Ice cold waters and red hot killers

Watching the news last night my mind ran back a few years to wonderful days spent in the Swat Valley, Pakistan. I was there on business but you can hardly spend a week in Pakistan's "little Switzerland" without seeing something of the ice cold, torrential, rivers and wonderful mountains, and breathing the life-giving thin clear air. We also spent time wandering round ancient Buddhist temples, now neglected in a land ruled by Muslims. A paridise on earth! It is hard to believe that today 200,000 refugees have fled the valley whilst the Pakistan army engages in "full scale" conflict with Taliban forces infiltrating from Afghanistan.

Whether Pakistan will be able to "wipe out"' the Taliban through military action is an open question. Personally I very much doubt it. The Taliban may be a military force, but they are much more significantly a spiritual force, and if anyone is to engage with them creatively it will not only be militarily. Extremists they are, people with deep (and perhaps misguided) convictions, but they will not go away just because their fighters lie dead below the snow capped mountains of Swat. Military action may be necessary but much more urgent is the engagement of minds, philosophies, world-views, and spiritual sensibilities. Buddhists no longer pray beside the rushing rivers of Swat, Christians struggle to maintain a presence in the ragged towns, the Taliban have their mosques, but what of the future? What does or does not happen in Swat this month will have implications for us all as we struggle to live in a world of deeply held religious (and anti-religious) convictions.

Kenyan insight into Genesis

Gerald Mwangi, a colleague from Mission Together Africa, based in Nairobi, staying at my house this week, joined us for tonight's home group meeting. We had lined up a study of Genesis 1 and frankly I was not anticipating any revolutionary new thoughts. ('Oh man of little faith'?) We were a smaller group today (you know, that 'buying a wife and marrying a cow' stuff) but we had a great discussion. The highlight for me however was Gerald's thoughts on 'Why did God rest on the seventh day?'

Kenyan synthetic thinking drew a fascinating parallel between God's resting on the seventh day of creation, after He had seen that everything He had created was 'very good', and Jesus 'resting' on the cross after he uttered those powerful words, 'it is finished, complete'. Both creation and salvation are, for God, complete and also 'very good' - even if they do still take some working out by us mere mortals. But there's more! Just before God rests in Genesis he commissions human beings to care for creation, to manage it, to bring it to completion. In a very similar way, just before salvation is completed on the cross, Jesus commissions his disciples (us!) for mission - to share in God's salvific as well as His creative work. Good thinking, Gerald - thanks!

Pain v Truth?

No, this is not a comment on tonight's match. (Although I did see pain in the faces of Arsenal fans the truth is Manchester United deserved the win!) Thousands of miles away from the championship battle another, more bloody, battle rages - in Sri Lanka. There pain is more than real.

My challenge this morning was that a Tamil friend in London contacted me and asked me to publicise the "truth of what is happening in Jaffna ... attrocities which I didn't even hear of in the holocaust". Of course I want to help, I have editorial access to a website, I can publish - but what do I publish? No one can deny the dreadful suffering of tens of thousands of civilians holed up in a tiny strip of land with vitually no food and no medical assistance - but, "worse than the holocaust"? I went to the website she asked me to look at - Tamil Net - and read the latest headline: ‘State terror’ waging ‘racist war’. If I publish that what will happen to the good relationships we have with Singhalese Sri Lankans? How much is truth which is painful, and how much is pain expressed as truth? I felt the pain but I chickened out of publishing the pain (or do I mean the truth?). My item (see Faith2Share) was the usual Christian, 'pray for the victims' stuff. But still I'm left wondering what to do with the pain. And what is more true than pain?

Hopeful Strategies

The mission world has its travelling sales people as well as Kleeneze and sometimes (but not always!) they have some interesting gadgets in their show case. One such walked into my office today. In fact he is based less than a mile from the Faith2Share office but somehow we had not met before. A teacher, turned Oxfam's man in Indonesia and now in Oxford producing resources to help communities deal with HIV/AIDS, Glen Williams, is quite an etrepreneur. You can check out his Stategies for Hope Trust at http://www.stratshope.org/. They have a lot of workbooks, resources for church leaders and community facilitators, etc. in several different languages and quite a lot of it is free to those who will be using them in Africa, Asia or Latin America. A travelling salesman with freebees!