Taiwan Life: Two Stories

Life in Taiwan is not always full of excitement once you are used to living here (ministry can easily fall into routines, and comfort zones have to be even more actively avoided overseas where it's so easy to retreat to them), but interesting things do happen on a regular basis. Here are two stories from a couple of years ago, which illustrate the kinds of situations I often find myself in.

Story #1: McDonalds Atheist

McDonalds in Taiwan: Typically faster and a bit cleaner than a McDonalds in the States,
and with different food options, though not as nice as the renovated/re-styled ones.
(This particular McDonalds is the least nice one around here, I don't go to them very often these days)

Spring in Taiwan seems to bring insomnia to many. Winter can be rainy and humid, but the air doesn't have the heavy, supersaturated feeling that makes the days oppressive and the nights restless for those more sensitive to atmospheric changes. A couple of years ago I went through a period of insomnia around this time, and with the stress of some unexpected challenges I was dealing with at that time, often went out for a night walk to decompress.

There is a day market near where I used to live in this neighborhood, near an open grey/waste water canal. The mix of the tainted smell of waste water and fresh meat/organs on sale can be oppressive when there is no breeze to move the air, but the market is colorful, the atmosphere is relaxed but energetic, and the mostly car-free street provides an area for families to relax and children to play (you don't see kids freely playing outside here much except at parks with play areas). The area feels comparatively bustling for this wider community, which empties out during the day as people go off to work and school, or to lock down a place to sit somewhere with air-conditioning.

The market consists of fruit and vegetable stalls (and early in the day, fresh cuts of meat and organs) and temporary stands under umbrellas strung down the road which runs alongside the waste-water drainage canal. Continuing for a couple of minutes, the street becomes a covered thoroughfare under an assortment of metal and plastic roofing sheets, with a maze of stalls constructed from old or scrap wood. This is the covered portion of the traditional market, and while fish and some other things are sold inside, there are also various dry goods and small items. It's smaller than a real Chinese nightmarket and less lively and with less variety than a Middle Eastern souk, but seems to have been there for longer than the building around it have stood. (Some Taiwanese friends I have shown around our community expressed surprise that Taipei still has this kind of area; it's a holdout from an earlier era of the city)

At night, the temporary stands along the road are either left there or wheeled into little niches, and the covered area of the market becomes a dark and silent maze of a few alleys, full of the musty smell of old wood and dust that got very hot during the day and are now cooling off. I call it the haunted market for fun, as it does have that vibe at night, though the only ghosts I've seen are cats sneaking stealthily through the roofs and rafters, hunting large rats, and sometimes creepily staring down at you silently with eyes reflecting whatever light may or may not be present.

One late evening, as most of the city had gone to bed, I restlessly made my way down to a McDonalds I knew would still be open. The quickest way was through the "haunted market." I know those streets well, and emerging from a narrow opening onto the main road, my destination was directly ahead. The weight of my introversion was upon me, and I didn't want any social engagements, just to eat something satisfyingly unhealthy and read on my phone for a while. (Yes, missionaries have those times too)

As I sat reading and listening to music, a conversation beside me began to filter through. My Chinese had just reached a level where it was possible to "overhear" things people were saying, versus needing to actively focus and listen to catch anything. I heard certain Christianese phrases which indicated the people talking were Christians, and began to feel like I needed to at least say hello to them.

I turned and politely asked what church they were from. They were very surprised that a white foreigner had randomly done this, and I explained that I was a Christian who had moved to Taiwan to help the Taiwanese church. (I sometimes don't use the term 'missionary' as it's ambiguous and people don't ever inquire further) They were happy to hear it and invited me to join their conversation. They were speaking with a guy who had come to their church for a while and counted as part of their social group but who wasn't a believer, and was actually an atheist; skeptical that God existed at all. They asked if I could help them convince him that God was real.

It's rare in Taiwan to not believe in the supernatural or the divine. The significant majority of Taiwanese view the existence of an unseen, supernatural world as a matter of course; in Taiwan you are never living far from it, and many people's lives are entangled with it. (One need only visit some of the creepier temples to be well aware of it.) To deny it would be rather like stubbornly disbelieving the existence of unseen information being passed around in the air via wifi because you can't see or feel it.

I know some excellent arguments for the existence of God, solid enough that only those skilled and having experience in this area of debate would know how to talk their way out of them. However, this approach is all but useless in Taiwan, because religion is not a matter of logic here. People frequently follow multiple, mutually-exclusive belief systems simultaneously. This is not paradoxical for them because it is not considered reasonable for humans to presume to know which of the countless explanations of the divine are true, if that even means anything; for the majority of Taiwanese, a human's job is merely to be respectful and sincere in our approach to "the divine," and not disrespect anyone by saying their particular understanding is wrong, unless it leads to obviously bad behavior and societal disharmony. (or polluting the environment; mass burning of paper money on important lunar days has been targeted lately as contributing to the bad air quality here)

So although I recall mentioning perhaps one or two of these, I didn't dwell on them. My Chinese was also not quite up to explaining how the point of maximum potential energy in the universe could neither have eternally existed nor could an eternal universe gradually gotten there; something must have triggered it and/or supplied the energy itself.

Instead the very present circumstances suggested the most powerful approach: I informed the man that God had sent me, a foreign Christian, from the other side of the world, to Taiwan, to this McDonalds at midnight where I just happened to overhear their conversation, to tell him that God was indeed real. His eyes widened a bit at that, but I pressed the point home. What are the chances of this conversation even happening? His friends were excited. "It's an angel!" they said, not meaning a ministering spirit from heaven but in the sense Taiwanese Christians use, that person you need, sent by God at the right moment.  The guy dithered a little, saying he wanted God to give him some kind of evidence. I waved my hand. "Hello, I am your evidence. I'm hear from several thousand miles away in this McDonalds at midnight, sent by God to tell you that He is real." He looked scared. (As is nearly always the case, the problem wasn't lack of evidence; the problem was that he didn't want to believe.)

We talked for a while after that, and eventually it got very late and we all needed to head home. A few months later I moved to the other side of the neighborhood (and stopped eating junk food at midnight) and very rarely went to that McDonalds, and I didn't see that group of people again. But certainly God arranged that meeting. I hope the man took it to heart. In the midst of a challenging time in my adjustment process here, it was certainly encouraging to me.

Story #2: Accidentally Stumping the TCM Doctor

A packet of Chinese medicine, herbal powder to mix with water and drink.

Not long after that, I came down with a pretty bad flu. It took me nearly a week to get past it, yet while my body stopped aching and I could function again, I didn't really feel "better." I mentioned this to one of the men who attended my English class at the community center. "I'm going to see the Chinese medicine doctor in a couple of days," he said, "do you want to come?" I had not tried Chinese medicine yet, but I was willing to give it a shot.

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is focused less on curing your illness or suppressing your symptoms and more on figuring out why you're getting sick in the first place, and fixing that. If you don't want to invest time and effort into becoming more healthy, you just want a pill to make you feel better, then Chinese medicine is not for you. Even in Taiwan many people are skeptical of it (you can take expensive herbal supplements and avoid certain foods for a long time and not notice any real change), but many people have experienced its effectiveness for certain problems. (Even in the West, acupuncture has made a name for itself by resolving certain problems in an almost magical way. It seems there are signal paths in the body that ought to be the focus of more research) Since Chinese medicine usually has less impact on the body than western medicine (even if various methods for increasing blood circulation to the surface of the skin look intimidating), people often view it as a better first resort, feeling that popping pills will damage their liver and possibly other things and that more natural methods put less strain on the body and encourage it to heal.

