A New Year: The Blessed Unknown

Borrowing this pic, since I didn't go to the Taipei 101
fireworks show this year, though we did watch from far away

Resolutions vs. The Future

Happy New Year everyone. It's January 1st, that time when many people make resolutions which will seem increasingly less worth the sacrifice it takes to maintain them as the cold weeks slide past. That's the problem with resolutions; they are goals which can't factor in what might happen in the coming months. Sure, maybe you give up out of simple laziness, but let's say you have better reasons than that. Often it's the same reasons we are all familiar with--by mid-February winter has worn most of us down and we don't have the mental fortitude to keep doing productive but willpower-draining things which aren't an established habit quite yet. (In Taiwan there's a different yearly rhythm; no Christmas holiday and a mad rush to finish everything in January before the long Chinese New Year break in late January or February.)

But let's imagine that your failure to maintain your resolution is entirely due to unforeseen events: you are determined to go to the gym, but then you land a huge work project which requires most of your energy and all of your time. Or you were going to lose weight, but you started learning to bake and have discovered your superpower is making delicious cookies. Neither a valuable work contract or the ability to produce perfectly-crunchy-or-chewy chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven whenever you want are bad things, and maybe if you'd known about their emergence ahead of time you could have planned your resolutions accordingly, or at least been better prepared for the struggle of maintaining your resolutions in spite of them.

This ignorance (not stupidity--ignorance is not knowing something, stupidity is when knowing it wouldn't help you) of what the new year might bring can in some ways be considered a form of mercy. My examples above are positive, but all too often what lies ahead as we face every new year is unforeseen hardship and pain. Perhaps the global geopolitical situation will become more unstable, straining the economy and threatening war. Perhaps sickness or disease will afflict you, your friends, or family members. Perhaps you'll simply find yourself unable to meet your goals through factors seemingly beyond your control, and slowly slip into ennervating ennui.

All these things and many more are possible, and we know that they will all happen at some point in the future, as a matter of statistics. This is the world we live in; we never know when misfortune may strike, and that inability to know can be faced in various ways. (Libraries of books and articles have been written about how to face the unknown without debilitating stress, many of which can be encapsulated in Paul's reminder to "be anxious for nothing".)

Making Impossible Decisions

With the future tantalizingly guessable but also unknown, many decisions must be made without knowing the outcome. As an INTP on the Myers-Briggs personality indicator, I know that I have a tendency to delay making a decision until I have all the relevant information to help me decide, the problem being that a) sometimes you simply can't know all the relevant information, and b) sometimes if you wait long enough to try to know everything, you've missed the decision-making window.
Life is unfair; sometimes the only effective decision is one made before you know how rightly to decide. It's still a little surprising even now when I do that and turn out to have chosen well; it seems like any decision made before you could know enough to make it would be wrong, yet that's often not the case.

People have different ways to make that kind of "stab into the unknown" decision; some like to "go with their gut feeling" (this depends on having a healthy/reliable gut in the literal, physical sense--anxiety and depression can make your gut feeling a bad and unreliable guide, something I have discovered only after many years trapped in the doubt-labyrinth). This is a form of taking personal responsibility for the decision, and for people with strong intuition and the "knack" for making good rapid decisions, the results can seem almost like magic.

By contrast, some prefer to offload the decision-making stress by flipping a coin or using some other "this is random yet maybe fate/divine providence is out there guiding it" method. This is more natural for people with a more external locus of control--they feel they're not really in control of most things to begin with, so every decision is somewhat arbitrary. I am the opposite, with a very internal locus of control--I believe there are very few things in life that you don't have some measure of control over, it's only a question of whether you are willing to really consider all of your options, including those most people aren't willing to consider, and deal with whatever consequences may result. (The upside to this is the capacity to see options and make choices and achieve results which are not even on the radar of many people; the downside is knowing that basically all the bad things that happen to you are your own fault, and not being able to externalize the blame for your problems without knowing you are being hypocritical in doing so. Some degree of self-loathing is the risk of making better use of your gift of free will.)

Other people (very commonly, here in Taiwan) try to get around the unknown future problem at its source, by resorting to a wide variety of fortune-telling methods. There are entire classes of fortune telling here largely unknown in the West, using birds and dangling pendants and the dates of one's birth and characters in one's name, and tossing little red crescent-shaped wooden blocks (jiaobei) at temples to see how they land.

