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.

Christians: Prisms, and Space Probes

Prisms

Let's start with prisms.
Have you ever seen how a glass prism splits and reflects the light that passes through it? Most of you probably have, in science class or on that Pink Floyd album cover if nowhere else.

That's right. I am using this for an illustration of our life in Christ.
1 Cor 9:22 all the way.

Like a mirror, the prism doesn't generate its own light. It takes the light it receives and reflects/refracts it out into the space around itself.

Actually the Pink Floyd triangular prism example above is about as simple as it gets. Anyone who's seen cut crystal for things like fancy light fixtures knows that the more facets a prism has, the more light it reflects in more directions. There's a reason diamonds are elaborately faceted into what's called a "brilliant" cut.

And if you are truly seeking to follow God, you will not feel like you're being gently sanded into a smooth sphere; you will feel like He is cutting pieces off of you. Smooth spheres might have a certain inner luminescence, but they don't reflect the light like multifaceted gems, don't send it shooting out in rainbow sparks. The gemstone must "suffer," must be cracked and fractured, to assume that kind of final brilliant form.

This is not a diamond commercial. Do your research, some are "blood diamonds" indeed.

The more we are shaped by God, the more we reflect the light of truth from Him to those around us. Yes, we do not merely passively shine; there is effort involved, but if we are not mature in our faith, if we have not sought out God to be in His presence, we are not going to put forth His light as we could, because we are simply not the right shape to do so. We must undergo fruitful suffering, to let the gemcutter grind new facets that will reflect His glory in new ways.


Note: Missionaries

So if believers are like prisms that reflect/refract the light they receive all around them, missionaries are simply prisms that have been placed far away, in places that may be quite dark. Imagine a fine cut gem* in a coal mine. Shine a light on it, and the effect is dramatic in the total darkness. Yet we cannot do anything to the coal, we can only keep reflecting our Lord's light; it is He alone who can exert the infinite Divine pressure to convert the coal into the rough diamonds for whom the cutting and polishing process can begin as it once began for us. (*- You can immediately see a problem with sending immature believers to the mission field...)

Left by itself in the coal mine, however, the jewel's reflective surface will quickly be coated by coal dust and stop reflecting light. In a nutshell, this is why missionaries need your prayer so much. It's not business as usual; we're not only in a darker spiritual environment, but being here tends to slowly dim our reflectiveness too. We need to be covered in prayer so that the coal dust doesn't stick to us and obscure our light, especially when the enemy is slinging it at us.

Space Probes

A prism doesn't only reflect more light by having more facets, of course. It also depends on how it's oriented with respect to the light it is receiving. (If you have ever played with a prism, or a dangling bit of chandelier or light fixture, you will no doubt have noticed that turning it at different angles towards the light changes how the light is reflected)

So orientation to the light is important, especially as we have "not yet been perfected" and are still undergoing sanctification. Our reflection is still partial and unbalanced; we need to stay rightly oriented to God for our light to shine effectively.

When discussing a craft in flight, especially space flight, one can speak of altitude but also attitude. Attitude in this context refers to the orientation of the craft with respect to some other frame of reference. (It could be the orientation of a space probe with respect to the mysterious planet it circles, or to an inertial frame of reference, etc.)

Bad image quality, but you get the idea.

Without the right attitude, an accelerating spacecraft orbiting, say, the Earth, will soon leave its proper orbit. It might dip too low, begin coasting through the Earth's outer atmosphere, and be dragged down, burning up in an unplanned, fiery re-entry. Conversely, it could swing too wide, begin to escape the earth's gravitational field, and head out into deep space.

Believers are no different. Without the right attitude -without the right orientation towards God- our effort will not result in productive progress for the Kingdom. We might sink lower and lower and burn out, or raise our opinion of ourselves higher and higher and grow distant from Him. In fact, with the wrong attitude, the more effort we put in, the faster we move in the wrong direction.

This is why ministry progress is a dangerous and misleading focus for Christians. Our focus must always be God. He is our frame of reference. If we are rightly oriented with Him, our efforts will progress in the right direction, in fact that's all they can do. On the other hand, if we aren't, all our efforts only take us further from where we need to be. It might look good at first; sometimes an orbit decays slowly. But sooner or later, without an attitude adjustment, we stray. God then graciously allows us to be zinged by a mini space rock at thousands of miles per hour, which hurts and confuses us, but has the effect of knocking us closer to our proper orbit around Christ.

Summary

 

So, what's the point of these two little analogies? Just two ways of thinking about our Christian lives.

First, in order to reflect the light of God's truth to those around us, we need to be in the right shape. This involves fruitful suffering, as Paul talks about in 2 Timothy, to chip pieces off until we are like a brilliant gemstone that does not merely receive the light but reflects it back into whatever context God places us in.

