In the Past 7 Days

In the past seven days, I have spent...

59 hours in the air or in airports or traveling
48 hours in Santiago, Chile
44 hours in Austin, Texas
and 5 hours in Honolulu Hawaii

Or you could put it like this...

7 airplanes
1 missed plane
3 free beers
5 bitchy American Airline Stewardesses (oh my gosh, they are the meanest!)
5 security check points
5 movies on a plane (a miley cyrus movie, a chipmonk movie, Taxi with Queen Latifa, 500 Days of Summer and Old Dogs)
4 airplane meals (5 actually but i declined one cause you had to pay for it - gah!)
4 languages (English, Spanish, Hawaiian, Filipino)

In addition, to...

3 preached sermons
4 worship services attended (including the one in the airport chapel)
and 1/2 the Eucharist consumed (I got those Catholics by taking communion anonymously despite their preface of "those belonging to the holy Catholic church may partake..." but they got me by only offering the body. No blood (or wine) in airports i guess.)

But now, I'm on vacation. In Hawaii. On Lanai. So no more numbers, k?



Except maybe four happy people...

Don't Ask...

A Recap of Chile in Don't Ask sentences...

Don't ask if i wore long underwear to bed and also fuzzy socks and a hat and gloves. Because you know I did.

Don't ask if Chile has central air/heat because you know it doesn't.

Don't ask if the apartment I stayed in had hot water, because as luck would have it, it didn't.

Don't ask if I showered. Just thank God I'm a pseudo-hippie.

Don't ask if I just HAD to wash my hair at some point, and stood (after dragging the heater into the small bathroom), naked in the bathtub and washed my hair under the faucet, sucking in my breath, as I felt brain freeze (like one you get from eating ice cream too fast) - brain freeze, from the outside in and all over my head.

Don't ask how much weight I gained since all they eat in Chile is sugar, tea and bread because you know there were no veggies or fruit offered the whole time I was there.

Don't ask if I flew on more airplanes (4) than actual days I spent in Chile (2).

Don't ask if the people there believe women can be ministers and pastors.

However...

You may ask the following questions... Did the pastor accept you finally, after you preached your first sermon? Ask if he prayed for me and thanked God for me and even admitted to eating his own words as this female pastor who made such a sacrifice to come to Chile brought to them a word from God.

You may ask if the Holy Spirit communicated to the people even though I spoke in English and Raquel, my translator, spoke in Spanish. You may ask if as we spoke on top of one another, the people understood us anyway to the point that one woman came up afterwards and hadn't even realized I (the North American) hadn't been speaking Spanish.

You may ask if as the pastor (who doesn't believe woman should be pastors) prayed for me, if someone behind me put their hand on my shoulder and if in laying hands, he or she brought the Spirit of Peace upon me. You may ask if it called to mind every other time I've felt the Spirit of Peace come upon me through the hand of a compassionate soul.

You may ask if people came up to speak to me afterwards in fluent Spanish, chattering along as if I could understand even though I said, "no comprendo," over and over again. Likewise you may ask if some Chilean woman thought I was a youth that Raquel had brought in to preach and if she tried to hook me up with her teenage son. And you may ask if I unknowingly agreed to come preach at a youth conference for a church when the man was going on and on in Spanish despite my no comprendo smile and empty eyes.

You may ask if it was a blessing. You may ask if God went with me. And you may ask if I'd do it again.

And I would answer... "In a heartbeat."

Chilean Children Minister's Conference Sermon 3

A year ago last May I was here in Chile on a mission trip.

After making connections with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship in North America and meeting Raquel from UBACH, I and 11 students and one translator flew into Santiago and then on to Temuco to work at the Fundacion Para Amar, a home for girls who have been court-ordered removed from their homes for reasons of extreme poverty or abuse.

I planned this mission trip for my own students, college kids, most of whom had never before been overseas, because I wanted them to learn the importance of serving those who are less fortunate than they.

And also because I wanted them to experience another culture and another climate (and some of them were not too happy I brought them to Chile in the winter when it was cold!).

I brought them to Chile because I knew it would change the way they see the world and change the way they see God.

Indeed, after our work at the girls’ home, I overheard one of my students say to another student on the plane on the flight back to the United States, “My Major is Childhood Education, but after being with the girls in Temuco, I may add Social Work as a Minor.”

And lives were changed.

For the past year, we have written to the girls in Temuco and they too have written to us. With me on this trip I brought money that our translator wanted to have delivered to the home as a financial donation and I brought a gift for one of the girls that I became friends with. The background of my computer screen is the group picture we took of all my students and all the girls and the workers in the home. I have two framed pictures in my home of me with the girls. It breaks my heart that I do not have time on this short trip to fly down to Temuco and see my darling girls and the Tias who work with them again. I miss them so!

And it breaks my heart that such beautiful children of God could be abandoned or abused or neglected by their parents.

So for this final sermon today, I want to talk in part, about parenthood.

Ministering to children and youth is important, but it is equally important to minister to their parents. We must look at families wholistically.

Parenting is hard work!

Last week I had a Sunday School party at my home for a class of parents with young children. When I told them I was coming down here to spend time with you at this conference, they said, “Tell them raising children is hard and the parents need to be ministered to too!”

In a staff meeting at my church the other day, we were reading the Bible and the subject of infertility came up.

We began talking about married couples in our church who have struggled with issues of infertility and the names just kept coming.

Issues of infertility or miscarriages among couples is a secret pain that many couples bear alone because it is rarely addressed or ministered to in the United States.

And yet issues of infertility affect over 6 million people in the United States and I can’t imagine the number of people worldwide.

The loss of motherhood is a deep seeded grief among many women that we as ministers and servants of the Gospel must be sensitive to. It is often a hidden pain that does not need to be suffered alone. Rather, we need to help our parents by creating an environment where it is safe to talk about their stories of infertility. And in doing so, we need to connect people so that in community they can feel love and not have to grieve alone.

In addition to infertility, the challenge of parenting of a new infant brings its own complications and fears as parents’ lives change and they learn to live with a different schedule and to act in a different role. There is a new financial strain on young families as well and they must learn to manage their money differently.

As children get older, it becomes even more challenging as parents make decisions regarding technology for their children and cell phones and facebook and internet use and movies that are appropriate to see.

Just last week I read an article in the paper on “sexting” where children in some cases are harassed and in other cases willingly participate in texting sexually explicit phrases and pictures to one another. The article discussed the role of the schools in disciplining children for after-hour cell phone use and the sexual bullying of young girls that often results.

But I would ask, what is the role of the church? How can we help parents teach and protect their children?

And when those children become teenagers, and they begin experimenting with drugs and sex, how can we help parents grieve their children’s loss of innocence and support them in educating their children on the dangers of certain behavior and the potential consequences of their actions?

I’m embarrassed to tell you the United States has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the industrialized world. The Center for Disease control says that one-third of girls in the US get pregnant before the age of 20. Teenpregnancy.org states that there are "750,000 teen pregnancies annually. Eight in ten of these pregnancies are unintended and 81 percent are to unmarried teens."

According to an article written in 2007 about teen pregnancy in Chile, the global rate of teen pregnancy is projected that out of 1000 female teenagers 53 will become pregnant, and the rate for Latin America and the Caribbean at 76 out of every 1,000 girls.

We must teach our teens to respect their bodies, practice safe sex and engage in healthy age-appropriate relationships, and we must help our parents to instill these values in their children. And for those teens who do get pregnant, we must help them and their parents make wise decisions about keeping the baby or adoption options, and above all we must provide support for the young girl and the boy who may now be parents themselves.

And finally, even with older parents, they still need the church. How can we help parents who are experiencing what we call in the U.S. “empty nest syndrome?” When two people have spent 18 years functioning in one capacity as parent to a child and all of the sudden the child is out of the house and off at school, how do we help parents transition into the next phase of their lives?