Knowing this, I was more interested to go for the experience than from necessarily thinking I was going to feel better quickly. Meeting the man early in the morning (there would be a line out the door, he explained), we walked across the neighborhood to where the clinic was located. As he predicted, even before the metal outer door was rolled up, there were a few elderly people waiting around outside. We decided to grab breakfast first, and by the time we returned, the doctor was seeing patients. My friend taking me to the clinic was a Buddhist (in a more strict sense than most people in Taiwan; he didn't believe in Chinese folk religion, and only followed Buddha, though he wasn't strict enough to be a vegetarian), and as we waited we began discussing religion.

He explained that a saying of Buddha compared religion to a river that various boats could get you across. We found that a difference in the teaching of Jesus and Buddha lay in their attitude toward their own teaching: "Heaven and Earth shall pass away but My words shall not pass away," said Jesus. But the man said that Buddha had predicted there would come a point when no one remembered the way or his teachings. (Anyone reading this who can confirm or refute that is welcome to comment, I couldn't find the reference myself)

Using another analogy, my friend insisted all religions, if not equally helpful, were at least equally valid. "Like us here," he explained. "We're all here to see the doctor, and we all want to be healthy. But the medicine he gives each of us might be different." I nodded. "We are, but using that analogy, we would need to make sure our definition of "healthy" is the same." At that moment, an assistant announced it was our turn to see the doctor. As we walked in, the man addressed the doctor breezily. "Doctor," he said, "we were just having a conversation you might be able to help us with." The doctor turned inquiringly. "What is the definition of health?" my friend asked.

The doctor's eyebrows went up, then he paused with a brief look of panic. One could almost hear him thinking "Oh no, I am supposed to have a good answer for this." He blinked. "Uh, let's... let's see what's wrong with you first." We acquiesced, and my friend continued. "Yes, perhaps health is as simple as the absence of sickness." I disagreed that it could be defined in purely negative terms. As the doctor examined us by carefully feeling our pulse at the wrist, however, he recovered his presence of mind and ended up giving a decently good definition of health by the end.

After taking my pulse he explained gravely that the instability he could feel in my pulse demonstrated that my body had too much "heat" (in Chinese medical theory it doesn't mean your body temperature is too high in a way that would show up on a thermometer), and was also too "humid." He gave me some medicine for my persistent lingering symptoms from the flu, and said as long as I had the excessive heat-humidity condition then summer in Taiwan would be feel even more hot and uncomfortable than usual, but to fix it would take some herbal therapy and dietary adjustments over the long term.

Leaving, we got our medicine in little packets, and I got a page listing all the foods I should avoid that would aggravate the heat-humidity condition. Noticing that it was pretty much everything I enjoyed eating. (from chocolate to curry to mangoes to coffee), I immediately resolved that it was entirely possible my diet was causing this problem, and that I was also not at all willing to correct it.

I would, however, take my medicine. I am used to taking a certain kind of fiber supplement that tastes like tree bark, so the slightly medicinal and bitter taste of the Chinese medicine powder was not a problem. My Taiwanese coworker was one of those people skeptical about Chinese medicine, and expected I wouldn't notice much of anything. However, the medicine had an unexpected effect on me. The packets didn't say what herbs or other ingredients had been mixed together into the powder, but after taking the first one I decided one ingredient must be guarana or powdered caffeine. Not only did my cold symptoms flee, but I found myself humming with energy and unable to sit down. I hadn't expected this at all, but took advantage of the burst of energy to straighten up my apartment.

After that I took a few of the remaining packets as instructed, but slowed down and used the rest as pick me ups for when I was feeling sluggish (easy to happen during Taiwan's rainy spring season, especially during bad allergy days). I still don't know what was in there, but it worked better than any energy drink I've tried.

So that's two pretty normal stories of life here. Want to hear more, or learn more about certain aspects of life here? Leave a comment and let me know!

Don't United Airlines Yourself

1. A Debacle for United:

Just a short entry today. I am not the kind of blogger who often pounces on the social media news scandal de jour, but in this case we have been flashed with a 10,000 watt, unpleasantly vivid object lesson.

Here's the basics (click the link above for more details and the video):

Needing to transfer 4 airline staff to another airport on an overbooked flight, United Airlines requested some passengers to volunteer to take another flight later, with compensation. Nothing special there. But after raising it to $800 and no one volunteering, UA announced they would select passengers at random with a computer. One passenger, a doctor, insisted it was important for him to make the flight to see patients later, and would not leave the plane. He was eventually dragged off the plane, face getting bloodied in the process, in an ugly spectacle that shocked watching passengers.

At this point it's irrelevant whether or not his behavior was reasonable or not, as the film of him being dragged from the plane is all over the internet. My FB feed is covered in darkly humorous UA memes, every post representing tens of thousands of dollars of people taking any other airline but UA, and a tone-deaf pseudo-response from United Airline's CEO is only making things worse.

It's already quite obvious that this is an absolute public relations nightmare for United Airlines. At best, this escalates into legal action which results in passengers actually retaining their civil rights on an airplane, which is currently not the case, practically speaking.

Just imagine the exchange next time United calls for passengers to take another flight.. "Or else what, you'll beat us up and drag us off the plane?"

"Oops" - Rick Perry

2. A Lesson for Us:

While it's true that, if more people suffer for this very poor judgment call in the coming days, it's likely to be the employees of United (and not likely the ham-handedly or apathetically unapologetic CEO), let us at least consider the important lesson for us here which should not be ignored:

Unwilling to offer a few hundred more dollars for people to voluntarily give up their seats, United Airlines has incurred a public relations scandal which is going to cost them millions at best, probably more.

So consider this: are you doing the same thing to yourself right now?

For the sake of stubbornly or lazily being unwilling to pay whatever cost would be necessary to overcome some small obstacles in your life, are you hurting yourself in deep and significant ways over the long term?

What things would take merely some unpleasant effort in the near-term, require spending some money you don't want to spend, in order to avoid big problems down the road? Living in Taiwan, I can think of at least three things I need to stop procrastinating on, three hurdles I need to jump, which would make my life easier in the long run and save me from future problems. Not ministry things, but things which would put me in a better position from which to minister.

One fairly mundane example would be how I've balked at spending the money and time necessary to get a real water filter installed. Bottled water is cheap here, and the tap water won't make you sick (in the short term... the water is okay, but the pipes in various areas are not, leading to nebulous health issues which are difficult to prove are from the water but many local people believe it to be so), but either way there are obvious reasons why being having a filter for the tap is preferable, if only so that I can offer a glass of water to visitors worried about water quality. I've just been putting it off as a fairly expensive and troublesome item that there's never a good time to stop everything else and do.

(Now having blogged about it I guess I'll need to pester myself into doing it.)

3. Do Not Withhold...

If that seems like a stretch to get to from the United Airlines situation, it's much less so than it seems. We often undermine ourselves by focusing on our current disinclination to do something, even though there are big potential downsides which are only possible when we don't do it. This is especially true when it's a question of paying other people. You may seem to have spared yourself a bit of time or money or effort, but you may have lost much more.

