...don't give up until you drink from the silver cup.

Lonely.

I have discovered that during these past few weeks, I have been very lonely. Not for lack of friends. Not for lack of stimulating conversation. Not for lack of joy.

For the lack of someone who knows me and someone with whom I do not have to explain myself. A reference from a book I’ve been reading—“Telling Secrets” by Frederick Buechner—sums up what I’ve been feeling: “Man’s greatest desire is to know and be known.” And somehow, in this loneliness, I am reminded of God’s habit to come to us in our humility, reminding us of the open arms waiting, just waiting, for our return. And ultimately that is WHOM we want to be known by, surely. What fleeting emotion could be greater than the joy that comes with the knowledge that we are known by the one who created us, shaped us, and loved us first? Loneliness in and of itself is, albeit, uncomfortable. But it is in those times of discomfort, of sadness, of restlessness, that God comes to us. Our hour of need is His shining moment. What a redemptive thought. I am tired of being lonely, but I also know that these are the days for me to look out with expectant joy and delight at the coming of my Lord to my cry for a friend, my cry for a soul who knows mine.

I cannot wait to know.

I cannot wait to be known.

I cannot wait to be home.





Machine Gun Preacher:

…thoughts on “Machine Gun Preacher”, the new film concerning the life work of Sam Childers and his mission in Sudan and Uganda.

I went into the theatre expecting the main ethical debate to be focused around the vigilante stance that Childers takes on defending his orphanage against Joseph Kony and the LRA—the “spilling blood for the sake of the Lord”, and as Childers puts it in his own words “…if your child was taken, and I was the one who was going to bring him home, does it matter how I get him home?” However, I surprised myself by getting caught up in the ethical issue of his work coming before his family. The struggle between what he had experienced and what he wanted to experience was brilliantly played out—I appreciated the vulnerability that the scriptwriter added there. Human emotion—raw and expressive, always messy and unscripted, tended to be a major theme in the film. The movie as a whole was very thought provoking and offered more questions than answers at the end, but as one of my friends here mentioned on the subway ride home: “How can we view something like that, come away with a knowledge, and not do anything about it?” The evil we have to be most guarded against in this world is not the faceless evil in the dark, but the indifference of good men.

The movie spanned the life of Childers, not hesitating to include the beginning of his story that involved drug and alcohol abuse, and the brutal stabbing of a car hijacker. However, the scenes in Africa were what made me shudder the most—raping and kidnapping in villages, child soldiers shooting guns that were bigger than them, and the especially gripping scene of a pile of bodies (a group of children that could not fit in the back of the truck when they were discovered—Childers said he’d be back for them in a few hours) that lie burning in an open field, victims of the LRA’s killing spree. The movie was brutal and hard to watch at times, but eye-opening and allowed an opportunity to feel, be enraged by what is happening in Africa now. Splendidly done, hard to watch, thought provoking—I’d highly recommend it, but it is not for the faint of heart.

"If we allow ourselves to be full of hate, then they've won - you must not let them take your heart.” –William, a Sudanese child and friend of Childers.