All fortune-telling is forbidden by scripture, of course, as it's random self-deception and ex-post-facto rationalization at best (and real contact with dark spiritual realities at worst), and in every case an attempt to face an unknown future with less or no need for faith or God's presence and guidance (or for learning discernment and wisdom). God wants us not to know the future, because that's how we learn to trust. We want to know the future, because trusting is hard and can hurt. It's more or less the sin of Eden; we want to know what God knows so we can make decisions as we deem best, vs. trust and obedience to someone other than Self.

Hindsight Is Not Invalidation

Another reason knowing the future would be harmful, is because that knowledge is a "collapsed" version of reality compared to experience. You do not live a year instantaneously. The troubles and hardships are spaced out with joys and relief. Looking back with hindsight is different from knowing all the ramifications of a decision ahead of time, because knowing them ahead of time would compress them all together, a giant bundle of future pain, whereas experiencing them in reality takes place over time, where there is solace and recovery and lessons learned. Living in time means you only need to confront and deal with each problem as it comes, whereas the ability to see all the future problems together means mentally confronting all of them at the same time, which would make any decision impossibly daunting.

When I was making the decision to move to Taiwan to do long-term missions work, I had no idea how my life here was going to be. It turned out that I had mostly rational expectations (for those few expectations I dared to have, knowing how dangerous they can be) but I was also wrong about nearly everything: most of what I was looking forward to fell through, didn't work out like it was supposed to, or was taken away rather painfully. Why were my expectations so far off-base? Partly through things I could have known but didn't know to ask about (the "you don't know what you don't know" problem), and partly through things I could never have known or predicted ahead of time (I have a strange talent for getting myself into frustrating situations that no one I know has ever encountered before).

I think if I could have foreseen all the various difficulties and challenges I would encounter as a missionary ahead of time, I would almost certainly never have left the U.S. Yet that would have been the wrong decision, and coming was the right decision, which I could make because I was spared from knowing what would have made deciding correctly impossible for me.

When seeking God's will to come here, I did not foresee all the difficulties and obstacles I would face, but I did receive very clear confirmation to go. It was not wrong for God to decline to inform me of what would happen if I followed His leading, because it would have stopped me from obeying.

In terms of making the decision itself, I was blessed to have the strong confirmation that not every missionary receives. Yet that is not a necessary condition for making the decision, since with the Great Commission given to all followers of Christ, deciding to serve the Kingdom of God in a full-time capacity is never odds with the revealed will of God (who will open and close doors according to His hidden will for the particulars, whether we like and understand it or not).

Though we sometimes act as if the default is to do nothing, and that in special circumstances, some "super Christians" or the "specially called" can work at the Great Commission and spreading the Kingdom, the Bible teaches the opposite; the default is what God already told us all to do. I spent a lot of time worrying that being a missionary to Taiwan might not be God's will, until finally I made the decision to do it, and simply asked Him to close the door if it was not His will, and close it hard enough that I would absolutely not be able to get through it. Then it was simply a matter of crawling over every obstacle until I got here. (At which point the obstacles got taller and thornier. The reward for endurance is more weight on the next set, when strength and not comfort is the goal)

If It's Not Wrong, Pray, And Do It

No amount of hardship encountered after the fact can make a decision wrong purely on the basis that there is hardship (unless it was a comfort-based decision). That is a blessing for we time-bound creatures; we can "swear to our own hurt and not change"--make irrevocable decisions which cause us pain yet still honor them; Psalm 15 calls this a mark of someone who may dwell in God's presence. Because the future is unknown to us, we can make correct decisions which we might not be able to bring ourselves to make if we knew how hard the consequences would be, yet still not give up.

The idea that "God won't give you more than you can handle" is false and a lie; God will absolutely give you more than you can handle, so that you have no other recourse but to take refuge in Him, or reject Him. Those are the only two eternal choices any human has.

But it's one thing to make a godly decision, then need to rely on God to survive the consequences, and another to know how hard it's going to be and still make the decision. Ignorance is a protection for the weak in a sinful world; those who know a lot have to be much stronger to handle that knowledge and still move forward, and that strength often only comes through suffering.

Yet the Bible exists so that we should not be ignorant of those things God considers it necessary for us to know and act on, and it teaches us not to stay willingly ignorant, but to seek wisdom and get understanding. And while scripture is deep and sometimes complex, on the whole the Bible is not that complicated when it comes to what we should and shouldn't do. We no longer live under Old Testament law, but one sin of legalism in any era or church is that it destroys the freedom that God offers us: The idea of "Thou shalt not..." is actually incredibly liberating, because "Thou shalt..." would confine us to only what was mentioned. But we have freedom in Christ to do whatever is not sin, for His glory.