Second, if we don't maintain the right attitude to God, our eternal frame of reference, not only will we not reflect Him as strongly as we could, but our "progress" in ministry will, slowly or quickly, be leading us in the wrong direction. We need to constantly reorient ourselves with respect to God, through His word and time seeking out His presence, to make sure our orbit isn't decaying, leading us spinning out into the depths of space or crashing in flames down to earth.

You don't want to be this kind of shooting star...
Actually, biblically speaking, falling stars are pretty
much always bad news in general

Bit by Bit - Spiritual Checkmate

(Bit by Bit is a series expressing gospel
truths through gaming metaphors. The title refers to our progressive sanctification. And, you know, 1's and 0's)

Like many other people, I very much enjoy games of strategy, whether digital or board games. (in a few years there will probably be increasingly no distinction) I preferred them from childhood onward because I had -and still typically have- rotten luck; if it involved dice, I would lose. For games that depended on skill rather than chance, at least I had only my own abilities to blame, and I had a reliable way to improve.

I've only ever been decent at chess, as having a brain that jumps all over the place is not conducive to carefully considering a series of moves. Also my strategic efforts tend to naturally gravitate a place somewhere between Chess and Go- I tend to focus a little too much on local maneuvering and capturing other pieces in Go, where one has to always keep the big picture in mind, and a little too much on "putting pressure" here or there in Chess, where you have so few pieces in a small area that each move has immediate importance as well as being part of a given strategy or "push." (Some game that involved about 6 additional kinds of chess pieces per side on a board about double the size of a chessboard might be perfect)

But I often lose chess for purely tactical reasons. I recently got a chess app for my phone, and have been playing the computer on the hardest difficulty that's still fun (I lose 3/4 of the time). I found that I will nearly always try to wrest initiative away from the other player by making a series of provocative moves that he can't help but react to. Sometimes I can score an early victory in this way, or at least put him on the defensive and get my own pieces out earlier.

However this tendency of mine typically leads to a loss. The main reason is that when I am focusing on seizing the initiative early and putting pressure on the opponent's king, I am forced to concentrate less on building up a strong defensive position. This means as the game progresses, holding on to initiative and keeping up my attack on his king's position begins to mean sacrificing a pawn here and there, and sometimes making gambits which are numerically equal but weaken me positionally. The result is often a premature checkmate, made possible by the enemy taking advantage of my weak defense to pin and fork my pieces drawing near to his king and force them to retreat to try to protect my own king. It's often then too late to stop the checkmate, and even if I do, I'm forced to surrender initiative and begin a defensive game from my now weaker position.

Spiritual Checkmate

When this happened yet again in a quick chess app match this evening, it suddenly struck me that there was a direct analogy to our spiritual lives as well. As a missionary in the 10/40 window I am generally considered more of an offensive than defensive unit when it comes to the Kingdom of God and the domain of the enemy. I'm on the edge, pushing into new territory (which this shrine-and-idol-filled neighborhood I work in certainly is..) for the gospel. But in my personal spiritual life, if I am always focusing on ministry and evangelism, and neglect my own time with God and His word, I'm making exactly the same mistake I have been making in those chess games.

While I'm maintaining forward momentum in my ministries I don't notice it; I can see there's progress being made, and experience spiritual growth of one sort through my efforts and seeing God at work. But when our little team runs up against difficulties, or a ministry fails, or if repeated salvos of insomnia and temptation of various kinds begin to wear down my spiritual armor, my lack of defensive preparation begins to show. The enemy can start "pinning and forking" me, and suddenly I've lost initiative and can only try to react from my weakened position.

Thankfully, the battle belongs to the Lord, so I am never only thrust upon my own devices. But certainly God allows us much freedom in how closely we choose to walk with Him, and my experience is that, like the Father He is, He is typically willing to let us suffer through the object lessons if we don't do what His word taught in the first place. That is not purposeless suffering, it's sanctification the harder way. (There is no easy way, but there are certainly wise and foolish ways to go about it which lead to more or less hardship relatively speaking.)

But "Spiritual Checkmate" by the enemy can certainly happen when we focus our time too entirely on working for God versus being with Him. In our spiritual life, often the best defense is not a good offense; both are necessary, but if anything it's the other way around. It's frequently noted how much time Jesus spent away from the crowds in prayer and solitude, seeking quiet and God's presence. If He did so, it's arrogant of us to assume we can always be in "attack mode," and not need to draw away and rest, not just physically but spiritually. (We are simultaneously spiritual and physical creatures, so the two are inextricably linked for us) Our spiritual immune system, our spiritual defenses, will be strengthened during those times.