Ministering to children and youth is not just about the kids, it’s about the parents too. Creating a vision of ministering to children changes the way we do programming entirely and it even changes the way we think as a church.

I was speaking to a man yesterday whose church is in the reconstruction phase after the earthquake destroyed their building. And he said he realized that the church has not purchased anything yet for the children. To him and his church I would say, it’s not too late!

And part of why it’s not too late is because ministering to children, youth and their families is first of all a mindset, a shift in vision, a re-focusing of our theology. If the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these, then it is time that we begin teaching them, so that they may in turn teach us.

You may feel overwhelmed by what you have heard at this conference. There are resources and testimonies of what people are doing in other churches. So I would say to you, start small. If you have Sunday school for children, that’s a good place to begin. Now move forward. Make sure you are teaching the Bible to children in a way they can understand that matches their brain development stages. When that is strong, add something else. Maybe provide worksheets for children to work on during the worship service. Or maybe add a special point in your service designed just for children where you sing a song they like or maybe your pastor gives a short children’s sermon. Baby steps. (Pun intended).

But before you worry about programming you must make sure that we have an attitude change. We must value children and youth as members of our spiritual community. We must recognize that Christ valued children. He wanted them near him, he wanted to teach them and he wanted to heal them.

So too must our ministries be wholistic. A child who is hungry and hasn’t had breakfast or lunch cannot hear from his teacher at school how to practice division in mathematics. Similarly, a child in poverty who is hungry and hasn’t eaten all day cannot hear about God’s love. We must meet the children’s needs both spiritually, physically and emotionally.

We need an attitude change. We must recognize that children have many things to teach us about God and if they are given the tools to think about God and re-imagine the biblical stories, then indeed they will teach us about God.

When I was at the Fundacion Para Amar in Temuco last year, the first night we were there the director of the home asked the girls if they would like to say anything to the North Americans who came to visit before we said grace and began our evening meal. Predictably, the 18 year old in the group, offered a gracious welcome to us. She’s been at the home over 14 years and while she is old enough to leave the home, she chooses to stay and live there while she goes to college. Her name is Karen and she wants to be a teacher. Awesome. We nodded our appreciations to her and smiled and began to sit down to eat with another voice piped up. A seven-year-old girl Maria, raised her hand and said she would like to say something. And as her words were being translated from Spanish into English, I realized that this small child was welcoming us, twelve adults from the United States whom she didn’t even yet know, into her home and to her table. Amazing.

Several days later we visited a large private school in Temuco started by missionaries from the United States a hundred years ago. The students there, kindergarteners through seniors in high school, wore uniforms and spoke of going to college to study to be doctors and teachers and directors and engineers. The difference in financial advantage and privilege between the private school and the children’s home was overwhelming. “Next time you come to Chile,” the director of the school told us when she found out where we had come to serve, “you should come work with us.”

“No,” I thought, no. Next time I come, I will go back to the home of the girls whose families don’t want them, who have a much lower chance of breaking free of the chain of poverty and abuse and teen pregnancy. I will go back to where little Maria, despite all her misfortune knew the love of God and neighbor well enough to speak before forty people and solemnly and earnestly welcome them to her humble home.

The people who worked at the children’s home knew that they needed to do two things, take care of the neglected children – feed them, clothe them and give them shelter, and they also needed to tell them about God’s love.

We must do the same thing. We must teach our children and youth about God’s love and in turn be taught by them!

In Luke 10:25-37 we read the story of the Good Samaritan and I’m guessing that most of you are familiar with that story. We know that it was an enemy of the Jews who ended up helping the beaten man lying on the side of the road. And we translate that into our modern cultures. For us it the United States perhaps it is an Iraqi who came to the aid of the beaten American man. Or perhaps it is a Muslim who came to help the beaten Christian lying in the road.

But what if it doesn’t have to be an enemy who comes to our aid. What if it is anyone we consider an “outsider.” We have lots of good ways of making people out to be different, to be other, to be apart from us, to be an outsider.

So what if the person who came to help the Jewish man lying on the side of the road was a child?

Jesus is always asking us to re-evaluate the way we understand God’s love and mercy. Jesus is always asking us to re-draw the lines around our circles so that they are big enough to include a Samaritan, big enough to include children. Jesus asks the disciples and the Pharisees and the people crowded around him to change the way they think about life and culture and God time and time again.

Be transformed, Paul says, by the renewing of your minds. Paul merely writes what Jesus already asks of us. And just when we think we’ve got this whole church things down, he asks us to rethink it again.

And today God’s asking you to rethink your theology about children, youth and their parents. It has been a wonderful weekend. You’ve heard many things and I have too thanks to Raquel. And now it is time for you to return to your churches and you have the choice… You have the choice to challenge them to re-think what they have always thought about ministering to children, youth and their families or you have the choice to leave what you’ve heard here in the seminary at Santiago.

The choice is yours. Choose wisely. Choose children.

Chilean Children Minister's Conference Sermon 2

In a book called Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church by Kendra Creasy Dean, she describes the primary God-images that kids have as either a “cosmic therapist” or a “divine butler.”

“The therapist serves as the one who helps you feel good about yourself; the school guidance counselor image comes to mind here when working with teenagers. The divine butler is somebody who comes when called upon but otherwise stays away. Those images were identified in the study as being dominant among teenagers… it's a very acculturated and self-serving view of religious faith,” Dean says, and I agree.

So if this is the view of God that our teenagers have today, what do we need to do to remedy this faulty assumption?

We need to tell them some more stories.

We need to tell them the story of Jonah whose self-righteousness was not in line with God’s vision for the world. But addicted to his pride and his determination to keep God’s forgiveness to his own people, Jonah tried to run away from God (as if we could run away from God). But no matter where Jonah (or us for that matter), no matter where we run, God is always with us, even if we get ourselves into so much trouble that we’re stuck inside the belly of a great fish.

We need to tell teenagers that God’s love is for everyone, even their enemies, even them, and that God has the ability to help them move from the belly of a fish to the sands of a far away kingdom. We need to tell them that Jonah finally swallowed his pride (only after being swallowed by a fish!) and told God’s story of forgiveness and love to the Ninavites. And that even the Ninevites, Jonah’s enemy were able to become people of God, people of love.

We need to tell them the story of Amos. We need to tell our teenagers that, just like the Israelites, they are called to serve one another. If all they do is eat empanadas and text on their telephones and draw in their diaries, then God is not satisfied. They too, as teenagers, are called to love their neighbors, and if they leave their neighbors hungry and sad and in need, then they are not being who they need to be.

We need to tell them how Amos warned the people that if they didn’t allow their hearts to be softened toward their neighbors, if they didn’t share their food and share their clothing and share their love, God would give them over to oppression. And we must tell them how the Babylonians came in and conquered Israel and God let that happen because the Israelites were so focused on themselves. And while probably no country is going to come in and conquer Chile, the unhealthy things that we do have the same ability to make us slaves. We become slaves to our egos and slaves to our jobs, and slaves to schoolwork, and slaves to fashion and slaves to alcohol and slaves to exercising and slaves to sports teams and slaves to anything in our lives that we pay so much attention to that we forget to share our wealth with the people around us.

We must tell our youth the story of Amos and the story of a God who will not always save us from our own destruction for our actions have natural consequences, but a God calls us to serve the poor and the needy.

We must tell our youth the story of the Woman at the Well.

We must tell them how when Jesus saw her, he had compassion for her even though his culture taught him that he should never talk to a woman or a poor person or a Samaritan because people like that were beneath him. We must tell them how Jesus broke down barriers: he broke social barriers, and religious barriers and economic barriers and racial barriers to meet this woman where she was. We must tell them how Jesus loved the woman at the well just as she was, knowing that she had already had five husbands, and knowing that she had a bad reputation. We must tell them how he shared with her a living water that could make her clean and wash away her sin and give her the strength to tell God’s story to the people all around her. Even people who normally condemned her.

