Letter from Mom

 
Today I received a letter from home.  My Mom wrote me a card—it was the first one she had sent to us since we moved to Chonburi.


But the timing of this was especially poignant.  Only 10 minutes earlier, as we were driving to the post office, my sister had called from California to say that my Mom had just passed away.

It is fitting that my Mom used stationery with an image of a bird on it.  I have always had a huge interest in nature type things—in this I was more like my Mom and her dad than my siblings.

This love of nature expressed itself in my early years as my trying to make a pet of whatever creature we could find in our back yard and pond.  As an adolescent, I found myself following my Mom’s father’s footsteps and a joined a trail maintenance crew.  Later on, with my Mom’s brother, I joined a forest fire-fighting crew.

Physically, I was more like my Mom than were my siblings.  Only I had the brown eyes.  Only I had the hair that did not bleach blond in the summer like my siblings.  (When I was young, I was jealous of this, but now I am glad for the more sun-tolerant skin, being that I have lived in the tropics and worked outside for many years.)

We siblings have had a practice of having one of us call my mom each day to check on her.  She lived alone in the house she had lived in since she got married in 1946.  Today was my turn to call her, but just a couple of days ago she had e-mailed me not to call her because she was going to a party for one of her Chinese grandchildren.  It was they who had called the police when my Mom did not show up at the party.  (Several years ago my mom helped several Chinese people to learn English and she was adopted into their families.)

It was from my Mom that we all learned the value of service.  My Mom has been a volunteer for all kinds of organizations throughout her life.  For years she worked with the girl scouts.  Every year our garage would fill up with cookies as it became the regional distribution center.  And we would also go to help set up tents in the girl scout camp each year.  (I learned how to tie a clove hitch at a very early age.)

It was in her later years when Mom volunteered with literacy volunteers, through whom she met her Chinese family.

During my younger years we hosted exchange students from Norway and Barbados, so we also have family in those countries as well.  The exchange students came through a program called AFS, of which my oldest brother is now on the US Board.  Perhaps it was through these exchange students, as well as our cross-country road trips, that I got an interest in things exotic and foreign.  And so later I found myself living in Haiti and marrying the prettiest girl in the world, who just happened to be German-Canadian.  And now I’m in Thailand.

My Mom endured the idiosyncrasies of my youth (and there were many) and told me that they made me special.  And she was right—after I learned to control them, they have enabled me to adventure many places where others might not venture.

So thank you, Mom:
for loving me
for teaching me to love and serve others, no matter their race or nationality or religion
for putting up with me when most others thought me unendurable
for encouraging my curiosity and need to explore.


When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:
"Death is swallowed up in victory."
"O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?"
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.
But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
1 Corinthians 15:54-57 (ESV)





Sylvia Russell 1924-2012
Vernon Russell 1920-2006

Bald Spot

Nat in her shop
Originally uploaded by SierraSunrise

You can't tell by looking, but I do have some hair on the top of my head.  There are not very many and I think they are more annoying than cute, so I keep them shaved off.  But even if I didn't, you would hardly notice them.  One glance at the top of my head and you can make a quick judgment: "Oh, he's bald all right."

Last week we visited the southern tier of provinces in Isaan (Northeast Thailand)--Buriram, Surin, Sisaket and Ubon Ratchathani.  We are looking for a place where God might be having us plant churches.  Our focus is on those areas that do not have them.

And so our travels brought us to a district (Amphoe) in Sisaket Province called Uthumphon Phisai (อุทุมพรพิสัย--and no, it is not as easy to pronounce as it looks).  According to some statistics we had there were no churches and no Christians in this district of about 110,000 people.

But the statistics were wrong.

Just like there are actually a few hairs on my bald head, so in fact we now know there is at least one Christian in Uthumphon Phisai.  Nat is a hairdresser who had moved away to Bangkok for a while, during which time she decided to become a Jesus-follower.  Now she has returned to Uthumphon Phisai where, as far as she knows, there are no other Christians in her province.  We found out about her when Judy, one of our team members, went to inquire about getting massages.

We were glad we were able to meet Nat and encourage her in her faith.  To help bless her, we each got a haircut, whether we needed it or not.

Nat faithfully reads her Bible, but still she gets discouraged sometimes.  Perhaps there are other believers in Uthumphon Phisai that Nat does not know about. 