United Airlines never imagined that an unwillingness to pay what they considered unnecessarily high compensation amounts to passengers would result in such a scandal, yet being unwilling to do so has cost them greatly. (Or, if you argue that the airline shouldn't have to submit to passengers holding out for the maximum compensation allowed by law, consider that they could have avoided the situation altogether by not overbooking the flight to begin with.) Again, this makes the forcibly deplaned passenger's behavior or motives irrelevant. I'd be willing to bet you the amount involved that someone on that plane who wouldn't get off for $800, would have done so for $1,300. We can't know for sure, of course, because they never made the offer, resorting to force instead.

This is less a slippery slope argument (for want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse, the rider, the kingdom, etc) and more an observation that when we establish a pattern of declining to expend time, money, or effort when it's appropriate to do so, we may hurt others and ourselves too.

For United Airlines, that was stopping well short of what they could have offered passengers because they knew they could force people off instead. Well, that backfired.

So, pay for the maintenance. Go get the check up. Practice for the certification. Tip the server appropriately. Don't shortchange yourself or other people when it's not necessary.

As Scripture says it: "Do not withold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to do it." (Proverbs 3:27)

That includes yourself too. Who knows what trouble you're saving yourself from.

The Church Abides

The Nonexistent "Good Old Days"

As I have previously written, our convictions on political or other questions may seem like they must be a different category from our faith convictions, but that's not automatically true. Our convictions are naturally intertwined and jumbled together, and if we aren't constantly being intentional about acting on those convictions we know rationally are most important, other convictions will instinctively rise to the top of the heap and become the guiding principles which really determine our behavior, regardless of what we'd claim.

One of my hobbies is geopolitics, and I'm fascinated by how abstract issues like metacultural worldview interplay with practical realities like the geographical distribution of valuable resources. (Without oil dollars, would Islam have continued to secularize after the Ottoman Empire dissolved?)

Given how all these phenomena are interdependent, it's not surprising that one can find parallels to some problems in the way we think about church, in the way we think about politics. In the U.S. I grew up in a conservative environment, and a constant refrain among Conservatives in those days was "getting back" to the good days when America was free, patriotic, prosperous, morally upright, God-honoring, etc. etc. (My own current views on this sort of thing aren't the point of this post, but suffice to say I am neither in lockstep with nor in rebellion against that upbringing. Mostly I think conservatism as a movement is an entirely ineffective way to accomplish the goals of conservatives, like trying to steer a car via the brakes.)

However, while one can point to specific ways in which each of those cultural qualities may have been more true at given times and given places in the past as compared to now (few would dispute that things have gotten pretty chaotic in recent years), at the same time, being intellectually honest requires admitting that there has never been a time when one could describe all of America in glowingly positive terms. There have always been unacceptable problems and rampaging controversies. There weren't any good old days, just different good things in those days vs. the good things we have now. Whether you prefer that good to this good may be an interesting and profitable discussion, but it's not only misguided to simply assume "everything was better before," even the Bible weighs in and says to hush.

Never Getting it Right

The same is true of the Church. The Church has never operated with safety wheels on or guard rails up. In the earliest era of the Church, congregations planted by apostles themselves openly engaged in behavior that would shock the sensibilities of not only any church but any decent person. (They did this partly because they confused what it meant to be counter-cultural, thinking basic human moral rules no longer applied to them now that they had a new identity in Christ.) Tradition states that in 325AD, Old Saint Nick found it necessary to impart the the loving hand of correction upside Arius' lying head at a church council. We laugh and meme about it now, but imagine if we managed to hold a church-wide ecumenical council now and it was interrupted by one pastor striking another in the face. The World would laugh for weeks and concern-bloggers would extrapolate every possible aspect in which this revealed the Church's deep failings.

Observe the technique: Grasp the left hand of heresy and counter with your right.

There is some evidence to suggest the Arias-punching story is entirely apocryphal, but certainly deep controversies have wracked the Church from its earliest days, and in later times when the Church had accrued much political power to itself, wars followed. Like the fallacy of the elusive glory days of free and virtuous America, the Church has been getting serious things wrong for as long as it's been a Church, but to suggest that this delegitimizes the Church demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature. Humanity is fallen and sinful. Anything we remain involved with over the centuries is partly a trainwreck in historically slow motion, we just like to pretend the brief moments of clarity or smoothness are the norm, like a poor athlete who has one great game and convinces himself it reflects his true average skill.

Today, seeing so many problems with the Church, many hasten to express their particular brand of condemnation. Older believers fear the Church won't survive being inherited by these tradition-eschewing millennials. Young believers believe the Church may not escape the non-leadership of their inauthentic and dispassionate elders. Right-leaning believers fear the Church will confuse social justice for the gospel, Left-leaning believers fear the Church has irrevocably tied itself to the Republican party. You could go into any Christian subculture and find people convinced the Church is headed in the wrong direction for exactly those reasons that are celebrated by some other subculture.

Whether well-intentioned or simply virtue-signalling, these concerned commenters all seem to forget that the Church survived the early heresies and persecutions, the Fall of Rome (at the time, truly the end of the world as far as much of the Church was concerned), the Great Schism, the Reformation (another even greater schism), Modernist reinterpretations, prosperity preachers and false prophets, etc. In every age, the Church has been beset by dangers any particular one of which could have destroyed it. Except, of course, that Christ already promised Peter that the Gates of Hell would not overcome the Church. God does not keep the Church from error, but He keeps it.

The Church through the Eyes of Sauron

Obviously, a local church or the Church in an area can be more, or less, healthy. Every believer must seek to maintain the health of their own spiritual life, and we seek it corporately as well, as individual members of one body. If the cells of a body are unhealthy, the body will be unhealthy, and on the other hand a body with healthy cells can harm them en masse by engaging in unhealthy behaviors. There is a micro and macro scale from which we can consider the health of the church.

Recently I noticed an impassioned and occasionally profane article in which the writer suggested that American Christianity has wandered so far that the Church just needs to die and be resurrected. ("I'm excited the North American church is dying.") because they feel it's too far gone to be redeemed, too confused with cultural elements, etc. This, for the article writer, is somehow connected to Supreme Court decisions and how we're not like those awesome Christians of 165AD who buried pagan people too, not only their own, but instead we judge people on social media. Or something. (It's an impassioned but somewhat disjointed and not entirely coherent piece of writing)

This kind of zealous self-flagellation springing from a comparison of the sad modern church we can actually look at vs. certain high points of church history has some basis in simple ignorance or naivety, like someone who compares themselves to someone else's social media profile and forgets there is a real, flawed person behind it. But there's also a kind of perfectionism or OCD that leads people to continually despair and condemn the Church and want to throw the whole thing out and start over, which is both impossible and undesirable. "If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off" is a command to individuals in their pursuit of holiness, however, not to the Bride of Christ. Schisms are direly unfortunate amputations, not a healthy purging of specific or regional churches who were weighed in the scale (by whom?) and found wanting. We don't want pieces of the Church to die; we want them nursed back to health if necessary.

C.S.Lewis, in his incredibly insightful Screwtape Letters, mentions--via the sarcastic viewpoint of one demonic tempter advising another how to lead his human "patient" astray--how easy it is to be unimpressed by the Church manifested in a particular place and setting:

One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided...

Lewis' description here, from the viewpoint of the Enemy, is accurate in its details (unimpressive aspects of a particular church service), the lie is in the attitude. It's not so much seeing wrongly, as seeing selectively and drawing selective conclusions. It's easy to do this when considering the Church.
At the risk of over-Inkling, an example from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is apt here as well: there is a point where Denethor, the stoic leader of Gondor, is revealed to have been led astray by Sauron. He has been using a magic seeing-stone to spy on Sauron, who is unable to stop him but can influence what he sees to some extent. Sauron therefore guides Denethor to see Mordor's strongest armies and most impressive defenses, and prevents him from noticing any problems and weak points. This results in Denethor, though continuing to go through the motions of his duty, internally giving in to despair, convinced Sauron is too strong to ever be defeated.