We must tell them how we too, after an encounter with Jesus, the living God, can be forgiven, can speak truth to our neighbors, can change our ways. We must tell them that like Jesus, we too can break down superficial barriers of social status and race, religion, age, gender and anything else that keeps us apart so that we can live in harmony side by side as one people under God.

We must tell our teenagers that God is a God of surprises. Wonderful Surprises. God is not Old Man Christmas (Viejo Pascuero) or a butler we call on when we need something.

God is a God who surprises us by loving the outcast, by empowering the weak, and by saving our enemies. And God is a God who asks us to live similarly.

God is a God who surprises us by showing up in very ordinary places: in a bush, in a fish, at a well, in a dream, at a dinner table, but when God appears, it is always an extraordinary experience.

God is a God of mystery whose name is I Am What I Am. No one can understand God’s ways except to say that God’s way is mysterious love.

God is called Lady Wisdom who existed when the world was first called into being and who still blows over creation wherever She wants to blow.

God is called the Word, the Logos, the Truth, the Christ, the Messiah who existed as God incarnate even before there was incarnation.

God is a God who can’t be named, let alone named something as trivial as “therapist” or “butler.”

These are the things we must teach our youth so that they do not learn a false view of God. So that who they worship, or rather don’t bother worshipping, is not a false idol of deism or a self-help book or a self-serving God called the ego.

“It's the church's responsibility to embody vibrant missional communities of faith that are able to tell their story as well as ‘be’ their story in the world,” writes Deborah Arca Mooney after reading Dean’s book, Almost Christian. And she’s right. It’s our responsibility as ministers and volunteers for youth to counter the story our culture is telling them. It is our responsibility to tell teenagers the truth about God.

Now, ministering to children another story. ☺

Besides the fact that they pull each other’s hair and bite and throw their food and spill their drinks, and forget to use the bathroom and rip holes in their clothing and stink up a room and break their arms and get into fights and throw temper tantrums, and besides the fact that they have a lung capacity comparable to an elephant… ☺

Besides all that, it’s difficult to take a book that is between 1,900 and 2,800 years old and translate it for children.

After all, we wouldn’t take literary works by Plato or Andres Bello and give them to an eight year old to read.

So how do we tell God’s story to children?

Children’s bedrooms and books are filled with images of Noah’s arc and the animals entering two by two and pictures of doves and rainbows. But how do we tell the story of Noah and the fuzzy animals with integrity? How do we tell the story of a God who gets angry and kills everyone except one family, drowning the world under two months of rain only to regret doing so 40 days later? How can we maintain integrity with regard to the biblical text of what actually happened while at the same time communicate carefully with a small child?

Do we skip the Noah story and move on to a nicer one?

How about the story of Jesus, a very nice man whom lots of people loved but whom lots of other people hated and then had publicly executed though they could find no fault in him?

It’s tricky.

How do we tell the often-gruesome stories in the Bible to children? How do we tell the story of Goliath and prevent our kids from throwing rocks at one another on the playground?

There must be a balance. There must be a balance between teaching what the Bible literally says and communicating a story to a child who cannot yet think theoretically or abstractly or on higher cognitive levels.

Often times it may be more challenging to write a children’s sermon than it is to write a sermon for adults!

But it is a good exercise, even for those of us who don’t minister directly with children, because it helps us get to the heart of the story.

Let’s start with the 10 commandments. How do we teach the Ten Commandments to children without getting into complicated discussions about adultery and murder? How can we help children find ways of understanding the real message of the 10 commandments in language that is relevant to them?

I learned the following 10 Commandments from the kids at my church this past year.
1. There is only 1 God (hold up one finger)
2. Only worship God (bend two fingers as a bow)
3. Don’t use God’s name in a bad way (three fingers to lips)
4. Sunday is a special day (chapel with fingers)
5. Respect Mom and Dad (high five)
6. Don’t hurt others (poke one hand with one finger)
7. Keep your marriage promises (2 for parents and 5 for family)
8. Don’t steal (5 fingers on one hand 4 on the other, bump it to 4 & 4)
9. Tell the truth (I have 10 fingers! Tell the truth, you only have 9.)
10. Be content (hold hands out, palms up in open prayer pose)

Using new language for this Exodus text and thinking about it in a new way makes a lot of sense for a kid, and when we put hand motions with it, it helps them remember even more easily. And in this special way, they not only begin to understand the heart of the text as opposed to saying, “thou shalt not covet or worship heathen idols…” but they’re memorizing scripture too!

Every year at my church the 10 and 11 year old students lead on Sunday morning in worship. And when I say lead, I mean lead. They do everything! They plan the service, pick the songs to sing, their choirs perform, they deliver the welcome, read scripture, pray and even preach! The children preach!

This year they talked about the story of David and Goliath. They talked about giant things in their own lives that they are afraid of – big problems they weren’t sure they could overcome – bullies, peer pressure, being sad about a parents divorce, things like that.

Only instead of using stones to kill Goliath like David did, we now have better methods of overcoming giant things. We have the Sermon on the Mount and the Fruit of the Spirit.

So each child who helped in worship that day found a smooth stone either in their driveway or on the playground and they each chose a fruit of the Spirit that they would use to overcome that problem in their lives. And they wrote that fruit… forgiveness, patience, self-control… on their smooth stone with a permanent marker to remind themselves of the tools they have to fight the giants in their lives.

I think as adults our congregation learned as much from that lesson as the kids did who were presenting it! Children and Youth have a fresh way of seeing life that as adults we need to learn from.

Often we get so weighed down by schedules and bills to pay and children to pick up and food to prepare that we forget to see life through the eyes of a child. We forget to find the balance.

Even with scripture, we become preoccupied with details of a text, or whether the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are the same God, or whether or not we are Baptist or Presbyterian or Catholic, and we forget to live life abundantly. We forget to read scripture through the eyes of a child.

Children are not naïve nor do they see the text through colored glasses, children know, perhaps just as well as adults that the world is a scary and painful place. But when the basic principles of the Biblical stories are applied to their lives, principles like the tenth commandment: be content, or principles like the eighth fruit of the Spirit: be gentle, then life can be enjoyed and can be lived abundantly!

It is our responsibility to model a life lived abundantly.

It is our responsibility to teach children to choose to live their lives under God’s principles of Love.

It’s our responsibility as ministers and volunteers for youth and children to counter the story our culture is telling them. It is our responsibility to tell them the truth about God.

And the truth is that God is so far beyond their imaginations and our imaginations, that we would do well to take off our shoes and never put them back on.

For this is holy ground that we are walking on. And it’s a wholly different story we have to tell…

Chilean Children Minister's Conference Sermon 1

I. Children and the Church

In May, I attended a preaching conference where we spent most of the day listening to different sermons or lectures. It was a fantastic experience for me. One particular sermon struck me, and I think what it said bears relevance to you as well.

The preacher, Thomas Long, opened his Bible and turned to Luke. He read us the passage from Luke 2 where Joseph and Mary take Jesus to the Temple for purification purposes eight days after his birth.

As you may remember, Both Simeon and Anna were there in the Temple that day awaiting a Messiah that they were sure would come at some point in their lifetimes. Simeon and Anna were old. They had probably had many expectations in their lives but there was still one more left to be fulfilled: seeing the Messiah.

And so when Mary and Joseph arrived at the Temple that day with the baby Jesus, Simeon, who had been told by the Holy Spirit that he would see the child before he died, was waiting. Simeon took Jesus in his arms and thanked God for the revelation the world was about to receive, and he warned Jesus’ parents about the hardships that would come.