Some people explode onto the ministry scene and make a huge impact in a short time through powerful and dynamic effort, but are brought down by scandal, destructive patterns of secret sin, or are simply worn out by the enemy's attacks. I suspect sometimes their private spiritual life was not strong; they were "too busy doing God's work" to maintain the devotional life that would have strengthened their spiritual defense against the enemy's attempts to stop their progress. Others may be hesitant to step up to ministry challenges and have less impact for the Kingdom than they might, but do continue on faithfully for decades unshaken. Their devotional life is steady, their defenses are strong, and they can weather the enemy's attacks. For them it may be their offensive capabilities that they need to work on, so that more people might be blessed through their faithfulness.

I would have lost if not for those two well-placed pawns protecting my king.
You can't win without the major pieces, of course, but sometimes it's the small,
consistent acts of devotion that keep the enemy at bay and help carry the day.

The Devil's (Desperate) Gambit

Since we have the Spirit, we do not need to look at this as a zero-sum game. Offensive capability does not come only at the expense of defensive capability and vice versa; both strengthen, enrich, and reinforce the other. Our private devotion and time in God's presence will directly improve our ability to advance the Kingdom through our ministries, and seeing God at work in the world and in our ministries brings excitement and passion to our devotion as well. That means we don't need to "balance" them, but increase both, focusing on whichever is lagging behind. Prayer (real, focused, time-consuming prayer) is probably the most straightforward way to simultaneously improve both.

I submit that in 2015, the enemy is pressing hard to bring the battle not just against our ministries but against our personal time in God's presence, when our defenses can be strengthened. Typically it's going to be our "defensive" side, private devotion and time with God, that needs to be constantly protected. A war is being fought to distract/entertain us 24/7, and increasingly I find that it's impossible to prevail by default. I have to actively take steps to push back. (It's one of my personal goals for this year.)

So I'd leave you with the same encouragement. Aggressively stake out time for defensive spiritual recuperation. You may find in doing so you've taken the initiative away from the enemy and put him on the defensive. Don't get cocky, the devil is a better chess player than any of us. But praise God that with Christ's total victory on the cross, he's only able to mount a losing battle. That the attacks look more and more vicious in recent months, as our brothers and sisters in the faith are attacked and killed in many parts of the world, is a sign not only of his evil malice but also of his desperation. The ultimate victory has already been won, but here on earth things will get worse before they get better.
Be neither apathetic nor fearful; shore up your defenses and stand firm.

"Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you." (James 4:7)

An INTP on the Mission Field: Another look at "Teamwork"

I remember engineering school quite distinctly (despite seeming in some ways like a previous life, I suppose it wasn't actually that many years ago). They were fond of giving us "group projects," ostensibly to teach us ornery engineers (real engineers are born, not graduated) how to play well with others. The most important lesson we learned through these was perhaps unintentional on the part of the school:

Observable Principle 1. Teamwork is the enemy of productivity
Observable Principle 2. Teamwork is the enemy of efficiency
Observable Principle 3. Teamwork is the enemy of adaptability
Observable Principle 4. Coordinating schedules with others is like herding cats
Conclusion for the maintenance of sanity: Avoid group projects whenever possible

My experience of team work until graduating college was pretty much this.

Thankfully, workplace experience demonstrated to me that this may not always be the case; it largely depends on the people on your team. It can be both worse (a team in which certain members are literally destroying the project through a combination of incompetency and obliviousness and harming your career prospects), or, in the rare case you get a bunch of qualified and competent people on your team, it can be a pretty amazing thing that results in stuff like, you know, getting a satellite to rendezvous with a comet after 10 years and dropping a lander on it. Of course in that kind of situation, teamwork gets a boost from the endeavor that unites them. More on that anon.

A Task Too Immense for Solo Work

Not being a people person, I definitely spent some time in prayer before deciding to become a missionary. "God, if I'm going to do this, if my job is going to be 100% people focused, you're going to have to change my heart towards people." I was pretty happy as a computer programmer; I had a few friends I trusted and family members that I loved, and didn't bother with people much outside of that.

(Contrary to what most people think, computers are quite simple. It's all 1's and 0's, they never get their feelings hurt, and they do what you tell them unless something is broken. And if so, it's usually easy to tell what's broken. People are tremendously complicated, get hurt from all sorts of accidental issues, let alone intentional ones, and actively hide their broken parts from you.)

God answered that prayer, and though at times I long for a nice, simple, straightforward task like several dozen pages of broken source code to debug, I have changed very greatly in how I relate to other people, not to mention in how I come across to them.