So that is my advice to you as we all face the daunting prospect of the year-which-comes-after-2017: make right decisions, and trust God to walk you through whatever difficulties may arise. And if you are a believer* who wants to do something that scripture does not condemn anywhere (specifically or in principle), if you have asked God to reveal His will to you, and He has not said No, then ask Him to close the door if it is not His will yet you can't know that, and move ahead with confidence that He will direct your paths. As I was told when in the middle of a tough decision once: "You can't steer a parked car."

(*--And if you are not a believer, 2018 is the perfect year to stop holding out against what everyone from astrophysicists to a child in Sunday school knows is true, and begin your path of faith to God. The Gospel of John is a great place to start--the trail of atheists who set out to disprove the Bible and later believed it is rather impressive.) 

The Church stagnates because we make non-action the default, afraid we might accidentally do the wrong good thing. We should be more concerned with not doing the good God has set in front of us. The world needs it in 2018 more than ever.

Hurricanes and the Goodness of God

For my American readers, this hurricane season will be one that many people remember for decades after the unprecedented flooding that Hurricane Harvey brought to the Houston area. Hopefully, it will also be remembered how people came together to help each other in the midst of a tense period in our national mood, when scenes of cooperation, relief, and unselfish neighbor-love are like balm to a frenzied social soul.

Now with Irma shredding through Caribbean islands and barreling down on Florida, we seem poised to be dealt another heavy blow from weather conditions not under our control. Only time will tell the scale of the damage there. Almost certainly there will be many billions of dollars of damage, countless lives disrupted, and a few ended. For Christians, not only in America but in all the world, we do believe there is One who has power over the weather, a God without whose permission nothing can occur, blessings or tragedies alike. So why does He allow these things to occur?

No Humansplaining

It is always ill-advised and futile to attempt to give narrowly specific reasons that large-scale natural disasters occur. Was Houston being judged for its sins like many claimed or implied New Orleans was in Katrina? Were the 16,000+ killed in the Tohoku earthquake/tsunami disaster more sinful than the rest of Japan or the rest of East Asia? Were the people whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices or who were crushed by a falling tower in Siloam more guilty than the rest of Jerusalem? (Luke 13:1-5, Hint: Jesus says "No!")

In the whatever'th-wave of the feminist movement we're in now, "man-splaining" is criticized as men offering unnecessary or patronizing explanations to which they expect women to listen respectfully. Or something like that. These things tend to be flexibly defined by those who wish to claim victim status, whether they have a legitimate cause for complaint or not. (They might as well lock up all the INTPs now, we love to explain things to anyone willing to listen to that much excited detail.)

But there is another kind of mansplaining, or humansplaining, which I would love to see end, and that is when people with positions of spiritual authority start trying to explain things they don't understand because they feel people expect them to have an explanation. Like the occasional situation in Chinese culture where courtesy demands a response to tourist inquiries of how to get to a place even if the local being asked has no idea, it's not so much about knowing, as feeling that you are in a position where giving an answer is expected and so you come up with a good-sounding one.

As a missionary with a seminary degree, I am sometimes put in this position. While I am not a very worthy example, at least I do try to always say when I don't know something off the top of my head but will go research it and have a better answer later, or else that the Bible doesn't actually give us an answer, so I neither have one nor should you trust anyone who says they do. It may be less satisfying than a pithy response you can copy and paste onto a picture and pass around social media, but I don't dare put words in the Bible's mouth. (If you feel I have done so with this post, feel free to let me know)

When a pastor or prominent Christian or anyone else stands up and says that a disaster happened for positive or negative reasons--as judgment for sin, or to bring everyone together--they are choosing from various possibilities, hopefully biblical-based ones, but they have no possible way of knowing the real reason or combinations. We are not privy to an explanation from God, and be very cautious about anyone claiming that they are.

But if we can't known the specific reason, then on a more basic level, why would a good God allow disasters like Katrina, like the Tohoku Quake, like the flooding in Houston, like the crises which you didn't even know were claiming lives every day in less-reported areas of the world, to happen? And can we answer that question without "humansplaining" or adding purely speculative ideas to scripture?
I think we can, and this is my attempt to do so.

A hurricane season that will be long remembered...

Why God Lets Hurricanes Strike Major Cities

I. Because when ocean water reaches a certain temperature, and seasonal wind patterns...

We know this reason, or at least learned it in high school or saw it on the weather channel at some point. This is what people call the scientific reason, and what atheists tiresomely pretend makes God unnecessary until you bring up that this is not the Why at all, but the How. Personally I find it fascinating, how the unbelievable amount of energy representing in a raging hurricane is all the result of a positive feedback loop that can emerge from the tranquil, sun-warmed ocean when conditions are right. But that's wandering from the thrust of our topic.