In addition, there was a prophet there at the Temple, a woman named Anna who stayed in the Temple day and night. And when Prophetess Anna saw the child, she too began to praise God and preach to those in the Temple that the One who would redeem Israel had come.

After reading the passage, the preacher, Dr. Long, looked at us and said, “That’s all we know about Simeon and Anna. They never appear in the story again.”

And then Dr. Long said, “The Gospel Writer Luke gathers a table of the elderly, but after Luke chapter two, we never see the old people again. Simeon and Anna are gone. They hand the gospel over to 20 year olds.”

And that, in part, is why you are all here today. You are here because you are teaching, molding, mentoring and encouraging the people to whom we Christians in our thirties, our fifties, our seventies and beyond must hand over the Gospel of Christ.

It’s a scary thought.

But it is an important concept.

Dr. Long continued by saying that he used to think that the hardest part of life was standing up for his faith – but standing up for your faith just means you have to believe you’re right. Rather, he said, to lean into your faith and let go, that means believing in God. Leaning into your faith and letting go means believing in a God who owns the future!

The future of Christianity, the future of God’s Kingdom here on earth, lies with the children and youth with whom you and I currently work.

So we need to have a greater emphasis in our churches to share God’s love with children and youth and also their parents – the people who are their primary caregivers and role models.

If our children do not hear about God’s wide mercy, about Christ’s vast compassion, about the Holy Spirit’s comfort from us, then to whom or to what will they turn to find mercy, compassion, and comfort?

In the U.S., as I’m sure is the case here in Chile, more and more children, not just teenagers, but children, are turning to alcohol and drugs to both define themselves and to seek solace from a difficult world. Using drugs helps them make a statement to their peers about who they are and drugs help them escape the pain they feel.

But what if instead they defined themselves as Children of the Living God? What if instead they sought solace in the “peace of Christ which surpasses all understanding?”

If you minister to children, youth and their families, then your role in God’s church is critical!

Indeed, your role in society is critical!

I’m sure you have heard of the new communication program on the Internet called Skype. To use Skype, you need a computer with a camera on it and access to the Internet. And once you have these two things, you can speak – practically in person – to any person who also has those same two things.

Skype is free and works like a telephone except when you call the person on your computer, you can see (thanks to the camera on your computer and your computer screen) the other person! It’s like watching a video of someone except it’s not a video, it’s live and you’re communicating with him or her in person!

While I downloaded Skype several years ago so I could talk to my boyfriend at the time who lived in Morocco, the rest of my family has only recently discovered Skype. But since they have, now I can see and speak with my parents in Kansas City, Missouri, my sister in Chicago, Illinois, and my aunt in Honolulu, Hawaii even though I live in Austin, Texas!

My grandparents also downloaded Skype (with the help of my sister) onto their computer. So one day, my aunt who lives in Hawaii took her computer over to my great-aunt’s house and hooked it up. That day my aunt and great-aunt skyped from Hawaii my grandparents in Missouri. And when my grandpa sat down in front of the computer and saw his sister for the first time in over eight years, he began to cry.

“I never thought I’d see my sister again,” he told my grandma, and together, the four of them talked on Skype for over an hour.

Families are important. They are, in most cases, the most important relationships we will ever have.

And as church leaders, we have the opportunity to help families learn about God. We have the awesome responsibility to tell them the biblical stories of families just like theirs – flawed and broken – who were loved by God anyway. We have the opportunity to help families learn what it takes to maintain healthy relationships. We have the chance to minister to parents who in turn can take better care of their children. We have the honor of molding the future as children and youth look to us for guidance and support.

In the musical theater production called Into the Woods written by Stephen Sondheim, at the end of the play, the main character sings a song called “Children Will Listen” in which she sings…

Careful the things you say,
Children will listen.
Careful the things you do,
Children will see.
And learn.

Children may not obey,
But children will listen.
Children will look to you
For which way to turn,
To learn what to be.

Careful before you say,
"Listen to me."
Children will listen.

“Let the little children come to me!” Jesus said when his disciples pushed the children out of the circle of conversation, out of the circle of healing.

We do the same thing though, don’t we? “Run and play, Mommy’s busy.” “You’re too young to understand.” “Sit down and shut up.”

We too, push children out of our way and out of our church services and out of our lives when we deny them the opportunity to worship God and experience God through community.

In Deuteronomy in the Old Testament and in the Gospels in the New Testament, God tells us about the greatest commandment: we are to love God and love our neighbor… and that includes children.

Let the little children come to me, Jesus said. The kingdom of God belongs to such as these.

What if, when Jesus said that, he wasn’t making a metaphor about us having innocent faith, a faith that believes whole-heartedly?

What if, when Jesus said the kingdom of God belongs to children, he meant it? What if, as Dr. Long suggests, the Gospel will be carried on through young people?

What if it’s time for us to get out of the way, and let them tell it?!

Chile Part Dos

I have no idea what day it is today, but on Wednesday, at 4:15pm, I kissed my dog and two cats good-bye and headed to the airport where I checked my suitcase and received for boarding passes that would take me to Dallas and then to Santiago, Chile.

One year later.

You may remember that in May of 2009, I boarded with 10 students and one translator to head to Temuco, Chile to work at the Fundacion Para Amar, a girls' home in Southern Chile.

One year later and I am preaching at a conference for children and youth workers in Santiago.

But first, I have to get through Dallas. And just as we missed our flight on the way home from Chile one year ago, so I missed my flight from Dallas to Santiago. Or rather, it missed me, and everyone else scheduled to board. So in a line long enough to hold a plane-ful of passengers, I finally got to the desk to discover the flight had been postponed until tomorrow morning.

"But I'm supposed to preach in Santiago tomorrow night!" I exclaimed hoping to win some sympathy points.

This is only after, upon seeing me, the startled woman behind the counter asked, "How old are you?!"
"32."
"Oh, oh, well, you look young. Sorry."
"No problem, you just confused me with an adolescent, but that's fine. I'll take it as a compliment if you can get me to Santiago faster than tomorrow night."

Alright, I didn't say that, but I thought it.

However, the woman didn't buy the minister card I played either. Sorry, she said. There was another flight we could have sent you on but it's already gone.

Helpful.

"Here's a hotel voucher and a voucher for dinner and breakfast, alcohol not included."

Well, what good is that gonna do me?

"No thank you," I replied. "Can I just get some extra miles or something?"

Of course, she wasn't authorized to give me that so I took the hotel vouchers and went to sit down.

There was no way I was going to sit by myself in a hotel room all night when I was in Dallas. So I called Cat and Josie. No answer from either. Oh God. Maybe I was going to sit in a hotel room in Dallas by myself. So I texted them, "call me ASAP." Surely that would work. It did. Cat returned my call.

"Hold on, let me put on some clothes, I'll come get you."

So Cat and I reunited in Dallas, ate some cheese sticks and salad (a little bit of comfort food, a little bit of good for you food) and went to her house. She just bought it a few months ago and it was great. Very spacious with tall ceilings. And I got to see Bridget for the first time in like 6 years! I used to dog-sit Bridget when we all lived in Waco when Cat was teaching school and I had to walk Bridget during my lunch hour. Sometimes I would take Olivia with me, the girl I often babysat. Good times. Then Cat and I watched a little bit of the House marathon on TV and both went to bed.

Less than five hours later, the alarm went off, I showered, re-put back on yesterdays clothes (no they would not give me my luggage back at the airport) and headed back to DFW.

We were supposed to leave at 8am. But at 8:10 the pilot came on and said there were mechanical difficulties. That figures. But we did finally take off and I arrived in Santiago only forty-five minutes after I thought I would (or rather 11 hours and 45 min after I thought I would) and Raquel was there to pick me up.