Maybe the reason God led us to Nat was not only to encourage her, but also to make us consider Uthumphon Phisai as a place to move to in the future.  In any case, we will try to continue to encourage Nat by sending her Christian literature and music.

Pray for us as we continue to seek God's will as to where to locate to in the fall.  Pray also for Nat and others like her in Isaan who can easily get discouraged by their circumstances.

(Our) purpose is that they may be encouraged in heart and united in love, so that they may have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ, ³ in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Colossians 2:2,3 (NIV)

In-dependence Day

Celebrating freedom.


People all over the world celebrate freedom.  This is the time of year when the skies all across North America light up in celebration of freedom from being ruled by other nations.  Being from a Canadian-America marriage, we find it convenient that Canada Day and the US Independence day are close together.

The founding fathers of America put it this way: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

From when we are children we seek freedom.  Freedom from having to clean up our room—or mow the lawn—or whatever.  And on it goes throughout our lives.

People die for freedom because they believe being dead is better than being a live slave.

In my home country, being independent is a value of high importance for many people.

Yet no one is truly independent.  Well, there may be one or two odd exceptions of people who live completely independent from the rest  of society, but even may of the people who want to “live off the land,” so to speak, end up using tools and things made by others.  God did not make us to be independent, but interdependent--interdependent on each other.

But God also made us to be dependent.  Dependent upon Him.

If we are not dependent upon God, we become slaves to something else.  One of those things is money.  Jesus put it this way:

No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money. Matthew 6:24 (ESV)

The Apostle Paul mentioned that we have a choice of being a slave to sin or a slave to obedience to God:

Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? Romans 6:16 (ESV)

It seems, then, quite appropriate to have a Declaration of Dependence:

God, I can’t make it to heaven without your help.  I can’t even make it through a day without sinning without the help of your Spirit.  I can’t love others unconditionally unless You give me the ability.  I can’t forgive seven times, let alone 7x70 times, unless Your Spirit empowers me.  Only because of Your work on my behalf through Jesus Christ do I have any hope of any kind at all.  I depend on You.

A declaration of interdependence would be good as well—to remind ourselves that we share our lives and our planet with many others.  So I hereby declare my interdependence with:

• my wife
• my family
• my church
• my friends and neighbors
• all the other co-inhabitors of my planet

Thanks everyone—I can’t do it alone.

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

DG

I was looking at a photo some friends posted on facebook of themselves standing on the shores of Shaver Lake in Fresno County, California.  He was standing barefoot in the “sand”--the coarse granular material formed by the decomposition of the granitic rock that is so prevalent in the Sierras and Los Angeles Mountains.  And here I was, feeling homesick for Decomposed Granite or DG as it is often called—the stuff which provided the base materials for many of the soils I studied during the years we lived in California.  But my fondest memories are of hiking hundreds of miles of trails composed of light gray DG in the Sierras.
So here I reminisce photographically about some of the trails I’ve walked in decomposed granite in California and a few flowers that push out of the gravely soils.

All the paths of the LORD are steadfast love and faithfulness, for those who keep his covenant and his testimonies. Psalm 25:10 (ESV)

Trail to Kaiser Peak-Fresno County, California

Trail to Kaiser Peak-Fresno County, California

Trail Down from Alta Peak-Sequoia National Park

Trail Down from Alta Peak-Sequoia National Park

Trail to Alta Peak-Sequoia National Park

Trail to Alta Peak-Sequoia National Park

Trail to Alta Peak-Sequoia National Park

Lakes Trail headed down from Pear Lake-Sequoia National Park

Lakes Trail-headed down toward The Watchtower-Sequoia National Park

John Muir Trail headed down from Nevada Falls

Pacific Crest Trail north of Walkers Pass in Kern County

Trail from Stony Creek to Jenny Lake in Kings Canyon National Park

Trail on Yosemite Valley Floor between Vernal Falls Trail and Mirror lake Trail

Trail to Chilnualna Falls in Yosemite National Park

Mountain pride penstemon (Penstemmon newberryi) along Alta Peak Trail

Blue elderberry and the Alta Peak Trail going off into the fog

Drummond's Anemone (Anemone drummondii) on Alta Peak