In missions, working with a team of one sort or another is basically necessary. Being a "lone wolf" missionary might sound attractive to a lot of INTP's and others too, but practically speaking it tends to not work out very well at all. If anyone could have worked alone (in the human sense), it would have been Christ, but He instead chose to surround himself with men to disciple, who would go forth and build the church after His departure. So at very least, if one is so competent that they do not to be taught or trained by anyone, they should work together with other people, to disciple them. But Jesus is obviously a unique example. What if we want a merely mortal example, the kind of person who is competent enough to rely on themselves?

We could then look at Paul, a stubborn genius who quickly got impatient with those less motivated than he. He seems like a good candidate for a lone wolf type, but it turns out he hated working alone, and always went out with a team when possible (my next blog post will mention this more). Later we see him sending his team members away to address issues in other areas only reluctantly, even when there was no one else who could go, and pleading with others to come join him.

The nature of modern cross-cultural missions work is typically such that one has a team to send you, and a team on the field. For new arrivals, one of the first things a team does (or should do! I've heard horror stories...) is help them get settled in. One is often not capable of surviving (let alone thriving) on one's own in the new language and cultural environment, and at very least requires help in getting started.

Settling in is not really the main issue, however. One could theoretically hire locals or expats to help you do all that, and some people are nice enough to do it for free. So my point is not that you couldn't survive the settling in process without a team; perhaps you could. That's a personal challenge that leads stubborn and/or confident people to think "hmm, I'll bet I could manage it."That kind of confidence or even stubbornness can be a useful character trait on the mission field, helping you "stick it out," though of course overconfidence or false expectations can torpedo the whole thing.

But the point of a team and the cruciality of teamwork is related to what I mentioned about great endeavors. That is, you need a team because the Great Commission is too massive a task for any one person to pursue alone, even in a local context. The team is not for you, the team is united for a common purpose, a gospel vision. Now, you've probably heard something like this before. In the secular sense, one could say "fine, that's not my vision," and walk away. For believers in Christ, the overarching goal, the meta-vision, has been provided for us, in the command from and example of our King. We are to make disciples of all nations, and though that responsibility extends to each of us individually, it's not a task any individual can tackle alone, at least not in any long-term sense; for something like planting a church, or taking the gospel into new territory, if Paul needed a team, you do too.

A Team Not of Your Choosing

Missionaries cannot typically choose their coworkers. A new missionary might arrive on the field and find, in the words of C.S.Lewis, "just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided." (from The Screwtape Letters) The guy with the annoying laugh who tries to joke about everything; the old guy who can't see why everything can't just be done the way they did it back in the day, when people were sincere and hard-working; the lady who feels the need to play devil's advocate in every discussion... (Note: these are "archetypal" examples and don't describe any past or present coworkers)
So the challenge then becomes working for the most important cause of all, with people who you would never choose as coworkers. Thrust into similar circumstances with a different task, perhaps it would be more manageable. But when your goal is to do something highly complicated and difficult- bring the gospel across cultural and other divides, plant reproducing churches, etc.- and there is no clear-cut way of achieving your goals, meaning you might have to "fail" a few times before seeing progress, then you have a recipe for teamwork disaster. (And if your team is multicultural, there are even more potential pitfalls to avoid.)

Add to this the INTP propensity for critical thinking and quickly seeing flaws in a strategy, and team discussions can be minefields for us. We feel very strongly that not pointing out flaws in the plan early on (obvious to us, who constantly run scenarios in our minds to see how they'd play out, and also file away any real-life experiences to improve the accuracy of this ability) out would mean failure of the plan is our fault; something many people don't realize... we are not attacking you! We are trying to help your plan succeed. This is our oft misunderstood attempt to prosper everyone and bless our efforts by making our plan foolproof. It just gets taken the wrong way when people begin to feel they're the fool we're trying to proof it against.

And please do not say, good missionaries wouldn't or shouldn't struggle with this kind of thing. There are no "good missionaries," there are only redeemed sinners learning to walk with God and how to obey His commands. (among them the Great Commission) Sinners argue, hold grudges, sometimes fight. At very least, they disagree about proper approaches to problems. Those differences of opinion are hard to let go of when you feel strongly that the wrong approach might not only cause this effort to fail, but make subsequent efforts more difficult. If it was a new marketing strategy for hybrid cars, that would be bad enough, but this is the gospel.

Example: What is the balance between a gradual and long-term approach that seems quite slow to bear any fruit but allows the cultivation of deeper relationships with local people and respect in the community, versus a bold and active approach that is willing to let a few people be offended and possibly wear out your welcome but results in more people hearing the gospel with the possibility of a breakthrough?

There is no right answer to this question! But everyone will have an opinion on it. We trust God, but we observe from scripture that He's given all believers work to do, and we've got to figure out how to do it, one way or another.