She's the President of UBACH, the Chilean Baptist organization. She arranged the children minister's conference and of course she had arranged my original trip to Chile the year before. So it was good to see her again.

We went straight to the seminary where the conference was held and after changing clothes in a bathroom and brushing my hair, we went into worship and 20 minutes later I was preaching and she was translating.

What a night.

And of course, after I finished preaching and we were gathering our things Raquel said, "I liked your sermon a lot but tomorrow it will have to be much longer."

Yikes! I'm not used to preaching for 40 minutes!

Afterwards, we went to dinner with her son and his girlfriend (I hadn't eaten since lunch on the plane) and that food was delicious. Some sort of pasta dish. And of course a pisco sour.

This morning I slept in, much later than I intended. But it's freezing here and I think subconsciously my body didn't want to come out from under the covers. I worked a little more on sermons two and three and then Raquel arrived and we went to another session of the conference.

Most of that consisted of me looking at people pretending to understand what they were saying, and Raquel occasionally translating. Lunch was good. Some sort of meat-free soup (yea!) which I had two bowls of and also a pasta alfredo dish with ham that was easy to eat around. And then some sort of raspberry yogurt pudding thing for dessert. That was all good considering all I'd been left for breakfast was hot tea and oreos... what?

So now it's the afternoon. I've finished the sermons and need to get them printed. Raquel is working on her computer in the little apartment I'm staying in at the seminary and when she's done we'll return to the conference.

Not much time for sightseeing, but hopefully on Saturday after my morning sermon is done.

Chile 09: Day Seven

Oh my gosh it's getting harder to remember everything. I wish I had written this all down earlier. But a month ago I was in Chile and I'm not done telling our story, so here goes.

Tuesday.

We woke up to find even fewer kids waiting to walk to school at 8am. The strike, remember? So we headed on to breakfast and on to our second full day of manual labor. It was pretty much the same, not enough tools, not enough heat and not enough sunshine. But we ploughed through. In the meantime we met Carlos.

Carlos is a badulaque. Or something. He was obsessed and I mean obsessed with this word. He would say the word to one of us and tell us to repeat it (he'd been in the military so he knew English pretty well) and then when we did he would laugh and laugh at himself or us or the word or I'm not sure really what. Apparently badulaque means jokester. And Carlos was one. But he was also a devout Christian. He grilled both Glenn and me and separate times about whether we were called. Called. CALLED to the ministry. "YES! God. Get off my back Carlos, I'm doing my best," I wanted to say to him, but I just smiled sweetly and said, "Yes Carlos, I am called to the ministry." Like the Tias, he was impressed that I'd been to seminary but I could tell he was skeptical. With Glenn he prayed for discernment and teared up, sharing his story of how God had called him to work at this home and be a Tio to these children even if only as a janitor. Carlos would sing songs in the hallway and always wanted to sing a duet with Elizabeth or me. Or he would sing a verse and then tell Esteban to translate it. Then he'd sing another.



(that's Carlos on the edge of the picture... I'm trying to find a better one of him)

In addition, Carlos had a wife (though you would have never guessed it the way he carried on with me and some of the other girls) who made organic vegetarian dishes. And after Viviana cornered me one day and demanded to know how many vegetarians we had in our group since they'd noticed us passing the food off to other people, several of us got to try her veggie dishes. They were a welcome alternative to horse...

Tuesday afternoon we (North Americans) gave a presentation on us. Or the U.S.... depends on how you look at it. The home asked us to tell about ourselves so most of my students brought pictures or small memorabilia of our families or where we live or where we go to school. So Meredith talked about D.C., Katherine talked about Louisiana and Mardi Gras., Molly presented on Colorado. The rest of us spoke about Texas and what we do. Naomi illustrated a dance she does with her company where they put candles on their heads. David showed pics of the Appalachian Trail that he hikes with his dad. Glenn juggled and showed pictures of his fishing boat. You get the picture.



Steve started our presentation off by hooking each girl up to an earpiece so that they could hear his translations of what we were saying while we gave our presentation. They LOVED that. He told about his job of translating around the world. Then I spoke about my family and Janie and Potter and Zorba and I talked about loving the theater and how I get to do that as part of my job. I showed pictures of me preaching, doing a wedding, leading worship, and a pic of me and Roger on my ordination day. Several Tias asked questions after my presentation. Did she go to school? Yes, Steve responded. College and Seminary. She is ordained? Yes, in 2006. Even though this is a Country with a female President, a Baptist Convention with a female president and a Baptist Home with a female director, they all were very impressed that I (I'm assuming as a woman) could accomplish that. I'll never forget looking at Tabita's face after I (Steve) answered the Tia's questions. She looked at me with an expression of surprise that seemed to say, "You go, girl."

And you can do it too! I wanted to say to all those darling girls. You can do whatever you want. You can finish high school and go to college and get a career and succeed if you just put your mind to it and set your heart on it!

A Glorious Homecoming Or At Least Coming Home

My family has always struggled with homesickness. When my sister and I were little girls I remember the phone ringing at 11:00pm on a Friday night and my mother slipping back on her shoes and throwing a coat on over her pajamas to go pick my sister up at her friend’s house where she got too homesick to be able to stay the whole night. “Who doesn’t like to spend the night at a friend’s house?” I always thought. My sister is so weird.

Going away to summer camps was an even greater challenge. Fortunately my sister and I were very close in age so when mother would send us off to camp, she would specifically tell Amy, if you start to cry at night go to your sister’s cabin and sleep with her.

She usually did.

I remember one year as we were preparing to go to children’s camp and my mom was doting over Amy who was weepy in the parking lot, I felt my own pang of homesickness, my own desperate feeling of not wanting to be sent away, but as I looked back and forth between my mother and sister, I swallowed hard and shook it off. Amy was the one who got homesick. Not me.

College is what finally did me in. After a rocky road through my teenage years navigating my low self-esteem and the need to assert myself and succeed through the hormones and opinions of four women living in one house together was a challenge to say the very least and I often failed. But when I finally left for college low and behold I discovered I actually loved those people I’d spent the last four years fighting with and homesickness set it. There was no driving home on the weekends because I didn’t have a car. And by fall break when I went on tour with my freshman choir instead of going home, I choked up at McDonald’s, not because of the bad food, but after explaining to my professor why I wasn’t having a good time. I was homesick.

Moving to Texas was the worst. My mother and I drove to Texas with all my stuff not knowing where I would live. When we found an apartment with three girls I didn’t know and got my stuff all settled in, she left and I stood in the middle of Texas and wondered how the hell I got down here and if I could get out. At Christmas break that year, I drove home for the holiday and when it came time to return to school in Texas everyone said their goodbyes, went to work and I headed down I29 towards I35 which would take me straight back to Texas. But I never made it to I35. At Platte City I was crying so hard I turned around and drove back to St. Joseph. My mother came home from work that December afternoon to find me sitting on the couch in the TV room. I should have been cruising through Oklahoma by that point. We tried again the next morning and with new resolve the second attempt was successful. I returned to Texas.

Spending a semester studying abroad in France proved a challenge too. And by that time I had a boyfriend which only magnified the homesickness. I was miserable there and one morning I woke up alarmed to discover that I had dreamt in French. Not only was I living in France and doing as the French do but now I was speaking French in my dreams too! “Please God,” I begged. “Let me at least go home in my dreams. And let me at least be speaking English in them.”

Sometimes I wonder if Joseph from the Genesis narrative felt the same way. It was no secret that he didn’t get along with his brothers but we have to think he loved them despite the way he gloated around them. And certainly he loved his father Jacob the patriarch and his baby brother Benjamin. Already we know he had lost his darling mother who had died in childbirth with Benji. And so his dad, his brothers and his other aunties, Leah, Zilpah and Bilhah were his family.