As I have blogged previously, the ancient Greeks spent some time thinking about why things happen, and came up with the brilliant idea that every event had multiple causes, as seen from different perspectives.

For a simple example, a crystal goblet dropped on a stone floor shatters into scintillating shards. Why? Well, 1) because someone dropped it. But also 2) because it's crystal. If it was rubber or wood, it mostly likely would have survived the fall. Also 3) because the floor is stone. If it had been thick shag carpet, the goblet probably also would have been fine, though my allergies might not. Also 4) because in some humanly incomprehensible way, the shattered goblet fits into the vast and mysterious unfolding of all things, under God's authority and obeying His will. When we ask "why did this happen" we are usually speaking more to the that last category. What was the ultimate purpose?

I am not here suggesting the Greek causal categories are comprehensive or even correct. But their reminder to us that there is not merely one reason for things to occur is important.

So for our damaging hurricane, we could come up with a similar set of explanations. "Why did a massive hurricane strike a populated area with lethal results?":

1) Because of a set of natural phenomenon which to some extent can be traced back in chains of cause and effect to the beginning of the universe. Energy was transferred and the earth went around the sun and the ocean sloshed around for millennia and the hurricane was always going to happen at that time, unless you want to go really deep into arguments about human free will and chaos theory, and suggest the sinking of some Carthaginian trireme during the Punic Wars was just enough energy disruption to butterfly effect the hurricane into being thousands of years later. Perhaps so, but even that can be described precisely by physics, if we had access to the data.

2) Because people decided to build a city there. Actually there are lots of big coastal cities, and hurricanes have a very wide track. Sooner or later every city near the coast will be hit, it's just a matter of time. If we didn't build any major cities within 50 miles of the coast, hurricanes would rarely ever threaten them seriously.

3) Because people build communities out of materials which can be affected by storms. I live in Taiwan, where cities are dense and built mostly out of concrete and steel. Here in the capital metro area, even supertyphoons are mostly just a day of missed work or school, while eating instant noodles you bought at 7-11 before the storm got too intense to carry an umbrella, and listening to the wind howling past the windows. People who live in the mountains are at greater risk of mudslides and flash flooding, however, because of the nature of their environment. Our choice of living space and way of life does render us more or less vulnerable to nature's occasional fury, and like New Orleans, deciding to live in low-lying coastal areas is simply accepting the risk that sooner or later there will be tragedy.

4) Because God did not prevent it. I say it in this way, because when people ask the question in other way (If God is good, why does He send hurricanes) they are implying that a hurricane wasn't going to happen, and God "incited" it. But it was, as we explained above. Given scientific superpowers, we could trace the unbroken chain of cause and effect and energy transfer and weather patterns all the way back to the Creation event. This is important. God's creation is real. It is broken by sin, but it still functions according to knowable and consistent physical laws. Now the Bible certainly does speak of God causing disasters specifically as punishment for sin, but it also certainly does not say that every natural phenomenon which humans are caught up in and suffer is a punishment from God.

So we live in the kind of world where hurricanes happen, we have built cities in their path, and we haven't built those cities to be hurricane-resistant. Yet knowing all this, God doesn't stop them. Why? This brings us to the second part of what we mean when we ask why a disaster occurred:

II. Because God did not interfere in the Natural Order on this occasion

We spoke of the unbroken chain of cause and effect which proceeds forth from the creation event: God can and does interfere with this when He decides to, but this is a specific and special event, what we call a miracle. Even in the Bible, which being concerned with God's salvation plan for humanity and interactions with us mentions miracles and direct acts of God very frequently, we still read of a natural world that is God's creation and functions more or less as it was designed to, a world where the sun is a light-emitting object that God placed in the high heavens for the benefit of earth (a different kind of geocentrism -- the sun doesn't revolve around us, but it's there for us and not we for it), yet not a world where the sun is a little god in a chariot that rides around the sky every day but might choose not to do so tomorrow, or might be caught by a hungry sky wolf instead. The very existence and persistence of creation is itself a miracle, to be sure, but to speak as though every single thing that happens each moment is an arbitrary supernatural intervention risks ignoring a default reality the Bible itself assumes, the blessing of being able to take reality for granted, a core component of a scriptural worldview that all modern science is based on and to which it testifies.