So under stress from living in a culture that is not our own, speaking a language that is not our own, making decisions we often don't have enough information to make (an especially stressful factor for INTPs, who might prefer to balk in those situations and wait for more data before making a decision), working with people we might not always respect or see eye-to-eye with, teamwork is a tenuous thing, easily fractured. And that's not even going into how the enemy is constantly trying to fragment our fellowship and set us against each other; discord is one of his works. So much intentional effort must be put into maintaining "one heart and one mind."

Substitute satan for management (no doubt easy for some of you), and this is pretty much
what is always happening on this mission field. This is one reason we need prayer!

One of the best ways to build and maintain a strong team is praying together! Coming together into God's presence not to talk to each other, but to Him, lets the Spirit do some direct work on people's hearts. This is something my team does intentionally, and I think it's incredibly important.

Summary: INTPs and Teamwork on the Mission Field

Basically, as INTPs we must be wise to avoid the following scenario:

Strategy Discussion for a Particular Ministry:

Person A: Maybe we could try [plan that was tried last year and failed]
INTP: I think we've seen that doesn't work well, unless you think the situation has changed in a fundamental way since we tried it last that would make it a good plan now?
Person A: Uh.. I'm just throwing out ideas!
INTP: *thinks* "Why waste time by talking about obviously useless plans?"

Person B: How about [plan that flies in the face of how local culture does things]
Team Leader: (Fully intending to discard this idea): Ok, maybe that's something we can think about.
Person B: (Feels appreciated, doesn't care if the plan is not actually used because their goal was to participate in the discussion in a meaningful way)
INTP: (Doesn't understand this^) "But what about [x] culture factor? Wouldn't they have [a] and [b] objections?"
Team Leader: (trying to salvage Person B's having contributed) "Not necessarily, maybe it's worth trying to see what happens."
INTP: (Feels slightly embarrassed that the team leader has rejected their assessment, and thus defensive:) Presents a 5-min, airtight logical case, with multiple failing scenarios, demonstrating that this approach is totally at odds with the local culture and could cause any number of problems. Provides an unlikely scenario in which it might succeed, wanting to be diplomatic. Some people nod in agreement or chime in, wanting to demonstrate they also have been culturally observant and understand this issue. 
Team Leader: *Sighs* Cannot disagree because the statement was clearly accurate.
Person B: (Feels foolish and under attack) Strikes back defensively insisting it could work.
INTP: (Unfortunately B's statement, born out of hurt feelings, is more an emotional expression than a rational counter) Warming to the debate, has no trouble picking B's defense apart. Noticing that B is flustered, they reassure him that they are not taking any of this personally. The INTP is confused when this only makes things worse.
Team Leader: (Resigning to the inevitable) Well, INTP, what would you suggest?
INTP: Provides a very long and well-thought out plan, taking into account both abstract methodology and practical and cultural considerations. Talks too long because they answer all questions about the plan as if the person is suggesting they didn't think through a particular issue, which they did, and feel compelled to make sure that person is aware, not wanting to appear incompetent for having missed such an obvious point.
Person B: (Upset, criticizes the INTP's plan because if theirs got criticized it's only fair that the INTP's plan gets criticized too)
INTP: Explains why their criticism of B's plan was valid, whereas B's criticism of their plan was invalid. It's not about getting equal time, it's about the validity of one's thought processes.
Team Leader: Uh, let's wrap this up and move on to the next subject.

As they leave the meeting:

INTP - Thinks the meeting went well, though B is too sensitive. Talks animatedly with a few people about the cultural issues that got raised during the meeting. Later, goes back and reflects on B's comments, making sure any potentially valid criticism is taken into account so the INTP's own arguments can be that much more solid next time.

A - Thinks INTP was a little mean to B, needs to lighten up

B - Feels upset, and possibly has begun to regard the INTP as an opponent. Concludes they can't actively oppose the INTP in a meeting without being made to look stupid; begins to think of ways to counter their influence. The beginnings of a crack in the team are possible. If they struggle with self-confidence, they may be less inclined to strike back, but hesitate to share in future meetings, for fear of their ideas being shot down.

Team Leader - Tired. Wishes INTP would not subvert his attempts to keep the team happy, through probably is aware that it isn't on purpose, and may just feel the INTP has an overbearing personality without realizing why he acted as he did. (Doing a meeting with personality tests to understand where each person on your team is coming from might be helpful. Sometimes it doesn't matter that you understand why someone could think that way, so long as you know it's a personality difference and not intentionally directed at you)

An INTP can bring extremely useful skills to a team, if they will learn and always keep in mind those rules which don't come with our personality, as I mentioned in a previous INTP post. You must take into account that most people won't have your motives, or dwell so entirely in the world of ideas, or think that the person with the most logical or well-tested thoughts should be the one to talk the most. It also helps to be self-aware, and explain your own motives for speaking up if you have a comment on what someone else is saying. They might still not appreciate it, but at least you can move from being "that INTP" to "our INTP."
As I mentioned earlier, prayer is a key here. It's harder to criticize your teammates in a potentially abrasive way when one has been praying for them! Prayer will shift one's thinking away from only their ideas or contributions and towards them as people, sons and daughters of God, which is always important for us.