What you see depends on where you look, or are persuaded to look

When, with the desire for a healthy Church, we consider the Church's many problems, the Enemy may not be able to deceive us entirely. But he can influence where our gaze falls, and he can undermine our attitude. 
Looking at an American Church which is taking the gospel all over the world, that feeds the homeless and helps the poor daily, that is constantly bringing the same truth to the world in new and creative ways (that is in fact of identity the Bride of Christ, flawed but redeemed), and concluding that the whole thing should die as soon as possible so "the real Church" can somehow emerge, based on your particular ideas of what that should look like, is to be looking at real problems but doing so with the attitude of the Enemy, who also wants the Church to die and doesn't mind if you think you have godly motives in agreeing with him.

Cultural Christianity is Good if the Church is Healthy

The "North American Church," the Church in general, should not die, and will not die. God will keep a remnant for Himself even in situations much direr than the onslaught of sloth, leaderlessness, personal distraction, and nihilism we face in 2017.

The Church doesn't handle peace and affluence well; the Church is Antifragile, growing mostly through testing and adversity. This has indeed led some people to understand growing hostility to the Church in American culture to be a blessing in some ways. But two important facts must be acknowledged here:

1) Times getting tough for the Church doesn't mean "Cultural Christianity" will die. Cultural Christianity is an unavoidable aspect of Post-Christian cultures, or even subcultures--Taiwan has a problem with Cultural Christianity even in its small and culturally marginal church. Cultural Christianity may eventually more or less die if America really moves very far away from its roots, but for a long time before that it will look like the culture calling something Christianity which is not. That's already been true for a while.

2) The decline of Cultural Christianity does not translate to a healthier Church. A culture that respects God is not a bad thing. Yes it's bad when people think they are Christians because they go to Church, but no church with strong biblical teaching and a healthy discipleship culture is going to have lots of its members thinking they are Christians simply because they show up.
Rather, it's a blessing to a culture to recognize God as the God they accept or reject, and a barrier to the gospel when that recognition is lost. "Do you believe in God" or "Does God Exist" is not a culturally meaningless question in America the way it is in Taiwan. God ought to be glorified, ought to receive respect, and even the lip service of the world is a recognition of His glory, though an unreliable one that does them no good unless they are in relationship with Him. Even the rocks will cry out, and in the presence of the Church, even a sinful worldly culture will testify to the truth by its specific refusal of it. (Like those Atheists who don't realize what they're really saying when they insist they don't believe in "God," meaning the God of the Bible)
The presence of the Water of Life will naturally begin to make the air humid, and then people will feel less thirsty when the air is less dry; it's an inevitable process that can be seen in the history of Great Commission efforts throughout the world.

The decline of Christianity in the culture means many things for the Church, but it does not follow that the Church will suddenly become more devout just because the culture stops recognizing God or knowing the basic terminology of the gospel in a cultural way. It's foolish to have less scriptural understanding in the culture as a hoped-for situation, let alone that the Church will implode somehow. The Church has always struggled, and it's always been bigger than you.

Don't celebrate desertification, overflow with water now.

Babylonian Cuneiform, Virtue Signalling, and Fungal Fake-Wheat

The other night I was preparing for a sermon, and got off on a whole rabbit trail which began with cuneiform and went all sorts of places. (The most fascinating intellectual inquiries always seem to pop up when one is trying to concentrate on preparing a sermon) What began as the discovering of some fascinating scholarship mixed with disappointingly juvenile conclusions about scripture, now continues as a question of how to get rid of the dirty bathwater but keep the baby, intellectually speaking.

1. Not Settling for the Bronze, Owning It

I had heard vague noises about a professor achieving momentary internet attention by deciphering an Akkadian cuneiform tablet only to discover it recounted a Babylonian flood account in which the ark was a massive upright cylinder, but discovered the man himself was actually quite fascinating. It turns out his name is Dr. Irving Finkel, he has a PhD in Assyriology, and a glorious beard to match.

I happened upon Dr. Finkel not via the "real noah's ark" controversy, but after a post one of my seminary professors shared on FB, of a Dr. Jeremiah Peterson doing cuneiform in the original fashion, on a circular, wet clay tablet with a square stylus. It's a beautiful thing. I can't link to his video but here is a screenshot. Apparently he makes these for sale as well, though a quick search didn't reveal any links to an online shop.

This piqued my interest (which is admittedly highly piquable), and headed me off in search of more information, the rabbit trail I mentioned at the beginning. Dr. Finkel turned up early in the process, due to his enviable position as Assistant Keeper for the part of the British Museum which houses 130,000 cuneiform tablets, which he gets to read and keep track of. I don't know who the primary Keeper of the Tablets is, perhaps the position is honorarily kept open for Ashurbanipal himself)

Dr. Finkel should be experienced by everyone, so here he is. Skip to 1 minute in to get past the perfunctory student intro before Dr. Finkel starts speaking.

(Bill Nye and Neil Degrasse Tyson, get on this guy's level)


I especially appreciated his asides on education (Babylonian cuneiform lessons involved a schoolmaster with a cudgel who would smack students on the head if they'd not been diligent, a practice Dr. Finkel believes should be brought back in modern schools "to make people learn something") and on cuneiform tablets as a superior method of information storage (in the far future everything from the digital age and indeed the age of print could conceivably be lost, being printed on perishable paper or stored electromagnetically, but in that distant future all the cuneiform tablets will be more or less exactly as they are today)

2. Avoiding both Scylla and Charybdis

Dr. Finkle is a gentleman and a scholar by all appearances, but in his lectures and writings he does lapse into unbeardsmanlike conduct. Celebrating his own discovery of a new Babylonian flood account (apparently the only one to mention the animals going in "two by two" as in the Biblical account) he ran straight into the same error so many secular scholars of antiquity fall into, that of discovering something with connections to the Biblical account and then immediately assuming he's figured out where the Bible writers got their ideas from and proclaiming it as the new definitive "real story behind the Bible." It happens pretty much every time. Anything people manage to discover from antiquity that agrees with the Bible on particular points is automatically regarded as the original, and the authors of scripture must have been copying it.

This kind of modernist intellectual arrogance is common among the more charismatic scientists and professors (I did not choose the examples of Bill Nye and NdgT at random, though much of their own sciencing is in fact Science cosplay), who being good modernists in a post-modern era have a religion of artifacts and lab coats and the distinguished trappings of old-school academia.

This "science is frickin' awesome" movement has been a loud and enthusiastic voice online against a scriptural worldview for years now, although I believe the Trump election is sort of a convenient social landmark which demonstrates the conclusion of that era and the beginning of a different phase, in which many people have finally realized people they used to view as ideologically neutral are actually all pitching narratives at us, and circle their respective wagons. (not necessarily a better situation, but a different and perhaps less naive one)

In general, educated people know better than either to listen to every single thing scientists say, or to refuse to believe any of it, but there's not much at stake either way. For Christians this process is complicated by the fact that we value science as a method of understanding creation, yet recognize that many doing the science come at the process with atheistic premises which clash with a scriptural worldview and both consciously and unconsciously promote these via their efforts. (The scientific method is a great tool for exploring and understanding our physical universe, and even has built in self-correcting mechanisms, but it's naive to pretend that any process which involves humans is not influenced by their premises coming in.)

