Significant

Recently a friend of mine posted on his blog about how, for most of us, our names will be forgotten within a few generations.  Perhaps for those of us without children it might be even less.

I know there are days when I wonder about what I am doing. I want to be doing something significant, and plugging away at learning to communicate with the Thai people in their heart language just doesn't seem to qualify as one of those things--especially on those days when I mess up so bad.  (Well, at least on those occasions I may have given someone something to laugh about.)


But the fact that our name does not live on does not mean that our lives do not have an impact.  And the reality is we never know completely, at least in this life, what the eternal significance of the impact of our lives is, for good or bad.

This got me thinking about windmills like the ones pictured above near Tehachapi, California.  Windmills are seemingly a fairly benign source of renewable energy.  We do know what some of the impacts of the windmills are, positive and negative.  But we certainly don’t know all of them.

Windmills take energy from the wind.  After the wind passes through the windmills, it has less energy than before.  That energy used to be dissipated somewhere else, but we don’t know exactly where and we don’t know what the effects of the loss of that energy downwind will be.  It could be good.  It could be bad.  While mathematically it could theoretically be calculated what the impacts are, the number of variables is almost unfathomable.

The truth is we don’t live in a vacuum.  Everything we do affects our environment or the people around us in some way.  There are also impacts in the spiritual realm that we cannot see.

What that does mean is that we have to be careful about the decisions and choices that we make.  True, no one person may be watching—though these days it is hard to escape the views of security cameras, webcams and phone cameras—and even if God were somehow not aware, it does not mean our choices do not have consequences.
So we need to choose carefully and decide wisely.

One of my favorite passages from the Bible is Hebrews 12:1-4.  The writer here talks about a “great cloud of witnesses”—referring to the great heroes of the faith that have gone before us—as if they are watching us as we go through the race of life.  The picture I get in my mind is of a stadium full people cheering at an athletic event or the people lining the road of a marathon course who cheer on and encourage the runners.  We are being watched.  People do care, even if we do not see them.  And these aren’t just any people.  These are people who encountered great trials and tribulations in this life but somehow managed to persevere to the end.  And it was worth it.  These are the people who cheer us on.

So let us, as the writer says in these verses, “lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.  Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted.” (Hebrews 12:1-3 ESV)

Our lives DO matter. We are significant.

One day we can be part of that great cloud of witnesses cheering others on in their races.

Tear Down This Wall

I was reading somewhere that today is the 25th anniversary of Ronald Regan’s famous speech at the Berlin wall where he challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”

President Regan giving his speech at the Berlin Wall 6/12/1987
from the National Archives: http://arcweb.archives.gov (ARC Identifier 198585)

Walls.

People like putting up walls.  There are the walls you can see and the ones you can’t see.

Many walls are physical walls designed to keep our enemies from attacking us.  The thing is that these kind of walls don’t often protect us.  Sure they may prevent enemies from getting in.  But they also keep us from forming relationships that might keep us from having enemies in the first place.

The there are the walls we put up in our lives so that people won’t know what we’re really like because we’re afraid if people knew what we were really like they would not like us.  The problem with these walls is that if people knew what we were really like, they might realize how much we’re alike and they might like us even more.

But worse than the walls to keep people out are the walls that keep people in.  The folks in East Berlin might have said that the walls we’re to keep people out but they were really to keep people in.  The leaders knew that if people could leave easily, many of them would and then there would not be much left to govern.

But the communists aren’t the only ones who do this. The church has often done a very good job of this.  People can get so accustomed to all the programs going on inside the church they forget how to relate to people outside the church.  After a while the people outside the church think of church members as a bit strange, and the church does not do a good job of communicating the good news of Jesus to those who need Him the most.

After the crucifixion of Jesus, the disciples were huddled behind locked doors.  They did not look like likely candidates for communicating the good news about Jesus. Jesus somehow had to go through the walls of that locked room.  He had to get inside to give them a message to go outside

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age. Matthew 28:19-20 (ESV)

The church is not about staying—it is about going.

We in the church need to tear down the walls that keep us in just Gorbachev needed to tear down the walls that kept people in.

A few years ago I wrote a song about this:

Tear Down That Wall
© Edd RussellFresno, California 11/2006

You are a God without borders,
You stepped out from heaven for us,
You reached in the dark, lonely places;
Illuminated us with Your love

You tore down all of the fences
That kept us from coming to You.
You opened the doorway to heaven
When Jesus stepped into our lives.

But we’ve erected some fences
To keep all Your love to ourselves.
We hide Your light under a basket
So everyone stays in the dark.

We want to tear down that wall.
We want to tear down that wall.
We want to tear down that wall.
We want to tear down that wall.
Jesus help us tear down that wall.
Cuz we’ve got to tear down that wall.
Yes, we need to tear down that wall.
We want to tear down that wall.

The Rise

Front view of The Rise

Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God.
They collapse and fall, but we rise and stand upright. Psalm 20:7-8 (ESV)



We have been in our new place just over a week now and I think we finally have things unpacked—at least as much as we need for these 4 months.  Our new place is called The Rise and it is located behind one of the main shopping malls in Chonburi.  The tenants are primarily Thai but there are a few foreigners as well.  There must be enough foreigners here that some of the local restaurants have the main menu in English.

Our new place is less than a 5 minute walk from the office which makes it really convenient for when we need to go there.  And the mall, which is slightly further, has two grocery stores to choose from!

View of Central Plaza from the roof (behind the pink building)

Our place in The Rise is a bit of a let-down from the old place in Bangkok—16 floors to be exact.  We’ve moved from a 22nd floor to a 6th floor.  But there is a nice rooftop which we can get to which offers views in all directions—from the Gulf of Thailand to the west to the hills to the east.  It’s nice to have a view of some green space, which is a bit different than Bangkok.

Even though Chonburi is a much smaller city than Bangkok, there is still lots of traffic, on weekends especially.  This is because there are two popular attractions—the mall is popular with the locals and the ocean is popular with the people from outside of town.  I have just started driving this week so I am trying to get used to some of the unwritten driving rules (which are often contrary to the written ones).  It’s amazing how long one has to wait to make a right turn in some places (since we drive on the left side, this is similar to making a left turn across traffic in North America.) 

On the roof with the ocean in the background

Our apartment is a bit larger than the one we had in Bangkok and is designed much more nicely.  There are three rooms plus a bathroom—living/dining room, kitchen and bedroom.  The big plus is the kitchen—while it is not terribly large, it actually has cupboard space.  It has no window screens—though we hope to change the situation soon—but it does have air conditioning.  Lately we’ve been having lots of gusty breezes blowing, which makes it more comfortable.  (Yesterday we were enjoying the cool evening breeze after the rain and I checked and saw that the temperature was 85F/29C.)

Some of the green space visible from the roof

Even though we have only been here a really short while, we have already become quite involved in the different ministries here in Chonburi: The Abundant Life Homes Orphanage, the Sila Church and the Thailand Mennonite Brethren Foundation office.  But we ill say more about those later.  Meanwhile, here are some pictures of our new home:

Living/Dining Room

Kitchen

Bathroom

Bedroom