Finally, a truly servant-hearted INTP who has learned when not to speak, may find people are quite willing to listen when he does. We yearn for people to benefit from our insight; to communicate that insight we must first clearly communicate the love of Christ.

Half a Year in Taiwan - Some Serious Thoughts

As of 4 days ago, I marked 6 months of long-term service here. It's been an interesting time, with some surprising struggles, and unexpected encouragements.

Since in about a week I will be busy and travelling for summer camps until sometime in the latter half of July, this week seems like a good chance to reflect on lessons I've learned and am learning.

 

Reflections on these six months...

 

1. Expectations might be your enemy, but you can't ever quite succeed in not having them.

I tried not too have too many expectations coming back to Taiwan, but the very experience that made it a more feasible task to swap continents, lifestyles, and environments also inevitably meant that I would have some expectations based on that experience. Much of the experience that gave rise to those expectations was valuable, crucial even, to working effectively here this time, but the hardest thing coming back has been the frustration of some of those expectations.

I imagine most of you know what culture shock is; well reverse culture shock is the (often unexpected, and sometimes more difficult) shock one experiences when returning to one's home culture and realizing that your perspective has been changed as a result of your experiences in a new culture, and that you now view your home culture in a slightly different way. Sometimes your eyes are opened to negative things you never noticed before, sometimes your priorities have simply be rearranged, but either way it can be difficult to experience and nearly impossible for anyone who hasn't experienced it themselves to sympathize with you.

The blessing of my prior experience of living in Taiwan for a year affected my coming here this time in nearly every possible way, basically letting me hit the ground running. I was actively doing ministry within a few days of arriving while my brain was doing overtime trying to get used to being in constant Chinese mode. At the same time I was caught unprepared for the painful realization that Taiwan, and more specifically my acquaintances in Taiwan, had not been static and unchanging in the 5+ years in between last time I lived here and now. Kids who were in middle school my first few trips to Taiwan, and only early highschool when I lived here that year, are now getting into their early 20's. Being still in my 20's until next year, that means we're all in our 20's together, which is fun and meaningful in some ways and rather odd at the same time!

At the same time, old friends have moved on with their lives, with those fundamental changes that creep in between your mid 20's and your late 20's. I discovered some friendships have survived, many haven't, and the warmth with which I was welcomed back to Taiwan before my actual arrival turned out to be more or less unrelated to the eagerness of the welcomers to actually meet with me once I was here. Some former acquaintances are now friends, some friends are now more like old acquaintances, and I find myself not starting with anything like the social circle I thought I had coming in.

You could call it reverse-reverse culture shock, perhaps; learning to dodge the jab of culture shock only to be hit with a left hook when moving back into reach of the same culture again. But I think a more accurate term would be simply time shock; regardless of culture, it hits all of us sooner or later.

2. Yes I Still Love Taiwan!

The process of getting over here nearly gave me ulcers again. ("Let go and let God" sounds lovely and serene, but my experience is more like "Hold on tight and ask God to keep your fingers from getting broken if this thing comes to a quick stop") Having finally made it, though, it is such a tremendous blessing to have been given a love for the place to which you are called. And love is the right term, because the like gets stretched at times, but in the end I wouldn't want to be anywhere else.

My work here is varied; I am not just here to "do ministry," though there's plenty of that, I am here to be a living representative of Christ. That calling leads to everything from teaching songs to 2nd graders and English to 80+ year old seniors using DIY bingo cards, to having late night Skype meetings with American short-term mission teams because of the time difference, to discussing concepts of Christianity and Taiwanese culture in mandarin with my young professional friends in elaborately-ambianced cafes, to turning the tables on pairs of Mormon missionaries and witnessing to them instead.

I'm not sure where Taiwan lies on the scale of comfort in terms of mission fields. It's really a false question because how comfortable you are depends on a lot of factors, and the overall environment and modernity of your surroundings is merely one of those. One could get along quite happily with a great ministry team planting churches in jungles, slums, or even a city dump, or push through day after discouraging day with no visible progress in your lonely coffee shop gospel outreach in a posh, comfortable neighborhood of a global city.
For my part, I tend to feel lucky that I get to live here. Sometimes when a short term team visits, though, I'm reminded that not everyone shares my enthusiasm for the details of life here. Living in Taiwan comes with all the benefits and drawbacks of living in/right next to the tropics:

There's intense humidity (hanging one's clothes out to dry may result in their mildewing instead), the insect life is diversely sized and numerous (from air-thickening mosquitoes to flying cockroaches to spiders that are like skinny tarantulas), nothing lasts more than a couple of hours without being refrigerated, garbage disposal becomes a serious endeavor that requires planning and multiple types of garbage bags, one is typically soaked in either rain or sweat within 90 seconds of going out the front door, I could go on. Most expats actually flee Taiwan after the school year ends to spend the relentlessly muggy summer elsewhere.