So for believers there are two mistakes we can make at this point. The first is to throw out whole fields as "tainted" (something people might call fundamentalism, though everyone is doing it these days) or, convinced that sufficiently well-trained experts can successfully set aside their worldview premises and produce raw truth, try to "balance" our faith with these findings (the source of much liberalism in the church).

1. Virtue Signalling: "You have been Weighed on my Scale of what's Okay and what's Not Okay and found Wanting"

The first mistake arises very naturally from a prior mistake, which is to identify one's duty as a believer as finding reliable sources of information (websites, authors, pastors, etc) and passively absorbing them. Then, when a pastor says something wrong, or an author "goes liberal," or "gets too right-wing," people start viewing them with increased wariness, and will perhaps eventually throw them out, and look for someone who will hold fast to an ever-narrowing and more specific range of convictions espoused in certain ways.

Those who go about things in this way, and they are very numerous, often make statements or symbolic actions which have the primary purpose of communicating to other people where they stand on a particular issue. This is called "virtue signalling," in case you've heard the word thrown about recently. They may loudly condemn, or try to convince everyone to stop listening to, a pastor who takes a position with which they don't agree. But they won't write a book with sound theology, or usually even explain what specific things are invalid about the pastor's views and how they determine that. They just want to make sure they've expressed that they're a good person for publicly praising and condemning the appropriate things.

Of course, there are always lies being promoted, and plenty of pastors and books and sources of ideas which shouldn't be trusted. But in the world of ideas, there are a lot to go around. We don't want to narrow our minds to keep all unsafe ideas out, we want to be more discerning, knowing how to navigate the world of ideas safely and effectively, steered by a deep understanding of scripture. This takes time and effort, confidence and humility. But if our goal is to make ourselves more able to see and understand the underlying claims or premises of whatever information is being shared with us, whether through a book, or a TV show, or a sermon, or a scientific article online, rather than to decided if this is "good" or "bad" and then announce to everyone our acceptance or condemnation of it, we're probably on the right track to Jesus' command to be not only innocent as doves, but also wise as serpents.

2. Progressing from Scripture while trying to Bring it along too.

The second mistake may arise from a desire to avoid the first. Recognizing that the world of ideas is primarily not a bunch of atheistic professors trying to sarcast the faith out of their naive students, but often nice or at least very intelligent people on a quest for knowledge who have never accepted the premise of theism, many Christians want to somehow find a way to reconcile the fact that beloved teachers and/or impressive scholars teach that which cannot be reconciled with scripture, with their own conviction of the truth of scripture.

When these two convictions clash, however, it is very often scripture which is expected to conform. The basic (and nonscriptural) idea of progress or progressivism (using it loosely here), that humankind is moving forward from error to enlightenment, makes it tough to hold to any unchangeable standard, because for progressively-minded people such a standard, no matter how brilliant and true in its day, would necessarily be becoming slowly but inevitably outdated and untenable. Evolution is in many ways not merely a theory of the development of the biological life we see around us, but a whole worldview of itself; the idea that things can and will improve as they change over time, and that we all partake in this process not only biologically but societally, morally, etc.

Progressives with a more favorable view of Christianity's influence on the world may say things like "Christianity got so many things right, but we can do better," while others may view it more negatively, but either way the question is not of truth, but of progress. For them the question would be: Is Christianity getting us where we want to go? If not, we can move on from it.

Interestingly, the majority of American Christians seem to have ingested this worldview of progressivism to varying degrees growing up, usually more and more the younger they are, and it has led to a fascinating array of paradoxes in their own beliefs. I see many people trying to say morality is derived from God, while simultaneously updating their own moral sensibility according to secular trends (of the month), without noticing any contradictions. (An extreme example was one person telling me that if Jesus were to do the things He did in the gospels today, some of it would be sin, though it wasn't at the time because people didn't know any better.) This is of course untenable, both in terms of consistency of faith or even rational thought, but reason speaks calmly while trends shout enthusiastically.

3. One Solution: Look to the Wheat and the Tares

If we seek to avoid both of the preceding mistakes--living in a sort of perpetual Inquisition and virtue signalling our allegiance to the increasingly few sources of information which "can be trusted", or else trying to cram secular academia and moral philosophy into the throne alongside scripture and serve both masters--we must do what Odysseus could not, and find a way to avoid both Scylla and Charybdis. Like him, for most of us pragmatically speaking it may be a matter of veering closer to one or the other, with the goal of making it through as unharmed as possible.

Yet I think the concept of "the wheat and the tares" can be applied here to good effect.

Jesus tells a fascinating parable in Matthew 13:24-30: A man sows his field with good seed, but "an enemy" comes and sows "tares" in the field. Interestingly, this isn't noticed until the heads of grain start appearing. ("when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also") This lends credence to the theory that the word translated as "tares" in the KJV (Simply "weeds" in the NIV and ESV) is a reference to a kind of plant called Darnel, which very closely resembles wheat until the grains ripen. (At least according to wikipedia, in the Roman Empire sowing Darnel in someone's field was illegal. So Jesus may have been referencing for His parable a destructive practice common enough to be banned, a scenario with which his listeners would have been familiar)  Darnel is susceptible to fungal infection, and the particular kind of fungus which infects darnel is toxic and causes drunken-like nausea, which can be fatal. Sowing darnel in someone's wheat field was literally small-scale biological warfare, and hard to remedy, though in this case the owner of the field has a wise solution.

(Note: Jesus Himself explains what He meant by the parable in the same chapter. I'm not suggesting this is an alternative meaning, this is just an application which I find helpful in my quest for wise discernment vs. either judgmental over-rejection or naive over-acceptance)

Wheat, top, vs Darnel, bottom. Once threshed, the grains are hard to tell apart.
Credit: http://the-biologist-is-in.blogspot.tw/2016/07/more-crop-mimics.html

Applying this parable to the world of ideas, the parallels immediately jump out. Truth is there for us to grasp, by observing the reality of God's creation and by accepting the special revelation of scripture. However, the Enemy has sown lies throughout the fields of human knowledge (and corresponding heretical ideas throughout the Church), lies which seem like truth--until they bear their false fruit, which leads to toxin-induced drunkenness and death.

What can we do to root out these dangerous untruths? The parable has the servants suggest that the false wheat can literally be uprooted--pulled out from among the true wheat. This is the first mistake mentioned above--over-zealousness in trying to keep ourselves from being in contact with any "tainted" sources of information. The master explains the problem with this in his reply--in doing so, you will throw out much real truth in the process. This is not the right stage for sorting them out, it's too early. But one does not simply accept this false wheat along with the true wheat, which would be the second mistake. Instead, having been taken in, now the wheat is sorted. True wheat is taken into the barn, fake wheat is burned to ashes.

This happens before the wheat is threshed. Thousands of tiny darnel and wheat grains look similar, and once mixed together can't be easily sorted out. But the clusters of grain look different on the different plants, as the picture above shows. Once you internalize ideas (I.e. "Once you take them into your barn," but as Spurgeon would say, there's no need to push a good metaphor/illustration to exhaustion), it can be quite difficult to figure out which ideas you got from what source. The process of distinguishing truth from falsehood does need to happen in the context of where you received the information. The facts, context, and situation all matter; there is no "hypothetical wheat." (And the task of discernment is greatly helped by recognizing how to reject false hypotheticals and "setting aside X" arguments where X is relevant.) If you do find that a certain field pretty much always produces false wheat, it makes sense not to spend most of your time searching for true wheat there.