But his brothers turned on him. His stomach must have dropped along with him when they dropped him in that pit. Were they leaving? Were they leaving him in there? Or was this another prank? Some of them sauntered away in delight. And then with relief Joseph saw the rope swing down into the pit and he began to climb out of it, figuring the gag was over. Okay guys, very funny. You’ll be lucky if I don’t tell dad.

But it wasn’t just his brothers waiting at the top. There were some merchants probably Egyptian, Joseph figured based on their clothes, jewelry and smooth skin. What were these boys up to now? Joseph’s hands grabbed the top of the rope and his brothers pulled him up, yanked his arms behind his back, bound his wrists with the rope and handed him over.

To Egyptians.

Talk about homesick.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have shared that last dream with the fellas,” Joseph thought and desperately began his shower of verbal apologies. “Guys, seriously. Please. Y’all, I didn’t mean it. Okay, this is very funny. Reuben, come on. Benjamin, get dad. Benjamin!” But one of the men speaking a language he didn’t understand stuck a sweaty stinky rag in his mouth that made him gag and yanked so hard on the rope tied to Joseph’s wrists that he would have fallen down if the rope had been long enough. But it wasn’t so he stumbled forward, alongside the camels carrying his new masters across the desert. He turned his head to look behind him as they headed off, no longer sick to his stomach but sick in his heart because he now knew what had happened. He’d been sold not only from his family but by his family into slavery.

Talk about homesick.

Of course that’s just the beginning of Joseph’s story. Then comes the saga in Potipher’s house where he made it out of servitude and into actual employment to a man who became a father figure to the now fatherless Joseph, teaching him his business and grooming him to someday take over. But Potipher’s loose wife fouled all that up. And then there’s the jail stories where Joseph again makes some new friends and seems to find a community again, a new home if you will. But his friends are either released from prison or killed on death row and Joseph is forgotten. But only for a few years. Years.  Because when Pharaoh has a dream he can’t get interpreted one of Joseph’s cell mates remembers his old buddy in prison who interpreted dreams and suggests to Pharaoh Joseph’s services and after a good dinner and a shower, Joseph finds himself making a new life for himself a third time, now at the top.

He even got married and started his own family, naming his sons, Manasseh, “For God has made me forget all my hardship and all my father’s house.” And the younger son, Ephraim, “For God has made me fruitful in the land of my misfortunes.”

But was it enough? Was all the power and jewelry and fine clothes and fine dining and the pretty wife and the cooing young sons enough? Was it enough to hide the ache in his heart for his own father, for his own younger brother probably all grown up now, even for his pain-in-the-butt-brothers who got him into this mess? If bitterness didn’t get the best of Joseph, then was the longing to go home, to his real home, still in him? If God healed him of remembering his hardships, was the luxury and power enough? Or did Joseph still experience pangs of homesickness?

Let’s look at the text. Genesis 42.

Reading verses 1-7 we would answer no, he didn’t still feel homesick. He didn’t miss what once was. But let’s keep reading. In verse 15 Joseph insists that the men bring their youngest brother to Egypt to prove they aren’t spies and the reader begins to wonder what Joseph is up to. And by verse 24 we realize that indeed Joseph is not only touched by seeing his brothers again, but he weeps, overwhelmed one can only assume, by the memories, by the love and by the frustration of being a family. Everything is coming into place: the dreams are making sense, his brothers are remorseful. Maybe it’s not strange that all these years he has longed to go back to a place where so much misery surrounded him. These men were his family and they had come home.

Of course, like any good sibling, Joseph messes with them. Or as the Bible puts is, “tests them.” He hides money in their sacks and holds one brother ransom and demands the return of the youngest brother and frames them again with his gold cup and all of this to test his brothers before his final revelation to them in chapter 45 verses 1-15.

And his revelation is this: that it is not in bitterness or anger that he remembers his family, for God orchestrated everything in Joseph’s life for a purpose. It is in love and affection and fondness and indeed homesickness that he remembers his family and longs for them to be reunited again.

And except for the fact that the Hebrews eventually become slaves under Egyptian rule after Joseph is long forgotten, his story ends happily with the reunion of all 12 brothers and his father (and presumably his aunties and Dinah too) where they all live in Egypt with well rationed food for the rest of their lives.

The End.

I just love happy endings.

So why did I choose to tell a story tonight of homesickness? Seems a strange topic for a bible study at a church.

Most of you know, or should know (and if you don’t you need to read your Clarion more often and quit sleeping through church) that I just returned from a mission trip to Chile. Everyone asked me if I was excited before I left, and the answer was yes! But in my mind there was a little reservation. If you haven’t figured it out already, I’m a homebody. I love my little house and my Austin family, even if they have four legs and are covered in fur. I worry about them and leaving and whether the cats will run away or whether the dog will sadly stare out the front window all ten days I’ll be gone or just five of them. I worry whether the pet-sitter will remember to give them water or whether my neighbor will remember to water my plants. I’m a worrier (Sundays sermon was very good for me) and I get terribly homesick, even if my home is only a dog, two cats and some cacti.

But the trip was amazing and went off without a hitch. And when I returned I discovered something I hadn’t ever noticed or experienced before.

I was homesick for Chile.

Well, not Chile necessarily, but for the girls at the Baptist Home we worked at while we were there. I’ve been writing about the trip on my blog every night, trying to tell our story. And every night I upload pictures to the internet and while I’m picking out the very best ones to share with the World Wide Web, I scroll through and whisper the girls’ names. I giggle as I remember the contexts of the pictures. I get sad when I remember which girl was angry at her mother that day and wouldn’t smile for the camera or which girl is missing from the photo because she hadn’t taken her medicine and ran away.

And I’m homesick for those girls. And I wonder if they’re homesick for us. Or if they’re homesick for the homes they’ve been court-ordered removed from. I wonder if they’re homesick for the parents who abused and neglected them. For the siblings left behind. I’m homesick for Tabitha whom I could have adopted a brought home with me to Austin.

And I wonder if someday they’ll be able to say to their mothers who neglected them to their uncles who took advantage of them, “Now therefore it was not you who sent me here, but God.” I wonder if they’ll be able to see the evil that they have experienced already in their young lives and part of a bigger story of redemption through the love of Jesus Christ. I wonder if they’ll see God delivering them and putting them in the position to choose to help others as a result.

I wonder what will become of their homesickness. Bitterness and anger? Forgiveness? The opportunity to break the cycle of poverty and abuse? A chance for success, normality, school, friends, college, a job and a family of their own?

I’m homesick because I worry I admit it. I’m homesick because in just one week I fell in love. I’m homesick because I want the best for children who are a lot like Joseph.

And when I look at those pictures on my computer, and read stories from the Bible about hurting people and tell about my trip in my sermons and on Wednesday nights, I utter prayers for all those girls who get just as homesick as I do. If home is where the heart is and our hearts are with God then we can be home all the time. And I want those girls to feel at home. Home with God. Not in a dying and living in the clouds for all eternity home, but in a here and now “God has healed me from the hardships of my father’s house” home. I want those girls to find their home in God. And someday maybe this year, maybe next, I’m going back to the Baptist Home to be reunited with them again.

Day Six or Our First Day

Although it was the sixth day into our trip and although we had arrived at Fundacion Para Amar two days earlier, Day Five was our first full day of work at the Home.

We awoke early enough to walk with the girls to school. And three of us rode with Jessica, a deaf and mute girl at the home to her school where she would live for the week. It was a little sad to have to say goodbye to one of the girls already. She had been the second child we met, hanging around the stairs up to our apartments and then clinging to Rodrigo (Viviana's husband) when we found her. We were consoled because we knew she would return on Thursday for the girls' birthday party (it was Monday).