On the other hand one can drink inexpensive fresh papaya milk between waving palm trees under a glowing blue sky and feel that all that is not so bad. And since it's Taiwan, you might just as easily be doing that in front of a 3-story, Times Square-style LED billboard that's advertising cough syrup with Chinese medicinal herbs, or next to a quaint country train station built in the old Japanese colonial style with summer breezes playing through the flooded rice fields. There could be a garbage truck playing Fur Elise, or a guy beatboxing Mario bros. across from the barbecued squid stand.

Really, you never know what you'll see...

A Rubber Ducky bigger than a Starbucks floating in the harbor? Yeah, you might see that.

3. Things Never Stop Changing Anywhere in the World.

Taiwan in 2014 is a little more tired, a little less affluent. Taiwan's overall cultural worldview is even more heavily centered around almighty Success than America's is, so the lack of it (worse, due to global economic conditions and Taiwan's rather unique situation, the creeping realization of the inevitable future lack of it) affects people and society in general here even more deeply.

So the "cheerfulness" factor in general is noticeably down for someone who's only been back on a few short trips between 2008 and the end of last year. The glory days were just ending then, and there was happy inertia. Not so much now.
Of course all this is compared to the 'Taiwanese miracle' days of being one of the 4 Asian Tiger economies. So having come down several notches from that doesn't qualify as "hard times" yet here, but it's harder than many students now have ever known. Up until the middle of that decade people had been throwing out old stuff and buying new, now they're holding onto what was new in 2008 and it's not so shiny anymore. Graduating students don't find jobs waiting for them. It's a similar situation to what America faces now, really, except America has far more power, resources, and potential options.Taiwan is in a difficult political situation, and their friends are few and not willing to challenge China. In the past, the US was a guarantee that China would not unilaterally move to change the situation, but nowadays that's looking less and less like a surety.

Of course, while obviously no one enjoys a decline in prosperity, we have to ask the most important question: What does this mean for the gospel in Taiwan?
Honestly, it will probably result in people being more open to listen. People accuse Christianity of being a crutch for the weak, but it's far more the case that success is a crutch for the mortal; a means to pretend to control his own fate. Once the idols one worshipped in exchange for hope of worldly success seem ineffective, people will be more willing to listen to those who claim there is a God whose hope is not of this world. (They'll also be less willing to tolerate missionaries who don't seem to be contributing to Taiwan's economy, so we'll see how that situation progresses.)

4. I Need More of God

I am increasingly aware that my own relationship to God is more relaxed than fervent. The focus in American Evangelicalism on sound Biblical doctrine is very important, but it should serve as the rails on which our train runs, not the station we're headed to. God seeks to know us, and our path in life is to walk with Him, not only have very scripturally sound ideas about Him.

My time in seminary was glorious and blessed, but my lifestyle over those 3+ years was totally exhausting physically, mentally, and spiritually. My faith was strengthened and not weakened, praise God, by the fearless and intimate look at His word "behind the scenes" that my seminary offered. It was not confusion and dismay at some of the Sunday School Answers being challenged so much as relief that for some topics there were more complicated and grown-up answers that were much more satisfactory while not challenging scriptural authority whatsoever. (Sometimes the original text even leaves room for more than one interpretation! What a relief to find that we can disagree with each other on non-doctrine level questions and still all be equally convinced of the truth of Scripture.)

But by the time it was over, I needed rest and recovery. The time in Alabama was mostly an unstable "between time," with several months of "oh, you're still here?" It was valuable time spent with family and old friends, which I am grateful for, but also stressful in that I was neither here nor there.

After finally arriving in Taiwan and after the initial few months of transition, my life began to assume some kind of normal routine. I began to realize the lack of normal routine or stable life situation had seriously affected my daily walk. I'd been praying and working through so many big, one-time issues both as I left the US and upon arriving here that I'd gotten entirely out of the habit of setting aside daily time with God.

In America that's wrong, it's spiritual laziness, and being actively involved in church isn't sufficient to make up for it.
But Taiwan is not America. This is not Christendom, and never was; idolatry has never been seriously challenged until these few decades, and the real breakthrough hasn't happened yet. Here, under spiritual warfare and without a consistent church home, trying to plant a church in a spiritually resistant community where no steeples rise but the chimneys of many daoist sacrificial furnaces do, where the air is often thick with the smoke of burnt paper money and joss incense, what was detrimental to my spiritual health in the US is here an imminent danger.