(Though indeed it's not an entirely one-sided process; our Friend seems to delight in sowing real wheat seed in the night among what the Enemy considers a safe field of tares.)

In summary, the wheat and false-wheat are to be harvested together: we take the good and bad ideas together as they come. It can be tough to distinguish them at first, but we can tell them apart since their fruit is not the same. This is the role of discernment. Not to pull up and throw away anything that looks like a weed before any fruit is ripe, nor to internalize all ideas and try to sort them out later, but to know the difference between true and false wheat by the fruit they bear, and take what is true and discard what is false.

Psalm 119:66 - "Teach me good discernment and knowledge, for I believe in Your commandments."

2 Complicated Things I Miss from America

Been doing some hiking recently. Taiwan is full of mountains waiting to be climbed!

As I move into my 4th consecutive year in Taiwan, getting into medium to early-long-term territory, the things that I miss from the US become more abstract, and sometimes more complicated. As an INTP (i.e. a very analytical personality), serving in the well-developed East Asian nation of Taiwan, I don't really care about this or that particular thing from the States (food, etc), or anything I could acquire by hopping on an airplane tomorrow. If I really missed them enough, I could get access to them one way or another, and I know awesome people who would send all sorts of things to me if I asked nicely.

As you will note below, what I miss at this point are not really specific tangible things, or places. It's almost misleading to say they are things I miss "from America," as they aren't particular to that nation per se but related to my life there before coming out to the mission field.

What I miss are certain aspects of life which are absent or changed when one's career is that of full-time cross-cultural missionary service, and which I know are not available to me so long as I follow this path. It's simply the way mission work goes, much of the time, but I have found that aside from helping people see some natural challenges of missionary life, thinking through these kinds of things often brings forth ideas of how to adapt more helpfully to this way of life. Also, there's that slight chance that someone else is in the same situation, and will be encouraged by the sharing.

So, here is a bit of unpacking of two complicated things I've found I miss over the longer-term.

1. The Feeling of Productivity

I have long felt that most people don't like being productive so much as feeling productive. Most people don't particularly like having to wake up on Monday and go to work, for example, but the morning ritual of dragging one's self out of bed, with the shower, the coffee, enduring morning traffic with morning news or talk radio or music or whatever, which plays itself out over years for millions of middle class Americans, has become a sort of de facto rite of passage. You know you are an adult because you wake up early like an adult, dress like an adult, get annoyed at traffic like an adult, and go to the office to do grown-up things. (This is more or less what many younger millennials only half-jokingly call "adulting.")

As more of a task-focused type than a people-person, in my time on the field I have realized that this feeling of productivity, of boxes checked and specific things accomplished, of doing what the world expects from a responsible adult, is more important to me than I'd realized. Though I'm an INTP who prefers to work via flow vs. a rigid schedule, and requires adequate time for contemplation/processing to stay mentally healthy, as an adult man with a fairly serious case of oldest-child syndrome, I feel responsible for everything I'm involved in and need that sense of accomplishment to not feel that I've wasted a day.

The question of whether a day has been productive or wasted in terms of ministry can be complicated, but in general our sense of ongoing productivity tends to come through "xiao chenggong", the "little successes." Small accomplishments and specific tasks done well which give one a sense of progressing towards a goal. (or better yet, measurable progress towards an impressively big yet humanly achievable goal)

It's tough to get that feeling on a church plant. There's no "going in to the office," as I do gospel-centric activities scattered across a Taiwanese city district (a room in the local community center this morning, the lobby of a local business HQ after lunch, my coworker's home in the evening, etc). It's a job for which sitting at a computer is often necessary, planning lessons, putting together presentations, etc, but there is never any clocking in or clocking out. Missions is a 24/7 job, not defined by specific locations or hours. You are never off the clock, there is no time divided between "work" and "my free time." Meeting with a non-believing friend to chat over coffee, spending the same amount of time in a missions school board meeting or leading a Bible study, are all part of the gospel work, and there is simply no system or scale by which one can rate them in terms of "kingdomliness."

So there is a sense in which I am unable to gauge how much I've accomplished in a day, because there isn't anything to compare against. Just having a class or activity go well doesn't mean much. It's good, but it's impossible to exactly what extent I've advanced the cause of the gospel here, or to what extent we've drawn closer to planting a church, when we can only do that when people respond to the gospel message, which is something we can't control. My passion is that Christ be glorified in Taiwan, whereas most people are either literally bowing to statues, have a sort of vague TED-Talk religion of personal goals and giving back to the world, or are simply focused on personal success and comfort. But we can't change hearts, only the Spirit can do that, so we're putting years of time and effort into something we're intrinsically incapable of accomplishing alone. If God doesn't move, we don't see any fruit from our efforts. As an incoming missionary, I thought this meant He definitely would move, but I have discovered in the past couple of years that God does not alter His pace to cater to a human need for a sense of progress. (He may or may not move, and where God moves one usually finds His servants hard at work, but there is no contract where He agrees to move in proportion to how hard we work.)

Breaking new ground for the gospel doesn't always look impressive, then, and sometimes its fruits are only seen in the harvesting that follows at some point much later, sometimes one or multiple generations later. It's like a business in which nearly all the profit is continually invested back into the business itself. Everything may be proceeding according to the business plan, and there may come a day of tearfully glorious success, when it is revealed to have all been worth it all along, but workers may or may not be willing to keep investing in the future profit when it can't be seen now. (Sadly, many missionaries have left Taiwan when fruit seemed too slow in coming, or simply nonexistent. It's a constant struggle to balance the idea that one will see God working visibly when one is in His will, with the fact that He yet often calls us to continue in faith when we can't see the visible signs we feel should be there, all in tension with the knowledge that He works according to His own timing. As Lewis reminds us in the last Narnia book, He's not a tame lion.)

We say we walk by faith, not by sight, but it's quite a challenge to work by faith, not by sight. I am committed to learning how to live and work in this way, and Lord willing, can disciple others to do the same. Humanly speaking, however, some days I do still wish I could clock out after a hard day's work accomplishing measurable goals of one kind or another, and feel that I'd earned some leisure time.

2. Resource-based Solutions

A. When hardware is lacking
America is almost ridiculously blessed with resources. You can throw "stuff" at a problem, equipment, money, etc. and accomplish huge tasks with efficient use of manpower. It's seriously great to live in an economy and society where you can have your own shed, garage, workshop, etc. filled with your own tools, not to mention owning the space necessary to store them. If people weren't burdened under national debt and quasi-socialist tax burdens, and enslaved by entertainment media, the American economy would be incomprehensibly strong. A lot of people could do what they do at their job in half the time, spend some of their pay to buy capital goods, and spend the other half actually producing things of value at their home.

In Taiwan, and pretty much anywhere else in the world I've visited, these kinds of personal resources are scarce. The society isn't wealthy enough for lots of random individual people to acquire and maintain a whole supply of tools in support of their individual interests. Instead those resources are possessed by the wider family or community, sometimes in a less satisfactory way. You don't have the wrench, but Uncle Chen works at a shop which has one you can borrow next week. In Taiwan, the average person in a city doesn't have much living space to spare for tools or anything else, let alone the extra money to put into time-consuming hobbies. (America is wealthy in ways it's hard to recognize unless one has lived abroad in various parts of the world, though that's beginning to change as the middle-class is systematically destroyed and all the extra money siphoned out of society.)

