a multistory electronics mall and spent some time looking around through dozens of stores selling computers, motherboards, chips, peripherals — and for some odd reason I'm not sure of, the hallways were lined with tables full of ladies' underwear. Maybe guys come looking for the hottest computer and drag along their girlfriends, who use the time to pick up a new bra?

Anyway, in a store that sold mice and game controllers I found a bin full of umbrellas with cartoon characters on them. I bought a blue one with two bears surrounded by hearts for $2.50, and it kept me dry for the rest of the day.

I'll be leaving about midnight, flying from here to Seoul, South Korea, then to LA, then down to Mexico for some more meetings. I have an 8-hour layover in Seoul, so I'm going to try to make a quick tour of the city if I can. Both my flights over the Pacific have been on Korean Air's new Airbus A380 double-decker jet, a very comfortable plane, especially for very long flights, but one so big that it is just plain disturbing to think that it can actually fly. More legroom than usual, though, and that is much appreciated.

I'll have more to say about my trip to Thailand in another post. If you ever get the chance to visit here, by all means do. Thailand is a beautiful country that goes out of its way to make guests feel welcome.