(By way of analogy, imagine back when they had the smoking sections and non-smoking sections in restaurants. Sure, you could still smell dangerous second-hand smoke sometimes drifting over from the smoking section, but spiritually speaking this is like sitting at the table full of people smoking)

So if I don't hold onto time in God's presence on a personal level, actively seeking after Him, I will be dragged away from Him. Not from salvation, the enemy can't touch that. But your spiritual health can be chipped away bit by bit, and here I see how that can happen. Missionaries need your prayer for more than just the success of their ministry, when they go into the enemy's territory with the gospel they get the enemy's poisonous attention.

Sacrificial pig on display during Ghost Month, a plea to ancestral spirits to not harass the living

 

5. Taiwan Needs Prayer, More Than Ever Before

Even without this special kind of spiritual pressure, being on the mission field our reliance on God is made more obvious. I submit that this should not only be the case on the mission field, but it can be more difficult to leave our comfort zone when it's the default and you have to work to get out of it, whereas on the mission field being out of your comfort zone is the default and you have to work to fine one, if it's even possible.

In any case, we pray a lot! We know that any success in this kind of spiritual endeavor (and in the face of this warfare) will come through God's work, not our plans. We are all ambassadors for Christ here, and that role is made glaringly obvious in a land where most people's reaction to Christ is neither acceptance nor denial, but a shrug. He's great for you westerners, but what has He go to do with Taiwanese?

Missionaries have been in Taiwan for a long time, but the gospel has only reached certain sections of the population. The church that does exist cannot be described as consistently healthy either. I've noticed that some people think that while the church in America is sometimes sadly described as a mile wide and an inch deep, in countries with only a small church presence it must be the opposite; small gatherings of passionate and fearless believers. Taiwan is more or less neither, to be honest. In terms of Protestant Christians, there are a few dozen very large churches on the island, several thousand in total (most having fewer than 50 people on an island of 23 million people), and most of them are similar to American churches. People come on Sunday, maybe participate in a weekday night service or maybe not, and in small churches the "80-20 rule" (80% of the work done by 20% of the church) might even be more like 90-10. Or frighteningly often, only the pastor, because he's the "professional Christian," and it's his job to do the spiritual stuff, right?

I have noticed even more strongly this time living here that the prosperity gospel is also rampant in Taiwan. Joel Osteen is in literally almost every church bookstore. When you worship idols, it's a very natural transition. Idols (and the gods they represent) don't love you, but they can help you get stuff you want if you worship them. How much better to change your allegiance from a bunch of small gods to one big God who loves you -and- will help you get the stuff you want if you worship Him?

Please continue to pray for Taiwan.

6. Seeking My Place in Taiwan

"Doing" ministry in Taiwan is not always easy but it at least consists of relatively clearly defined tasks with goals you can write down. "Being" in Taiwan is what has presented me with the most difficulties so far, and it's something I want to work on. Who am I, here?

As a westerner in Taiwan, I'm not under any illusions that I'll ever be Taiwanese in the strict sense. If I spoke absolutely fluent and brilliant Mandarin, Taiwanese, and Hakka too, was a Taiwanese citizen, wrote famous historical novels about Taiwan in Chinese, had a seat in the Taiwanese legislature, whatever.. to a random person on the street I would be a white tourist. That's just how it is.

In a way, though, that takes some pressure off. If I was in Germany, say, for lifelong ministry, I might be tempted to set the goal to basically become German. This would be impossible in one sense (I didn't and now can never grow up Germany), but it would seem much more attemptable, as being ethnically Northern European, after some years, in dress, posture, and maybe even language, it's conceivable that I could appear to be and come across as a native German. That's an extremely difficult thing to do, and arguably you lose out on some benefits that you bring to the table as a foreigner in terms of ministry. It also leads to interesting identity issues.

In Taiwan, since this is impossible, I don't have the temptation to try. I am not content, however, to remain solely on the sidelines. My goal is to be fluent in at least Mandarin, and find a place in Taiwan's society, an accepted role among my friends and acquaintances and coworkers, so I can have an identity here other than "guest who doesn't leave." Some have suggested that's impossible. Maybe so. At this stage I think it's too early to say, so I will forge ahead and see what happens. It's true that it would have been more of a feasible option had I gotten here 9 years ago and spent all my 20's here, making friends long before those friends started families. So I know I'm arriving late in the game, but it's also a game without clearly defined rules, so maybe I can write a few myself. Only time and God's providence will tell.

So please keep praying for me too; it's been a long road but my journey is only beginning...