So that's the first half of the problem. Much of the world simply doesn't have the impressive hardware and resources widely available to Americans, so there isn't the option to simply swoop in with the right tools to get the job done quickly and move on to the next one. Specific example: Our summer campground is a very old facility that requires continual maintenance as things break. We can fix them, but it requires time spent away from ministry to do so, and people who actually know how to do the work decently well, who are few and far between and typically otherwise employed. It would be a fun task for many American men, who have a pickup-truck-load of tools just waiting for the right chance to be used, and pride themselves on knowing how to use them to good effect. As an engineer by trade, there are times when I really miss problems which can be solved simply by acquiring the right tools and possessing the know-how.

B. When Physical Resources Can't Help Much Anyway
More to the point, however, in the case of missions and really anywhere one can passionately demonstrate a worthwhile need, there are good, generous people who would love to provide those resources. They will give sacrificially, they will go to considerable lengths to make sure the work of the gospel (or of charity, etc) is not hampered by the relatively straightforward problem of a lack of funds, or resources which can be acquired by said funds.

But there is not really any hardware which can be thrown at the challenge of building gospel relationships in the dense concrete jungle of a Taiwanese urban community, where there is no open field to raise a tent or park some cars, barely even space for a cluster of people to stand outside and avoid cars and scooters passing by; where whatever is done is done in your home or someone else's or a restaurant, to which people must accept an invitation. (Our community center is by far the best public area for events in our vicinity, and there is lots of competition for booking rooms)

There is a sense in which a trip to construct an entire new church building from the foundation up is vanishingly simple compared to the task of trying to disciple a single local believer. I've run cranes and tied rebar and welded steel columns and poured concrete foundations and laid tile and run pipe and done all manner of things necessary for constructing new homes or churches. It's hard work, but at the end of the day, it's done, and you have something to look at and feel that great sense of satisfaction.

But working with people is an entirely different challenge, and one which simply can't be solved with a bunch of physical labor, hardware tools, and enough funds to cover the project. You need to speak the local language well, you need people to be willing to connect with you, you need time in your and their schedule to meet, you need them to be spiritually open, and to slowly build trust with people somewhat suspicious that you're being nice to them while appearing to get nothing out of it yourself, etc.

So when people ask "how can I help," it can be a little frustrating that I don't have a lot of answers. I would love to have some specific request ready like "we need funds for our well-digging project" or "we need help building an addition on our orphanage," etc, but none of those apply in our context. We don't "need" anything in the sense of physical resources, and even more funds don't necessarily translate into being able to do more, since we already lack the manpower to comprehensively follow up on the community outreach we're involved with now. A few very specific things could enhance our work, especially Chinese-language teaching aids with traditional characters (much of what is available is in simplified Chinese, what China uses).

But the majority of what must be done is a long, slow process of building bridges with people and establishing trust, to let them experience God's love and joy, and sustain a long-term burden for them, praying that they too can enter the kingdom and know Christ as we have come to know Him. We need more people to do more follow-up, to meet new people in our community and make friends and build relationships for the sake of the gospel, to open new doors and be a living witness shining in a still-dark place.

Basically, what we need is neither funds nor stuff, what we need is you--to come help in the work of being fishers of men.

Overlooked Parts of the Christmas Story

Merry Christmas from Taiwan!

As I teach the Christmas story repeatedly over these weeks, some bits of the story that are often overlooked or misinterpreted based on popular art and tradition rise to the surface. Here are some of them which you may find interesting. Most of this can be found in other articles being circulated, but I thought it would be nice to have it all together in one post.

1. Why was there no room for Mary and Joseph?

It wasn't just a busy night in Bethlehem and Barliman ben Butterbur happened to be all full up at the Prancing Pony--Mary and Joseph weren't the only ones who had to go back to their hometown for the census. The place was packed with travelers, and there would have been other members of Joseph's extended family traveling back to Bethlehem too, since that was their ancestral hometown as well. 

There's no indication from Luke that Mary was in labor as they arrived and Joseph was running around in desperation knocking on doors; it simply says that while they were there (i.e. had already arrived) the time came for Jesus to be born. (Luke 2:6) So the scenario described is less suitable for a dramatic scene in a film, but much more true to life, with the young couple arriving in town with Mary pregnant, yet finding it so crowded due to the large influx of census-takers that they couldn't have their own room and had to make do with a secondary space.

"No room" means no room of their own, then, and not "no units available for rent," since 1) that's based on a medieval idea of inns and is probably the wrong translation of the Greek for such inns as existed at the time:

2. Not an Inn, nor an isolated Stable in a Cave

As is becoming more common knowledge, the famous "no room at the inn" line is not the best translation, and the Greek word used probably refers instead to the guestroom of a family home. 

Some evidence in support of this would be 1) Mary and Joseph didn't have the money for something like an inn for traveling merchants (as evidenced by the fact that they had to use a pair of birds for the dedication sacrifice for Jesus instead of a lamb, only allowed when one is very poor), and 2), given the circumstances and the culture of the time (and lack of phones or internet or effective postal system to let someone know you are coming, it must be remembered), it's much more likely they have first gone to find and try to stay with Joseph's family in Bethlehem. (Some have suggested at that time it was more or less a cultural obligation for them to do so)

With the place packed out with incoming family, however (who would likely have gotten there first before Joseph and very pregnant Mary coming in from up north), there was no room in the house's little guest room for Mary to have a baby, so they moved to the front area of the main room, where the ladies could help Mary. In the cramped and intimate quarters of a 1st century Jewish home, animals often sheltered inside the house in an area by the door, and a stone manger with soft straw would be a secure place to lay a baby to keep him out from under the rest of the family packed into a small house.

A good chart which shows how things might have looked,
obtained from this article which has a good quick rundown
on the reasons why Jesus wasn't born in a roadside inn
or a stable full of animals away from other people.

For more information, see this really good article, which brings up both the Greek translation issues and also the humorous reminder that, at very least, had a bunch of Jewish shepherds found Mary and Joseph in a stable by themselves with a newborn infant, they would have been horrified and insisted the three come back with them so their wives could care for Mary and the baby.

The manger situation was probably about like this.
A secure stone trough in a nook by the front entrance.

3. A Lengthy Stay in Bethlehem?

Mary and Joseph didn't go back up to Nazareth until Mary was ceremonially clean again after 40 days, and they had done the dedication offering for Jesus at the Jerusalem temple, and Luke 2 mentions that only after visiting the temple do they head back north to Nazareth in Galilee. So they must have stayed around Bethlehem for at least 6 weeks.*

This is yet another piece of evidence that they stayed with family, as either being stuck in a stable with a newborn for several weeks or trying to pay for a room in an inn for that long (plus food, etc.) would be highly problematic for the poor young couple.

*- On the other hand, based on the account of the Magi visit in Matthew 2, it can be argued that the flight to Egypt may have occurred very soon after Jesus' birth. That would mean that the time in between Jesus' birth and settling back in Nazareth again after the temple visit would largely have been spent in Egypt instead. (We'll look into this below)

4. Simeon and Anna

Why does the Bible especially mention how old Simeon and Anna were? The two aged prophets at the temple, who rejoiced to see the birth of the Messiah, were old enough to have lived in Pre-Roman Israel. After the Maccabean revolt, Israel was its own nation again for a few generations, until Rome finished defeating/absorbing the old Seleucid Empire (previous rulers of Israel, whose desecration of the Jewish temple led to the revolt and subsequent cleansing of the Jerusalem temple which Hanukkah celebrates).