So science is true and godly in the sense that it measures this physical world God established to function according to the laws of physics, neither arbitrary nor pantheistic. Yet if we believed only in this, we would be deists and not followers of Christ. As Christians we understand additionally that the One who set those parameters is present and active, and can always make the call to intervene directly, and does so both unprompted for His own reasons and in answer to our prayers.

So then under what conditions does God intervene? The Bible gives us some general categories:

1) Salvation history - God's interactions with the Patriarchs, miracles on behalf of Israel, through His prophets, in the person of Jesus Christ, etc. The Bible is mostly about this--God's special interactions with individuals and nations in His eternal plan for our redemption, and what happened in history as a result.

2) Judgment for Sin - Both the Old and New Testaments mention specific occasions not directly related to the progression of salvation history, which show God specifically acting to punish special sin. In the Old Testament we famously have Sodom and Gomorrah, but in the New Testament we also have Herod, receiving the crowds' adulation in a blasphemous way (Knowing who the LORD was, he still welcomed the crowds' praising him as divine) and being struck down for it. This is mentioned almost parenthetically as a direct punishment by God, and not as the Spirit-empowered act of any apostle, like the blindness of Elymas. We can assume if God punished both individuals and cities/nations directly, in both Old and New Testaments, for sins other than causing harm to Israel (as in the case of Egypt), then He may still do so today.

3)  As an Answer to Prayer - Whether it is the healings and exorcisms performed by the disciples, or the miraculous answers to prayer the Church has seen from its inception until today, Christians know that God is sometimes willing to intervene dramatically. Testimonies to medical "mystery" cases where tumors vanish and doctors are confused by inexplicable recoveries are so common (even discounting the made-up, "share this post for a blessing" ones) that if modern scientists were as inquisitive as their forebearers we'd have whole fields of research trying to figure out by what means these things are occurring. (expect some kind of quantum energy/power of positive thinking explanations to crop up eventually as a way to get around a Biblical explanation if they haven't already, East Asia is way ahead of the West on that front)
Another specific example pertinent to our topic today: After a particularly severe typhoon here in Taiwan a few years ago, cleanup had just begun and rescue crews were still trying to get to people trapped in the mountains, when another typhoon headed for the island. Many people prayed earnestly, and the typhoon made an abrupt u-turn and headed straight back into the Pacific Ocean where it dissipated. I've heard similar stories in other places, and can't speak to their veracity, but at least I've witnessed it happen once myself in this case.

All this has prepared us to answer the central question: If a hurricane was going to hit a city through natural processes, yet God could directly intervene if He so desired, why didn't He do so?

Let's check our categories of Divine intervention mentioned above:

1) Is the hurricane part of salvation history? By definition, no.

2) Is the hurricane judgment for sin? Possibly. As I said above, it's foolish for us humans to pronounce this without knowing the mind of God (let alone start listing out which sins we guess God is punishing or why it was these people and not other people), but with Biblical precedent we also can't rule it out. I personally don't like this explanation because a hurricane is not really a "black swan" event; they happen every year, some are always more powerful than others, and it's only a matter of time before a large city is affected.

3) Did people earnestly pray in faith for God to send the hurricane somewhere else but He answered no? That's complicated, isn't it? Who would you pray for the storm to hit instead of you? As a Christian I fully believe that if many churches gathered together and prayed for God to make the storm do a 180 degree turn and head back out into the Atlantic, He could and might do that. I've seen a similar thing happen once, as I noted above. Obviously I have no way of knowing if those prayers occurred, though I think people tend to not pray with that kind of real urgency unless there's a special emergency. Sometimes we blame God for things we never really petitioned Him to change, but both scripture and the church's experience of great acts of God suggest that there is power in many people humbly petitioning God that a single person's earnest request does not have. To investigate how that works would both take a longer blog than this, but it can be said that prayer is never a means to manipulate God; we can never discover a formula by which to get consistent affirmative answers to our various requests, the Bible only touches on the topic of which prayers are pleasing to God, while telling us that there are some requests to which we will get consistent affirmative answers (Like James 1:5). (Note: This isn't a question of sovereignty--if God has ordained a thing, He has ordained the means, for example the prayers of many, by which it shall occur.)