I wondered how the girls would react walking to school with a bunch of Tias and Tios. I remembered the kids from my elementary school who went to a Home as well. Everyone knew who they were and they didn't have a lot of friends because they smelled different, looked different and had lice. But the girls (after a greeting of kisses) had already found their favorite Tias and Tios and slipped their hands into ours and we headed down the block to school. I walked with a middle school aged girl named Rebecca and carefully monitored her reaction to me. She called out to a friend getting off the bus and hand in hand they walked in front of me toward the school. We crossed at the walk together and when we arrived she kissed me good-bye, as did her friend, and bid me good-bye as did who friend who looked sort of jealous of our relationship.


(picture from later in the week)

Maybe it's cool to have a bunch of Americans walk you to school, even as a teenager. Who knows.

Several of the girls didn't go to school at all though because their teachers were on strike. Not getting paid enough or something, who knows. So after we return from the short jaunts to schools and had our breakfast, as we began our work we were often spied upon by a little nina or two.


(our dinner table)

Our jobs were as follows:
1. Paint the fence
2. Paint the storage closet
3. Beautiful the study room

Piece of cake! I thought when Viviana told me. But each job proved to be more challenging than I first anticipated.

The fence painters had to first scrape off with a metal brush the old paint chips. And there's four sides of each tall skinny pole to paint black. And you can only paint when it's dry and sunny... riiiight.





The storage closet people had to first remove every book, paper, phamphet, toothpaste bottle and piece of trash from a closet that was probably 8x8 feet wide. That took several hours. Then they had to sand the shelves and clean them. Then finally paint. Probably 50 shelves and each of the four posts around them. Whoa!





And the study room people got to do the fun stuff. Those studying to be teachers got to make initial plans for the room. Then they left to buy supplies while others began washing walls (which would be polished), moving huge furniture items to the hall, sanding tables (which would be painted) and cleaning out the room.





We broke from these jobs around 1pm to clean up. During this process, Glenn, Grant and I discovered that we had been painting with corrosion-free black paint which would not come out of our brushes or off of our hands.

"Find Steve."

After some question and answer sessions with the Tio Carlos the custodian and Tio Jaime the business manager, we finally got some paint remover stuff to begin washing... and washing... and washing our hands.

We were late to lunch.

But at least our hands were no longer Black. All. Over.

That afternoon we piled into two cars and headed out to Mapuche land again. This time (now in sunshine) we visited a religious site where they have ceremonies and religious festivals. Here is the god(?) who stands in the middle of the big open field.





From there we squeezed back into our cars and headed to the Temuco market to shop. That was fun and reminded me of all the shopping malls anywhere overseas. Name a country and I've been in a little shopping pavilion like that. Lots of touristy things for cheap and you have to haggle for your prices. I picked up a couple of small gifts for my sister though. And a little wooden Tea holder. I really wanted a sheep fur rug but didn't want to fork over the money for it. But it was SO SOFT!

We were late to dinner that night and Tia Ceci was not happy with us. I don't know what Steve said to her but he apparently smoothed things over.

That night we gathered, a little poorer than the night before, and had our next devo. Meredith led with some questions about community. And I kind of started to push back on the students. Several of them talked about their churches and where they are now and Christians versus non-Christians and what community looks like with different people. I realized I have had very different experiences with community than most of these students. And that was weird. By this fifth night of devos I was having fun just being in a community myself. So often I've leading the bible study or discussion or am at "work" where I have to behave and monitor what I say, but with these students and Steve, I was safe, so I felt comfortable talking. That was an amazing feeling. Gosh it was fun just talking and throwing out ideas and discussing things as a group where I was just one of a crowd. It made me realize how much I miss being in a small group or bible study of my own apart from my role as Minister at the church.

Day Five: This Is the Day the Lord Has Made

Sunday morning started early with a breakfast of white bread, butter, jam, cheese slices, meat slices (ew!), eggs and tea. We did not yet know that this would be our regular morning meal and that this was the beginning of all the white bread I ever want to consume in my life. But Tia Cecelia came in special Sunday morning to make it for us, so we were grateful.

Afterwards we gathered with the children for church. We piled into a bus that they had rented (still not enough to seat 23 girls, 12 North Americans, 2 Germans, a driver, and a handful of Tias. So we sat on laps and stood up and scrunched in for the hour drive to Mapuche land.



I read about the Mapuche people in my Chile guidebook. They are comparable to our American Indians in that they were here first and of course the European, Peruvian and Argentinian settlers came in and eventually won the land and developed it. Now the Chilean government allots land and a small allowance to the poverty stricken Mapuche people who are generally looked down upon by the upper class. For example, one girl at the home is Mapuche by birth but was punished in school if she spoke Mapuche and is now ashamed of her heritage. Awful.

In planning the trip to Chile with Raquel, the President of UBACH (Chilean Baptist Convention) I had requested a visit to an indigenous church, not an FBC America transplanted in Chile. She was thrilled and spoke with Viviana at the home. We ended up being invited to a small Mapuche church about an hour outside of Temuco where the church honored the children's home on their 55th anniversary. The children sang a song and Viviana spoke a lot.



The men and women's equivalent of our WMU each spoke as well and presented gifts (monetary) to the Children's Home. We sang Spanish songs to a guitar and keyboard and finally the pastor preached on the Good Samaritan.

Consequently, it felt more like an awards ceremony than a church service, but it was beautiful seeing the man who had travelled all day to come to this small church to see the leaders of the children's home and the girls themselves and present money his men's group had spent all summer raising from out of their own poor pockets. And we loved listening to the girls' choir perform. I got the impression that the church's natural look would have still reflected a western service had we not been there and that was challenging to observe. Western Missionary fingerprints were all over that church.

But so were the fingerprints of the Mapuche people themselves. I sat next to a man at lunch who is the father of the current pastor. He built that church with his own hands. And while we ate (and Steve translated) he taught us (and Steve!) Mapuche words. And we taught him English ones.



The dinner was extraordinary and was prepared in honor of the celebration of the Children's Home. Unfortunately the night before (as I mentioned before) there had been hard rains and the Mapuche realized their water sources had all been cantaminated. I kid you not, two people who lived several miles away WALKED IN enough jugs of water to cook for the 41 of us, the 10 other Baptist visitors and the regular members of the Mapuche congregation. They walked in water to feed around 75 people.



Amazing.

Unfortunately the dinner was horse. As in Mr. Ed, Black Beauty and the likes. I am not lying to you. I knew this ahead of time as Viviana had warned me and left it to my discretion to tell my students. However one of them overheard and not being of the keep-it-to-yourself sort of girl, she promptly informed everyone before we boarded the bus. Great. But I planted myself next to a hearty American boy and passed the meat from my stew on to him and just ate the potatoes and squash. This was a feast for our new friends.



After lunch, because we couldn't travel through the mud in the bus to visit the indigenous, traditional homes of the Mapuche people, one couple let us carry them back to their land (more people on the bus!) where they let us walk around and see a now raging creek and the bridge their children had built years earlier. It was beautiful countryside. In return, the North Americans sang Amazing Grace at the request of the Choir Tia for the Mapuche couple. It seemed to be appreciated.





After most of us snoozing (while the girls used our cameras to take pictures of each other) on the way home we arrived in time for dinner (white bread, jam, etc.) and then headed up to our dorm rooms for another devo. David (our children's minister's son) led and read to us from Ezekiel 34:1-16. He spoke about his expectations and asked us to reflect on ours as well. He nailed our reason for being in Chile at that home when he said, "I expected to come here to take care of people and instead I'm coming to join the flock." The Mission Trip I planned was designed for us to be extra helping hands to a hard-working Christian social justice outreach. We can do what they don't have time or sometimes money to do. We were there to provide relief and encouragement to the God's workers by giving them time off or at least hopefully alleviating some stress by entertaining the girls in the afternoons. We were there to play with and love on God's little girls. We were there to work where God was already at work. And David understood that. "God takes care of people," I wrote in my journal, "and we are joining who God is already taking care of..."