Thus, for over 100 years between kicking out the Hellenistic Seleucids and being brought into the Roman Empire, Israel was autonomous and ruled by an Israelite king. Both Simeon and Anna grew up in the last days of this temporarily restored Kingdom of Israel, so the idea of their waiting for the consolation of Israel (Simeon)/redemption of Jerusalem (Anna), and God's promise to Simeon that he would not die until he saw the Messiah, the true King who would reign on David's throne, is especially meaningful. They had seen a glimpse of Israel restored, only to be subjugated yet again by a foreign power. They longed for the coming of the Messiah who would bring political and spiritual restoration.

Aslan has come, winter will soon be over.

5. Magi/Wise Men/Three Kings: Not there with the Shepherds, But also not 2 years later?

It's clear that the Wise Men or Magi are not identified by Matthew as kings, but the Greek term used refers to something more like royal alchemists/astrologers. Matthew never says there were three, and they certainly didn't set off across the desert by themselves on camels, but would have been at least a small caravan, probably a rather large one. They must have been at last somewhat impressive because they got to speak directly to King Herod, who was willing to enlist the help of scribes and priests to answer their question.

One theory of their arrival time suggests that they were probably not there on the night Jesus was born, nativity scenes notwithstanding, but became aware of it due to "his star at its rising" and made a long trip to Israel to come pay their respects, arriving when Jesus was around or less than 2 years old, basing this off of Matt 2:16.

One major problem with this view when investigated carefully is that the Magi do indeed find Jesus in Bethlehem, but we know from Luke that his family returned to Nazareth after Mary was ceremonially clean again, about 6 weeks after Jesus' birth. However, the text of Matthew 2 is not written in such a way to suggest that the Magi went to Bethlehem, then the star led them up north to Nazareth instead.

Note that scripture doesn't directly say how old Christ was; it's possible the star/sign appeared early, and part or nearly all of the journey was made before He was born. Matthew does specifically mention that Herod specifies children 2 years old to be eliminated, and does this based on the time he had ascertained from the Magi. So what we know is that Herod believes the Magi to be searching for a very young child or baby in a village with a few hundred people. (WF Albright estimated around 300 people, I don't know if he allowed for an influx due to the census) In this context it's unlikely that 2 years was a precise estimate, but was based on the Magi's inability to be sure of the age of the child they would find, only their knowledge of how long they'd been aware of the star.

One objection to the baby Jesus - Magi view is that Matthew says He was already in a house, not an inn or stable. However as we have seen above, the strongest evidence is that Jesus was born in the house of some relatives of Joseph, in the side area were animals were kept, because there was no place for them in the room for guests. So this is not actually a problem but perfectly in line with what the evidence suggests.

There is also the Flight to Egypt to consider. When did it occur in the context of these other events?

One view I saw reconciled the timeline by having the Magi arrive very soon after Jesus is born, then Joseph being warned in the dream and the family fleeing to Egypt after leave. They are in Egypt for a month before Herod dies (as others have suggested, the gifts of the Magi arrive just in time to finance this excursion), and go to Jerusalem to present Jesus at the temple after returning from Egypt. Luke, with a different focus, in 2:39 simply tells us that they return to Nazareth after this, while Matthew 2:22-23 explains more about Joseph's motivation for doing so.

Another possibility which allows for the young Jesus - Magi view would be that after Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the family stayed until it was time to visit the temple and after that went to Nazareth. Back in Bethlehem a couple years later for whatever reason, perhaps visiting the same relatives, the Magi are led to them, and they then flee to Egypt until Herod dies, returning back to Nazareth much later than planned with a very interesting story of why they were gone so long. This requires positing a subsequent visit from Nazareth to Bethlehem which coincides exactly with the Magi visit, something Matthew doesn't seem to indicate, but it would explain why Luke doesn't bother including the Magi-Egypt story between the birth and temple visit, as the entire incident happened later and Luke is focused on the future important temple visit when Jesus is 12 instead.

 (For more on the Magi, here is an article about the history of the Magi as a religious/political order, and how it may have been Daniel's prominence in Babylon that brought Hebrew prophecy to their attention. Some of it is just speculation, but the background information is interesting)

It's likely the Magi were from Parthia. A rowdy bunch.
When not perfecting their horse archery, their Magi were
inventing primitive DC batteries to achieve gold electroplating,
giving rise to the legends of alchemy and gold transmutation
which their European counterparts later tried to re-achieve

6. The Star: A long-term, non-obvious, and highly specific astronomical phenomenon

What exactly was the star that the Magi saw has been the subject of much speculation, but it must have been an astronomical phenomenon that the Eastern star-gazers noticed and saw significance in, yet not so locally obvious that hordes of people descended upon Bethlehem to see what was going on. It was clearly nothing like artistic depictions of a massive "Christmas star," since if a natural phenomenon it would be a supernova of unprecedented magnitude, frying the earth dead with gamma rays, and if supernatural and that obvious, Herod wouldn't have needed to resort to ruthless measures to find the child Messiah, as half of Jerusalem would have turned up wondering why a glowing orb was illuminating that specific house.

Matthew does say that the star that they had seen when it rose (at the beginning of their journey, Matt 2:1-2) later went before them to the house where Jesus was, once they were already in Israel (Matt 2:7-11). It is difficult to imagine what kind of astronomical phenomenon can be described as a star that rises, yet can also come to rest over a specific house, to their great joy and rejoicing. 

The imagination can provide all sorts of images without any way of verifying them scripturally. The trouble with these kinds of images is that they substitute a non-scriptural picture for one that simply doesn't exist, since we lack the information to do anything but speculate:

A group of foreign magi and their retinue, bearing scrolls with the writings of Daniel, one of their honored predecessors, arrive in a splendid caravan coming down the mountain from Jerusalem, after Herod's response from the chief priests and scribes indicates Bethlehem is the right place. They turn west off the main road, as people gawk at their passing. It is evening, and the sun has begun to set. Very familiar with the movements of stars in the night sky, they can see the star they have followed from the East for so many nights, as it drops from higher in the sky, barely visible, toward the dimly illuminated and rapidly darkening horizon. They follow it into the village, and the star becomes increasingly visible as it drops in the sky, nearing the roofs of the low houses clustered together. Feeling they are near the culmination of their quest, one magus dismounts, the others joining him, and they leave the bulk of their caravan behind them, going down the narrow, dirty street on foot. The star is directly ahead of them now, and does not move to either side as they continue on, but remains twinkling steadily over one house at the end of the lane. From the darkness within the small dwelling, the light of a solitary lamp escapes from the doorway. As they draw so near that from their point of view the star seems to descend and touch the roof, among murmuring voices inside they suddenly hear the cry of a baby...

This could be a bit like what happened, or totally off, but at least, let's know to what extent the pictures and popular traditions we have inherited through many ages of artistic license adhere to the truth of God's word. A careful investigation of the birth of Christ is a great way to honor Him in this season when we celebrate His birth, the Divine invasion, the beginning of the final defeat of evil and the restoration of our relationship to God.

By His Grace, and until His Coming, Merry Christmas!

Do you have any more interesting observations or information on the account of Jesus' birth? Did I leave anything out in comparing the Baby Jesus vs. Young Jesus Magi visit theories? Leave me a comment below and let me know!