III. Because Suffering and Pain is the Default of our World, not the Exception

Perhaps I was the only person who hadn't figured that out, but growing up this was not clear. Life wasn't perfect, but it was alright, and events like serious sickness or car accidents or job loss or natural disasters were tragic intrusions in how life ought to be. Much of the developed world seeks to make this perspective as much a reality as possible--that through use of resources and wise decision making, the suffering of this life may be minimized for as many people as possible. This is not a biblical perspective, but it's a natural human one, that leads to evils as well as good. (Trying to minimize suffering leads to acts of mercy and the alleviation of need, but also to abortion and euthanasia)
Scripture does not describe the world exactly in this way. Rather, a peaceful life free from tragic incidents or societal chaos is a blessing from God, a manifestation of Shalom, something to be sought after not because it is "normal" but because it's what people want and how the world was initially supposed to be. We are all longing after Eden, but sin has turned our quest for it into the welfare state, or even communist regimes.

When man fell, he dragged creation down with him. we have no idea if the world had hurricanes before the fall; although people do like to take one verse and run with it, on this question at least there is biblical evidence to suggest that before Noah's flood the climate didn't allow for that kind of thing. By the time of Noah's flood, not only had the fall taken place, but mankind was so wicked that God initiated a pan-disaster that dwarfs the most furious hurricane the world has ever known. To run the risk of the "humansplaining" I mentioned above, my understanding ("I, not the Lord") is that hurricanes and many other potentially lethal weather events began in the post-flood world as an inevitable result of changed climatic factors. (There is also some biblical evidence to suggest "climate change" in terms not of global warming, which an increasingly small number of people cling to in the face of insurmountable evidence to the contrary, but of the increasing instability of the climate is also an inevitable result of the fall, and will only get worse until the end.)

I have mentioned in a previous blog how, just as you cannot get the tin out of a bronze-alloy sword without destroying it, our post-fall world is alloyed with sin. God will remove it one day, but in doing so "the heavens will perish with fire" and the "earth shall melt like wax." He delays so that more will know Him, more will fill His tables at the feast and enter His dwellings, before the end comes and the door is closed.

Hurricanes are an inevitable phenomenon in our sin-alloyed world. God does not, except in special cases, intervene to prevent the natural consequences of sin. That is the reality of the messed-up world we inhabit. Yet through common grace, by wisdom and understanding the nature of creation (effective city planning and disaster preparation, science that understands the weather and also stronger building materials, etc), we are free to develop ways to mitigate the destructive power of natural phenomenon, and indeed we have done so to a large degree.

So pray for recovery in Houston, pray for mercy in Florida and the Caribbean, and indeed for western wildfires, violence in Syria and Yemen and Nigeria and Sudan and American inner cities and elsewhere, tensions on the Korean peninsula, and a whole host of situations. But if you are simply praying that God will make all the bad things and the hurting stop, that prayer may arise out of the heart's distress, but it does not correspond to biblical reality. The consequences of human sin will wreak havoc as they do, until the final judgment.

Then, what should we do?

God has entrusted the task of letting the world hear the gospel to us. While movements of the Spirit are bringing millions to His kingdom, they are doing so alongside and through the faithful service of brothers and sisters around the world. We are His witnesses, and that is our constant and joyful responsibility whether or not we see God specifically intervening to do miracles on His own. "He's not a tame lion," but we are no longer languishing in the endless winter of frozen Narnia--Christmas has come, and Aslan has died, defeated death, and opened the way.

Now should we sit and question God for letting nature take its course, a course we chose ourselves in Eden by deciding we had better options than trusting obedience? Not as believers. We are on this earth to proclaim Christ to a world that desperately needs hope beyond this world. We are called to love our neighbors as ourselves. When confronted with disaster, we have two necessary options:

1. Pray, but don't do it alone. God does listen to our requests made in faith. If He chooses to let nature take its course, that is not being mean or unjust, that is in fact exactly justice. He may rather choose to show special mercy in a specific situation, even in a miraculous way, but my experience at least is that He rarely does so when we are casual about asking. And I don't mean prayer memes on FB, but roomfuls of people on their knees.

2. Go. Help. If you are burdened by a disaster, demanding the government or somebody do something on your behalf earns you zero points. (maybe even negative points, by encouraging a culture of shifting Christian responsibility up the secular ladder) Also you can earnestly request, but are unable to demand God do anything. But you are quite capable of being the body of Christ and bringing love and joy to a broken world. If people need help, you go help them.

And some people already are, as we watched in Houston. But what if, like Paul and his race, the Church was excited and even competitive about this? What if the government complained that so many Christians were already responding that they couldn't get state and federal aid in there? (I'm not talking about interfering with professionals doing their jobs, I'm saying a) that's an excuse when there's so much that can be done, and b) Christians can get access to that training too, yeah?) What if we decided no one would outdo us in showing charitable love and being first on the scene to bring mercy and relief in times of disaster and hurting?