Chile: Day Four or Day Is Done, Gone the Sun

On the morning of our flight out of Santiago and on to Temuco, Steve argued that we had time to visit Santiago's cathedral before we headed to the airport. So, sure enough, I complied and our Shalom amigos (Julian and Freddy) dropped us off back downtown to view the inside of this beautiful cathedral. I asked my students to take in their journals and spend not only some time admiring all the art and craftsmanship, but to also meditate and prepare for our day ahead.






The cathedral was beautiful and I spent some time writing on thankfulness.

After yelling and hollering and threatening that if they bought one more postcard they would miss our flight, everyone was back on the bus and headed to the airport.

The flight to Temuco was short and not in a puddle hopper which I think everyone was grateful for. I've flown in some real doozies overseas and so it was nice to be in a stable aircraft. After landing and searching for our bags we met Jaime, the first member of the Fundacion Team.

He spoke no English.

Thank God for Steve.

Outside, we met Viviana, the director of the children's home. And after explaining to each other that neither of us spoke much of the other's native language we began the long haul of stuffing twelve people (and three adults from the Fundacion Para Amar) into two vehicles. Little did we know that this trip would merely foreshadow many more to come.

Three minutes down the road, we stopped. Now, I need to explain a little something about dynamics in our group and some jokes that developed - rooted of course, in reality. One such joke goes like this: Can I change money? Sure... tomorrow. You see we NEVER seemed to be able to find or have time for changing money from dollars into pesos. It became a little ridiculous actually. In the airport: "Can we change money?" Too expensive, wait for in the hotel. At the hotel: "Can we change money?" Not a good rate, wait until later. On the city streets: "Can we change money?" I can't find a place that's open. I mean, seriously, as a group we changed money ONE TIME in 11 days that i can remember.

But three minutes into our drive into Temuco, we stopped. "Steve is taking us back to the airport to change money." This came over the walky talky about a bunch of niners and ten fours. But changing money? Brilliant. Finally. This is what could have happened before we loaded 22 suitcases and fifteen bodies into two cars, but whatever. We headed back.

The money change place was closed. So Steve loaned money (as he did most of the trip) to the students in dire need at that very money and we piled back into the two cars.

And after half an hour facing backwards and practically sitting on the dashboard of our van...



... we arrived.

Temuco.

The orphanage.

Our mission was beginning.

It was pouring. The sunshine and cool warmth of Santiago had been replaced by pouring rain and cold wind. We came out of the van like clowns from a car in the circus and rushed inside the building that would be our home.

A cute girl of fifteen wearing anime-looking pigtails and a pink shirt greeted us at the door with a kiss on the cheek. She grinned from ear to ear. The men who picked us up were bringing in our wet suitcases which began piling up at the bottom of the staircase to our right. We just kind of stood around until Viviana showed us upstairs to our room.

The main building had two wings: the side the girls use with the kitchen, dining area, study room and offices and another side that can be rented out by groups for small conferences, meetings, retreats, etc. Above the two wings are the "girls' side" and the "boys' side" suites with bedrooms. Each area has a small kitchenette, dining and living room area and 7 or 8 bedrooms with one large bathroom like on a dormitory hall.

The accommodations were excellent. Better than I expected. But that would turn out to be a theme for the week.

"I was beginning to wonder why we came all the way over here to work" one student reflected on the first hour a couple of days later.

We took quickly split up rooms and unloaded our luggage and put some extra layers of clothing on. (There was no heat at the Fundacion). And then we headed downstairs to the left wing for a late lunch: some sort of ground beef stirred into mashed potatoes with melted cheese on top. A huge plateful. I ate around the meat as my stomach was still irritated by the short plane ride earlier that day. Best not to make it any angrier by adding cow to it's digestive agenda. "No te gusta?" Viviana asked. "Airplane," I responded and pointed to my stomach and gave the thumbs down sign. She nodded her head.

"Now the girls will be coming in soon for afternoon activities. Do you have games you can play?"
"Uh..." Most of them were outdoor games. But based on the gushing of water outside the window and the flickering lights, I guessed we wouldn't be playing outside today. "Si. No probleme."

After lunch all the tables and chairs were moved to the sides of the room and when we re-entered the dining hall having had a brief brainstorming session the little ninas began to trickle in. One by one they came by all twelve of us giving us an hola and a kiss on the cheek. One by one they filled their chairs laughing and giggling and talking, I suppose about the new gringos.

"Okay girls, quiet down, first we are going to do introductions," Steve translated. "Let's start with the visitors." Oh god. Here we go. One by one we went down the line saying hello, our name, where we were from and where we went to school and Steve translated to the children.

"Hola, Mi nombre es Ann. And I'm from Austin, Texas where I'm a minister. I'm not married, but I do have a dog and two cats." Steve translated and everyone laughed. Only later did I learn he told them "two cats: a good one and a bad one."

Then the children introduced themselves saying their names and where they went to school, how long they'd been at the home and also pointed out any siblings sitting in the room too. There was the shy new six year old who had just arrived the night before. There was an 18 year old in school to become a teacher. There was a set of three sisters. There were the squirrelly girls who when it came time to talk mumbled with their heads lowered and their eyes peeking out from under their bangs.

We ended by meeting the tias, the adults in the room with us: a social worker, a sign language linguist, two german volunteers, a psychologist, and a cook. All tias.

"Geez there's a lot of women named Tia who work here," I thought to myself. Someone explained later that Tia means "aunty." And Tio Steve means Uncle Steve.

I became Tia Ann.

After countless rounds of "Ride That Pony," "Gorilla, Man & Gun," and "Look Up, Look Down," and some other games the girls taught us,



we were exhausted and took a break to move the tables and chairs back into their lines, wash hands and prepare for dinner.

Before we ate though, Viviana asked if any of the students had anything they'd like to say.

The 18 year old (who got to sit with the adults at our table) said thank you to the visitors from America for coming here and gave thanks to God for us. As we began to start grace one of the little girls piped up that she would like to speak. She too gave a brief but mature word of welcome and thankfulness to the Americans for joining them. Then the girls all sang their grace in Spanish of course. Don't ask me for the words. I listened to them all week and never picked it up.

Then we ate. Hotdogs in a huge white subway bun with mayo and guacamole and tomatoes slathered on them. And there were some chips and crackers and a slice of cheese and (as I was coming to realize would be a regular at every meal) tea. With sugar. Lots of it. The lights flickered and went out. "Oooohh," the girls all squealed. Just like North American kids.

After dinner we received our second round of kisses as the girls filed through us saying Buenos Noches and Ciao. We looked at each other amused and retreated upstairs.

"Devotions in fifteen," I hollered into both suites.

Anna's turn to lead Devo Time, as it came to be called revolved around her question, "How do you experience, God?" Several students mentioned music or traditions as how they experience God, but relationships was the real winner: experiencing God through other people. Hmm. How do I experience God? "In words, I think..." I finally answered. "I mean, it's no surprise to most of you that I'm not really a kid person. I like children one on one or one on two, but mass quantities of children make me tired and quite frankly, I'm exhausted after the afternoon's activities. But what gives me energy is words. I experience God best through beautiful words, well crafted sentences. That's why I like the bible and story telling and preaching and music so much, I love well beauty created from words... I learn about God through the creative communication of words and I return that love to God through words. I think that's my final answer."

Anna closed us in prayer and most of us headed to bed, seduced to sleep by the pounding rain and our pounding hearts. Tomorrow would be our first full day at the home.