I guess, in that situation, the Church might even look like salt and light to a hungry and darkened world. Pray for Florida, pray for Houston, pray for God's mercy on those involved in these and other disasters nationally and globally. Then recognize that God might be prompting you to be one of those expressions of His mercy that you were praying for, and go help someone.

Why I'm Going to Taiwan, Part Two

As mentioned in my previous entry, I'm commonly asked what led me to commit to long-term ministry in Taiwan. We continue here with a discussion of how I came to make that decision; I pray it may be helpful to anyone in the midst of the same consideration...

Reason I'm going to Taiwan #2: I love Taiwan!

I mention this second and not first because I want to emphasize that leading and direction from God should certainly take priority over preference for a particular destination. No amount of love for a place will produce eternal results for the kingdom of God, only God can accomplish that through us, so we must remain in His will and not assume strong emotional pulls in one direction or another are sufficient evidence of our being so.

I have great respect for missionaries I have encountered who seemed to be not especially attached to the place or culture to which they were called, yet persisted in faithfully slogging it out over years for the sake of the gospel. I hope that, in a similar situation, my endurance would be as great, seeing the prize for which we run. In my own experience, however, concurrent with my growing involvement in Taiwanese ministry was a growing love for Taiwan and its people.

Love for the people one is called to, I was once advised by an experienced Australian missionary who I greatly respect, is the only motivation which can keep one from eventually burning out. I don't know if this is the case in every situation, but one can certainly see how it would be generally true. At the time it was what I needed to hear; my love for Taiwan was rather abstract, in the way that one might say one loved NYC, for example, or "the beach." Certain things about the place strongly appealed to me, and I enjoyed my time there due to, and not in spite of, the place being itself. But my experiences there were still confined to two short-term missions trips, and I really knew very little about Taiwan.


Some things about Taiwan are readily apparent to the first-time visitor. Frequently cited are the island's natural beauty, the friendliness of Taiwanese people towards visitors, and its delicious and comparatively cheap food, notably the street food found in the numerous nightmarkets...

Mango ice dessert from one of Shilin Nightmarket's underground food stalls

An underlying layer of attractions reinforce this positive impression: a highly efficient mass-transit system (at least in Taipei, which is the first part of Taiwan most visitors experience), leading-edge technology side-by-side with ancient Chinese culture, and how even in the midst of thriving metropoli one is never far from the peaceful countryside.

Flooded rice fields in Dajia, near Taichung

After my year of living there, the initial attraction was now a deeper feeling based on real experience. I had visited many parts of the island and really lived life there, seeing Taiwan's land and culture firsthand. But more importantly I had formed real friendships and ministry relationships with Taiwanese believers. We were working together for God's kingdom, and our identity in Christ and common purpose defined us more than any differences in nationality. Culture gaps were there, and at times presented obstacles, but we overcame these through the fellowship we had in Christ.

To some, this may sound like an overly-rosy portrayal of cross-cultural work. Sometimes it's not so harmonious. Sometimes the people are not friendly, or suspicious of outsiders. Sometimes your supposed friends really have their own purposes in maintaining contact with you, and your own ministry coworkers oppose you for reasons that aren't always clear. All of these things can be true in overseas ministry, and I would be naive not to expect some or all of them to happen to me in the course of my life. I'm grateful that my beginning was smoother than is often the case, and won't assume ministry there will always be so. But it makes even less sense to me to set aside or discount the time God saw fit to bless with peace and productivity. Ministry need not always be a weary task, and a heart for your place of ministry and those you are ministering to and with goes far towards easing the burden of the work, even as it increases the burden one feels to spread the gospel there.

It's hard to summarize why one loves something or someone in one short sentence. Usually, if cause can be assigned, it's actually due to a whole host of reasons, large and small. My best answer is that God has given me a deep and compelling desire for the well-being of the Taiwanese people, in the eternal and most significant sense: that they know Him and the grace found in our Savior. In accordance with His call, He allowed me to experience Taiwan in a way that draws me deeply to that place and people. I expect the reader will understand that to recount those experiences would be to recount whatever it is that binds you to the places and people you love; the happy memories and beautiful moments, triumphs celebrated and difficulties endured, quiet places of peace and festive times of celebration, shared sorrows and shared growth.

They say home is where the heart is, and in our increasingly mobile modern world, more and more people are discovering that the converse is also true; where your heart is, that place can be home. Over the years of visiting and living in Taiwan, God has given me a heart for that land and people, and in at least that sense, it has become home.

Why I'm Going to Taiwan, Part One

This is probably one of the most common questions I'm asked when sharing that I'm going overseas for missionary work. It seems like an appropriate way to start the posting here as well, so here goes:

Reason I'm going to Taiwan #1: I have a Calling

The idea of a calling can be misinterpreted, and sadly often is. Some Christians wait for some kind of Gideon-esque sign from God, and others for some intangible sensation that will "confirm" the call in some definitive-enough sense that they can feel the decision can be made with minimum uncertainty. Neither is necessarily required for the decision to pursue cross-cultural missionary work, and many organizations now discourage the use of this term for that reason. How many Christians are waiting on a "sign" from God to go, when Jesus has commanded us all to go? For someone who is clearly led towards and qualified for a certain ministry, "waiting for a calling" could in fact be a way of clothing their own fears and hesitation in godly-sounding language.

(Although sometimes God does indeed make it that obvious; I recall hearing a friend tell of his friend committing to ministry in China after having a dream in which "CHINA" was written in giant fiery letters. Without the context of seeking God's will in a matter, however, this could be easily explained as merely a result of thinking very hard about the decision during waking hours. Looking at the examples of Moses, Gideon, and others, scripture suggests that this kind of sign from God is typically a response to prayerful inquiries and appropriate in the context of a revelation from God which has already been given, not a trumpet call "out of the blue.")

In my own experience, the confirmation went hand-in-hand with the commitment, and both strengthened each other to some extent. My own wet/dry fleece moment could be said to have occurred when praying repeatedly and earnestly for confirmation that I was indeed on the right path in my pursuing Taiwan missions.
After helping my small group organize a week of prayer for our upcoming missions conference at seminary, I randomly chose a time slot which was open on an afternoon I knew I was free, without giving much thought to the particular time I was choosing. Upon arriving at the prayer chapel, I found a document had been supplied which provided a list of countries, American cities, and missionary organizations as possible prayer options. Each day had one each of these, and upon finding my day I discovered to my considerable surprise that the country was Taiwan, and the organization was TEAM -the very organization I'd been intending to join and with whose missionaries my Taiwan ministry experience had been accomplished.

This alone would have been a poor method of picking a ministry destination and organization, but coming after years of Taiwan ministry experience and hours spent in prayer over the decision, and already being at seminary for the purpose of being more prepared for ministry in Taiwan, I believe it was a gracious answer to my fervent prayers for confirmation that I was indeed in God's will. At other crossroads in the journey, I needed confidence again, and each time God provided evidence that I was in His will. Sometimes it was a new local ministry opportunity which tied into my ongoing progress to overseas ministry, sometimes an improbable meeting with the exactly right person to help me take the next step; the God who calls will provide what is necessary to obey the call.

The most interesting moment in my pursuit of Taiwan ministry came during TEAM's annual conference in Taiwan when I was spending a visionary year of ministry there to explore the potential of longer-term service. I was praying outside, enjoying the warm air and starlight (Visible when far enough away from urban environments; Asian cities tend to be glorious, multi-splendored beacons of light pollution and Taiwanese cities are certainly no exception.), and more or less directly asked God if I was supposed to come back there. I received an interesting silence back in answer. This I was not sure how to interpret. It was certainly not a "no," yet I didn't feel any sort of confirmation.

Later after more prayer I realized that I had been trying to foist off the decision on God.
Basically, I wanted God to tell me to go, in no uncertain terms, so I didn't have to shoulder the responsibility for my own decision to do so and whatever ramifications that might have in my own life or the lives of others. I was worried that if I chose wrong, or misinterpreted His will, I might end up somewhere far away from where I ought to be, and then have to try to uproot myself from wherever that was and try to get back into the thing that really was His will for my life.

God in His merciful and infinite wisdom did not comply with my attempt to obtain "decision insurance," and instead allowed me to learn what seems clear now; that God does not test us in this way. Certainly, He will test our obedience by asking us to do things which are more difficult than we can accomplish without His aid, or things we don't understand at the time (and sometimes ever in this life), but God will not set an open, righteous and God-glorifying path in front of you and then punish you for following it because you honestly mistook it for His will.

Yet, I knew that it would be difficult to distinguish obstacles the enemy threw in my path from God re-directing me. So I prayed that, as my goal was to find His will, I would try to overcome every obstacle and trust that if I was going out of His will, He would close the door effectively enough that I wouldn't mistake it merely as spiritual opposition. By the time I finished that year in Taiwan, I had made the decision that, unless He closed the door and locked it, I would pursue Taiwanese ministry and not let any difficulty stop me. Praise be to our glorious God: that was many open doors ago.